Are You Orpheus?

“…Produced by Morton Anal, Jr. Photographed in SpermoVision, a Division of Napalm Industries. Recorded by Sucktone, a Division of Sodom Chemicals, in association with Napalm Industries, a Division of Anal petroleum jelly. A Napalm-Anal release. Certified ‘X’ For Mature Audiences Only.

No one read the film poster.
Listen, said Underground.
No one listened. The chill rose up from the black tunnels.
Are you there? Said Underground. Will you answer?
No one answered.
Are you Orpheus? Said Underground.
No answer.”

From 'Kleinzeit' by Russell Hoban.

What did it mean that whole don’t look back thing? Then of course he looks back and she is gone, the one he waited for, the one taken from their wedding festivities, the one the beauty of his song has won him chance to reclaim, gone? I mean there is a recurring theme within Trickster myths of the figure (Coyote, Rabbit, Raven, Legba, Loki, Eshgal etc) being given a strict set of instructions and then failing to live up to a crucial point and then lo and behold grief has come upon him. Sometimes grief falls upon all of humanity as result, rather like some tragi-comic version of the Fall from the Garden, I can think of one example from Lewis Hyde’s wonderful treatment of these myths whereby Coyote has been instructed to follow an invisible spirit, a ghost, how to find the tribe of the dead whereby he meets his wife and friends again. He is allowed to leave with his wife as long as he does not touch her for 5 days, of course as the days go by she gets more and more vibrant and, well you guessed it.

The friskiness of the trickster deity brings upon all of humanity the lack of capacity to interface meaningfully with the dead, causing loss to all subsequent generations. If as Steiner suggested relations with the Dead are central to a healthy psychology in the present then this is a big loss. Yet for all the similarities in the stories there is a very different feel, Coyote’s mission and ultimate failure as a kind of Brer rabbit on acid feeling, it is more Simpsons than ‘Love Story’ if you follow. Orpheus on the other hand is earnest, an artist that has dared to charm the Lord of the Underworld in order to reclaim the unnatural loss of his bride on his wedding night (chased by a Centaur she is bitten by a snake and falls...). His story in modern film form would have the audience sobbing; this is the end of the ‘English Patient’ territory, a desperate man seeking the life of she whom he loves. I remember as a small boy being very angry and upset at Orpheus; I was shouting at him, ‘why did you look back?’ I mean Pluto had only given one condition (deliberately to entrap, to get him thinking…like a man saying don’t think of pink elephants of course you cannot help but…the ultimate cheat?). I was very disturbed by the story of Orpheus age seven. I could not understand why he would do that. Why?


Orpheus is not just a Trickster even though the failing the key instruction links him to these ever backfiring creatures. He is a symbol of the maker of art within a human. To be disturbed by his story implies a resonance of that story with something in one’s own life, or psyche. Orpheus resonates, his song touches (teaches the animals their true ear sings Rilke) he resounds across the ages. To a boy in a Cheshire village who had nothing else to do than to read Greek myths and fall in love over and over with the nymphs (who would not want a girl that lives in a tree or a stream?) and suffer as the heroes suffer, and suffer, and be angry that Orpheus would lose. It felt like a loss, both in the sense that he lost her but also that he played the game and he lost. He lost it. A shocker for a young boy! For the boy the tales of Hercules were much easier to take, the Thracian lion tamed and worn as trophy now there’s the stuff of legend huh? Yet it was the failure of Orpheus to stop himself looking back at Eurydice that haunted this boy, not the filthy stables or the Hydra.

Am I Orpheus then? – To feel that hurt? Are you Orpheus? Said Underground, Hoban’s symbol of the mighty Hades, are you the singer of songs that will change this place? (Kleinzeit busks). Was he looking back to check she was ok? Did he mistrust the god who had claimed she would be safe? Certainly I mistrust the gods at times, the most powerful of inner urges can overpower me and quicken inside me to a point of feverish certainty and literally a few moments later I can be wavering again… Is he a man neurotically bound to the past? I mean was looking back to see her a symbol of those times we get stuck in a consciousness of regret, of past-binding, you know ‘I wish that had not happened’ ‘I wish that person had given me a chance to tell them how I feel’- was Orpheus, as many artists are, too bound by nostalgia, by the weight of the past? Is this a Remembrance of Singer’s Past? I do not know. Is it just a case that she was so beautiful to him and he was so focussed on his wedding night and then the loss (like Novalis night after night at the grave side writing) that he literally had to look back just to see her face, the beauty of her presence? I mean I have told myself I will not ring so and so and then have done, but here the stakes are so high, was one look worth the loss?

