The "Father" Issue

Orpheus, are you perhaps fatherless, except in the myths, those stories we can just barely trust to be true. Some have given you the greatest honor any man born out of the Greek-shaped world can receive: the paternity of Apollo, the bloodline of the God of Light, the source of both Poetry and Music. Others claim a King and a Muse for your parents. Either story tells why, even as a youth, you stood every morning at the highest point in the landscape, erect, playing the lyre, motionless as the Light flooded your outer being and your inner being poured forth song-poems of worship that ascended on great shafts of light backward to the shining realm of shining Apollo. Was not this indeed a son's doing? Or perhaps Apollo adopted you as a son out of love for you, but forgot to list it in the Olympian archives? And so you were at once a favored son, a boy orphaned by a god, a mere mortal. What a complex fate! But each day you rose in darkness, cleared your throat and practiced your high notes as you climbed, flexed your fingers so they moved nimbly across the strings of your lyre, and so prepared, you offered Apollo, whom you loved, the purest worship of a man for a god. Only the nine Muses witnessed your sacrifice, and they wept, even as they joined you in dance and song.