Eurydice Quotes

Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?

They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Eurydice sits alone on a red bed. She has flaming red hair, so flaming that you can't see anything else of her, much less anything else around her. She takes up too much space. Also she's mad. Which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.

The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

I want to be your Eurydice, if you'll let me.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

[...] A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice.

... and in the homosexual phase which would follow Eurydice's death ... Orpheus sings no more, he writes.

If we keep on fucking, I'm not gonna die.

Dear Camryn, I never wanted it to be this way. I wanted to tell you these things myself, but I was afraid. I was afraid that if I told you out loud that I loved you, that what we had together would die with me. The truth is that I knew in Kansas that you were the one. I’ve loved you since that day when I first looked up into your eyes as you glared down at me from over the top of that bus seat. Maybe I didn’t know it then, but I knew something had happened to me in that moment and I could never let you go. I have never lived the way I lived during my short time with you. For the first time in my life, I’ve felt whole, alive, free. You were the missing piece of my soul, the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins. I think that if past lives are real then we have been lovers in every single one of them. I’ve known you for a short time, but I feel like I’ve known you forever. I want you to know that even in death I’ll always remember you. I’ll always love you. I wish that things could’ve turned out differently. I thought of you many nights on the road. I stared up at the ceiling in the motels and pictured what our life might be like together if I had lived. I even got all mushy and thought of you in a wedding dress and even with a mini me in your belly. You know, I always heard that sex is great when you’re pregnant. ;-) But I’m sorry that I had to leave you, Camryn. I’m so sorry…I wish the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was real because then you could come to the Underworld and sing me back into your life. I wouldn’t look back. I wouldn’t fuck it up like Orpheus did. I’m so sorry, baby… I want you to promise me that you’ll stay strong and beautiful and sweet and caring. I want you to be happy and find someone who will love you as much as I did. I want you to get married and have babies and live your life. Just remember to always be yourself and don’t be afraid to speak your mind or to dream out loud. I hope you’ll never forget me. One more thing: don’t feel bad for not telling me that you loved me. You didn’t need to say it. I knew all along that you did. Love Always, Andrew Parrish

What madness destroyed me and you, Orpheus?

We are each what never leaves us, what we never see the back of is the self. But what loves us is at the back, as Eurydice was escorting him out without his knowing.

Perhaps Eurydice wants to remain marginal, a shade insubstantial… the mute waste in a limbo without light and without depth are a style of anima fascinations in which the absence of significance is the significance.

Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.

Meanwhile the temperature is getting hotter and hotter so no one can think clearly. No one perceives. No one cares. Insane madness come out like life is a terrific party.

What she really wanted [...] was [...] "to experience every emotion to the limit" so she could go beyond every limit.

If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.

It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world - then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other - that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.

And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right. After all, she has gone to visit pieces of her art so many times. But they were only pieces, stripped of context. Sculptured birds on marble plinths, and paintings behind ropes. Didactic boxes taped to whitewashed walls and glass boxes that keep the present from the past. It is a different thing when the glass breaks. It is her mother in the doorway, withered to bone. It is Remy in the Paris salon. It is Sam, inviting her to stay, every time. It is Toby Marsh, playing their song. The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

Done with the whole dark & the insect dirge under blue lit lamps. Done trying to remember June, first stars & August when I was Penelope when I was Eurydice when July was missing & I was my own dull shade.

I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

Eurydice, forgive the Winds, forgive the Sun, forgive the Moon, forgive the Stars, forgive the Rain, for never loving you as I will.

ORPHEUS: How will you remember? EURYDICE: That I love you? ORPHEUS: Yes. EURYDICE: That's easy. I can't help it.

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened, like winter, which even now is passing. For beneath the winter is a winter so endless that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart. Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing. Climb praising as you return to connection. Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient, be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be. The emptiness inside you allows you to vibrate in full resonance with your world. Use it for once. To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable numbers of beings abounding in Nature, add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

He finds Eurydice in blessed fields. His yearning arms embrace her. They stroll, now side by side, now as he follows, now as he leads. And Orpheus in safety can turn and look at his Eurydice.