I mean is this the point? Actaeon pays a terrible price for looking upon the beauty of the Virginal bathing Moon, he is hunted for his vision. Is Orpheus the artist who can turn the woodland into temple, the herd into a temenos because that beauty, the beauty of turning and seeing was worth it? Is there a part of Orpheus that does not see any of this as a loss? Is it the heroic ego of the child in me that has lost it? Is it the limit of the rational that says why did you break the rules when the stakes are so high? Am I actually a man living in fear because I do not celebrate Orpheus and his particular form of seeing, a seeing around, a seeing backward and into the dark?

Song, you teach us, is beyond achievable desire,

it is rather the sheer reality of immanent being:

simplicity itself for deity,

but how may we partake? When will you inspire

our being, bestowing earth and stars by turn?

This has no relation, youth, to your enamoured care:

mouth forced wide by the thrust of your voice - learn

to set aside impassioned music. It will end.

True singing breaths a different air.

Air without object. A gust within God. A wind.

From Sonnet to Orpheus 3, translated by Robert Hunter

Has Orpheus in fact stilled his longing? Or was this afterwards, was this the journey he took when he wandered after realizing what his longing had done, how it had destroyed her, the very one he loved and longed for? Was this is maturation in fact, his journey into manhood? Is Eurydice in this sense Anima, at her most elusive when grasped for by the aggressive male desire (most certainly a look can be aggressive in it’s wanting…)? For certainly she became the “air without object” when he looked, did he indeed look so hard that he saw right through her, that she became invisible, empty even of inherent existence?

“Kleinzeit didn’t want to get out of the train, there was no time there, nothing had to be decided. He dropped his mind like a bucket into the well of Sister. There was a hole in the bucket, it came up empty.”

I wonder was Orpheus beginning a journey into becoming a Zen Master, certainly from the point of view of this interested party he leaves a challenging koan in his tale of song and loss. Whatever you bring to that koan and I have far from exhausted those possibilities of this increasingly late night meander through the backwaters and eddies of Underground - you can see yourself in what you bring, you can see the possibilities of Self itself in all its multiple and yet interlinked forms. Like Zeno’s arrow the Self is always motionless and yet it is always moving to a destination. Something happened at the gates of Hell. Something in that look, in the journey to, and the journey from that look, something happened that changed Art and Consciousness in the West. Rilke knew this clearly and after the lengthy abstraction of the Duino Elegies he returned to sing the song of Orpheus, he who had given birth to song. Something about the look, the looking for, the looking into, the forbidden look. Whatever we conclude as to the meaning of the journey of Orpheus we must see that it brings us closer to the beating heart of things, the arterial rhythms of time, that like Orpheus is shattered by the look and wanders into nature to have his new found woundedness and heartfelt-ness contained so must we walk if we wish to emulate the meaning of the song. Even if you are only a sometime poet (and aren’t we all at least sometime poets?) you might wish to journey with Orpheus, with Kleinzeit or with Rilke into the deeper Life:

“Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,
As if the banks through which it moves had widened out.
Trees and stones seem more like me each day,
And the paintings I see seem more seen into:
With my senses, as with the birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the blue sky
My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”



Moving Ahead by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly.



Mark Jones

Images: Orpheus (2004) by Nikolay Antonov, Hermes, Eurydice and Orpheus (2006) by Daniela Ovtcharova

In Memoriam

“Now Besso (one of his oldest friends) has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”

Albert Einstein, as quoted by Robert Lanza

“All psychological difficulties are due to the absence of a right relationship with the dead”

Rudolph Steiner (as quoted by Robert Sardello)

So first principles…what I have been witness too: when the death rattle stops and the psyche finally leaves there is a palpable stillness, a peace descends, and a struggle surrenders into a mystery, a mystery that emanates presence. This have I seen, and my heart felt a relief as my loved one left. A joy that stayed with into the next day, playing meaningful music and entering the world with an unencumbered brevity of movement and lightness of mood, soon to become unstuck within hours of picking up her stuff and signing death duties and civic records, but hey…

All of us of a certain age have sat with the dying. We have been with them through the trials of that process, the bed sores, the aching or paralysed limbs, the difficulty breathing, the pallor or blackening…At times one can enjoy humour and breathtaking shifts of perspective with the dying. I am ready now; everything I have is now yours said one old lady to her two grandchildren who had just said how much they loved her. A complete change, a reversal in energy, a feeling shift, she would leave later that night having given of everything that she ever could have.

