Kate Bernheimer, editor of the new anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths,assembles a collection of her favorite retellings of the story of Orpheus. Among them is “The Lyre of Orpheus,” the 2004 song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, featured above:
The title song of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 2004 double album, “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus,” presents the myth as a twisted fairy tale, set to a languorous blues-rock tune: Orpheus builds a lyre from a block of wood and a wire, accidentally kills Eurydice when he plays it for her, and eventually falls down a well, into Hell, where he’s reunited with her. “Orpheus went leaping through the fields,” Cave sings in his baritone twang. “Strumming as hard as he did please/Birdies detonated in the sky/Bunnies dashed their brains out on the trees…” It’s the plaintive chorus—“Oh, momma! Oh, momma!”—that clinches this version for me. Cave’s music always has a particularly primal, post-human tone; its grungy, sadistic lift suits Orpheus’s predicament better than any more conventionally beautiful song could.
The evil ones, according to C.S. Lewis. Micah Mattix finds this passage from his A Preface to Paradise Lost that explains why:
Satan is the best drawn of Milton’s characters. The reason is not hard to find. Of the major characters whom Milton attempted he is incomparably the easiest to draw. Set a hundred poets to tell the same story and in ninety of the resulting poems Satan will be the best character. In all but a few writers the “good” characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder.
I’m genuinely perplexed what Lewis is talking about. Is he under the impression that the history of literature is bereft of heroes? Presumably, those would be people possessed of “high virtues” if the phrase has any meaning at all. I suspect Achilles wouldn’t pass muster for him as “good” – but if he’s not possessed of “high virtues” then I don’t know what the word means. Or does he think that bourgeois virtue is pale and boring? Is he under the impression that Dorothea Brooke is an uninteresting character? Or Leopold Bloom? Or John Ames?
And what about those evil characters? Iago, yeah, he’s a pretty rotten piece of fruit. But is Othello evil? What about Anna Karenina? Or Captain Ahab? For that matter, is Edgar really less-interesting than Edmund? Really? Are you sure?
And dare I mention in this regard Huck Finn’s own estimation of his damnedness, versus our own estimation of his heroism?
Saying “all it takes” to write a successful character is to release one’s own pent-up desire to do evil is akin to saying that “all it takes” to make a hit movie or television show is to show a little skin. Which is to say: it isn’t correct at all. Writing a successful villain is extremely difficult – because writing any kind of successful character is extremely difficult.
(Depiction of Satan, the antagonist of Milton’s epic poem, by Gustave Doré circa 1866)
Eric W. Dolan spots a remarkable recent homily from Pope Francis, a riff on these lines from the Gospel of Luke: “Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge!” He interprets the phrase as a critique of Christians who turn belief in God into an ideology. From the Vatican Radio transcript:
“The faith passes, so to speak, through a distiller and becomes ideology. And ideology does not beckon [people]. In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements.”
… “The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances the Church from the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh? Already the Apostle John, in his first Letter, spoke of this. Christians who lose the faith and prefer the ideologies. His attitude is: be rigid, moralistic, ethical, but without kindness. This can be the question, no? But why is it that a Christian can become like this? Just one thing: this Christian does not pray. And if there is no prayer, you always close the door.”
“The key that opens the door to the faith,” the Pope added, “is prayer.” The Holy Father warned: “When a Christian does not pray, this happens. And his witness is an arrogant witness.” He who does not pray is “arrogant, is proud, is sure of himself. He is not humble. He seeks his own advancement.” Instead, he said, “when a Christian prays, he is not far from the faith; he speaks with Jesus.”
As you know, I have been skeptical of Pope Francis, but this sermon of his really spoke to me. I had made an ideology of my Catholicism. I hadn’t meant for it to be that way, but that’s what happened. It came about mostly because I was rightly (I still believe) concerned with the loss of the sense of the holy, and of morals and doctrines, in contemporary Catholicism. But I made the cardinal error of ceasing to pray, or to pray as often or as well as I should have. I mistook talking and thinking about the faith for being serious about the faith. Ideologization helped make my faith brittle. I’ve found that the Orthodox approach to faith makes it much harder for people like me to make the ideologue’s error, though the temptation is always there.
It is hard to be mindful of right doctrine, and right morals, while at the same time remembering that the purpose of the Christian faith is not to learn how to behave morally. But it’s necessary. I am certain that Francis is onto something when he talks about how serious prayer — by which he means an encounter of the soul with the living God — is the antidote to ideological religion.
Read the extensive Dish coverage of Pope Francis here and here.
“In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two-pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history…That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival,” – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
Before the Iron Curtain, before the sadder
Century, the one I was born into as
A little Cosmonaut, creeping in bomb shelters
With Mr. White, the school custodian
Who shoveled the coal while I occupied the alcove
Of my ways, it was so warm inside.
