“The Eyes of Argus transform’d into a Peacock’s Train” – Ovid
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Tag: Argus Panoptes
June 22, 2020
“The Afternoon of a Faun” – Debussy / Nijinsky / Nureyev
“Faun and Nymph“ (1867)
Pál Szinyei Merse
________
to take a break, for a moment, from the
travails of Io, a heifer still, though her
father, Inachus, is aware of the situation,
and Hermes, messenger of the gods, is
out, on the orders of Jove/ Jupiter / Zeus,
to save her, and, at the same time,
inspired by the music Hermes tells Argus,
her many-eyed keeper, Pan, god of the
wilds, has been playing, with reeds he’s
been left with of Syrinx, the nymph he
would’ve loved had she not been
transformed into rushes, as imagined by
Debussy in his evocative Syrinx for solo
flute, as highlighted in my last instalment,
I could not not remember Debussy‘s
other similarly mythological, and intimately
related, work, his Prelude to the Afternoon
of a Faun, as modified itself by Vaslav
Nijinsky, legendary dancer and
choreographer, into an event that verily
shook the early 20th Century
retitled, L’après-midi d’un faune, The
Afternoon of a Faun in English, the
performance captures everything one
would gather from Ovid’s myths of its
primitive, primal, sensibilities
the faun, needless to say, is representative
of Pan, god of the wild, woodlands, a satyr,
part instinct, part man, see above
watch Rudolf Nureyev, then, his equally
celebrated successor, take on the role
Nijinsky made famous, without any
alterations made to the original 1912
production, however improbably,
though entirely successfully, we’re in
Paris, May 29, though transposed,
faithfully and superbly, to New York,
Broadway, 1979
proceed, however, at your own discretion,
The Afternoon of a Faun is steaming, it’s
about what happens when a young buck’s
fancies, implacable and irrepressible, turn
to love, not for the scrupulous, where does
love begin, it asks, and lust retire, or is it
the other way around, where does yin, in
other words, meet, become, yang
these are questions that more and more
begin to come up, you’ll find, in Greek
and Roman, and most other ancient,
for that matter, mythologies, something
that isn’t at all touched upon in the
Abrahamic traditions, Christanity, Islam,
Judaism, monotheistic, though they’re
at least as old, where nature, the place
of animals, vegetation, land, water, our
intimate interconnection with them,
don’t much, for better or for worse,
come up
I miss the wonder of the more
pantheistic, the pagan, perspective
enjoy
R ! chard
June 17, 2020
The Transformation of Syrinx into Reeds
“Pan and Syrinx“ (1617 – 1619)
Peter Paul Rubens
__________
Then Hermes thus:
Hermes, messenger of the gods,
addresses Argus, keeper of Io,
who’s been transformed by Jove,
god of gods, into a heifer, though
she remains daughter, ever, of
Inachus, river god, to tell the
story of his rare, beguiling reeds
A nymph of late there was
Whose heav’nly form her fellows did surpass.
here we go again with nymphs,
beautiful, irresistible, however
ever innocent, prey, due, indeed,
to their very beauty, their very
innocence, to lustful, inordinate
desires, in these instances,
markedly divine
deities, I point out again, make
up their own rules
The pride and joy of fair Arcadia’s plains,
Arcadia, apart from being an
actual area of Greece, is also
the ideal, in our historical
imagination, of an utopia,
much as is the lost island of
Atlantis
Belov’d by deities, ador’d by swains:
Syrinx her name, by Sylvans oft pursu’d,
Sylvans, could only be, though
I’ve been unable to find actual
confirmation of my opinion,
wood spirits, forest entities,
satyrs, goat men, and such
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
Syrinx could often, or oft, delude,
or fool, ward off, the lustful Gods
The rural, and the woodland Pow’rs disdain’d;
satyr yourself, Syrinx would’ve
impudently taunted
With Cynthia hunted, and her rites maintain’d:
Like Phoebe clad, even Phoebe’s self she seems,
Cynthia, is Phoebe, both also known
as Diana, goddess of the Hunt, you’ll
remember Phoebe / Diana from her
connection to Daphne, who earlier
here was transformed into a laurel
Syrinx sounds an awful lot, incidentally,
like another version of Daphne
So tall, so streight, such well-proportion’d limbs:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow:
the only difference between Syrinx
and Cynthia / Phoebe / Diana was
that Syrinx didn’t have, bear, a
golden bow
Distinguish’d thus, the sight she cheated too.
had she borne a golden bow, Syrinx,
[d]istinguish’d thus, would’ve cheated
the sight, looked identical, to the
beautiful, it is inferred, goddess
Descending from Lycaeus, Pan admires
The matchless nymph, and burns with new desires.
