What is one thing you can’t live without?
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‘What is life without thee!’ sings Orpheus: yet it’s clear he made a shot at continuing life that was something that others envied.
The Bacchae, also known as Maenads, kill Orpheus, or think they are doing so.
Let's piece together a life from the parts
of Orpheo, that bold envious girls
from tender limbs, once whole. tore. Torn from hearts
too of silly boys, playing finger swirls
on that lyre body of their sometime god.
Gluck made that poet, lost in painful song,
incapable of breath. Without his wife,
there was but evermore only that long
sliding scale downwards to the end of life.
What is life to me without thee,
What is life if thou art dead?
What is life, life without thee,
What is life without my love?
What is life if thou art dead?
Euridice! Euridice!
Ah, hear me! Oh, answer!
Ah, hear me!
Thy dear Lord, am I so faithful?
Thy dear Lord, am I who loves thee,
Who doth love thee?
What is life to me without thee,
What is life if thou art dead?
What is life, life without thee,
What is life without my love?
What is life if thou art dead?
Euridice! Euridice!
In my dread anguish nought can aid me,
None can comfort,
Earth is cruel, heaven is cold!
What is life to me without thee,
What is life if thou art dead?
What is life to me without thee,
What is life if thou art dead?
What is life to me without thee,
What is life if thou art dead,
If thou art dead,
if thou art dead?
Ovid played games with the love torn sad youth,
turning him into a maker of dark hymns
that spoke as if wholeness were all truth
was. Being true cause Bacchae tore those limbs.
Here’s one that Tom (Coleridge called him ‘Pagan’) Taylor translated (find the Orphic Hyms online), one full of Neoplatonic contradiction, where mystic sexual play is the type of the purest, wholest love:
I Call great Eros, source of sweet delight, holy and pure, and lovely to the sight;
Darting, and wing'd, impetuous fierce desire, with Gods and mortals playing, wand'ring fire:
Cautious, and two-fold, keeper of the keys of heav'n and earth, the air, and spreading seas;
Of all that Ceres' fertile realms contains, by which th' all-parent Goddess life sustains,
Or dismal Tartarus is doom'd to keep, widely extended, or the sounding, deep;
For thee, all Nature's various realms obey, who rul'st alone, with universal sway.
Come, blessed pow'r, regard these mystic fires, and far avert, unlawful mad desires.
‘Unlawful mad desires‘ are what the Bacchae are, after all. But let’s return to my poor quatrains:
Englished Ovid has one Maenad, passion
spent: 'her tangled hair tossed, light breeze despite,
shout; “See! Here is the poet scorned our song”
Then hurled her spear to attempt to alight,
filling melodiously thus, the mouth
of Apollo's great bard': she missed, of course,
but her torrid crew pulled east, west, north, south
until his limbs were split and song-sound coarse.
Here is a point. His head ought not to live
without his body, but it went on, song
needs lungs as well as mouth, but, me forgive,
On that went too: on and on, ever on.
So, for one thing I could not live without;
love, song, friends, art, laughter, or perfect health:
I would simply say; nay, perhaps I'd shout
It only can be this. It's life itself.
Bye for now.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxx
