Persephone's Soul Road
On the archetype of death-in-life within abuse, madness, sexual mania and addiction)
The mythic is always personal; it must be, because the personal material is what provides its garb and gab, something literary and linear to hold on to (but hopefully not too literally).
Archetypes are buried, like Pluto’s wealth, in our experience; mining personal history is thus instructive. Of course, the eye needs to be trained to see the invisible within the visible.
Our personal flair in the telling, the relish we get from the iota of our own personal landfills, may indeed be directed by invisible desires. “The kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes,” writes Erich Neumann, “but what we experience is always individual.” So there is a doubling of archetypal features and individual motley, making our encounters with archetypes but universal and unique. Maybe my experience resonates in yours, maybe not: IMO the best we can hope for is a constant peripheral resonance, like a waves on a shore, where we meet and greet the gods.
***
That said, this personal reverie:
***
Persephone, Persephone, how you rule and augment and chill my soul’s marrow in the harrows of your depths! According to Robert Graves, your name derives from “phero” and “phonos” -- “she who brings destruction”; your name in Athens (this also from Graves) was Persephatta, from “ptersis” and “ephato” -- “she who fixes destruction.” Are you in the bad woman’s pheromes rising from a cleavage I love the too much? In the heavenly phonograph of Hell, whose music deranges as it delights? Are you the pterodactyl wing of dark desire, the oomph of ephedra and darker hooves ramped by crystal meph?
Where does you darkness wind down to? Your father is Zeus and yet he is also the father of your son Iacchus, the first Dionysos (according to Robert Calasso in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”); Zeus came to you in the form of a snake and left you with a bull destined to be torn apart. Sick shit, eh? Are you an altar to every violated child, for all the youths sacrificed to one pederast or another?
And how is it that eros gets wrapped in such darkness, and becomes a thirst for more dark couplings of that first inky ilk? When Persephone is abducted, she’s admiring a narcissus, the yellow flower which was gathered in garlands for Eros as well as hung on the dead. What is the poppy allure of such destructive sex? Why does the abused child so often go on to a destiny in bottomless porn or addiction’s bottomless cups? If it’s happened to you, have you sensed that wyrd wild attraction to the darkest haunts, the evillest lovers, in the most hellish of seasons, not meant to be survived ... much less praised.
In my story, there’s the Man in The Car who picked me up at age 6 one school day and then let me out, dazed and bewildered, everything different to the sky afterward though I remember nothing of what happened sitting next to him in the car. (Was he a Hades, driving that chariot, his purposes dark, fixed, burning, immobile?) ... And then there was the Girl in the Woods from about the same time, a prepubescent who took me into the woods near our houses to a clearing she had fashioned into a home of sorts, demanding that I do various things that a Daddy would do, telling me that if I told anyone she would hit her sister and be prevented from my ever seeing her again. I was terrified to go through with her requests, in love with her though I was. What darkness was she playing out that I responded to so well? How did I manage to develop such a radar for it in girls and women much later, knowing they were bent my way, and .... liked ... it ...
Pathological shit, and yet ... (taking exception, do I side with Hades?)
Calasso also sees a quality in Persephone’s abduction which was quintessentially (archetypally?) spiritual: the assault of the invisible on the the known. “‘Theos,’ the indeterminate divine, was an invasion of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien.”
Thus (Calasso continues,)
“When Hades asked to carry of Kore, Zeus sensed that the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible world would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before; their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new centre of gravity.”
Further down, because we were further along. If the Jungian axiom that “the bigger the front, the bigger the back,” is true, then it reads truly the other way around: Hades’ abduction of Persephone puts a new augment to sexuality and love; death and life get married, and the universe has to adjust. Thus the Eleusinian Mysteries emerge, just when the psychic ground, the hymeneal bed, the spring-time field of flowers is ripe for the plucking.
