Orphic Consolations

If in truth a mythological mind, consciousness, awareness recognizes all images as metaphor, how might we illuminate a way for those seeking answers in the death of a loved one, explanations for a 9/11 and a 7/9, when what we know is beyond words? For those us who have experienced these events as esthetic wonders, have you found a way to illuminate at least one other person?

That's a tough one, because for the bereaved, IMO, only the return of the person who's died will do, the real, living, corporeal, strangely scented, clumsily shod beloved will do -- Short of that, there is no consolation, not from myth or religion or all of the opiates of oblivion -- none of those can fully delve the the lost one back from the mist, so lived time on this earth becomes dead time.

Orpheus wasn't content with singing about his lost wife, he sang his way down into willow groves of Persephone to gain her release from the world of the dead. All he had to do was not look back as the two of them walked out and he could have pulled off the unimaginable, but his heart was too greedy, he HAD to look upon the face of his beloved before they were officially Out , and once he did look back, that beloved face diffused into myth. It made for a good song but Orpheus didn't want a song about his beloved, he wanted his dead wife. Love harrowed Orpheus where he could not harrow hell.

So the consolations of myth are partial at best. It seems that part of the grieving process is one of telling the old stories, remembering the departed, holding a wake of sorts where the living share their recollections of the dead. There is a sort of myth-making in this, placing the human up in the backdrop of the divine (not always truthfully, but that's the wish of the heart). Relics of the living take the form of a room left intact from the day of the dying, nothing disturbed, everything relished. (When my wife's nephew was killed by a car accident, his mother left his greeting on the telephone answering machine for years afterward. Very spooky ...)

At some point though -- when the heart has suffered the full harrows of its lament -- myth can play an important role in the healing process. When the living decide it's OK to go on living (forgiving themselves for not dying too, or first), then the sort of inner meaning-making provided by myth and religion shines a light ahead. There's work still to do, and love still to share. A deeper embrace of life is called for, a vision quest or a voyage. A new next adventure. Myth offers the voyager courage to sail out once again, back on that mighty sea, with the knowledge that the rudder is held by greater hands, and that every destination along the way is meant.

***

I wonder if Orpheus' harrowing of hail was that process of being nailed by pain, his agony at losing his wife. She stepped on an snake in the grass on their wedding day, so his greatest joy was punctuated (punctured?) by that greatest loss. Leave it to a myth to raise the awesomeness and awfulness to infinitude, embracing both in that one moment.

Orpheus' grief is mythic -- to long so for one's dead wife that you travel down to hell and try to gain her release -- his determination to have the corporeal woman back, in defiance of every hound, every black lake in hell. And to do it with a song! Breaking every heart in Tartarus, connecting the collective grief of hell in his own.

(When Rilke writes of Orpheus' walk out from Tartarus, led by Hermes, followed by Eurydice, he has Eurydice a blank cypher, so full of her death that even the slightest vibe from Orpheus (his impatience to be done with their walk and have her again) hurts, as if touch itself (the infinite tenderness of the living) was itself too painful. SHE is dead, dead even to the sentiment which Orpheus is willing to peramble hell for.)

And that moment when Orpheus proves too human and, at the last moment, at the very last threshold before returning to the land of the living, he looks back -- only to watch her falter, fade, and become nothing but the sigh of a breeze -- perhaps that is what becomes of our memories of the dead. The pain which calyxes that memory fades, and the memory passes into oblivion.

Perhaps memory has a false resonance, keeping us in thrall with the past, preventing us from letting the dead die. Orpheus would have beat all of the gods down under if he had just refused to look back. But he's human, thus the tragic error of our human need to hold on to the dead, to cherish our memories greater than the fullness that awaits. Orpheus, first singer, couldn't stop cryin' in his beer.

***

What got me thinking about this is how loyal and greedy the heart (or whatever that life-force is within us) for the living, for the beloved. Only the real thing will do exactly when it is lost. We can't disengage from that need, it haunts and persecutes us, the anguish intensified by feelings we know will never touch the departed one again. Amputees a plagued by ghost-pains of their lost appendages, and the bereaved dream of the dead returning as if not lost, only misplaced, then wake clutching that dream fading into their pillow. The very passion which drives lovers together are the nails which drive them into their agony of going on alone. Always there's distance between I and Thou, but death makes that a difference of that distance, killing all hope of reuniting once again. (Maybe that's why hell is so forlorn.)

