I posted a song called "Song to Sing the Siren", by John Frusciante (the first and second video on the top bar are of equal quality) because in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Calasso begs the question "What song did the sirens sing?" and, in a nut shell, this song is about the sirens singing to a guy, and he's basically singing this song back to them (on the surface at least). The album is called The Empyrean (meaning heavenly), and some of it's songs are pretty darn mythological.

    I thought, after our talks about the different ages, and the cyclical nature of a life, I might share this quote from my favorite author/singer Brandon Boyd: "There's no such thing as the good old days, the older we all get, the better we all were...and maybe it is the end of the world, but when was it not?...we are all tomorrow's food, today."
    I always think of this line when I think about the age of Heroes and how (geriatric) people tend to revel, with a sort of nostalgia, or wistfulness, about how good things were back in the day. (This one is also for all the people who think we need to get back to Reaganomics. NO.)

Well, I've pretty much finished the book since my last blog, and I haven't really been blogging, because I've been so busy reading. At any rate, I've certainly got a few things to blog about, so I'll break them up over the next few days and talk about them in small bits. Let me preface this section by saying this: Do not feel obligated to read this whole blog. It might really frustrate you to read the whole thing, and then realize it doesn't have any real conclusion, or point in the end. That said today's blog topic is Helen as the  result of coupling beauty and necessity.
    "The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble of Zeus's reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not earth where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen's lifetime. it was a time marked...by calamity. But it was also the time men would go on dreaming of, long after the fire had gone out." This passage prompted a sort of flood of contemplation for me. See, for the most part I just appreciate the book for its narrative quality, but there are a few passages, including this one, that just make me think about everything; things that don't even seem related to the book, but they are, I'm sure, in some strange way. For now, however, I'll try to stay as on topic as I can.
   So Zeus goes through this whole elaborate rouse to rape Nemesis, and then from the egg Nemesis lays, Helen hatches in Leda's womb basically, Ergo the forced coupling of Necessity and Beauty. But is Helen herself necessity and beauty? Helen is beautiful, yes. In fact, she is the most beautiful. People waged a nine year war over her, because she was so ineffably beautiful. But in what ways did Helen represent necessity? I had a divergence in my thought here. Firstly, when I could not think of any way in which Helen embodied necessity, I got abstract. I thought "Well I suppose that death is a necessity, as is the end of an era, and Helen was the death of the heroes, and the end of their age." But that seemed way too far fetched, so I tried to think of how she actually did represent necessity, and all I could come up with was this: essentially, Helen herself is the necessity. Once you've seen something so beautiful, can you feel any other way, but to feel as though you need it? Can you really live as full a life without it? Or perhaps it's not so much the obtaining of beautiful things that is a necessity, but the wanting of beauty. Wanting what one finds beautiful is essentially the beginning of loving something, and what is more necessary than love?
    But Helen isn't really an embodiment of love either, she is something lusted after, and Calasso describes her as a fire that rages and destroys, not something easily loved. So like a fire, she kills all who try to get too near her. Except for Theseus, but he was the exception only because he was able to abandon her, to keep his distance, to avoid seeing Helen as the necessity. And here I kind of went on a train of thought tangential to the original. Theseus took the virginity of the most beautiful girl ever to live. In effect, he "initiated" her into the life of lust and careless abandonment she would know (albeit know the other side of) for the rest of her life. Theseus was also "the initiate of heroes". Helen was no hero. In fact, Helen herself brought about "the end of the age of hereoes." The end of the Theseus, and his other initiates. In my thoughts this makes a bit of sense, because Helen's own true mother is Nemesis, vengeance. And what better way to take revenge on Theseus for taking advantage of, and then deserting her, than to wipe out his entire generation of friends? But  I digress.
   There is also the possibility that Helen doesn't embody each in representing their coupling, but is rather just a memento of the coupling of necessity and beauty, of Nemesis and Zeus. But which was which? Nemesis, a figure of necessity, was also super beautiful, and Zeus, the god of gods, was able to finally "[unite] himself with her, out of powerful necessity." so each had a bit of both beauty and necessity. but Zeus's necessity seems less like something bound to happen, and more like something forced to happen, but what happens happens, and is therefore necessary to history, simply because it exists. This powerful necessity is not the same as something necessary, but rather a different definition of necessity (definition number 5 of 5 in Webster's dictionary in fact): an unavoidable need or compulsion to do something. In this case, that something was Nemesis (bad joke). So maybe it is in this definition, which Helen's necessity is embodied. People have an uncontrolable need or desire to have her. Like Zeus needed to have Nemesis.
   So how is Helen both beauty, and necessity? This question I still can't really answer with any certainty. Perhaps this is because this coupling "could only be sustained on Olympus, certainly not on earth...." or perhaps the answer is just eluding me because I missed something in the reading, or perhaps it's just one or a mixture of the answers I've already proposed. If anyone has any other thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