What a happiness it would be to cry.

Arthur went down, and I know him too well to imagine he's coming back up unless I drag him behind me, a sullen Eurydice. I know the hard set of his jaw and the soft slide of his lips, I know the terrible guilt that drives him and the scars it left behind. I know he is the thing I have been chasing and craving, searching and waiting and hoping for my entire life: home.

LESBIANS are women who prefer their own ways to male ways. LESBIANS prefer the convoluting halls of sensuality to direct goal-pursuing mores. LESBIANS have made a small world deep within and separated from the world. What has usually been called the world is the male world.

yet for all your arrogance and your glance, I tell you this: such loss is no loss, such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls of blackness such terror is no loss; hell is no worse than your earth above the earth, hell is no worse, no, nor your flowers nor your veins of light nor your presence, a loss; my hell is no worse than yours though you pass among the flowers and speak with the spirits above the earth.

Every angel is terrifying. Through the darkness, they move silently... I will go down into death with you. I must go where I must go To see what I must see In that place where no one knows... ... This is where love is taking me. You have been leading Me, angels, in and out of death. I have no idea who you are. Eurydice. Is she nothing Or is she your mirror? I don't know anymore. I am at war. Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard, And so it is love that brings us, To what cannot be born, To ourselves, And so we must change, Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown. Lovers disappear in each other. Do they disappear forever? Where do they go?

I chose to live in the Ether, to be starlight and legend....

She was in herself, like a woman near term, and did not think of the man, going on ahead, or the path, climbing upwards towards life. She was in herself. And her being-dead filled her with abundance. As a fruit with sweetness and darkness, so she was full with her vast death.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.

Imagine this: Instead of waiting in her tower, Rapunzel slices off her long, golden hair with a carving knife, and then uses it to climb down to freedom. Just as she’s about to take the poison apple, Snow White sees the familiar wicked glow in the old lady’s eyes, and slashes the evil queen’s throat with a pair of sewing scissors. Cinderella refuses everything but the glass slippers from her fairy godmother, crushes her stepmother’s windpipe under her heel, and the Prince falls madly in love with the mysterious girl who dons rags and blood-stained slippers. Imagine this: Persephone goes adventuring with weapons hidden under her dress. Persephone climbs into the gaping chasm. Or, Persephone uses her hands to carve a hole down to hell. In none of these versions is Persephone’s body violated unless she asks Hades to hold her down with his horse-whips. Not once does she hold out on eating the pomegranate, instead biting into it eagerly and relishing the juice running down her chin, staining it red. In some of the stories, Hades never appears and Persephone rules the underworld with a crown of her own making. In all of them, it is widely known that the name Persephone means Bringer of Destruction. Imagine this: Red Riding Hood marches from her grandmother’s house with a bloody wolf pelt. Medusa rights the wrongs that have been done to her. Eurydice breaks every muscle in her arms climbing out of the land of the dead. Imagine this: Girls are allowed to think dark thoughts, and be dark things. Imagine this: Instead of the dragon, it’s the princess with claws and fiery breath who smashes her way from the confines of her castle and swallows men whole.

The only way Addie knew ho to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

I find myself glancing back, as if to make sure my Eurydice still follows.

Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

Orpheus I also play the lyre Eurydice Ooh, a liar, and a player too! I’ve met too many men like you

She was like a reprieve; like Eurydice, gifted back to Orpheus from the darkness for a brief miraculous moment. I wanted, so intensely it took my breath away, to reach out and lay a hand on her soft dark head, to pull her tightly against me and feel her slight and warm and breathing, as if by protecting her hard enough I could somehow undo time and protect Katy, too.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing. Climb praising as you return to connection. Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient, be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. Be. And know as well the need to not be: let that ground of all that changes bring you to completion now. To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable numbers of beings abounding in Nature, add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music. If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much. But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats. This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful. Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

