The Art of Ovid

I was browsing through some articles on Ovid this morning, trying to find some interesting information to cite and I found this website. If you scroll down through the information to the web links, there is one entitled "The Ovid Project". Here there are hundreds of engravings from Ancient illustrated works of Ovid. The captions in the engravings themselves are not in English, but one can recognize some names if mentioned. The pictures are absolutely gorgeous works, full of energy. I definitely recommend checking them out.

Willing Supplicants to Jealous Gods

After having read my small part of Ovid's Metamorphoses and thinking of it throughout class today, I simply could not reconcile the humanistic view of the Greek civilization with the idea of jealous, domineering gods who always always get their way. I asked Prof. Sexson about it just after class, and we had a pretty interesting, if short, discussion about this idea.

Think about humanism, this system of thought in which the individual is glorified, wherein human achievement is not only appreciated but expected. Think about it... Creation! Could there be anything so wonderful as this. We, acting as gods ourselves, create. Regardless of discipline, intent, or circumstance, we create. We cannot help it. Even the simple course of day to day life is a sort of creation. We bring ourselves into being, and we define ourselves as we choose.

How can there be, in this time of utmost enlightenment, of achievement and movement, how can there be room in this world for superstition, for the cruel reign of gods and goddesses? How could these men prostrate themselves before an idea not contained within their own being? The greatness we strive for without lives in wait within. How could these men, particularly the men of ideas and wonder, how could they not see this? How could they make themselves so...lowly.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his Brothers Karamazov, says simply "So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship." We actively seek out places to fall and lords to worship. Why? Because standing on our own two feet, without any sort of safety net or eternal scapegoat, is too terrifying.

And yet...

Who are these gods we worship? For the Greeks, they were love embodied in Aphrodite or war embodied in Ares. Wisdom lives through Athena and mischief reigns in Hermes. These are but attributes after all! We define these things we cannot see, hear, or explain within the body of a human being! The fact that we make them live forever as something "not human" betrays only wishful thinking...or the fact that these attributes live on as man lives on. There has always been love and wisdom and as long as we live, it lives in us.

Prof. Sexson said it is the defiance of the gods that is revolutionary here. Though they are all-powerful and though the individual gets torn apart in the end, the idea of even challenging the gods is revolutionary and humanistic. As humans, we are as powerful as the gods, we can be better than they are, sing sweeter, weave better.... but they will conquer us. The abstract concepts of love or hate, death or wisdom, will always hold sway, regardless of our circumstance or any ability. Because these concepts live in all, they will win in all and are inescapable. In this lies the true "will of the gods".

Howling Hecuba

Tragedy.

Over and over in recent classes, Prof. Sexson repeats one phrase, "the tragic sense of life". It seems simple enough....but I keep coming back to that phrase, that exact combination of words, in my mind. What does it mean to perceive life in a tragic sense? Or to wallow in that rich and horrifying, dark and foreboding side of the everyday? Perhaps this simple combination of words means to truly experience life, an act that in itself is hopelessly tragic and endlessly terrifying.

Shakespeare once said that we are actors on a stage. Well if we are, what is the theme of our days? Do we frolic in the throes of comedy? Or do we spurt onto the stage our tragedy and pain...like blood, so real and...undeniable. Perhaps we act the tragedy, a tragedy so hopelessly absurd in the immensity of its own pain that it transcends itself, skimming along that all too insubstantial line alongside comedy. Laughter and tears, we cycle through laughter and tears in our days on earth, in all the varied turns of fortune's wheel.

Hecuba laments in Euripides' Trojan Women, "Fortune is a whirling dervish that twists and turns and leaps now this way, now that. Success is not of man's own making." And, in the end, our Chorus reiterates, "Like smoke blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country, perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear." "The name of the land will pass into oblivion. [. . .] Hapless Troy is finished."

Tragedy.

Regardless of what we think of Hecuba, what we assign to her through the multifaceted veils of time and place, we should but witness her pain, the pain of an entire nation screaming in agony. Actors attempts to embody the complete desolation of hundreds of thousands of people somehow fail to meet the ultimate crescendo of the tragic sense of life. Always, they hold back, unable or unwilling to fully prostrate themselves before the vision. Too often we turn away from tragedy because we cannot take the pain. We must. Go back to it. Witness it; make it a small something of what you are so that those people never truly die. To live faithfully one must contain all of life, tragedy and comedy combined.

Hecuba watches, helpless, utterly helpless as her nation is destroyed. The blood runs in the streets and the haunting cries of the slaughtered reach even the palace walls. Her warriors are defeated and dishonored. The army has fallen. She sees the loss of two sons in a war of folly. Her husband is murdered, her children scattered. In this tiny play, we see this woman receive the news of a daughter's death, another's grim fate as concubine to her enemy....and the third.... her fate is unspeakable. This daughter, Andromache, loses a part of her self and her soul. Her child is torn from her arms to be smashed into all too unforgiving stone. She will marry another enemy. Hecuba buries Astyanax's frail body and with it, Troy itself. In the final scenes, the entire city is engulfed in flames, its children scattered to all the far-reaching corners of Greece.

Imagine for a moment....going on in that knowledge, with that sight seared into your very soul. Imagine living the rest of that life, as a slave when once you were great....a queen. We witness it. Through Euripides, we live it, and Hecuba herself lives in our living.

How can we go on? How does Hecuba....go on. Somehow we do. Call it laughter, call it hope....somehow, and without pretense, we go on, even when the very heart of darkness fills our cup of life with acidic nectar.

There is something within us. And that something....goes on.