She Who Turns Away (Third Cup)

The Aphroditean surnames Pandemos and Ourania — of whom I’ve posted about here recently, are linked, according to Kerenyi, to a third, “and thus form a trinity; as in the very ancient cult of Thebes, where the goddess had a third form in Apostrophia, ‘she who turns herself away.’”

His reference comes from Pausinas, who writes of “The three wooden images of Thebes, so very ancient that they are actually said to be votive offerings of Harmonia, and the story is that they were made out of the wooden figureheads on the ships of Cadmus. They call the first Ourania (Heavenly), the second Padmemos (Common) and the thrird Apostrophia. Harmonia gave to Aphrodite the surname of Ourania to signify a pure love free from bodily lust, that of Pandemos to denote sexual intercourse, that of Harmonia Apostrophia, that mankind may reject unlawful passion and sinful acts. For Harmonia knew of many crimes already perpetrated not only among foreigners but even by Greeks, similar to those attributed later by legend to the mother of Adonis, to Phaidra, the daughter of Minos, and to the Thrakian Tereus.” (9.16.3)

Now here’s a strange curvature of Venus! Not that three of her are represented — the Triple Goddesss has been much touched on here — but that the third would seem such a rejection of Aphroditean pleasure. Is this the third Aphrodite. pr does the epithet Apostrophia — “she who turns away” by Pausinas — as the Venus who steers us away from her dark passions — have a more satisfactory completion of the other two Aprhodites?

Elsewhere in Pausinas (8.32.2) a sanctuary of Aphrodite is mentioned on the south of Megalopolis in Arcadia, then in ruins, where there still remained 3 images of Aphrodite: Ourania, Pandemos and “the third without a surname.” Instead of a name, we have “she who turns away.”

There is a mystery, a gap, a lacunae in this third Aphrodite, which makes her perhaps the most powerful of the three. Certainly she engages the imagination most as it hurries to fill in her gaps, dredge her depths and excavate her ruins. Nature abhors a vacuum, and Venus delights, IMO, in a good penetrating poke into her most mysterious places. As the Greek gods and goddess were projections of psyche, so Aphrodite lifts like a moon from us, triple in aspect as somehow our psyches, our souls, are triune in its longing, how our imagination comes to be fertilzed and new work is fructified.

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The word Apostrophia has roots in the Greek root “stophe” meaning “the act of turning” plus the prefix “apo” meaning “away”: hence, “to turn away.” There obverse epithet of Aphrodite “Apistophia” means “she who turns toward,” as in the heart’s flush and rush to love. So we have this turning away from from something, perhaps from the shamefulness of sex in Aphroidite Pandemos to the heavenly nature of love in Aphrodite Ourania, perhaps away from love itself into some other or next evolving.

The epithet survives into our language as “apostrophe,” the mark which gives posession to a noun — certainly Aphrodite’s claim to the world around her in Pandemic profusion. It also gets to the how’s and why’s of inside knowledge, Ourania’s coin which vaults in us from bittersweet experience.

In a third definition, apostrophe is a manner of speaking in which a person not present is addressed: When I write, “My delight in the sound of words is a bow to Aphrodite,” I apostrophize. Her presence is inferred and evoked when I speak of Her that way.

In the writing life at least — this alchemy of symbolic play in the waterworks of the Lord — The ghosts in my skull all crow for my astrohphopic attention, beckoned by the black blood of ink pouring from my pen. The mythic tongue is apostrophic in troping or turning the senses of words over into their otherworldly or underworld associations. Aphrodite Apostrophia might be the goddess of that delight, worthy indeed of much praise.

A fourth defining: The ancient Greek chorus — the ur-stage of all literary works — would sway back and forth over the ground of its theme through the motions of strophe and antistrophe. In the strophe it would turn from one side to the other of the orchestra, speaking one side of the argument or representing the protagonist’s voice. This was then matched by the antistophe, an exact answer to the previous strophe, turning to the other side of the orchestra, addressing the counterargument, the antagonist. A strict logic is inherent in this motion, perhaps in mimicry of the bilateralism of the brain, the poles of thought which range from one side of an opinon to its other, from dark to light, up to down, epiphany to tragedy.

