Struggle and Doubt

GRACES:
Mother of Aeneas, darling of gods and men,
Venus our nurse, below the wheeling
Stars of heaven you fill ship-bearing
Sea and fruitful lands with life. Through you
All manner of things alive first are
Conceived and then emerge and see the light
Of day.









APHRODITE PIPES IN:

"Oh, yeah. That was Lucretius. Confused the hades out of the scholars afterward; he was a scientist, you know, explaining the universe to the Romans, and, of all things, he pleads with Venus to help. Why does a guy trying to displace the gods ask one to assist him?

Lucretius was mortal. He had love in him. And, he was a suicide, died after drinking....an aphrodisiac.

Poor Empedokles almost had it. You know, he threw himself into Mt. Etna when his own philosphy left him...or found him. Or he just couldn't get a date. Or all three.

He figured that in nature the prime forces were Love and Strife. Well. I guess he'd had a live-in, huh?

So Empedokles believed that love joined opposites; Strife divided their union, and created new opposites that could unite later. On and on. Life and love. Heraclitus the Grouch believed that struggle was the father of all things.

How about the motherfather?
You better watch it if you slip in the pronounciation, huh?
The Great Motherfather.
Ah--or, what's the term: The Handmaiden. Hah. Struggle is the handmaiden of all things.'
Well you know. It can make you sweaty. 'Specially if its good.
What you do when you're confirming the ritual of love and life-making--
Hands grip hands and wrists and loving can sound like a struggle.
Sometimes even look like it, right?
Love-making. Think about that. To make anything, two aspects must come together.
Well. It's true; even if you're by yourself.
Birth? Screaming, blood, cursing. Yuh. And each month when you don’t give birth--Uh,
huh. Struggle; without a doubt.

At one time in life's season of flowers does
Love bring together the limbs that belong
To the body--
--c'mon, pick it up--"

Love and Beauty: le petit morde

"I have to show up; it's my job. Love retreats to abstract havens where the indignities of misrepresentation can't reach. Love isn't obvious. Aphrodite leads you into Hades and brings you back, into life. Kind of a pivot point, right? I like saying that. Pivot point. The place where it comes together; where birth and death are united, swinging from darkness...into the light. Something to think about, how the French phrase it, : le petit morde--the little death--at climax.

--But where does Love and Beauty go when every actress is deemed a goddess and each passing infatuation is passion, and everywhere you look, you're surrounded by the defiant faces of the annointed Beautiful and when the highest act of emotion itself just might eventually kill you--

What is Aphrodite, then, but a statue, a frozen chunk of a creator’s endeavor, a cold descripton of an ideal--and you see, the artist puts me here--. And I defy the darkness. Like I say, it's my job."

Living in an Art Barn

"So they make the pilgrimage from all over the world--well. They did that in the old days, too, when the world was...Smaller. Now they come to this corner of the big marble art barn and they gaze and gawk and they take pictures and lately there's even been video cameras--I guess it's credit to the artist: 'Ooooh, looks like she's moving!" The scruffy, furtive artist, with his stained drawing pad, edging closer to the girl, telling her: 'Ah, you are her! She is you!' The blush that seeps into her cheeks. She doesn't believe him. But she wants to. When lovers visit, it's easy to see how far along they are. If they’ve been together just a little while--they're inspired to hold hands--Like I could tell them: It's okay. Go ahead. If they're progressed in their rituals, they see me and they kiss. And beyond that; well, I've witnessed more than a few proposals of marriage. It’s enjoyable for me, seeing the connection that's made: if it's a transcendant sexual glance--or a curt dismissal with the shove of a lip and a flip of the hair. "Phooof," the French girls say. Was a kid a few years back who'd come and sit and just gaze and gaze and gaze, amazed amazed amazed, like he thought by looking long enough he'd make me move, or catch me in the act. Rodin was his name, from around the block. Anyway, he calls me, "The marvel of marvels," and at the dinner table with his family--he's 15 years old--he says, "But there is neither unrest nor torment in her inspiration. She is the joy of life, harmonized and controlled by reason." That was pretty good; and he came fully to understand the joys and torments of Aphrodite. He realized them and put them in stone. And what an old satyr he grew up to be, huh? People sometimes leave notes. The management doesn't like that too much, it's litter and out of character, but they collect them: "Venus, I plead and pray, intercede on the behalf of my heart..." They speak to me to send a message to Persuasion, and the other gods. But the heavens are crowded by many goings-on. Gods have only as much power as they are given; and these days... So many used up gods, gods of no faith, limping dejected and rejected in the dust and dusk, sitting around, moping, waiting for somebody to use their names and that doesn’t happen very often. Goes hard on old gods when they outlast their worlds and all they got left is the memory of power that comes from worship. Nowadays, their temples are odd books of religious history; their pedastels are long, Latinate footnotes, and their words of ritual are Ibid. and Op. Cit. and, the worst, Passim. If they’re still interested, they compare citations, not nymphs they’ve done or cities they’ve lain waste. Me? Aphrodite doesn't fade. She transforms. Love and Beauty.... An entire world advertises their qualities and everybody wants them but what's left out of all that jazz is: None of it is easy. They try building it, they want to construct it; beauty, they want to manufacture love. Ehhh. Well--We had our illusions, too, back in the day--that’s kind of obvious. But you have to know that when you start making beauty dogmatic and mechanistic, it’s all over. What can I do? I like amusement. What I see gives me plenty to laugh at. So. I make a point of appearing in places where I'm not expected...Like love. Oh, go ahead. Break it into equations. It's about the 'firing of the synapses' and 'chemical changes in the hypothalmus' but, ah-- Wouldn't you rather have them, than not? See. Here I am. In the middle of these dark, mistral-haunted places..."