Eurydice" It’s more like the sound a doe makes when the arrowhead replaces the day with an answer to the rib’s hollowed hum. We saw it coming but kept walking through the hole in the garden. Because the leaves were bright green & the fire only a pink brushstroke in the distance. It’s not about the light—but how dark it makes you depending on where you stand. Depending on where you stand his name can appear like moonlight shredded in a dead dog’s fur. His name changed when touched by gravity. Gravity breaking our kneecaps just to show us the sky. We kept saying Yes— even with all those birds. Who would believe us now? My voice cracking like bones inside the radio. Silly me. I thought love was real & the body imaginary. But here we are—standing in the cold field, him calling for the girl. The girl beside him. Frosted grass snapping beneath her hooves.

This poem throbs with rage, as though Eurydice has waited a couple of millennia to get all this off her chest. But it does not end in anger; it ends with a declaration: 'hell must break before I am lost,' she says, in the final stanza. Eurydice may be dead, but she is still triumphantly herself.

if I could have caught up from the earth, the whole of the flowers of the earth, if once I could have breathed into myself the very golden crocuses and the red, and the very golden hearts of the first saffron, the whole of the golden mass, the whole of the great fragrance, I could have dared the loss. — H.D., from “Eurydice,” Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1982)

When I was in the Everneath, I thought about Jack every day. Every minute. Even after I'd forgotten his name, the image of his face made me feel whole again. Was Jack the reason I'd survived? Were our ties to the Surface what somehow kept us whole? The one problem in the anchor theory was Meredith.She had a connection with her mom,yet she didn't survive. But then the more I thought about it, the more I realized Mrs. Jenkins didn't have a similar connection to Meredith. She forgot about Meredith the second the Feed began. Then it hit me.Orpheus didn't forget about Eurydice.He loved her the entire time she was gone. Maybe the attachment between Forfeit and anchor worked only when it went both ways. The drinking fountain next to me shuddered to life as a flash of intuition hit me. I knew now that Jack never forgot about me.He'd never stopped loving me.He was the anchor that saved me. And now he was gone.

INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD Janey dreams of cocks. Janey sees cocks instead of objects. Janey has to fuck. This is the way Sex drives Janey crazy: Before Janey fucks, she keeps her wants in cells. As soon as Janey's fucking she wants to be adored as much as possible at the same time as, its other extreme, ignored as much as possible. More than this: Janey can no longer perceive herself wanting. Janey is Want. It's worse than this: If Janey gets sexually rejected her body becomes sick. If she doesn't get who she wants she naturally revolts.

Eurydice Speaks” How will I know you in the underworld? How will we find each other? We lived for so long on the physical earth— Our skies littered with actual stars Practical tides in our bay— What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical? Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls, By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him On the shore of a river written and rewritten As elegy, epic, epode. Remember the thin air of our earthly winters? Frost was an iron, underhand descent. Dusk was always in session And no one needed to write down Or restate, or make record of, or ever would, And never will, The plainspoken music of recognition, Nor the way I often stood at the window— The hills growing dark, saying, As a shadow became a stride And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight I would know you anywhere.

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.

When I returned, not to Berlin, but to Hamburg in the midst of the fog of the beginning of winter, to the road that runs right above it’s river and docks, a castle which never existed and a fountain which is really a sewer, a gust of wind far sweeter and more fragrant than any red rose carried the smell of shit and floating soil like a tongue into my nostril.

In 'Eurydice', she gives us a glorious, bristling version of this character who was delighted to find herself in the Underworld: 'It suited me down to the ground.' She invites us to picture her face 'in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe/ from the kind of man/ who follows her round/ writing poems'.

Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.

Listen to her the way you would listen to your own daughter if she died too young and tried to speak to you across long distances.

They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice and every time they turn back, she is ruined.

Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.

I hate parties. And a wedding is the biggest party of all. All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower. He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them. Then I have to greet them.

Orpheus in Hell" When he first brought his music into hell He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the shapeless fires And the jukebox groaning of the damned Some of them would hear him. In the upper world He had forced the stones to listen. It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces Wondering if all of hell were without music. He tried an old song but pain Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying, “Orpheus!” He was at the entrance again And a little three-headed dog was barking at him. Later he would remember all those dead voices And call them Eurydice.

