Motherhood & mythology
Mlurdoch, Anna Maria
SUMMER THOUGHTS ON SEX AND CREATIVITY Motherhood & mythology ANNA MARIA MURDOCH ...
...Let the light of the torches also proceed, in rake and the plough (to rape the mother-earth...
...But the female forms...
...beneath the earth to live with him...
...When I their pride demands that they carry on about the indignity of say split decision I mean that it is difficult to say who came out selling dog food...
...Mothers if possible...
...For Medea that solution is too late...
...Niobe-like, languid and agriculture, birth and death, are intermingled...
...she teaches him the come noted hereafter for the prosperous fortunes of the secrets of shipbuilding, pottery and weaving...
...He falcons, Apollo and his sister swooped down on Niobe's ran up like a slim tree, I tended him like a choice plant in children and killed them all with their bows and arrows...
...Outside, the cicadas have begun and with itself nowadays, as well it ought to be...
...Not to be outdone, Hem, his ballot to Orestes...
...respects with my whole heart, and am entirely in favor of the Hephaestos, however, became the master craftsman, the god father's cause...
...Like the gift of Nights in bed with cowardly Aegisthus could hardly have been Pandora played by Zeus upon men...
...They have staff as Dave Garroway, or Jack Lescoulie, or Frank Blair...
...Pungent drafts of rosemary roast"My mother says I am his son...
...Both met on Tom Brokaw combines banality with a portentous voice, fertile turf for their points of view, for this was early morning and is therefore the conscience of the program...
...THERE WAS a meeting of the minds not long ago, of the This is the sort of bogus professionalism anchormen delight in sort that only television can offer Margaret Trudeau practicing...
...Am I Clytemnestra lent him away, probably for his protection...
...That elusive ingredient, chemisTelevision try, could not so easily be found in the series of eager aspirants I paired with Barbara Walters for a week's audition...
...she shows order that these friendly dwellers in the land may beman how to yoke cattle and bridle horses...
...exactly what the Today Show (NBC) and its imitators provide...
...He was, in retrospect, as integral a part of the from the garden...
...It was hubris duties in allowing his brother to abduct Persephone...
...In the city, remy son sitting snug between my thighs, smooth bulwarks moved from nature's patterns, my thoughts don't run so...
...And Athena, of course, often called "Pallas" Athena, Athena is then produced as proof that one can become a meaning the Maiden, was the eternal virgin, the daughter father without a mother...
...births...
...But Joseph Campbell has And yet, when we take comfort in that fact, we think of the pointed out the unique and valuable insight Bachofen gives example of Sylvia Plath...
...between my legs...
...I have been reading Middlemarch this summer...
...The problem, it turned out, was finding a serious broadcast journalist who was willing to do commercials as well as talk...
...Is that my freedom...
...Let's think...
...returned to his spiritual home, the local news beat, in WashingWHME ARC YOU, J. FRED MUGGS...
...He was knowledge of her son's mortality: the god of light, and music, and had the gift of prophecy as Woe is me, unhappy mother of a noble son...
...Interruption, not blood relation of the man she slew: continuity...
...Hero] Hera, wife of Zeus, uses less drastic measures to return to that state of freedom, oft equated by modern women as childlessness, by bathing yearly in a magic stream...
...they are a pure product of show business, and yet versus Jane Pauley, two rounds, split decision...
...Fecundity and death...
...The comings and the darkness has descended...
...A sick joke is woman...
...I challenging any radiance sent down from the sky...
...Her revenge was against Jason...
...With a the male who is the author of its being...
...folk-tales with mixed late-summer emotions...
...Smooth see them grow and change...
...Motherhood is and where a great deal can be made of nothing at all...
...The boys follow her excitedly...
...It is Creative gods...
...One must accept...
...The way your head is and out of the house like moths round a candle, I picked up a shaped, the fine eyes, yes, how like him...
...Thoughts scatter like shards...
...And they are led, happily chanting behind victorious Athena Athena, however, outdoes him in the number of skills with who shouts: which she is endowed...
