Figure 1. Anselm Feuerbach, Orpheus und Eurydike, 1869. Belvedere, Vienna. Public Domain.
*******
‘— No, I Won’t Do That’
Meat Loaf’s I Would Do Anything for Love inspired social media abuse when the singer died in January 2022.[1] The problem then — these days we mind that less — was his outspoken views on Covid and vaccines. But even apart from his personal thoughts on this or that issue, provoked by the viral, critics and the public had always had trouble with the words from the lead song I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) from the second Bat Out of Hell album, the 1993 Back into Hell, a ‘to hell and back’ production.
At issue was the promise, the words, I won’t do that.
What — one wants details — did that mean?
What wouldn’t Meat Loaf do for love? Whenever they were asked directly, both Jim Steinman, who wrote the song, and Meat Loaf who sung it, would insist that the answer was there in the song. In essence, the song replied to the worry that attentions would drift — sooner or later, you’ll be sleeping around (think Tristan).
To double metonymy is to double its power: Orpheus, the original myth of the myth, who did and did not — and this did and did not is the way of all love songs — retrieve his beloved from hell. Thus Plato’s Symposium mocks Orpheus for his being unwilling to die himself for his beloved, all he wants is to bring her back and all he gets is “an apparition only.”[2] More than 2000 years later, circa 1762, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice repeats this in his opera. ‘Almost’ bringing her back, before Orpheus yielded to the one ‘no’ he needed to remember, to keep as sacred vow, a pact he would not break, that’s a fact, until he broke it: I won’t do that, as the promise he gave Hades to gain access to the underworld.
But you never don’t do the thing, the one thing, you must not do. This Oscar Wilde tells us in the Ballad of Reading Gaol. And so Orpheus was broken until the Thracian women gave his body in pieces — the original corps morcelé, after the Dionysian original, baby Zagreus — to the river, so that his mother, just to quote Milton’s Lycidas, could find only his head.
Where the original art for the album cover of Bat Out of Hell famously featured the cartoon powers of Richard Corben (1940-2020), the long-haired hero seemingly having sex with a motorcycle (I tweeted the album cover), calf-flexing paroxysm, head thrown back, motorcycle emerging from a graveyard — should you be checking the entire cover for context.
By contrast, the album cover for Bat Out of Hell II is comic book vanilla. Well, absent Corben, famous for the over-endowed Den, what else could it be but ‘vanilla’? Not that that’s nothing and so too is the Nick Cage rhythm of Johnny Blaze, Marvel Comics/Gil Kane’s and Joe Sinnott’s Ghost Rider, since morphed beyond those origins — Hollywood, fresh out of ideas for screenplays has long been tapping comic books for films.
Less Corben’s erotic muscularity, Bat Out of Hell II gives us a motorcycle ghost rider on his way to rescue the winged lady perched with the bat, echoes of Plato, on the top of the Chrysler building (the music video alludes to the first album: ‘sometimes going all the way’ — which they, barely seventeen, were planning for that night — ‘is just a start.’)[3]
Cartoon or not, one could compare the iconography of the motorcycle rider on Bat Out of Hell II to the Merode altarpiece Annunciation, featuring a flying soul, with its little cross.
Figure 2. Robert Campin, Merode Alterpiece. Center Triptych. 1427-1432. Cloisters, NYC. Public Domain.
Where Paradise by the Dashboard Light ends with an end-of-time vision of domestic violence, play acted by Meat Loaf on video, I Would Do Anything for Love, is less about a lover’s prowess, everything he can and would not do, extended nearly twelve minutes on the album, but the wonder of connection, of love. Love songs to be love songs try to heighten what most memories of love, even the ‘half-filled cup of coffee’ as Dionne Warwick sings Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s 1969 Odds and Ends. Meat Loaf singing, musing, as he can shift between lyric opera and rock, But — and one needs the conjoined connector for this — I’ll never do it better than I do it with you, there is a pause, a breath, so long, so long.
