La Colonna dell’Immacolata c. 1880. Via
Today, in Italy, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It celebrates “the sinless life of the Blessed Virgin” and officially begins the Christmas season.
In Piazza di Spagna, there’s a tall column with a statue of Mary on top. This morning a fireman will be lifted with a crane so that he can place a wreath of flowers on the statue’s head. Later in the day, after various processions, the Pope will arrive to honor Mary, too.
Knowing that the area would be crowded with people, we walked towards the Pantheon instead. For years there was no entrance fee and the Pantheon was always fairly empty. But now that you must pay to get in, there’s always a line. Aren’t people funny?
We walked towards Piazza Navona and its side streets where there are many boutiques and antique shops. It was great fun window shopping. Or at least it was until I saw a bust of Hera next to a statue of Hercules. How could this be possible? Everyone knows that Hera and Hercules couldn’t stand one another. So why force them to share the same limited space?
Hera’s husband, Zeus, was a real womanizer totally lacking in decorum. The first time he saw the beautiful mortal, Alcmene, Zeus’ biorhythms went into tilt. He was so aroused that he disguised himself as Alcmene’s husband so that she would not object to having sex with him. But later that night, Alcmene’s real husband came home and wanted sex, too. This led to Alcmene’s double impregnation (known as hetero-paternal superfecundation) and the subsequent birth of twins who had different fathers.
When Hera learned that Alcmene was pregnant with her husband’s baby, she went berserk. Hera, despite being the protectress of women during childbirth, was ready to have Alcmene’s baby slaughtered. But Alcmene, aware of the danger her child was in, took her Zeus sired baby, Hercules, to Athena for help. Hera later showed up at Athena’s and, not recognizing the baby as that of Alcmene and Zeus, felt sorry for the skinny little baby and nursed him. But the baby sucked so hard that Hera pushed him away causing her milk to spray across the sky thus creating the Milky Way. But what milk baby Hercules had managed to drink had given him supernatural powers. Hercules became very strong and, even as a baby, was not afraid of anything.
Because of his strength, he earned quite a reputation for himself and even managed to marry the daughter of a king. Pity that every time Hera saw Hercules, it reminded her of her husband’s betrayal. One day her wrath overpowered her. She put a spell on Hercules that made him go crazy and kill his family. Once he had realized what he had done, Hercules fled to Delphi to seek advice. For atonement, the Oracle gave Hercules a series of tasks to complete.
Although Hercules finished the 12 Labors assigned to him, he just couldn’t stay out of trouble. In a rage, once again, he threw his friend Iphitos, over the city wall. This time the Oracle decided that, as punishment, Hercules should be sold as a slave to the recently widowed Omphale, Queen of Lydia.
Omphale was thrilled. Finally, she had a chance to subject a man to those things women had always been subjected to: subordination and humiliation, obligation to do menial chores, and sex on demand. To help Hercules visualize the difference between them now, she insisted on their cross-dressing to underline the inversion of roles. Hercules was expected to flutter around the house wearing silk clothes as he did household chores. Omphale, instead, now wore the skin of the Nemean lion Hercules had slain as one of his labours.
Eventually Omphale freed Hercules and the two married and had a son. But having had to live as a woman had scared Hercules so much that he escaped the first chance he had leaving his wife and son behind. He returned to Greece where he married for the third time making another big mistake.
-30-
Related:
The Tumultuous Tale of Heracles and Hera + Labours of Hercules + Hercules and Omphale + Crossed-Dressed Lovers: Omphale and Hercules + History of cross-dressing + Artemisia Gentileschi Painting of Omphale and Hercules Damaged +
The Narrative Within 
I do love the ancient myths!
Such soap operas, no?
Hey Cynthia, Wow it’s been a minute. i’m loving the way you write out mythos. + your explosive colorful illustrative work is so enjoyable. i feel it must reflect your personality in a deep way. Was wondering – how large do you work?
Here’s trusting you are playing w/ the creative muse + enjoying the short winter days. They keep me inside more than i want + sleeping more than i need to.
i am deep in a corpus work now. Damnatio Memoriea – working with the idea of erasing a memory + replacing that memory – or transferring memory on top of another to obscure. Which is refreshing as i had ben doing one-of images for so long. It’s that true quite profound excitement to be on a theme, though loosely, to explore + exhaust the possibilities. Time marches … somewhere! The studio right now is hit + miss as it’s been cold on + off. The building is a spring summer fall studio – working inside the house when i need to. i am limited to the size of work, but just now working on no larger that 3×4 shards of canvas. There are a few images up on the patron site if you’re curious. As soon as i have build a good core will be looking into opportunities for installation.
