#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....”