Laters Alligators, Jerrod

Well this isn't really about a reading, but I had a some mythological experiences today that I thought someone might appreciate. Really the one I was freaking out about most was probably the smallest example ever, but it was just a showing of fate. So I'm walking down this road (it was actually a concrete sidewalk, but if you picture a dirt road, the story is a bit more mythological), and I see a man about 50 feet away from me walking on a path that will surely intersect mine. The closer we get to each other, the more certain I become that, if one of us does not change either speed, or course soon, we are bound to run into one another. Seeing this as something I wanted to avoid, I decided to cut a corner with about 5 feet left before impact (approximately two strides). The man must have had the same thought, because he also felt it necessary to cut the same corner at the same time. This being the case, we bumped into each other, and the fates popped out from behind a bush and sneered at me. I shook a fist at them and cursed them. "Darn you fates!" I said, (but none of this latter part actually happened) but the fates had already won, and vanished. See I was going to run into this poor guy, and experience this awkward exchange of apologies no matter what. If I had stayed on course, surely, so would have he. Since I tried to escape this fate, naturally so did he, and so we created for ourselves the exact event we both sought to avoid, and we both experienced it's inevitability. Myth!
     The only other things that really happened today were less mythical in form than in content. First, a friend of mine sent me an email of the song Oh, Comely, which I had never heard before, but it uses some pretty mythological vocabulary. And secondly, I met a dog named Apollo, and he was super cute!

  It's taken me a while to get this first post up, not for lack of reading, but because I don't use computers very often, or very well. But here we are, and here we go.

  Upon reading the first couple of chapters, I found myself thinking, more than anything, about how paranoid every attractive girl must have been back in these times. It seems as though if you had a rockin' bod, and your head wasn't on a swivel, you could be abducted at any moment by any one of the various Gods. Heaven forbid you should pick flowers, because you'd be snatched up quick as any daisy, and if you go swimming, there is probably a divine voyeur checking you out from somewhere "on high". 

  I was also noticed (and was psyched about) the fact that the Gods could be gay without any of the other Gods calling them out on it. Dionysus was in love with Ampelos, and was also apparently one of the biggest womanizing figures in myth. I was surprised to get open bisexuality from the ancients (a God nonetheless) when so many of us still don't want to ask or be told today. Dionysus seemed like a terrible being, but he has such a duality to his character that he really just reminds me of most of my favorite musicians, or a Third Eye Blind song. He starts out with a love, loses it, and turns pain and loss into art (wine is artistic in my opinion, I understand if someone chooses not to agree with this). I just get the image of him slumped up against a thick tree in some forest, drunk and alone, holding a golden goblet just barely upright enough to spill only a few drops of wine. I picture the sharp and bitter taste of strong red wine mingling with internalized anger and drizzling out of the corners of slack jaws in a stream of profanity. I don't want to quote too many lines from page 45, so I would encourage reading over the first paragraph on this page carefully, and really picturing and understanding the wonderful analogies Calasso uses. Some beautiful writing.

  I also liked the point Calasso brought up about how Erigone was the farthest thing from a "celestial queen", but still managed to make it into the heavens as a constellation, just because it's interesting to think about this weird, macabre story hanging in the sky with all of the heroes and monsters of epic poems, and classic tales, like a strange cousin. just a thought, I suppose.

  Until next time, 

  Jerrod