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Who Would Have Thought Hell's a Negative?

On listening to the Hadestown London Cast Recording, it occurs to me that the musical is uniquely suited to marry form and function in the creation of affect. Should you not know Hadestown, then you will have no need to proceed further. However, on the assumption of the essayist that you will either go learn of Hadestown or already know of Hadestown, or are interested without background knowledge, I may proceed. Too full oft does an essay stop to bring the reader up to speed rather than proceed at proper pace: I will offer no such scaffolding here. We are already in the train station, and it is crumbling down.

Hadestown's rewriting of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is in the prime poetic and musical tradition. Concerned with poetry ourselves, and with music, every poet and every writer must grapple with this idea of the death of love, of the loved one. Whether a real death, a real absence, or even a break-up. Mapped properly, the myth is an echo of the stages of grief (Echo herself repeating the same chant to Narcissus). It is the prime mode of poetry, even of music, an attempt to capture that which is gone. Eurydice, representing lost love, representing any love you project onto her, also represents nothing at all. The possibility that there is a nothingness of meaning. A Lacanian Lack. But this means that the thing that makes Orpheus so love Eurydice is that he loses her. In Hadestown, he is working on a song; the song is out of grasp, it is never quite done.

When we set out to play a song, it is different, each note bending time itself and falling away. There is a reason we say that a note, a person, might die. Like the greatest of art, like liquor, music distorts and bends time. And our human preposition of memory means that we can see shadows of the past and the future—the time that might have been, was, is.

The story itself is about the cycle of rebuilding, of retelling, of reframing the story. So pas encore arriving, we by commodius vicus learn at the end that the song will be sung again. And it will have and/or has been: in that Orpheus itself is perhaps the most retold musical of myths, being a myth about music. About how music tries to capture something that is always lost. I say again, notes die and fall off, and as the river is no two moments the same, the same song on repeat is also different. Because time differences us all.

Consider the cycle of the creation of the musical: workshopped, off-Broadway, rewritten, rewritten again, taken to Broadway. A great source is the book explaining the rewriting of the lyrics, "Working on a Song." Anaïs Mitchell details her processes, working with other people, changing the story. The art people love most is collaborative anyway: music requires at least a singer and a listener, even if a singer themselves. Plays, movies, video games are all collaborative. The myth of the isolated artist doesn't even hold for a novelist, who requires editing and an audience. Perhaps the Palais Ideal and the Watts Towers were for no one else, or the Henry Darger plates, but the maker and the viewer are both the same person and a different person (we're back in the river).

Consider the invention of the opera: Orpheus. Consider Sang d'un Poète: Orpheus. Consider Black Orpheus.

The story itself is eternal because loss is eternal, because of the Lack. What makes the search, the quest, the attempt so meaningful is indeed that missingness. Is that functional indefinable object petit a, the Eurydice in us all. That we do not know death, this fragment: we are confronted with the absolute and total Real.

Hadestown is different sonically in each variation. More so than other musicals and operas. Yes, the singers change, the staging changes, but the core remains. In Hadestown, the core remains but is unstable. The work itself is constantly revised, a cycle, and exposed by its very originator (Anaïs). It is a work meant to be transformed over the years, never finished. Valéry said a poem is never finished, only abandoned, and each time I finish Valéry, I arrive at him.

So to with Hadestown. We're going to sing it again: the musical itself is about the very negations that make our life have meaning. Orpheus is searching for a song, but if he completes the song, he loses Eurydice. He searches for Eurydice, love, the Real, and in grasping her, he loses her. This loss was what he wanted—fetishistic disavowal—"I know very well that love is dead, but I will act like it is alive anyway." Persephone herself is embodied negation, her return to the underworld is a desired friction she keeps at bay. Erotic! She is all denial of death, and what more embodied can le petit mort have than the spring becoming the choking death of winter?

Hades is building a wall, but he is never done building the wall. He cannot be because if he finishes the wall, then the wall would not need to be built. Echoes here of Pink Floyd ("Isn't this the place / where we come in?"). His dealing with the lack, his own missing love, is to pretend that it isn't missing. Even Eurydice lacks, is searching for the missing. She is disappointed when Orpheus is so focused on his song, his art, he doesn't notice her death. But in true Lacanian fashion, she is disappointed because she has set herself up for that disappointment. The artist that she loves, the inattentiveness that comes with the hyperfocus becomes the annoyance and the attraction. She loves him, that is, because he cannot be her own projection.

But these things are all subject to revision, to retelling.

That nasty breakup? It wasn't so nasty after all. I miss her not because I miss her but because I miss what my mind has made her now, what it made her then.

That time I fell in love, staring in the eyes of a Palestinian Christian, a teacher whose school was bombed, who never got the chance to play, to swing on a swingset until touring the US with her story, who cried on having to go back to the home she loved?

Perhaps sometimes she thinks of me the same way. It is said that when we recognize the lack within us, then we can have love that is a direct confrontation with the Real. But this is traumatic: "the most merciful thing in the mind .... the inability to correlate its contents," qua Lovecraft. (Even there we arrive at the point, his name Lovecraft and his style about what is missing, the eldritch LACK).

The form of Hadestown, then, is the form of flux. Of eternal revision. It is built to be adaptable. You can set it anywhere, just as with the myth, but it will have core elements, the bohemian ideals.

"On the road to hell there was a railroad line..."
"We're gonna sing it again...."

Because the story itself is unstable, each retelling is unstable. If you try to control it, to define the narrative, it dies. Orpheus and Eurydice is a fluid myth because what we love, what we lack, is fluid. When the thing we love dies, we grieve, and that grieving creates the love ex post facto. We might therefore say the negation of love, that is, death, creates the very love it destroys. An unresolvable tension, unsatisfying except when we bring it to poetry, when we sing through it because then we are in/out of time.

Consider then the joke: a man is discovered cheating on his wife. When asked why, he says, "Because I love you so much I don't want to fall out of love with you. That is why I do those things I want to do with you with her, so you remain the objects of my desires." And when the mistress objects to being so objectified, the man explains to her, "But don't worry, my dear, because with my wife I do the things I would like to do with you: building a home, raising a family, sitting and reading the paper in quiet. That way I will never disrupt my fantasy of you in domestic bliss or my fantasy of my wife as an object of sex!" Each woman is an object petit a precisely because the man projects onto her a lack. (I am aware of the dangers here in calling a woman an object anything, but trust your intelligence to differentiate between objectification and psychological object.) Each woman is love because she is NOT the other woman, the things which she is not are what drive the man's desire: "I see that you are not her (I want you to be her)" being the erotic formula.

A thesis must clearly outline the major points of an argument, précis of what intellectual thought is to come.

Thesis: Hadestown's fluidity and perpetual revisionism negates its own stability, leading it to properly define its own concerns, the intertwining and universal idea that we love more because we lose rather than because we never want to lose.
"We gonna sing it again..."