primus amor phoebi

Lover of mine, 

I write to you from the 25th floor of a fairly ugly building, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows exposing the twinkling lights of center city. This is where I usually go to watch the sun set.

You've been on my mind quite a bit lately, now that the weather is turning warm and summer is again upon us. Today, when the sun peaked across the horizon, it was a morn of Rome and May. I wonder, did you feel it today, too?

Speaking of which, I've been thinking about Phoebus these days. I could use some of his rays, it seems, as Scotland was none too kind in the vitamin-D department and I've yet to recover. And I've also been chewing over that whole Daphne and Apollo story. Still. Always, I think.

For my Ovid class, we were assigned to dig deep into a myth. Really deep. We were to analyze the myth's language, the art it's inspired, the science and cultural heritage of some aspect of the tale, and how we use the story to understand some facet of our lives. We were to inhabit the space of the myth, and then write. Of course I chose ours.

I don't know if you will ever read this, but in case you do, here goes:

Daphne and Apollo

To me the Daphne and Apollo myth is one of beginnings. Both intellectually and personally, I understand the story to be one of commencement: the inevitable growth out of and away from, but always due to the very existence of, the fated first. This first love—“not the fruit of random chance,” as Mandelbaum translates the Ovid—was introduced to me by my first love, a rugby-playing classicist who would one day break my heart.

The summer before I left for college, he and I joined my parents for a sleepy week on the Delaware shore. Reclined on terrycloth blankets, pale skin burning, we lost ourselves in separate literary worlds. Excitedly preparing myself for Penn, I consumed the freshman reading project, a dull non-fiction tome about sanitation. He, as usual, had his Roman nose resolutely pointed toward an ancient epic—for academics or pleasure, the difference never mattered.  

“You’re a lot like Daphne, you know,” he told me. “Who?” I asked. “You’ll meet her one day,” he responded, smiling, and returned to his reading.

Perhaps fittingly, Ovid initiates his magnum opus with a tale of the god of poetry. This time, though, Apollo finds himself in pursuit not of the terrifying Python, but of a woman. Ovid chooses this story of first love—primus amor Phoebi—as his first full-scale love story in the Metamorphoses. Theirs is the first story following the great flood survived by the pious couple Deucalion and Pyrrha, and as Mother Earth, Alma Tellus, sighs, reestablishing balance and repopulating her fields and mountains, newly dried from the watery deluge, Ovid reminds us:

For, tempering each other, heat and moisture

engender life: the union of these two

produces everything. Though it is true

that fire is the enemy of water,

moist heat is the creator of all things:

discordant concord is the path life needs.

How telling, then, that Apollo, the god of the unrelenting sun, and Daphne, “daughter of the river-god/Peneus,” mark the movement into Ovid’s tale. Apollo, “aflame with love,” chases fair Daphne, whose hair “streamed in the breeze” as she recedes from his pursuits, as all rivers according to their nature must. Balancing one another—the pursued and the pursuer, the lover and the beloved—the pair initiates the subsequent, interwoven myths of metamorphosis. They introduce to us Ovid’s literary realm of tension and resolution in which, according to Italo Calvino, “interpenetration between gods, humans and nature… clash and balance each other out.”

The Latin text itself is imbued with allusions to other literary commencements, including the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. Ovid carefully phrases his dactylic hexameter to signal to us other famous beginnings in epic poetry. For example, Virgil’s Aeneid opens by describing the hero Aeneas sailing from Troy to the shores of Italy:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris

Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit

litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto

vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram …

Aeneas’ journey, a story of finding—indeed, founding—one’s home, is guided by Apollo, the same god who stars in numerous tales of love, lust, and longing in Ovid. Homophony connects Vergil’s famous opening lines, the canonical initiation of the epic, to Ovid’s retelling of Apollo’s first love. Primus ab oris in Virgil becomes primus amor in the Ovid. Juno’s wrath, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, is replaced by the mischievous vengeance of the boy-god Love whose archery is responsible for Phoebus’ impassioned longing: saeva Cupidinis ira, writes Ovid. In this way the language itself situates Daphne and Apollo in a tradition of birth and beginning—a foundation from which something new grows and blossoms.

During that week of tanning and swimming, reading and loving, we would sneak out of the rickety, sun-bleached house each night. After closing the screen door slowly to avoid the telltale squeak, our bare toes squished into the sand, still hot from the day, as we walked to our favorite spot. We climbed the pastel ladder of the abandoned lifeguard tower and situated ourselves gazing upward, to feast our eyes on the stars. “I will love you forever, you know,” we promised. And I remember wondering: what does it mean, to be a first love? When you feel it, the emotion is so very singular, pointed, and blessed; I could not imagine a separate reality. But we were only teenagers, and we knew life might happen. We knew the sun would rise, the vacation would end; we knew our plans might become unfulfilled what-ifs, infinite potentiality.

