AUTHORING THE SONG OF LIFE
ΕἰςτέττιγαΜακαρίζομένσε, τέττιξ,
ὅτιδενδρέωνἐπ΄ἄκρωνὀλίγηνδρόσονπεπωκώς,
βασιλεὺςὅπως, ἀείδειs (Ανακρέων)[i]
victory symbol this
cicada's chirping song
©2015 Forever Young stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
[i] “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a
little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.” WEST, M. (1986). Carmina Anacreonta. Leipzig: Teubner.#6words #amwriting #writers #blog #poetry #mpy
#2lines #mythopoetics #vss
Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye
notes
1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it. In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.
2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as
a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”
~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research
b) Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)
c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”
d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.
The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way. The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.
Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…
…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs. (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)
3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus. (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)
The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.
4. In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".
5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…
λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.
A like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418. 2 of the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406. see Liddel and Scott http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ
6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.
Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees. The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn? How will it show its autochthony?
Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.
Writer’s Prompt: In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about becoming an author. #6words #amwriting #writers
Prompt Source: @kelsye
notes
1. Cicada. Order, hemipteran and suborder, Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily, Cicadoidea. In Latin, “cicada” means “tree cricket”. When they start buzzing in late July and August there is about 6 more weeks till frost legend has it. In Greek, “cicada” is called “tettix” with modern Greek calling it “tzitzikas”. Both words are fun metrics in writing.
2. In a scholar’s paper Anastasia Georgaki provides a number of interesting research ideas such as
a) “The earliest explicit reference on the cicada singing, comes from Homer in the Illiad with the adjective leirios (like the flower 'lily') where Homer describes the 'shrilling voices' of the elder men, likened to Cicada song 'lily-like', after their city has been besieged. Hesiod's reference underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ) and Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine).”
~see Anastasia Georgaki Listening to the Cicada Chorus in the Plato Academy: soundscape research
b) Hesiod’s reference (Hesiod Works 582 ff. : “τέττιξδενδρέῳἐφεζόμενοςλιγυρὴνκαταχεύετ̓ἀοιδὴνιπυκνὸνὑπὸπτερύγων, θέρεος” “καματώδεοςὥρῃ) underlines the advent of the summer by the first loud cicada song (ηχέτατέττιξ)
c) Anacreon creates a precious ode on the wonderful singing of the tettix under the effect of dew (like the effect of the wine); “We call you happy, oh Cicada, because after you have drunk a little dew in the treetops you sing like a queen.”
d) Georgaki mentions two important myths with regards the cicada. One is the myth of Eunomos. Eunomos is a citharode, a poet who composes his poetry upon the stringed instrument, the cithara, a kind of lyre. The myth says there is a contest between Ariston of Rhegion and Eunomos of Lokri, which takes place in Delphi. During the contest a string breaks on the lyre of Eunomos and a cicada jumps up to fill the role and supply the missing note. The poet-singer adapts his music to that of his accomplice’s missing note and this move(ment) wins the contest. This odd thing happens along the Halex River marking the boundary between two regions, Rhegion and Lokri. The river passes through a deep ravine. The cicadas on the Lokri side of the bank sing, the cicadas on the Rhegion side do not. This tale is taken up again by a Christian revisionist, Clement of Alexandria, who retells the story another way, one, Roger Lipsey in Have You Been to Delphi? in a section called ‘A Chapter of Tales” says Clement works with at great length to alter in accent the miraculous kinship bond the poet has with nature through cicadian rhythm. For more about this turn in the Christian theological imagination see Have You Been to Delphi?: Tales of the Ancient Oracle for Modern Minds, New York: Suny Series New York Press, 2001 pp116-117.
The second cicada myth Georgaki mentions is the myth of Tithonos and Eos, Dawn. One of my poetic achievements around this story conflates it with the Endymion/Selene tale (a blissful form of the pair in the tale) and the rose of the Aurora-princely tale of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. Endymion would be a sleeping beauty, Selene supplying “the kiss of 100 years” in a fresh way. The poem I reference comparing the three is published here two days before today’s poem.
Tithonos is granted immortality but not youth, by Zeus when Eos, the goddess, Dawn asks for immortality for Tithonos. When Tithonos grows old he begins to babble on and on about all the things he’s lived and knows about life and this is that to which he is forever riven as a result of his unnatural longevity. Eos is dutiful as a lover and shuts him away from the world to live forever in this manner…
…when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs. (see Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite)
3. Other Greek variations in telling the myth of Tithonos say Eos turns him into the first cicada. And here it strikes me this renders something visible. A Delphi of the mind is perhaps suggested here. So when the word Delphi is invoked, it invites both the historical imagination and the soul of this other, earlier Pythian form. Like the twin banks of the river Halex, cicadas sing only one side of Delphi. That side can be likened to the Delphi of the mind in which a patterned potential capable of archetypal activism evermore and particularly now activates in aging psyche. And in the story of Tithonos, Eos can be likened to the likes of the thirteenth fairy who is really the twelfth; she is changing the way Tithonos is fated by Zeus. (In the painting of Endymion on Mount Latmos, 1879, Grimshaw has painted Selene in the form of such a fairy!)
The river place has become likened to the riven place place of the split, crack, boundary, gap, place for turning outcomes another way; it marks the spot in the temporized zone of the mind’s space―that deep ravine, just where revisioning in poetic seeing is possible. Yet, like that landscape along either side the bank of the Halex River in the story of Eunomos and the cicada, not every kind of poet hears it.
4. In the same scholarly paper, Georgaki also notes how Thucydides wrote that Athenians wore gold Cicadas in their hair in order to show their "autochthony".
5. There appears to be a comparison in Homer between lily-skinned voices (old age) and the missing note cicada supplies Eunomos…
λειρ-ιόεις, εσσα, εν, prop.
A like a lily, but in Hom. only metaph., χρόα λειριόεντα lily skin, Il.13.830; of the cicadae, ὄπα λειριόεσσαν their delicate voice, 3.152; of the Muses' voice, Hes.Th.41; Ἑσπερίδες Q.S.2.418. 2 of the lily, κάρη Nic.Al.406. see Liddel and Scott http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.43:4.LSJ
6. The application of this missing note, the poetic life’s lilyskin, psyche’s deep voice in the age’s aging seems to be that similar solution Eos supplies Tithonian existence. At first light the goddess puts a Dionysian sweet on Tithonos’ tongue which is drunk with dew; it supplies the missing note giving way to metamorphosis.
Noticing this I note how it is these days. To outlive one’s beautiful youth and still be too young and healthy to die seems to be the lot of a good many retirees. The spiritual task individuating a long life, what will it have been like? Into what image and likeness will it have been reborn? How will it show its autochthony?
Having grown up under the sign of the hippie, perhaps wearing the lily skin in our hair is the role of the 60’s generation who are now in their 60’s literally.
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