Medusa Frequency

5 The Head of Orpheus Begins Its Story

It was an eyeless and bloated human head, sodden, covered with green slime and heavy with barnacles. I took it in my hands; where the flesh had been eaten away I could feel the ancient skull.

I could feel the head humming and buzzing in my hands, then it began to speak. Its voice was more elemental, more profound than human voices are; the way it spoke seemed more animal than human; it was as if speech had suddenly become possible for an animal, as if the creature were for the first time putting thoughts into words. ‘Who are you?’ said the head.

‘Nobody, really. Nobody you’d know.’

‘You wouldn’t be seeing me if I didn’t know you. What’s your name?’

I didn’t want to tell it my name.

‘Speak up,’ said the head. ‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Everything.’

‘No you aren’t, you came to the river and you said, “Yes, I will.’”

‘I don’t know why I said that.’

‘Tell me your name.’

‘Herman Orff.’

‘Is that really your name?’

‘Yes, it really is.’

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘No. Who are you?’

‘I’m the head of Orpheus.’

‘How do you do.’

‘You sound as if you don’t believe me.’

‘Why aren’t you speaking Greek?’

‘The words that I’m speaking are what I find in your mind. Is there any Greek there?’

‘No.’

‘That’s why I’m not speaking Greek.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You still don’t believe me. Do you want me to sing for you?’

‘All right, sing for me.’

The head opened its mouth, its lips and tongue moved, I félt it vibrate in my hands but I heard nothing. After a long time the vibration stopped. ‘Well?’ said the head.

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

The head began to weep, it shook in my hands with great wild racking sobs. After a while it quieted down.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s all right, I believe you without the singing.’

‘You don’t believe me the way I want you to believe me, I can hear it in your voice — you don’t believe I’m the real head of Orpheus.’

‘In the first place I do believe you, and in the second place how much difference does it make if you aren’t the real head of Orpheus? I’m not sure I’m the real head of Herman Orff but I get up every morning and get on with it. You’re what you are and I’m what I am and let’s leave it at that.’

‘All right, you believe that I’m the head of Orpheus. But do you believe that I’m real?’

‘Real how?’

‘Like the river, like the stones and the mud.’

‘I believe you’re real in your way.’

‘What way is that?’

‘You’re real in my mind; you’re a hallucination.’

‘Do you think I’ll go away if you stop thinking me?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what if I stop thinking you?’

‘I think I’ll still be here.’

‘Let’s try it,’ said the head, and was gone; in my hands I held a slime-covered stone. There was a greyness all around me, a tightness across my chest, a heaviness coming to a point on each side of the base of my throat, the veins and arteries of my arms seemed filled with lead. The pain grew harder and heavier; I thought I was going to collapse there in the mud by the river. Then the head was back in my hands, the greyness and the pain receded.

‘That’s what happens if I stop thinking you,’ said the head of Orpheus. ‘Do you know what I am to you?’

‘Probably not.’

‘I am the first of your line. I am the first singer, the one who invented the lyre, the one to whom Hermes brought Eurydice and perpetual guilt. I am your progenitor, I am the endlessly voyaging sorrow that is always in you, I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief moments when you can write.’

‘Endlessly voyaging sorrow and astonishment. Yes, I have those from you, I know that. Perpetual guilt, you said.’

‘In the stories they always say I turned around to look at her too soon but that isn’t how it was: I turned away too soon, turned away before I’d ever looked long enough, before I’d ever fully perceived her.’

With those words there came into my mind Luise. Once when we were living together I was on a 22 bus and I saw her unexpectedly in Sloane Street. The bus was moving slowly north in heavy traffic and she was walking south. She was wearing a long black coat and as she approached she was smiling to herself and walking slowly, lingeringly, as if lost in thought. Then the bus passed her and I turned and saw her going away. After that I sometimes imagined her seen from a distance walking away slowly, lingeringly, not coming back.

‘Does anyone ever fully perceive anyone else?’ I said. I began to cry.

‘Cry on my face,’ said the head, ‘maybe my eyes will grow back.’

‘Is there healing in my tears?’

‘I don’t know, I’ll try anything.’

