Anne Carson

Bakkhai

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  • zafiroboliviahas quoted7 months ago
    Beginnings are special
    because most of them are fake.
    The new person you become
    with that first sip of wine
    was already there.
  • ♡emma♡has quoted4 years ago
    O grief without measure.

    I don’t know how to look at you
  • gerdhas quoted6 years ago
    A wise man is a well-tempered man
  • gerdhas quoted6 years ago
    Will they say I look silly dancing around with ivy in my hair?
    Well yes, but so what?
    Dionysos didn’t specify his worshippers be young or old –
    he wants reverence from all.
  • shannonsullivan6has quoted8 years ago
    we do nothing but repeat it.
    Beginnings are special
    because most of them are fake.
    The new person you become
    with that first sip of wine
    was already there.
    Look at Pentheus
    twirling around in a dress,
    so pleased with his girl-guise
    he’s almost in tears.
    Are we to believe
    this desire is new?
    Why was he keeping
    that dress in the back
    of his closet anyhow?
    Costume is flesh.
    Look at Dionysos,
    plucked prematurely
    from his doomed mother’s womb
    and sewn up
    in the thigh of Zeus
    to be born again later.
    Life is a rehearsal
    for life.
    Here’s a well-known secret
    about Dionysos:
    despite all those legends
    of him as “new god”
    imported to Greece from the east,
    his name is already
    on Linear B tablets
    that date to 12th-century BC.
    Previousness
    is something a god can manage
    fairly well (“time”
    a fiction for him)
    but mortals
    less so.
    Look at those poor passionate women
    who worship this god,
    the Bakkhai,
    destroyers of livestock
    and local people
    and Pentheus the king.
    They had a prior existence once.
    The herdsman describes them
    lying at peace in the mountains
    “calm as buttons on a shirt.”
    This is the world before men.
    Then the posse arrives
    and violence begins.
    What does this tell us?
    The shock of the new
    will prepare its own unveiling
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