Futile Horn

10.17.2003 - 5:27 pm (hometown heroics)

I tried to convince myself that I didn’t care about the outcome of the game last night, but I was betrayed by my own childish screaming in the bottoms of the 8th and 11th. I wonder why I get so passionate about it, since I’ve mostly despised profession sports since the baseball strike in ’94 (yes, I remember the year). Perhaps because watching the Yankees with my grandfather is the only “quality time” I remember spending with an adult male as a kid, but I’ve no idea why I hate the Red Sox so much (with the notable exception of Johnny Damon), because I think I was rooting more against them than for the Yankees. First I thought it was because I had a desire to see losers keep losing, but then I realized I rooted for the Cubs and they are bigger losers than the Sox. I think the answer is because the Yankees have always beaten Boston when it counted. And when you always win you have to keep winning, or else you get gloated over. Win 99 times out of a hundred, if that one time you lose you get gloated over it really burns your ass. Like when you are 8 and people you’ve never bothered stand up on their chair and dance because they scored two points higher than you on a spelling test. So I guess I am bitter and taking out my aggression on New England. Not that I feel especially bad about it.

So that the time spent watching the game wasn’t a total waste, I spent a good bit of it doing exercises on the guitar. It has occurred to me that 21.5 months in my arbitrary two-year plan “to become a good songwriter” that the objective requires me actually learning to play an instrument properly. I even got all nancy-pants guitar-on-the-left-thigh about it.

I also spent some time reading one of Horace’s odes. It’s addressed to the tortoise shell (you know, cus they make the lyre out of it), and it is instructed to tell that frolicking unripe girl about the one good and noble daughter of Danaus who didn’t slay her husband on her wedding night. I haven’t quite made much sense of why she is to be told this story. The girl, Lyde, is described as “adhuc protervo cruda marito”, something like “still harsh for a desiring husband” (or perhaps hard like an unripe grape, a revolting image Horace has used before), but the word is related to cruor, blood or gore, which anticipates the 49 Danaids who stabbed their husbands to death on their wedding night.

The poem charges into Hades (Horace actually prefers “Orcus”) where we meet the Danaids who are condemned to fill leaky jars for all eternity (a futile task I’ve heard described as somehow relating back to their female anatomy). Of course, it’s the tortoise shell, the addressee of the poem, that goes to hell where it charms Cerberus. This is the third time Cerberus has been subdued in the Odes, first by the Lesbian poets (capital L: Sappho and Alcaeus) in Ode 2.13, then later by Bacchus. Whose hands is the lyre in? Could be Alcaeus’, I suppose. Orpheus comes to mind as a better choice. Cerberus’ “fury-like head” is described as guarded by a hundred snakes, which recalls the snake-bite death of Eurydice. The language reshapes the imagery of 2.13, where the hundred headed Cerberus is flanked by the Furies with snakes entwined in their hair. In both poems the labors of the damned are eased by the sound of the lyre. Also 2.13 is the first mention of Horace’s falling tree accident, and it warns of the approach of death from an unexpected quarter, which is what happened to Eurydice. The poem ends with Hypermnestra, the non-man-slaying Danaid, talking about her future epitaph, so maybe it’s her we’ve gone to retrieve.

It’s hard to resist the lyre being in the hands of Mercury, both its inventor and the psychopomp, the one who leads the souls of the dead to the afterlife; his name is the first word of the poem. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, I recall the god bartering dominion over the lyre to Apollo (I can’t remember what he gets in return), but Horace seems to prefer Mercury as his patron, probably in no small part due to the fact that the god is associated with Augustus’ quasi-divine aspect (Maecenas, Horace’s patron proper, is “practically co-emperor” with him). Augustus had a domestic policy of what basically amounted to the reassertion of traditional family values (which is not quite as ridiculous as it is today; after generations of civil war, Rome had something of a shortage of proper citizens) against which the Danaids obviously perpetrate an egregious offense.

So maybe punishment the underworld just serves as the incentive for Lyde to be a good wife someday, and this is a poem for the purpose of building moral character (since each generation is worse than the last, says Horace), the idea being to teach her before she comes of age, while she is still frolicking in the field (Why are young girls are depicted as frolicking so much? Is it for contrast, because they can’t frolick once they’ve been knocked up?).

This interpretation comes into two problems: a) Horace historically seems to have soured at the idea of his poems being “taught”, but more pertinently, b) if the lesson is to avoid punishment, why so much emphasis on the salve music provides to the damned? Horace isn’t driven by thoughts of marital virtue; he likes being a bachelor. And he likes lovers’ quarrels, you can almost say makes a living out of them. And maybe while cheating and murder aren’t on the same level, I would imagine him not getting excited about writing about married people being nice to each other.

And yet, the treatment of the story is quite eloquent. I read the odes for the interplay and tensions between themes, how he writes between lines and between poems, while the lyric of the Latin is usually lost on me. But yeah, the story is well told.

One angle I’ve got left is this is that names of people do not appear in the story. This is not strange at all, because Horace not infrequently leaves out names because the audience is clearly expected to know the story before it is told. But the person always conspicuous for his namelessness is Mark Antony, who was famously allied with Egypt and the also not-to-named Cleopatra at the battle of Actium which took place a few years before the publishing of Horace’s odes. The victor of course had been the man who would be called Augustus, and the battle had concluded the last civil war. The husbands of the Danaids are the sons of Aegyptus. The marriage of Roman armies to Eygpt was war, it’s undoing the long-sought peace. Interestingly Antony fell on his sword, Cleopatra was killed by snake bite.

If that’s in the poem at all, there is a conflict, because at least at first glance Hypermnestra cannot straddle both Augustus’ military history and his domestic policy at the same time. She must chose between duties to the state of Rome: between her obligations as a wife, and her obligation to wield the sword, quite literally in this instance, against a son of Egypt.

Tonight’s objective is to finish writing the words for the song I’m working on. I’ve written so many angry songs lately, and I find myself sometimes nearly consumed with hatred for the theological voodoo I see looming as a more and more concrete threat over our civilization. I find myself wanted to create something mellow, and maybe even, you know, happy.

So yeah. Wash myself, wash some clothes, grab something to eat, and go out.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn