Пламен Антов

1. In my poem, excerpts from which I am presenting at this festival, I combine two of the archetypal subplots in the myth – about the poet (Orpheus as a symbol of the poet in general) and about the exorcism from hell/Hades. In the myth, the subject of this derivation is Eurydice, the poet’s wife, who died on her wedding day after being bitten by a poisonous snake. The god of the underworld, Hades, sets a condition that until they leave his realm, he must not look at her. However, Orpheus cannot resist and the moment he looks at her, she turns into a shadow again and begins to move back, sinking back into the darkness. My interpretation transforms the myth by joining a very strong romantic tradition of love-hate: Eurydice is the people, and Orpheus is the lonely poet.

2. The name “Orpheus” itself comes from the Greek orphanos, which means “orphan”, “orphaned”, “lost (something)”, which, we can say, means exactly what my poem states in its title – a loner. The poet is the ontological loner. Historically, the myth of Orpheus itself (and the entire religion of Orphism) arose as a result of collective trauma after the collapse of the Achaean civilization, as an attempt to compensate for the collective/communal feeling of loneliness – a need for (symbolically-compensatory) restoration of previous social and sacred connections. As a result, secret cults began to appear, in which only “those uprooted, transplanted (i.e. other/foreign cultures), artificially (forcibly) regrouped beings who dreamed of restoring an organization from which they could not be excommunicated. Its only collective name is ‘orphans’ (i.e. Orphics)” participated .

3. I share the main critical metaphor for the naive, sub-rational and unconscious character of the collective-national consciousness, which is non-self-referential: it disappears at the moment of its self-awareness, similar to Hölderlin’s Empedocles, who separates himself from nature the moment he realizes his own divinity. (Parenthetically, here, at these depths, are the roots of Toncho-Zhechev’s ethno-conservatism of the 1970s, their philosophical basis leads to the legacy of German Romanticism and from there synchronizes typologically, i.e., at different times in the sense of Kozelek, with the late Heidegger, whose philosophy is a gigantic, monumentalizing reinterpretation of Hölderlin’s interpretations of Greek myths.)

4. We can lay a Hegelian substratum in the interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that I have proposed. It refers to the symbolic potential of the two components beyond their personification, but while preserving their gender specificity. Namely, the Spirit and nature as its otherness: the Geist/Spirit, resp. culture, as the masculine; nature as the feminine. (In the symbolism of the myth, important to me, they are represented respectively by the individual figure of the poet and the collective figure of the people/crowd.)
The Hegelian matrix can be reduced in its simplest form to the following: What we call “nature” has its own meaning as nature only in contrast to what we call “spirit.” But what we call “spirit” is nothing more than our own self-interpretation as non-natural, supernatural beings. – And from here on we can, separating ourselves from Hegel, continue on our own: it is precisely this “super-”, this supra-naturalness, which is, first of all, the self-referential ability in us, separating us from nature. Secondly, at a subsequent, higher level, it is the poetic in us (including in the direction of the specific meaning that Heidegger – through Hölderlin – puts into the poetic, into the figure of the man-poet, of the poetically living man). – On another, but functionally identical level, the antithesis is “art—nature”.
From here, my interpretation of the myth leads to the pair “poet—people”, united in a romantic love-hate: the Spirit reflecting its body.
In this metaphorical connection, Eurydice is the national body, whose ontological existence is always on the border between life and death, being and non-being. On the one hand, it itself is life/reality in the Nietzschean sense of the Dionysian; the life. But on the other hand, it, as nature, is devoid of self-consciousness and therefore does not have its own, autonomous reality. It has its reality only in the interpretation of the Spirit, resp. the Poet, or the intellectual in a broad sense. And the love between Orpheus and Eurydice, with roots in the “feminine” essence/ethos of the people-as-body, brings all the drama to the relationship between them: the Poet and his people in the entire range between Pushkin’s “poet and crowd” and Botev’s amorous contempt. The poem “Orpheus, or Solitude” is my, current version of this ancient metaplot, which is not at all unambiguous, neither in one direction nor the other, but is located precisely in the difficult, insoluble antagonism.

5. Here somewhere an intermediate, ambivalent sphere emerges – that of modern mass art. It is ambivalent in two different ways.
First, regarding the place of its author, who – and this “art” itself – is closer to the “body”, i.e. to nature, than to the reflecting Spirit; i.e. there is a kind of collaborationism. (That’s why I put “art” in quotes: modern mass art is closer to nature; it is the naive nature of art, which means its “other”, anti-.)
But on the other hand, it is precisely in this grassroots, low-minded (“natural”) position that it is valuable, insofar as it is an expression, an emanation of the collective, singular “spirit”, of the folk genius, to put it in romantic terms. In this sense it is typologically identical with folklore.
Such a single expression of the collective – its monumental personification – is also the single creator (the Poet, the intellectual); therefore, there is a specific identity between them.

6. But here, in the field of sexual divergence, identification continues on a vegetative level. The vegetative, we know, is a “feminine” sphere; the feminine as giving birth, after being fertilized by the Man (in different and diverse images-figures, either specifically natural, like the rain, or specifically cultural, technical, like the plow, the plough, the ploughshare).
The poet is a dual figure, i.e. in a sense bisexual, hermaphroditic. He is, first of all, a chthonic being. (“The poet is a chthonic being,” says the book in its very title, which contains the poem “Orpheus, or Solitude”; it says it precisely with a verse from this poem.) – The poet descends into the chthon to free and bring out the kidnapped Eurydice; and in doing so he enters into the ancient archetype of the Hero-dragon fighter, liberator of kidnapped virgins.
But unlike the classical Hero, the Poet fails to defeat the Monster, his feat remains unfulfilled; due to weakness, he fails to bring the maiden into the light, she returns halfway. Ultimately, what the failed antihero-Poet manages to do is to bring himself out. But that is enough, says at the end, in its last verse, the poem.

7. As for the chthon (Hades), its essence is the vegetative metaphor, representing the dialectic of death and birth, each of which not only presupposes – causally and in time – the other, but is substantially an intrinsic part of it. Let’s leave aside for a moment the myth of Eurydice, although it belongs to the same mega-plot about the descent into the realm of the dead. The dead have always been thought of by archaic consciousness in a vegetative key as “seeds” from which life sprouts. The clearest vegetative myth in Greek culture is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, symbolizing the merging of life and death. The plot is similar to Orpheus’: Demeter is a goddess of fertility; but she is also the personification of sadness after Hades takes her daughter away, and in this sense she is a typological version of Orpheus (or rather the opposite).
But here comes the important difference. – Unlike Eurydice, Persephone is in a situation of constant, periodically alternating duality; she spends half the year in the underworld, during the other half she is allowed to emerge to the surface, into the light and into life. This oscillating infinity itself (which means the endless mutually presupposing change of spring and autumn, summer and winter, life and death, dying and birth) is natural in essence. Conversely, Eurydice’s descent into the underworld is a one-time, and in this sense a higher, cultural act. The tragic failure of Orpheus’s sole attempt to bring her back to life is an individual tragedy.
To put it in a grand parable, returning to the poem “Orpheus, or Solitude” – Orpheus is the modern tragic poet, and his beloved Eurydice is a possible metaphor for his own inner chthon. – But the personal, intimate plot of love is here displaced into the political one: the beloved Eurydice is the people, the object of a complex, and doubly complicated, love on the part of the poet. – The poet, as the verse that gives the title to the entire book states, is a chthonic being; but his chthonic essence is not vegetative; it is not “feminine,” i.e. natural, i.e. oscillating between worlds and states, dying-and-giving birth. His chthonicity is “masculine,” i.e. modern, one-off, and tragic.