i. If you’d ask me to recount my night I'd proclaim limb-raveging ecstasy, moon worship and indignant blood-letting. The kind of business that has to hide from itself because Lucifer and Dionysus belong to two different realms, and my Naiad cove does not have space for both at once. Oh, but it is the form of Bacchus, Bacchus that has my heart, for he tempts, but The Devil corrupts, while god lacks capitalization! Will I ever sing in Bacchic remembrance the chant that engulfs us all? Will Dionysian Mysteries reveal themselves through divine inspiration and permit my involvement in what lies below hell? Will my girlhood return in the process? If I dig deeper into my ribcage than he ever could (or dared to), if I take back my pain by recounting it in a more acute fashion, will I be pure once more? Will I smile with teeth? Will my spilled guts feel gut-wrenching or gut-gratifying?
ii. Is it not the flail that calms you? Is calm not found in a frenzy of the sun-scorched kind? Are my tears still made of blood if there is no one here to taste them?
‘Darkness helps us to feel holy’
Euripides, The Bacchae
Comments