***
I had bad winters when I was in my younger 20’s -- perhaps the result of those earlier bad (or alien) encounters, bereft of any psychic equipage I might have gained from therapy or any semblance of healthy relationships along the way, and deepening into my own addiction. I’d sit by a heat grate in my apartment in Spokane and drink quarts of beer, watching winter’s white bones pile up against the window. It felt like I was in the belly of an ice whale, the last of my warmth slowly leeching out of my heart, rendering me into a mortis, my days like nails in a coffin. Nights I drank and hard, taking lots of speed and smoking pot to keep me to slow the descent (like aerolons for a meteor fallen into the sea).
Petit mal seizures multiplied into a constant, screaming mezzo; utter breakdown or suicide were the only options I could see. But those winters ended in a thaw, and I always managed back up to a surface of sorts, not quite the same for my harrowing. Was Persephone my dark Queen of those black winter days, my thrall with oblivion music to her ears? Who called me back to life there at the rims, causing me to fade away from death in some mirror-reverse of Eurydice’s loosening from the gaze of Orpheus? Did Orpheus fail to revive his dead wife because his spirit was not ready? Did Persephone release me because I was not meant to die, only to be harrowed by winter as a way of opening me to the invisible infinites of life?
***
The Mexican poet Homero Aridjis wrote a verse novel a ways back titled “Persephone,” about a man’s love affair with a whore who worked in some awful Tiajuana brothel that stayed open all night. The narrator harrows a long season with her in that darkness, drawn in every addictive way (to the sex, the booze, the darkness, the saxophone solos of tincup jazz quartet scraping together a living from that bottom of the barrel (“merde, bad gig”). Drawn to the beauty and thrall of oblivion. The poetry of that thrall is exquisite. I read the book after getting sober, and in it I read my own addict winters as distilled from the same depths, wallowing in honky-tonks mooning for one vixen or another, desperate in the fool’s hope to rescue Persephone from those dives -- and thus myself. Ha ha.
Remember that Theseus attempts to rescue Persephone from hell -- to abduct her back to life. Why is the ultimate heroic labor tantamount to walking in darkness, coldcocking Death and then hauling ass back to the crib with his squeaking wife over one shoulder?
Ah but we are mortals, and such attempts are meant to fail. Theseus was received by Hades, who knew (being a god) what T. was up to, and, ever the hospitable host, bid him sit down in at the banquet table in the Chair of Forgetfulness at the banquet table -- a chair of fire which T. was not able to free himself from.
And didn’t I also turn to some sulfurous stone, fixed to a barstool, drinking from the fiery paps of the black mother? My rescue attempts all failed, and finally I had to surrender to the fact that I would never rescue Persephone from her void. (Anyone who has married or loved a Persephone knows there’s no fishing the Queen of Hell back from the deep). I also had to recognize that Persephone was never the sea-witch serving up shots of tequila on the other side of the bar but the anima projecting all of those sylphs and sirens as part of her song to weave me into the depths, into the indeterminate land of imagination (of which fantasy is the too-literal, sexualized border).
In my own spiritual education, Persephone required an altar in my own darkness, beyond madness and lust, beyond the particulars of bad history, beyond my every refusal to give death its due with my own pound of mortal flesh. Her education bids me see with an e ye trained on borders where the veil is thin, where visible and invisible are flower and bee, where dark amplitude pours up through my beloved’s sleeping face, where brilliance limns the dark like hoarfrost in winter, where my history and our infinite mysteries share the same bed deep in my mind my ear my heart my gut my balls.
***
Rilke came to terms with Death late in his life. His “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets To Orpheus” can be read as meditations from that porous border where death and life exist together.
The problem, as he saw it, was that we push Death so far away, refusing it any place in our days. But really, Death is “our intimate companion”; the invisible is always wound in the visible, and the dark music of history and mystery belong side by side with every glory and ecstasy of our days.
In a letter to Countess Margo Sizzo-Noris-Crouy dated Jan. 6, 1923, he put it this way:
“We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim; we are full whenever we reach it -- and being full means (for us) being heavy. -- I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself --. What do we know of it?
“Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations -- and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life; but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.” (transl. Stephen Mitchell)
The mythic is always personal; it must be, because the personal material is what provides its garb and gab, something literary and linear to hold on to (but hopefully not too literally).
