On this episode we are reading Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Book 11 opens with the grisly dismemberment of Orpheus, whose severed head floats down the Hebrus River, the waters causing his mouth to still murmur his sad songs mourning the loss of his wife Eurydice, as if the earth itself were mourning for him (or with him). This book also relates the famous story of Midas and his ill-fated wish to turn all he touched to gold, and of the violent king Daedelion, transformed into an equally violent bird. The book ends with the long, tormented soliloquy of queen Alcyone, who failed to prevent her husband, king Ceyx, from sailing to Delphi, and during his voyage, as she had foreseen, he died at sea. Her story ends when, as she is wailing on the beach, mourning Ceyx’s death, his body washes ashore. She rushes to kiss his corpse, whereupon they are both transformed into seagulls… What do we owe the dead? How powerfully are the ghosts of the past alive in the present? Can a poet’s song of mourning animate or re-animate inert matter? Can any human artifice do this? Is Nature built from human memory, or is all our suffering and all our loss merely absorbed into Nature’s ever-changing flux, along with everything else?