In various videos singing this, more compactly timed, you can find these online, Meat Loaf’s eyes are sometimes closed, sometimes not. When the operatic vision turns, as opera must, to a duet, there is the small town vision of the woman’s voice, like the excesses of Archilochus’ lyric violence, opera is misogyny and little besides, thus she asks, in the touchingly simple faith of women, ‘the Gretchens’ as Nietzsche teased, if her suitor can or cannot bring this or that to a proposed tryst, Will you get me out of this god forsaken town, turns into pure relief, so easy: is that all you want? Oh I can do that.
As the song goes, it turns out that women already know the tune, cannier in such exchanges than they seem, asking the world and already guessing, Cassandra like, the apocalypse: we all fall down and we all turn to dust. The lyrics are malleable, does she sing we’ll all fall? ashes, ashes, we all fall down: dust to dust?
Age is a thief and, when it is not sudden, death is cut by cut, this would be like Georges Bataille’s surreal description in his Les Larmes d’Eros[4] including horrifyingly arresting images of Lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, a death so slow we barely notice, a death that although officially proscribed since the beginning of the 20th century, is back again, tinier than ever with Lipid Nanoparticles: loss after loss after loss, like marriage, till death: sick with desire, as Yeats teaches, a tattered coat upon a stick, as Shakespeare taught him to say, sans everything.
Steinman’s 1977 I Can See Paradise By the Dashboard Light, with its recollection, of every little thing, as if it happened only yesterday, and all the kids at school, they were wishing they were me that night, with Phil Rizzuto calling the bases as Meat Loaf, presumably ‘takes’ them, if so camp that no one takes offence, remains painfully sexist.
Here I note only the delaying masculine device, pretending an answer while gaming what is sought in the process: Let me sleep on it, I’ll give you my answer in the morning, as Meat Loaf extemporizes. A certain misogyny echoes in the repeated feminine query, Do you love me?
Will you love me forever?
The backwash in the song offers a phenomenology of the bodily surge of eros — like a tidal wave — and true-to-life absurdity in the promise, twice repeated, I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave / That I would love you to the end of time. / I swore that I would love you to the end of time!
The fall out isn’t a retraction. This is bible belt thinking: I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow, and thus the protracted exchange by the dashboard light becomes the longer contours of post-coital, married life, So now I’m praying for the end of time / To hurry up and arrive…
Beginning with paradise taken to eternity, salvation is promised at the end of the order of time.
‘Will You Know My Name?’
Figure 3. Jean Delville, L’ecole de Platon. 1898. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Public Domain.
Where Jim Steinman’s and Meat Loaf’s Paradise By the Dashboard Light begins with the erotic promise of heaven-on-earth, comparable to a classic chrome outline, well known in casual discourse on love and climax, thus the Phil Rizzuto riff, the paradise promised in Judaeo-Christian redemption is an unknown land if it has elements (Dante makes this clear to us) in common with older stories of the afterlife.
And what we know, as Plato reminds us at the end of the Republic: ‘The Myth of Er’, typically unread by philosophers, is that we know exactly nothing about an afterlife: no one has returned, Plato says, and to deal with this nescience, Plato invents a return, not a near death experience, but a fallen warrior, Er, specifically sent back as witness by the judges of the underworld. Thus Plato tells a lie that he tells us is a lie, he calls it a myth, to argue the case for justice, contra tyranny, contra the life of wealth and accumulation that he had already argued in his text: living a good life for the sake, this is how the Republic begins as old Cephalus muses making his preparations for death — initiation rites ensuring a good passage to the afterlife. And this brings us back to the question of the place of women.
