#his idea of love is to transcribe eurydice the way he would transcribe like a nice tree or a bird

[nulfaga]

the world's wife was 99 and eurydice was 2004. whenever i read them together i think ruhl must have taken some cue from duffy consciously or not. (Not because of the very elementary "challenging the roles of women in world mythology" thing but because of the way Orpheus is characterized: as a god-touched scatterbrain who appears harmless and nonthreatening, swept away by his own music, but whose wife is doomed by his talent. prophet and lancer; jesus and judas—except when the lancer is a man, he is doomed as an ordinary person is doomed by a messiah. When she is a woman, she is doomed as a woman is doomed by a famous man, which is much worse because it's BORING)

worse than doom is boring doom that makes you into like a wax figurine of a beautiful eternal muse w/ nothing behind her eyes.