Pythia - Notes

Pythia owes a debt to the poets Catullus and T.S. Eliot. It brings myth to modern life, traces of the past lying beneath the surface of the present. The poem is bookish and raw. It reaches across history and it has personal concerns. It casts antiquity in today’s imagery.

The poem is a distillation of a short story by the author, The Education of a Young Gentleman. In the first stanza, a woman extends an invitation during a night of debauchment. She appears in the guise of a muse in the second stanza and seduces the boy with a tantalizing image of mature erotic beauty. She gets the tipping she desires in the fifth stanza and leaves him disillusioned in the last. 

The boy achieves momentary harmony with the muse, has a sexual awakening, gains a measure of self-discovery, and turns it into a personal mythology. 

a. Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, sits in a cauldron on a tripod, making her prophecies in an ecstatic trance state, like shamans, and her unintelligible uttering. The tripod was perforated with holes; and as she inhaled the vapors, her figure would seem to enlarge, her hair stood on end, her complexion changed, her heart panted, her bosom swelled and her voice became seemingly more than human.—Wiki

b. The opening scene is a bedroom in a Catholic suburban home, instead of the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.

c. Smoke and perfume signify the vapors at Delphi. Gasses of ethane, methane, ethylene, and benzene rising from the fissures at Delhi helped Pythia achieve her trance, as drugs do today. Others have suggested laurel leaves (oleander) and fermented honey.

d. The boy enters the room and takes the woman as Pythia, a possessed woman who was a vehicle for the ambiguous messages Apollo delivered at Delphi.

Through her nostrils thick with incense

The Pythia hurls a breath of flame

Panting, howling, drunk…

—Paul Valéry.

e. The woman has an anxious conversation with the boy, asking questions, speaking in the idiom of the present day, trying to connect. He reacts to the temptation, trembles, referring to Kierkegaard.

f. Anaphora (word repetition in successive clauses) occurs in two places: 

To tremble

To hear a moan

To sink into unguent warmth

I slid fingers to her nipples

Her nostrils flared

Her bosom swelled

A tremor crossed her face.

g. ‘the green room’

 

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

—Coleridge, Kubla Khan

h. ‘Have we spoken?’ buttonholes the boy. ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time?’ (New International Version, John 14.9)

i. Bishop Sheen had a pop TV show at the time. ‘Bishop’ is a masturbation reference, as in “Beat your bishop.” ‘Read’ is in both the active present and past tense. ‘Bishop’ also refers to the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The woman laughs at the jokes.

j. ‘I adore Coblenz’ is repartee. Coblenz (or Koblenz) could be misunderstood as a person. It’s a fortress at the junction of the Rhine and Mosele Rivers, a favorite haunt of the poet Jules Laforgue whom T.S. Eliot adored. The woman speaks with a deep Eastern European accent.

k. ‘Kiss me’ is from The Brian Auger Oblivion Express—Compared to What, live at Baked Potato, Hollywood, 2004, at 3:35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrkxrgTiVyk

l. One reader found a vampire vibe in the poem.

m. The woman exhibits metempsychosis—previous lives buried within, that suddenly speak and are gone:

 

Thou hast committed—

Fornication? But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

—The Jew of Malta

 

The bitch is dead now.

—last line of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, 1953

n. The woman is neurotic and bored e.g. ‘I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter’, (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) and offers the ancient world to the boy. Greece is the location of Delphi and also refers to Lord Byron.

 

You promised me that I would be taken by divine Achilles,

For his legitimate wife, that he would carry me away in his ships,

To Pythia, where our marriage would be celebrated among the Myrmidons,

—McCarthy, Mary, and Simone Weil. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” Chicago Review, vol. 18, no. 2, Chicago Review, 1965, pp. 5–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/25294008.

o. ‘That's where I wanna go.’ is from Mesopotamia by the B52s.

p. The Caesarian Section or C-section relates to the Roman Caesarians and Julius Caesar in particular, who held at least one poetry reading by Catullus.  Her scar marks an alternate entrance to her uterus and a profane contrast to the sacred virgins Mary and Pythia. A C-section grounds the poem and may be considered its navel—exotic, like a tattoo. Mother, childbirth, pain and sacrifice.

q. The ‘cold-hard floor’ of the house basement refers to the temple floor of marble at Delphi. The haiku-like rhythm of ‘on a cold-hard floor’ is a play on ‘on a wet, black bough’ in the last line of Ezra Pound’s haiku, In a Station of the Metro:  

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

r. After a final description of the woman, she vanishes. The emotional core of the poem is the connection and disconnection between the boy and the woman. The last two lines predict a hard landing for the boy; he's lifted out of the scene to see her for what she is: a shape, a silent form fixed in his memory. Passion desires recurrence, but he's left in a void, to figure it out for himself.   

s. Much of the power and verbal music of the poem is in ones, twos and threes: old smoke, stale, night, green room, kiss me, stale mint, cold-hard floor, C-section, black spike heels, etc. Most lines end in a monosyllable. The sounds attempt to override the meaning of words. The speaking voice interrupts the narrator and adds tension, making the action and characters real.