A Serious Anti-Hero

      Mythic narrative is a funny thing, sometimes. You can go in with all these expectations that the good people will be rewarded and the evil will be punished and the heroes will marry the princesses and they’ll all live happily ever after…and that’s often not how myth works. Myths may follow folkloric conventions of promoting honor and virtue, but then again they may spin off in unexpected directions and provide endings that are difficult to understand as satisfying. In my opinion, Ino is one of the most extreme examples of a character rewarded who I didn’t want to see rewarded.

      Ino started her career as an evil stepmother. She married a king who had two children (a boy and a girl) from a previous marriage, and, as is often the case with stepmothers in folktales, she was eager to get her stepchildren out of the way and advance her own children in their place. To this end, she committed a crime so heinous I can’t even think of an appropriate word to encompass its atrocity (but please feel free to offer suggestions). She caused a famine by sabotaging seed corn to prevent it from sprouting. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the full scope of her evilness: she was so intent on killing her stepchildren, she deliberately destroyed a year’s food supply for an entire kingdom of people who depended on her as a leader; her ambitiousness almost certainly caused the death of many people who couldn’t afford food when the famine hit. After that, when the grain wouldn’t sprout, Ino staged a false oracle to report that the famine could only be ended by sacrificing the king’s children (her stepchildren). The children found themselves in the same predicament as Isaac or Iphigenia, all trussed up for sacrifice, but were saved at the last minute by (what sounds like something out of My Little Pony) a magic, golden, flying sheep. The sheep was sent by the gods to save the king from the sacrilege of needlessly killing his own children.

      The children went on with their own adventures: the boy landed safely in a distant kingdom and took up a new life. He married a princess and gained fame as one of the glorious heroes of old. In gratitude for saving his life, the boy killed the sheep in sacrifice (his gratitude was directed toward the gods who sent the sheep, of course, not toward the sheep itself, which he found expendable), and its golden pelt became a treasured artifact in the kingdom where he lived--you can find it again in the myths of Medea and Jason. At least, in some accounts he marries the princess; in other accounts the king of the distant kingdom kills him on arrival. The girl fell off the sheep while it was flying, landed in the sea and drowned, a misfortune that doesn’t seem to bother ancient authors nearly enough (there’s a clear narrative pressure to rescue her from the threat of being sacrificed, and the deus ex machina does intervene to whisk her away from that threat, but no one seems to care when she dies anyway in the rescue attempt). In my opinion, the stepmother Ino’s subsequent story deserves more attention, though, because she gets away with everything. She was the archetypal evil stepmother, plotting to kill her stepchildren and replace them with her own children; she engineered a famine to the detriment of her own populace; she arranged for her stepchildren to be killed; and in the end, one of the stepchildren certainly died, while the other was taken away to an impossibly distant kingdom and never bothered her again (or may have been murdered by someone else far away). Hurray, the evil stepmother goes home victorious! It seems like it would be much more satisfying (to me anyway), and more true to folklore conventions, for the evil stepmother to be found out and brought to justice. Yet in the versions we have, she gets her way and comes out as the hero of the story.

      Ino has some further changes in fortune, though. After she gets rid of her stepchildren, she and the king have two sons of their own and carry on as if those earlier children never existed. But their cozy new nuclear family is interrupted when Ino’s sister undertakes the sexually deviant practice of…extramarital sex. Apparently the guys who wrote these stories thought that extramarital sex was destructive enough to tear a woman’s entire extended family apart, at least in this case, because the one Ino’s sister was having extramarital sex with was none other than Zeus, king of the gods and husband of a famously jealous wife, Hera. Hera not only killed the young woman Zeus was having sex with, she also visited extraordinary horrors upon the woman’s sisters and nephews and brothers-in-law, but Ino was subject to an especially ghastly horror, for a specific reason. After Hera killed Zeus’ young mistress, Zeus handed the baby (the young god Dionysus) over to Ino to raise. Therefore Hera harbored a special grudge against Ino, and, after a substantial interval, one morning Ino and her husband suddenly panicked when their home was invaded by lions. In truth it was a delusion; the “lions” in question were actually their sons, and the king managed to kill one of them while trying to fend them off. (If this sounds suspiciously similar to the climax of the Bacchae, when Agave kills her son under the delusion that he’s a lion, it’s not a coincidence--in fact, Ino herself is one of the bacchae in the play.) Ino attempts to save her remaining son from her husband’s violence, and ends up running off a cliff.