...cal accuracy of his hypothesis...
...Aegeus had replied: "I am not to open the cock that projects from the skin...
...I am afraid of modern-day Athenas...
...Her daughter, Persephone My own Achilles...
...consists of three hosts and a news reader...
...She holds it in her cupped hand, it is small and void that he left, however, has been more than filled...
...We place it in chimpanzees can fill up the air with patter for an hour or two...
...from...
...Noise is disgruntled mother-friends have truth on their side...
...Is that how freedom is to be achieved...
...I must go in...
...white soles white-winter, the inevitable separation...
...She has her children...
...He even created the first time exercising due weight in their dealings with men, robots, in feminine form we read without surprise, who aid everywhere the most honored of the gods...
...Bachofen's thesis on the existence of a pre-Hellenic grey question-mark in the room...
...Till you do what...
...Commonweal: 466 I must let go, loosen the threads like weeds, that bind my too, the image of Iphigenia, turn against her mother, and children to my hair...
...Motherhood and creativity...
...My God, what an added torture for Clytemnestra...
...those instances when exposure may be profitable...
...Is it true...
...In a letter to her mother written in into a period in man's growth, into the psychological under1960, she writes: "I really hunger for a study of my own out of standing of our "entire cultural heritage...
...the process of sexual fulfillment, are mothers to pay too...
...But against any stings, while splashy sounds of other siblings reach here, faced daily with the signs of earth's cycle, fecundity and us now and then above the hums...
...But that is the genius of television, really, where the facts fit What is any art-form anyway but an attempt to concretely the fantasy, where Jane Pauley can play at being a reporter, express an experienced or imagined emotion...
...Orestes is on trial and Apollo and Distractions...
...Parturiwho can forget Antigone's passionate defense of her beloved tion...
...All the elements of In fact, they both had every reason to be happy, for both, contemporary living are covered, and all the ingredients of having entered the contest for separate reasons, felt that they motivational research and interior design have been thrown had done what they set out to do...
...Do what I want to do...
...At last, in of thing she does, a Junior League version of Barbara Walters, this century, we are freed of the bonds of our female bodies...
...his mother, Clytemnestra...
...Like mine...
...God, I wish I could convince myself, lay waste this cold I confess that I almost never see early morning television, question which won't leave me alone...
...These riarchy...
...I am the earth, proud, I hold him at the end of summer, his golden skin my offspring are saplings produced by tilling and warmth...
...Autumn reminds me of the coming rounded-brownness, now squirming to be off...
...I pick up my book on mythology...
...It is nearly forgotten now that in the early days an important What is that...
...We dance It is the childless Athena too, the male-begotten child, who like mice behind our new Pied Pipers, determined to turn us Commonweal: 468 into female forms of eunuchs...
...constant toil" which is vital to the ORESTES: Do you call me related by blood to my mother...
...I really believe I could do some good blood and are out for revenge against Orestes for the murder of stories if I had a stretch of time without distractions...
...not wanting to let go...
...But the boy replies: book a guest had given me...
...ton, D.C...
...and where the great branches...
...Once, in a fit of womb-envy, Zeus had cause, a perfect child-woman till the end...
...Niobe, who was so proud of her seven vowed to let no plants or food grow on earth until her daughter sons and seven daughters that she once boasted that their was returned to her...
...31 August 1979: 467 [Phaedra, Jocasta] Mortal mothers in Greek tragedies, however, with neither the stomach for Medea's ghastly methods, nor the magic of Hera's bathing, usually kill themselves...
...Leto had la- [Thetis] bored nine days to give birth to Apollo, clinging to a palm tree But I have no Demetrian power to yoke my children to me...
...And she interrupts...
...Listen to my heart...
...The facts...
...to be left as silent as the marble mound that once was Niobe...
...SUMMER THOUGHTS ON SEX AND CREATIVITY Motherhood & mythology ANNA MARIA MURDOCH horizon are lit here and there with early red and yellow leaves, the chlorophyl sucked out by the heat of August days...
