Dangerous Liaisons

                         If inspiration is a moment of the purest ecstasy that an earth-bound creature can be afforded, then it is the artists among us who are closest to touching the divine. With beatific vision in their eyes and gospel upon their lips, poets and painters manipulate the palette of human emotion upon a canvas of creativity. Of all the colors of the soul, no two shades produce such powerful inspiration as love and death. These two momentous life-affairs are so profound in their impact on mankind that they have developed an odd-couple relationship in the literature of the world.  Love and death battle like sentient titans throughout the pages of antiquated myth and continue their raging battle into modern works. 

The ancient Greek myth of Orpheus is one such tale of love and death. Orpheus was a musician, famous for the haunting strains of his lyre - the illumination for his work was his deep attachment to his wife, Euridice. Their relationship was so intimate that, even when she is bitten by a snake and dies, the depth of Orpheus’ affection continues to be the impetus for his beautiful song; a song that now laments rather than glorifies, and that beseeches the kingdom of death itself for mercy from his greif. His minstrelsy is so moving, in fact, that even “cold Persephone sobbed. Her heart was so touched that she turned to her husband and begged him to let Euridice go back to the sunny world above.” (Orpheus 102) The brilliance of love melted even the icy hearts of the underworld, until Hades has agreed to release Euridice to Orpheus, and back into the land of the living.   Yet, remaining classically Greek, there is still one tragic twist to this myth. Whereas love may be passionate enough to fight loose from the very grip of death, death finds a familiar ally in love’s worst enemy: fear.

 

          “The way was long, and as Orpheus walked on and

on, doubt began to creep into his mind. Had Hades

deceived him? Were the sounds he heard behind him

really Euridice’s footsteps? He had almost reached

the upper world, and could already see a dim light

ahead, when he could bear his doubts no longer. He

had to turn and see if she was really there. He saw

her sweet face, but only for an instant, for again

Hermes appeared at her side. He turned her about

and led her back to the gloom below. Faintly,

Orpheus heard her whisper farewell. He had lost

her forever through his lack of faith.”(103)

 

Fear undermines the foundations of love, so romantics find little use for it. According to Dante, even the fear of eternal damnation cannot quell the flame in the hearts of the most fervent lovers. “Circle Two” of the Inferno is dedicated to punish “those who had sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty who betrayed reason to their appetite.” (Dante 59) In Dante’s time, marriages were arranged as political and social contracts, rather than for love. Therefore, any relationships born of romanticism were seen as adulterous and sinful, and the wages of sin are death. 

 

“Love, which in gentlest hearts will soonest bloom

seized my lover with passion for that sweet body

from which I was torn unshriven from my doom.

Love, which permits no loved one not to love,

took me so strongly with delight in him

that we are one in Hell, as we were above.

Love led us to death.” (61)

 

The souls who are guilty of crimes of passion are endlessly whipped and tossed in a delirious storm; symbolic of the tempest of lust that led them to stray from their various social, political and religious responsibilities. Dante has doomed many famous paramours to his second circle of Hell: Helen, Achilles, Paolo and Francesca, Cleopatra, and Tristan.

 

          In fact, Tristan’s story is another example of the perpetual battle between love and death. The Fates weave a convoluted web between the lives of Tristan and Iseult. Thus, these unintended lovers find themselves inexplicably tangled in the web of fate after inadvertently drinking a love potion, originally made for Iseult and her new husband - Tristan’s own uncle. As sin begins in the mind, so the battle actually begins within Tristan’s conscience.

 

          “Fair uncle, who loved me orphaned ere ever you

knew in me the blood of your sister Blanchefleur,

you that wept as you bore me to the boat alone,

why did you not drive out the boy that was to

betray you? Ah! What thought was that! Iseult is

yours and I am but your vassal; Iseult is yours and

I am your son; Iseult is yours and may not love me.”

(Bedier 49)

 

Despite his own mind’s cognition and his own soul’s contrition; and even in spite of the familial blood coursing through his veins - yet -any light of reason seems ever subdued by the glory of love. No matter how strongly Brangien warned the couple of the dangers of their forbidden affair, it seemed they were powerless to fight the attraction.

 

          “Two days she watched them, seeing them refuse

          all food or comfort and seeking each other as blind

          men seek, wretched apart and together more wretched

still, for then they trembled each for the first avowal.”

(49)

 

Again, threats of death seem a weak opponent against the sharpened edge of human desire - whet by raw appetite, seeking only immediate gratification.

 

          “The lovers held each other; life and desire trembled

through their youth, and Tristan said, ‘Well then, come Death.’ And as evening fell, upon the bark that heeled

and ran to King Mark’s land, they gave themselves up

utterly to love.” (50)

 

Joseph Campbell points out: “In the religious lore of India there is a formulation of five degrees of love through which a worshipper is increased in the service and knowledge of God…” (Campbell 51) Comprising these points, he lists: love of servant for master, love of friend to friend, parent to child, spouses for one another, and the fifth and highest order of love is illicit love. This is the extreme of love. Thus, this is the realm of ardor that is intimately married to death, because of its zealous nature. Illicit love possesses the mind with a moth-to-flame attraction to its very own destruction; because the rapture of the emotion evoked by such extreme sentiment is, in itself, an escape from temporal laws… as is death. But by Campbell’s definition, this most immeasurable measure of passion in love is that farthest measure and deepest expression of pure love, which is the highest of the high – the level of pure adoration reserved only for God himself – who IS love.

So, even the familiar story of the fall of Lucifer becomes somehow beautifully poetic when seen through the vantage of this definition of love. We are told that Lucifer lost his glory through pride in that he refused to bow in reverence to mankind, as God’s most fantastic creation. Yet, according to a Moslem reading, it was because he loved God so profoundly that he could not bring himself to supplicate before anything other than the divine. 

 

          “And it was for that that he was flung into Hell,

condemned to exist there forever, apart from his

love. Now it has been said of all the pains of Hell, the

worst is neither fire nor stench but the depravation 

forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely

painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be…”

(49)

 

“What an image of exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and anguish of love!” (49) Such profound images are the influence for the most moving works of art. 

 

Love and death interplay with such significance in the lives of all people, evoking relationships of emotions that so define the nature of the human race as to become a recognizable theme of the mythos of human legend - retold, rewritten and repeated - throughout history. If emotion is our physical experience of God, and art is the pursuit of transcendence; then literature seeks to reflect the resultant conflict within man. Moreover – as tradition dictates - our mythos, legend and literature will ever carry on the archetypal theme of the eternal entanglement of love and death - as long as man dares to carve out his environment with the dangerously-sharp blade of madness, forge his will with the scorching flames of passion, or seek out the mysteries of love and death through mad and passionate affairs!

©1999