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Orpheus carries a lyre and a lock of his dead lover’s hair. It is winter now, and the ground is barren. He sings as he walks, but no flowers grow. He remembers a time when he walked across meadows in the sun, when he carried a girl on his back and promised her a piece of heaven in a song.
Orpheus carries a lyre and his lover out of hell.
He only gets to keep the lyre.
Persephone carries an iron crown on her head, a kiss from her mother on her cheek, and six leaded pomegranate seeds in her stomach. Winter is only above the ground, but she still feels everything as the cold sinks into her bones and won’t let go. She wipes the frozen tears off of her porcelain face as her husband reaches for her hand. This is how things happen, he tells her. There are laws to this universe we live in, laws that we cannot break.
But who makes these laws? She thinks. Who decides? She looks across the dais at her husband and wonders if he would have done what Orpheus did, if he would throw the laws to the wind to fight for her.
These are the laws, her husband says, and we must follow them. She turns away.
Orpheus sings of a wedding in the spring. She tries to remember his song, to sing it to herself after he leaves, but she keeps swallowing the words. They come to rest with the pomegranate seeds.
She knows Orpheus is gone now. Give him a chance, she had begged her husband. Just once, give him a chance.
The tragedy of poor Orpheus, she thinks, is that he could sing but could not listen.
Orpheus walked into the Underworld with a lyre in his hands, a head on his shoulders, and a hope in his heart. He walked out of the Underworld with only two of those things. When he returned some time later, he had none.
Hades carries the weight of a lost sky on his shoulders. Atlas, he thinks as he looks to the heavens, has nothing on him. Hades has learned to love the coldness of his throne, to love darkness instead of light, obsidian instead of marble. People do not ask Hades for favors. Hades does not ask either, he simply takes. Not once has anyone ever asked him for something back.
Orpheus comes to ask a favor of him. Orpheus sings of a profound loneliness, of a forever kind of loss.
Hades looks at his wife, and wonders if she would still have followed him into the dark had he taken the time to ask. He does not know. There are no laws that govern love.
Sometimes now, he remembers Orpheus. He offered him a deal, he remembers. A fair sort of deal. Do not look back, he told Orpheus. Do not look back, and she will once again be yours.
Is it still a fair deal if it is a deal you know that you will win?
The tragedy of Orpheus, then, is the fault of Hades, the fault of the rules of the gods and the rules of nature. No man may cheat death of his due.
Orpheus carries sadness now, across his brow. He carries it in his songs, in the song he sings for the King and Queen of the dead.
He sings this song as he wanders the earth, and he calls it “Eurydice.”
The Fates carry on, spinning the thread of life, weaving it, cutting it, and sewing up the loose ends. Orpheus will die one day, and the Fates will lop off his head and tie up the loose ends with the strings of his lyre.
There is no tragedy then, in the story of Orpheus. There is only inevitability. There are only plans, plans that only destiny knows.
They all carry the weight of the Underworld. Such is the punishment of gods and musicians and destiny: all things must die. One day, people will stop listening to epic tales. Orpheus will die, as all men do. Gods will sink into the mud of their kingdom, disappearing with only the trace of old legends behind them. Even the fates will fade, destiny replaced by coincidence and luck. There is no destiny in this story, there is no moral. There are just ghosts.
Orpheus and Eurydice made a vow once, to carry each other until death did them part. Death did do them part, and Orpheus still could not let her go, could not let her fall. This, then, is the origin of the tragedy.
Orpheus’s head rests somewhere in a river, his lyre floating along behind it as it drifts out to sea. Men who have seen it swear that his cold dead lips still whisper “Eurydice.”
Eurydice carries nothing now, as shades are wont to do. She looks up and thinks she can remember fields of flowers and a hand that clasped her own. But she never really does. Every day, she follows the rest of the shades and sips water from the river that runs through the sludge, tasting death and forgetting life.
Every day, she has the same half-dreamt thought as she raises cupped hands to chapped and ghostly lips. “I wish I could look back,” she thinks, Orpheus inverted. “I wish I could look back just once.”