That ice age was a little one, a few hundred years about
One thousand years ago. That was all before buttons
And their holes had been considered closure,
Before there was a left shoe from the right.
My mother’s hair was ginger-colored, somewhere where
It’s even colder than it will ever be again.
Everything I ever wished for—
A Dalmatian bounding spotted through the snow.
Reviewing the philosopher A.C. Grayling’s Friendship, Stuart Kelly questions his brushing aside of Christianity’s contributions to the theory and practice of philia:
Grayling being a notable anti-theist, it is no surprise that he treats Christian views of friendship as an opportunity to take a few pot-shots at some large fish in a particularly small barrel. By doing so, he misses the chance to comment on a radical difference. In Cicero, for example, there is a vexed discussion of whether or not it is possible to be a true friend to someone who holds different political or ethical beliefs. The idea of treating people as if they were friends already seems to me to be a more profound shift in the concept than Grayling admits. He may have some fun with the idea that the infinite, self-sufficient deity should require being chums with sinners, but it is at the expense of realising that in religious ethics there is the very openness that he wishes for in terms of contemporary secular friendship. He praises the notion that “children in kindergarten will be unconsciously friends with anyone at all, of any persuasion, background, colour, faith or political family”. That one might consciously choose to befriend despite difference seems to me to be a religious rather than a philosophical proposition. The “as if” (treating people as if they were friends) is a leap of faith, not a cold piece of ratiocination.
Read my own thoughts on Christianity and friendship here.
Ben Myers describes worshiping God “as a way of sharing the common lot with everybody else”:
I go to church sometimes not needing comfort for my own private griefs but seeking consolation for the slow unfolding trainwreck that is called human history. I go to church sometimes hoping to find forgiveness not for myself but for my ancestors, my parents, my children and their children who will one day be born and will have to live (who knows how?) in whatever diminished world that I bequeath to them. I go to church sometimes not to be reconciled to anybody in particular, but because for fifty thousand years the land beneath my feet was home to other peoples, and I am hoping by some miracle to be reconciled to them. I go to church sometimes not seeking peace within my own soul but hoping to find relief from the raging violence that has boiled in the blood of all my brothers since the time of Cain.
I go to church and take bread and wine not necessarily because I feel hungry but because the common human condition is, at bottom, hunger and thirst and nothing more. It is the hunger of my mothers and fathers that I am feeding when I take the consecrated bread. When I take the cup it is the burning thirst of Adam that I slake. It is for the whole huge accumulated mass of human arrogance and stupidity and meanness that I hang my head in shame and say, Lord have mercy.
Recently the Dish noted the forthcoming publication of the prayer journals Flannery O’Connor kept as a graduate student and fledgling writer. In a two-part essay, A.G. Harmon unpacks a number of Connor’s entries, including this one about her literary ambitions:
I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, “oh God, please,” and “I must,” and “please, please.” I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation—that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind, realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.
Harmon’s commentary:
O’Connor’s desperate calls for heavenly intervention are deeply resonant. Our pleas of please are all but screamed, as though God’s attention must be captured; as though he must be distracted somehow, since there’s no other explanation for the breathtaking speed with which the ever-towering failures come.
But what the writer speaks of here is that such tumult is not the right way to approach God on these matters. It smacks of a demand upon God, suggesting that his concession must be granted, given how deeply earnest the prayers are and how terribly hard the supplicant has worked.
Whether O’Connor was ever able to achieve the state she sought is unknowable, and moot, since her prayers were answered anyway. But it is the coupling of love with resignation that takes lesser souls like mine aback. That correlation—that if one loved more, he would not presume so much—implies that love allows for trust regardless of how things fall out; and trust does not exhibit itself in panic, in screams, in claims of desert.
Read Harmon’s second installment on O’Connor’s prayer journals here. Previous Dish on O’Connor here, here, and here.
Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or-winning film by Abdellatif Kechiche, continues to draw controversy for its NC-17 sex scenes. But not every theater is taking notes from the MPAA:
[The recommendation from the MPAA ratings board that “no children will be admitted”] is only, in the end, a recommendation, without legal or contractual force. And at least one theater has decided to flout it. The IFC Center in Greenwich Village — part of the IFC family, which includes Sundance Selects, the label that submitted “Blue” to the ratings board in the first place — will not turn away curious youngsters. In an e-mailed statement, John Vanco, senior vice president and general manager of the IFC Center … announced that “high school age patrons” would be admitted.
A.O. Scott, whose 14-year-old daughter viewed the film (twice), offers advice to parents:
You have your own rules, and your own reasons for enforcing them, and naked bodies writhing in ecstasy may not be something you want your kids to see. But in some ways, because of its tone and subject matter, “Blue” is a movie that may be best appreciated by viewers under the NC-17 age cutoff. It’s a movie about a high school student, after all, confronting issues — peer pressure, first love, homework, postgraduate plans — that will be familiar to adolescents and perhaps more exotic to the middle-aged. In spite of linguistic and cultural differences, the main character, moody, self-absorbed and curious, will remind many American girls of themselves, their friends and the heroines of the young adult novels they devour. The content of the film is really no racier that what is found in those books, but our superstition about images designates it as adults-only viewing.
