Olim lacus colueram,
olim pulcher exstiteram,
dum cygnus ego fueram.
Once I swam on a lake
Once I existed, beautiful,
That was when I was a swan.
We went to the Louvre today. Like everything else we've done so far, it is enormous. Truly, staggeringly, enormous. It is a former palace, and the rooms, floors and ceilings themselves are worth the price of admission. We saw the 'usual' attractions- Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, as well as rooms and rooms of 16th, 17th and 18th century paintings. The best part of the visit is a current special exhibit on the history of the Louvre itself, which started as a fort in 1200. It was Napoleon I and Napoleon III who built much of what we recognize as the Louvre, along with Louis XIV, who did his part even while building Versailles.
Coming to the Louvre was a very powerful emotional experience that left me in tears half a dozen times. Some of it was the artwork. Some of it was a confrontation with myself.
There is a painting titled 'Greek Families waiting for Death or Enslavement' that tore me up. I was told the stories of Turkish occupation by my father. Families were offered the choice of conversion to Islam, with circumcision of their sons, or death. Mothers, in response, threw their children off cliffs, then killed themselves, rather than convert. This is why there will never be peace between Muslims in the Balkan and Serbs and Greeks. Every single Muslim in the Balkans is a blood traitor, who sold out while others died for their beliefs. There is no forgiveness, as shown by the mass migration between Turkey and Greece after the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-22.
The statue that got me most, however, is of Pallas Athena. Athena is a moving and powerful figure to me, the goddess of Wisdom but also the goddess of War. She sprang fully formed from Zeus' head after Hephaistos cracked a hole in Zeus' skull because of blinding headaches. The myth is a glorious representation both of migraines but also of trephination. She is called Parthenos because of her virginal birth. The name Pallas comes from her representation of military invulnerability and strength. The English term palladium comes from the same source. As Pallas Athena she is depicted with a helmet and usually a shield, on which is the head of Medusa, usually represented by writhing snakes. She is rarely armed; she doesn't need to be. The Medusan head strikes terror and incapacitation into everyone that sees it. In the Louvre statue she is larger than life, helmeted, with snakes writhing around her shoulders, one arm up in a call to victory and the other forward, dispensing it to the supported army. Its facial and body restraint, without arms or grimaces, speaks to me of the triumph of strategy and terror over brute force.
In trying to view the statue, I had to wait for one couple after another in which the woman posed like the statue, except smiling and kicking her foot back. It appears to be a 'thing' during a visit, as multiple giggling couples did this. And that is where I lost it.
These people were utter, ignorant cretins. For them, this statue was just something to mock rather than something to think about or admire. They took their damnable pictures and waltzed away without so much as a glance at the statue. I can tell you the mythology, the story of the Choice of Paris leading to the Trojan War, why Athena was overtly partisan toward the Greeks despite being a patron deity of Troy, the story of Medusa, how Perseus killed her. I can read it in Latin. My mother used to make reference to 'the sons of the gods and the sons of clay'. There was no question which she thought I was, and how I saw myself as well- #1 in my class, prize-winning engineer, prize-winning singer, medical student and doctor-to-be, composer, pianist, sometime drummer. Pallas Athena walked in front of me, surely. I looked with disdain on the idiocies and ignorance of the world.
I went to the Louvre as part of a European trip 38 years ago, in 1979. A month after I returned, I decided to put to bed the ogre, the bete noir, of polycystic kidney disease by getting an ultrasound through the student health service as Washington University. And residents and students were called by the fellow to see my scan, so prototypical of PKD. Pallas Athena did not walk before me that day. As far as I was concerned, my life was over. I finished med school, although my grades dipped deeply in second year as a struggled through a relationship damaged, in part, by my sense of vulnerability and worthlessness, a very new and painful feeling.
I have made my choices and lived my life. I regret some choices. Others are just an expression of my preferences. I fully planned to be a professor of OBGyn and a fellowship trained physician as part of achieving that goal. I hated my fellowship, and I hated IVF, an idiot procedure bereft of the wonder and excitement of surgery and endocrinopathies. I have wandered in practice, trying different things, never at ease even while doing well, always dogged by my sense of failure to live up to my own expectations. Despite all that baggage, I have made choices that felt right at the time, and which have expressed my feelings, an awareness of which came late to me, far later than my intellectual grasp of the world. I often feel it is my failures that have made me acutely aware of the feelings of others, that I, like all people, am a son of clay. It has made me a much better physician.
Here in the Louvre, seeing an embodiment of my former future disrespected by a bunch if ignorami, I felt acutely the contrast between my past and my present, of both my successes but also my failures.
In 'The Fortunate Pilgrim', the daughter laments that she wanted to be happy. Her mother, who has survived a litany of trouble and pain to get to New York and a tenement, says harshly 'Happy? You should be glad you are alive!' I'm fortunate to be alive too. I am happy with the ordinary things I always discounted- wife, children, home. I have lived long enough to finally go back to Europe, which I have not done for those 38 years, because I feared facing myself. I am indeed a son of clay, but I am a son of the gods as well, and very fortunate to confront myself with honor and at least some respect.
Ted
olim pulcher exstiteram,
dum cygnus ego fueram.
Once I swam on a lake
Once I existed, beautiful,
That was when I was a swan.