Ah, but what was the ground of that turn but Apostrophia, she who turns our thought away from one ground, one certainty, toward its other shore, its opposite end of the earth? It is Aprhodite Apostrophia who changes our minds midstream, turning the postures of youth into the humilty of old age, the moral authority of the sun king to twist tragically into the weeping of women, pride become tears.

Something has to turbine that movement, and it isn’t in the brain which mediates and motions its binaries or contrairies but comes from below, stemming in the heart, a much fickeller engine, whooshing its sea-enriched blood like a tide into the cortical heights, washing first this way then that.

Indeed, Apostrophia is identified with Roman Verticordia, “the turning of the whirling heart.” A dancing sufi prays into being our waxes and ebbs of thought. This Apostrophia is She who provides the to-and-fro motion of our fray, is perhaps the very ground or dancing floor of the ancient drama.

Whatever position we’re in, she delights in switching, first on top, then missionary, then from behind, then in the behind. If Pandemos creates a pandemonium of floodings desires, Apostrophia makes us pine for Ourania’s high clarities; if we get to be too damn heavenly to be any earthly good, Apostrophia gives us a thirst for that honkey-tonk sea-booze, for actual nipples. What she turns us to is of no import to Apostrophia; her altar and exalt lies in the very act of turning itself ...

This reminds me much of Emerson. The critic Richard Poirer once remarked that the places Emerson goes to in his thought are far less important than the manner of his leaping. Poirer writes:

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... “Nothing,” (Emerson) remarks in “Circles,” is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.” Rely, that is to say, not on anything fixed or stabilized in your vocabulary but only on the power that allows you to move away from these, movements precipitated by desire whose object is uncertain and which, if too certainly defined, could turn thinking into more thought, activity into inertia. As a writer, much less as a person, this is for Emerson a saving principle, and it determines the disruptive energies at work in his essays, and in the compelling enigmatic turns of his poetry. (in “Poetry and Pragmatism,” Harvard University Press, 1992)

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So isn’t what you know that counts, its that you use it to leap after what you don’t know. Such thinking is Apostrophean in nature, IMO.

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As Aphrodite Apostrophia turns away, so we revolve from light into darkness, as a moon becomes full with passionate lucence and then wanes to a frail sickle. Why would anyone or thing or god choose to turn toward darkness, away from light and love? Why leave behind the joys of tidal passion? Do we choose, or does life has its immutable rhythms? The goddess in her third, dark aspect is one of maturity-in-decrepitude, filling with that knowledge which is death-in-life, the wisdom of dark things. She is Eurydice turning back from the lip of doom to walk slowly home, fading from the eyes of Orpheus as all fallen loved ones fade from view into oblivion. The sight of Eurydice retreating is enthralling, is holy, as beautiful in its way as that maid appeared on the wedding day of spring. Revence for buttocks may be a meme for the ache inherent in all parting, the last we see of our beloved as she walks out that door of parting. (Perhaps, or maybe that’s just salt water intrusion of Pandemos iinto Ourania’s turf.)

Certainly whatever Apostrophia turns toward is dark and darker, darker than mere light, stranger than life. The moon empties til it is gone and there is a space of nothing, as if the moon had never existed: But then it reappears, is reborn in some new-moon equivalent to the last visage of the old-moon. Out of the emptying of light comes the birth of life; out of the turn away from life and love new life and love is reborn. There is an emotional law here at work which defies the brain, which cannot conceive of letting go its bright hold on certainty. We are dragged kicking and screaming into our darkest truths, turned toward them, perhaps, by Aphrodite Apostrophia.