Love stories abound in all cultures: Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice, Tristan and Isolde, and in the Middle East, we find the stories of Yusuf and Zuleika, and Majnûn and Laylá. The story of Majnûn and Layla- was (and still is) widely known throughout the Islamic world. However, in the hands of Persian Sûfî poets, the story became transformed into a symbol of the love of a human being for Allâh. In Sûfîsm, questing for Allâh is similar to the European Grail quest in which the Knight quests for a Chalice (the cup being a symbol of the female sexual organ). Laylá, in Arabic, comes from the word layl meaning 'night'. The association of the Divine Feminine with Darkness and the Night is ubiquitous.

The Greek’s told the story of Orpheus who descended into the underworld to rescue his bride Eurydice from Hades. The Nordic people had their hero-warrior Beowulf, and the Sumerians wrote of Inanna who battled her sister in the dark world.

And then we jumped off Mount Olympus and flew through the clouds and you held your knee to your chest because you skinned it on a sharp cloud and then we fell into a salty lake. Then I woke up and the window frightened me and I thought: Eurydice is dead. Then I thought—who is Eurydice? Then the whole room started to float and I thought: what are people? Then my bed clothes smiled at me with a crooked green mouth and I thought: who am I? It scares me, Eurydice. Please come back.

If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much. But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.

I hate parties. And a wedding is the biggest party of all. All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower. He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them. Then I have to greet them. A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day. I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.

Orpheus never got the memo that loss is a ticket to resilience, not some sewer of revenge in which to wallow, marinating selfish, hellbent purpose for centuries on end.

Look, they descend: light, water, all things released seek the earth... All things go downward. Even the rocks settle and sink, even the flowers bow.

If your gaze takes in the world, a person's a puny thing. If a person is all you see, the rest falls away and she becomes the world.

Do you get it now,Becks?" Jack wrapped a finger around a long strand of my hair, and we were quiet as it slipped through his grip. "You haven't moved on?" He chuckled. "I have a lifetime of memories made up of chestnut wars and poker games and midnight excursions and Christmas Dances...It's all you. It's only ever been you.I love you." The last part seemed to escape his lips unintentionally, and afterward he closed his eyes and put his head in his hands,as if he had a sudden headache. "I've gotta not say that out loud." The sight of how messed up he was made me want to wrap my arms around him and fold him into me and cushion him from everything that lay ahead. Instead,I reached for his hand. Brought it to my lips. Kissed it. He raised his head and winced. "You shouldn't do that," he said, even though he didn't pull his hand away. "Why?" "Because...it'll make everything worse...If you don't feel-" His voice cut off as I kissed his hand again, pausing with his fingers at my lips. He let out a shaky sigh and his hair flopped forward. Then he looked at my lips for a long moment. "What if...?" I bit my lower lip. "What?" "What if we could be like this again?" He leaned in closer with a smile, and as he did,he said, "Are you going to steal my soul?" "Um...it's not technically your soul that..." I couldn't finish my sentence. His lips brushed mine, and I felt the whoosh of transferring emotions,but it wasn't as strong as the last time. The space inside me was practically full again. The Shades were right. Six months was just long enough to recover. He kept his lips touching mine when he asked, "Is it okay?" Okay in that I wasn't going to suck him dry anymore. Not okay in that my own emotions were in hyperdrive. Only our lips touched.Thankfully there was space between us everywhere else. He took my silence to mean it was safe. We held our lips together, tentative and still. But he didn't let it stay that casual for long.He pressed his lips closer, parting his mouth against mine. I shivered,and he put his arms around me and pulled me closer so that our bodies were touching in so many places. He pulled back a little.His breath was on my lips. "What is it?" I asked. "I dreamed of you every night." He briefly touched his lips to mine again. "It felt so real.And when I'd wake up the next morning,it was like your disappearance was fresh. Like you'd left me all over again." I lowered my chin and tucked my head into his chest. "I'm sorry." He sighed and tightened his grip around me. "It never got easier.But the dreams themselves." I felt him shake his head. "It's like I had a physical connection to you. They were so real. Every night,you were in my room with me. It was so real." I tilted my head back so I could face him again, realizing for the first time how difficult it must've been for Jack. I kissed his chin, his cheek, and then his lips. "I'm sorry," I said again. He shook his head. "It's not your fault I dreamed of you, Becks.I just want to know if it was as real as it felt." "I don't know," I said. But I told him about the book I'd read on Orpheus and Eurydice, and my theory that it was her connection to Orpheus that saved her.

