The god running after

The first frost has encased the world, and fog erases it. Nothing moves. Out of white walls come faces set hard against the cold and expressionless. My favorite willow is frozen now, jagged branches rime-edged, like a waterfall shocked into stillness. Like a nymph is trapped under its bark.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, nymphs are always turning into trees. Struck with love, Apollo pursues Daphne. She calls out for help and in answer, roots and branches envelope her. This change forecloses all possibility for further change. Not dead, but also unalive: “her head was confined in a treetop, and all that remained was her beauty.” Beauty untouched by the god or, like a statue, by time.

Gianlorenzo Bernini sculpted these figures in mid-flight, just at the moment of metamorphosis. Apollo, so close to overtaking her, watches as Daphne sprouts buds from her fingertips, the bark beginning to wreathe her waist. His desire is that of the lover on Keats’ Grecian urn – “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” – a desire forever deferred.

When we think of forever, Keats’ ode might seem a natural choice for comparison; freedom from the temporal and its corruptions, an eternity in art. But eternity can also be terror. Not truth in beauty but, as Louise Bogan once wrote, “beauty with a rusted mouth.”*

Bogan rendered another, more terrible mythic transformation in “Medusa.” After glimpsing the Gorgon, the poem’s speaker has turned to stone. The entire surroundings have also frozen: “This is a dead scene forever now. … The water will always fall, and will not fall, / And the tipped bell make no sound.”

The poem ends on a quiet, leaden note:

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

The world in “Medusa” is a stone world, de-naturalizing even the dust. A live world is one of change. To be human is to see and suffer those changes, again and again.

In his book on the archetypal hero myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes of Daphne as someone who refuses the hero’s “call to adventure.” She would not give herself over to the god, and in that refusal, refused giving herself to life.

Granted, women in Greek mythology who did succumb to the seductive power of gods didn’t necessarily make out any better, seeing as those gods often had vengeful wives who turned nymphs into cows. But I wouldn’t read this myth literally (i.e. if men chase you through a forest, you should just have sex with them), nor does Campbell suggest we do so.

Forces of life are always in pursuit. Maybe “forces of life” is too vague, but I have my own in mind and maybe you do too, and I know they are not beautiful like the god. They make messes and bruises or a general feeling of discomfort. They will not necessarily make you better. They would take hold of you, and in entering you, make you changed.

There is a painting by my mother of Daphne, the nymph’s face just barely visible beneath a pale film and leaves and the emblazoned word,  “Transform.” The word is an imperative. It is not a choice. To revise Rilke: You must change to live.

In the autumn I went to a Rosh Hashanah celebration in the city of Dnipropetrovsk. We went to the Dnipro river. It was wider than I’d thought. The light was a deep autumn light, it cut deep shadows. The wind tore the waves, and the light tore them blue and black. Rolls of bread were passed around and broken. It was the new year. We were to think of our sins in the past year, and the parts of ourselves we wanted to leave behind. I tore the bread into many small, soft pieces for my many sins which have been neither small nor soft. I threw them into the Dnipro and gulls dipped down to eat them. 

...

*From “A Tale.” For your interest, you can listen to Bogan read “Medusa,” and poet Mary Kinzie (my former professor!) comment on it, on this podcast. Both of them have great poet voices.

One last thing: Toot toot toot shameless self-promotion! Read my guest post on Tori Dot Gov! It will make you uncomfortable but you'll love it, I promise. Then read all of Tori's posts ever, laugh until you weep, weep until you laugh, set yourself on fire!