Lucian in his Kataplous, his ‘Journey to the Plutonic Realm’[5] as Nietzsche echoes the reference at the conclusion of his Human, All too Human, his ‘Hadesfahrt [Journey to Hades]’[6] emphasizes that — and this is already evident in Homer’s Nykia and it is the very point of ‘blood for the ghosts,’ just to come to voice at all — there are no bodies, no organs, no flesh, no faces, no voices: just shades in the dark and dust. Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran priest, was taken by the metaphor and the third book of Human, All too Human has the pilgrim title: The Wanderer and his Shadow.
There is the mystery of sex in heaven as this is also the question of women in heaven: do they get to go there? Did Orpheus who excluded them from his rites have a point in so doing?
Led Zeppelin’s 1970 (released in 1971) Stairway to Heaven puts a soft misogynist spin on a woman determined to buy her way in.
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to Heaven
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for…
Well sure, but does this lady, Led Zeppelin makes no bones about it, have a chance of getting in in the first place, assuming she ‘gets there’?
There are a range of questions. Are there bodies? Not for the Greeks, just shadows in need of blood as we read in Homer, as Lucian mocks in his several dialogues of the dead: one is stripped, men lose muscular and every worldly distinction and women their beauty. In the Judaeo-Christian vision, we can ask about the resurrection of the body. Maybe it’s easier to ask if angels are sexed (the heavenly ‘Kitzeh’ Vladimir Jankélévitch mentions does not exempt men, not erotically, at least not, after Augustine’s City of God, for the theologians)? Alan Rickman demonstrates the glumly graphic case per contra playing Metatron in a Ken Barbie Doll costume in Kevin Smith’s 1999, Dogma. Jankélévitch pushes the point: “Music of all the arts, is in the end the one most alien to eroticism.”[7]
We know from Empedocles who tells us that he has been there and done that, that the gods dine and Greek myth has them engaging in all manner of physical pursuits, sex, procreation — or we would not have demigods, Christ too, as Hölderlin reminds us, naming him with Dionysus and Herakles — drinking, fighting. Lucian, the first sci-fi author,[8] parodizes the idea of eating and other accoutrements of the afterlife in his discussion of the ‘Isle of Blest’ in his Alethe diegammata [True History], a tale apostrophized as false and thus ‘true,’ qua flagged as false).[9] In his Katharmoi, the pre-Platonic Empedocles tells us he has dined with the gods but we know, and it is Lucian, once again who satirically highlights the point, that the gods only dine on vapors, absent a body unless incarnate in ontic material being (the great Christian achievement, as Archibald MacLeish teases in his 1958, Pulitzer Prize winning J.B., ‘you get your body back’[10]) — the Olympian Zeus excelled in this which quite puts a determinative spin on his divine metamorphoses: as a swan — very Orpheus — an eagle, a shower of gold, making the matter of food and drink for the gods, nectar and ambrosia, more complicated than one might think.
The Greeks might well keep the flesh of their animal sacrifices for their human enjoyment, reserving the fat and the bones for the gods, all the smoke. Gods trade in smoke, as the 7th century BCE Pindar tells us in his second Pythian that Zeus created a phantom cloud, Nephele in the likeness of Hera, to deceive the ill-behaved Ixion, who, meaning to seduce Hera, thus embraced a vapor, leading to bastard progeny, which progeny went off to mate with magnesian mares, thus centaurs.
If Lucifer dreams, as Milton and Goethe restore the sexual dimensionality Augustine’s more exacting theology had excluded in The City of God for both men and for women (both sexes get to go to heaven, neither sex has sex), the question of women remains just to read the gospel: “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”[11] Once again: are the angels sexed? Milton says so: his Lucifer is a fallen son of the divine and Milton’s angels are sexually active, as I am assured by my friend and colleague, the Milton and Swift scholar Frank Boyle. Bryan Carr muses, complicatedly, negatively, on the “Miltonic Lucifer,”[12] and other scholars — there is a large literature — review the evocative, basar achad, One Flesh.[13]
Beyond the angels, the broader question persists.