Aren't we just talking (mythically) about the grieving process here? Some take longer than others to work through their grief, and some never survive. Grief pitches a person into a darkness that must be walked through, step by step, back to the light of day. The human pattern is to walk for three days and nights down there and return. That's an appropriate mythological season for working through one's grief. Some swoon in horror and remain there, petrified by the rigor of their mortification into stone. They can't wait to join their lost beloved and do everything possible to hasten that reunion.

For most, the only thing that really helps is time. As the days and months grind on, eventually the force of that life-force so gripped around the departed begins to loosen its hold. The memories become less blooded, less real. People find themselves unable to remember the dead one's face. The guilt over having survived ebbs. The dead begin their inexorable fade into oblivion from the minds of the living. Eurydice is gone.

Strange, our human condition, that we have so little eros for ancestors more than a generation back. They are Gone to us, and there's little affect for them. We often can't recite the names of great-grandmothers and -fathers. Calibrate that feeling against the intense feeling we have for wives and children and current cats, and the living shows itself to be immensely short-sighted. No wonder we keep bumping into each other.


***

And playing the same old tunes! That Orpheus' head wouldn't shut up after being parted from its shoulders, floating down a river whistlin' its birthday song, yammering on like a radio with a single, solid gold frequency -- means that we sing on and on and on the old ecstasies, scoring them into a deathless art form. The consolation of art with its mythic grandiloquence and heart-breaking purity is that it spiritualizes the lost, the broken, the irredeemable. Orpheus couldn't stop singing those songs, since that was where he had retrieved her.

I think the story of Orpheus tries to provide instruction in the way you intuit -- to see the folly of chasing after shades, showing that our memory is a place to be honored but also a jail for those who cannot see through them.

In a sense, it was only when Orpheus lost Eurydice a second time -- that time simply reaffirming the first loss -- that she was freed to become his greater muse, to become his reflexive, inward focus - a mediator between the day and night worlds. Jung calls the reflexive function "bending back" and "turning inwards" - both images of Eurydice turning back at the gates of Tartarus, the mortal lost, the immortal born.

In that sense, all reflective activity -- meditation, imagination, the writing of poems, the brooding post -- reenacts the mythologem of Orpheus. We follow back and down some trailing thought or anguish, trying to hold it with the best of our art, our rhetorics; and though we always fail to bring it back alive, the process -- the inwarding, meandering peramble -- harrows us somehow, deepening the reflection, making possible whatever comes next.

I think the bereavements of love and death (of Eros and Thanatos) as to be so similar as to be faces of one coin. We build an altar for that departed, swearing, with all of our art and religion and life-force, You Shall Never Die. Even when all physical hope has vanished, the heart still tends the flame. We either drain all passion for life through that hole or try to fill it by pouring all of our passion back into life, into the lives of other, into the next love.

***

Youth is innocence and freedom and wholeness, the unbroken egg of the heart, no self-division. The infant cannot distinguish himself from his mother's breast, they are one; the child has a faith in her God which is uteral, seamless, unbreakable. Then comes puberty and the lamings, the sexual differentiation sprouting and swelling and going smoky with flame -- the agony of separation, the insatiable desire to quell a flame hardly named. Love as emancipation from self and utter imprisonment in it, the starry union dreamed, glancingly shored, then howlingly lost. The link to God sundering along the fissure of loss of first love. Is God dead? Is love dead? And then the true mortalities, some teen on a motorcycle driving 120mph into a tree, hauling along in his death-wake grieving mothers, siblings, a girlfriend, all now lamed, innocence and paradise lost, lonely days ahead.

I wonder if the mutilation practices of the olde puberty rites -- male and female circumcision -- are part of that piercing. Growing up means experiencing the nails of death, learning the fact of our insuperable breech from Thou. Mercea Eliade says that once the word for death was formulated, there could be no return to eternal springs of humanity's childhood. That word became flesh by its piercings, wounding the part of our brains that things that there is no beginning and no end, that love does not die, that loved ones never leave. Thou Art Dead To Me -- a statement as much grim fact as a curse, the ultimate rejection of one's selfhood. The sound of the Great Mother's breast whistling out like a punctured balloon or bladder, lip-farting down to
eternal silence.