Pan, god of the wild, woodlands
Lycaeus, Latin spelling of Lykaion,
is a mountain in Arcadia
A crown of pine upon his head he wore;
And thus began her pity to implore.
But e’er he thus began, she took her flight
So swift, she was already out of sight.
Nor stay’d to hear the courtship of the God;
But bent her course to Ladon’s gentle flood:
Ladon, a river in Arcadia
flood, rushing, though gentl[y],
water, rhymes in the preceding
verse, you’ll note, with God
There by the river stopt, and tir’d before;
Relief from water nymphs her pray’rs implore.
Syrinx, once by the river stopt, seeks
the help of, assistance, [r]elief from,
the nearby water nymphs, her
consorts
Now while the lustful God, with speedy pace,
Just thought to strain her in a strict embrace,
Pan, like Phoebus / Apollo, or
Jove / Jupiter / Zeus before him,
is, as well, and characteristically,
a lustful God
He fill’d his arms with reeds, new rising on the place.
And while he sighs, his ill success to find,
his ill success, his thwarted,
ineffective, enterprise
The tender canes were shaken by the wind;
And breath’d a mournful air, unheard before;
the reeds that Pan gathered in his arms,
shaken by the wind, create a mournful
air, a melancholy music
That much surprizing Pan, yet pleas’d him more.
though Pan might’ve been much
surpriz[ed] by the sorrowful sounds
he heard, he was more pleas’d by
them than startled
Admiring this new musick, Thou, he said,
Who canst not be the partner of my bed,
At least shall be the confort of my mind:
Thou, Syrinx
And often, often to my lips be joyn’d.
in a kiss of consolation
He form’d the reeds, proportion’d as they are,
Unequal in their length, and wax’d with care,
They still retain the name of his ungrateful fair.
the instrument Pan devised from
the tender canes he fashioned
from the unaccommodating reeds,
what we now name the Pan flute,
was called in Ancient Greece a
syrinx, in honour of the
recalcitrant nymph
listen, coincidentally, to Debussy
tell the story, for solo flute,
however, which is to say, on a
modern instrument, for our having
long ago abandoned at a
professional level the original pipe,
though it remains, apparently, as a
folk instrument in more agrarian,
communities around the world, for
shepherds, one would imagine, to
while away the hours while tending
to their, however wayward, sheep
R ! chard
June 9, 2020
“The Transformation of Io into a Heyfer” (III) – Ovid
“Io Recognised by Her Father“
Victor Honoré Janssens
______________
The head of Argus (as with stars the skies)
Was compass’d round, and wore an hundred eyes.
not only did [t]he head of Argus have
an hundred eyes, but they circled,
compass’d, round his head, as with
stars the skies, as with stars the
geocentric firmament
note the passive form of the verb to
compass in the two lines above
standing in for the inverted sentences
I earlier made mention of as literary
devices Ovid, or Dryden, uses
throughout the poem
the standard sentence, the active
sentence, should read, an hundred
eyes compass’d [t]he head of Argus
compass’d, encircled
But two by turns their lids in slumber steep;
The rest on duty still their station keep;
Nor cou’d the total constellation sleep.
never could all the eyes, the total
constellation, sleep, or in slumber
steep, since only two of them would
turn[ ] their lids, close, at a time,
while the others continued diligently
to keep watch
steep, incidentally, is a verb here,
as in to put the kettle on, not an
adjective, as in dauntingly
pitched, threateningly angled
Thus, ever present, to his eyes, and mind,
His charge was still before him, tho’ behind.
even when she was standing behind
him, Argus could still see Io, [h]is
charge, with the eyes he had in the
back of his head
In fields he suffer’d her to feed by Day,
But when the setting sun to night gave way,
The captive cow he summon’d with a call;
And drove her back, and ty’d her to the stall.
On leaves of trees, and bitter herbs she fed,
Heav’n was her canopy, bare earth her bed:
So hardly lodg’d, and to digest her food,
She drank from troubled streams, defil’d with mud.
hardly lodg’d, given difficult living
conditions
Her woeful story fain she wou’d have told,
With hands upheld, but had no hands to hold.
fain, gladly
Her head to her ungentle keeper bow’d,
She strove to speak, she spoke not, but she low’d:
to low is to make the sound that
cows do, to moo
Affrighted with the noise, she look’d around,
And seem’d t’ inquire the author of the sound.
the sound that she herself was making
not only [a]ffrighted her, frightened her,
but had her wondering where could
it possibly be coming from
Once on the banks where often she had play’d
(Her father’s banks), she came,
Her father, Inachus, god of rivers
and there survey’d
Her alter’d visage, and her branching head;
And starting, from her self she wou’d have fled.
much as the sound of her altered
voice had [a]ffrighted Io, now her
reflection in the water chastened
her as well, enough to make her
start, be startled, and want to run
away from her self
Her fellow nymphs, familiar to her eyes,
Beheld, but knew her not in this disguise.
