Daphne

A Love Story

The legend of Apollo and Daphne … is possibly the defining study … into the relationship between a man and a woman … and a close examination of its criteria … gives a great satisfaction to  understanding the love impulse. It reveals the nature of the human condition … both in the twin aspects of the individual and social self … and helps to bring a self awareness … to the nature of the obsession … that is inherent in the relations.

 

The legend itself is quite simple … in its reports … and tells of how Apollo was smitten by Daphne …  poured his praises on her … and pursued her in the heat of the passions that … he came to direct towards her. She in turn was astounded by all that he was saying …  couldn't affirm the truth of its content … and was terribly perplexed … in the way she responded unwittingly to his attention. Certainly she must have applied herself quite rigorously … to understand her role in the matter.

 

Apollo himself … was reflecting on the way he had come to an identification and understanding of the world and himself. It was the commencement of his role as the great God of the sun … in Greek legends. But how did he come to such a profound and deep understanding of the nature of reality … and thereafter to represent that to the community of people? And what did that have to do with Daphne?

 

At this time … it may be possible to suggest how such a phenomenon took place … on the basis of our understanding of the human mind and condition. It relies on the basic principle of reproduction … that is to say … that all human thought and understanding leads to the advancement of the specie … and comes to express itself in the reproduction function. That Greek gentleman … who was to represent the Apollo experience …  found his self understanding rising … to encompass the sun and the world … and his bodily response to such understanding in his eros and sexual energies.

 

Obviously the correct understanding … would involve relating the entire experience to oneself … and our relations with the world. But that is somewhat incoherent to the mind as … dream … imagination … and physical reality … mixed together at whim. But in relying on the social identity … that causes us to relate to one other person in the social experience … we express the experience in the context of love … in a relational context with the environment … as cause and effect.

 

Apollo was obviously in a relationship with Daphne … and naturally transferred a part of his experiences to her. In that … he broke his original experience of the individual nature … and expressed it as a phenomenon … occurring on account of two people. It lend itself to be better observed … and understood … as the miracle of self understanding. And it commenced a way of viewing the human social nature in practice in society.

 

Daphne on the other hand … in the subtle experience of her passions … and the feminine privacy of issues … lacked the basic boldness to transfer that to another. Hence when Apollo attributed a part of his experience to her … she engaged his guide … to relate to the impulses arising in her … and to view it in division … as if to say one part is male and another female. And in the gradual unfolding of their relations … it came to epitomize the relations … between man and creation.

 

However in the case of the legend … it reports on how Apollo may have … attributed all of what he experienced to her and her alone. This would have caused her considerable confusion … as if she had become one with the world or the universe … and denied her the human content of the experience. She took off … and sought the help of Zeus … to hide from the persistent pursuit of Apollo. The legend says Zeus turned her into the bay laurel tree.

 

The theme of man … being converted into a form of a tree … is not uncommon in the legends. It refers to a state of mind … in which an individual minimizes their social activity … to spend more time on their own … in the awareness of the phenomenon … that's taking place in their mind and body. Its an experience of allowing the mind … its own natural inclinations … to function on its own … without interference from the individual.

 

In these times … with the greater familiarity we have come to have of the qualities of the love experience … it must be possible … to achieve a balance in the relationship … between the man and the woman … without one unloading all on the other. It thrusts upon us the responsibility … to understand our role in the relations … and to understand that about how our mind and body work … in the experience of the human physiology.

 

In the case of the legend … Apollo lost his contact with Daphne … probably spent some time … making sense of his experience … and then re-discovering the experience again in his disposition. But how does a person do that without a clear rationality of the issues? We call it a divine experience … and Apollo was in that way revered in Delphi … where they set up a temple to him as the sun God. But the failure to achieve a greater clarity of the experience … came as a high price to Greece.

 

The Olympus family fell from grace … in the years that followed … and remains as a historical relic of the past. Certainly any attempt to reprise the phenomenon of the experience today … must have a more stable basis on understanding … the rationality of the experience … in the human condition. It does become more stable … when properly related between two individuals … and to record the expression of such a relationship … as the wheels that move the phenomenon … in the individual experience.

 

It ought to be pointed out that … the human is not at heart a narcissistic experience … that seeks its individual and self aggrandizement … at all costs. Such images has been brought to us from our past … and continues to create much doubt … in our pursuit of managing such phenomenon in modern times. The key is to understand the rational nature of the experience … and to organize it orderly in the context of human society. It gives new meaning to the expression … ' You're my sunshine.'