Cupid and Psyche, Part III: Aphrodite Gets Out Of The Tub At Last

First: I was part of a conversation about book publishing at Charlotte Shane’s Meant For You newsletter this week, if you’d care to read it.

“And of course there's a whiff of coping mechanism to ‘it's nice not to be overscheduled,’ isn't there? The implication being that one is otherwise so successfully busy that downsizing comes as a relief. When of course if I were to be overscheduled because the book was such a runaway hit, I would cheerfully abandon the ‘this little house is just the right size for me!’ approach and plaster my social media with whistle-stop tour graphics. I would love to be overbooked. ‘Him again? He's everywhere!’

I do want things. I want the books to be good, I want the readings to be well-attended, I want my readers to be conscientious and intelligent and tasteful. I don't want to feel contempt for myself or for others. I sometimes find publication day/week anxiogenic, but rarely deranging.”

Second: I’ll be speaking in Mankato this October at the annual Betsy-Tacy convention, if you’re in Minnesota and want to hear me discuss the work of Maud Hart Lovelace.

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The story of Cupid and Psyche, broadly, is of the most bumbling marriage between two gorgeous fools ever contracted. Psyche is a young woman who is so beautiful that everybody hates her; Cupid is the darling rascal of Heaven with a serious case of small-dog syndrome, since no one, least of all his mother Aphrodite, has ever bothered to discipline him as he tears about in the nude flinging arrows at people. Aphrodite, for her part, is the most ruthlessly committed boy-mom this side of Norma Bates…

Previously: Part I, marrying Amelia Bedelia. Part II, it was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well.

[From Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: Adlington version, Bulfinch version]

Bedaubed, at this point, with equal parts mud and contrition, Psyche set off for the nearest temple of Aphrodite. “The most likely outcome is that she will kill you outright,” Demeter had said by way of farewell, “although it’s certainly possible, if she is feeling particularly capricious, that she will first turn you into a hind or a squirrel, to be torn apart by dogs. And Aphrodite very often feels particularly capricious, which is why I make sure my temples are always built at a considerable distance from hers.”

Psyche thanked her prettily: “I wish you had been Cupid’s mother, good lady.” But evidently this was the wrong thing to say, because Demeter stiffened and went white and after another minute turned into a bushel of wheat. Psyche was young, and certain allowances must be made in favor of beauty and naïveté, but while a god may freely criticize another god before a mortal (in fact most of them do), it is never an invitation to join in that criticism yourself.

Incidentally, by this point both of Psyche’s sisters had thrown themselves off of a great stony precipice, where their bodies and the various sundry parts of their bodies were scattered in the valley below, and torn on the rocks, and made prey for birds and wild beasts, as punishment for being sisters.

Cupid, for his part, was still in such agony from the burn he had gotten from the oil of Psyche’s lamp, that he had turned into a white gull. But turning into a white gull can only alleviate that sort of injury; it cannot cure. He therefore turned in his course and flew toward the great Ocean, where he found his mother bathing herself, as she did twenty-three hours of the day.

Without looking up from her ablutions, Aphrodite said the following:

1. My son! My son is burned and in danger of gorgeous death!

2. Everyone, every common brute says, speaking evil of all the family of lovely swan-necked Aphrodite, that her worthless son does nothing but stagger after rude mountain bawds in the middle of nowhere. That’s what they’re all saying about us

3. I’ll kill the whore that spoilt your beauty if it’s the last thing ever I do

4. Once I get out of the bath, I mean

5. When did I ever encourage you to marry? What have you ever seen of marriage but envy, discord, and naked hostility? When did ever your mother tell you, “Son, get married”? Was she lovelier than me? I know she was not. There is no woman lovelier than me, and I never told you to get married, not once. So why come crying to me now over it, when I have done nothing but give you good advice?

She said these things all at once, and in a great hurry, and the great white gull that was her son squawked.

“What, has my son gotten love?” she cried, so furious she stood up in the middle of her bath, and changing forever the tidal patterns of the great Ocean. “And what is the wench’s name? Is she a goddess, a nymph, a Muse? At least a Grace?”

“She is called Psyche,” said the bird her son.

“She usurps my beauty — installs herself as vicar of my name — makes a mother-in-law of me, and has not even a portion of immortality to call her own?”

To which the bird could only squawk, as he had not concerned himself with the particulars of Psyche’s antecedents during their courtship. And of course because he was still in a great deal of pain.

“I will give your arrows and your wings to my meanest servant,” his mother said, not minding his answer, “cut off your hair, which I had arranged with my own slender hands, quench thy fire, and mutilate the perfection of your profile, so the harlot your wife shall be reminded I am not to be trifled with,” and had to turn herself into a furious and gorgeous deer three or four times before she could compose herself.

It was at this point that Psyche knocked at the gate to Aphrodite’s temple.

“Put more mud on you,” Aphrodite said. “I won’t speak to you unless you’re good and truly smeared with mud.”

Psyche dutifully smeared, crouching. “O great and holy Goddess,” she recited carefully, “I beg you will take pity on thy servant Psyche, who is weary with sorrow and pursued by birds, and who after all, if you consider the matter carefully, only sought to obey the dicta of Aphrodite herself by falling in love, for is she not the goddess of love herself—”

“Kindly do not teach me what I am the goddess of,” Aphrodite said. “But it is fortunate you are that you have approached me as a servant, and not a daughter-in-law, for such an invitation would have been met with such a scratching and such a pulling of hair that no mortal has seen in living memory. You have set my son on fire and he is now thoroughly spoilt. You will be dead in the blink of an eye, but I am going to have to look at him as long as the Earth remains.”

To which Psyche said nothing, but continued to crouch. This somewhat mollified the wrath of Aphrodite, who often flared up in great rage but just as often forgot it.

“If you would seek the favor of your singed bridegroom,” Aphrodite said, “it will must needs be by virtue of your diligence and housewifery, for I can see the reports of your beauty have been greatly exaggerated. Go to my storehouses. Not my great storehouses, but my lesser storehouses, the ones I keep for my doves, and see what order you can make of the wheat, barley, millet, vetches, and lentils before evening.”

Begrimed in mud and insults she might be; husband a bird; sisters not merely dead but in pieces; faced with ten thousand identical-looking pulses, seeds, and cereals and the impossible task of sorting them out before near-certain doom, but still, Psyche said to herself as she began to divide the nubbins into likely groups, “It’s nice to keep busy.”

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