From:
deborah mattingly conner <
museredux@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, May 24, 2008 at 11:43 PM
aspecta medusa
Andromeda, by Perseus sav'd and wed,
Hanker'd each day to see the Gorgon's head:
Till o'er a fount he held it, bade her lean,
And mirror'd in the wave was safely seen
That death she liv'd by.
Let not thine eyes know
Any forbidden thing itself, although
It once should save as well as kill: but be
Its shadow upon life enough for thee.
DGRossetti's poem.
The Medusa, one of three sisters originally... beautiful, a priestess
in the Temple of Athena; that is, a beautiful mortal in the sacred
sphere -- a temple being the eye of the polis -- of Wisdom. And Beauty
is the direct apprehension of the Good, the pure Being of the
stillpoint; an aspect, or rather a reflection of the perfect, the
divine, the One: Things that can "exist" only outside of time. Things
Eternal, timeless -- and thus, dangerous to look at directly... Not
something that can belong to a mortal. So of course the earth shaker
comes to shakes things up, Poseidon, a god who goes back before Homer.
And he rapes the priestess right there in the temple. And the goddess
of Wisdom punishes her. Was it her fault, being a carrier of things
outside of time? She, a virgin priestess, servant of that wisdom? No,
not her fault any more than it is ours to be vessels of consciousness
who apprehend the immortal, a thing we cannot have. Medusa suffers the
loss of her beauty as we must suffer death. She becomes a creature no
mortal can look upon -- the mysteries as they truly are: eternal,
belonging outside of time. To violate this is to be an abomination,
and that is her face with the snakes for hair, snakes that crawl in
and out of darkness, writhing and unnatural in the world of time and
space, one end in the light and the other in the dark unconscious.
She, a symbol, a creature of our most profound pity. She, our own
self, each of us, forced to live with the knowledge that we will
suffer death. And so Perseus comes as a resolution. Again, he is each
of us, taught and armed by the psychopomp Hermes, slicing off her head
without directly looking at her, precipitating the higher birth of
Pegasus -- imagination. Pegasus who soars, tended by muses.
Pegasus, winged horse, beloved, an
eros who moved it all from the beginning.
....Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.
Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognize the five
That make the Muses sing.
Those Images ~W. B. Yeats
*********
The weather continued to be warm, and the doctor had agreed after a
reasonable amount of badgering to take the twins down to the beach. It
had been weeks since they'd been there, and they spent awhile
exploring the changes washed up on the shore.
After a time, he sat down by the cliff to watch them. He'd become
their ever-observant tutor, studying them as they studied everything,
and with as much time as he spent with them, he thought it odd that he
still couldn't tell them apart. Then he chuckled at himself, thinking
why should anything be predictable about them? They were not ordinary
twins.
They were not ordinary in any way at all.
They had developed quickly into robust, brilliant, amiable boys. To
watch them, one would think they were simply exquisitely beautiful
children, normally curious as they turned over and examined a great
piece of driftwood in their serious way. They were copper-haired like
their father, with great gray eyes and cupid mouths, as seemingly
angelic as their names. But when they spoke, one knew that they were
something more. Something extraordinarily more. Most three year olds
didn't spontaneously read and write. Most didn't care about
Shakespeare, Dante, Leibniz. Or write verse, or know what had been
before, and the people and places they'd never seen.
Michael (or was it Gabriel?) came at last and sat beside him. "So,
Doctor—It is soon to be the turn of the century," his little voice
said, great with solemnity. "I understand that when the term
fin-de-siècle is used, there is something more implied."
"Yes," the doctor began, thinking it a bit much to explain to one so
young and trusting. "The century's end implies a great deal, no matter
how you look at it," he said diplomatically. "There's a sort of a
mood, an expectation people have when a century turns over. There's
something—ominous about it."
The child studied him. "Ominous expectation. Then it's a forward
looking thing."
"Yes," the doctor agreed. "But backward looking, too. People seem to
give a lot of thought to where we've been, and where we're going. It's
an impetus to take stock."
The child nodded, and then rose—walking to the water's edge where his
brother was standing. For a very long time they both stood looking out
across the channel. The doctor got up, dusted the sand off his legs
and backside, and joined them. Something about the look on their faces
drew his concern.
"Doctor—do you see it?" one of them said.
"Eh?" he replied. "See what, child?"
"The end of one time," the other twin said, "and the beginning of the next."
Somewhere, far out on the water, he thought he saw a great silver
cloud, a singular haze.
Then, Gabriel (or was it Michael?) bent down, and picked up the thing
he'd brought with him. It was a round bottle—odd and old, sealed with
lead—and inside were two small boats. He showed it to his brother—who
nodded—and then threw it out onto the tide, which caught it—breathing
it in, pulling it onward toward its depths.
*****
***
*excerpt from AM, dmc 2000