What is it that triggered this vision of the dark foggy ground from which we spring?

Must be a fact of human psyche: as it awoke, it divided. All of those ritual arrangings of a dead body for the travel into the beyond to me means that the afterlife is a sort of poetic attempt to keep the dead alive. Any difference between a queen buried with her jewels, a few garroted servants and a guard, jars filled with mead or grain (another mystery there, what did they eat for the beyond? now that's a diet) -- any difference between that rigorously phrased ritual and the ritual of writing a poem about my lost love?


The twice born and the twice dead? I fell from you in body, and now I fall from you in spirit. You shall sing of me when you sing of others, > for now I am free to be all and not that image you have frozen. So there is a sense of the Anima/Animus, pulled out to light yet turning back into the hidden Self. And is this in part where the energy for art comes from, the Healing that is also a Wound?

Don't we ritualize those agonizing moments, make of that huge hole a door to the infinite? Yes, She does become the bride of my imagining, once all living phosphor has ebbed from the door. My desire to keep her if only in spiritual form is exactly why we don't let the dead die, and why ghosts roam the earth: because in the imagination (as in the dream), living and dead are one. I like to think of those lost lovers as all being housed in a gleaming blue fountain at the bottom of my heart, a pure welling of everything dreamed and fraught on the perilous bed of love.
Thou Will Never Die -- and from the record of Trois-Freres, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the courtly love stories of the 13th century, the cult of the Virgin, the sad flower-wreathed crosses standing at roadsides -- art makes it true.



THE NAKED TRUTH

Sept. 15, 2005
by Brendan's dayside other

Marcus, a student of the gnostic
Velentinus (c. 150), relates that
a vision "descended upon him ..
in the form of a woman ... and
expounded to him alone its own
nature, and the origin of things, which
it had never revealed to anyone,
divine or human."

-- Eileen Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

She appeared at the upper bar
out of nowhere, fanning through
the smoke and blaring rock
as if stepping from that wave
ordained to drown me with
every blue fury in the lap
and chest of Love. We talked
a while nursing beers in
the wild din, her voice and
mine forming a bower
in which some goddess awoke,
aroused, and laid hands
on us, ushering us into woods
to sacred for a name.
And left us there, in
reverence for a secret
only we could reveal
and revel when all
our clothes fell like
angels to the floor.
Much later that night --
in fact well into the
next morning's too-
bright hot summer light --
She smiled unbuttoning
her tropic blue blouse,
and unhooked her bra with
that hidden gesture,
freeing her full, pink-
nippled breasts, startling
me more awake than
I had ever been: And with
eyes locked on mine
came close, to softly
weave her chest against
mine, whispering O
make love to me. O
indeed: And so I did,
a half dozen times or
more that too-late-night
which had crashed
so dreamily on the next
day's shore, licking her
to sweet moans once
then twice, getting sucked
off, fucking slow and
long in rhythmus
to a secret beat
which was new even
to God. We could not
stop entering and
collapsing in each
other, leaving selves
and hours far behind;
thus we drifted
so far offshore as to
never quite return.
Ever. But as a
mortal pair we fared
quite poorly, and in
weeks she jilted
the needy, greedy,
angst-ridden boy
I had become, walking
back into the night
for good. After all
these years, I mark
this day -- Sept. 15 --
as the tolling of
her wavelike recede
from the ecstasy of
my life, my feet forever
thence half in a surf
which once proclaimed
our naked name. Fare
thee well, lost lover.
The child you said you
begged of my seed
our second night
would now be 23,
and perhaps he
or she is here,
cuculattus of that
high blue wave
which crests in every
"Yes!" God gives
me truth to shout.
Whenever I hear those
old Journey songs
from 1982, I go back
to that first unveiling
hour, in thrall
and surrender to
the whole fantasy
of love and lust,
believing it more
than Truth itself. That
fictive beach where she
and I came hard
calling each other's name
remains here, built
up with the ground
bones of every other
love I've sung,
sustained now by
the long, perhaps
my life's remaining
duration with the woman
I call my wife by
day and blue welling
deep down the
pike of night.
Our hearts are
more naked now
than our bodies
may be allowed to
go: Mere angels
can't fly this naked reach
which is part dream,
part ocean beach,
part clear blue sky
inside you and I.