Eclipse
The map of places passes.
The reality of paper tears. . . .
Holes in maps look through to nowhere.
- Laura Riding Jackson
And because I don't know what else to do, I flee to an alien land whose history has become like you -- impossible to be grasped. To escape chaos, the Greeks created art with abstractions. It is a familiar approach, having long used geometry to deny myself caresses. Oh -- but now to feel the white-haired woman I will become sitting by herself, looking through a window and seeing only snow. I know nothing after all. I have become the smile of the kouros with a critical difference: I symbolize nothing.
She knows she said I won't reach out to you again. But even as I write this, I don't think I'll have broken that promise. You don't exist. I never entered a dark building after the high heels you love tip-toed around potholes. I never rode an elevator whose walls presented cracks so I could feel the embrace of leers. I never walked down a hallway clouded by an air I was scared to breathe. I never entered a room where you raised your voice in anger. I never entered a room where you don't exist. I was never
felled through a rip in space where I felt you sculpting a dispassionate embrace.
The shards of geometry are all that are left to me: I attempt the poem, only to repeat consistent failures. But I would like to keep trying as I fear the chaos you rightly said I've never experienced. I long have known that I wouldn't survive chaos. You have. What does this say about me? What does this say about you? Now, I struggle everyday to determine how I can continue writing when I have heard my Muse whisper how small I am.
She is in a panic. And when she sends this to you, I know she is reaching out to a void. You don't exist. I am falling. And you don't exist: so where have I been?
How does she know I will betray Lucretius?
And how has she become a shadow when there is no light . . .
Purity
Once, the Greeks tolerated subjection to obviate chaos. But an attitude of detachment is like anxiety - a flower in a glass prison. So "the entire male population of Miletus was put to the sword and the women and children were sent into Asia as slaves." I look up from the page into the dying years of the 20th century. I am feeling the inhumanly fast beating of a woman's heart as she raises a rifle, then shoots a canvas with pellets of paint. I am feeling a deer quicken its leaps. The artist avoided the aftermath of wounds, but I see red.
After the fall of Miletus, the poet Phrynichos staged a drama about it. But the play's performance was forbidden by Athenians who fined him "for reminding them of afflictions which affected them intimately." I consider my search for unrelenting intimacy -- a search I conduct despite my heart's cocoon of encaustic. I consider how a grid is supposed to eliminate gesture from paint. Although paint, finally, must return to its nature and flow like a menstruation -- ooze with the viscous intensity unmitigated by geometry.
Though the Greeks would come to thwart the Persian invasion, I believe it noteworthy that such a victory belied intention. The Greeks - like all of us, through all of time -- first attempted compromise. Now, encaustic fails and my heart looks me in the eye. I am compelled to answer the many variations of the same question: Why do I weep before a square canvas depicting a square? Or a circular canvas depicting a circle? Have the Greeks attained purity? Attained perfection? Have I deserved the moments I made my mother cry?
Ethos
She is missing the tip of her nose. Yet I think of sultry women in leopard coats, flashes of violet eyes and slanted cheekbones behind fur. She is missing her hands. Yet I feel her pulling me out of bed where I had burrowed into pillows fatted by goose down. She is missing most of her body below her waist. Yet she stiffens my spine so that I leave the bed we have never shared. I consider this photograph of Athena, 460 B.C. It seems her form barely affected the block of marble from which she was carved. Stolid stone -- you refuse the ornaments of the Archaic period to display essence. Ancient marble -- you reach across the years to contradict what the people of my age had considered a truism: an object can never manifest its Ideal.
Photograph of an ancient sculpture -- how many dimensions may be defined before my sight touches its target? You evoke an old poem I wrote that made others scoff and label me a "mere girl." I thought to honor the lucidity of objects that manifest intention -- like the feather, the diamond, the rose and others now fallen from the sieve my memory has fought against becoming. When people laughed at my poor poem, I bowed in shame and slunk away. Now, Athena wipes my tears and notes: the girl offered truth because the girl retained the innocence of youth.
Once, you hovered because, you said, you wished to know how long I can retain my Idealism.
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