Alexa Demie In Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

Persephone the Wanderer (II)

by Louise Glück

In the second version, Persephone is dead. She dies, her mother grieves– problems of sexuality need not trouble us here. Compulsively, in grief, Demeter circles the earth. We don’t expect to know what Persephone is doing. She is dead, the dead are mysteries. We have here a mother and a cipher: this is accurate to the experience of the mother as she looks into the infant’s face. She thinks: I remember when you didn’t exist. The infant is puzzled: later, the child’s opinion is she has always existed, just as her mother had always existed in her present form. Her mother is like a figure at a bus stop, an audience for the bus’s arrival. Before that, she was the bus, a temporary home or convenience. Persephone, protected, stares out of the window of the chariot. What does she see? A morning in early spring, in April. Now her whole life is beginning–unfortunately, it’s going to be a short life. She’s going to know, really, only two adults: death and her mother. But two is twice what her mother has: her mother has one child, a daughter. As a god, she could have had a thousand children. We begin to see here the deep violence of the earth whose hostility suggests she has no wish to continue as a source of life. And why is this hypothesis never discussed? Because it is not in the story; it only creates the story. In grief, after the daughter dies, the mother wanders the earth. She is preparing her case; like a politician she remembers everything and admits nothing. For example, her daughter’s birth was unbearable, her beauty was unbearable: she remembers this. She remembers Persephone’s innocence, her tenderness– What is she planning, seeking her daughter? She is issuing a warning whose implicit message is: what are you doing outside my body? You ask yourself: why is the mother’s body safe? The answer is this is the wrong question, since the daughter’s body doesn’t exist, except as a branch of the the mother’s body that needs to be reattached any any cost. When a god grieves it meas destroying others (as in war) while at the same time petitioning to reverse agreements (as in war also): if Zeus will get her back, winter will end. Winter will end, spring will return. The small pestering breezes that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers– Spring will return, a dream based on a falsehood: that the dead return. Persephone was used to death. Now over and over her mother hauls her out again– You must ask yourself: are the flowers real? If Persephone “returns” there will be one of two reasons: either she was not dead or she is being used to support a fiction– I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth? And he would say, in a short time you will be here again. And in the time between you will forget everything: those fields of ice will be the meadows of Elysium.

From Head of Medusa (1617-1618) by Peter Paul Rubens

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (½)

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (2/2)

TALES: KASHMIRI STORIES AND SONGS collected by Tilawônu Hatim, Sir Aurel Stein, and Sir George Abraham Grierson (London: Murray, 1923)

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sorry i didn't respond i had a katabasis

“The manifold self-contradictions in Greek ideas and phrasing about death are not errors. They are styles of imagining the unimaginable, and are responsive both to personal needs and to old conventions. The same conflicts surge up in many cultures. They are necessary ambiguities in a realm of thinking where thinking cannot really be done, and where there is no experience.”

— Emily Vermeule, “Immortals are Mortal, Mortals Immortal,” Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry

Women who don't hold back their tongue vibe. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4

Place of minos at knossos (1921)