Lyra
The star Vega, second brightest in the northern hemisphere, makes up a key part of the tiny parallelogram known as Lyra, the Harp. Lyra serves as the radiant for April’s annual Lyrids meteor shower in which, on average, nearly 20 shooting stars grace the night sky per hour. The Lyrids have been observed going back as far as 600 BC; no other modern shower has been recorded as far back in time.
Symbolically, Lyra represents the lyre – a small U-shaped harp – played by Orpheus, musician of the Argonauts, and son of Apollo and the muse Calliope. Apollo gave his son the lyre as a gift, and Orpheus played it so well that even rocks and beasts and rivers where tamed. Talent, however, when not directed, can lead to meandering, rudderless exhibition, and Orpheus, unfocused, led a dissipated, adventurous life with no true North Star to follow. Eventually his wanderings led him to join the expedition of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece. In one of the more well known Orpheus related tales, the Argonauts heard the tempting song of the Sirens, sea nymphs who had lured generations of sailors to ruinous ends. Orpheus sang a counter melody to drown out the Sirens’ call and enshrined himself in lore and legend.
After the expedition, Orpheus and Eurydice, a beautiful wood nymph, met after a chance encounter in the forest. Orpheus first saw her figure reflected in still water and immediately felt that he could die for love and longing of her (aka, lust and limerence.) She noticed him noticing her and, as the story goes, they fell passionately in love with one another. They married and, as one does, moved to a palace. For a time, they lived a happy and full life, although Eurydice, being a nymph and thus of nature, would regularly return to the woods for solace and sanctuary. One afternoon while in the forest, she saw a hunter chasing a helpless fawn. Rushing to the rescue, the fawn escaped, but the hunter’s wrath was incurred. As any normal, well-adjusted individual would do, the huntsman demanded a kiss as recompense. Eurydice refused and when the hunter tried to force himself, she too fled. The hunter pursued – literally – ultimately driving Eurydice into a mad dash towards freedom wherein she stepped on the head of a viper whose venomous bite brought about a terribly swift death.
Heartbroken, Orpheus processed the grief through his lyre, managing to move everything, living and otherwise, in the known world; rocks rose, tears were rent asunder, birds and animals and gods and men took notice of his pain. In the resulting chaos, an opening to the Underworld appeared and Orpheus decided to venture down, to find Eurydice, knowing that his divine nature would offer some measure of protection in Hades’ realm. Once more, he relied on both lyre and beautiful voice, this time convincing Charon, the boatman at the river Styx, and charming Cerberus, Hades’ three-headed dog and guardian of the underworld, to allow him safe passage. He made his way past countless damned and unknown souls to the court of Persephone and Hades, Queen and King of the Underworld. He played once more, moving them both with the heart of his music. Hades allowed Eurydice to leave the Underworld on one condition: Orpheus had to walk in front of her the entire time on their journey back to earth, never once turning to look at her until they were completely into the sunlight of Earth. As a ghost, a spirit, Eurydice would remain speechless, ethereal until that time. In so many words, Hades was testing Orpheus’ faith.
Orpheus, delighted, accepted Hades’ condition, believing his patience and love would see him through this long journey from darkness to light, from death to rebirth. Over the course of their travel and travail, cracks of doubt began to mar his confidence; Orpheus wondered whether it was his lover behind him or if was a trick, a demon, which followed. His anxiety and fear grew and just before they were to emerge into the light he gave into temptation. A single backward glance cast him, and she who he loved, into pinched darkness. Witnessing a pale Eurydice being whisked into the black was too much. It was written that live men can only enter the realm of the dead once – powerless to follow her into the darkness a second time, he spent the remains of his days wandering once more, playing his lyre, and singing his sad sad songs. The maenads, raving passionate followers of Bacchus and Dionysus, fell in love with him, yet Orpheus was broken and didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t yield to their attempts at seduction. True to their madness, the maenads tore Orpheus apart, scattering his remains across the rising nation-state of Greece. In a final saving grace, of sorts, this allowed Orpheus and Eurydice to be together forever in death as they never could be in life.
There’s the godawful early rise. The pour of steaming water over welcoming grinds. Stifling yawns set against muted and earnest eagerness. The hurried equipment check before the revel, roar, and rush of the motorcycle. Ritual always holds within it the comfort of familiarity. I’ve come to love the intention and attention given over to each action, nearly much as I love going into the pinched darkness of an early AM morning, when the stars are still out but the night is long gone.
Ever since I was boy, since I can remember, the naked evening sky has always been a black canvas of wonder. Some of us are built to probe, to seek, to muse. We turn our inquiries over and over, uncovering, discovering, and revisiting, often, the same questions all our long lives. The night sky, the stars, and all manner of celestial watching is not only the oldest and most reliable canvas I’ve set my questions upon, but also the one which always affords a penetrating inward gaze.
During the particular island of April 2020, COVID April, I went out to photograph the annual Lyrids meteor shower as much as I did to think. To turn over those same questions about life, purpose, place, as well as the past and the present – all those old inquiries which never stray far in mind or heart.
I think about lover’s spit and American spirit. I listen to Norwegian Wood on repeat and think a lot about calluses, how hearts grow hard and change. Action and reaction. I think how I’ve changed, too. I think about the casual cruelties of adulthood, how they go both ways, how I’ve inflicted pain on others – innocently and, at times, intentionally. I think about my own ornamentation of grief, the ways I’ve historically dreseds myself in it, as if it’s my Sunday best. How that identity ossified over years of abuse, doubt, and addiction. Weeds which grew wild. I think how it’s beyond time for me to stop paying penance for a life I’ve long-since lived.
I think about how Orpheus’ final loss is, itself, born from a lack of hope, of faith. The doubt and anxiety ruined it all for him. Had he kept the faith, things would have gone a different route. Maybe. Probably.
I think about what it means to fall. Not in the literal wobble, stumble, and regain ourselves manner, but what it means to crash into the orbit of another human-being. And, to be vulnerable enough to allow them to crash into you. What phenomenal strength it takes. I think about the word “surrender”, and how the total abandon which comes with it, with falling and love, is one of the greatest faiths one can have. I fret over what happens when things go bad – as they often do – and I think about the value of holding empathy and compassion, about being honest with self and through that, honesty with others. Even, and especially, when it’s hard. I think about what we’re entitled to and know it’s not words or time or work or even the breath in our lungs. I think I know that nothing is promised, yet it all still seems possible.
I think about how we die twice. The first is our natural death, when breath leaves body for the last time. The second, and lasting death, is when the memory of who we are fades from the mind of those who knew us or knew of us. History, rubbing us out. For now, forever.
All this doesn’t take too long, 20 or 30 minutes of star-gazing.
The hard edge of acceptance blooms, then softens, like any bed of flowers. Release.
I saw earth-scrapers, streakers, and quick bursts of light that morning. I did something different and turned my camera to the world around me, rather than towards the heavens.
I’ve finally come to see how much pain, and growth, I’ve been avoiding. There’s an ocean of it inside of me. One I’ve been damming for years, decades really. I always held secret faith that something or someone would rescue me from drowning in that ocean. Now I think maybe the ocean itself is key. A reprieve from linear thinking and a way into a deeper world of feeling. Compassion, acceptance, compassion, the void collapses…the only way I can ever let go is to wade through it. Albeit in an altogether different context, James Baldwin once wrote that, “to accept one’s past — one’s history — is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”
Morning always rises from the east, brazen and brilliant. Before that, the world is dirt and bone, difficult and beautiful. The silence is immense and the sky holds a million candles, still.