Ev’n Inachus himself was ignorant;
And in his daughter, did his daughter want.
no one recognized Io, not even
her father, who, in his daughter,
the one who stood before him,
the altered Io, could not make
her out
did his daughter want, as in to
be found wanting, in the cow,
to not even be suggested in
the, however conspicuous,
heifer, not at all part of the
picture
Io is there but, simultaneously,
disconcertingly, not there
She follow’d where her fellows went, as she
Were still a partner of the company:
it should be remembered that
Io was a beautiful heifer, even
Juno had been impressed, so
that her fellows, her companions,
only other maidens, I’ll point out,
fellows taking on its sexually
indiscriminate meaning here,
not at all restricted to males,
would have easily let her follow
note the symmetry, incidentally,
between follow’d and fellows,
the nearly hidden alliteration,
a delightful literary effect,
though if you blinked you’d
miss it
They stroak her neck; the gentle heyfer stands,
And her neck offers to their stroaking hands.
Her father gave her grass; the grass she took;
And lick’d his palms, and cast a piteous look;
And in the language of her eyes, she spoke.
her lowing would’ve had no effect,
would’ve let no one in on the fact
that beneath the animal exterior
there might be an Io
She wou’d have told her name, and ask’d relief,
But wanting words, in tears she tells her grief.
Which,
and here we get the punchline,
the plot twist, which turns this
story into, relatively speaking,
a total enchantment, as though
Ovid were giving us, prefiguring
in fact, Walt Disney, our own
20th Century mythologist
with her foot she makes him understand;
And prints the name of Io in the sand.
see above
R ! chard
June 6, 2020
“The Transformation of Io into a Heyfer” (II) – Ovid
“Juno, Jupiter and Io“ (1672)
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
________________
we left Inachus in my last instalment
looking for his daughter, Io
Her, just returning from her father’s brook,
Her, Io
Jove had beheld, with a desiring look:
the sentence structure, as it’s been
crafted in the verses above, has
been an aspect of Ovid’s poem for
some time, though, it must again
be noted, as translated by John
Dryden, the subject goes where
the object should go, the sentence
is inverted
the sentence should be, Jove had
beheld her, … just returning from
her father’s brook
but the placement of Her at the
top of the sentence, and even
capitalized, is, you must admit,
arresting, and of the highest
poetic order
And, Oh fair daughter of the flood, he said,
the flood, the many rivers that came
to comfort Inachus, their sovereign,
in his distress at having lost Io, his
daughter, their many surging
confluences would’ve created
overflowing torrents, the flood
Worthy alone of Jove’s imperial bed,
Jove thinks Io worthy of no one
else’s mattress but his own
Happy whoever shall those charms possess;
The king of Gods (nor is thy lover less)
Invites thee to yon cooler shades; to shun
The scorching rays of the meridian sun.
whoever might partake of her charms,
Jove tells Io, would be Happy
again an inverted sentence, note
but Jove makes his play, flashes
his pedigree,The king of Gods,
nothing less, and invites her to a
shady grove, out of the noonday,
the meridian, sun
Nor shalt thou tempt the dangers of the grove
Alone, without a guide; thy guide is Jove.
Jove / Jupiter, god of gods
No puny Pow’r, but he whose high command
Is unconfin’d,
Jove / Jupiter is not a nobody, but,
rather, unconfin’d, omnipotent,
he boasts
who rules the seas and land;
And tempers thunder in his awful hand,
Jove / Jupiter, supreme master of
the elements
Oh fly not:
Jove urges Io
for she fled from his embrace
O’er Lerna’s pastures:
Lerna, a region of Ancient Greece
he pursu’d the chace
Along the shades of the Lyrcaean plain;
Lyrcaean, after some investigation,
seems to mean from Lycaeus, the
Latin name for Lykaion, a mountain
in Greece, considered by some to
be the birthplace of Jove / Jupiter /
Zeus
otherwise, but very improbably, the
Lyrcaean plain is a literary invention,
of Ovid, or of his translator, Dryden
At length the God, who never asks in vain,
Involv’d with vapours, imitating night,
Both Air, and Earth;
Inform’d with, having transformed
himself into, vapours, a mist,
imitating night, shrouding [b]oth
Air and Earth in darkness,
becoming himself, therefore,
indistinct, indefinite, nebulous,
within them
and then suppress’d her flight,
And mingling force with love, enjoy’d the full delight.