Haunting the halls of Rome’s Galleria Borghese, one can find today an evocative memorial to almost-achieved love, frozen in eternity. “Even the gods must be baffled/By richness of change and becoming,/By the anguish of answered prayer,” mused poet George Garrett as he contemplated Bernini’s sculpture Apollo and Daphne.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned the piece, an exemplar of seventeenth-century sculpture, in 1622 as an addition to his already impressive collection of antiquities and contemporary masterpieces. Bernini, a prominent intellectual of his time, was assuredly inspired both by Ovid’s retelling of the myth and by other artistic renditions, such as the second-century marble Apollo Belvedere, a copy of Leochares’ fourth-century BCE bronze original, and the poem “Dafne,” written by Giovanni Battista Marino and published just two years before Bernini began work on his. He sculpted the work over three years, beginning when he was only twenty-three years old, and paused in the middle to sculpt David. The finished product is the last of Bernini’s mythological group sculptures and thus represents a milestone in the artist’s career.

For Bernini, like Ovid, metamorphosis became an “integral part of his creative process and artistic vocabulary.” Bernini translates into figure the poetic description of the strikingly beautiful, unattainable Daphne and the handsome god Apollo in pursuit of his love. The metamorphosis depicted by Bernini’s transformation of shapeless stone into formed flesh—of a terrified woman into tree, of hope into disappointed shock—parallels the literary realm created by Ovid, which Calvino understands as a “space… densely packed with forms which constantly swap size and nature, while the flow of time is continually filled by a proliferation of tales and cycles of tales.” By transforming the story into sculpture, he has changed Ovid’s tale into something other than narrative. He has turned a moment of flight into stillness, the verbal into visual, story into snapshot. The viewer, then, is able to incorporate this moment into her individual experience of the myth via memory and imaginative musing.

These days, I look at old photos and my cheeks recall the salty gusts that sent my hair streaming as we rode a black tandem bike south on Coastal Route 1. Through a summer shower we peddled, my fist clutching the hem of his gray t-shirt, until we dipped our front tire into the Atlantic. I wondered, that summer, why my hair tie suddenly became more meaningful to him, why he made certain that one was always wrapped around his wrist. Now I know. I really was like Daphne, after all, who “around her hair—/in disarray—she wears a simple band.” Apollo’s first thought on beholding Daphne is, indeed, her hair:

Spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos

Et ‘Quid si comantur?’ ait …

…He looks at Daphne’s hair

as, unadorned, it hangs down her fair neck,

and says: ‘Just think, if she should comb her locks!’

Like Bernini’s nymph, once I had become the beloved, the object of impassioned romantic pursuit, I relinquished my hair band. Bernini sculpts his Daphne with flowing, untied hair as Apollo wraps his hand tenderly around Daphne’s waist.

Yet, just as Apollo reaches the flowing locks that first captivated his eyes and heart, Daphne “feels his breath upon the hair that streams down to her neck” and prays to her father Peneus, entreating him to “‘transform, dissolve/my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well!” As Phoebus tantalizingly approaches the object of his desire and places his hand upon her beating heart, Daphne changes into an entirely new figure; he can “only touch the locks of Daphne’s hair with his insubstantial breath.” Bernini captures in marble the transformation that follows. Daphne’s feet turn to root, her torso becomes trunk, her fingers sprout twig, and her head becomes the crown of a tree—the laurel. “And yet/Apollo loves her still,” Ovid tells us, as Apollo proclaims “arbor eris certe mea”—“certainly you shall be my tree.”

Poet John Fuller writes about this moment of transformation in “A Footnote to Ovid”:

Arbor eris certe mea (Metamorphoses, I)

Run slowly now. And I won’t follow faster.

Let me without pursuit catch up with you.

Or if my question fails, go on, go on.

But slower now. For see, it puzzles you,

You put down roots into my patient ground.

The tree stirs, seems to be saying yes:

Art is appeased. The slim girl running still.

At what moment does Apollo succeed in his pursuit? (Does he?) Does Daphne truly escape? (Does she want to?) Fuller complicates the simplistic dualities of success and failure, hope and disappointment, and desire and rejection. Daphne morphs into a tree, an organism rooted to the ground yet perpetually shifting, growing fresh rings of bark, sprouting leaves, shedding petals, absorbing rays from the sky, and drinking water from the soil. “The tree stirs,” Fuller writes, showing that the laurel retains her autonomy, able to quiver her twigs in consent. The new paradigm between the lovers is a fresh start, as Apollo will forever wear a piece of his first, his Daphne.

