eros, logos

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Janus

Janus is the Roman god for whom January is named: god of doorways, crossroads, entrances and exits, depicted with two faces, one looking forward and one backward. January is an appropriate month for him, coming as it does on the hinge of the calendar when one year swings shut and another opens. Each of us now stands similarly poised, looking back over the year and looking ahead to the one that will come.

He was also god of doorhinges and handles, opening and closings, beginnings and endings. Supposedly he gave the nymph Carna power over doorhinges and handles after he'd raped her, which might be a sign that he has a cruel and rather crude sense of humor. Being literally two-faced must have been a help. Nothing so significant or powerful as beginnings or endings, or even crossroads for her. I imagine the gift as a kind of sneer while presenting her with the face that smiled; he gives her a gift which symbolised not any sort of power but memorialises the lack of it. Thanks to him, she can preside over the essential workings of portals she has no power to close, and is made the avatar of the very means which allow all gates and doors to be opened at will by anyone.

One notices he doesn't give her power over locks, for example. Still less keys.

Janus is typically depicted with a key in his right hand. What will he open this year, for you or for me?

I have a lot of old posts, written long ago but never public, which I'll be posting now. Some of them are very ugly and uncomfortable, to read and to write. Old calendar pages flying by. I think of it as cleaning the system and in some ways I left out many parts of the story I was telling. It's difficult to accurately record emotion while it's happening; it's still more difficult to make it public, and there I failed.
So this blog will be similarly poised for a while yet: posts looking backward, and a few, very few, about now.

Happy New Year to you all, especially those of you who continue to check in and read whether I write or don't. I'm very grateful and it's why I'll be writing now.

I hope no one is in too much pain this morning, but I fear I would be remiss in my role as soi-disant sex blogger if I did not point you in the direction of Kingsley Amis's cure for a hangover -- it begins with sex, of course, with some caveats. Read it all.

He's also written the best description of a hangover I have ever read:

He [Jim] stood brooding by his bed…The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

And finally, on metaphysical drunkenness, some Baudelaire:

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Labels: doorhandles, hangovers, Janus, metamorphoses

posted by O @ 13:19 Social bookmark this 5 comments

Monday, March 26, 2007

echo, echo

Ovid tells us that Echo was a mountain nymph, cursed to never speak until spoken to, and then doomed only to repeat the end of what is said to her. Thinking of this now, I realise that there are several Greek myths involving speech and the inability to speak--and all involve women deprived of the power of speech or of the ability to be heard and understood. In all cases it is a punishment for being an object of desire: some are punished by male gods for having resisted their advances, others are punished by female gods for having been raped or just desired by their husbands.

In one version of Echo's story, she rejects and flees from the god Pan and for this she is killed. She's torn apart (the Greeks have a love and a fear for this, death by dismemberment) and her bones are then strewn around the earth. Aphrodite loves her voice and preserves it, and it remains when nothing else does. Like what remains of her body, it's spread out everywhere and exists both everywhere and nowhere, and in no place entire or whole.

In Ovid's version, Echo's shade falls in love with Narcissus, and follows him in the woods. Separated from the friends he was hunting with, he shouts, Is anyone here? And Here! she answers. Here!
I'll stay here, he says, you come to me--and come to me, to me, she calls back.
Stay there, he says, confused, I'll come.
Come, come, she says.

What it feels like to me is like someone has walked down the corridor of my mind. All doors were open for him, and he has walked through and picked up each object. He’s handled each, turned it over, cradled it in those hands that have parted my thighs and lifted my legs over his shoulders, and I feel weaker now under those metaphorical hands than I do under the real. The subtle probing mind is so much more dangerous and seductive to someone like me than the gentle tongue, or the insistent thrust.

Ultimately though he’s left, or he needs to not enter certain rooms now. What it feels like is that these items, precious to me, were looked at and examined carefully and then put back carelessly, rejected. Everything is slightly in disarray, everything has been handled, and when I look at them now these things that were precious and seemed rare no longer do. They look like the unwanted items after a rummage sale, strewn about or at least handled and discarded. In my mind’s eye I see myself naked and splayed and him lifting himself off me, satisfied and contained, while I’m left raw and wet and exposed, still shuddering and gasping.