She runs, trips and pitches down the stairs, holding her letter. She follows the letter down, down... Blackout. A clatter. Strange sounds—xylophones, brass bands, sounds of falling, sounds of vertigo. Sounds of breathing.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot alwasy decipher them precisely the clearer light of our own day.

In this story, Orpheus is married to a beautiful woman named Eurydice, but she’s bitten by a snake and dies, so Orpheus travels into the underworld to save her. Hades, the god of the underworld, agrees that Eurydice can follow Orpheus back to the realm of the living on one condition: as they walk through the caves, Orpheus can’t look back. Not once. So guess what old mate does?’ ‘He looks back?’ Kate offered. ‘Orpheus looks back. Eurydice is pulled back into the darkness forever, while Orpheus is torn to shreds by vicious, hungry beasts.

Our document, though in its own way eloquent, is on these subjects mute. We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Caeiro’s work is truly a manifestation of a pagan mind. The order and discipline of paganism which Christianity caused us to lose, the reasoned intelligence of things, which was paganism’s most obvious attribute and no longer ours — permeate his work. Because it speaks here its form, we see the essence, not the exterior shape, of paganism. In other words, I do not see Caeiro reconstructing the exterior form of paganism. Paganism’s very substance has in fact been summoned up from Avernus, as Orpheus summoned Eurydice, by the harmelodic magic of Caeiro’s emotion.

Today is the thirty-seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I have thought of her, longed for her, every day of those thirty-seven years, and my father has, I think, thought of her almost without stopping. If fervent memory could raise the dead, she would be our Eurydice, she would rise like Lady Lazarus from her stubborn death to solace us. But all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. The only thing my need could do was bring me to her. What will Clare have when I am gone? How can I leave her?

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

P. 51, l. 915. The speech of the Muse seems like the writing of a poet who is, for the moment, tired of mere drama, and wishes to get back into his own element. Such passages are characteristic of Euripides.—The death of Rhesus seems to the Muse like an act of vengeance from the dead Thamyris, the Thracian bard who had blasphemed the Muses and challenged them to a contest of song. They conquered him and left him blind, but still a poet. The story in Homer is more terrible, though more civilised: "They in wrath made him a maimed man, they took away his heavenly song and made him forget his harping." Thamyris, the bard who defied Heaven; Orpheus, the bard, saint, lover, whose severed head still cried for his lost Eurydice; Musaeus, the bard of mystic wisdom and initiations—are the three great legendary figures of this Northern mountain minstrelsy.

In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She kept going – down, down, like Eurydice, to the depths of the criminal world, the enfer of the film noir – and then compelled her lover to glance back and betray himself…. But for all her guts and valor, and for all her unredeemable venality…she hadn’t a soul she could call her own. She was, in fact, a male fantasy. She was playing a man’s game in a man’s world of crime and carnal innuendo, where her long hair was the equivalent of a gun, where sex was the equivalent of evil. And where her power to destroy was projection of man’s feeling of impotence. Only this could never be spelled out; hence the subterfuge and melodrama. She is to her thirties’ counterpart as night – or dusk – is to day. And the difference between their worlds, between the drawing room of romantic comedy and the underground of melodrama, is the difference between flirtation and fornication … or rape” (Haskell 191).

