欧宝娱乐

“Perhaps he makes a choice. He chooses the memory of her. That鈥檚 why he turns. He doesn鈥檛 make the lover鈥檚 choice, but the poet鈥檚.”
― C茅line Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

“We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale

“Eurydice sits alone on a red bed. She has flaming red hair, so flaming that you can't see anything else of her, much less anything else around her.
She takes up too much space. Also she's mad. Which has nothing to do with anything. She lives in her own world because she makes the whole world hers.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“It was only when we were in that bed, high above the world - then I thought the birds could have been circling around our bodies circled around each other - that we made our world totally separated from everything else. It was the only way we could be together.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“Every angel is terrifying.
Through the darkness, they move silently...

I will go down into death with you.
I must go where I must go
To see what I must see
In that place where no one knows...

... This is where love is taking me.

You have been leading
Me, angels, in and out of death.
I have no idea who you are.
Eurydice. Is she nothing
Or is she your mirror?
I don't know anymore.
I am at war.
Perhaps that which is given -
Being human -
Is too hard,
And so it is love that brings us,
To what cannot be born,
To ourselves,
And so we must change,
Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.

Lovers disappear in each other.
Do they disappear forever?
Where do they go?”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“What madness destroyed me and you, Orpheus?”
― Virgil, The Georgics

“INTENSE SEXUAL DESIRE IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD

Janey dreams of cocks. Janey sees cocks instead of objects. Janey has to fuck.
This is the way Sex drives Janey crazy: Before Janey fucks, she keeps her wants in cells. As soon as Janey's fucking she wants to be adored as much as possible at the same time as, its other extreme, ignored as much as possible. More than this: Janey can no longer perceive herself wanting. Janey is Want.
It's worse than this: If Janey gets sexually rejected her body becomes sick. If she doesn't get who she wants she naturally revolts.”
― Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld

“I chose to live in the Ether, to be starlight and legend....”
― Laurie Perez, The Look of Amie Martine

“Girls, I was dead and down
in the Underworld, a shade,
a shadow of my former self, nowhen.
It was a place where language stopped,
a black full stop, a black hole
Where the words had to come to an end.
And end they did there,
last words,
famous or not.
It suited me down to the ground.

So imagine me there,
unavailable,
out of this world,
then picture my face in that place
of Eternal Repose,
in the one place you鈥檇 think a girl would be safe
from the kind of a man
who follows her round
writing poems,
hovers about
while she reads them,
calls her His Muse,
and once sulked for a night and a day
because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns.
Just picture my face
when I heard -
Ye Gods -
a familiar knock-knock at Death鈥檚 door.

Him.
Big O.
Larger than life.
With his lyre
and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.

Things were different back then.
For the men, verse-wise,
Big O was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee, silver tears.

Bollocks. (I鈥檇 done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And given my time all over again,
rest assured that I鈥檇 rather speak for myself
than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.

In fact girls, I鈥檇 rather be dead.

But the Gods are like publishers,
usually male,
and what you doubtless know of my tale
is the deal.

Orpheus strutted his stuff.

The bloodless ghosts were in tears.
Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years.
Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers.
The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.

Like it or not,
I must follow him back to our life -
Eurydice, Orpheus鈥� wife -
to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes,
octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets,
elegies, limericks, villanelles,
histories, myths鈥�

He鈥檇 been told that he mustn鈥檛 look back
or turn round,
but walk steadily upwards,
myself right behind him,
out of the Underworld
into the upper air that for me was the past.
He鈥檇 been warned
that one look would lose me
for ever and ever.

So we walked, we walked.
Nobody talked.

Girls, forget what you鈥檝e read.
It happened like this -
I did everything in my power
to make him look back.
What did I have to do, I said,
to make him see we were through?
I was dead. Deceased.
I was Resting in Peace. Pass茅. Late.
Past my sell-by date鈥�
I stretched out my hand
to touch him once
on the back of the neck.
Please let me stay.
But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.

It was an uphill schlep
from death to life
and with every step
I willed him to turn.
I was thinking of filching the poem
out of his cloak,
when inspiration finally struck.
I stopped, thrilled.
He was a yard in front.
My voice shook when I spoke -
Orpheus, your poem鈥檚 a masterpiece.
I鈥檇 love to hear it again鈥�

He was smiling modestly,
when he turned,
when he turned and he looked at me.

What else?
I noticed he hadn鈥檛 shaved.
I waved once and was gone.

The dead are so talented.
The living walk by the edge of a vast lake
near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

“Eurydice, forgive the Winds, forgive the Sun, forgive the Moon, forgive the Stars, forgive the Rain, for never loving you as I will.”
― Michan Bakhuis, Lament to Eurydice

“Orpheus never got the memo that loss is a ticket to resilience, not some sewer of revenge in which to wallow, marinating selfish, hellbent purpose for centuries on end.”
― Laurie Perez, The Power of Amie Martine

“When we are stone will the world recall us?”
― Bruce Meyer, The Seasons

“Ted rose early the next morning and took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale, cool, echoey, empty of tourists despite the fact that it was spring. He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the proximity of Orpheus and Eurydice before he saw it, felt its cool weight across the room but prolonged the time before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up to the moment it described: Orpheus and Eurydice in love and newly married; Eurydice dying of a snakebite while fleeing the advances of a shepherd; Orpheus descending to the underworld, filling its dank corridors with music from his lyre as he sang of his longing for his wife; Pluto granting Eurydice's release from death on the sole condition that Orpheus not look back at her during their ascent. And then the hapless instant when, out of fear for his bride as she stumbled in the passage, Orpheus forgot himself and turned.
Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if he's walked inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. It was the moment before Eurydice must descend to the underworld a second time, when she and Orpheus are saying goodbye. What moved Ted, mashed some delicate glassware in his chest, was the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently. He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost. (p. 211)”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Play your harp ones more,
to lament the death of love.
Or be still
If you never loved me at all' (p.40, Apollo's Playbook)”
― Tessa van Vliet, Apollo's Playbook

“The shade of Orpheus now fled below,
and recognized all he had seen before;
and as he searched through the Elysian Fields,
he came upon his lost Eurydice,
and passionately threw his arms about her;
here and now, they walk together, side by side,
or now he follows as she goes before,
or he precedes, and she goes after him;
and now there is no longer any danger
when Orpheus looks upon Eurydice.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses