Margaret Atwood,"Eurydice"
He is here, come down to look for you.
It is the song that calls you back,
a song of joy and suffering
equally: a promise:
that things will be different up there
than they were last time.
You would rather have gone on feeling nothing,
emptiness and silence; the stagnant peace
of the deepest sea, which is easier
than the noise and flesh of the surface.
You are used to these blanched dim corridors,
you are used to the king
who passes you without speaking.
The other one is different
and you almost remember him.
He says he is singing to you
because he loves you,
not as you are now,
so chilled and minimal: moving and still
both, like a white curtain blowing
in the draft from a half-opened window
beside a chair on which nobody sits.
He wants you to be what he calls real.
He wants you to stop light.
He wants to feel himself thickening
like a treetrunk or a haunch
and see blood on his eyelids
when he closes them, and the sun beating.
This love of his is not something
he can do if you aren’t there,
but what you knew suddenly as you left your body
cooling and whitening on the lawn
was that you love him anywhere,
even in this land of no memory,
even in this domain of hunger.
You hold love in your hand, a red seed
you had forgotten you were holding.
He has come almost too far.
He cannot believe without seeing,
and it’s dark here.
Go back, you whisper,
but he wants to be fed again
by you. O handful of gauze, little
bandage, handful of cold
air, it is not through him
you will get your freedom.
7 comments:
Is the emphasis yours?
Yes... I was channeling Atwood...
Rilke's original hinted that Eurydice's pov was missing in the "Orpheus" myth, and Atwood gave it... that the "essence" of what/who you are doesn't come from others, be they husbands, wives, or children... that you must "be yourself". That is your "essence". That is what Lacan is talking about when he says, "don't compromise your desire."
for even though you "desire" constituted from the "desire of the other", your own desire seeks recognition From yourself AND from the 'other' as well.
Although Lacan’s maxim is that man’s desire is the desire of the Other, he does not picture our desires as clones of the Other’s. Rather, part of the job of creating our own subjectivity is to generate some autonomy between us and the Other, which in the first instance is manifested as the mother, or motherer. In order for him to become a subject, the helpless infant must first identify the mother’s desire, and then pick a position in response to it. A baby may get fed when he cries, whether or not his cry was a cry for food, for warmth, or for a change of nappy. The most urgent task in the development of his own desire is in coming up with an answer to the question of what the Other (in this case, his mother) wants, and seeking for himself a position in respect of that unfathomable ‘x’. Lacan characterises this dilemma in the following way in Seminar V:
“It is not just frustration as such, namely something more or less in the real order which has been given or which has not been given to the subject, which is the important point; it is the way that the subject has aimed at, has located this desire of the other which is the mother’s desire, and with respect to this desire it is to make him recognise, or pass, or propose to become with respect to something which is an X of desire in the mother, to become or not the one who responds, to become or not the desired being” (Seminar V, 12.03.58., p.3 -4).
You may get kissed by a Muse, but your "aura" is your own. ;)
You have a way of tying it all together, don't you?!
❤️
I like to "try", anyway...
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