In these internal rooms now my feet echo on the floor, once again there’s no one here but me, yet somehow I am poorer. The rooms are suddenly too big and feel empty, and what’s in them now looks worthless. I wonder why I opened the door to his knock and why I gave him the keys. He still wants everything, or almost everything. Everything I am thinking or doing or feeling, but not what I feel about him. Us.

I wonder about sacrifice, and where the limits of it are. I think my heart has already been made stone, and yet it still does not suffice.
I don’t feel the pain I once did, and distance no longer has the same power to hurt me…distance feels natural now, as it must have to Echo, eventually.

Sex with him now is no longer with me, but with parts of me. Each part is worshipped but I am not there. Sex is dirtier now, even more explicit, harder, even more addictive.

What does it say about me that I need that even more now?

But it feels like I am a doll pulled apart and strewn around the room, and now each part is individually worshiped and commented on but it is not me. My ass, my pussy, my breasts–all are now in isolation and it is no longer me that is praised or wanted or adored. I’ve been dismembered and now my legs and arms and hips are lifted and commented on, my parts are moved and arrayed, yet I am no longer present–I am no longer seen, because he no longer wishes to see me entire.

If he did see me whole, he’d see how I tear and break under his hands.

Come, he says, and Come. Come, I answer.

More Ovid, here.

Labels: Echo, metamorphoses

posted by O @ 04:25 Social bookmark this 25 comments

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Galatea

He knows 'tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir'd with this thought, at once he strain'd the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress'd.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X

Pygmalion falls in love with his statue. He comes to worship her, he brings her gifts and adorns her, he makes her a bed to lie upon and slides a pillow under her head, 'as though it had sense in it' says Ovid. Sometimes he caresses her, kisses her, and worries that he has held her so tightly that her pale marble will bruise.
And Aphrodite takes pity on him, and so one day he wildly thinks he does feel her breast give slightly under his hand, and imagines her lips do redden under his kiss. So like his earlier fevered imaginings, yet now when he takes her wrist in his hand he finally feels her pulse leap and beat, throbbing under his thumb.

The artist's creation moves, breathes, speaks his name, looks at him and sees him. The stories don't say what she felt, or if she did, and Ovid does not even name her. She is not named by the sculptor either, but only 'my ivory maid', a name being one of the features that I suppose appeared inessential to him, although he took infinite pains over her face and body.

It is so important to you that I should look at you and see you clearly. The mirror needs to reflect back a true and faithful image of you for you to value it, and we prize mirrors for their accuracy in this task. Yet this reflected image is one which serves to enlarge you in every sense. There is something about this particular 'I' which you value; this seeing 'I' is important in some way in which other eyes are not. I want to see the back of the mirror though. I want to see the other side of the fairy tales.

Did Galatea think? Or were her thoughts only those wished for her by Pygmalion? Perhaps he forgot them as inessential, in the same way he neglected to give her a name. Did she think and feel, and keep those things inside, hidden?

I imagine she opened her mouth and her legs compliantly always, gracefully arranged those ivory pale limbs in whatever manner requested. How could she fail to be other than graceful, when he had invented her? And how fail to be compliant, when once those marble limbs became pliant ivory and bruisable flesh? This was after all the purpose for which she was created, and Pygmalion had started to bring her to bed long before Aphrodite granted him his wish and made her warm to his touch.

Perhaps she thought and kept silent. Perhaps she had only those thoughts Pygmalion had wished for her, and so was a wholly invented and owned creature, even there in the private palace of invention. And perhaps she had no thoughts or feelings or desires of her own, and was only the living statue, the empty vessel, the reflective surface. Ovid doesn't say; he tells us only that she opens her eyes, sees her lover and the sky above, and blushes.

But what I want to know is what was behind her eyes, and why neither Ovid nor Pygmalion seem to ask.

Labels: metamorphoses

posted by O @ 06:49 Social bookmark this 2 comments