#the book is wrath goddess sing btw

[catfishofoldin99colours]

oh dear the book is reaching Blorbo levels of a Dangerous Calibre

[black-is-beautiful18]

If you are considering reading Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane…I suggest you don’t. R.M. Virtues on Twitter talks about it and I will link his post, but the book includes racism, transphobia, the butchering of Egyptian lore, making a Black trans character a slave…. As I said, I’ll link RM’s thread about it because he can explain it better than I can.

(This is the book btw)

https://twitter.com/rmvirtues/status/1540007848356110337?s=21&t=avZ1krk-NsqlfdKAjtDzaQ

Here’s another thread:

https://twitter.com/rmvirtues/status/1539625684867227650?s=21&t=avZ1krk-NsqlfdKAjtDzaQ

[wordmakingpoets]

Invocations

Epic poetry is steeped in tradition. It would take like a whole semester to talk about all of these, so I’m going to focus on one element–invocation to the muse.

Homer, Virgil, Milton, and others are known for littering epics with invocations, basically shout-outs to some divinity or other to 1) ask for help with the difficult task of telling an epic 2) make sure they get their facts right 3) engage in the larger tradition of epic (this mostly applies to people who write after Homer). It’s a way to take the burden of the epic off of one man’s shoulders; the epic becomes something greater, a text that the divines already know and reveal to mortals.

The Iliad starts like this: “Sing, goddess, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus…”

Some folks translate “goddess” as “Muse,” likely Calliope, whose domain is epic poetry. Homer talks to her throughout his epics, but it’s this first line I want to focus on.

I’m a massive Ancient Greek nerd. Here’s the verb from this line in Greek: ἄειδε. It comes from the verb for “sing” (you can sort of see the way it turns into the English “audio”). It’s an imperative (aka a command), present tense. In Greek, a present imperative implies a continued action and not a single instance. (My professors example uses “kiss.” Aorist imperative: a peck. Present imperative: make-out session.) When I read ἄειδε, I think of the Phantom of the Opera yelling for Christine to sing at the end of the titular song, especially with the implications that Christine is at his disposal from here on out. I end up hearing it in my head in Ramin Karimloo’s voice whenever I read this line.

If I were to translate this first line and bring over the implications of ἄειδε, it might go like this: “Hey, Calliope–I’m going to need your help for a while. Sing about Achilles and his wrath, and don’t stop until the story is over.”

Homer’s invocation is pretty aggressive, but I didn’t realize it until I compared him to a different invocation, one in this wild mock epic I translated last year. The Battle of Frogs and Mice (which deserves its own post or series of posts later) is a parody of the Iliad and epic in general. It taps into the epic tradition from the very start by using the same meter as Homer–dactylic hexameter–and an invocation. Frogs and Mice starts like this: “Starting from the beginning, I pray from my heart / that the chorus comes down from Helikon on account of the song / I have just set down on the tables at my knees.” This chorus is a chorus of muses, btw. This poet isn’t using the imperative; he’s using a technique called indirect speech. Verbs of feeling, thinking, or saying–or praying–introduce this extra layer of grammar. Instead of putting the clause in quotation marks (aka direct speech), Greek has special ways of signaling this kind of clause. A more accurate translation would be “I pray the chorus to come down from Helikon…” “To come” is an infinitive, conceptual and removed from the speaker, a far cry from the imperative in Homer. (This infinitive construction actually can show up in English, like “I believe him to be a good man.” Sure it sounds a bit archaic, but it’s there.) No more harsh command, no more immediacy, just a prayer for company from the divine. He isn’t even asking the chorus to sing. He just wants them to be present.

Virgil takes the invocation and twists it further. In the first line of the Aeniad, sort of a fan-made sequel to the Iliad, the poet says “cano,” or “I sing.” A first person, singular, present, indicative verb, a third mood different from the previous two. I’m no Latin student, but I do know enough grammar to know how revolutionary this is. Virgil says to hell with the muse. Virgil’s poet sings his song himself. The audacity of this anti-invocation echoes the Aeniad’s foundation in Greek epic tradition (it’s in dactylic hexameter, too) and basically tells the audience, “Y'all remember Homer? I’m gonna do what he did, except totally better.” The role of the poet has shifted to that of conduit for the divine to that of independent maker, creator.

So why think about invocations now, a post-epic world? Invocations remind me a bit of how Lemony Snicket begins his books with a dedication to Beatrice. She’s elevated to something more than human and involved with the story. Dedications aren’t invocations, but I think the traditions are related. There’s something about an artist appealing to an outside source for the storytelling process. And if you choose to use an invocation, you’re tapping into a tradition that has been around for millennia. You’re making a commentary on the function of a poet. You have the potential to twist the tradition into something revolutionary. What if the muse talks back? What happens if the muse never responds? What is a poet independent of the muse? And what kind of poem would Calliope write if she didn’t have to be filtered through a human mouth?

[alicelufenia]

[Image ID] Achilles held the black blade closer. It seemed to her that a spot of red had formed on the metal, and as she looked closer, she saw: where a tiny fleck of seawater had touched the blade, it was changing, blushing red, then flaking orange. This black metal, this strange metal, burned in air--though very slowly.

Sideros. The name came to her like a thought from another mind. This metal also comes from stars. She sighted along the blade, and above her the stars themselves rearranged beyond the clouds, re-forming into different constellations, brighter and closer together--and then her mind was hurtling through the void of the night sky, through time and darkness.

In the infinite dark of the abyss, a glowing cloud rushed inward, swirling, spiraling, brightening, a maelstrom in three dimensions that swept down into itself and burst into white flame. This was the birth of a star: a monstrous thing further across than a hundred thousand seas, its surface burning a million times more brightly than the sun. Glorious, glorious was its youthful splendor, and every fiber of Achilles vibrated to its ineffable song. The light, the heat--

It lasted for a thousand thousand thousand years. It all flashed in an instant. In the heart of the star, something dark began to grow, a star-within-a-star.

The fire of the star created darkness, and the darkness sank deeper within it. The weight of the star grew terrible, and the heat at its heart increased. Premonitions of mortality flashed across its surface, which burned all the more brightly for a time and expanded to a great size, turning redder, darker, hotter, and finally collapsing inward, only to explode into a still-brighter flame.

Now the darkness was its entire heart, and yet a deeper blackness grew within it, an inner heart more brooding and hotter than before, heavier, tempestuous, certain of its own impending death. The star screamed, expanding outward again, red and throbbing, the universe's animus exposed, and again it collapsed and blazed. Again and again its light created darkness, each denser than the last, heavier and more ruthless, hotter and hotter. No clouds were left, only a hell of molten liquid under ever-increasing pressure, changing to heavier and heavier forms, an inexorable contraction without end.

Then everything rushed downward and inward at once. For an instant the star was made of molten glass, and then it was a star of pure metal, star-metal, signifying the end. It burst, erupting like a trillion volcanoes into the abyss. Molten gobbets of blazing ore the size of mountains flew past on every side.

One missile of sideros traveled through the darkness for a thousand thousand years, cooling sometimes to a smooth black orb, heating sometimes to flow and move and warp, and after ten thousand lifetimes, it landed in her hand as a black dagger.

Sideros. The black metal, the star-metal, the death of stars. [/ID]

One of my favorite random things from Wrath Goddess Sing is it has the best description of a fantasy/sci-fi invincible unobtanium metal I've ever read.

In this case it's meteoric iron, which might as well be a super metal in the bronze age Mediterranean world.