Bernini, too, integrates the persistence of time into his sculpture. Wilkins argues that the statue, today, is situated inappropriately in the middle of a room in the Villa Borghese; previously it was placed against a wall, near the entrance, allowing the viewer to see, at first, only Apollo’s back and then experience the narrative as she walked gradually around the sculpture, slowly perceiving Daphne’s transformation. It is in this way that “Bernini has incorporated the fourth dimension—time—and in that fourth dimension he has captured the spirit of Ovid’s epic change.” Indeed, Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel tree belongs both to the moment but also to the temporal expanse, in which innumerable instances of change have preceded us and will follow.

He and I cast a fleet of sailboats to the sea of the hardwood floor that summer, scattered the sand-worn panels with scrunched, white tissues soaked in the tears of goodbye. “We’ll never survive college,” I lamented as he held me, trying to convince me otherwise. “It’s a choice, Lauren. We get to write our own ending. But, just so you know, I’ll carry your laurels with me everywhere.” “You’ll what?”

Ovid’s tale of Daphne and Apollo succeeds the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulating the flooded earth by throwing the “bones/of the great mother” behind them as they exit the temple of Themis. “By the great mother, the earth is meant; and bones, I think, mean stones,” Deucalion reasons, and as he and his wife toss the stones behind them, the rocks lose their hardness and soften into changing forms of nascent humanity, “the kind of likeness that a statue has/when one has just begun to block the marble.”

In this way Bernini gives form to Ovid’s existential understanding of stone—an essentiality of humanity, literally born of stone. Out of the most elementary material, rock, both Ovid and Bernini depict “the process of transformation—this most unlikely and fantastic phenomenon—[as one] reduced to a sequence of quite simple processes.” In Bernini, then, we find the “ultimate paradox of mimetic sculpture in marble, where simultaneously stone is flesh, flesh is stone.” Indeed, what could be more natural, more inevitable, more essential than change?

It is through this inevitability, this growth following birth, that we receive the mythological origin of the laurel wreath, the crown of “Roman chieftans” and of Apollo, the eternal poet, himself. The symbolic nature of the laurel as victory has been used from ancient times, crowning Olympic victors in ancient Greece and successful military commanders in Rome. Today, we chide one another for “resting on your laurels,” and grant with due respect the terms baccalaureate and poet laureate. The imagery has also used in literature, poetry, and art to symbolize victory.

Petrarch, for example, writes about his mortal beloved Laura, who like Daphne could never be physically obtained. Thus she is reconstituted in the sounds of her lover’s poetry—l’aura, the air—and in return she bestows the laurel crown—lauro—of artistic immortality upon her lover, a gift of eternal fame. Bolland argues that Petrarch’s treatment of the Daphne and Apollo myth, explored through the distance he suffered from his own beloved, was so influential in its romantic recasting that he influenced the subsequent Renaissance writers, readers, and artists who encountered the tale.

“‘Never lose/that loveliness, o laurel, which is yours!’” Apollo entreats Daphne as he caresses her branches and kisses the whorls of her trunk. Ovid tells us: “With new-made boughs/the laurel nodded; and she shook her crown,/as if her head had meant to show consent.” The nymph has become flora, at least in the eyes of her beloved, and she is thus destined always to soak up his rays to ensure her growth. The bay laurel, biologically Laurus nobilis and Daphne in Greek, is an aromatic evergreen tree commonly used medicinally and gastronomically. Also known as Sweet Bay, it can grow to be quite tall, reaching its branches toward the heavens. It prefers warmer climates and grows best in full sun.

I wonder if I will ever return to that stretch of sand in Delaware. And if I do, I wonder who will stand beside me. Just as the tale of Daphne and Apollo initiates a series of discoveries, adventures, beginnings, and transformations, I feel myself at the precipice, the entry to adulthood. My Apollo and I whispered our future to one another on that well-worn lifeguard chair and in a dingy hotel in London and atop smoothed boulders parting a Maryland stream. We always skipped from the now—the first, the start—to the end, the finality that just had to be true. “When I die,” he would say, “I want to do it in love with the world, or with someone far more important.”

But like a chase through the woods or penning an epic poem or sculpting a masterpiece, the journey is all. The beginning, the end—these are merely points on a continuum. We live for and in the middle, the A to B between the You and the Other. Whether adorned by laurel branches or a hair tie, whether dodging tree trunks or sea-infused raindrops, the flight is the space in which we reside. As humans we are at home in movement.

And so, when Daphne turns root, when Apollo asks of her Be a form of devotion, she tells a fib. To become someone’s memorial—to let him prune your branches in victory—is to lose humanity, the essential self. If Daphne is still Daphne, as I believe she is, as seemingly Bernini and Ovid and Petrarch do as well, she will never be merely an evergreen tree. Indeed, she continues to run, changing and moving and growing, and in that sense, both lovers receive what they truly wanted from the other.