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In my dream I am in a great hotel for a convention, selling wares to a group I have no apparent connection to. I’m just a vendor, a panderer of wares. (Waking note: I do this sort of thing in my day job.) I travel a great distance to be there and am in the surficial experience of travel, which is defined by fresh impressions which have no roots in day-to-day experience: I don’t know these people, I don’t know the area, I don’t know whether to order the veal or the salmon on the menu, I flip channels on the TV in the room to station call letters which are foreign. I think about drinking — who would know here? — and wander about the hotel, searching for a bar perhaps (one turn seems to open onto a saloon but its a flower ship) or just perambling through the rooms, the stations of a night. There is a digression into family rooms, my wife and I at my aunt & uncle’s house, staying there past our welcome, one of our cats vomiting on their nice living room floor — And then I approach a sultry woman in a great hall, she’s a “former intellectual” (so says the dream), before than an 80’s porn queen: She’s got big hair and a frowsy blowsy dress, curves popping out all over, walking towards me with this gaze which is at and through me, not looking at me at all, or looking at something deeper in me than I am aware of. We pass; my left pinkie grazes her hand, a warm fleshy part that would feel wonderful to be in the tight silky clasp; but she’s gone, and the dream ends in a loading dock of sorts where giggling young men and women are fished from a lake of sorts, drenched in delight and passion.

I share this dream mainly because it rose in me on the night before I began writing this third assay on Aphrodite, and I was advised long ago to put the dreams in last. I don’t have any great understanding of the dream but love its twists and turns, the rooms of its enactment like twisting chambers of a nautilus fished from some surf. Who is the woman who approaches me? Ourania as the “former intellectual”? Pandemos as the “80’s porn queen?” Or Aphrodite Astrophia, the spiralling twisting one whose movement is far more important than her name, is the queen of that conch, lifted from the shore of my waking and unscrolled here. Perhaps she is the cup which pours out the three.

Whatever the case, this three-part post began with an epithet without a name -- “she who turns away” -- and has rounded via Apostropha in that work which poceeds by finding a means to an end. Pour the third cup, baby, and turn me all the way round. I’m done with this prose, lemme turn away from what I learned here toward the blue boundlessness of an unshorable verse.

Happy Beltainne to all --




THREE GRACES

after Botticelli’s “La Primavera”

It could be any clearing
in every woods, a May
quilt of sunlight and
early summer shade,
as vernal as a painting
could ever go,
composed raw from
a god less believed
than breathed
(even though the
Neoplatonism’s ripe).

Three women dance
a simple round,
praising an invisible
Maypole which centers
them like the horn of
a unicorn,
in all we know
but cannot see,
their hands joined
in a loose knot of joy:

The first on the left
faces most to us,
her soft red hair
violet eyes and pale
face simple as the
tufts of flowers which
The sheer fabric of her dress
strains lightly at her
breasts but reveals
nothing, as concealment
and revelation bordered
the wild bounty of rapture:

At the right turning
back to the circle is
the one composed
harvesting shades,
not as one facing death
but rather someone returning
the bounty to God: a taller
maid by an inch or two,
and perhaps older, oh, only
by two or three years —
we know that she returns
what the first grace newly learns,
her position in the round
much like the musky
breath of an orchid beneath
a midsummer moon.
Her shift is a hue between
cobalt and silver, the
splendor of days:

And the third — well, we’re
not exactly sure how
to describe her, her back
is to us and she turns
toward the first yet her
head looks back to the second.
We cannot tell her age
due to the play of light
and shadow on her face —
a motley which might
betray joy or grief or
the tenderest desire:
Her hands are joined
to the others’,
keeping the circle complete,
her betweens filling a
cornocopiea to the brim:

The painting is old for
our age, a reliquary
of adolescent fuses
long faded by hard use.
Hard to believe now much
in grace—much less three.
Expression is untutored
and shrill these days,
an flash of broken swords in
blind alleys. Hardly anyone’s
left to admire a painting
which now hangs on a
a wall too far away.
But I don’t care: I’d sing
of those three ladies anyway
because they circle my every day,
their softly turning feet
a murmer in my ear
urging me forever to have heart
and sweat the details
and never let their motion go.