Working on a Song

The musical Hadestown is special to me for many reasons which I'll share in time. The purpose of this post is to explain how the main character created by Anaïs Mitchell validated my choice to use narrative as a frame to think about the relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth.

In Hadestown, Orpheus's main objective is to finish and sing a song that will "bring the world back into tune;" a world of extreme weather and in which food won't grow. He attempts to sing his song three times. The subjects of the song stay the same each time: he is describing the relationship between Hades and Persephone. But the story changes each times he sings it. The focus shifts and more detail is added as he gets closer to finishing the song.

"Epic I" describes how the relationship started and what it was like "long ago, before we were on this road." The relationship was characterized by balance and agreement. This didn't mean that it was static. Their arrangement was dynamic, with Persephone walking on Earth for six months, then returning to stay with Hades for the other six. The resulting cycle supported life; "the lives of the people and the birds in their flight."

"Epic II" describes the deterioration of this relationship. When Persephone is gone, Hades grows jealous and doubtful. As a result of the lack of trust, the jealousy, and the doubt, he turns to something else he can control: a labor force that will allow him to extract and hoard riches behind a wall "with a million hands that are not his own." All of this extraction obscures and distracts him from the relationship he used to have with Persephone. He can't hear the song he once heard.

"Epic III" is Orpheus's final attempt to sing the song, this time with Hades as his audience. Orpheus summarizes the story of the love between Hades and Persephone then describes just how much Hades has changed "now that he has everything." Instead of having his arms outstretched to Persephone, he focuses on protecting his outsized power and material hoard. After Orpheus asks Hades "Where is the man with arms outstretched/ To the woman he loves with nothing to lose?" Hades begins to sing the "la la la la la la" phrase, the song of love referenced many times in the story, with his arms outstretched toward Persephone and spontaneously produces a flower. The pair dances.

While developing my environmental studies curriculum, it occurred to me that the three units I was planning mapped onto the three epics that Orpheus sings. The structure of my course converged with Orpheus's songs. The first unit is an overview of Earth systems and the way that they work, the same way Orpheus describes the rhythms of ecological life in "Epic I." The second unit is an overview of the history of human presence in Vermont, highlighting the ways that some human social systems and paradigms lead to negative ecological consequences, the way Orpheus describes the deterioration of Hades and Persephone's agreement. The third unit looks toward the future, exploring ideas around reconciliation and repair with an emphasis on storytelling as an essential part of a life-affirming relationship to the rest of the Earth. "Epic III" invites Hades to sing the old song of love and the couple dances for the first time in a long time.

I've found this framing to be very useful for both my organizing my curriculum and thinking about the relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth in general. Instead of swimming in information and recalling random facts and book titles, I can organize and structure what I know, which means I can more easily convey the ideas to others as well. I see it everywhere. When I created my Are.na account in another attempt to organize what I know, it was the obvious choice for structuring my channels. I recently purchased Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's book What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures and recognized my framing in the epigraph: "For nature, culture, future."

So that's the structure I'll use for this blog: Epic I, Epic II, and Epic III. Some topics, texts, questions, and ideas could fall in more than one. That's okay. Categories fail because the world is made up of nonlinear and messy systems. It's the attempt to contextualize that matters, at least here.