‘Maybe you ought to stop trying. You’re old, you’re blind and rotten, you can’t sing any more. Why don’t you just pack it in?’

‘I haven’t that choice, there’s no way for me to cease to be. I’m manifesting myself to you as a rotting head but there’s no picture for what I am: I am that which sings the world, I am the response that never dies. Fidelity is what’s wanted.’

‘Fidelity. I got my head zapped looking for a novel and here I am listening to homilies from a rotting head.’

‘You don’t know what you’re looking for,’ said the head. ‘Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging I think constantly of fidelity. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.’

Again I felt the pain across my chest and down my left arm. ‘If you’re going to take a high moral tone you’d better find someone else to talk to,’ I said, ‘I’m not up to it.’

‘Do you think about fidelity sometimes?’ said the head.

‘Sometimes.’ Years after Luise had gone I found inside a copy of Rilke’s Neue Gedichte her recipe for bread; I’d never seen her use a written-down recipe but there it was in her writing on a folded-up feint-ruled notebook page marking ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’:

1·5 kg granary flour

2 dessertsp oil

1 ” salt

1 tblesp caraway seeds

2 ” dried yeast

1½ pts water, bloodwarm

1 teasp sugar

Put flour in a bowl, add oil & caraway seeds. Put sugar & yeast in a jug, add a little of the warm water. Leave for 10–15 mins in a warm place to froth, add salt to warm water. When yeast dissolved, add to the flour and water. Stir, then turn on to a floured board & knead 10–15 mins until it is elastic. Put back in bowl, cover, leave to rise in warm place. When doubled in size, take out, divide into 2, knead & thump, shape into loaves and put in greased tins. Cover, leave for 10 mins in a warm place, then put in oven & bake at 220° for 40-5 mins.

The smell of the brown loaves was like fidelity.

Luise had an accordion and she liked to play hymns on it. Her favourite was ‘Aus Tiefer Not’, ‘From Deep Distress’:

Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir,

Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen.

From deep distress cry I to thee,

Lord God, hear thou my calling.

This is Psalm 130, ‘De profundis’, and the Book of Common Prayer renders it:

Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord:

Lord, hear my voice.

She sang it in German of course, in a deep and distant Thirty Years’ War soprano while the accordion marched on in a minor key like a troop of pikemen with dinted helmets. Luise’s mother had bought her the accordion and paid for the lessons; her father had died in the Ardennes in 1944.

She farted like a woman who carries a spear and drives a chariot. ‘What kind of piety is that?’ I said. ‘With your upper part you’re singing hymns and with your lower part you’re making Götterdämmerung. You’re making tiefe Not for the rest of the world.’

‘They can cry out to God the same as I do. The airwaves are free, it costs them nothing.’

‘Tell me more about your deep distress.’

‘With you everything comes out; with me it stays in, it’s deep, it’s nothing to talk about. Also it’s not uncomfortable, it’s like a mountain of stone and on top of it grows a little blue flower. Don’t worry about it.’

‘The mountain stays in but the bad air comes out.’

‘Inside I’m pure,’ she said.

‘Is there something else you wanted to talk about?’ I said to the head. ‘Or is fidelity the only thing on your mind at the moment?’

‘Do you want to hear my story?’ said the head.

‘Yes, I want to hear your story.’

‘I ask you for the second time: do you want to hear my story?’

‘Yes, please tell it.’

‘I’ll ask you three times: for the third time, do you want to hear my story?’

‘Yes, yes, yes. Three times yes. Now tell it.’

‘Once begun, the story must be finished.’

‘Well of course I want to hear the whole thing.’

‘You have to take it on you then, you have to say, “Once begun, the story must be finished; I take it on me.’”

‘Once begun, the story must be finished; I take it on me.’

‘Now I’ll begin,’ said the head. ‘I’m not very sure of anything; I may be lying or I may even be making it up as I go along. I was a good musician but I’m not reliable in any other way. Sometimes I can’t make the distinction between how things seemed and how they actually were.’

‘Who can?’

