Fields of Asphodel

The first myth that grabbed me was Persephone.

I can remember about age five or six, reading a hardback, cheap-paper edition of some collection of classical myth, maybe an Edith Hamilton version? It included, as many such do, "The Rape of Persephone." I had no idea how sex worked at the time, but I knew rape was extremely bad, something you didn't even talk about -- this was rural Missouri in the early 80s, in my upbringing's defense. The title freaked me out, but I read it, I think several times just trying to figure out what was rape-like in it (or what rape even was that was so inarticulably horrible). Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary for myths, or stories generally. I'm not sure when I found out that "rape" could mean "capture," something like "kidnapping," but it wasn't for quite a while after I encountered the word used that way, in that story. In the meantime I got very familiar with the picture of the girl swept up with the big, muscular arm around her waist and the god with the dark helmet in the darker chariot, plunging into a chasm in the ground, and with the story that started beneath it.

It was about a very pretty girl who went off by herself, and that was a way I wanted to think of myself. Moreover, she was off alone picking especially beautiful flowers, ones her friends didn't notice or didn't dare to go after. This terrifying god of hell/death bursts up and carries her away to the underworld, and although she resists, tries to starve herself, eventually he persuades her to eat -- and it's fruit, which I've always been big on, and an exotic fruit, the pomegranate. Meanwhile her mother has sent the entire earth into mourning and refused to let crops grow or trees have leaves, instituting the first winter, over her missing daughter, and that, I have to say, always appealed to me. Not the idea of being responsible for global starvation, but the idea of being that important to one's mother. The girl finally becomes the goddess of spring, signifier/cause of all things lovely and renewing, the happiest side of natural cycles of plenty and poverty, and also the queen of the dead.

I turned my dissertation's intro over to my chair and my most anthropologically-oriented committee member this week. It's full of these stories -- not Persephone herself, but the birth of Aphrodite, Psyche and Cupid, Orpheus. Orpheus has ended up being my primary figure for poesis, and I was thinking about him and Philomela today, and then about him and Persephone -- both figures who return from the underworld, with very peculiar, fraught love relationships. And then about Persephone and me.

As an undergrad, I turned over and over the question of why spring would end up wedded to death. It seemed so very unbalanced a union -- Love and War make sense; so do Love and Art, for different reasons, and Love and Soul; so does Song/the Sun and all his various nymphs (one needs an audience, when one is that big and bright, not a partner); so does bratty masculine law and equally bratty feminine law; etc. Of all the couples in classical myth, though, Persephone and Hades were the only one I could find who seem to stay monogamous, and they also at the time seemed one of the unlikeliest couples. Now I can look at it and see: the virginal maiden-goddess' youth has an inherent fragility that speaks already to death and decay; the goddess of spring's robustness echoes Hades' role as ruler of earthly wealth ("Pluto," as in the plutocracy); she's what the earth needs in order to feel whole, a latent power that suits the queen of the dead. The pairing goes beyond this for me, though, to something inexpressible and definitely strange, something the rightness of which will never cease either to compel or to surprise me.

As that same undergrad, I wrote a short story for one of my first creative writing classes that was a retelling of the Persephone/Hades story. In my version, she half-tricks him, pretending to be more vulnerable than she is because she's actually a mopey, misfit teenaged goddess-girl who (like any teenager) has no taste for the grown-up gossip and endless plenty of the Olympians' more or less adult world. She immediately spots Hades as a sucker for girlish charms and a quick road to adventure, so she deploys the former effusively in order to secure the latter. Hades takes her below, where she becomes enchanted with the underworld's strange plants (always plants with me; these I lifted from Swinburne) and gets to like the notion of ruling alongside Hades. Hades, it turns out, is grave (no pun intended) and not chatty or ordinarily social, but a really solid, thoughtful, devoted husband. (This, I imagined, had to be the reason they stay together -- Hades just got a bad rap from the mythographers.)

I adopted the same background for a very bitter poem in my book that's out about Persephone, and about me going home, and staged the "rescue" scene of Demeter coming after her daughter as Persephone running from her, tearing up the unearthly flowers in her own garden as she crashed through them in her flight, grabbing a pomegranate and eating its seeds as a desperate attempt to stay below in this world where she had so much going for her. It only works halfway, though, and she still has to spend half the year up here making the world fertile for us. It's terrible for her, having to leave her husband, every year, to do this duty with her mother and make the world fertile for people she doesn't even know. Connections to Orpheus and Philomela, the way they produce song out of grief but get no consolation -- draw them at will. I certainly am.

My mother is nothing like Demeter. At one point I even had a note to that poem saying that if my mother had been more like Demeter, we would have gotten along better. The trip home in there is entirely fictionalized, too; I took the air travel imagery from a trip I made to I think Atlanta for a conference, or maybe to visit a then-boyfriend, and the Missouri-local imagery from a memory of the field at the edge of my high school's turnaround. That was what put this poem together, though.

When I wrote the story, I thought and talked about it as the story of two sides of myself getting together. It may have been, and it may still be. This Orpheus business I just wrote about is all about the bifurcated state of being a person who lives and acts relatively functionally out in the daytime world, and a poet who operates in a vertiginous, presubjective space, beneath Kristeva's thetic, etc., and coming up with a way to explain how we do that. Orpheus and Eurydice; Orpheus below and Orpheus above; Persephone and Hades, Persephone below and Persephone above. If Persephone were associated with song/art, I could have done all that about her. So my circling around this story for so long may have been and may still be about a loosely Jungian dynamic of self-integration (I can feel my psychoanalyst dissertation chair wincing at that even though he doesn't read this). I think it's also a love story, though, one I've not lived but would like to.

Hades. Actually Hades. Someone who loves me as the admittedly quirky, flighty, flower-gathering girl, off in the woods by herself, and who can meet me there but who's also serious and dark but stable, who will put me in charge of things. And, with my now very well damn developed theory of poetry and being dead, probably someone who will have a life with me that sets me up as in charge of poetry things in this serious regard. Someone who understands the underworld, but unlike me isn't perpetually flipping back and forth in and out of it; someone at home with the caves and the rich rocks and the mystery, in a totally pragmatic, unrufflable way. Notably among classical deities, Hades is terrifically calm -- implacable is often the word. As befits, you know, death, because it's not like you can argue with it. Someone non-creepy; Hades is shy, in my imagination, but actually extremely cool when you get to know him. Independent and capable, as, again death kind of has to be, because nobody's going to help him do his thing. Outside all the ambrosia and boisterous bullshit on the mountain that's rejected him, and is even sort of afraid of him although he can't hurt it. Someone who's had a rough deal (he drew the short straw, which gave him the underworld in the first place, vs. Zeus' sky and Poseidon's sea) but made it work for him, in ways that people may not even recognize. Hades. This whole time, I've been trying to find Death to get him to fall in love with me.

No wonder I have trouble meeting guys?