A Muse of Fire

A Muse of Fire

[It] was both a plunge into carnal oblivion, and a flight from memory and grief.
More than that, I now see it was a frantic attempt to beat back death.
~W. Styron, Sophie’s Choice

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O For a Muse of Fire…
~W. Shakespeare

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[O my reader, who wishes me to comfort you with lovely lies; you wish me to tell you that her end– the despisèd Lisa’s– was beautiful. Shall I?— shall I tell you what you wish to hear, in poetry that would soften your anger, even your hate for this woman, and that would wring from you the grief you are certain she does not deserve? Shall I say she burned up in a flame of her own making, a fallen firebird unseen yet unashamed, there in the ancient dark with him?— shall I paint here with my words a haunting scene in which once again she cried out let me go, and in which, once again, Vincent refused, staring down Death Himself until the very last?— that he bore witness, that he did not let her go until he could feel the life leave her and knew her to be free at last from the childhood terrors that drove her farther than anyone had ever dreamed for her— anyone but Vincent, that is?

Shall I promise you she did not suffer, or not more than she could bear, or not for long?

That I cannot do for you, O reader;

What I can tell you is what she had, right to the end:

The gift of flight.]

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To any other eye she is gone already, to any other eye but his her immobility would render her invisible there where she rests against the rock wall of the listening chamber, her face impossibly translucent now under the vintage scarf where her hair used to be, her elegance undiminished as she strains toward the music with what strength remains, her eyes open, fixèd, ever, on some magical mark only she can see, some vanishing point in her imagination that he has never seen, himself, except in the evidence: she must move toward it or die.

It is more than dance, in her.

It is flight.

So, it is her stillness, then, that stops his breath? For when has she ever stopped moving? Even in trance her body’s electrical field has always trembled and sparked with life; even in repose she has always radiated the heat, the life that whispers immortality, until now, until tonight;

he breathes her in, parsing every molecule for information, no longer even attempting to brace himself against the inexorable power of a scent that ribbons deeply through him, still and always, tying him to his most essential self, no matter the passing of time and fantasy, no matter a new love and a new loss as catastrophic as the first even as, failing and falling in grief, he was caught and held fast by a lifeline so unexpected it has redefined him to himself– that of the gift of his son by Catherine, giving new life in the face of implacable death;

…this scent, even here even now, binds him helplessly to his earliest awareness of her and of himself as her creature, everything he was and ever hoped to become inextricably linked to this consuming and ineffable longing, this intoxicating free-fall of desire– of limitless possibility– and equally of annihilating shame and of the end of his youthful illusions…

..this scent, her scent… it has changed— no, not changed, but is shot through, now, with an oily, acrid blackness that, in his mind’s eye, seems to overtake the smoky blue light of the chamber a little more with each throb of her athlete’s heart,

and his own sinks as he recognizes the lethal cocktail in her bloodstream, as he hears the poison lapping every cell…

It’s the Canadian tonight.

He cannot tell if this is her observation or a request for confirmation that she still has her wits about her in spite of the morphine.

Yes, he tells her. Samson et Delila set in the Algerian war.

There is a moment. She closes her eyes.

He’s not crazy, you know.

I know, just “esoteric,” says Vincent, wondering if they are speaking of the fiery octogenarian conductor, or the young Syrian-born choreographer who almost missed the opening of his own ballet due to a mistaken listing on a U.S. no-fly list.

He continues, Mary read us the piece in this morning’s Arts Section. It opens with a story about you and Twyla and Peter Martens that first year. He said he was too nervous to meet you so Peter fetched an autograph from you and brought it out to him after the party.
He pauses, then adds if you wish, I can read it to you after you’ve had some more rest.

Vincent thinks he sees a slight nod, and he waits, his eyes on the almost imperceptible rise and fall of her chest under the rich russet folds of her cashmere wrap, deftly arranged to obscure the chemo shunt above collarbones sharp as knife blades; but she says nothing more and he takes a chance.

Where is Dmitri? Vincent hopes his tone conveys no jealousy, only concern.

Prague, she answers; then, I let him go. His mother is unwell.

Does he know? he asks her, though he can guess.

He hears her answer though she does not speak it aloud:

No.

No; at her end of course she has run from everyone who loves her. It is so like her, to run;

from everyone but him.

I saved her life, bringing her down here, and the clumsy boyish missteps she took in stride so terrified Father he banished her, as if it were her fault, as if she were some siren and not just a child, as I was, and she was thrown out of the only home she had ever known because I loved her. But I am not a boy anymore, and even now she has somehow found the strength to brave the enduring mistrust and repudiation of the only father she ever had, to come back, to come home.

To me.

I am Home to her….

And now, now that it is too late, her flight has brought her back full circle to the place where she started: with me.

Was there no treasure jealous death would not steal away from him?

–to have so deeply loved and been loved in return, not once but twice in one lifetime, by two women equally extraordinary even as they seemed, on the surface, so unutterably dissimilar– and to have lost each before the great temple of love had been built, before the union had been truly and deeply satisfied in both the spirit and the flesh–

The crushing injustice of this echoes through him as a series of explosions, breaking, breaking, blind Sampson bringing down the temple…

 

* * *

Once blind, now, at last, Vincent sees:

For us, the left-behind, it was too easy to tell ourselves that hers was a flight from something: demons, love, responsibility, adulthood, entanglement, commitment, boredom, shame, restraint, mediocrity….. insignificance.

But now, too late, he realizes that hers was a flight toward something, not away; a yearning for something holy, something sacred, something which we could not even imagine, and which she could not explain to anyone, even if they had cared to listen to what she had to say, demanding from her instead only her physical beauty and transcendent artistry, only the haunting and indelible stories written on her body as she danced, her dreamy smile covering a thousand deeper truths the audience would carelessly attribute to mere technical perfection, if they thought about it all.

 

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From the program notes for Djimon Bargozsy-Al’ashar’s 2016 ballet Samson et Delila:

Samson (Hebrew‬,שִׁמְשׁוֹן‬, Shimshon, “man of the sun.”) The biblical account states that Samson was given immense strength to aid him against his enemies and allow him to perform superhuman feats. Betrayed by Delilah, Samson loses his strength and he is captured by the Philistines who blind him by gouging out his eyes. One day, the Philistine leaders assemble in a temple for a religious sacrifice to Dagon, one of their most important deities, for having delivered Samson into their hands, and they summon Samson so that those gathered in the temple— 3,000 Philistines— may watch as he is forced to perform.

When he is led into the temple, Samson asks his captors to let him lean against the supporting pillars to rest. He prays for strength and God gives him strength to break the pillars, causing the temple to collapse, killing him and all those inside. After his death, Samson’s family recover his body from the rubble and bury him near the tomb of his father Manoah.

The Bible does not mention the fate of Delilah.