PASSION

I’m reading Rachel Pollack’s novel Temporary Agency and while listening to the sublime Nima ben David’s playing on one of my favorite instruments, the bass viola da gamba, I stop at Rachel’s epigraph for Part Two from Euripides: “I pray that love may never come to me with murderous intent, in rhythms measureless and wild.” Nima stretches her fingers on the neck of the instrument in an impossible way, weaving her touch with the vibrations from her bowing in such a way that I feel penetrated in both my vision and my gut. This instantly reminds me of Rachel’s other book: The Body of the Goddess in which she uses this epigraph from Judith Guest’s Miss Manners for one of her chapters: “Ways of doing things may be new, things to be done are generally not.” The bass goes very low on four strings at this point and I hide quickly in Euripides’s prayer. I search for the word of my passion. In Euripides’s time, the Greeks never wrote obituaries. They posed only one question: did the dead have a passion? The text escapes through the soundscape, and a gate opens.