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Furrows, Frowns, and Fire.

July 1, 2019 by Exangel

by David D. Horowitz.

Ancient Roman sculpture is probably best known for realistic portrait busts. While Greek-inspired youthful beauty, perfect proportion, and calm expression find their place in Roman sculpture, the busts often represent—and highlight—wrinkles, warts, moles, furrowed brows, double chins, baldness, frowns, tight-lipped rage, and anxiety and concern concentrated behind intense stares. Here is a world of worry, feuding, arrogance, anger, and ambition—conveyed via a stern stare, a grave brow, a menacing silence.

For many, “eternity” in the visual arts suggests perfect serenity or grandeur: a cathedral’s rose window or a snowy mountain range during a golden sunset. And yet, how contemporary, and timeless, these fiercely detailed Roman busts appear: this emperor’s furrowed brow, that senator’s stern stare, the bags beneath the eyes of this weary but perseverant old woman, that philosopher’s bravely questioning eyes. The Roman busts of wrinkles, baldness, ferocity, worry, furrows, and frowns still whisper and haunt. Yes, looking at the amazing gallery of busts in a book like Roman Portraits (Phaidon, 1940; photographs: Ilse Schneider-Lengyel; text: Ludwig Goldscheider), I feel these Ancient Romans share the room with me. They inhabit my thoughts and inflame my empathetic curiosity: what were these people really like? Indeed, here is something at once ancient and contemporary. Here is resonance across millennia. Here is human nature in all its grandeur and delusion, pathos and pettiness.

Near the end of Roman Portraits are portrait bust images 102 and 103, both listed as having been sculpted around 300 A.D. They face each other on opposite pages. One is of the emperor Diocletianus (ruled 284-305 A.D.): regally self-contained, comfortably in power. And facing him is one of the book’s—and antiquity’s—most intense sculpture busts. A thick-necked, round-headed middle-aged fellow stares bitterly: deep furrows; eyes ablaze with blame and suspicion; fury around a pursed, shut mouth. And, in this book at least, he stares forever at Diocletianus. I hear the man’s silence, as he looks at the emperor: A god?! You’re from the underworld! You ordered the murder of several of my friends; you bribe, lie, spy, and manipulate; you treat Romans like slaves and servants; and yet you appear so smugly blameless! You would have me killed, too, Diocletianus Augustus, were I to have spoken… But I fear for my wife, my children, my friends… Murderer! Oh, I mean “god.”

Great art can tend toward beautiful idealism or warts-and-all realism. Both reach and teach us, as humans participate in larger tensions between idealism and pragmatism, anger and restraint, anxiety and serenity. Ancient sculpture seems to have captured these tensions in busts both idealistic and realistic. I frequently return to photographs of them for insight, nourishment, deepening silence.

Filed Under: EAP: The Magazine, Summer 2019: Eternity or Bust.

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In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

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