The Revolt of Aphrodite Read Online Free PDF

off a car-battery. I am not so sure whether in the brothels of Piraeus he did not achieve the mare pigrum of the philosophers and alchemists. Here one bares one’s sex to a whole landscape—internal landscapes of empty sea, nigger-head coral, bleached tree-trunks, olive-pits burnt by lye. Islands (each one a heart and mind) where the soft spirals of waves shoulder and sheathe floors awash with the disquiet of palaces submerged in folded ferns. Symbol of the search is the diver with the heavy stone tied to his belt. Sponges!
    Then lying about among my own records I come upon some stone memoranda like altars and tombs; stuck in among them some moments of alarming happiness. If the portly Pausanias had seen the city’s body through that of a young street-walker his catalogues would have had more life. Names and stones would have become the real fictions and we the realities. After dark we often sneak through the broken fence and climb to the cave below the Propylea. Her toes are fearfully dirty in her dusty sandals, as are mine, but her hair is freshly washed and scentless. We are never quite alone up here. A few scattered cigarette-points mark the places where other lovers wander, or lie star-gazing. Up on these ledges in winter you will find that the southern gales carry up the faint crying of sea-mews, sacred to Aphrodite; while in the spring the brown-taffeta nightingales send out their quiet call-sign in the very voice of Itys. “Itú, Itú, Itú” they cry in pretty iteration. Then bymoonlight come the littleowls. They are tame. (No more!) Turning their necks in strange rhythms—clearest origin for ancient Greek masked dancing.
    Down below in the later sequences of the play the tombs face east with their pathetic promise of resurrection. The modern town rolls over it all like surf. Prismatic gleams of oil-patches on macadam; coffee-grounds and the glitter of refuse (fish-scales) outside the smelly taverns with their climbing trellises and shelves of brown barrels. Once a golden apple was a passport to the underworld, but today I am only able to buy her a toffee-apple on a stick which she dips in sherbet, licking it like a tame deer.
    A true Athenian, free from all this antiquarian twaddle, she knows and cares nothing for her city; but yes, some of the stories alert a fugitive delight as she sits, sugaring her kisses with her apple. It is pleasant to babble thus, floundering among the telescopic verb-schemes of demotic; telling her how Styx water was so holy as to be poisonous, only to be safely drunk from a horse’s hoof. They poisoned Alexander this way. Also how Antony once set up his boozing shop in the Parthenon, though his was a different sort of poisoning, a chronic narcissism. (She crosses herself superstitiously as a good Orthodox should, and snuggles superstitiously up to me.) Then … about embalming bodies in honey—human toffee-apples: or curing sick children by making them swallow mice coated in honey. Ugh! But excited by this she responds by telling me of witches and spells which cause nausea and impotence and can only be fought with talismans blessed by a priest. All this with such earnestness that out of polite belief I also make the sign of the Byzantine cross, back to front, to ward off the harms of public utterance from us both. (“There is no difference between truth and reality—ask any poet.” Thus Koepgen sternly, eyes blazing, a little drunk on ouzo.) The quiet wind blew dustily uphill among the moon-keepers. To make love in this warm curdled air seemed an act of unpremeditated simplicity that placed them back once more in the picture-book world sacred to the animal kingdom where the biological curve of the affect is free from the buggerish itch of mentation. Warm torpid mouth, strong arms, keen body—this seems all the spiritual instruction the human creature needs. It is only afterwards that one will be thrown back sprawling among the introspectionsand doubts. How many people before