1.) Orion.
In the Works and Days of Hesiod, Orion is also a constellation, one whose rising and setting with the sun is used to reckon the year.
There are various stories pertaining to him:
According to this version, Orion was the son of the sea-god Poseidon and Euryale, daughter of Minos, King of Crete. Orion could walk on the waves because of his father; he walked to the island of Chios where he got drunk and attacked Merope [see March 18 #1: Pleiades], daughter of Oenopion, the ruler there. In vengeance, Oenopion blinded Orion and drove him away. Orion stumbled to Lemnos where Hephaestus — the lame smith-god — had his forge. Hephaestus told his servant, Cedalion, to guide Orion to the uttermost East where Helios, the Sun, healed him; Orion carried Cedalion around on his shoulders. Orion returned to Chios to punish Oenopion, but the king hid away underground and escaped Orion's wrath. Orion's next journey took him to Crete where he hunted with the goddess Artemis and her mother Leto, and in the course of the hunt, threatened to kill every beast on Earth. Mother Earth objected and sent a giant scorpion to kill Orion. The creature succeeded, and after his death, the goddesses asked Zeus to place Orion among the constellations. Zeus consented and, as a memorial to the hero's death, added the Scorpion to the heavens as well.
...the gods Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon come to visit Hyrieus of Tanagra, who roasts a whole bull for them. When they offer him a favor, he asks for the birth of sons. The gods take the bull's hide and ejaculate or urinate into it and bury it in the earth, then tell him to dig it up ten months later. When he does, he finds Orion. This explains why Orion is earthborn.
...[a] source tells two stories of the death of Orion. The first says that because of his "living joined in too great a friendship" with Oenopion, he boasted to Artemis and Leto that he could kill anything which came from Earth. Earth objected and created the Scorpion. In the second story, Apollo objected to his sister Artemis's love for Orion, and, seeing Orion swimming with just his head visible, challenged her to shoot at that mark, which she hit, killing him. He connects Orion with several constellations, not just Scorpio. Orion chased Pleione, the mother of the Pleiades, for seven years, until Zeus intervened and raised all of them to the stars. In Works and Days, Orion chases the Pleiades themselves. Canis Minor and Canis Major are his dogs, the one in front is called Procyon. They chase Lepus, the hare, although Hyginus says some critics thought this too base a prey for the noble Orion and have him pursuing Taurus, the bull, instead.
And then there are many other variants I choose not to include here.
There is also the madness of interpretations!:
The 16th-century Italian mythographer Natalis Comes interpreted the whole story of Orion as an allegory of the evolution of a storm cloud: Begotten by air (Zeus), water (Poseidon), and the sun (Apollo), a storm cloud is diffused (Chios, which Comes derives from χέω, "pour out"), rises though the upper air (Aërope, as Comes spells Merope), chills (is blinded), and is turned into rain by the moon (Artemis).
The 19th-century German classical scholar Erwin Rohde viewed Orion as an example of the Greeks erasing the line between the gods and mankind. That is, if Orion was in the heavens, other mortals could hope to be also.
The Hungarian mythographer Karl Kerényi, one of the founders of the modern study of Greek mythology, wrote about Orion in Gods of the Greeks (1951). Kerényi portrays Orion as a giant of Titanic vigor and criminality, born outside his mother as were Tityos or Dionysus. Kerényi places great stress on the variant in which Merope is the wife of Oenopion. He sees this as the remnant of a lost form of the myth in which Merope was Orion's mother (converted by later generations to his stepmother and then to the present forms). Orion's blinding is therefore parallel to that of Aegypius and Oedipus.
In Dionysus (1976), Kerényi portrays Orion as a shamanic hunting hero, surviving from Minoan times (hence his association with Crete). ...he turns Orion into a representative of the old mead-drinking cultures, overcome by the wine masters Oenopion and Oeneus. (The Greek for "wine" is oinos.)
The 2002 opera Galileo Galilei by American composer Philip Glass includes an opera within an opera piece between Orion and Merope. The sunlight, which heals Orion's blindness, is an allegory of modern science.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_%28mythology%29
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2.) Et maintenant un peu sur le mention de Philip Glass:
As Galileo marches backward from old age to childhood - portrayed in turn by tenor John Duykers, baritone Eugene Perry and (in a non-singing role) young Zach Gray - he traverses a spectrum of emotional lights from grim resignation to bright confidence to the thrill of the dawning of intellectual curiosity.