The head of Orpheus gave a little cough and seemed to pull itself together. ‘I don’t really want to tell my story,’ it said, ‘but I have to do it if I ask three times and you say yes each time. I’m not even sure what the story is. Have you ever, perhaps while walking, found the world coming towards you in all its detail and then receding behind you and nothing has any more significance than anything else: a stone in the road or the sun in your eyes or the black shape of a bird in the blue sky, you don’t know whether one thing matters more than another?’

‘Yes, it’s often like that with me.’

‘My mother’s name was Calliope. Sometimes she sang a little song:

“Hermes the maybe, Hermes the sending –

in the day a road, in the night a wending.”’

‘“Who is Hermes?” I asked her.

‘“Hermes is your father.”

‘“Where is he?”

‘My mother pointed to the road. “Here and gone.”

‘“Where’s Hermes?” I said to the shepherds.

‘They showed me a heap of stones by the roadside. “There’s Hermes,” they said.

‘“How can a heap of stones be Hermes?”

‘“Every man who tupped your mother put a stone on that heap in the name of Hermes,” they said.

‘I put my ear to the stones, I listened to the dance in them, listened to the music of Hermes-in-the-stone. I looked at the road that was the place of Hermes. Without moving it ran through the valley and over the mountains, at the same time running and standing still, at the same time here and gone.

‘That night I went to the road. There was no moon, only the night and the dim road wending into darkness. I stamped on the road, I whispered, “Hermes!” The road moved backward under my feet, faster, faster. The steady rhythm of it stretched its long dream into the darkness and the whispering of the night. Running, running I said to the night “I have no name but the one you give me, no face but the one you see.”

‘I was, I am, an emptiness. I don’t know what anything is: I don’t know what music is, I don’t know the difference between running and stillness, between dancing and death. The world vibrates like a crystal in the mind; there is a frequency at which terror and ecstasy are the same and any road may be taken. There was an olive grove, it was morning. Shadows and whispers in the greenlit shade and the sunlight twittering in the leaves above. Hermes doesn’t show itself as a picture in the eyes, it’s there like a beast that can’t be seen, a strangeness dancing in the greenlit shade, dancing its music in the brightness of the shadows, in the darkness of the light.

‘There was an olive grove, I could feel the Hermes of it. There was a tortoise. My hand reached down and picked up the tortoise; with a hiss it drew its head in. I stood there feeling the shape of it and the weight of it in my hand and there was an idea coming to me when I felt eyes on me, felt myself being looked at. There was someone else in the olive grove, there was a man who hadn’t been there a moment ago. He was staring at me with eyes open so wide that I could see white all around the pupils. He had his hands out in front of him as if he was going to say, “Don’t”, but he didn’t say anything. A dark man, not young, but I couldn’t have said how old he was.

‘The tortoise was in my left hand and my knife was in my right; my idea was the tortoise-shell empty and two posts and a yoke and some strings for a kind of little harp with the shell as a soundbox. The man’s eyes were still on me, his wide-open eyes; almost I wanted to use the knife on him to make him stop looking at me. He let his hands drop to his sides when I cut the plastron loose and dug the body out of the shell, ugh! what a mess and my hands all slippery with blood and gore. The entrails were mysterious. I think about it now, how those entrails spilled out so easily when I made an emptiness for my music to sound in. Impossible to put those entrails back.

‘You know how you’ll hear a sound while you’re asleep and there comes a whole dream to account for it and in the dream there are things that happen before and after the sound — might it be that the whole universe has no purpose but to explain the killing of the tortoise? Do you see what I mean? Perhaps the universe is a continually fluctuating event that configures itself to whatever is perceived as centre. Do you think that might be how it is?’

I closed my eyes and saw the long nakedness of Luise twisting in the stardrift of galaxies and nebulae. ‘I hope not,’ I said.

‘The dark man watched me as I emptied the tortoise-shell,’ said the head. ‘He cupped his hands in the shape of the shell, then he mimed the plucking of strings. “Music? For making music?” he said.

‘“Yes, for making music,” I said. “How did you know?” Because what I was going to do had never been done before, there was no such instrument as the lyre then.

‘“I don’t know how I know,” he said. He had come closer; he smelled of honey.

‘“Why do you smell of honey?” I said.

‘“I keep bees.” he said. “My name is Aristaeus.” He stood there as if listening for something that only he could hear.

