The gods always keep their bargains, or, Orpheus and Eurydice

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I hadn't intended to read Grace Dane Mazur's Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination this week. It's October, after all: I'm supposed to be reading of ghosts and ghouls.

But the book drew me in--and, unexpectedly, offered some areas of thought suitable for October. I wrote about two earlier in the week, and here's another: Orpheus's descent into Hades.

The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice has long bothered me for one simple reason: Orpheus's lack of discipline. Discipline--in its complicated interactions with habit, routine, and commitment--is the foundation of my understanding, and living, of day-to-day life. Discipline is difficult when its rewards are vague, the punishment for lapses uncertain or manifest only over a longer term, or when it is forced to wrestle with strong competing imperatives. But when it takes the form of a singular requirement--do not look back at your wife, or you will lose her--discipline should simply take over; it should, ultimately, not be hard. Yet Orpheus, with everything in the balance, couldn't follow a single command. As Mazur writes, setting Orpheus in contrast with Virgil's agricultural concerns in the Georgics:

But never has there been someone more unlikely to follow instructions than Orpheus. He is a genius, a poet, a musician, not a farmer, and his instruments are the imagination, language, and the lyre, never the plough. Descended from and inspired by the Muses, he is not one for prudent behavior or stolid obedience.

And that's how I understood the story of Orpheus . . . until about a year ago, when I was struck, wildly, by the realization that Orpheus didn't turn back because of a failure of discipline, but because he had no choice:

Orpheus pulls himself up one more step. It feels as if he's been climbing forever, with no memory but of this hunched-over, claw-fingered, back-straining scrabble up the mountain, wreathed in sulfurous smoke that has left his lungs ragged, nostrils streaming, and his beard smelling of foul fire. The endless razors of the rough rock have turned his hands and feet into burning ribbons of bloody flesh; his knees, too, are lacerated almost to the bone.

When they started their climb--the last time he was able to gaze on Eurydice--the summit of the blackened mountain way above them, which would lead to the remote cave that would eventually spill them out once more into the land of the living, was wreathed in smoke, invisible. And in the hours (days? weeks?) of climbing since, it has not once appeared; if anything, the darkness has closed in even more tightly. Aside from the occasional, brutally tantalizing glimpse of a few feet further up offered by the occasional break in the clouds, Orpheus might as well be wearing a hood.

And why not wear a hood? For the one thing he wants to see, lives to see, descended--good gods--into Hades to see, he cannot see. In the early stages of the climb, Orpheus could at least hear Eurydice behind him, picking her way carefully up and over the rocks. Once, early, he even felt a puff of her breath against his neck, deliciously cool in Hades's hot toxicity, shivering him with an emotion that felt utterly foreign to this place: joy.

But now he has not heard her for he doesn't know how long. Not a word, not a breath, not a step. It is impossible to climb this mountain without sending a clatter of rocks sliding to the bottom with every step. But from Eurydice, for lo these many hours, there has been no sound.

The gods always keep their bargains. The gods always keep their bargains. Orpheus continues to climb, up and on. Up, and on.

Then Eurydice cries out. Orpheus. He stops. Help me. I'm so tired. I don't know if I can keep going. I'm afraid I'm going to fall all the way back down. Lifting a hand, a foot, continuing to climb, Orpheus throws words of reassurance over his shoulder. But they don't reassure; rather, they seem to inflame. Orpheus!

He tries singing. It has always worked. It has always been the answer to any situation in which he's found himself. But it does nothing, and for the first time--remarkably, insanely, for the first time in this entire journey into the land of the dead--Orpheus feels fear.

The gods always keep their bargains. Eurydice cries out again. This time it is a cry of pain. And Orpheus begins to feel his control of his mind slip, begins to wonder. When they get to the cave, and on to the world of the living--and they will, he has no doubt; the gods always keep their bargains--will he find himself, not the brave husband who descended into Hades to retrieve his lost love, but, rather, the cruel husband who callously ignored all his wife's entreaties, hardened his heart to her pleas when she was in utmost despair? Will Eurydice--while in her rational mind knowing, or at least telling herself, that he had no choice--hate him in her secret heart, nurse, year after year, a cancerous canker that will slowly poison their marriage, blanch then poison their love? Doubt is a worm that never stops eating. Burrowing. Orpheus falls to his knees, trembling, racked by uncertainty.

Eurydice is screaming. The gods always keep their bargains. But do they keep the spirit along with the letter? They promise to return your wife, but do they promise to return her whole, sane, unbrutalized, unflayed? What commitments do they honor? What commitments ought Orpheus honor, to himself, his love, his wife?

Eurydice screams. Orpheus turns.

The gods always keep their bargains.

This is why the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is a horror story at heart, suitable for October: it is about being left with only impossible choices, only evil outcomes, yet still feeling responsible. Having been thinking about Orpheus in this new (to me) way for a while, I was pleased to find Mazur working along similar lines, but with an additional, interesting twist:

In the end Orpheus may prove to be wiser than most heroes. Even when he looks back, I think he knows what he is doing. . . .

Orpheus is fully aware of the relative time--momentary versus infinite--spent above and below. In fact, it may be the opposite of greed and impetuousness to do what he does, for by looking Orpheus is ensuring an infinite joy with his beloved, rather than the short-sighted not-looking that would have gained her momentarily, but always, during life as well as for the infinite afterlife, with the marital strife and blame of inconstancy: "You never once looked at me."

If there's one thing that October stories teach us, it's that, while the gods always keep their bargains, we mortals should avoid those deals if we have any choice at all. Chance and fate may be implacable, but they also offer fewer cruel illusions.

