Aphrodite, Persephone, Adonis

MOREOVER

Jack Gilbert

We are given the trees so we can know
what God looks like. And rivers
so we might understand Him. We are allowed
women so we can get into bed with the Lord,
however partial and momentary that is.
The passion, and then we are single again
while the dark goes on. He lived
in the Massachusetts woods for two years.
Went out naked when the moon would allow it.
He watched the aspens when the afternoon breeze
was at them. And listened to rain
on the butternut tree near his window.
But when he finally left, they did not care.
The difficult garden he was midwife to
was indifferent. The eight wild birds
he fed through both winters, when the snow
was starving them, forgot him immediately
And the three women he ate of and entered
utterly then and before, who were his New World
as immensity and landfall, are now only friends
or dead. What we are given is taken away,
but we manage to keep it secretly.
We lose everything, but make harvest
of the consequence it was to us. Memory
builds this kingdom from the fragments
and approximation. We are gleaners who fill
the barn for the winter that comes on.

from Refusing Heaven (2005)

***


‘O where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven,
Or, in the ocean drench’d or in the fire?
What hour is this? or morn or weary even?
Do I delight to die, or life desire?
But now I lived, and life was death’s annoy;
But now I died, and death was lively joy.’

— Venus in Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” 493-8

First the tale Aphrodite/Venus and Adonis, figure and ground of this meditation on what it means to grow up into the insides of love. Adonis is the love child of Myhrra and her father the king of Lebanon (or Cyprus or a number of other kings — so this is a foundational story). Myhrra was so vain of her hair - she thought it more beautiful than even Aphrodite’s - the love goddess stung her with an immortal immoral desire for her father’s embrace. Myhrra connives to get her father drunk and lay with him for 12 nights. At last the father sees the face of his dark lover with the aid of a hidden lamp and, to his horror, sees his daughter asleep in his arms. Enraged at the sacrilege, the king draws a sword and chases her from his court. Pregnant and ashamed, Myhrra pleads with the heavens to send her to an oblivion that is neither among the living or the dead. Aphrodite thus turns her into a myrrh-tree, the tree that weeps its fruit in spicy gum.

Adonis, the future lover of Aphrodite, is born of this tree. He is so beautiful that Aphrodite hides him in a chest and sends him to Persephone for safe keeping. The Queen of the Underworld is curious and, taking a peek in the box, is so struck by the boy’s beauty that she claims him for her own. Aphrodite, yearning to have the boy back, takes her suit to Zeus, and his judgment is that the boy should be shared as follows: for a third part of the year he dwells by himself, a third part with Persephone, and the last third with Aphrodite. Kerenyi comments, “Aphrodite was thus compelled to mourn for Adonis before she could truly possess him.”

***

A strange story, about the nature of passion I think, for desire is only a third part enactment and rapture, spending the greater part of its year either among what’s lost or simply alone. Aphrodite’s greatest love, the one which breaks her immortal heart and makes a religion not of consummation but of separation — for Adonis’ fate is to sundered by the tusk of a boar and speed away through air and sea away from Aphrodite, living on a realm of her heart which is eternally with and without. Weird epiphany, huh. In the rites of Adonis, women brought him little “gardens” — symbols of their femininity — and in eastern shrines they were compelled to offer themselves to strangers or sacrifice their hair: thus some symbol of what attracts men to women — the Aphroditean lure - is offered or sacrficed, as if to render holy that which is forsaken.



Myth and folklore offer blue-tinted lenses for looking without and within, IMO, a skein of mystery for tracing back the labyrinth of history. As I meditated on the tale of Aphrodite and Adonis this morning, weirdly I thought of a really horrible season in my life now twenty years past, when one life was dying and the next was far too underground yet to discern. Please bear with me this story, a good yarn as skeins go, which traces a fragrance — spicy gum, perhaps? — into a grave which is rimmed with faint light. That that lucence which shines in darkness, half of darkness composed, which is, IMO, how the greater half of the heart is lit, I write ...