Like the rich young man who comes to ask Jesus how to be perfect only to learn that for this, exactly beyond keeping the law, beyond following the commandments, he is to sell all he has and then — there is a list — he is give the proceeds to the poor and then he is follow Jesus, no part of which, as he is rich, he is willing to do. The issue is complicated: the current genocide in Gaza, the problem of wealth and the political about which Plato writes,[14] shows the persistence of claims to religious superiority over all other confessions and, similarly, just think of those confessions, the question of women in paradise remains.
Ernest McClain, the Brooklyn College arithmetical musicologist, counts the numbers by way of Gematria: 2 is the first female number, three is the first male number, to muse that in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor freeman, male nor female.[15] Satan can use Eve to undermine Adam, undermining Eve would scarcely count but it is also through woman, through Mary as handmaid, that deity can redeem the world. Jesus is the son of man solely, that is exclusively of the lineage of David, solely through Mary.[16]
When it comes to heaven, we think all kinds of things: rainbow bridge reunions for pets; perfect redemptions; a body at its ideal and thus perfect age (exactly thirty-three), and incorruptible, male, form.
The problem of heaven for women remains a thing.
But what do we know? Eric Clapton and Will Jennings, writing after the death of Clapton’s young son, Conor, ask about the problem of recognition in their 1991 Tears in Heaven. Would you know my name? Maybe it’s true of everyone, bodiless, qua transposed, assuming there is a soul, to the beyond, would it feel the same? Still Clapton is sure: there’ll be no more tears.
And we hear about the virgins promised to martyrs. Dissonant: if there are women there, if there is sex, what do righteous women get? what is promised to women? And we hear that women can get into heaven by the sheer force, intersession, of their sons.
But we don’t believe that. How could we believe that? There are so many different stories. Back to the basics: is there sex? Well, there’s no procreation — Augustine has thought it through — so no lust as he says. But is there gender? Perhaps, he says, this would be theological aesthetics, decoratively so.
I’ve argued that the women excluded from the Orphic mysteries were less than sanguine about this exclusion, if misogynistic readings turn this into garden-variety resentment on the part of the maenads, scorned, competing with the memory of Orpheus’ dead wife (is this so?) and certainly in contest with one other, tearing him in their anger, limb from limb, a compensatory backwash, the vision of selection and loss haunting in (and haunting rock motorcycle ballads), the 1965 Shangri-Las, Leader of the Pack, or of a Lesley Gore kind, her 1963 hit, It’s My Party or, written by Beverly Ross and Edna Lewis, her 1963: It’s Judy’s Turn to Cry.
At issue in raising the question of women in heaven is the theme of the afterlife, the beyond and what it says about, or how it bears on, this earthly life, here and now.
Phil Collins tries to make this point in the official video for his 1989, Another Day in Paradise.
The listener is warned to take care, Collins reminds us of our oblivion, our heedlessness to the heaven all around us. The ones on the street, the beggars we purposefully refuse to see, carefully step over, pass by, an old story that goes hand in glove, thus Ivan Illich also underlines in his reflections on the parable of the Good Samaritan which Illich, being Illich, makes more rather than less problematic as a parable.
The Good Samaritan, Illich tells us, is a Palestinian. One is to “choose,” Illich says, one’s neighbor, and the change or shift from Judaism and the neighbor, like the Greek ‘friend’ that must, as Plato says, this is an old story in archaic Greece, be treated kindly by contrast with the enemy, is that, for Illich, one’s neighbor, this is the shock teaching of the ‘good news,’ no longer includes proximate distinctions or those traditionally made between Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female. The current essay shows how problematic that change has to be. One’s neighbor, Illich argues, must be chosen and can be freely forgotten, Illich will name this ‘sin,’ any time one wishes.
You can think twice.
Going back with a fairly broader sweep to the Eagles, 1976 Last Resort, You call some place paradise, And kiss it good bye, indicting as Plato did, our cupidity, What is yours and what is mine? and our thoughtlessness… or again, In the Air Tonight, for Phil Collins, I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord.
