medusa

Better to be a diamond with a flaw than a stone that is perfect.

The gods are always falling for the beauty of humans. As if the very fragility, the very ephemerality of it was what tempted them. A constant perfection tires the eye, wearies the heart. What is precious is always at the limits of itself -and therefore on the verge of fading back into something greyer. A love that faileth is the only one they can take seriously, the only one whose game can delight.

In the knowledge of death we are superior to God
--Allama Iqbal.

The mortal coil. Perseus ends up on an island amid a vast ocean. He is brought there in a box (a bag?). Of the three , he pursues the mortal Medusa. Should this surprise us? The Gorgon lives on the frontier lands of the world, the borders of what is hidden and what is seen and known. She is the antithesis of Perseus , the winged one: lightness, speed, and invisibility. If Perseus cannot be seen it is because of the gift of the gods-for her, it is a curse.

The head of the Gorgon writhes with serpents, her hands are bronze. There is no subtlety to them, no flexibility. But still, mystery of mysteries, we are told she is " beautiful Medusa" (and the blush in her cheeks in Caravaggio's painting suggests as much). She is sad and funny, but don't ask why. Some say her hair is straight, others that one could lose oneself in her tresses.

The quality that makes for living things-mobility, flexibility, suppleness, warmth, bodily grace-all of that turns to stone [in Medusa].

Watching a re-run of one of the old Star Trek episodes. In it the Medusans, a race of sublimely intelligent , disembodied people have to be transferred from one place to another. But their form is so hideous, so grotesque, that it must be hidden from the eyes of Man and kept in a black box (bag?). One glance is enough to drive a man to madness, to murder. There are some realities that one must turn one's eyes away from, that can blind us. There are some truths that can only be viewed obliquely, through a dark glass. Is there any way in which we can attune our vision to such a sight? Perhaps to see such ugliness would only remind us of our own and that is itself a form of death. Are Medusa's eyes anything but a mirror?

But it is Perseus who has the mirror (the shield). Art is always a re-presentation of reality.

Then the ambassador who wants to see the Medusa and not just know its mind, its supreme intelligence, asks: who is to say what is beautiful and what is ugly. May it not be that we cannot see the Medusa because it is dazzlingly beautiful? Only the ambassador knows how to chose the right words to speak to the Medusa, as if the beloved behind the veil could only be spoken to in this particular way, not that.

Our eyes must rove since they cannot absorb, take in, the picture of something that is so spectacularly beautiful. Both the absence of light and an excess of it produces blindness.

From Calvino, On Lightness: Perseus, who is carried by the wind, the clouds, slays Medusa- the one who turns souls to stone, whose gaze is the weight and inertia of the world. But still he carries her head with him in a bag: as if to say that in a ‘thoughtful lightness’ one cannot look directly at reality but only its reflection. One doesn’t refuse reality, but carries the opacity of the world with one. Melancholy is not a dense, brooding inwardness, but a sadness that has taken on lightness.

Maneater - Hall & Oates