Art: Jane Desonier

Eurydice Emerges into the Light

so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back—H.D., “Eurydice”

          I can relate to the poet H.D.’s interpretation of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. I have (more than once) fallen in love with an Orpheus, the artist whose affecting music is inspired by his heartache, and when he has the chance to end his pain by bringing his beloved Eurydice back from the Underworld, he turns around, defying the one condition for her return: he must not look back to assure himself she is following him out of Hades. And yet he does check behind him, so she is “swept back,” according to H.D. (and I agree), not because he is worried that Hades has tricked him, that he is not, after all, allowing Eurydice to leave with her beloved. Rather, as in H.D.’s poem, Orpheus turns around to make sure she does not escape the underworld. If his beloved returns to live happily ever after with him, what will Orpheus sing sad songs about? How will he move people with music inspired by contentment?

why did you glance back?

          I met a poet, and we were happy. For a while. He wrote lovely poems about our joyful courtship. But his first collection had been inspired by the death of his young, beloved wife. How could I compete with that? I had no intention of dying. Not yet thirty, I was just getting started with living. Could he write prize-winning poetry while in a happy relationship? It seems he came to doubt it, for suddenly I could do nothing right in his eyes. And yet, he did not send me away. He needed me to leave him, me to break his heart. It was years before I realized he willfully, even if subconsciously, created the angst that inspires art.

          I felt sorry for him, but I turned and headed toward the sun, leaving him to wallow in his dark self-imposed hell.

what was it you saw in my face?
the light of your own face,
the fire of your own presence?

          I fell in love with a musician, whose music was angry and discordant. I made him laugh, brought order, gave him hope. For a while. I do think this artist preferred the light, but our harmony was off. He needed me to be perfect, the artist’s ideal, and my flaws broke his heart.

          I left him for a writer. Same pattern of elation followed by too much melodrama to inspire his sad stories of lost loves.

so for your arrogance
I am broken at last

          “I have loved a poet, a musician, a writer. Maybe I should go for a painter next,” I told my mother.

          “I’ll paint you,” she said. “Find a doctor.”

          Give up the creative types? Not a bad idea, to avoid getting sucked back into hell like Eurydice.

          My mother is an artist. It was not an idle offer. A painting of myself hangs in my house.

          A doctor now lives in my house. The PhD kind, a chemist. The explanation he gives to non-science types like me about what he does is that he expands the toolbox of what can be used to make new molecules. The compounds he is most interested in have pharmaceutical properties, mostly for anti-depressants.

         He enjoys being happy and those around him being happy, and he has no interest in melodrama. It is sunny outside where we live “among the flowers.”

* Quotations are from H.D.’s poem “Eurydice.”

In the author’s words:

A native of Louisiana, Margaret Donovan Bauer divides her time between her home in Greenville, NC, where she teaches at East Carolina University, and her sanctuary home on the Pamlico River. She has served as the editor of the North Carolina Literary Review for almost 25 years, and her service as such has been recognized by the North Carolina Award for Literature and the John Tyler Caldwell Award in the Humanities. The author of four books of literary criticism, including A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O’Hara and Her Literary Daughters, she has transitioned in the past five years to creative nonfiction and has published essays in Cold Mountain Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Deep South, Eclectica, New Madrid, and storySouth.

About the artist:

Jane Colvin Desonier is an oil painter living in Asheville, NC. At midlife, the artist returned to college, earning a BA in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans. She went on to study at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, an institution devoted to traditional art methods and classical training, with Auseklis Ozols and Phil Sandusky. Since then, Jane has studied with nationally known artists, including Ted Goerschner, Charles Sovek, Julyan Davis, Gay Falkenberry, and Thomas Buechner. She participated in the Scottsdale Artists’ School’s “The Best and the Brightest Art Show and Sale” for two years and is a member of the Oil Painters of America, taking part in their 11th Annual National Juried Exhibition in Chicago. Jane has been fortunate to live and to paint in a variety of picturesque locations, beginning with street scenes in New Orleans; marsh and coastal scenes in Pass Christian, Mississippi; mountain vistas in Asheville, North Carolina; and the magnificent swamps and live oaks of the bayou country. See her landscapes on her website at janedesonier.com.