We went to the Louvre today. Like everything else we've done so far, it is enormous. Truly, staggeringly, enormous. It is a former palace, and the rooms, floors and ceilings themselves are worth the price of admission. We saw the 'usual' attractions- Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, as well as rooms and rooms of 16th, 17th and 18th century paintings. The best part of the visit is a current special exhibit on the history of the Louvre itself, which started as a fort in 1200. It was Napoleon I and Napoleon III who built much of what we recognize as the Louvre, along with Louis XIV, who did his part even while building Versailles.
Coming to the Louvre was a very powerful emotional experience that left me in tears half a dozen times. Some of it was the artwork. Some of it was a confrontation with myself.
There is a painting titled 'Greek Families waiting for Death or Enslavement' that tore me up. I was told the stories of Turkish occupation by my father. Families were offered the choice of conversion to Islam, with circumcision of their sons, or death. Mothers, in response, threw their children off cliffs, then killed themselves, rather than convert. This is why there will never be peace between Muslims in the Balkan and Serbs and Greeks. Every single Muslim in the Balkans is a blood traitor, who sold out while others died for their beliefs. There is no forgiveness, as shown by the mass migration between Turkey and Greece after the Greco-Turkish war of 1920-22.
The statue that got me most, however, is of Pallas Athena. Athena is a moving and powerful figure to me, the goddess of Wisdom but also the goddess of War. She sprang fully formed from Zeus' head after Hephaistos cracked a hole in Zeus' skull because of blinding headaches. The myth is a glorious representation both of migraines but also of trephination. She is called Parthenos because of her virginal birth. The name Pallas comes from her representation of military invulnerability and strength. The English term palladium comes from the same source. As Pallas Athena she is depicted with a helmet and usually a shield, on which is the head of Medusa, usually represented by writhing snakes. She is rarely armed; she doesn't need to be. The Medusan head strikes terror and incapacitation into everyone that sees it. In the Louvre statue she is larger than life, helmeted, with snakes writhing around her shoulders, one arm up in a call to victory and the other forward, dispensing it to the supported army. Its facial and body restraint, without arms or grimaces, speaks to me of the triumph of strategy and terror over brute force.
In trying to view the statue, I had to wait for one couple after another in which the woman posed like the statue, except smiling and kicking her foot back. It appears to be a 'thing' during a visit, as multiple giggling couples did this. And that is where I lost it.
These people were utter, ignorant cretins. For them, this statue was just something to mock rather than something to think about or admire. They took their damnable pictures and waltzed away without so much as a glance at the statue. I can tell you the mythology, the story of the Choice of Paris leading to the Trojan War, why Athena was overtly partisan toward the Greeks despite being a patron deity of Troy, the story of Medusa, how Perseus killed her. I can read it in Latin. My mother used to make reference to 'the sons of the gods and the sons of clay'. There was no question which she thought I was, and how I saw myself as well- #1 in my class, prize-winning engineer, prize-winning singer, medical student and doctor-to-be, composer, pianist, sometime drummer. Pallas Athena walked in front of me, surely. I looked with disdain on the idiocies and ignorance of the world.
I went to the Louvre as part of a European trip 38 years ago, in 1979. A month after I returned, I decided to put to bed the ogre, the bete noir, of polycystic kidney disease by getting an ultrasound through the student health service as Washington University. And residents and students were called by the fellow to see my scan, so prototypical of PKD. Pallas Athena did not walk before me that day. As far as I was concerned, my life was over. I finished med school, although my grades dipped deeply in second year as a struggled through a relationship damaged, in part, by my sense of vulnerability and worthlessness, a very new and painful feeling.
I have made my choices and lived my life. I regret some choices. Others are just an expression of my preferences. I fully planned to be a professor of OBGyn and a fellowship trained physician as part of achieving that goal. I hated my fellowship, and I hated IVF, an idiot procedure bereft of the wonder and excitement of surgery and endocrinopathies. I have wandered in practice, trying different things, never at ease even while doing well, always dogged by my sense of failure to live up to my own expectations. Despite all that baggage, I have made choices that felt right at the time, and which have expressed my feelings, an awareness of which came late to me, far later than my intellectual grasp of the world. I often feel it is my failures that have made me acutely aware of the feelings of others, that I, like all people, am a son of clay. It has made me a much better physician.
Here in the Louvre, seeing an embodiment of my former future disrespected by a bunch if ignorami, I felt acutely the contrast between my past and my present, of both my successes but also my failures.
In 'The Fortunate Pilgrim', the daughter laments that she wanted to be happy. Her mother, who has survived a litany of trouble and pain to get to New York and a tenement, says harshly 'Happy? You should be glad you are alive!' I'm fortunate to be alive too. I am happy with the ordinary things I always discounted- wife, children, home. I have lived long enough to finally go back to Europe, which I have not done for those 38 years, because I feared facing myself. I am indeed a son of clay, but I am a son of the gods as well, and very fortunate to confront myself with honor and at least some respect.
Ted
I did not really know the reason for the Turkish/Greek antipathy I had vaguely heard about. Wow. I, too, would have thrown my baby off a cliff in that situation, I believe.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, I had lunch this week with a new Serbian Orthodox friend that I met recently by chance.
It is shameful about the way people behaved in regard to the statue. Obviously, they did not have the history with all things Athena, nor the Greek connection with it that you did, but it is still disrespectful to - all kinds of things. The fact that you said they didn't even really look at it bothers me the most. I'm not above finding humor in a majority of situations, but I'm not going to pass up the chance to behold beauty. I will probably never make it to the Louvre, and it would hardly be something I thought of as just a tourist destination if I ever had the opportunity to visit Paris.