Castaways

Shakespeare’s The Tempest may be the definitive castaways-tale. There is the duke, Prospero, who becomes usurped from the throne by his own brother and put to sea, along with a baby girl, in a meagerly provisioned, shoddy boat. Ovid, Shakespeare’s unofficial muse, used this suspenseful theme in the mythical tale of Perseus. Similarly, there is an island on which the two exiled royals find refuge and where they ultimately long for a return home. In both Shakespeare and Ovid, the castaways survive with the unusual advantage of magic.

The Tempest’s Prospero has spent his life studying books of the supernatural within the sequestered comforts of his beloved Milan. Now, many leagues from his homeland, surviving for approximately twelve years on a faraway island in the Mediterranean, Prospero has been plotting with his art to conjure a storm, a tempest, which will bring his enemies to the island. It takes a tremendous amount of control to accomplish such a feat, and Prospero certainly is something of a control freak at best and a cruel brute at his worst.

Though he adores his daughter, Miranda, Prospero is manipulative with her in the way he controls her thoughts and her memory and even what she sees:

The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,
And say what thou seest yond. 1.2.411,412

With cunning conversation, he allows for certain memories to filter in. But when Miranda begins to recall too much, Prospero utilizes his absolute power to knock her out with sleep. So, Miranda is continually awakening from naps with a quizzical look on her face. Still, she has very early memories that appear to be surreptitiously pressed on her by Prospero:

’Tis far off,
And rather like a dream than an assurance
That my remembrance warrants. Had I not
Four or five women once that tended me? 1.2.46-49

Mirada, (whose very name is phonetically similar to the words memory and remember), speaks with eloquence about what she does or does not recall of her early childhood in Milan. She is the angelic, innately wise ingenue that Shakespeare often employed for his female characters.

Since landing on the isle, Miranda has been under Prospero’s tutelage and influence. Yet, her temperament hardly resembles her father’s. For instance, while Prospero has enough angry aggression to create a violent tempest that would bring a ship crashing in flames to the shore, Miranda has not inherited any of his meanness; in fact, she sympathizes with the crew:

O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer! 1.2.5,6

As they made the island their home, Prospero had quickly acquired slaves: Caliban, (an anagram of cannibal,) a native of the island who is referred to as a grotesque creature – and Ariel, a male or kind of asexual sprite, who had been imprisoned in a tree trunk by Caliban’s mother, a witch. The witch has since died, so Prospero frees Ariel from the tree, but imprisons the airy spirit all the same with threats of returning him to the tree if he does not obey:

Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou forgot
the foul witch Sycorax… 1.2.259,260

In keeping with this colonialist trope, Shakespeare has Prospero commanding these two slaves for the magician’s own purposes in raising the storm and using his minion, Ariel, to perform spritely tricks on the royals, who wash ashore. Indeed, Ariel is eternally on-call to carry out fantastic, magical activities all across the island. Hence, Prospero, who was exiled, has exiled his captors to the imprisonment of slavery and bondage.

The dialogue is highly poetic even between the oppressed Caliban and his master, for Prospero and Miranda taught Caliban to speak, thus he speaks their elevated language, yet he resists their complete control by saying:

You taught me language; and my prophit on’t
is, I know how to curse… 1.2.365-366

On the other hand, Ariel addresses Prospero as he would want to be addressed:

All hail, great master! Grave sir, hail!… 1.2.189

However, Ariel’s salutations to Prospero are so slavishly sycophantic, one might mistake it for mockery. But Ariel has been promised the carrot of eventual freedom; and so, the invisible sprite dashes from one side of the island to the other and then out into the middle of the sea before you can blink, in order to fulfill Prospero’s deeds.