Spit polishing the short work you asked for about Ekphrastic. Is there a deadline?i’ll send it on to you soon. You can decide if you’d like to use it or no.
This is getting long, hope you were enjoying some tea.
Whoa, it’s that year, once again, that comes around every 4 years. Good time to plan an escape route. Mine will be an extended stay on Crete this fall – sept/oct/nov.
Strange mood, strange days, not a stranger tho. Let me hear from you. As always, the best to you my dear- Jayne ox Harnett-Hargrove harnetthargrove.comharnetthargrove.blogspot.com/http://www.instagram.com/jayneharhar/
Hi Jayne, I am just now getting over a wicked flu that’s going around Italy. so I’m driving on empty these days.
There’s no deadline regarding Ekphrastic…
the best to you, too, dear Jayne. When my energy level is up again, I’ll write you directly. Besitos
and have fun in Crete!
Hello Cynthia!as always i’ve been enjoying your posts. just now sending you this piece on ekphrastic prose. i’ll paste it below + also send a pdf. i realize you can not change / edit the pdf so will paste it below, too. typos are wily animals! use it – or no- whatever you’d like. + if i was way off in what you wanted or expected, let me know. ok – today will be a day of putting out theater fires – so i need to head on into it. See you on the screen. J ox————-
Onto EkphrasticÂ
Afterward, + for a long time, i wanted to publish something, ANYTHING, a chapbook, broadside, or perhaps an omnibus while he was still top editor + curator at that SF City Lights publishing house. Since he has past, not so much â¦Â
i don’t remember clearly, clearly my mind is a bit rough. But when Ferlinghetti took the stage, or really, as he wedged himself in front of the stuffed-in crowd at the City Light Bookstore that afternoon, i became spell-cast.Â
He introduced his book Seeing Pictures, a slim volume of ekphrastic poetry. Having introduced the bait, we were all eager to bite. He was eloquent + humble in the reading. Amusing + candid.Â
A slight asemic art feel overtook me. The feeling of words blurring w/ optic meaning, + pictures overlying words in time lapse – the way the i love lucy cursive was magically hand written on the tv show intro. i had always been a visual artist. i had never placed writing into a categoric queue. Everyone i knew wrote; some much better than others. This turning a visual into words grew provocative + engaging. If a picture is worth a thousand words whatâs a word worth? Why nail down an emotional feeling? Donât words belie an essence? Isnât visual a more universal + immediate art? Can not the appointed picture convey what we feel to be true? i had a question that needed answering. + the question kept changing.Â
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i have always drawn quickly w/ a bit of an expressionism + i feel my best work is done fast, never closing the lines. On the other hand i spend so-too much time organizing thoughts. i can get them down quickly, but organizing words in such a way as to be understood becomes an Atlasian struggle. There are rules, there exists a playbook, there are limits – perhaps the canon of writing helps w/ the universality of understanding the intended.
Talking to me is much like playing charades i know the word somewhere deep inside though i don’t know the way to pull it out, nor do i often have the patience to do so. Too much hunting + pecking for the right word, too much designing + crafting. then the flash of relearning, every time, somewhere in-process i can write as though i was painting. Make a sketch. Fill it in by corralling words a section at a time, color it, push it toward an understandable meaning. Massage it til it sings. As in visual art, by covering my mistakes w/ the next step the process becomes not so difficult. Editing + spit polishing is deliberate. Actually i think thatâs where the arts + letters craft merge. No matter what process you use to write – in the end it becomes deliberate.Â
The quarterly experiment that is Meraki Issues came about in wanting to satisfy an urge to mix the visual + the word. There is so very much work that does not have an out. The zine format accommodates, keeps me on the rails + keeps me honest. Our minds crave stories + so can put even the abstract sequential into meaning. Each issue is an attempt to create a themed work, where i exhaust the possibilities in a n abbreviated way. i realize the outcome is tragically truncated. But w/ this practice i raise other ideas that will be blown up + out in future work. Art records the moment. + every moment has its own logic.
A friend has said, paintings are never finished they only stop in interesting places.
i can say the same for ekphrastic prose. Eloquently speaking in a thousand tongues. The intent is to lay an image bare. -30-Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â jahh feb1.24.3:37AM
Harnett-Hargrove   harnetthargrove.comharnetthargrove.blogspot.com/http://www.instagram.com/jayneharhar/ https://www.patreon.com/harnetthargrove