...At last he was brought the ocean with her handmaidens, the Nereids, pushing seaforth, and indeed all the jealous fears of Hera were fulfilled, weed from her hair and, as we read in the Iliad, lamenting her for Apollo was the embodiment of the Hellenic spirit...
...O NE EVENING when the sun was sinking like a great orange In the Odyssey, Athena questions Telemakhos, "You globe behind the woods and the children were darting in must" she tasks "be Odysseus's boy...
...quotes Lycaon, son of Priam, who shouts out, in order to save [Pandora] his life, to Achilles: "I am not from the same womb as Hector, I feel as though I have got too close to my daughter's horse he who killed your powerful and kindly companion...
...while she, as a shock I realize there are none...
...a righteous huff, and Jane, for having wielded the razor with The upshot of all this is the current Today Show, which those piercing questions...
...Foolish Niobe to set her sights so high...
...Do you disown gives multitudinous examples of periods of silences...
...Distractions of a summer matriarchy, Bachofen expands this theory of the uterine link evening...
...avoidance she could take...
...Or is the reason perhaps that swim, transparent seahorses on the waves...
...Instead of feeling the kicks and Of course, Margaret must realize that there isn't much bulges of a new human being, they offer us instead empty interest in her except for her answers to personal questions, bellies of guilt, envy and frustration...
...When Frank McGee died there was trouble finding a suitable replacement for him...
...We have eaten all the goodness from them...
...Let them pay for the price worth it...
...Margaret, for having walked off the set in before they think they did...
...There are no lingering dark corners in my mind...
...She which destroyed Niobe...
...Do fathers feel the same, wanting to let corners...
...I know not surely...
...Like avenging lovely boy, perfect and strong, a hero above heroes...
...I with her encircled arms, for Hera, Zeus's wife, had forbidden am rather more like Thetis of the silver feet, who drifts under the goddess of childbirth to assist her...
...Ants Today Show has always proved that the human equivalents of are crawling round its blue, thinskinned eyelids...
...They are closer, he argues, than are the consan- mothers-as almost no part-time, part-self persons-have guineri, those children engendered by the same father...
...Wq are free to choose-both...
...have been thought trivial in the past is a deadly serious game today...
...Margaret all emotion, grist for the mill...
...wringing the truth out of the likes of Cher, or George Burns...
...Or does the A cool afternoon breeze rouses me...
...I bore a well...
...My emotions refuse to accept what my mind hesitates And then Apollo gives his ridiculous argument, that to contemplate...
...how many newspaper stories could she possibly suscourses on mythology read in summer gardens...
...At last Zeus begged his brother to Leto's children, fathered by the great god Zeus himself, were allow Persephone to return to her mother...
...Punishment for sexual desire...
...the garden, I let him go in the fleet to fight against Ilios: Weeping Niobe was turned to marble and her tears formed a but I shall never have him back again, he will never return running stream upon its surface...
...for there is no mother who gave me birth, and wife, conceived Hephaestos on her own...
...And she is carried off in triumph to the land of Erechtheus in a chariot drawn by winged dragons...
...The featherless...
...In blossom" of herself...
...She accused Zeus of neglecting his mother love...
...Jocasta too, fearing the worst long before Oedipus was aware of the truth, hung herself "in a twisted noose of swinging cords...
...The male seahorse myths, as they have come down to us, written by the great carries the eggs...
...him when he walks...
...l hey are right to insist that it may be undigon top (or bottom) because both came away looking and nified, but they started down the path to the Alpo can long feeling triumphant...
...Orestes was a little boy then...
...freedom or chains...
...The Indian folklore tells that there was once a great bear hunt in the raspberries have been good this year, and now the canes sky and when the hunter fought the bear, the blood, dripping stand dry, stick-looking, with limp leaves and tangled down to earth turned the leaves to red...
...In Myth, Religion and Mother kitchen beckoned...
...a box and shine a goose-necked lamp on it...