With Ariel, there are many references to the Greek gods and goddesses, unicorns, mysterious incantations and mythical masques and pageants. In Act IV, a magnificent engagement-ceremony is performed for Miranda and Ferdinand, who fall in love at first sight. With a fantastic tableau and supernatural arias, Ariel conjures the spirits of Queen Juno and the goddess Ceres. Invoking the Proserpine myth, Ceres must first be assured that Venus was not a part of this union, for Ceres has forsworn the Goddess of Love because of the way Venus sealed the fate of Ceres’ daughter, Proserpine, who was abducted by the King of Hell to become the Queen of the Underworld. After Ceres has the assurance that Venus had no part in this coupling, the engagement-ceremony for Miranda and Ferdinand is then blessed by Juno, Ceres and the singing and dancing of ethereal spirit-nymphs.

Unlike Ovid himself, who was exiled by Augustus Ceasar to the island of Tomis in the Black Sea, Prospero attains his desired outcome: the royals and their lords land – setting the stage for the magician’s machinations. In perfect, Shakesperean writerly-timing, the newly arrived men notice the enchantments in the sultry island:

These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger. 5.1.227,228

Still, the royals and their men soon speak of plans to establish an ideal government in a sort of utopian society. Politically, however, their ideals only lead them to contradiction, debate and trechery. And as with most Shakespearean plots, the jesters stumble on stage to mock everything that is taking place in the play.

Meanwhile, Prospero and Miranda are prized with the most philosophical and poetic lines, as when Prospero addresses his new, prospective son-in-law, Ferdinand; Prospero councils:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep… 4.1.156,- 158

Another poetic tool, personification, is generously used throughout the play, as when Prospero personifies time:

Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey, and time
Goes upright with his carraiage… 5.1.1

Finally, Prospero’s solemn speech in Act V has been attributed to Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater. Spectacular as it is, the soliloquy is too long to quote here, (5.1.34-57), as is Prospero’s epilogue, a prayer, really, of farewell and forgiveness. (Epilogue)

Yet, Miranda utters the most famous and widely used lines in The Tempest when she says:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t! 5.1.182-185

These are the words she speaks as all of the survivors of the tempest gather around Prospero. They are highly optimistic words that can be broadly interpreted coming from innocent Miranda, who could not recall seeing another man, other than her father, Prospero, and a slave, Caliban, her entire life.

{photo taken with my BlackBerry}

Spring Posy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So we’ll live,
And p r a y, and sing,
And tell old tales,
And laugh
At gilded butterflies…
And take upon’s the mystery
Of things,
As if we were God’s spies.

William Shakespeare
~ from King Lear

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

{photos taken with my BlackBerry}

Goddess Season

In the short story, “Demeter” by Maile Meloy, the writer draws parallels between a modern-day woman named Demeter and the ancient goddess of the harvest in Greek mythology. “The Rape of Persephone,” one of the most sorrowful tales in mythology, is the story of a young girl torn from her mother, Demeter, by a great, colossal fiend – Pluto, the king of hell. In some of the mythical versions, Persephone is a maiden and in other versions she is a goddess in her own right – the goddess of spring.

As the myth is told, Persephone was picking flowers in a vast, summery field among her friends, when Pluto, the king of the underworld, snatched her up and brought her down to Hades to be his wife and his queen.

Terrified,

In tears, the goddess called her mother, called

Her comrades too, but oftenest her mother;

And, as she’d torn the shoulder of her dress,

The folds slipped down and out the flowers fell,

And she, in innocent simplicity,

Grieved in her girlish heart for their loss too.*

The myth, while portraying Pluto as a monster, also allows for the fact that Venus, the goddess of love, had arranged for the coupling by instructing Cupid to shoot Pluto in the heart with an arrow that had Persephone’s name on it.

Meloy’s short story brilliantly translates the sorrow of the Persephone myth into an everyday tale of relationships and divorce, linking the modern world to the myth of antiquity. Here, Demeter’s daughter, Perry is fourteen, perhaps a couple of years older than her mythological counterpart. And her real name is Elizabeth, an intimation of the name-confusion in the Roman vs. the Greek. For example, Persephone and Demeter in the Greek version are named Proserpine and Ceres in the Roman.

