Orpheus Ascending
by Connor Freff Cochran
[This essay would have been impossible to complete without the help of my unofficial “big sister,” Karen Hogan, whom I sincerely thank.]
According to the stories he was the greatest artist of his time: A musician and singer beyond compare, a healer of the sick, a bold adventurer, a speaker of prophesies. When he sang, birds would come down from the trees and stand before him in rapt silence, listening. When he played, rivers would change their course just to come near. He was that good. And why not? In some of the tales he was fathered by the god Apollo, in others by Oeagrus, the human king of Thrace, but in all of them his mother was Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. For an artist that’s a hell of a bloodline.
His name was Orpheus, and of course he didn’t actually exist. He and his life are the stuff of myth (Greek myth, to be specific). But this lack of reality doesn’t make his story less powerful as a source of guiding principles — quite the opposite! Real life is messy, convoluted, contradictory. It’s not pure. In real life every hero has had villainous moments, and none of us wears a snow-white hat, no matter what we might like to think. Kurt Waldheim was secretary-general of the United Nations and later president of Austria, but during his youthful military service he collaborated with the Nazis occupying his country and turned a blind eye to genocide. According to many of the people who worked for him, “Uncle” Walt Disney, the shining public icon who gave us Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom, was, in private, an alcoholic anti-Semite who was given to fits of rage, feelings of betrayal, and a weakness for petty revenge. That’s just the way it is inside these human suits. We are good and bad in an ever-changing, always complicated mix. Even the Dalai Lama has his dark side, somewhere. I’d bet on it.
One reason we tell stories is to clear all that confusion away and get to the heart of things. In that sense, myths are a kind of macroscope. They open up an unobstructed (if metaphorical) view on human truths.
For all its bright beginning, the story of Orpheus is a tragedy. At the height of his acclaim and abilities he falls deeply in love with the beautiful nymph Eurydice, and immediately marries her. While this seems like it should be a good thing, it isn’t. Life, even mythical life, turns on narrow hinges, and fate has something other than happiness planned for this couple.
There are many different versions of what happens next, but they all share the same nightmarish conclusion: far too young, and completely unfairly, Eurydice dies.
While bathing in a stream she is seen by a traveler named Aristaeus. Enflamed by her beauty, he tries to rape her. She runs…and is bitten by a venomous snake.
Mere moments after her marriage to the handsome Orpheus, she wanders away from the wedding party to gather flowers for the garland she will give him when they enter their conjugal bower. While he drinks and celebrates with their friends, unaware of her absence, she makes a single wrong step…and is bitten by a venomous snake.
The snake does not bite her. It is her companion. But she is only half-mortal, same as her husband, and connected through birth to the gods of the Underworld. Her time among the living has run its course, and love alone is not enough to keep her in Orpheus’s arms. Against all her preference, but in accordance with the will of greater powers, she leaves her briefly-shared home and goes to join the dead.
And thus Orpheus loses his only love. If this happened to you or to me, we’d be shattered. We’d cry and wail and curse the unfair world until we were too exhausted to cry or wail or curse any more, and then after some rest we’d start crying again. The pain would carve our hearts as thoroughly as any cow was ever cut to pieces in an abattoir. That’s what loss does to a human being.
I speak from experience, having lost both my marriage and a much-sought child in recent months.
Regular readers of Creative Options will remember that I was married in 1996, and that in 1997 my wife and I set out to begin a family. Like many older couples, however, we discovered that we faced fertility problems: in our case a fallopian blockage that made natural conception not just difficult, but impossible. The moon would fall out of the sky and tap-dance in Saskatchewan before we’d have a child without medical intervention.
This was not good news, and it came at a time when our marriage was undergoing considerable strain. But we weathered the shock, did our research, and set forth again on the reproductive quest — only this time with lots of expensive help. A whole plethora of doctors, nurses, specialist technicians, and consultants ultimately became involved over the course of two necessary surgeries and two rounds of IVF (in vitro fertilization). There were long courses of daily drug injections that my wife had to take, and I had to learn to give. There were numerous tests. There were hopeful, optimistic days and immensely depressing ones. There were good friends and true, all eager to help us, a surprising number of whom had already been down the IVF path. There were stress reduction classes, and an acupuncturist, and taking a single baby aspirin every day to promote capillary growth in the uterus, and prowling the Fourtility internet board for useful tips, and stocking the refrigerator with soy-everything after reading that soy in her diet would help keep my wife’s estrogen levels in the crucial proper range….