      Surprisingly, this is not the end of her story. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods get together for a little conference as Ino and her son are plummeting down the side of the cliff. Venus begs Neptune to save Ino and her son. She doesn’t say why--you might assume it’s repayment for raising Bacchus, which probably makes more sense than anything else--but she pleads persuasively, and Neptune agrees to save them. In fact, he turns them into two sea gods, and they crop up in the Odyssey to save Odysseus from drowning by lending him inappropriately gendered clothing. At any rate, they become gods in their own right and live forever among the blessed.

      You can even find more beyond that, because Ovid continues on in a different work, the Fasti, to talk about how Ino traveled to Italy and became a local goddess there. She was known as Mater Matuta, worshipped by the Roman state, and had an annual festival celebrated by aunts, which, true to Ino’s nature, included the ritual harassment of an innocent slave woman. (Next time you’re in Rome, check out the two well-preserved temples in the Forum Boarium, one of which is sometimes identified as a temple to Hercules Olivarius but is more conservatively called “the round temple by the Tiber”--the rectangular temple next door is probably dedicated to Ino’s son, the one who wasn’t killed by his father). In fact, Ino’s story as related in the Fasti strongly resembles the stories of various founder figures who came over from the Greek world and established their own cities and cults in Italy: Aeneas, Diomedes, Hercules, Evander, the list goes on and on. (I feel a little bad for Evander, since he came all the way over from Greece to found a new city, and had these small-time hero conferences with Aeneas and Hercules, and yet his proud Greek settlement apparently disappeared before Romulus could meet his descendents. Certainly nobody mentions any Greeks hanging around on the Palatine when Romulus opened the Asylum on the Capitoline.) It’s tempting to think that at one point Ino might have been identified as a founder figure of some Italian city, and that we’ve lost any trace of it beyond Ovid’s legends of Ino in Italy; I’d like to believe that Ino is a rare female founder figure in the company of Dido (as opposed to women like Aegina or Europa, who are raped by gods and abducted to some locale distant from their homeland, where their sons go on to found cities). But then again, I hesitate to hang my hopes for female glory on someone so reprehensible as Ino.

      And I can’t read over Ino’s life story and hide my disbelief. She started out as an evil stepmother, an ABOMINABLY evil stepmother. She succeeded in getting rid of her stepchildren by means of starving her subjects. She never made any atonement for this crime and was rewarded for it when her own children became the king’s heirs. It’s like a sinister version of the Cinderella story where the stepmother is the hero, one of the stepsisters marries the prince, and Cinderella dies on the street. Later on Ino’s sister engages in deviant behavior that destroys the entire family, except that Ino alone is saved and promoted to divinity. If there is any story in classical mythology to show that you can be a completely reprehensible person and impose all sorts of terrible punishments on the people who depend on you and still be rewarded for it, this is it. Classical mythology isn’t populated by a lot of simple morality fables in which kindness and justice are rewarded; reading myth can be sobering in terms of how the endings you want to find are often thwarted for no apparent reason. I wish Ino’s story were more satisfying.

Ending the Blackout

Returned as promised. These past few weeks have been an ordeal. I feel like Beowulf rising out of the mere after defeating Grendel's mother. I should be back on a weekly posting schedule now, and I have a very new poem here about a blackout that spread down my street one summer night.

Un-street-lighted

Of course the city’s always bright.

Stars hardly show their faces.

You should see it in winter on cloudy nights

when all the glare from the city lights

bounces back between the clouds and snow

and makes it bright as day is.