Eurydice He is here, come down to look for you. It is the song that calls you back, a song of joy and suffering equally: a promise: that things will be different up there than they were last time. You would rather have gone on feeling nothing, emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace of the deepest sea, which is easier than the noise and flesh of the surface. You are used to these blanched dim corridors, you are used to the king who passes you without speaking. The other one is different and you almost remember him. He says he is singing to you because he loves you, not as you are now, so chilled and minimal: moving and still both, like a white curtain blowing in the draft from a half-opened window beside a chair on which nobody sits. He wants you to be what he calls real. He wants you to stop light. He wants to feel himself thickening like a treetrunk or a haunch and see blood on his eyelids when he closes them, and the sun beating. This love of his is not something he can do if you aren’t there, but what you knew suddenly as you left your body cooling and whitening on the lawn was that you love him anywhere, even in this land of no memory, even in this domain of hunger. You hold love in your hand, a red seed you had forgotten you were holding. He has come almost too far. He cannot believe without seeing, and it’s dark here. Go back, you whisper, but he wants to be fed again by you. O handful of gauze, little bandage, handful of cold air, it is not through him you will get your freedom.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer

You see her, and a wave of memory comes crashing down. You realize that you’ve gone about it all wrong: you were never supposed to follow her; you had forgotten what you’d been searching for. It was never yours to find, anyway. You are no Orpheus and she is no Eurydice. She knows that, but you didn’t realize it until now. You see her and suddenly your mouth is dry but you can’t swallow, your eyes are tearing, your body is shaking, and you want to throw yourself at her feet and say I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

Vipers and Virtuosos is a dark, contemporary romance inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The scene is grim, a dank corridor rising out of Elysium, back to human climes and textures. I feel the man sensing what he’s done and the catastrophic change in the air around him. Grief as swift as a blade that cuts the cord of your innocence but leaves you stranded, still alive and pulsing while she stays stuck in death. Or did she? Now I’m chasing down Eurydice as she disappears into that tunnel. The story of Orpheus no longer interests me; I’ve been there, done that. What I want to know is how she took it, what she wanted to happen in that moment.

When I was writing my novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I became enthralled by the myth of Orpheus, the greatest poet who was also the greatest singer, the personage in whom song and story became one. You can recount the myth of Orpheus in a hundred words or less: his love for the nymph Eurydice, her pursuit by the beekeeper Aristaeus, the snakebite that killed her, her descent into hell, his pursuit of her beyond the doors of death, his attempt to rescue her, his being granted by the lord of the underworld -- as a reward for the genius of his singing -- the possibility of leading her back to life as long as he didn't look back, and his fatal backward look. And yet when you begin to delve into the story it seems almost inexhaustibly rich, for at its heart is a great triangular tension between the grandest matters of life: love, art and death. You can turn and turn the story and the triangle tells you different things. It tells you that art, inspired by love, can have a greater power than death. It tells you, contrariwise, that death, in spite of art, can defeat the power of love. And it tells you that art alone can make possible the transaction between love and death that is at the centre of all human life.

...if you should recognize Eurydice's voice with its distant echo of the silent music of the elements, tell me, give me news of her, you extraterrestrials, temporary visitors, so that I can resume my plans to bring Eurydice to the centre of the terrestrial life, to restore the realm of the gods of within, of the gods who inhabit the dense compactness of things, now that the gods of without, the gods of Olympian heights and the rarefied air, have given you all they could give, and clearly it isn't enough.

The music of the Lyre, in Greek legend, cast such a spell that Orpheus charmed every living creature with it, even persuading the grim guardians of the Underworld to allow him to rescue his beautiful wife Eurydice from the Land of the Dead. Having been warned to cast no glance upon her until the couple had safely reached the upper world, Orpheus unfortunately lost Eurydice at the last moment by disobeying the fateful order. The story is one of the most popular of the Greek legends, and was the subject of the opera Orpheo ed Euridice by Gluck in 1762, and a ballet by Stravinsky in 1947.

And you,” he said, pointing to Eurydice, “I will never hear the end of it from your father if you run away with this uncouth lout, so behave yourself! Ride your camel and follow us.