Forbidden things

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Reading Grace Dane Mazur's Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination the other day, I encountered an object well worthy of a ghostly tale or two:

But some mirrors must never be looked at, not ever, at least by humans. This is the case with the sacred regalia mirror, Yata no Kagami, kept at the Ise Shrine in Japan. This is presumed to be an octagonal mirror, ritual in nature, similar to other known octagonal mirrors.

This forbidden mirror is kept in a box within a box within a box, hidden from outsiders in a ritually restricted area of the shrine. The outermost box is made of Japanese cypress wood (Hinoki). The middle box is also of cypress wood. The innermost box, containing the mirror, is made of gold, and thus is incorruptible.

This Shinto sacred mirror is not, in fact, a looking glass, but rather an emblem of imperial nobility in ancient Japan, and, at least in ancient times, possibly a device for reflecting light, thus connected with life and fertility.

No one may look at this mirror, not even the Emperor, though some say the Emperor may have seen it during his pilgrimage to the shrines in 1869; and there is the possibility that Shinto priests may have glimpsed it during a ritual in 1901, when the innermost container was permanently sealed.

I'm enchanted with the idea of a mirror that has never reflected any image that can be aware of its reflection, never had a chance to steal a soul. Surely the story of the Emperor and the priests are but rumors, right? No punishment is spoken of, but it's hard to imagine a forbidden mirror that wouldn't exact a vicious punishment for a transgressive glance. I like to think that, rather than your soul, it would steal your sight, so that as it sat, solitary, in its box of gold in its box of cypress in its box of cypress, it could see, while you, the whole world all before you, are lost in blackest night.

All I know for sure is that, should I ever happen to get to see this mirror, it would be the one mirror in the world into which I would stare while saying, "Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary."

Through gates of horn and ivory, or, Entering the realm of the Oneiroi

{Photos by rocketlass.}

October brings longer nights, and, in the upper Midwest, with its clouds and storms, darker nights. More time for dreaming; more time for nightmares.

In The Terrors of the Night (1594), Thomas Nashe writes of dreams:

There is no man put to any torment, but quaketh & trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the daye time wee torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured.

I am a light sleeper. When my brother recently mentioned being woken by the ticking of his wife's watch as it lay on a table a floor below, I nodded in recognition. So while I am fortunate enough to dream extravagantly, my dreams tend not to take me over completely, not to disorient me on waking. I don't know the terror expressed in the passage below, which begins Charles Baxter's novel The Feast of Love (2000):

The man--me, this pale being, no one else, it seems--wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.

The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don't recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight's distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What's worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed--actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There's a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can't manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn't working, and because it, the flesh in which I'm housed, hasn't yet become me.

I was led to the Baxter passage by Grace Dane Mazur's remarkable short book on the concept of the hinge, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination (2010), where she writes, about it and other works:

The openings of some contemporary American masterpieces show the same sort of liminality and entrancement [as Proust] and also an intricate imbalance leading to a sort of structural instability--that state where things are so precarious that something has got to happen. This structural instability can come from being on the edge, or simply being on edge, and is often accompanied by uneasiness, excitement, fear.

In one of the wonderful echoes that reading multiple books at once can generate, I had just that morning been reading Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States (2007), which links Proust and Kafka in a chapter that begins,

At this point, it is also important to rethink the idea of real life.

Describing an early draft of the opening of The Trial, Thirlwell writes, of the moment after the two officials enter Joseph K.'s room:

Joseph K., however, is quick to set things straight. He establishes friendly terms. "The strange thing is," says Joseph K., chattily, "that when one wakes up in the morning, one generally finds things in the same places they were the previous evening. And yet in sleep and in dreams one finds oneself, at least apparently, in a state fundamentally different from wakefulness*, and upon opening one's eyes an infinite presence of mind is required, or rather quickness of wit, in order to catch everything, so to speak, in the same place on left it the evening before."

But, as Thirlwell explains, Kafka deleted that portion of the scene:

This conversation between Joseph K. and the guardes who have come to take him away, in which K. reports what someone once told him, that waking up is the "riskiest moment," because after all, "if you can manage to get through it without being dragged out of place, you can relax for the rest of the day"--this conversation disappeared.

The omission, Thirlwell argues, is key: what separates Kafka's reflections on the disorientations of sleep from Proust's contemporaneous ones ("How then, searching for one's thoughts, one's personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one's own self rather than any other? . . . One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one's hand.") is that Kafka never cues us to look to sleep's dislocations:

Ratehr than speculating on the fact that falling asleep might be ontologically dangerous, Joseph K. now wakes up in a world which is exactly like a dream. Like a dream, it does not feel like a dream at all.

And, as a lived dream in the world, it is, inescapably and inevitably, a nightmare.

In Hinges, Mazur writes,

All these temporal and psyhic perversities combine to put us in an unstable situation in which something, everything, is bound to happen. We, and the characters, have entered into the world of the story, which is clearly a different world from our own.

The same could be said for the world of the dream. Anything could happen--at least up to that moment when, as Paul Bowles put it ins Without Stopping: An Autobiography (1972), "a dream ceases to be a neutral experience and declares itself a nightmare." If we're lucky, at that moment we wake up, or at least begin to receive some intimations that this reality is not reality, and there will be an end to it. A way out.

Which brings me back to the opening, and the sense, on waking, that we have to quickly set the world to rights or risk being permanently unmoored. John Aubrey, in his endlessly diverting and useful Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects (1696), has an entry that suits, under the heading of "Of One's being divided into a Two-fold person":

In dreams it is a sign of death, because out of one are then made two, when the soul is separated from the body.

Sleep is a prefiguring of death,  a dream a hope for countering it, a nightmare a marker of our fears of it. There is a way out, a gate made neither or horn nor of ivory but of bleached bone, through which one day we'll all pass.