And so imagine my surprise

one shocking summer evening

when a power failure blossomed wide

all down my street and amplified

our sense of dissolution from

the city and its seething.

Our lifeline was all stripped away!

A silent blackout fell that day

the un-street-lit street paved the way

to the carpet of stars above us.

External Pressures

My apologies. I am under pressure from several deadlines (it comes with working in academia) and I won’t be able to devote the energy to writing sarcastic mythology for the time being. I plan to return on September 7^th. In the meantime, enjoy the end of summer.

The Next First Time

The Next First Time

A milestone, in Roman speech,

is what one would encounter each

and every mile in the reach

of Roman roads,

and not, as we prefer to say,

a great event, a single day

that instantly will pass away

beyond our reach.

So at some annual event

there always must be some present,

the new initiates, who spent

it overwhelmed,

while all the others sigh at them

remembering that past age when

they thought that world beyond their ken

and not routine

and for a moment they resent

that froth of gay embarrassment

that held them when they underwent

that death sublime,

But even if it hadn’t been,

we might forbear to scoff at them,

for time will roll us down again

the next First Time.

      I wrote this on the train home from my first APA (that is, SCS) conference. Having spent this past week on the road at a different conference, I was planning to post this poem last Sunday, since the theme seemed apt. As you can see, in the end I decided not to do so, mostly because this poem has never said what I wanted it to say. This happens, sometimes: I start at the beginning of a poem with a particular image or emotion that I want to examine, and the thing spins out of control until I’m talking about something completely different. For example, when I was in high school, I had a very intense experience the morning I was going to take the SAT. I was so nervous about the ordeal that I woke up before dawn and sat in bed, staring out a window that faced out over my backyard, that gave way to a picturesque wood (a drainage ditch in disguise), that climbed up a steep hill before you reached the next row of houses. The whole experience seemed terribly fateful, as I faced down anxieties about how this one day might determine my future and watched dawn gradually illuminate the landscape, watched a line of windows at the top of the hill light up one by one as my neighbors came down to their kitchens for coffee. After that morning I spent a year beating my brains out, trying to capture the experience in poetry, before giving up. About a year after that, I tried again to write a different poem about how I viewed those high school anxieties from the vantage point of being halfway through college--also a flop. I did finally use some of the ideas I had gleaned from that morning to write a poem that I deemed worthwhile, but the poem turned out to be about a persona who felt rejected and unloved by the entire world, particularly her mother (?), and not at all about anxieties about intellectual tests as determining factors of worldly success from the perspective of someone on the cusp of adulthood.

      So anyway, one of the hazards of writing poetry is that the poem might not turn out to say what you want it to say. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it never does. On the train back from my first APA conference, I was thinking about what it’s like to attend an event for the first time, or for the fifth time, or for the fiftieth time. There are plenty of big annual events that every year draw in a complement of first-time attendees, and meanwhile have a reliable gang of old hands who can each be counted on to attend maybe 80% of the time. If you’re a newcomer, the entire experience can be pleasantly overwhelming, between all the people you’ve never met and all the things you’ve never had the chance to do. Then again, if you’re an old hand, you might see the experience as rather tedious and unnecessary, another rehash of the same stuff you see every year. I wanted to call attention to how the old hands were once first-timers themselves, and would do better to remind themselves of their previous excitement in the event rather than scorn the excitement they observe in newer attendees, in particular because, no matter how seasoned and world-weary these old hands may be, they no doubt still have some first times still lurking in their future, even if they anticipate no first times except arriving on Saint Peter’s doorstep. There will be for everyone a Next First Time, when they might be overawed by some new experience--to their benefit.

      No matter how long I squint at it, I don’t think that’s what this poem says. It doesn’t necessarily need to arrive at my predetermined objective; some poetry is well served by taking off in its own direction--even so, when they do, I find it a little unsatisfying, because I still want to reach my original goal. But here we are; I’ve polished this poem up as well as I can for the time being, and I after all that work I wanted to give a small window into my compositional processes. If I’d had my way, this poem would have been something different, but it’s not. I hope you nonetheless enjoy it.