Archetypes are buried, like Pluto’s wealth, in our experience; mining personal history is thus instructive. Of course, the eye needs to be trained to see the invisible within the visible.
Our personal flair in the telling, the relish we get from the iota of our own personal landfills, may indeed be directed by invisible desires. “The kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes,” writes Erich Neumann, “but what we experience is always individual.” So there is a doubling of archetypal features and individual motley, making our encounters with archetypes but universal and unique. Maybe my experience resonates in yours, maybe not: IMO the best we can hope for is a constant peripheral resonance, like a waves on a shore, where we meet and greet the gods.
***
That said, this personal reverie:
***
Persephone, Persephone, how you rule and augment and chill my soul’s marrow in the harrows of your depths! According to Robert Graves, your name derives from “phero” and “phonos” -- “she who brings destruction”; your name in Athens (this also from Graves) was Persephatta, from “ptersis” and “ephato” -- “she who fixes destruction.” Are you in the bad woman’s pheromes rising from a cleavage I love the too much? In the heavenly phonograph of Hell, whose music deranges as it delights? Are you the pterodactyl wing of dark desire, the oomph of ephedra and darker hooves ramped by crystal meph?
Where does you darkness wind down to? Your father is Zeus and yet he is also the father of your son Iacchus, the first Dionysos (according to Robert Calasso in “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”); Zeus came to you in the form of a snake and left you with a bull destined to be torn apart. Sick shit, eh? Are you an altar to every violated child, for all the youths sacrificed to one pederast or another?
And how is it that eros gets wrapped in such darkness, and becomes a thirst for more dark couplings of that first inky ilk? When Persephone is abducted, she’s admiring a narcissus, the yellow flower which was gathered in garlands for Eros as well as hung on the dead. What is the poppy allure of such destructive sex? Why does the abused child so often go on to a destiny in bottomless porn or addiction’s bottomless cups? If it’s happened to you, have you sensed that wyrd wild attraction to the darkest haunts, the evillest lovers, in the most hellish of seasons, not meant to be survived ... much less praised.
In my story, there’s the Man in The Car who picked me up at age 6 one school day and then let me out, dazed and bewildered, everything different to the sky afterward though I remember nothing of what happened sitting next to him in the car. (Was he a Hades, driving that chariot, his purposes dark, fixed, burning, immobile?) ... And then there was the Girl in the Woods from about the same time, a prepubescent who took me into the woods near our houses to a clearing she had fashioned into a home of sorts, demanding that I do various things that a Daddy would do, telling me that if I told anyone she would hit her sister and be prevented from my ever seeing her again. I was terrified to go through with her requests, in love with her though I was. What darkness was she playing out that I responded to so well? How did I manage to develop such a radar for it in girls and women much later, knowing they were bent my way, and .... liked ... it ...
Pathological shit, and yet ... (taking exception, do I side with Hades?)
Calasso also sees a quality in Persephone’s abduction which was quintessentially (archetypally?) spiritual: the assault of the invisible on the the known. “‘Theos,’ the indeterminate divine, was an invasion of body and mind. It was our becoming intimate with what is most alien.”
Thus (Calasso continues,)
“When Hades asked to carry of Kore, Zeus sensed that the time had come for a new ring to be added to the knot of the snakes. But this time it wasn’t up to him to act. He would be a consenting witness. The invisible world would now reassert its rights over the body of the visible more strictly than before; their dealings with each other, long diluted and mingled together in life on earth, would find a new centre of gravity.”
Further down, because we were further along. If the Jungian axiom that “the bigger the front, the bigger the back,” is true, then it reads truly the other way around: Hades’ abduction of Persephone puts a new augment to sexuality and love; death and life get married, and the universe has to adjust. Thus the Eleusinian Mysteries emerge, just when the psychic ground, the hymeneal bed, the spring-time field of flowers is ripe for the plucking.
