Long ago, the poet was in Rhodes, and went to see these fanous Aphrodites.
The statue above was hauled from the ocean in the 1920s, inspiring Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections of a Marine Venus. Durrell describes the scene (wholly fictitious, he wasn’t there):
She rose as if foamborn, turning that elegant body slowly from side to side, as if bowing to her audience. The sea-water had sucked at her for centuries till she was like some white stone jujube, with hardly a feature sharp as the burin must originally have left it… She sits in the Museum of the island now, focused intently upon her own inner life, gravely meditating upon the works of time.
The Aphrodite below also spent a few thousand years under the sea, and is much more visibly marked. Both Aphrodites are beautiful, and both have endured the fragmentation Durrell describes. The paint which gave their eyes and limbs colour and expression has been stripped away, while the stone’s sculpted outer skin has been fragmented. by sea, bacteria and leaching.
We’re looking at pale ghosts of the original artworks.
The poet, standing there in Rhodes last month, thought of all our modern-day creations and expressions, all our words and images, and how they too will erode and decay, maybe under the rising waters, maybe the data degradation to which all digital data is subject.
Will what is left of us be as beautiful as these Aphrodites?
The poet dashed off this poem:
all those words of love
unspool like pixels, bit rot
•
fragmenting them all
•
away like sense lost
loosening the shifts of time
•
unloaded bodies
you and me together in a moment undividing
•
beauty’s artefacts
merge in knowing datamosh
•
not resolving all
•
the glitches of us
corrupt and macroblocking
•
(fragmenting Freddie).
§
The poet thought well, this is all very personal, but abstract too… and yes, there’s a lot to be said for expressing the personal—or keeping it at arm’s length, when needed—in life and writing.
But sometimes it’s be better to just shut up about it altogether.
There’s something to be said for that, too.
Come the times one’s caught between.
Such times, only a poem will do.
To take us beyond words.
Back to Aphrodite:
Photos by Freddie Oomkens
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hall of lost footsteps
lost in your head
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