Gods on Fire

As I related in my previous blogs, Ovid Metamorphoses is colored by stories of characters who are "hot with love", set aflame by passion, and how I am enjoying this colorful description of our nature. We have seen Zeus emerge as the biggest womanizer of all, raping beautiful women frequently throughout Ovid's stories. While our class reads on in disgust at Zeus' lack of control, in greek mythology madness was actually looked upon as a gift of the gods. Dionysus had the power of freeing people from their inhibitions by bestowing madness (often induced by wine). In Phaedrus, Socrates speech declares that madness is not a bad thing, and that the greatest goods come through madness when it is "divinely inspired". In fact, he goes on to say that love is madness. In greek mythology, when characters are set on fire with desire, it is a sign that god is near.
Psycology seeks to give complex names and explanations for the forces of madness, for those "powers that act upon us" (Calasso 94). In this modern age, we attempt to assign some responsibility for the feelings that overcome us. Mythologies of the past are different...

"The homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them it was as if every
crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant
that a god was present and at work. What we consider as infirmity they saw as
'divine infatuation' (ate). They knew that this invisible incursion often
brought ruin: so much that the word ate would gradually come to mean 'ruin'. But
they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that "moral life can never
have anything great about it except through ate" -"The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" Roberto Calasso

Ate- ruin: from Sophocles, the great tragedian, ruin being the defining characteristic of tragedy. It seems all mythology is dependent upon this principle of madness.

Hot with Love

I've spent my Spring break taking in Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is no small feat. Held up as one of, if not the most important source of classical myth, Metamorphoses is said to be "the most comprehensive, creative mythological source handed down to us from antiquity" (Galinsky). Ovid sings of "bodies becoming other bodies" (3) and, indeed, the binding theme is transformation: it occurs in every story throughout the 15 books.

While all the stories are united in the theme of change, there are variations of themes beneath it, and one of these that is inescapable is that of love. We've been seeing in classical lit that everyone in Greece is "hot with love". It's portrayed as an epidemic; the characters we're meeting are sick with love, love is driving them to madness. But no where in literature have I ever encountered more incessant, colorful descriptions of this epidemic than in Metamorphoses. And I'm having a lot of fun with it!


The painting to the left is from the story of Coronis, the Raven, the Crow, and Nyctimene in book 2. Coronis tells the story of how, one day, while she was walking by the shoreline, Neptune (the sea God) saw her and "grew hot with love" (p. 60) He chased Coronis down trying to have his way with her, and the Goddess Athena pitied the virgin and turned her into a bird so she could fly away and escape her.

The picture to the right is from the story of Narcissus and Echo in Book 3. When Echo sees Narcissus roaming through the woods, she becomes "inflamed with love" (p. 92). She was cursed by Zeus' wife Juno, and punished so that she could only repeat the last syllable of what she heard. Narcissus shunned her, and in her depression she wasted away until she was only a voice.

In subsequent stories we encounter characters who are taken out of their element by love. In the story of Medea and Jason, Medea, the king's daughter, sees the hero Jason and is struck by "the raging flame of love" (p. 209). I like how Medea describes her condition in the soliloquy that follows. She has never been overtaken by love, and she laments "If I could blaze no more, I would be healed. Instead, despite myself, a force that I have never known before impels me now: my longing needs one thing; my reason seeks another. I can see- and I approve the better course, and yet I choose the worse" (p. 209-10). This relates back to my previous blog about extremes... her soul is at odds, reason waging against passion. And while she knows what is best, she is hot in the flame of love and she cannot fend off her passion. She must help Jason. As the story goes on, the fire analogy is used repeatedly to depict the burning desire that she must succumb to.
Variations of the theme of madness and love are rampant in Ovid's stories, increasingly as we get into books 6-11. The pathos of love is perfected in Metamorphoses. Senses are heightened in the reading; we experience the passion these characters suffer vicariously through vivid descriptions of hot, burning, feverish, uncontrollable love. And I enjoy it all over again as it comes up in each story, this notion of our lust experienced in heat. Last semester in American Lit 2 we read a poem by Wallace Stevens called "Poems of our Climate". The poem closes with these lines:
"The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds"

That line- "The imperfect is so hot in us" - was one of my favorite things that I read in Wallace Stevens, one that will never leave me because, ironically, that is the perfect way to express what it is to be human, and flawed, and prone to excess, contending with our conscience and collapsing under the weight of our desires. To see it resurface again and again in Ovid- these perfect depictions of the heat of imperfection- has been exciting and beautiful.

Greek and Roman Names

As I got into Ovid, I quickly realized that the names Ovid uses in his stories for mythological characters were unfamiliar since they are different then the ones we have been using in our class discussions. This is because Ovid is a Roman writer. The Romans adopted many of the legends of Greek mythology, adapting them to a Latin equivalent. Here you can find a list of the most well-known parallels and their descriptions:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/troy/2774/mythgods.html

Madness

I have found myself bombarded with the theme of extremities in the books that I have been exploring in the last week. Do you ever notice how in life we sometimes fail to find the middle ground that our sanity depends upon? It's either all or nothing, black or white, good or bad, high or low. I really believe that life can be harder for passionate people because they experience emotions and pursue goals with marked intensity, and thus are prone to these extremities. I have been fascinated reading about characters in mythology suffering from this passion, which is a blessing and a curse.
The Phaedrus is a book that's been sitting on my shelf for months, but I'd forgotten about until we got into the Symposium in class. The two works are spoken of as companion dialouges. But rather than an open discussion amoung friends at a party, Phaedrus takes place between two characters only: Phaedrus and Socrates. And while it also centers around the topic of love, Phaedrus explores a wide range of other high passions including madness, divinity, art and beauty (which is why I enjoyed it even more than the Symposium, and would highly reccomend it as a compliment to that discussion). And the best part of Phaedrus, I thought, was it's discussion of the nature of the soul and the extremeties that rule us: our lust for pleasure, and our conscience or judgement that aims at what is right. In other words, excess and restraint. Socrates uses the perfect metaphor of the soul in 3 parts: A charioteer driving two horses. On the right is a white horse: he is good, noble, and obedient. On the left is a black horse: he is evil, disobedient, and drives the charioteer towards excessive and lustful delights. And Socrates says that for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed and the good one freed. As we learned in the Symposium, love is highly reliant on balance; for true love to flourish, the dark horse must be tamed, and the good horse freed.
Classical Literature is littered with examples of the extremities. Even the genres of comedy and tragedy represent opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Comic characters are worse; the heroes in tragedy are better. I am really enjoying the exploration of madness and sanity in the material we're reading. In the beginning of Phaedrus, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he is "sick with passion for hearing people speak". He goes on to a deeper discussion of madness, defending it in a way, because great things come from madness, and this is true. When we become possessed by passion, that is when action is taken. Aristotle said in his Poetics that action is active: when we percieve something that we want, something beautiful, we move ourselves towards it. Madness, and passion, is a driving force. It is productive. Love is madness: it takes us to the extremes. Which leads me to Ovid...