Alyssa Rosenberg applauds Scott for “talking publicly about the value of introducing your children to challenging culture, instead of focusing solely and obsessively on the potential dangers”:
So often, pop culture’s treated as if its only possible impact on young people who consume it (and too often, older people, too) is deleterious. And it’s absolutely true that films, television, books, comics, video games, and even museum installations can be frightening, confusing, upsetting, and challenging.
But they can also provide flashes of profound recognition that make viewers, readers, and players feel less alone in the world. They can stun you with beauty, or wound you with ugliness. They can level you with humor. Loving something can provide profound connections to people who share your affection for it. And even when a piece of culture profoundly disturbs you, it can open up the world to you, and reveal big truths that you’d previously avoided. These are risks that are worth taking.
Daniel D’Addario agrees that teens “can handle some on-screen sexuality – and they might just be enriched by art.” Michelle Dean praises the film but questions whether its depictions of lesbian sex are realistic. For Stephanie Zacharek, the question is: “At this point, what reasonably curious person doesn’t want to see Blue Is the Warmest Color? But what’s going to happen when people trek out, revved up for lots of hot lesbian sex, and find something else?”
[S]ome will see Blue Is the Warmest Color as pure horndog bait, yet another degradation of the female image made by a guy with his dirty-minded camera. Others—more, I hope—will see a story about the universality of desire and heartbreak. Love will tear us apart again. For better or worse, that truth is more enduring than politics.
Richard Corliss calls the film “unmissable” and suggests other filmmakers take note:
Instead of wondering why there is so much whoopee in Blue Is the Warmest Color — and it’s actually not that much: about nine minutes in the nearly three-hour film — one might ask why there is so little in most other movies. Considering that sex is an activity almost everyone participates in and thinks about even more, it’s startling and depressing to think about how few movies connect their characters’ lives with their erotic drives.
The movie goes on for three hours without an emotional letup — it’s finally overwhelming. People who’ve been through a terrible recent breakup—or can conjure up the sense memory of one — should approach Blue Is the Warmest Color with care. It might not just open old wounds. It might show you wounds you didn’t know you had.
Ha! I read your post while sitting in a John Deere 4440 tractor, waiting for a truck driver to pull into the field so I can load him with corn. Having recently split with my extremely cool poet GF who lives in a loft studio three hours away in the Twin Cities, I admit to having considered the “rural singles” type website. It’s a little hard to explain to a woman why I have no time for anything but harvest, or planting, or why I now have a whole bunch of free time since it rained, when I previously said there was no way I was available for that thing she wanted to do.
I think I’ll take my chances on another city woman. It might be easier to find her with a Dishhead Match service. Put me down for a smart, literate, open-minded woman 40-60. Tattooed and/or pierced and willingness to drive on muddy roads would be a bonus. I can offer grass-fed beef and all the locally grown vegetables she can eat.
Accepting profiles here. Another reader quotes me:
“What’s missing [from dating sites]? One word: serendipity.” This is a common refrain among people of (ahem) a certain generation. Its only flaw is that it’s dead wrong.
Serendipity will always be at the heart of falling in love. All online dating does is compress the time scale so that there are shorter gaps between opportunities for serendipity.
I am a recent entrant into the online dating world. I met a wonderful person not long ago with whom I’ve found some unexpected and profound spiritual/emotional connections. None of the salient aspects of ourselves showed up in our respective profiles or in the algorithm that introduced us. And, prior to meeting this person, I’d been on plenty of dates with people who I guessed going in would be better matches. What was missing in those instances? One word: Serendipity!
Another is on the same page:
I adore you and your blog, but this bit: “What’s missing? One word: serendipity. Which is how I met my husband. I have to say it has a charm all its own – but it’s sooo retro.” is more than a little self-congratulatory.
Online dating is no more and no less than a way to meet people – just like bars, college, work, church, and every other way people have met their mates throughout the course of human existence. I would think that you of all people would recognize that it’s possible for serendipity to exist online – isn’t that pretty much your business model?
I tried both Match and EHarmony off and on for five years. Believe me, I exhausted the friends/family/church/school connections years ago; if anyone who knew me knew of a marginally appropriate mate, we were introduced. I’d join a site for six months, get frustrated, quit, then a year later realize I was still looking and join up again. About a year ago I got back on Match and a few months later met someone who is so freaking perfect for me that I can only call it a miracle. (We’ve also used the word serendipity, thank you very much.) And this wonderful man, my favorite person on the planet, proposed on Saturday. Yay!
The Dish 
