Finally finished Ovid ...

So, "Tales from Ovid" is finished. It ended on an appropriate note - Pyramus and Thisbe, which I really only knew from Shakespeare's skewering of it in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I think I prefer the latter ... because the original tale is pretty boring without the Mechanics.

I don't really feel like writing about that now - my brain has been kind of shot since I took the GREs yesterday. I'm also almost finished reading "The Name of the Rose" (Umberto Eco), which I am really enjoying, despite the occasionally looong digressions about religion and the nature of heresy and all of that. Obviously I enjoy the parts that revolve around the library, and around books - I just finished a section in which the main character (William of Baskerville) and the narrator (Adso) are discussing the nature of books and knowledge. I was struck by something William says:


"The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore is is dumb."


I don't have the energy to write much about that now. But I believe it completely.

Poor Pentheon

Well, I just finished plowing my way through "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" today, which had been occupying a lot of my attention. I don't really have a lot to write about it, as I couldn't process a lot of the ideas it presented in just one reading. It's a book I would really like to actually study, and I'm frustrated that I could only give it a sort of cursory glance at the moment. But I think that's the stage of learning I'm in - I need to just throw a whole lot of ideas at myself, read as much as I can, absorb whatever sticks, and go back and sift through the stuff that didn't take the first time at some later date. Like grad school. Which is hopefully just around the corner.

Meanwhile, I'm nearing the end of "Tales from Ovid" - got through several LONG tales today, including "Bacchus and Pentheus." Another very disturbing ending, similar to Actaeon (and even invoking that myth as well, proving there's some pattern to the gods' madness). I was much more sympathetic to Actaeon than I was to Pentheus, though - I mean, come on, Tiresius told the guy what was going to happen and he paid no attention. You would think at some point these guys would figure it out. If a god tells you not to do something, you better the fuck NOT DO IT.

The thing I liked best about "Bacchus and Pentheus" was that Pentheus's transformation was not as overt as the previous metamorphoses had been. Usually, it's pretty obvious what's happening; Ovid comes right out and says it. But this time, the reader is united with Pentheus in not realizing what has occurred until it's too late.

As Pentheus is climbing up the mountain to Citaeron, he's going completely crazy with rage -


... his brain temperature
Rose a degree. Something insane
Behind his eyes
Tore off its straitjacket.


So it is not surprising to read that his lust for blood grew


When he heard the unbearable howls
And ululations
Of the Bacchantes, and the clash of their cymbals.
And when he stumbled in his fury
And fell on all fours,
When he clutched the sod and felt their stamping
Shaking the mountain beneath his fingers,
When Pentheus saw the frightened worms
Twisting up out of their burrows
Then the red veil came over his vision.


So far, this reads just like the reaction and physical negligance one would expect of a crazed, wronged man. But then, brilliantly, unexpectedly, we hear his mother yell:


"It's the boar that ploughed up our gardens!
I've hit it! Quickly, sisters, now we can kill it!
I've hit it."


And we realize what has occurred. The final painful twist occurs as Pentheon sobs for his mother to recognize him, to look at him. And for just a moment, the reader thinks she has understood.


Agave stares, she blinks, her mouth wide.
She takes her son's head between her hands
And rips it from his shoulders.
She lifts it, like a newborn baby,
Her red fingers hooked into the hair
Letting the blood splash over her face and breasts


Oh well.

The irony in "like a newborn baby" really is eloquent.

Thoughts on metamorphosis

As I continue to read "Tales from Ovid," it's interesting to see a sort of pattern emerging in the way the Greeks seemed to think about the concept of metamorphosis. Stupidly, I wasn't really thinking about the concept itself when I first started reading; I just thought it was interesting that each tale involved a sort of metamorphosis. But obviously there was some reason behind creating a work that revolves around such a concept.

I read a big chunk today, and there were two tales that essentially came to the same conclusion about metamorphosis: it is a third option in the choice between life and death. Rather than an afterlife or a continuation of life, a metamorphosis places one in a sort of permanent limbo, which in some senses is the worst option of them all. The first time this came up was in the tale of Myrrha, who prays to the gods to give her the "most pitiless judgement."


I only fear that by dying
I would pollute the dead.
Just as my life contaminates the living.
Give me some third way, neither wholly dead
Nor painfully alive. Remove me
From life and from death
Into some nerveless limbo.


Later, Venus says something almost identically similar when contemplating the crimes of the Cerastae and the Propoetides. She considers destroying their cities entirely, but there are many innocents in the cities that do not deserve death. So, she realizes,


Why should I punish all
For a few? Let me pick out the guilty
And banish or kill them -
Or sentence them to some fate not quite either
But a dire part of both.
The fate for such, I think, is to become
Some vile thing not themselves.