As a somewhat sporty, straight-forward and logical girl, Perry hardly mimics the nature-loving, flower child who, rather anemic, rises from the dead every spring, like Persephone – and Perry is spared from actually being abducted, but she fits well into the narrative of a young girl torn between two worlds. In her parents’ divorce-settlement, Perry is to live with her father for half the year and her mother the other half, a harrowing division of the year.

Meloy begins:

When they divided up the year, Demeter chose, for her own, the months when the days start getting longer.** 

This correlation with the annual division of the seasons stands out as the most telling, connecting theme. In Meloy, Perry disappears into her father’s house: The dark interior of the house engulfed her. The screen door slammed shut.

Meloy sprinkles her story generously with such tropes that hearken to the original tale. Perry refuses to eat Demeter’s ultra-healthy, organic food: It’s not real food! I will not eat millet! she shouts – a nod to Persephone’s seven pomegranate seeds. Perry’s parents, Demeter and Hank, are at opposite extremes, just as the goddess of grain, who gives life and vitality to the earth vs. the king of hell, who lives in a dark, cold land underground.

Hank is a scuba diver, and though he is not really a hateful character, death clings to his preoccupation with the extreme. The premise of plunging underwater or swimming works well in Meloy as both symbols of death and transformation – two key ideas that fill the Greek myths.

While Hank’s scuba diving conjures death in Meloy’s story; for instance, their friend, Duncan – Demeter’s lover – drowns on a scuba diving expedition lead by Hank, conversely, Meloy uses swimming as a platform for transformation and healing with Demeter. Just as Arethusa transformed into a beautiful, streaming pool in Ovid, the modern Demeter transforms as she swims in the local swimming pool:

It was her favorite moment of swimming, the passage from dry to wet, her skin shedding tiny bubbles of air as she kicked. It felt as if the world were washing off her. She was starting over, newborn.**

Among many brilliant references to the gods, the celestial-constellations, lightening bolts and “thundersnow,” Meloy supplies her Demeter with plenty of similarities to the character of Demeter in the ancient myth. Both women are the quintessential earth mother; one can imagine each of them cultivating the earth, barefoot – long, wavy hair billowing in the flower-scented air. At her most subtle and brilliant moments, Meloy brings the two together in spirit:

As soon as she knew she was pregnant, Demeter had stopped smoking pot. She started meeting the black-coated Hutterites in their truck to buy chickens and eggs. She bought vegetables at the farmers’ market from the Hmong refugees, who coaxed green shoots from the ground so much earlier in the year than anyone else. She ordered milk from the dairy and made baked eggs and cream with Hmong chives. She didn’t worry about getting fat – she was supposed to get fat.** 

The goddess Demeter can be inserted into this scenario of natural, culinary, food preparation with these nomadic, pastoral peoples. As well, both Demeters bear powerful feelings and emotions: the tormented, inner thoughts of the modern Demeter often match the violent responses of the sometimes angry, ancient mother-goddess.  And, of course, they both suffer with the tragedy of separation – the consequence of their unbreakable ties to a young daughter.

Meloy’s story is a tale of grief and loss, just as sorrowful as the original mythological tale. Demeter’s feelings emerge in waves over the separation with Perry as much as for the death of Duncan. And the writer brings us ever closer to Demeter’s loss, by degrees, to the culminating moment in the pool when Demeter tries to imagine, while swimming, what Duncan may have felt as he drowned. Then, the whole universe seems to react to Demeter’s slight flirtation with drowning. Annie, the lifeguard who also happens to be Duncan’s eighteen-year-old daughter by his marriage, becomes the sentry amidst all of nature’s omnipresence – blowing her whistle and clamoring down the ladder.