**

I was playing in my last band — Innocent Thieves — ha ha, very 80’s, big hair, skinny ties, metalish New Wave if there could be such a thing, power-pop-ish a la Robert Palmer’s Power Station (“Some Like It Hot”) - yet we were All Original, choosing the muse who fated us to play shit dives off of the A-list. And my bandmates were a bunch of guys I hardly knew and little cared for, banded together simply because it seemed the next thing to do for us, each for different reasons, a between-time sort of exercise, two of the guys playing out at Disney in a 50s-review (their day gig), me pining for A-list kliegs but wanting to write my own songs (right feeling, wrong medium), a drummer on hiatus from a Top-40 band that played the hotel bars. We had been playing together for about 3 months whipping together fairly tightly-crafted stuff though drinking always seemed to be the greater order, someone running out after the first hour practice on a beer run which juiced up everything so much that the second set loosened into disarray and angst — we really didn’t like each other much — and then everyone took off on their own. A ship of fools fuelled on fading rock dreams.

Sometime in July we finally got a gig, playing in a 7-band showcase called Rock Against Racism in a rented American Legion hall. We were on the bill with a bunch of punk bands with names like Declared Ungovernable and Damage. Punk of that era was careening into death metal Nothing like the stuff we played, but hey, it was a gig.

The night of the gig I started out at my usual happy-hour watering hole, knocking back a couple of Myers rum-and-pineapples, watching the afternoon outside begin to brew into the usual bruised gnarl of ass-whupping storms. My hair was teased up in Rod Stewartean chunks of blonde and I wore black jeans, hightop sneakers & a black bowling shirt festooned front and back with leopard spots. Flashes of lighting outside would fade into a penumbra showing my ghost in the window staring back at me in some rictus parody of all I depserately wanted to project, like a tincture of abyss, someone tensed and ready for every magnitude he had ever yearned for, now in the fullness of an almost fully-waned legitimate youth (I was 28). It was an imagined self, a caricature; in reality I was a loser guitar player stuck down an endless bottle, but in my imagination I was the ripened shape of exactly what was needed to snare the Beloved of my dreams, a woman somewhere between Barbie Benson and Eve, an oceanic Yes fitted in a tight polka dotted dress. Oh it was an imagination so vivid, something that I took so literally, that I was literally anointed for the fall which began in that night as the cold booze glowed through my veins.

The gig was insane, wild, horrible. It was hot and humid in a hall which slowly filled with a mosh-pit of punks and gawkers lured by public-service ads picked up mysteriously by the local Top-40 station, the place where none of us would ever be heard. The two tribes eyed each other with amusement and malice. We were third on the bill, and I spent the first two acts standing at the bar in the back, trying to pace myself with beer. though the proceedings were depressing. Punk bands flared up these two-minute smashing freight trains of blitzkrieg thunder, flailing, hoarsely shouting into the mikes, bobbing mohawks, razor blade earrings flashing. Out on the floor the moshing grew earnest, dudes in fatigues and jackboots hurling into the center of the fray and richocheting off each other with glancing punches. No one in the pit was much in the mood for a late 80s power-pop band though there was applause from the gawker/geek fringe. We didn’t really have anything to offer, our set unwinding badly, monitors on the fritz, guitars going out of tune or breaking strings. We had maybe two good songs out of the eight, the first and penultimate, hard-rocking on one and then a ballad on the other which had this riff I played at the chorus that was pure myrrh, sweet and longing and hanging over the din of colliding and falling history.

(I can remember the heft of my blue Hamer Phantom electric, fleet and stony, a winged axe with fast action, screaming pickups, and a whammy bar I never had much use for. Did I play it or it play me? I’ll never know.)

We then crashed through our last song, the final of my stage career, meager as that was, smart and muscular but hoarse and wounded, torn deep in the thigh by the angst we could not control in our out-of-control lives. The rock beast killed us in the end, and we bled that last song profusely, crashing down the last chord with the relief that it was finally over, shooting murderous glances at each other.

I headed to back of the room where the bar was and proceeded to get drunk, knocking back doubles of Dewars, watching the disorder of the next set spill over into the room. One of the punks careened off a gawker and the fighting began, first here and then there, suddenly everywhere at once. Chairs collapsed, fists windmilled, boots stomped, gleeful thugs dove into the meelee, girls screeched hugging the walls. One of the synth players from Damage squirmed through the melee back to the bar and ordered up a beer next to me. “I wuz wonderin’ when things would start rocking,” he said, proud of the panorama. Cops came, so did firemen and paramedics, clearing the hall. I don’t think anyone was hurt, really, it was just a night of punk glory and mayhem, maybe the real stuff of what rock n roll needed to become, a darker angel, losing the mousse and eyeliner. I dunno ... But whatever I thought that stage was to deliver to me that night was horribly wrong, and I knew there was only one place for me to go: out and away, far into the night. I wormed back in through a side door, discreetly grabbed my axe and amp, packed ‘em into my ca, and drove off under a wet night flashing with long ripples of heat-lightning, lucent scars tracing the malefecence of black clouds.