There are some incidents, of course, in which metamorphosis seems to be a positive thing - but the idea that humanity faces three options (life, death, and transformation) is interesting. Applied to today's world, I think it is safe to say that there are some people who have already undergone the last option and just have yet to realize it.

Actaeon

I thought I knew the myth of Actaeon, but apparently I didn’t. At first, while reading it, it seemed to me a probable source of the Titania/Bottom predicament in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so I read it as such, expecting (for some unknown reason), a similar dreamily disoriented ending. I should have known better, seeing as most Greek myths seem to end in cathartic tragedy. The first clue I had that this was going to go much deeper than Shakespeare’s flippant treatment of Bottom’s transformation into an ass was the description of Actaeon’s reaction to the metamorphosis – by far one of the most touching and searing descriptions in the “Tales from Ovid” thus far.

Human tears shone on his stag’s face

From the grief of a mind that was still human.

One of the reasons I am scared to death of various debilitating diseases is that I think there can be nothing worse than having a functioning mind trapped in a nonresponsive body. And the next most terrifying thing would not be you forgetting the faces of those you know, but your realization that those around you no longer know who YOU are. Which is what happens to Actaeon. As his own hounds turn on him, his friends,

who had followed the pack

To this unexpected kill,
Urged them to finish the work. Meanwhile they shouted
For Actaeon – over and over for Actaeon

To hurry and witness this last kill of the day –
And such a magnificent beast –
As if he were absent.

It reminds me of an old legend/fable/story that I think my grandfather told me, about a man whose dogs turn on him. Dogs, of course, being the most loyal of animals – it only makes the vision more chilling.

Damn, Diana is a bitch.

Could someone pass the salt?

Well, after reading about Narcissus yesterday and talking about how everyone knows that story, I read a section today featuring someone I had never even heard of (and wouldn't know how to pronounce even if I had) ... Erisychthon. This was the first section of Tales from Ovid that actually surprised me, mostly because I was at least familiar with the previous myths. The matter-of-fact way that the twist ending is declared, though, contributed to the surprise, because I felt like this was something I was supposed to have seen coming - and not just have seen, but have thoroughly expected to see.

Erisychthon has been cursed with insatiable hunger by Ceres, who's pissed because he chopped down a tree that she had stashed a nymph in at some point. His daughter, in turn, figures out how to shape-shift herself and helps Daddy Dearest get money for his hunger habit by morphing into various forms in the marketplace (horses, slaves, parrots, etc.) for her dad to sell to unsuspecting customers. But of course this doesn't help, because his hunger can never be fulfilled. She did all of this


to feed the famine in her father.
But none of it was enough. Whatever he ate
Maddened and tormented that hunger
To angrier, uglier life. The life

Of a monster no longer a man. And so,
At last, the inevitable.
He began to savage his own limbs.
And there, at a final feast, devoured himself.


End of poem. It seems very odd to me that the climax is just stuck in there like a denouement, and that the daughter is not really dealt with at all. It's also interesting to think about who's undergoing the metamorphosis. The daughter is literally, of course, but the father's last act is also a type of grisly metamorphosis.

One wonders if, like the Shel Silverstein poem, all that's left of him is a chomping pair of teeth, doomed to grind on forever.

Narcissus

I just got back into my copy of "Tales From Ovid," and I found "Echo and Narcissus" much more interesting than I expected. One of the reasons I bought this book was because I felt like I didn't know as much about mythology as I wanted to know, and thouguht this would be a good way to increase my basic knowledge while enjoying the poetry of it all as well. But I didn't expect to like "Echo and Narcissus" because, let's be real here, who DOESN'T know that story? However, I thought that the way parts of it were worded was very moving.

Take, for example, Echo's reaction to Narcissus's rejection:


From that day
Like a hurt lynx, for her
Any cave was a good home.
But love was fixed in her body
Like a barbed arrow. There it festered
With his rejection. Sleeplessly
She brooded over the pain,
Wasting away as she suffered ...


I think this touches on how, in some ways, rejected love is much more powerful than love fulfilled. When Cupid shoots you with one of his arrows, that wound heals quickly, and the pain is welcome. Over time, in fact, that type of love itself can wane. But a wound infected by an arrow of rejection has the power to strip you of everything - even your body.

It is interesting that Echo finds "The petal of her beauty / Fading and shrivelling, falling from her -" whereas when Narcissus dies, all he leaves behind is "a tall flower ... a ruff of white petals / Round a dainty bugle centre / Yellow as egg yolk." Are their souls somehow joined in the aftermath anyway? Did Echo love Narcissus so much that she willed her own flower onto his soul, so that he could be rooted in something and not cursed with her own disembodied fate?

I'm back ...

The end of the school year kicked my ass ... but it's all over now. (Well, I still have to proctor finals and grade mine, but at least I'm on the home stretch.) So I'm going to attempt to resurrect this blog, as well as actually start reading for pleasure again ...