And as in the Greek, Meloy ends with a measure of justice – but with an almost joyful portion of hope. Scenes in which Demeter frolics in the snow with the teenagers, after the summer snowstorm of mythic proportions, symbolize a christening or a blessing of eternal hope – perhaps even Duncan’s blessing. The complications and challenges within a lifetime have brought Demeter to middle age, yet Annie represents the next generation, and she does so with a sense of anticipation. Annie includes and accepts Demeter where Perry, her own daughter, had always shunned and marginalized. Yet, Annie also lightly ridicules her own mother – such is the way of mother/daughter relationships in the modern world.

Meloy renders a beautiful ending worthy of the goddess who promotes the continuation of all life. Whether you are a mother, a daughter, and/or a lover of mythology, you will love and appreciate this story.

* Metamorphoses by Ovid, Translated by A.D. Melville.  Book V, The Rape of Proserpine.

** “Demeter,” by Maile Meloy, appeared in The New Yorker, November 19^th, 2012.

Maile Meloy’s “Demeter” will be published in Meloy’s new book of short stories due out this year in Penguin. Also by Maile Meloy, Half in Love, a collection of short stories.

Remembering Yeats

As I took my last final exam in my last and final quarter in college, I could hear the students who had already finished for the quarter outside whooping it up and cheering by the fountain

I couldn’t concentrate on my exam. It was a Women’s Lit class in a room built half underground, but I could see the blue sky through the upper windows and hear the shouting of students who were out on the lawn and near the water fountain, which spilled into a rushing pool. In my sleep-deprived, day-dreaming state, I actually pictured the students dancing in the pool – celebrating and splashing around. And I kept thinking of a line from Yeats: “… Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs copulating in the foam…” I had learned this from another class, 20^th Century British and Irish Poetry. I never memorized the entire poem, but that rather shocking line always lingered.

I honestly do not know how I passed the Women’s Lit exam, and I was surprised to learn that I had aced the class. Perhaps I was inspired by Yeats. I will always remember him and associate his poem with that moment and my image of the youths by the fountain.

NEWS FOR THE DELPHIC ORACLE

                        I

There all the golden codgers lay,

There the silver dew,

And the great water sighed for love,

And the wind sighed too.

Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed

By Oisin on the grass;

There sighed amid his choir of love

Tall Pythagoras.

Plotinus came and looked about,

The salt-flakes on his breast,

And having stretched and yawned awhile

Lay sighing like the rest.

                        II

Straddling each a dolphin’s back

And steadied by a fin,

Those Innocents re-live their death,

Their wounds open again.

The ecstatic waters laugh because

Their cries are sweet and strange,

Through their ancestral patterns dance,

And the brute dolphins plunge

Where wades the choir of love

Proffering its sacred laurel crowns,

They pitch their burdens off.

                        III

Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,

Peleus on Thetis stares.

Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,

Love has blinded him with tears;

But Thetis’ belly listens.

Down the mountain walls

From where Pan’s cavern is

Intolerable music falls.

Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,

Belly, shoulder, bum,

Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs

Copulate in the foam.

 

~ William Butler Yeats

 

{photo taken with my BlackBerry}

 

 

Always Dream

Reblogged from Laney McMann:

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

~William Faulkner

Read more… 6 more words

Perseus and Andromeda

The Greek myth, “Perseus and Andromeda,” is one of the rare happy ending tales in the mythology cannon. I like to think that Perseus and Andromeda’s romantic ending, or beginning, is a reward for each having endured harsh circumstances through early life.

Before they finally meet, Perseus and Andromeda both have suffered imprisonment, family betrayal and banishment. Add to this: outrageous encounters with monsters, and between the two protagonists they have racked up enough travesty to earn a happily-ever-after marriage.

Of course, this balance of justice is hardly a guaranteed credo of the ancient Greeks. More often, human beings, and even half-gods, will suffer until they die or are transformed. It is the way of the Greek gods to maintain control over living beings. Yet, the people of the ancient era created the gods in their own image as a way of identifying with the beauty of the human form rather than the mythical beast-deities of the pre-Greek era.