...But Tillie Olsen warns that it will only killed his father...
...And, indeed for one long, thirsty year the beauty could rival that of Leto's children...
...Unfortunately, he I approve of the male side-except that I do not marry-in all was born lame, and she pushed him over the edge of Olympus...
...Jane Austen and George Eliot...
...And and been kicked in the stomach...
...hearing of the nursery where I could be alone with my thoughts The Eumenides are the old Furies, who extract blood for for a few hours a day...
...As long as he lives and sees the light [Demeter] of the sun he has only sorrow, and I can do nothing to help Summer is nearly over and the blue Berkshire hills on my him...
...Have I given up my best but I have been traveling a lot lately, and one finds oneself work for them...
...She is the knowledge that his firm youthful flesh would one day rot, and mother of three children and has studied literature and philosophy at, that there was nothing she could do too stop it...
...He will sometelevision...
...No mean boast, for earth was utterly barren...
...Has all the creativPolynices, or those brother-sister murderers, Orestes and ity I once felt in my pen been confined to that creativity Elektra...
...between child and mother to that of the uterini, children of the Silences-and the sentence jumped at me: "Almost no same uterus...
...We are reading...
...Is that all there is...
...Hear the cause of my wrath, mother Night...
...opportunities, ideas will be lost forever, miscreant, within her girdle...
...to his father's house...
...They are could spin forever...
...Round our table it is bara Walters and the late Frank McGee...
...Its beak is too large for its head to support...
...By being whole, have I become less...
...At long last the successor was found, and it turned out to be a blow-dried anchorman named Jim Hartz, who lasted for awhile and then WAKE UP, AMERICA...
...Orestes asks the their trade, and motherhood is my profession while my chil- Furies why they did not chase his mother for revenge after she dren are so young...
...Demeter wandered the earth Time and space do not dissipate the passions aroused by wailing and mourning...
...My typewriter yawned, a Right, J.J...
...I flicked open a page-the book was Tillie Olsen's...
...I shall give this produced her from his forehead...
...Myths and archetypes float like pollen in the air...
...She is credited with the invention of the Forward...
...I call to the more...
...Hedda Hopper would Dispossessed of my ancient honors, the baffling wiles of these have known what to do with on-the-air tension between Bargods have made me of no account...
...Bachofen sees this play as symbolizing the freedom to be is as powerful an emotion as the freedom to be turning point between the old (matriarchy) and the new (patcreative, and the first freedom must precede the other...
...Part-person...
...She warns that creativity will CHORUS: Why, in what other way did she nurse you, you atrophy, cease to be...
...times gently' correct his colleagues, and often turn out to be 31 August 1979:469...
...to be a sorrow to men who eat bread...
...Her road to freedom, from pain, from Jason, lies in killing her children...
...Children called...
...They are mine...
...member of the Today Show team was a chimpanzee named J. Warily I watch my own grey-eyed Athena as she runs in Fred Muggs...
...And yet she asked Aegeus what the oracle had advised him on the subject of his own infertility...
...It rustles the tops of the biological function of the mother make her love her child corn...
...No path of New York University...
...press with a kind of deferential awe...
...the bearer of the so-called offspring is not the mother of [Athena] it, but only the nurse of the newly-conceived fetus...
...What pang is this goings of its various hosts and hostesses are covered in the that enters my side...
...Grant that our for war, he built the houses the gods lived in and adorned them lovely young maidens may have wedded lives . . . at every with beautiful things he had made...
...Now and then we hear the bird chirping as it struggles to But our standards are different nowadays, and what may survive...
...It was fated...
...Soon the I HAVE SAT this summer in my garden watching bees and hills will be ablaze with autumn tints, a never tiring sight...
...Poor Thetis, mother of that greatest of heroes, Achilles, was a ANNA MARIA MURDOCH has been a journalist in Australia, publishing goddess burdened with the pain of all mortal mothers, the articles in the Sydney Daily Mirror and The Australian...
...Or theirs, my children...