When we are stone will the world recall us?

Play your harp ones more, to lament the death of love. Or be still If you never loved me at all' (p.40, Apollo's Playbook)

Eve with her apple, biting in. Eurydice, smiling when the snake bit her ankle, then again, when he fatally tripped on his desire to keep her small and by his side. Things done wrong for the right reasons. No one is in charge of us, but us.

Dehors à la lumière des branches Éclatant sous leur propre sagesse, les cosses s'ouvraient. La feuille tombait, grisée, fatiguant l'air. Un oiseau se débattit au-dessus du mûrier. Comme un saint Georges au cirque, en automne, revenu du futur de mon corps, je dessinai l'au-delà. Les jours martelaient le silence comme un oreiller. Forgeron et gardien du feu, je regarde la montagne, cathédrale aux blanches torchères de mélèze, sous laquelle, en pleurs, s'est assise Eurydice. Après minuit, quand les clowns philosophent, je scrute la montagne. (p. 32)

maw of Death, the light drew him on, faster and faster, more hurried than any other step he had taken. His fingers were quick upon the strings,

Unlike some of my peers, Hades can see the writing on the wall. If Minos gets his way, then the murder of the last Hephaestus is only the beginning of the trouble we’ll see. It doesn’t mean he likes my methods, but he’s agreed to stay out of my way as long as I don’t endanger any of the precious citizens of his lower city. He wouldn’t thank me for including Eurydice in my plans, but what Hades doesn’t know won’t hurt him. And what Persephone doesn’t know won’t hurt me.

I have lost my Eurydice / I have lost my lover / and suddenly I am speaking French / and it seems to me I have never been in better voice.

Another scene from universal myth unfolds -- here powerfully reminiscent of the Underworld quests of Orpheus for Eurydice and of Demeter for Persephone. The ancient Japanese recension of this mysteriously global story is given in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, where we read that Izanagi, mourning for his dead wife, followed after her to the Land of Yomi in an attempt to bring her back to the world of the living: 'Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto and entered the Land of Yomi ... So when from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, Izanagi spoke saying; 'My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!' Izanami is honoured by Izanagi's attention and minded to return. But there is one problem. She has already eaten food prepared in the Land of Yomi and this binds her to the place, just as the consumption of a single pomegranate seed binds Persephone to hell in the Greek myth. Is it an accident that ancient Indian myth also contains the same idea? In the Katha Upanishad a human, Nachiketas, succeeds in visiting the underworld realm of Yama, the Hindu god of Death (and, yes, scholars have noted and commented upon the weird resonance between the names and functions of Yama and Yomi). It is precisely to avoid detention in the realm of Yama that Nachiketas is warned: 'Three nights within Yama's mansion stay / But taste not, though a guest, his food.' So there's a common idea here -- in Japan, in Greece, in India -- about not eating food in the Underworld if you want to leave. Such similarities can result from common invention of the same motif -- in other words, coincidence. They can result from the influence of one of the ancient cultures upon the other two, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or they can result from an influence that has somehow percolated down to all three, and perhaps to other cultures, stemming from an as yet unidentified common source.

