Minimalist poem review.?

I think your best bet is ALWAYS to suspect there's "something deeper" ... just because ...

(1) myths structure symbolic thinking, thinking by analogy. It's almost as if the moment you come into contact with a myth, it yanks you into a realm of meanings ...

(2) re-casting ancient myths in modern language almost demands that we read them in terms of their relevance to the modern world.

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"Artemis"

Artemis

Artemis

so I saw you naked --

well GO and get your g0ddam'd

virginity back

me, me,

I've got to feed my hounds.

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CRITIQUE OF MODESTY. In this case, I’d say the poem can be read as a critique of modesty, suggesting that what passes as modesty is actually a type of sexually-obsessed egocentrism.

Look: you got this guy, Actaeon, who’s in the woods for a legitimate reason. He’s hunting. He’s a hunter. He happens to catch sight of Artemis bathing naked in the wood. He looks at her – again, a not altogether unnatural response. And she turns him into a stag so that he’s torn apart by his own dogs.

The point: It’s the famously chaste who are obsessed with sex AND obsessed with the notion of themselves as some irresistible object of lust. It’s as if without constant vigilance, their incredible powers of attraction are going to unhinge the reason of any man who sees them.

So maybe in this little poem, Actaeon is being honest. He’s got stuff to do. This was a minor weird incident for him – and it’s sex-obsessed Artemis who makes a big federal case out of it. (Facile evidence from 21st-century America: girls who take purity pledges more likely to get pregnant; conservative family values republicans slink around with gay rent boys and restroom gay sex; anti-pornography feminist crusader Kate MacKinnon gets engaged to self-publicized poonhound Jeffrey Masson.)

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SEXUAL HARRASSMENT READING. Or, alternatively, you could interpret it to suggest how men WILL squeeze any type of sleazy sexual contact out of a casual encounter with a woman – and then deny it, suggesting it never happened. This would, I guess, be Actaeon as a work-place sexual harasser.

So he ogles Artemis bathing.

(I mean, this was ancient Greece, for cripes’ sake. Bathing in a stream in the woods wouldn’t have been THAT unusual, and it stands to reason that the polite thing is not to stare. Compare it to getting your jollies watching a young mother breastfeed her baby in the park.)

She calls him on it. Rather than accepting responsibility for his actions, he totally dismisses her claim. She’s crazy. Sex-obsessed *****. He was just doing his job. Whatever.

And she causes him to be torn apart.

In the second reading, he deserves to be torn apart. He uses his job (sneaking around in the woods as a hunter) to gain privileged access to a spectacle that he sexualizes (goddess of the hunt bathing in the woods). Rather than doing the decent thing, he ogles. And then he mocks her beliefs (“GO and get your virginity back”) and hypocritically claims retreats to the pressures of work to end the discussion.

If work was so damn important, why wasn’t he working when he was ogling her in the bath.

In that second reading, there's a poetic justice at work, right? Not just the hunter becomes the hunted (which is a kind of juvenile reversal), but rather this guy who participates in a type of low-level sexual predation (he hunts her with his eyes) ends up prey.

Take that in this direction: One defense that sexual harassers often toss up is that they're being punished (or criticized for) what are basically 100% natural, involuntary responses to sexual stimulus. Okay, so I stare at your breasts. It's not my fault. It's 2 million years of evolution. (Kind of Camille Paglia thing going on here -- that anyone who does anything even remotely sexual should be ready to be yanked into the unchanined dionysiac chaos.)

In the Actaeon story, the hunter is transformed to a stag and becomes the target of 100% natural, involuntary responses on the part of the hounds that he had previously controlled.

But maybe that's a stretch for this poem ...

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Does the poem actually support either of these readings? Both of them? Who knows.

But at base, it presents us with a CASUAL DISMISSAL of another’s MODESTY-RELATED GRIEVANCE.

So maybe it’s up to the reader to decide: is casual dismissal what such grievances deserve? (That’s the “if you don’t want me to stare, stop dressing like that” defense.)

Or is the casual dismissal a typical masculinist strategy to deny responsibility for stepping over fairly clear lines of social decency, manners, and respect for another’s humanity.

Interesting, I think the classical poets tended to split on this question with regards to Actaeon, some of them feeling he got what he deserved, someof them suggesting that the gods are vindictive and a little crazy.