Thresholds

Here is the ancient world mid-week. Seminars in various corners, held in Greek and Latin. I wish I’d known about the store room on my first day, and not my last – I might have made it my office. It reminds me of a bronze foundry I once worked in; with its dusty shelves, rows of plaster casts, the gantry with its winch – figures in a state of undress, under dust, among boxes of very old files, the odd tool and chair.

I climb the steps and look over the parapet of the store into the main gallery. A figure of Nike, her wings broken to smithereens: these are survivors, certainly, from a great length and depth of time. But it’s the anonymous figures which I keep returning to, the ones with no story of Hermes or Athena or Nike.

I have a brief, enlightening conversation with a doctoral student at the museum desk about Early Minoan culture; I read for hours in the library on the subject of psyche, of thumos (spiritedness), and then return, passing the great scene from the Eleusinian sanctuary of Demeter and Kore giving Triptolemos the secret of grain.

The process of casting results in a small loss of detail, a mere percentage, but discernible nevertheless. I can’t help assessing them for quality of casting, noting air bubbles and seams; before going off again to root around in the classics library underneath the gallery for the trails of stories; the figures they represented; the temples they came from. In my second week the need to keep in mind stories and places melts away. I think more about the acts of faith which made these casts manifest, and of what survives, the intentional finding of the figure by the stone mason’s skill; the commission behind each votive statue, each Kore; the wars which destroyed temples and cities; the burial of statues as rubble or infill; the marks of excavation in our own time. What is still active? On the Temple of Zeus at Olympia’s East frieze, there is a man sitting in the way of Rodin’s thinker. He has no neck, no throat, the right half of his head is missing, yet his profile is crisply intact. A new meaning is possible; the potential is terrifying.

In truth, I am bewildered by the sheer possibility of the room. There is something anarchic about so many postures of the human imagination in one physical space. But each one of the figures is utterly quiet. What I realise, quite steadily over the course of  days is, it is light which animates and renders them cinematic; it is a theatre for light.