Wide Justice

“‘I don’t know what’s between them in that space between the making of the lyre and my finding of Eurydice by the river. I think of the buzzingness, the swarmingness, the manyness of bees singing the honey of possibility. I see Eurydice sitting among the skeps under the apple trees listening to her bees. She was afraid that our story would find us but she was always listening for it.’

‘How can bees tell a story?’

‘The bees don’t tell a story but in the manyness of their singing there sometimes comes a story to the one who listens.’”
From The Medusa Frequency, Russell Hoban.

Eurydice (literally wide justice) proposes to Orpheus that real love and connection are pre-story, that they are in another dimension and that only when that dimension was lost did story emerge from the loss. In this Orpheus (a severed head speaking to our struggling novelist narrator via a cabbage and an old football) is the epitome of the artist, one who has experienced loss and must therefore sing of this. Eurydice is often found watching out for the stories and they enjoy their love, soon however, like a swarm of hungry ghosts the stories come and they find them, and they name them Eurydice and Orpheus, and their fate is sealed…

I would link this idea of hunting by the story - the incursion of meaning, narrative, alphabet and text into our experience - to recent mediations by amongst others David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous and Jerome S. Bernstein in Living in the Borderland on the origins of consciousness and the western ‘ego’. In Bernstein’s words;

“So if man is the image of God, then the godhead can no longer be falcons, or cows, or serpents, or crocodiles, or fire, or trees, or any other aspect of nature. From Genesis forward, God was to be experienced in anthropomorphic terms, unknown and mysterious, but forever distinct from nature.” (Author’s italics).

Bernstein sees the ‘Genesis’ event as the first emergence of the power of the alphabet (probably developed by workers in the late Egyptian period to bastardize and be able to make use of previously hieratic scripts in their work) to contain reality within a certain inherent boundary or limitation. An event that would be a fundamental factor in the development of the western ‘ego’ and its capacity for advanced technologies alongside its sense of itself as separate from the world around it. Although this is a power that has enabled enormous specialization of knowledge and culture it is also a power that is bringing us potentially to the brink of extinction, as we cannot fundamentally co-create with a world that we are separate from, and so we brutalize and control it (he shall have dominion over the earth…).

Even as Orpheus in The Medusa Frequency takes on the role of Hermes and cuts out the turtle from its shell to make the first lyre there is loss, the first musical instrument is born of a death. It is interesting that the Native Indian Cultures called the land mass of the Americas ‘Turtle Island’ - a people who were destroyed by the very advancements of the technological ego separated by its roots in nature, threatened even by cultures which were rooted in that place and intensely destructive of them. In Greek myth we find a weird echo in the turning out of the insides of the turtle for its usage as an instrument and the turning out of the Indigenous peoples to utilize and co-opt their land and its resources. I once gave a conference in South Dakota, a beautiful place with some fine people. The conference was in Custer State park (history written by the winners!) round a beautiful lake and jetlagged as I was I would walk around it just as dawn was rising, one day I extended the walk right into the hills. I am not claiming objectivity here, I was tired and emotional from travelling and teaching but I could feel a loss in the land even amongst the beauty of the turning trees.

So for all the advancements of our civilization (many of which I enjoy and do not wish to lose) we must acknowledge that the one-sided development of detached rational consciousness has created a loss that ripples within the culture and within the particular life experiences of individuals within that culture. In The Medusa Frequency the narrator Herman Orff (a word-play on the interpenetration of the masculine and feminine principles? Of matriarchal power, her man?) only encounters the head of Orpheus after he has his head treated because of personal and creative blockage… A true friend of mine recently travelling in Australia and experiencing solitude within a different and unique landscape ruminated that perhaps the ‘ego’ is the tinnitus of the Soul; it is an interference to the Music of What Happens (he also referenced the poet Wallace Stevens). Bernstein asserts that we need the Borderland experience, like an extension of the ancient Celtic Twilight, a liminal threshold whereby individually and collectively we open up to a new kind of experiencing the world, as an interconnected participant. He argues passionately that if we do not we seem to enacting a largely suicidal ‘egoic’ ideation onto the world with disastrous consequences for our survival.


Mark Jones - 2nd April 2007

Image: Orpheus & Eurydice by Nico Silvester (after Edmund Dulac)