first of all Phoebus / Apollo‘s pursuit
of Daphne, and now Jove / Jupiter‘s
constraint of Io, are not admirable
aspects of male deities, indeed in
our age of action against the
harassment of women, their
behaviour is disturbing, uncomfortable
for me even to read, I’m too reminded
of dissolute American CEOs, not to
mention presidents, but concluding
that this dilemma has been around
for countless ages among vertebrates,
be they animal, human, or, as in these
instances, divine, therefore written in
our antediluvian, our primeval, genes,
maybe, consequently, ineradicably
Mean-time the jealous Juno, from on high,
Juno, goddess of goddesses, wife
of Jupiter / Jove
Survey’d the fruitful fields of Arcady;
Arcady, or Arcadia, a region still
of Greece
And wonder’d that the mist shou’d over-run
The face of day-light, and obscure the sun.
which is to say, Juno, suspicious,
asks herself, what’s up with that
No nat’ral cause she found, from brooks, or bogs,
Or marshy lowlands, to produce the fogs;
she reckons
Then round the skies she sought for Jupiter,
Her faithless husband; but no Jove was there:
Juno knows her Jove / Jupiter
Suspecting now the worst, Or I, she said,
Am much mistaken, or am much betray’d.
it’s one of two things, Juno figures,
after [s]uspecting … the worst, I am
myself in error, she concludes, I am
myself mistaken , or am, by my
husband, much betray’d
With fury she precipitates her flight:
her flight, her plan of action, both
geographical, and tactical
Dispels the shadows of dissembled night;
dissembled, sham, not actual, Jove /
Jupiter, if you’ll remember, Involv’d
with vapours, was imitating night,
not easily visible
And to the day restores his native light.
note that day is masculine here,
his native light
Th’ Almighty Leacher, careful to prevent
The consequence, foreseeing her descent,
Transforms his mistress in a trice; and now
In Io’s place appears a lovely cow.
Leacher, lecher
in a trice, very quickly, in the bat
of an eyelash
a cow
see above
So sleek her skin, so faultless was her make,
Ev’n Juno did unwilling pleasure take
To see so fair a rival of her love;
though transformed into a cow, Io
remains lovely, even Juno can see
that, however be she jealous
And what she was, and whence, enquir’d of Jove:
where did you get that, Juno asks
of Jove, surely dryly
Of what fair herd, and from what pedigree?
and what, and when, and how, she
further inquires, probably acidly
The God, half caught, was forc’d upon a lye:
And said she sprung from Earth.
Jove, who’d had to tell a lye, a lie,
said that the heifer, the altered Io,
had sprung, spontaneously, he
claimed, from the earth
She took the word,
Juno accepted Jove‘s explanation
And begg’d the beauteous heyfer of her lord.
Juno asks of Jove that she might
keep the heyfer for herself, the
heifer, a virgin cow
What should he do? ’twas equal shame to Jove
Or to relinquish, or betray his love:
Yet to refuse so slight a gift, wou’d be
But more t’ increase his consort’s jealousie:
Jove / Jupiter was in a bind, to
out Io, or to out himself
Thus fear, and love, by turns, his heart assail’d;
And stronger love had sure, at length, prevail’d:
But some faint hope remain’d, his jealous queen
Had not the mistress through the heyfer seen.
if it weren’t for the fact that Juno
maybe, some faint hope, might
not have recognized Io in the
heifer, Jove / Jupiter would’ve,
had sure, eventually, at length,
confessed to his indiscretion, his
stronger love, having prevail’d
The cautious Goddess, of her gift possest,
Yet harbour’d anxious thoughts within her breast;
As she who knew the falshood of her Jove;
though Juno has been granted her
request, she remains sceptical,
knew her husband was prone to
falshood, or falsehood
And justly fear’d some new relapse of love.
justly, the facts would bear her out,
were she cognizant of them
Which to prevent, and to secure her care,
To trusty Argus she commits the fair.
