A Perilous Venture: Channeling Aphrodite
Welcome to Aphrodite, more recently known as the Venus de Milo. I am writing her fantasy. Writing serious stuff is like farming. It may not pay. I used to write television scripts, technical stories and features about advanced software. That paid well. Now I write to keep my brain in shape. Hence, Channeling Aphrodite.
Looking at the Venus de Milo some years ago I wondered: how would it be if the soul of the young Greek woman who modeled for her sculptor lived on in the Parian marble that became Aphrodite’s lasting being?
So, here is the start of a fantasy, a book I am writing in public, posting new drafts from time to time. (If you’d like to know when they will appear, please contact me.
May the gods on Olympus bless their fellow spirit, locked tightly in her stone — for here she is, Venus de Milo—she prefers her Greek name, Aphrodite—transforming through time from woman to stone.
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‘Dreams to my lover’: a start
Help me, dearest. Help drive out my dreams; my fields, fleets, flocks of dreams! Keels burdened to groaning by cargoes of dreams. Oars plying strokes whilst my dreams come and go. More come than go. My dreams are crowds; my mind, the stage on which they tread.
Dreams. Are they demons or thoughts? I wonder which. They thrash me like thunder, or swans’ wings on water. Thank the gods for the peace they impose in between. My being stumbles among spirits fair and foul. Oh for a bloat-tube to free my being.
I was the very beauty of woman in flesh, naked, or nearly so. Twenty-one hundred years ago. In poverty, and starving, my father sold me to a shrine. Suddenly I was a priestess — and a sculptor’s model set to become a statue of a goddess in stone. Then came chisel-tap by chisel-tap on an aggregate of seven stones, and months of rubbing with stones, both pumice and tuff. At the very end they rubbed my final form with soft white sand soaked in sponge until the stones of my newness were warm. In time I became a being in limestone, my complexion restored by high polish, eclipsing skin.
Since that distant hour beyond each passing day, I am cast as a beauty in rock. A thinking beauty, you will soon learn. My body, motionless. But, as Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger put it: “There is only one mind.” For every being to share. As a cosmic spirit I wander it freely, touching, tasting wisdom from the millions of years that our mind fetches back and then stores. How can that be? The cosmos is neither more nor less than the universe looked at through other facets: as a well-ordered whole.
How I miss the flesh of my youth, the keen senses in scents of summer air. Instead I stand frozen in stone, my soul and my mind translated to a different being. Statuesque, yes, but a statue. A statue of a goddess, no less, but inanimate save for my brain which evolves along with the progress of humanity’s knowledge. I am the richer by twenty-one centuries in human mind-force, collecting human history in one hand; mysteries of cosmic and natural science in the other. Thank the gods for that! Gods! Too often I forget that I am one. Assembling and firing knowledge is my recreation—I, who am at once rock and the wisdom of being.
She who is now dead, my old self, my flesh and being, my twin and model—she is preserved in me. My old body died long ago. Her name was Aglaia, the firstborn me. From Aglaia, the fisherman’s human daughter, I stand transformed—to Aphrodite, a figure in Parian marble with more than a little grace. Roman tongues prefer me to be Venus, but interpretatio graeca grips the name my people love. To you, this self in stone shall be your Aphrodite.
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(To be continued, from time to time. There are more pages somewhere. Either I have to find it, or write it again. Here’s my contact page. Reader, may your Fates treat you well.)
P.S. There may be hope for folks whose work stretches “an already wide spectrum”. See “The Expert Generalist: Why the Future Belongs to Polymaths“