2003-12-28 - 1:22 p.m.

The Other Sonnet to Orpheus

What I really wish that I could have asked you in the time before you took to tearing out your hair and living communally with the beasts of the field is how far you actually went for Eurydice' sake, and how far you went to assure yourself that you had finally gone far enough, and that it was alright to go mad.

It was the time of heroes, after all:
an abnormally large number of impossible things
were in fact accomplished on a regular basis.

I can't see many ways you could have been assured that your options involving Eurydice were over. You'd already overcome the boundries of What Is to have one chance to bring her back with you, if you'd just hardened your heart for a moment -- what is it that made you think this new reality wasn't just as mutable? Your voice could move stones to tears and even earned sympathy from Hades, who's heard it all.

You could have been a song of inspiration for the ages of the one who broke every rule of the gods and, though the arbitrary nature of deities in those days would have damned you..
you would have been remembered
by someone other than me.

Love seems, in that limiting way that one's own perceptions have of tainting everything, to me to be very fundamentally Nietzsche's urge to expend one's energy. A great challenge, but at its' essence a failure and an ending, because as any realist can see there will always be problems in relationships and marriages and romances and affairs -- that's why they exist in the first place, is that others have ended and changed and warped to make room in the lives of people who were once completely engaged.

My input is filtered through a melange of self-destructive tendencies and desires for cessation, mixed well with a strong sense of personal inadequacy and a distaste for life. Consequently, I look at Orpheus and see him looking for reasons to give up, when it's quite possible that he transcended the standards of his age simply in trying something different. Who else went down to Hell for love, and who else won tears from the skeletal boatman?

But I'm not looking for someone who transcended their time's standards. I am, apparently, not even looking for someone -- just transcendence, and it's only transcendence that seems to keep me healthily interested and awake.

Orpheus, Helen, and my Other One.

Searching for that which rises above.

Ciao.

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