Argus Panoptes, one of the giants
who must’ve remained after their
war
Panoptes, pan optes, Greek for many
eyes, of which only a few, it came to
be believed, of Juno‘s entrusted
guardian, slept at a time
to be continued
R ! chard
March 4, 2016
“Syrinx” – Claude Debussy
“Syrinx“ (1892)
__________
though Debussy would’ve called his
“Syrinx“ “Flûte de Pan”, “Pan Flute”,
alas, the name had already been
taken, he therefore came up with the
much more inspired “Syrinx“
Syrinx, with the help of other nymphs,
who’d come at her cry for help as she
fled the god Pan, a pursuer, had been
turned into a bush of reeds, its canes
producing a song so sweet as to
confound and disarm him, impelling
him to create of them that sublime
instrument
Hermes had been telling Argus, Argus
Panoptes, the giant with the hundred
eyes, the story about the pipes he
was playing, an implement received
from Jove, apparently, god of all the
gods, who wanted him to kill Argus,
for confining Io, who’d been turned
into a heifer by Juno, Jove’s wife,
who’d caught him chasing her, Io’s
plaintive lows had been getting to
Juno as Io fretted unfettered through
the fields too close to Olympus
when Hermes’ music finally closed the
giant’s last two eyes, he beheaded him,
but Juno, in merciful recognition of his
service, however ultimately ineffectual,
set them into the variegated tail of the
peacock
are you kidding me, I always think when
I read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, and am
ever nevertheless entirely enchanted
a flute solo had not been composed in
over 150 years when Debussy composed
at all unimpressive “Sonata in A Minor“
of 1747, it duly set off a new life for the
long overlooked flute, a reed which
Mozart famously didn’t like
note the tonal, rhythmic, and repetition
shifts from the rigid Classical model,
where these are much more strict,
Impressionism was not only breaking
down pictures, the pictorial arts, but its
sound world as well, it was an utterly
new era, new sensibility, new zeitgeist,
and you can feel it, though you might
not be quite able to immediately
verbalize it, the arts were again, as
they ever ‘ve been, the canary in the
gold mine
Richard
psst:
The Transformation of Syrinx into Reeds
Then Hermes thus: A nymph of late there was
Whose heav’nly form her fellows did surpass.
The pride and joy of fair Arcadia’s plains,
Belov’d by deities, ador’d by swains:
Syrinx her name, by Sylvans oft pursu’d,
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
The rural, and the woodland Pow’rs disdain’d;
With Cynthia hunted, and her rites maintain’d:
Like Phoebe clad, even Phoebe’s self she seems,
So tall, so streight, such well-proportion’d limbs:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow:
Distinguish’d thus, the sight she cheated too.
Descending from Lycaeus, Pan admires
The matchless nymph, and burns with new desires.
A crown of pine upon his head he wore;
And thus began her pity to implore.
Whose heav’nly form her fellows did surpass.
The pride and joy of fair Arcadia’s plains,
Belov’d by deities, ador’d by swains:
Syrinx her name, by Sylvans oft pursu’d,
As oft she did the lustful Gods delude:
The rural, and the woodland Pow’rs disdain’d;
With Cynthia hunted, and her rites maintain’d:
Like Phoebe clad, even Phoebe’s self she seems,
So tall, so streight, such well-proportion’d limbs:
The nicest eye did no distinction know,
But that the goddess bore a golden bow:
Distinguish’d thus, the sight she cheated too.
Descending from Lycaeus, Pan admires
The matchless nymph, and burns with new desires.
A crown of pine upon his head he wore;
And thus began her pity to implore.
Now while the lustful God, with speedy pace,
Just thought to strain her in a strict embrace,
He fill’d his arms with reeds, new rising on the place.
And while he sighs, his ill success to find,
The tender canes were shaken by the wind;
And breath’d a mournful air, unheard before;
That much surprizing Pan, yet pleas’d him more.
Admiring this new musick, Thou, he said,
Who canst not be the partner of my bed,
At least shall be the confort of my mind:
And often, often to my lips be joyn’d.
He form’d the reeds, proportion’d as they are,
Unequal in their length, and wax’d with care,
They still retain the name of his ungrateful fair.
Just thought to strain her in a strict embrace,
He fill’d his arms with reeds, new rising on the place.
And while he sighs, his ill success to find,
The tender canes were shaken by the wind;
And breath’d a mournful air, unheard before;
That much surprizing Pan, yet pleas’d him more.
Admiring this new musick, Thou, he said,
Who canst not be the partner of my bed,
At least shall be the confort of my mind:
And often, often to my lips be joyn’d.
He form’d the reeds, proportion’d as they are,
Unequal in their length, and wax’d with care,
They still retain the name of his ungrateful fair.
Ovid
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