Like The Bee Gees’ Too much Heaven, one can ‘see beyond forever’.
Is love — if it is love —forever and beyond?
There are more truncated reflections and Dylan’s 1973 Knocking on Heaven’s Door takes the perspective of Nietzsche’s ‘military school of life,’ of a dying officer,[17] very male, the first word in the song, is Mama, there is a “badge” of which he should be relieved, and the importance of burying, we can think Antigone, even as one is still alive, this is the knock, and the reference to the dark, It’s getting dark, too dark to see.
There are ways to raise the question of women in heaven but they are elusive. The Blue Oyster Cult’s 1976, Don’t Fear the Reaper, assures us that Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity. Still the language, like that of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1876 Forsaken Garden,[18] reflects on the equanimity transcending both failed and kept promises of eternity, a tiny opera in a poem on what is forgotten and past,
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.
Swinburne’s Victorian voice could not be more contemporary, the poet more blasé: tossing in the dialectic in the tiny word, the logical neutrality of disjunction
Or they loved their life through, and then went whither?
And were one to the end — but what end who knows?
… Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them?
What love was ever as deep as a grave?
They are loveless now as the grass above them
Or the wave.
Swinburne’s poem is not a paradise poem, it is a poem, contra myth, whether of love or death, on the death of death. The stark vision Swinburne gives has been analyzed, one needs the south of England it is said, but the poem’s last line, ‘Death lies dead,’ takes its time to get there.
Here death may deal not again for ever;
Here change may come not till all change end.
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,
Who have left nought living to ravage and rend.
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,
While the sun and the rain live, these shall be;
Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing
Roll the sea.
Like Freud’s fort/da, also Victorian, Don’t Fear the Reaper’s reflex: here, but now they’re gone is magnified by 40,000, again and again, every day, the point being, thus the song, we’ll be able to fly.
Coda ‘Mitsingen’
I end, just as I end The Hallelujah Effect, with Nietzsche on music and what for him mattered as the ineluctably democratic art of tragedy, given that tragedy, in antiquity, was nothing like a night at the opera — apologies to the Wagnerians incapable of reading Nietzsche otherwise. In his first book, Nietzsche had argued that tragedy would involve everyone, without exception.[19] The communal point works in some Neil Diamond concerts: pack up the babies, grab the old ladies. Thus Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show[20] describes a ‘revival’ meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, 1967, as Diamond tells us on the BBC, live in 1971, and as he explains on the Johnny Cash Show, Take my hand, dear God, walk with me this day, In my heart I know, I will never stray, this is the preacher’s sermon, Diamond’s Halle-, Hallelujah.[21] In his live performances, Diamond brings the crowd to sing, like the old red bouncing ball of a television cartoon, as he urges: Sing it now in his Sweet Caroline.[22]
Amen, brother.
For a different century, Nietzsche asks
“What would we understand of the text of a Mass by Palestrina, a Bach Cantata, a Handel Oratorio, if we did not somehow ourselves sing along? Only for those ‚singing with [den Mitsingenden]’ is there a lyric, is there voice music.”[23]
McClain emphasizes the sex of the virgins (no sex, perfect bodies) singing as determinedly “male virgins”
“When Solomon’s temple eventually is dedicated the perfect unisons of David’s 288 professional singers (“sons of Asaph”) accompanied by 120 “priests with trumpets” raise such a “cloud of glory that the priests could not stand to minister.” When New Jerusalem descends from the clouds at the end of Revelation these forces are dwarfed by a chorus of 144,000 male virgins “singing a new song” reserved for them, accompanied by 24 angelic harpists. These integers define pentatonic and heptatonic modal tuning systems…”[24]
Maybe it doesn’t matter (and transcendence has a powerful brief for things not mattering). Certainly, Nietzsche says, it doesn’t matter if the chorus singing Handel understands the words, that is not their concern: they sing “from out of an inner drive, untroubled as to whether the word is comprehensible to those not singing along.”[25]
In a way this is what Jean-Luc Nancy means at the end of his small essay collection on Listening when he says that “it is not a hearer [auditeur], then, who listens, and it matters little whether or not he is musical.”[26] For Nancy, “Listening is musical when it is music that listens to itself. It returns to itself, it reminds itself of itself, and it feels itself as resonance itself.”[27]
Of course Nancy echoes, quite as Husserl and Heidegger and Anders all echo, Augustine on music and singing psalms. This is the relation with time and perhaps thereby we might think the relation with paradise: “Music is the art of making the outside of time return to every time, making return to every moment the beginning that listens to itself beginning and beginning again.”[28] In this way, music, as Jankélévitch writes, “makes every listener into a poet.”[29] One does not have to follow all the classical (and very French: Debussy, Fauré, Satie) nuances of Jankélévitch’s variegated paean to the ‘ineffable’ in music, to recognize an air guitar, lovers, whether together or lonely, singing in a car.