I am going to tell a story: Once Upon A Time there was a man and a woman. The man and the woman were dreaming. The man and the woman dreamed each other and when they finished dreaming they had invented each other. So I am going to tell the story of a dream: Once upon a time there was a couple: the ideal couple, the perfect couple, the archetypal couple, who would combine in their two faces the features of all the lovers of history, all those who might have been able to fall in love with each other, all those ever imagined by the poets, and all those unimagined yet. They were (or would be) Abelard and Héloïse, Venus and Tannhäuser, Hamlet and Ophelia, Agathe and Ulrich, Solomon and the Shulamite maiden, the Consul and Yvonne, Daphnis and Chloe, Percy and Mary Shelley, the narrator and Albertine, Jocasta and Oedipus, Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, Pygmalion and Galatea, Othello and Desdemona, Penelope and Ulysses, Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval, Laura and Petrarch, Humbert Humbert and Lolita, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Alonso Quijano and Dulcinea, Leda and the Swan, Adam and Eve, Wagner and Cosima, Pelléas and Mélisande, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Calisto and Melibea, Faust and Gretchen, Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy, Tristan and Isolde, Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Jason and Medea, Miranda and Ferdinand, Kafka and Milena, Electra and Agamemnon, Don Juan and Thisbe, von Aschenbach and Tadzio, Poe and Annabel Lee, Borges and Matilde Urbach. As the curtain rises they are kissing each other passionately in the middle of a steamy, shadowed park, underneath the pines. Is this not perhaps the ideal beginning of any love story? Not to forget that there is also a unicorn, a tree laden with garnet-colored fruit, and a large neon sign hanging above them both that reads: A Mon Suel Desir. If we look carefully we will notice that the park is surrounded by water on all sides—that is, this is an island. The story might well begin at any moment.

Ted rose early the next morning and took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale, cool, echoey, empty of tourists despite the fact that it was spring. He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the proximity of Orpheus and Eurydice before he saw it, felt its cool weight across the room but prolonged the time before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up to the moment it described: Orpheus and Eurydice in love and newly married; Eurydice dying of a snakebite while fleeing the advances of a shepherd; Orpheus descending to the underworld, filling its dank corridors with music from his lyre as he sang of his longing for his wife; Pluto granting Eurydice's release from death on the sole condition that Orpheus not look back at her during their ascent. And then the hapless instant when, out of fear for his bride as she stumbled in the passage, Orpheus forgot himself and turned. Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if he's walked inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. It was the moment before Eurydice must descend to the underworld a second time, when she and Orpheus are saying goodbye. What moved Ted, mashed some delicate glassware in his chest, was the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently. He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost. (p. 211)

I look forward to the day I can repay my debt to each of you,” Kirill straightened and braced his arms behind his back. His voice lowered to a mere whisper. “Know that I am just as serious in repaying my allies as I am in punishing my enemies. You gave me your help when I needed it, before you had any reason to help me.” He lifted his chin, staring up at the World Tree. “Until I can make the proper repayment of your kindness, I intend for this…sharing of information, to be a step in that direction. But…” He slanted hard eyes on the werewolf. “I will not apologize for my pragmatism.” He sighed. Heavily. “And for pity’s sake, didn’t we agree that you would leave some clothes here, Etienne?” The unexpected joke shattered the tension. Adonis, Patricio, and Saamal chuckled and Etienne flushed as if he’d only just noticed his nudity. “I left in a hurry.” Etienne scratched the stubble at his face and neck before threading a hand through his shaggy brown hair. Kirill raised an eyebrow and pulled a small knapsack from the dark folds of his thick forest green cloak. Eurydice leaned forward and sniffed like it would help her figure out just what else Kirill might have hidden in that cloak. Weapons, certainly, but how on earth did the vampire keep the lines of his clothes so smooth and unassuming? Surely there should have been a lump where he’d hidden that sack. Etienne caught the knapsack as Kirill tossed it across the clearing. Adonis crowed with laughter as the werewolf prince opened it to find a pair of plain, brown leather breeches. “No shirt for the werewolf, eh, Kirill?” Adonis snickered. The corner of the vampire’s mouth quirked. “Adonis, even a prince as wealthy as myself could not afford to supply our lycan friend here with a complete outfit every time he shows up skyclad.” Etienne snorted and shook his head, but raised a hand in a begrudging half-wave. “Thanks.” -Kirill, Adonis, Etienne.

And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right. After all, she has gone to visit pieces of her art so many times. But they were only pieces, stripped of context. Sculptured birds on marble plinths, and paintings behind ropes. Didactic boxes taped to whitewashed walls and glass boxes that keep the present from the past. It is a different thing when the glass breaks. It is her mother in the doorway, withered to bone. It is Remy in the Paris salon. It is Sam, inviting her to stay, every time. It is Toby Marsh, playing their song. The only way Addie knows how to keep going is to keep going forward. They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.