None of this was easy. But the shared effort seemed to be binding up some of the wounds in our marriage — an unexpected but welcome side effect — and there were other odd compensations, such as getting to know the exact date of conception. That lab procedure turned out to fall squarely on my birthday, which was so grand and sweet a coincidence I couldn’t help but take it for a sign.
You have to understand something here. My own childhood was pretty appalling. As a result I have dreamt of having a family the way most men dream of having power. I wanted a kid. More than one, if that’s what we wound up with. (IVF is chancy, so doctors tend to implant every viable embryo they get; that’s why the relative percentage of twins and triplets in IVF births is so high.) For years I’d mollified my need for progeny by being the best damn “Uncle Connor” I could be to my friends’ children. But this was different: If the implantation procedure worked I’d finally be part of a family, instead of just passing through.
It did work. Two weeks later my studio phone rang with news of the positive test results. I remember stumbling down the stairs and out onto Pasadena’s East Colorado Boulevard in a complete daze. By another coincidence it was the anniversary of the night my wife and I first kissed. Across the street from me I could see the church where we’d gone that evening, to enjoy a Halloween Haunted House, and I stood still and shaky in the midst of so much past and so much possible future, all crashing together in a single moment.
Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
Orpheus probably felt much the same way at the end of his wedding ceremony.
Modern science made it possible for my wife and me to conceive. It let us see a picture of our child as a just-fertilized egg, let us hear its pounding heartbeat as a growing fetus, let us see an ultrasound picture of it moving within my wife’s womb...and then modern science pulled the rug out by revealing that we hadn’t dodged the 1-in-23 chance of genetic disaster that went along with being 44 years of age. It was a boy, the doctors told us, but the amniocentesis results unequivocally showed that he had a condition called trisomy 21, more commonly known as Down syndrome. Such a simple thing — 47 chromosomes instead of the normal 46 — and such a horrible impact.
Some Down syndrome children have only mild retardation, and grow to maturity. Those are the ones you’ll see on television or in pictures. A greater number by far have major mental impairment and painful physical disabilities, including serious malformations of the heart, lungs, or joints that will kill them before they see their teens. An even greater number never make it to birth in the first place, but are instead lost in spontaneous miscarriages.
A report of trisomy 21 is not a mild verdict. It requires making a choice.
What others would do, faced with this situation, doesn’t matter. What you would do (or think you would do) doesn’t matter either. This is as bad as the responsibility to reach a decision can get, and in every case it is a completely personal matter. I wouldn’t dream of finding fault with anyone for the position they finally came to, no matter what it was or how it may have differed from ours.
We had discussed this situation in advance, as a hypothetical, and for many different reasons had reached the conclusion that we would not carry a Down syndrome infant to term. Now the nightmare was actually on us, with a hideous twist: our marriage was on the rocks. By the time the amnio results had come in we were separated and hovering on the edge of divorce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was pressure from the pregnancy itself that undid all the progress we had made in the previous months. The stakes were just too high, now. Every conflict, no matter how small, became a struggle over the direction of the rest of our lives. We were like two people who had traveled together to a shared destination, only to find, on arriving, that the remainder of our respective journeys didn’t converge at all.
I have always believed, in my own fashion, that human beings are more than just clever biological mechanisms. And I have never believed that life is something to be held onto (or created) at any cost. Sometimes the price is just too high. I could not, in loving conscience, condemn my son to the only future that genetics and a failed marriage would allow him. Neither could my wife. Sick at heart, we made the choice we felt was right and scheduled an abortion.
I have never known such pain as I felt on the day I brought my wife home from the clinic. There was no way for us to comfort each other. Our relationship was too far gone for that. She asked me to go away, turning to her girlfriends for additional emotional support. I left the condo, retreated to my studio, and wept.
A few weeks later we started the divorce paperwork.
For months now I have been grieving. “Grief,” a friend of mine once told me, “is the time it takes to believe that you have survived.” I’m not quite there yet, though every day I come a little closer. Because that’s what we do, here in the real world. It’s part of our contract with existence. Unless the anguish completely breaks us, eventually we accept the pain, heal, and move on.
