I keep thinking about the story of Orpheus.
Orpheus and Eurydice was the first Greek myth that ever touched me deeply. I read the story over and over in my freshman english class, trying to decipher my mysterious attraction to it. Trying to understand what the story was telling me, for clearly it was whispering into the ears of my subconcious things about love and devotion and absolute stupidity and death that it was listening to but that I was only catching snippets of.
My comprehension of the myth began a few years later, with a quote that i have since completely forgotten where I saw.
Bringing someone back from the dead is not an act of a loving spouse.
There. That simple. Your loved one is safely dead, enjoying themselves in the afterlife (because Hades was not Hell; Hades incorporated both aspects of the Christian afterlife), and you come after them.
I imagine their meeting in some dimply lit gallery of Hades; Eurydice doesn't know Orpheus. Of if she does, it's only vaguely. Perhaps she can't even really see him, living souls being that different from dead ones. She has drunk of the waters of Lethe. she doesn't remember.
But Orpheus, being stubborn (after all, he won through all of those trials, pacifying all three of Cerberus' heads) and perhaps dangerously stupid, decides he still wants her. He can teach her. She can be rehabilitated. He will make her remember.
The message is passed to Eurydice. Her eyes widen, perhaps in fright, perhaps in simple astonishment. It's hard to read the facial expressions of the dead.
So Orpheus goes. He's told not to look back, but, of course, he looks. He thinks Hades won't keep his promises and maybe, if this were any other story, Orpheus would have been right. But, of course, Hades keeps his promises—both of them.
Euridyce falls back into the grateful darkness, Orpheus goes back up to the land of the living, and the gods laugh yet again at the stupidity of man.
But somewhere down in Hades, there's a faded shade who refuses to speak to her husband, even after all of these centuries.
*****
I did an entry for the 23rd, but it never got up.