At other times we sit through the clinging to life. We all do this … the living (who are the dying) and what we might call the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’…all of us get into clinging to life. Whether it is a significant relationship we did not want to end, whether it is a substance or daily routine we now loathe but still cannot give up, whether it is a body that has so far stood us so well that now develops a tragic flaw, an antidote to our existential hubris. Sometimes it is sitting with the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’ folks that allows us to see the absurdity of this clinging, the impossible dream we endlessly recycle as human beings desperate not to see our sense of meaning get up and fly over the fields like the black crows of death in Van Gogh’s last paintings…

In it no secret – we are all terminally ill, we are all ‘doing time’ as another put it and will leave the playing field sooner rather than later. How we deal with the inescapable anxiety of our self-consciousness in the face of our transience…well that is another issue. Some populate ever more fiercely the Elysian field of heavenly vistas; some turn their minds to apocalypse as if to project their own nihilism onto a global dimension. What we are doing with our fear, what we are doing with our fear of dying, what we are doing with our denial of death (Becker), our denial of the dead (Steiner) is an important issue, indeed is an ecological issue of great import. It is this existential dimension of the current climactic, energy and ecological crises that is often overlooked. What we are imagining as we stare into the barrel of the gun, as we write the sand mandalas of our lives, is an essential aspect of the subtle ecology of life on this planet.

For we are scared and fear has a way of controlling us and destroying us. Fear flows from some of the stories of Rabbit in the Native American Indian traditions (whose own fear would constantly manifest situations to justify itself) to the general tendency of human beings to eroticize or make relationship to their fears through fantasy material – i.e. that what cannot be appropriated easily by the unconscious mind becomes fertile ground for the activity of the unconscious mind. I have personally witnessed people defend the meaninglessness of life, the randomness of existence, the sheer chance of things with such vehemence that you could only imagine that this randomness was a god whose altar they filled every night with the summation of their earnest longing. Such were these people’s fear of meaning…

Fear of death. Fear of the dead. For they are there, they have not gone. For they have entered the (from our point of view) ‘ultimate’ shift in perspective. Their identity is phased out of the current seemingly linear reality we all, by consensus, occupy. More, where they go we, like Aeneas and many before and after him, must follow… obviously we have one trip lined up whatever, but must that be the only time we ever ask ourselves the questions, is that the only time we will journey?


For Kleinzeit the hero or small-timer (his name might mean both) of Russell Hoban’s eponymous novel is never allowed to ignore the fact that death lurks around every corner, and that in so lurking their can be no ownership, no permanent holding of any given, in fact every high is a ‘short high’ as one chapter holds, a black hairy voice offstage (death?) shouting, as Hospital tells him that nothing is his. As always it is Kleinzeit’s love for the sister that is redemptive for him, and by implication the whole of heroic small-time humanity. Yet even that love is awash with death, and in fact it is only this love (awash with death) that can make any sense at all of life with death:

“Sister by owl-light, Sister zipping out of the tight trouser-suit, stepping out of her knickers in the glow of the gas fire. Sister pearly in the dusk, silky on the flowered sheets, tasty in the mouth, opulent to the touch, Kleinzeit, overwhelmed, became nothing, disappeared, reappeared, from nowhere entered, inventing himself as theme, as subject. Answered by Sister he sounded deep chill, silence, all beneath him, raised Atlantis, golden domes and oriental carpets, central heating, dates and pomegranates, mottled sunlight, stereo. Far below them Underground said, are you Orpheus?”

A very good question indeed…


Mark Jones

IMAGES: Untitled (1987) and Mr Reddy doing Pranam to the Divine Mother (1986) by Mother Meera.

Orphic Resonance

Last night I attended the first of the Gaia Foundation’s 2007 evenings, this one with Brian Goodwin, leader of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher college (and thus a close colleague of the previous speaker Stephan Harding’s whose talk I covered here).

As you would expect there were many parallels with Stephan Harding’s talk, and both were based around new publications – in Harding’s case Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, in Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Both speakers made the case for holistic versus reductionist science and for a reappraisal and acceptance of animism – the belief that a “soul” or “spirit” existed in every object, even if it was inanimate.

Goodwin asked us to reconsider the stories of science, by telling different stories we find a different path. Following a Jungian, archetypal model Goodwin identified a “new” story that has emerged in our culture, which is actually the re-emergence of an old story – which alters our perceptions on science and opens up through animism a new connection with nature. This story is the myth of the Orphic Trinity – Chaos, Gaia and Eros.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim
Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros,
fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and
overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men
within them.”
Hesiod, Theogeny (c.700 BC)

Goodwin posited the era of the 1960’s as the genesis point of this archaic revival, first with the re-emergence of Chaos in the work of mathematician Edward N Lorenz. Lorenz attempting to apply mathematical modelling to meteorological phenomena and weather prediction discovered that apparently small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. These variations in initial conditions could be so numerous and so slight that they made accurate prediction of future effects impossible. What he described as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow has become better known as Chaos and has become an important part of mathematical and scientific enquiry. It would appear, as some anarchists and magickian’s claim: that “chaos never died”.

"Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Edward N. Lorenz, paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972)

“For the mass of practicing scientists... the change did not matter immediately... But they were aware of something called chaos... More and more of them realized that chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data... chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science.”
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

The second element of this archaic revival was the re-emergence of Gaia in the pioneering earth systems science work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This work finally gained its crucial nomenclature as a result of a conversation between the neighbours Lovelock and novelist William Golding in 1969.

“Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.”
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”

The final element of the trilogy is Eros, the force of love, also known as Eleutherios, "the liberator" and through that shared role connected with Dionysus – god of intoxication, music, peace, the civilizing urge – and thus also connected with Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries (I wrote about some of this previously in The Rebirth of Orpheus). Goodwin asked the audience “who here lived through the 1960s? Can you recognise anything familiar here in the aspects of this deity?”

“THE COURT: "Erotic," did you say?
THE WITNESS: Erotic.
THE COURT: E-R-O-T-I-C?
THE WITNESS: Eros. That means love, your Honor.”
From the Court Testimony of Timothy Leary at the trial of the Chicago 7 (1970)

“Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.”
Lennon/McCartney, All You Need is Love (1967)

Goodwin indicated that we are still in the process of integrating these archetypal forces into our science and into our culture, with the attractive force of Eros suffering from most neglect.

The discovery of DNA by Crick and Watson in 1953, with its beautiful double helix formation began a quest in the biological sciences to decode the organism and gain some total understanding of life. Goodwin quoting Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene presented the case that the completion of the human genome project had, rather than bringing such a total understanding, in fact revealed how large the gap is between genetic information and biological meaning. How the particular structure of organisms develop largely remains a mystery, there is some embodied meaning in the cells which is inaccessible to consciousness. Goodwin posits that the development and organisation of form by cellular DNA occurs through the action of a kind of language – and that particular forms are the stories told in that language.

Thus herbalists may develop the ability to read the story of a plant as manifest by its form and intuit the qualities of that plant. The holistic enquiries of wise women and cunning men from the era before reductionism took hold may have genuinely born a “shamanic knowing” that is not only dismissed by our modern science but is beyond its conception. Goodwin stated that meaning is “immanent” not “transcendent” – when science attempts to de-particularise and abstract, it in fact moves further from rather than closer to meaning.

So Goodwin asked, how do we engage with this? How do we go about re-integrating this sense of nature in our science and culture? How do we achieve harmony with our fellow entities? Relating this back to the Gaia Foundation’s work and the influence of theologian Thomas Berry, Goodwin suggested that by beginning to change our conceptions we participate in a greater change in consciousness, that this is part of “engaging in the great work” – the alchemical transformation of ourselves and society – the paradigm shift which might be understood as the Magnum Opus.

James Piers Taylor, London 2/3/2007

IMAGES: Brian Goodwin, cover of Nature's Due (2007), Projection of trajectory of Lorenz system in phase space with "canonical" values of parameters r=28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 (or 2.666667) and integration timestep 0.001. (2005) Computed in Fractint by Wikimol, Gaia mosaic (date unknown), Beatles (1967) by unknown photographer, Conjunctio (2006) by Paul Le Blanc.