some say: brilliance is a fleeting cosmic event, a shooting star. its origin is a matrix of factors both unknown and unrepeatable; they will call it: inspiration. brilliance, they say, is not for the taking; it is first prize in life's lottery.
Late at night, after much snow has fallen and while vestiges of the downpour continue gently, the streets are very quiet. The blanket of white inhibits sound and makes the yellow streetlights eerie beacons. In those hours, empty streets offer themselves to me, and i take them slowly, unwilling to ravage them after their recent purification.
i spoke recently about coincidence. it was an accident, a result of repeatedly thwarted plans, that i went today and not last week or month or year to the waterhouse exhibit at the musee des beaux-arts. on the heels of my interaction with joseph campbell, specifically the story of odysseus' meeting and hieros gamos ('sacred marriage') with circe that i came, unexpectedly, upon waterhouse's magnificent rendering of this meeting.
waterhouse began his career by painting representations of scenes from classical antiquity (his uniqueness was his ability to convey a narrative through pictorial rather than literature; he showed a side-scene, which conveyed the entire story), but he shifted, mysteriously and dramatically, to a focus on pagan antiquity and mythology. (to be sure, we can draw a distinct parallel here with the present writer.) this focus on pagan myth and the centrality of commanding females made people wonder about possible connexions to an occult society, since the mystical feminine -- the eternal, dual-yet-united power of the female, the destroyer/creator-goddess -- is at the core of the human story, is more ancient than our time, and is the obsession of seekers of ultimate truth.
one of my most persistent memories, brief as static but with all of nostalgia's pleasantness, is of a movie called 'wilde'. i sat on the floor of the living room of the london flat where i had spent about a dozen summers, half of which followed the formula of watching videos rented from the blockbuster downstairs while eating a small cup of haagen-dazs vanilla ice cream, purchased there. i sat on the blue carpet and watched the dramatised biography of a man about whom i knew nothing except his name. but that name would change my perception of the world, as the things he did with language were, to me, unimaginable. i never knew one was allowed to play, to manipulate, to wit, as he did. to be sure, my own skill wanes in comparison, but what i know now, i owe in some great degree to oscar wilde, and also in some great degree to the man who played him in that film, mr stephen fry. i believe it was the first time i'd heard of him, but he became then inextricably linked with mr wilde, and they were thenceforth fixtures of my fascination with language, a permanent benchmark, a zenith towards which to strive. many years passed after that initial initiation, and i began to investigate wilde's work, for the first time, and my mind's barriers were shattered, one more time. some more years passed, and i investigated mr fry again. his wit is unparalleled, his insight is remarkable, and his lexical dexterity is so magnificent that it is tearfully enviable.
it is a paragon of pluralism, created as a house for `every god`, the pantheon was designed to welcome and include all the people of the realm and the variety of gods they worshipped. it is one of rome`s oldest buildings, built by marcus agrippa in his third consulship after actium in 31 bce, and has been in continuous use for over 2000 years. (the xtians usurped it in the seventh c and its used by them still.) its walls are six feet thick, to support its huge dome.
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