Thus began a black perigrinatio of bars, Bailey’s and Decades and Two Flights and The Station, pouring booze into a gullet which thirsted greater than life itself, for which all the Bud and shots of tequila I hurled down could not sate. I drank past closing time and ended up at the Hot Line bottle club, this awful lupine inferno of rapacious drunks like I was, the locus of true unrepentent fury, whirled by disco lights and bad funk. There I stumbled into a woman I had screwed a few months ago and tossed off the next morning — modus operandi back then — and for whatever reason, she was as desperate as I to forget history. She invited me to the house where she was staying, and I lurched after, somewhere past the blackout hour of 4 a.m.

I don’t remember driving there, just suddenly being in this awful house close to the freeway, a claustrophobic cigarette-reeking mess of piled newspapers, stacks of bills pouring over a desk, overflowing ashtrays, stained furniture. Apparently it was the house of a woman who died several weeks before, the distant relative of this girl who had been given the task of closing out the place. It was the house of a person who had lived alone for years and died more alone than I could imagine (though in later months as the booze wore me down to a tiny carbon ball it was exactly the death I imagined). If there’s a way-station of Persephone in this life -- certainly in the story of my life -- it was in that house that night.

We cracked open beers from the fridge, smoked a joint in stifling sweaty smoky heat, croaking like two birds of one black feather: and soon enough tumbled on to bed, not in the urine-reeking room of the dead woman but another bedroom, tiny and cramped, room only for a single bed, a dresser, and a fan. Of the milky enactment there I don’t need to tell you anything but its nature, numb and greedy and hostile and broken. Between blackout spaces I ravened what I could, the room impossibly dark and hot, raked by the occasional pass of a twisting fan, traffic whooshing back and forth on the nearby expressway like life in motion high up on the surface of things, far from that bottom. And there was this soft clicking sound nearby, like the claws or beaks of big birds of prey holding vigil over us from the dresser, praising and damning us with the same black attention. Perhaps they were Aprhodite Praxis and Melanis (Sexual Action and Sex After Dark) crowing us on ... And then everything went thoroughly black until a car screeched outside and it was mid-morning, swords of sunlight jabbing through the window shade. Get up asshole, the girl was saying, trying to get me to leave.

***

Thus ended my night with Persephone, a waystation in Hell that began the slow and tortured travail leading to this 4 a.m. twenty years later, to a house that love created and maintains. The story of Aphrodite and Adonis, read again of late in Kerenyi’s “The Gods of the Greeks,” casts blue light on that black night, silvering its mordents, reflecting back lucent undersides. Soul must harrow before it comes to love, IMO, sample all of love’s plastic fruit set on the wrong tables, peramble through desire’s fragrant ghastly wood, chasing the ghost of the Beloved into every chamber of Hell.

And the weird part is how projection inverts the story in ways that make it difficult to see in the present: Adonis whom both Persephone and Aphrodite loves is, IMO, that image of self whom pysche must tutor in all the ways of love, my ego but a third part of soul, a shore between infinite night and blazing day, between loss and enactment, between the shades of passion and their singular moments, between Persephone and Aphrodite.

Thus we slowly learn, we slowly come to be, up out of the gorgeous wounding of our finally-sundered adolescence, into an adulthood which is both passionate Persephone and grieving Aphrodite, a muddled middle ground which is both and neither, a union of split states which is Hermaphroditic, of both sexes, weak and lamed (gored in the thigh, as the Fisher King was so wounded), ever bleeding like the anemone, ever fragrant like the cut bark of the myrrh, ever lost in the swirling hair which is half-underwater and half turned by the apostrophic breezes which turn us around to walk the other way.

“Do I delight to die, or life desire?” asks Venus in Shakepeare’s poem. Harrowed Adonis knows.


VENUS AND ADONIS

The having is only a third of
Love, the feasting to the bone
Once cup only that is poured.
And it’s not the first, not the

Second. He is strong and
Separate, hunting boars
Til sunset: Death then takes him
On its tusk: Even the goddess

Of every ripe encounter
Must be broken thus before
Her heart is wakened to
Itself. Venereal surf ever

Slapping at my thighs, you’re
Singing da blues too, crashing
On an empty shore, incessant
In your jones for him

Who climbs highest in departing
On the trellis of her sweet garden.