Imagine the life of a flower filmed in fast motion, to show in minutes the cycle of bud, bloom, closing and decay - run backward. By reversing the timeline, Glass and Zimmerman create not only a happy ending for the opera, they also show that whatever the disappointments of Galileo's life, his vision and work made his life an exemplar of the purpose of humanity. The thesis of the opera is: Our job as a species is to understand the universe.
The concept forms fully in the gorgeous, closing set piece. The conceit is that the child Galileo and the child version of his future patroness, Duchess Christina, are attending a court opera by his father, Vincenzio Galileo. The subject of the opera-in-opera is the love of the hunter Orion for Merope, who represents the moon. Her enraged father, played by Andrew Funk - who, tellingly, also plays the scheming Pope Urban VIII - blinds Orion.
Zimmerman captures exactly the gem-like miniature pageantry of early Baroque opera, with Orion, the moon goddess Merope (radiant dancer Tess Given) and the sun goddess Eos (Berneche, again [who plays Galileo's daughter, Maria Celeste, in a 'touching scene' earlier]), elaborately costumed as celestial bodies. Blind Orion makes his way across the sky from beloved moon to healing sun, whose warming grace restores his sight.
Orion, of course, is an allegory for both Galileo and humanity, whose blindness will eventually be cured by the sunlight of science. As Galileo takes his place beside his dear Maria Celeste - who preceded him in death and who is now an angel - his sight is restored. The entire company ends the opera with a minimalist chorale that is a paean to both clarity of thought and wonder at the miracle of the universe. The text is from an old English hymn Galileo once quoted in a letter:
Forever and forever, our Lord has set the ways
Of the moon, the sun, the stars, in their ever-winding maze.
from http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=55190
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What they seek to capture, which only becomes clear in the second half of this 100-minute one-act opera, is the grandeur of Galileo's vision of the heavens. That was no mere matter of lifting a telescope to his eye, but of scales falling from his eyes.
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3.) The humanism of the Glass opera interpretation is too simple. I haven't seen the opera, but based on what the article is saying, either it or the opera is, to me, shall we say, too simple. I wouldn't doubt it's in the opera: I can begin to sense where Philip and I differ.
Basically what's on my mind is an objection to the movement towards sun as progressive. Sun and moon continually cycle. It's beautiful that Orion's blinded by the moon, whose father resonates (resonates because the same actor plays both parts) with the steadfast pope who condemns Galileo as a type of Orion. (Orion's actually blinded by the moon's father in this opera; the previous sentence relects my curiosity.) Orion's a lover of the moon. (As Kinski says in Nosferatu to Jonathan: you are like the villagers, you cannot place yourself in the soul of the hunter...Orion, the Hunter.)
Orion stumbles towards the sun, the cyclical weeping of motion, resonating (same actor in these two parts - as the sun and Maria - as well) with his daughter Maria. I don't agree that "Orion, of course, is an allegory for both Galileo and humanity, whose blindness will eventually be cured by the sunlight of science." Orion clearly resonates with Galileo, and "humanity", if you want to put it that way, but I don't see his blindness as being cured by the sunlight of science. Maybe this article writer (artician?) does. Maybe Philip does. I see it as desperate hunching from one to the next: I imagine the sun blinding and clawing at the eyes, like Nosferatu, like Tristan (of Wagner's persuasion). I imagine a vulture of a sun, not in the ways of Prometheus, not in the ways we speak of it.
Do I smell Campbell?
I had something but I lost it. And so I am proud to say that this is not complete.
4.) Arrowroot flower
Prayer-plant flower
Now for something completely different. My mom gave me a prayer-plant a while ago, so called because it's leaves fold up as if in prayer at night. Apparently, it's in the Marantaceae family, also known as the Prayer-Plant Family or the Arrowroot family. Yes, it seems related to arrowroot. More specifically, the one I've got seems to be a Maranta leuconeura kerchoviana.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marantaceae
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