"You live in a world of signs as well as things. In that world, Actaeon fed his lust by gazing upon the goddess Artemis as she bathed; she fed her hounds upon his flesh. Desire and hunger: one body merges with another. The father of Actaeon was Aristaeus, likewise a lecher, who as a young man in a passion chased Eurydice through the woods, where she was bitten by a serpent and died. From the mouth: death. Her lover, Orpheus, went down into the underworld to retrieve her, perhaps the most celebrated catabasis of legend. He sang so sweetly to the god of the dead that he was permitted to bring her back—from the mouth: life. And yet he could not control his love, and looked upon her face too soon, so that she was torn away again. Thereafter he imposed control upon himself. He abjured physical love, and was himself by reason thereof torn and devoured by the affronted Ciconian women, worshippers of Dionysus, the serpent god—again, the serpent—who was slain by Titans as a baby and born again when his still-beating heart was planted in the body of the woman Semele. Those Ciconians who took into themselves the meat of Orpheus were like Semele got with child, and from their loins came monsters such as Cetus. From death by way of that deep and female interior mystery of creation, once more: life. Cetus the dragon plagued Ethiopia and met his end in combat with Perseus. The dead monster became the island of Thera, where after many years the ragged skull of Actaeon was brought. That same Actaeon! We return to the beginning. And from Actaeon’s open mouth—as from the severed head of Orpheus, which sang sweetly as it floated down the river on the tide of his life’s blood—arose a swarm of bees whose honey was a panacea against all but mortal wounds, and whose venom was unmatched in its lethality. Do you understand? The wheel turns and the road goes on and on. The mouth is the gate of life and death. We desire it, are devoured by it, emerge from it. Gods do not die, they are transformed. They are sundered, reforged, slain, reborn, eaten and regurgitated. The debts of our legends are never cancelled, because the seed of their renewal is contained in each payment.