...Eliot's heroine, Dorothea, nearly dies in childbirth...
...tain...
...yellow-jackets flitting through our raspberry canes...
...flashing as he races through the meadow to join the others, Demeter was the original earth-goddess, perhaps the only crushing wild strawberries and clover with his heels...
...of fire, he decreed, and ordered Hermes to add to his creation, But the real reason for Clytemnestra's murder of her hus- to "put lies, and wheedling words of falsehoods, and a band was her towering anger against him for sacrificing her treacherous nature...
...One may argue that these women chose death to avoid overturns the old goddesses in the Eumenides into weaker shame and guilt, not to achieve the freedom to create...
...I know without a doubt what womb these children came children not to catch cold...
...mother, Euripides declared, who overturned "this last and [Niobe] crowning sorrow of all mortals...
...I am the dearest blood of a mother...
...I try to destroyed, by punishing mothers for the presence of those dark reconstruct the bubble...
...The candle is lit...
...Clytemnestra] Were the fears of men to be allayed, the power of the womb My children shout...
...The two most creative gods, stranger for a stranger, preserves the young plant for Athena and Hephaestos, are also the product of "virgin" those whom the god has not blighted it in the bud...
...Thus he created enduring literature...
...Who knows for certain any more...
...I must whisper of my pride even here in was abducted by Hades, Lord of the Dead, and taken away this garden...
...Medea killed her children...
...and Jane continues to believe that journalism is in fact the sort The question of creativity is not an either-or one...
...Shut my ears...
...They are the tools with which mothers ply Athena are called in to judge Orestes's guilt...
...Oh Earth...
...proud of her needlework that she turned Arachne, an expert weaver who challenged her work, into a spider so that she I AM afraid...
...the glorious Apollo and long-legged Artemis...
...The facts are in...
...I sit musing on myths and late yellow-flowering broccoli gone to seed...
...The Furies answer, because she was not a breed more "distraction, not meditation...
...She wholeheartedly supports the male every man wanted...
...But the bear's yellow fat ran over the edge of the clouds, the leaves it bees still come, humming over us where we sit, circling the touched were turned to gold...
...The Today Show is very impressed and eat...
...Blue daytime soaps for house- Trudeau and her problems were to be seen on half a dozen wives to weep over, or Tannhauser at the Met, or college shows...
...Modern scholarship has thrown doubt on the historiearlier mothers were still prisoners of their biological destiny...
...And why did Elektra Two names immediately _ jump to mind...
...Phaedra, consumed with passion for her stepson, Hippolytus, tries to starve herself to death, and failing that, accused by Hippolytus of being a curse, a snare, a poisonous weed, she hangs herself from .a swinging noose...
...Does this float free, rising like bubbles to the surface where they can disprove the bond of the uterini...
...Greek tragedians, have been written by sons-not daughters...
...Do my childless-sisters and shaving in a lonely motel and yearning for noise...
...spasmodic, not...
...Who has ing in the oven with the meat were carried on the air...
...warm...
...seducing us with their torches and their songs...
...achievement of any art form...
...The known his -own engendering...
...It is time to gather And what patter it is...
...Finger-splaying, comb them out till they support the cause of revenge for her father's death...
...Her darling "long-wept" And so Pandora was created...
...She was so male inhabitants...
...Jane, because she plays the together to create an entertainment product for the '70s...
...There are things to be done...
...The role of a tough, no-nonsense broadcast journalist, and Mar- news is fresh, the features are geared to the young and the garet, because she protects her privacy at all costs, except in affluent, the interviews are expansions of People magazine...
...This stream, called Canathus is near Argos and returns her to her original state of virginity...
...of fire who worked with metal and made jewelry and weapons And the chorus is overcome by this logic...
...Till you reach what land...
...afraid...
...daughter Iphigenia to the winds...
...Why, then, when he grew up did he turn against his mother, [Medea] the wronged wife, the sorrowing mother...
...The found a bird...
Vol. 106 • August 1979 • No. 15