And yet the question I began by asking remains unanswered: are there women in paradise? “Monotono-theists,” as Nietzsche put it,[30] say yes, post-classically, variously so, depending on how they read their theology. In the mystery tradition of Greek antiquity, given death and rebirth, things were different.
Barred by Orpheus from participating in the Orphic cult in antiquity, women would make the transition from life to afterlife without access to the Orphic mystery rites.[31] Experts, like stock theologians, like to say that women had their own rituals but what did they offer and what was left out? If this exceeds the current discussion one would need to identify these rituals and to date them,[32] differentiating Eleusian mysteries, Demeter, and other cults. Separate cults, like separate roles, are exclusions. Perhaps the Maenad’s famed fury had less to do with being scorned than with an effort to protest a condemnation, unlike male initiates, to an eternal round of death and rebirth.
The plaintive question in the exchange in I Would Do Anything for Love, shows Steinman’s Meat Loaf (still) channelling Orpheus listening to his lady — Will you get me right out of this god forsaken town? For a man, that’d be easy: O I can do that. If the reference to the ‘god-forsaken’ is a gnostic reference to life on earth, exclusion attends the complicated theological question of the place of women in paradise. To the question, are there women in paradise there are different answers in ancient as in contemporary religious culture.
To ask the question otherwise: is there sex (or gender) as such in paradise? What about God? Are angels sexed? We have Milton’s answer. The rapture, so we read McClain above, features ‘144,000 male virgins “singing a new song”’.[33] Leonard Cohen supposes, so he tells us from his days at Columbia University, that women are angelic in nature.[34]
Must they be transfigured as men?
Is being male key to being imago dei? When it comes to priests, the Catholic Church is obdurate as is Orthodox Judaism, when it comes to the Rabbinate, but this may be changing.
It’s complicated as Robert Plant’s lyrics remind us: Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. Before the song concludes in extended enjambment, it softens, if after explaining the piper is calling (this is redemptive If we all call the tune Then the piper will lead us to reason): Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know / Your stairway lies on the whispering wind?
Acknowledgments
This text was born from a lecture: “Hallelujah and the End of Time: From Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan to Meat Loaf — and Messaien,” invited by Prof. Małgorzata Gamrat for the series: Meet the Masters, Department of Religious Monody and Polyphony, Catholic University of Lublin: 20 January 2025.
Notes
[1] See on The Philosophical Salon, Babich, “Dionysus in Music: On the ‘God of Sex and Drums and Rock and Roll’ — In memoriam: Michael Lee Aday: 1947-2022.” 31 January 2022. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/dionysus-in-music-on-the-god-of-sex-and-drums-and-rock-and-roll/.
[2] Plato, Symposium, 179.
[3] “I have travelled across the universe through the years to find her. Sometimes going all the way is just a start…” Jim Steinman’s opening lines for the official video.