***
I had bad winters when I was in my younger 20’s -- perhaps the result of those earlier bad (or alien) encounters, bereft of any psychic equipage I might have gained from therapy or any semblance of healthy relationships along the way, and deepening into my own addiction. I’d sit by a heat grate in my apartment in Spokane and drink quarts of beer, watching winter’s white bones pile up against the window. It felt like I was in the belly of an ice whale, the last of my warmth slowly leeching out of my heart, rendering me into a mortis, my days like nails in a coffin. Nights I drank and hard, taking lots of speed and smoking pot to keep me to slow the descent (like aerolons for a meteor fallen into the sea).
Petit mal seizures multiplied into a constant, screaming mezzo; utter breakdown or suicide were the only options I could see. But those winters ended in a thaw, and I always managed back up to a surface of sorts, not quite the same for my harrowing. Was Persephone my dark Queen of those black winter days, my thrall with oblivion music to her ears? Who called me back to life there at the rims, causing me to fade away from death in some mirror-reverse of Eurydice’s loosening from the gaze of Orpheus? Did Orpheus fail to revive his dead wife because his spirit was not ready? Did Persephone release me because I was not meant to die, only to be harrowed by winter as a way of opening me to the invisible infinites of life?
***
The Mexican poet Homero Aridjis wrote a verse novel a ways back titled “Persephone,” about a man’s love affair with a whore who worked in some awful Tiajuana brothel that stayed open all night. The narrator harrows a long season with her in that darkness, drawn in every addictive way (to the sex, the booze, the darkness, the saxophone solos of tincup jazz quartet scraping together a living from that bottom of the barrel (“merde, bad gig”). Drawn to the beauty and thrall of oblivion. The poetry of that thrall is exquisite. I read the book after getting sober, and in it I read my own addict winters as distilled from the same depths, wallowing in honky-tonks mooning for one vixen or another, desperate in the fool’s hope to rescue Persephone from those dives -- and thus myself. Ha ha.
Remember that Theseus attempts to rescue Persephone from hell -- to abduct her back to life. Why is the ultimate heroic labor tantamount to walking in darkness, coldcocking Death and then hauling ass back to the crib with his squeaking wife over one shoulder?
Ah but we are mortals, and such attempts are meant to fail. Theseus was received by Hades, who knew (being a god) what T. was up to, and, ever the hospitable host, bid him sit down in at the banquet table in the Chair of Forgetfulness at the banquet table -- a chair of fire which T. was not able to free himself from.
And didn’t I also turn to some sulfurous stone, fixed to a barstool, drinking from the fiery paps of the black mother? My rescue attempts all failed, and finally I had to surrender to the fact that I would never rescue Persephone from her void. (Anyone who has married or loved a Persephone knows there’s no fishing the Queen of Hell back from the deep). I also had to recognize that Persephone was never the sea-witch serving up shots of tequila on the other side of the bar but the anima projecting all of those sylphs and sirens as part of her song to weave me into the depths, into the indeterminate land of imagination (of which fantasy is the too-literal, sexualized border).
In my own spiritual education, Persephone required an altar in my own darkness, beyond madness and lust, beyond the particulars of bad history, beyond my every refusal to give death its due with my own pound of mortal flesh. Her education bids me see with an e ye trained on borders where the veil is thin, where visible and invisible are flower and bee, where dark amplitude pours up through my beloved’s sleeping face, where brilliance limns the dark like hoarfrost in winter, where my history and our infinite mysteries share the same bed deep in my mind my ear my heart my gut my balls.
***
Rilke came to terms with Death late in his life. His “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets To Orpheus” can be read as meditations from that porous border where death and life exist together.
The problem, as he saw it, was that we push Death so far away, refusing it any place in our days. But really, Death is “our intimate companion”; the invisible is always wound in the visible, and the dark music of history and mystery belong side by side with every glory and ecstasy of our days.
In a letter to Countess Margo Sizzo-Noris-Crouy dated Jan. 6, 1923, he put it this way:
“We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim; we are full whenever we reach it -- and being full means (for us) being heavy. -- I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself --. What do we know of it?
“Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations -- and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life; but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.” (transl. Stephen Mitchell)
posted by Brendan MacOdrum at 7:01 AM
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