I once told an art historian friend of mine that Van Gogh was my favorite and she told me I was very brave. To go with this, I provide a link to Louis McNeice’s poem Star-Gazer (it is still in copyright, so I think pasting it in would be a no-no).
A poem for Spring
The sun does arise,And make happy the skies.The merry bells ringTo welcome the Spring.The sky-lark and thrush,The birds of the bush,Sing louder around,To the bells’ cheerful sound.While our sports shall be seenOn the Ecchoing Green.Old John, with white hairDoes laugh away care,Sitting under the oak,Among the old folk,They laugh at our play,And soon they all say.‘Such, such were the joys.When we all girls & boys,In our youth-time were seen,On the Ecchoing Green.’Till the little ones wearyNo more can be merryThe sun does descend,And our sports have an end:Round the laps of their mothers,Many sisters and brothers,Like birds in their nest,Are ready for rest;And sport no more seen,On the darkening Green.
I was grading a bunch of quizzes on Ovid’s telling of the Icarus and Daedalus myth. One line that came up often in the discussion portion was puer Icarus… ignarus sua se tractare pericla “The boy Icarus, naively handling his own doom…” Just as I finished, “Superman” by Five for Fighting came on:
The opening lyrics just resonated with Icarus:
I can’t stand to flyI’m not that naive
I could see the spirit of Icarus singing this lament. As the song went on, the singer declares
I wish that I could cryFall upon my kneesFind a way to lie‘Bout a home I’ll never see
Poor Icarus (and his father) were in exile, trying to escape back home when they tried their luck to the fatal (to Icarus) wings. Icarus had, like Superman, been too young to remember his homeland and would never get to return to it. The lament fits Icarus well.
I, of course, can’t leave Icarus without pointing out Bruegel’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus based on Ovid’s account. See if you have spot Icarus.
You can just see his legs poking out of the water below the ship in the bottom right corner. In Ovid, all the figures in this painting were entranced by Icarus’ flight and fall, wondering if he were a god (but of course, he’s “only a man in a silly” pair of wax-adhered wings). In Bruegel, they couldn’t care less. As W.H. Auden captured it in Musee des Beaux Arts:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
(William Carlos Williams also responds to this painting beautifully)
I was thinking about posting this as a moment of joy, but joy isn’t quite the emotion of it. World events just have this one haunting me:
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A poetry Moment of Joy this week. One of my favorite poems. My mother made painted tiles of me hiking through the seasons with the key line of the poem. The Spanish version first (it has wordplay that cannot be replicated in the English) followed by an English translation.
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar. — Antonio Machado
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea. — trans. by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney
I’ll admit I was being a tad flippant when I asked whether Fridging was the world’s oldest trope. Mostly I was interested in tracing just how old that trope was and that it went back to some of the earliest literature. But I mentioned it in front of an English department colleague and he said, “What about the Femme Fatale?”
In short, the Femme Fatale is a stock character, a seductive woman who leads (mostly) men to their doom or downfall (link to tvtropes.org, which also provides links to other, closely paralleling tropes).
My colleague was right. The Femme Fatale beats Fridging by over a millennium (see examples below).
But I was also struck about what these two ancient tropes have to tell us in conjunction with one another. Both these tropes center on the use of women as plot devices to advance the male protagonist’s story. And that parallel function spoke volumes to me. At the very root of recorded human story-telling lies the treatment of female characters not as actual characters but more as props for male characters and their journey. No wonder we end up with the Bechdel-Wallace test, which sets a very low bar for stories (literature, movies, etc.) to cross, but yet so many (even otherwise great) stories don’t pass.
So how does the Femme Fatale beat Fridging as a trope by over a millennium?
My colleague at first mentioned The Bible, but the Hebrew Bible (despite covering the creation of the world) isn’t (relatively speaking) that old, although the oral traditions upon which it is based are no doubt older.
(Side note: I read the term “orature” as the counter-part to written literature in a scholarly article on African mythic tradition and quite like it.)
But then we both thought about The Epic of Gilgamesh and agreed that the Femme Fatale did actually occur there – pushing it back to ca. 2100 BCE vs. the mere 8th/7th cent BCE of The Iliad or the 7th-4th cent. BCE of The Ramayana.
While my colleague and I talked, I brought up Shamhat, the temple prostitute who domesticates the wild man Enkidu, who had been terrorizing the countryside but then becomes Gilgamesh’s loyal sidekick. In the words of an on-line translation, what happens when Shamhat meets Enkidu is:
His lust groaned over her;
for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused, and had intercourse with the harlot
until he was sated with her charms.
But when he turned his attention to his animals,
the gazelles saw Enkidu and darted off,
the wild animals distanced themselves from his body.
Enkidu … his utterly depleted(?) body,
his knees that wanted to go off with his animals went rigid;
Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before.
Her seduction reduces the power of this wild man and brings him to heel for Gilgamesh (who had sent her out for this purpose). Later in the epic, Enkidu, facing his own death, does curse Shamhat for leading him on the path to this doom. He does, however, relent and say it’s not her fault.
But there’s an even better Femme Fatale in The Epic of Gilgamesh. I only later thought also of Ishtar. When I started looking at the trope, Wikipedia has a nice list of ancient Femme Fatales and includes Inanna, a Sumerian goddess who does show up in The Epic of Gilgamesh and who later gets conflated with the Akkadian-Assyrian-Babylonian Ishtar. Yet it is not the Inanna-face of the goddess who’s the Femme Fatale in the epic. It’s the Ishtar-face of the goddess. (Inanna has a story about the huluppu tree in the epic).
In the epic, Ishtar comes to Gilgamesh and tries to seduce him. In his rejection of her, Gilgamesh lists all the human male heroes who have been destroyed by Ishtar’s amorous advances (from the same translation):
Where are your bridegrooms that you keep forever’
Where is your ‘Little Shepherd’ bird that went up over you! See here now, I will recite the list of your lovers.
Of the shoulder (?) … his hand,
Tammuz, the lover of your earliest youth,
for him you have ordained lamentations year upon year! You loved the colorful ‘Little Shepherd’ bird
and then hit him, breaking his wing, so
now he stands in the forest crying ‘My Wing’!
You loved the supremely mighty lion,
yet you dug for him seven and again seven pits.
You loved the stallion, famed in battle,
yet you ordained for him the whip, the goad, and the lash, ordained for him to gallop for seven and seven hours, ordained for him drinking from muddled waters,’
you ordained far his mother Silili to wail continually.
You loved the Shepherd, the Master Herder,
who continually presented you with bread baked in embers,
and who daily slaughtered for you a kid.
Yet you struck him, and turned him into a wolf,
so his own shepherds now chase him
and his own dogs snap at his shins.
You loved Ishullanu, your father’s date gardener,
who continually brought you baskets of dates,
and brightened your table daily.
You raised your eyes to him, and you went to him:
‘Oh my Ishullanu, let us taste of your strength,
stretch out your hand to me, and touch our vulva. Ishullanu said to you:
‘Me! What is it you want from me!
Has my mother not baked, and have I not eaten
that I should now eat food under contempt and curses
and that alfalfa grass should be my only cover against the cold?
As you listened to these his words
you struck him, turning him into a dwarf(?),
and made him live in the middle of his (garden of) labors,
where the mihhu do not go up, nor the bucket of dates (?) down.
And now me! It is me you love, and you will ordain for me as
for them!
In addition to the doom for these former lovers, Ishtar almost destroys the world due to her anger over Gilgamesh’s humiliating rejection of him – and the consequences of that do lead to Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s grief over that loss. A true – and very early – Femme Fatale.
Ramblings 