[4] You need the paperback Georges Bataille, Les Larmes d’Eros (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 1978 [1961]).
[5] See Lucian “The Downward Journey,” A. M. Harmon, trans. (Cambridge: Loeb Library, 1913), 253.
[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, Kristische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 2, 533-534.
[7] Vladimir Jankélévitch, Carolyn Abbate, trans. music and the ineffable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1961]), 89.
[8] See, for still more complexity, Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016 [1979]).
[9] Lucian’s True History. Francis Hickes, trans. Illustrations by William Strang, J. B. Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley (London: Privately printed, 1894). Cf. for discussion, including the ideal of political utopia, Babich, “L’atmosphère, le parfum et la politique de l’utopie : Lucien, Nietzsche, et Illich.” In: Diogène. Revue internationale des sciences humaines, n° 273-274 (janvier-juin 2021): 124-146.
[10] Dylan met MacLeish, at his invitation, for the sake of an apocalyptic play and he recounts the experience in Dylan, Chronicles. Volume One (London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 207ff.
[11] Matthew 22:30.
[12] Bryan Carr, “Ontology Inside-Out: Speculation and Faith in a Musical Cosmos.” In Carr and Richard Dumbrill, eds., Music and Deep Memory (London: Iconea, 2019), 139-169, here: 164.
[13] James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon,1987) and Gregory Chaplin, “‘One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul’: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage.” In Modern Philology, Vol. 99/2 (2001): 266-292 as well as Joad Raymond, Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Karma deGruy, “Desiring Angels: The Angelic Body in Paradise Lost.” In Criticism, Vol. 54/1 (2012): 117-149.
[14] Anna Schriefl, “Plato on the Incompatibility of Wealth and Justice.” In History of Political Thought, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018): 193-215.
[15] Galatians 3:28.
[16] See on this last theme, on woman and redemption, Babich, The Hallelujah Effect (London: Routledge, 2016).
[17] Dylan, The Nobel Lecture (New York: 2017) puts paid to the advantage of philosophy, citing a book, All Quiet on the Western Front (but it could have been the 1930 film directed by Lewis Milestone as junior and high school teachers liked to show this in class) as one of his influences. Dylan apostrophizes the story as from the “lower region of hell,” 12, to reflect that: “All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom — Plato, Aristotle, Socrates — what happened to it? It should have prevented this.” 16.
[18] Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Forsaken Garden. https://swinburne.luddy.indiana.edu/acs0000001-03-i003.html?highlight=fors.
[19] Thus Neil Diamond sings everyone goes, everyone knows / Brother Love’s show.
[20] Years later, Diamond’s Hot August night, I am inclined to argue, influences Jim Steinman’s Meat Loaf vehicle, You took the Words Right Out of My Mouth, set in parentheses: (Hot Summer Night).
[21] I am grateful to Frania Shelley-Grielen for posting this link — she has her own interpretation — on Facebook.
[22] One can compare this with the younger Neil Diamond, singing the same song on the Ed Sullivan show.
[23] Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 7, 369.
[24] Ernest McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic.” In: Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, van Gogh’s Eyes, and God (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 430.
[25] Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 7, 369.
[26] Nancy, Listening, Charlotte Mandell, trans. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 67.
[27] Nancy, Listening, 67.
[28] Nancy, Listening, 67.
[29] Jankélévitch, music and the ineffable, 87.
[30] See Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 6, 75, Vol 13, 525.
[31] See on the importance of initiation, to the letter, Alberto Bernabé and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008).
[32] As Nietzsche reminds us, setting philosophical dates prior to Plato is philologically challenging. See the first chapter of Babich, Nietzsches Antike. Beiträge zur Altphilologie und Musik (Berlin: Nomos/Academia, 2020).
[33] McClain, “A Priestly View of Biblical Arithmetic,” 430.
[34] Babich, “Hallelujah and Atonement.” In: Jason Holt, ed., Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2014), 127.
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