‘“What are you listening for?” I said.

‘“Your name.”

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t want to tell him my name.

‘“You don’t want to tell it,” he said. “You’re afraid.”

‘“Afraid of what?” I said.

‘“Afraid to hear the sound of your name in this place.”

‘“I’m not afraid.”

“Then tell it.”

‘“My name is Orpheus,” I said. Still he seemed to be listening for something else. “What are you listening for now?” I said.

‘“The olive trees whisper,” he said. “I always listen. You are the one who is Orpheus.”

‘“I’ve just told you that.”

‘“Not just your name,” he said. “You’re going to do it, you’re going to be Orpheus.”

‘“What else can I be?”

‘“You are the story of yourself,” he said. With his finger he traced figures in the air.

‘“What’s that you’re doing?” I said.

‘“Your name. You are the story of Orpheus.”

‘“How can I be a story? I’m a man, a live person.”

‘“You’re a story.”

‘“Not a story,” I said. I began to run.

‘Behind me, even when I was far away, I heard him say quietly, “You’re a story,” and I wished I hadn’t told him my name.’ The head fell silent, I held it in my hands and waited.

‘What happened next?’ I said after a reasonable interval.

‘My story is not a sequence of events like knots on a string,’ said the head; ‘I could have started with the loss of Eurydice and ended with the killing of the tortoise — all of it happens at once and it goes on happening; all of it is happening now and any part of it contains the whole of it, the pictures needn’t be looked at in any particular order.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because the thing is simply what it is. Hold a pomegranate in your hand and tell me where is the beginning of it and where is the end. The name of this pomegranate is Loss: the loss of Eurydice was in me before I ever met her and the loss of me was in her the same.’

‘Tell me what happened next.’

‘After the making of the lyre there is a long empty space before I became the Orpheus who was said to charm wild beasts and move trees and stones. I assume that I very slowly taught myself to play the instrument, that I made up little songs, nothing special. Probably I sang and begged my way from place to place. When I try to think of myself in that time I think of an emptiness carrying the emptiness that had been the tortoise. There is no story of me for that time — what I had been was gone and what I was to be had not yet come.

‘The next thing I know about is a morning, a dawn, the dawn mist rising from the river. I was sleeping off a drunk, I woke up not knowing who I was nor where I was. Something was looking at me from behind the mist, the strangeness that is Hermes, the strangeness that makes everything here and gone at the same time. The light changed and it was afternoon. The flight of the kingfisher opened in the air over the river a blue-green iridescent stillness in which a dragonfly, immense and transparent, repeated itself with every wingstroke. There was a drowsiness, a droning in the golden afternoon, a vibration in my mind or in the air, an ineffably sweet, honeyed sound that was seductive and demanding, a music not of any instrument. It enveloped and overwhelmed me, I felt myself surrendering to it, dying sweetly of it while the strangeness watched me from behind the blue-green stillness, from behind the dragonfly and the gold of the afternoon.

‘The air itself seemed honeyed, and it was in that fragrance that I first heard her voice, the voice of the woman who became my story. I heard her weeping in the leafy shade while the dragonflies printed themselves gigantically on the transparent stillness over the river.

‘There rose in my throat a terrible ache and in that moment the world became me and I became the world-child who knows nothing and believes whatever it is told; I was the world-child whose innocence binds the world together, whose innocence betrayed will unfasten the world. Oh yes, I thought, and as I listened to the weeping of the unseen woman in that golden, golden afternoon I became the tortoise I had killed. I felt my own cruel knife enter me, felt my life spurting out, felt my still quivering body being dug out of my shell. In an explosion of brilliant colours I suffered the many pains of death as underworld opened to me, underworld and the moment under the moment. I suffered the many pains, the many colours of death and I knew everything. The colours were swallowed up in blackness, there came a stillness and I found myself weeping by the river with the lyre in one hand and the plectrum in the other. The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water’s edge and swayed their tops against the sky.’

‘There opened to you underworld,’ I said, ‘and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping.’

‘Yes,’ said the head, ‘in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld.’

Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and a silence filled my mind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.

I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I supposed in some way it was still with me.