Once again, I am enthralled by your choice of painting. There is so much in the detail here. What I am first drawn to is that illusory index finger on the hand that grips the wand which, aided by the circular frame of the mirror behind her, directs the upward rising masculine energy of the finger gesture back towards the cup. I imagine the surface of the cup to be very much like the mirror on the wall and to be catching every drop of that "male gaze". The magic then cascades into the cup which is but an image in the mirror beneath which the artist has placed a lyre or harp shaped like a dove - or perhaps it is a wigeon.
Then there is that splendid foot placed firmly atop the little effigy of a human head.
Who was it said, "those whom the gods love, die young"?
I should say, the inspiration for the painting is Circe rather than Athena. This is 'Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus' by John William Waterhouse. Your comment rather drives home the advantages a painter has over a one-man-show artist, not least with crafting geometry and leading the eye upon a still canvas, rather than with a voice and body (and stick) moving on a stage. And the performer must do Athena, Circe and Calypso, distinguishable from Nausicaa, Penelope, Eurycleia and the rest. I must admit, I have trouble imagining how the fellow pulls off playing a goddess with a wand. But if he was any good, he would. Even as merely written words, Homer directs the imagination. And I certainly think the Odyssey's composer has thought long and deeply about the male gaze. Don't forget the pig by her footstool, gazing at the viewer!
As surely as not all women are witches, or Circe, or Calypso, I think it is fair to say that not all men are pigs. I did wonder about the pig and the little spear (?) in my own dreamy fashion. Most of my impressions of the μῦθος of the ancient Greeks come to me second hand via the English poets and in particular the imagery of the romantics. Think of Keats' Endymion and you have a fair idea of where I swim.
I looked up "pig" in the index of Graves' The White Goddess to stir the juices of my imagination and flesh out the pig:
" Why the cat, pig, and wolf were considered particularly sacred to the moon goddess is not hard to discover. Wolves howl to the moon and feed on corpse-flesh, their eyes shine in the dark, and they hunt wooded mountains. Cat's eyes similarly shine in the dark, they feed on mice...mate openly and walk inaudibly, they are prolific but eat their own young, and their colours vary like the moon, between white, reddish and black. Pigs also vary between white, reddish and black, feed on corpse flesh, are prolific but eat their own young, and their tusks are crescent-shaped."
I read on into the next chapter which I also found to be of interest:
Chapter Thirteen PALAMEDES AND THE CRANES
"What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythological fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that "music" and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguishes from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T E Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab sheik to the sheik's own clansman. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess of what it represented came from a man who took the sheik's foot to be the horn of a buffalo). And from the inability to think poetically - to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense - derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless, the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.
Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as; " Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes," or " Menw ab Teirrgwadd saw three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Fawr with every kind of knowledge and science written on them". The best that the scholars have done for the poems of Gwion is "wild and sublime"; and they never question the assumption that he, his colleagues, and his public were people of either stunted or undisciplined intelligence."
Do you know Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony? Your post on the multi-planar language of poetry and myth makes me think how impossible it is for academics not to murder the stuff. Although I would still maintain that the Homer people are exceptional in this regard. You cannot expound Mozart while ignoring all the notes. But I think Calasso gets it right. He evokes the stories by telling them—with footnotes.
Once again, I am enthralled by your choice of painting. There is so much in the detail here. What I am first drawn to is that illusory index finger on the hand that grips the wand which, aided by the circular frame of the mirror behind her, directs the upward rising masculine energy of the finger gesture back towards the cup. I imagine the surface of the cup to be very much like the mirror on the wall and to be catching every drop of that "male gaze". The magic then cascades into the cup which is but an image in the mirror beneath which the artist has placed a lyre or harp shaped like a dove - or perhaps it is a wigeon.
Then there is that splendid foot placed firmly atop the little effigy of a human head.
Who was it said, "those whom the gods love, die young"?
I should say, the inspiration for the painting is Circe rather than Athena. This is 'Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus' by John William Waterhouse. Your comment rather drives home the advantages a painter has over a one-man-show artist, not least with crafting geometry and leading the eye upon a still canvas, rather than with a voice and body (and stick) moving on a stage. And the performer must do Athena, Circe and Calypso, distinguishable from Nausicaa, Penelope, Eurycleia and the rest. I must admit, I have trouble imagining how the fellow pulls off playing a goddess with a wand. But if he was any good, he would. Even as merely written words, Homer directs the imagination. And I certainly think the Odyssey's composer has thought long and deeply about the male gaze. Don't forget the pig by her footstool, gazing at the viewer!
As surely as not all women are witches, or Circe, or Calypso, I think it is fair to say that not all men are pigs. I did wonder about the pig and the little spear (?) in my own dreamy fashion. Most of my impressions of the μῦθος of the ancient Greeks come to me second hand via the English poets and in particular the imagery of the romantics. Think of Keats' Endymion and you have a fair idea of where I swim.
I looked up "pig" in the index of Graves' The White Goddess to stir the juices of my imagination and flesh out the pig:
" Why the cat, pig, and wolf were considered particularly sacred to the moon goddess is not hard to discover. Wolves howl to the moon and feed on corpse-flesh, their eyes shine in the dark, and they hunt wooded mountains. Cat's eyes similarly shine in the dark, they feed on mice...mate openly and walk inaudibly, they are prolific but eat their own young, and their colours vary like the moon, between white, reddish and black. Pigs also vary between white, reddish and black, feed on corpse flesh, are prolific but eat their own young, and their tusks are crescent-shaped."
I read on into the next chapter which I also found to be of interest:
Chapter Thirteen PALAMEDES AND THE CRANES
"What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythological fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that "music" and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguishes from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T E Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab sheik to the sheik's own clansman. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess of what it represented came from a man who took the sheik's foot to be the horn of a buffalo). And from the inability to think poetically - to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense - derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless, the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.
Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as; " Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes," or " Menw ab Teirrgwadd saw three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Fawr with every kind of knowledge and science written on them". The best that the scholars have done for the poems of Gwion is "wild and sublime"; and they never question the assumption that he, his colleagues, and his public were people of either stunted or undisciplined intelligence."
Do you know Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony? Your post on the multi-planar language of poetry and myth makes me think how impossible it is for academics not to murder the stuff. Although I would still maintain that the Homer people are exceptional in this regard. You cannot expound Mozart while ignoring all the notes. But I think Calasso gets it right. He evokes the stories by telling them—with footnotes.
I will see what they have got at the library. He is new to me.