Perseus was the son of the beautiful princess, Danae, and the god, Zeus, who visited Danae in the form of a golden rain and so impregnated her with a child, Perseus. But the mother and child are soon locked up in a great chest and sent out to sea, at the hands of a paranoid king. So, Danae and Perseus, mother and son, brave this outrage together inside the dark, wooden chest as it is heaved about by the wind and the waves:

In that strange boat Danae sat with her little son. The daylight faded and she was alone on the sea.

Zeus must have been watching out for them from afar, because the chest is finally caught by a wave that delivers the mother and son safely to a friendly island. From here, they are looked after by a benevolent, farming couple until Perseus becomes a young man and sets out on his own to meet his destiny of heroic adventures.

Three times he saw the icy Bears, three times
The Crab’s long claws…

As he is part-god and part-human, Perseus meets every challenge with divine assistance. And it is within these ordeals that Ovid used his writerly craft to translate bizarre tropes whilst the ancient story sweeps the reader along, as in a fairy tale.

As if Medusa were not creepy enough, with her mane of writhing snakes, the twin sisters, who live in “A stronghold safe below the mountain mass/ Of icy Atlas,” share one eye, which they pass back and forth to each other in order to see. This is truly brilliant imagery! Anyone who has ever know twins, (or if you are a twin), has noticed the peculiar and uncanny insight that passes between these twofold siblings.

Ovid is filled with many such fantastic passages. But of course, Perseus forges through every episode with the ingenuity and speed of Mercury. By the time Perseus has finally destroyed Medusa and transformed Atlas into a mountain, (see The Hero Perseus), our hero is pumped and ready to rescue Andromeda from the sea monster.

Then Perseus laced
His feet again with plumes on either side,
And girded on his curving sword and clove
With beating ankle-wings the flowing air.

Meanwhile, Andromeda, the beautiful and innocent damsel who is chained to a rock in the sea, suffers a curse placed upon her by the naiads, who were angry with Andromeda’s conceited mother. So, Andromeda is actually suffering the sins of her mother – another incomprehensible but frequent punishment.

In Andromeda’s very compromising position: totally nude, chained to a rock with her hands and ankles tied while being threatened by a grotesque sea monster, as her parents stand on the shore watching, Perseus falls in love at first sight:

Love, before he knew,
Kindled; he gazed entranced; and overcome
By loveliness so exquisite, so rare,
Almost forgot to hover in the air.

Perseus, by trickery and stealth, kills the sea monster. First, however, he makes a long, impassioned speech to Andromeda and the spectators on the shore. There is just enough time for him to finish his long speech before the sea monster attacks Andromeda: this ludicrous scene might be a sign of Ovid’s humor. He was Roman, after-all, and the Romans liked to make speeches.

In the next scene, of surreal poetics, Perseus uses his own shadow on the water to lure the sea monster away from Andromeda. What follows is a pretty brutal killing involving lots of stabbing and blood:

The beast belched purple blood,
Sea spume and blood together.

Then,

Cheers filled the shore and echoed round the halls
Of heaven.

A wedding celebration of lovely adornment and festivities follows, wherein the sea nymphs play with Medusa’s head and set it upon wet seaweed on the sand and watch the seaweed turn to coral. Another supernatural setting, and hence, the Ovidian mythology of coral!

Other tales with happy endings include: Baucis and Philemon, Iphis, Pygmalion, and Ceyx and Alcyone.

Excerpts from The Metamorphoses, book IV, by Ovid, translated by A.D. Melville.

Picture credit: In the above tapestry, Perseus rescues Andromeda from a sea monster. The depiction takes place on the Bay of Jaffa in Palestine: Perseus & Andromeda. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes Tapestry by Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Vatican Museum of Rome. C.1516-1519

Autumn Contentment

Calendar pages into the wind ~

small kites limning cursive loops

on the whims of the air.

Freedom breathes up

through the colors of a pastel fallout ~

the smells of dawn mixing into a new, unknown day.

Like the first, fresh whiffs of Autumn,

when the earth turns away

from a long, sweltering summer ~

spinning up leaves of our new contentment.

 

~ tracy