Not Orpheus, though. In every version of the tale he refuses to let go of Eurydice. Death, to someone with his abilities and family connections, is not an insurmountable barrier. Without hesitating, carrying only his lyre, he descends through endless dark caverns and passageways in search of the Underworld. With one of his songs he buys passage across the River Styx in Charon’s ferryboat. Confronted by three-headed Cerberus, watchdog at the gate of the Underworld, he lulls the beast to sleep with his playing. Going even deeper he does the same with the three judges of the dead. Finally he steps boldly into hell, the only living man to ever do so.
The rulers of this twilight land are the god Hades and his mate, Persepehone. Impressed by Orpheus’s bravery, or perhaps just amused at this unique curiosity — a heartbeat and breath where there can be neither — they hear him out as he makes his plea in words and music. While he plays, all torment stops. Even the dead listen to him and weep. The sound of his lyre and voice sweep through the Underworld, and it is as if all Life has joined in the quest to reclaim Eurydice.
Moved despite himself, Hades tells Orpheus that the strength of his love and the beauty of its expression have won him what he seeks. He may return to the surface world unhindered, and he may take Eurydice with him.
But this is a myth, remember, so there’s a catch. A big one. Eurydice exists now only as a spirit, and spirits cannot survive mortal gaze. Orpheus must ascend in darkness to the world above, with Eurydice’s shade following him. When they step out together into the light she will be reborn in living flesh…but if he should turn and look at her before that, then he truly will lose her forever.
This one chance he has earned. There can never be another.
In the beginning the ascent is easy. His heart leaps for joy — soon, very soon, he and his bride will be together as they were meant to be. But over time, in the darkness, a small seed of doubt blossoms within Orpheus. What if Hades has lied to him? The Greek gods were not noted for their honesty. What if the cold and silent shade that brushes against him occasionally on the climb is not his beloved Eurydice, but some demon?
With every step this doubt grows stronger. Eventually it burns intolerably, consuming him. He can think of nothing else as he climbs. A hundred times he starts to turn and look, but stops himself, and each time his resolve and certainty weaken.
You can guess what’s next. When Orpheus finally reaches the glowing entrance to the upper world, mere seconds away from Eurydice’s resurrection, he falters. He knows he should step forward without hesitation, but that’s not what he does. Instead he turns. He looks, certain that Hades has tricked him…and discovers that all his doubts were wrong. For an instant that will haunt him until his own death, he sees his wife reaching for him, trying to hold on — and then she vanishes, condemned this time not by capricious fate but by his own lack of faith.
Like I said, a tragedy. But also an example to live by. For those of us returning to life after mortal disappointment or disaster, the story of Orpheus is a powerful lesson in dealing with despair. It has helped me more than once during my struggle to return to creative work, after months of emotional paralysis.
Consider the questions posed by the Orpheus myth. If you could change any one thing in your life, would you? If the power to do so came at a price, would you be willing to pay? And if your most fervent dream could only be achieved through meeting a challenge, how much suffering would you bear to win the day?
These are crucial questions for any of us, but especially for those living as artists. Loss is not the only thing that takes us into the Underworld. We repeat Orpheus’s journey every time we create. We descend into the unknown dark, seeking something we love, and do our best to carry that spark of creation back into the living world with us as we rise. It’s a fragile process, and every step of the way we are tempted to look, to second-guess ourselves, to make certain that what we think we are carrying really is the thing we sought. If we look too soon, though, as Orpheus did — if we stop short before the idea or dream is fully carried out of the dark — then that spark we love will never be realized. It may vanish or it may be still-born, but for certain it will never come to life.
Loss is a part of art and living, and so is letting go. Sometimes letting go is the right thing to do. Unlike Orpheus, it isn’t in our power to try and rescue the dead. Better to mourn and leave them to their rest.
But all those other times…those times when the spark is real, when light and life and hope are more than just a half-glimpsed fantasy…what a shame, then, to give in too soon; and how wrong to surrender to fear, when all we really have to do is keep climbing.
>>> A Creative Options essay by Connor Freff Cochran
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posted by kpr at 4:53 AM
