The Agony of Marsyas is the Inevitable Agony of the Human Soul in its Desire to Achieve God.

#IrisMurdoch100

Iris Murdoch, 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat', 1970:

“...‘I’ll love you forever.’

‘Decent of you. Could we get in there, I wonder?’

‘No, I don’t think so. You’re Apollo and I’m Marsyas. You’ll end by flaying me.’

‘That’s an image of love, actually. Apollo and Marsyas.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The agony of Marsyas is the inevitable agony of the human soul in its desire to achieve God.’

‘The things you know.’

‘The things you failed to learn at the Courtauld.’

‘I don’t believe it though. Someone is flayed really. And there’s only blood and pain and no love.’

‘You think our planet is like that.’

‘I think our planet is like that?’

‘No redeeming grace?’

‘None at all.’...”

The Flaying of Marsyas

Artist: Titian, c. 1570–1576

courtesy: Wikipedia

Dan Piepenbring, The Paris Review, July 2015:

“...The painting was one of Titian’s last, and it’s full of primeval fire. It’s drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which the satyr Marsyas brags that his skills on the auros, a double-piped reed instrument, are superior to Apollo’s on the lyre. The two agree to a kind of duel-cum-jam-session. But Apollo is, of course, a god, meaning he’s not just a better musician but a more temperamental one, inclined to punish all who defy him. And so he flays Marsyas alive for his hubris, a fate Ovid describes with violent relish:

As he screams, the skin is flayed from the surface of his body, no part is untouched. Blood flows everywhere, the exposed sinews are visible, and the trembling veins quiver, without skin to hide them: you can number the internal organs, and the fibres of the lungs, clearly visible in his chest. The woodland gods, and the fauns of the countryside, wept … The fertile soil was drenched, and the drenched earth caught the falling tears, and absorbed them into its deep veins.

Titian, painting with his brush and his thumb from a palette of squalid browns and reds, depicts the flaying every bit as vividly. There’s something especially gruesome about that little dog at the bottom, sniffing, if not lapping, at a puddle of blood. “Did Titian know that really human life was awful,” Murdoch writes in Henry and Cato, “that it was nothing but a slaughterhouse?” Short answer: yes....”