These ancient bronzes, which have long since lost their golden gleam, are still numinous fragments of a vanished world. One statue of young man was recently pulled out of a river; his pale sea-green body is scratched and scarred; but he is still a lovely apparition, reminding me of some lines from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.”
For the ancient Greeks, theater was a Dionysian ritual, and in the amphitheater of Pergamon, you can still feel that mythical intensity. The steep incline of the stone seats creates a tremendous focus of energy on the stage. When I stood at the center and sang, I felt my voice amplified, sound waves vibrating in the air.
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All that we know of Greece has come to us in ruins – armless, headless, faded, fallen, broken, battered, lost in translation. What we have are fragments, fragments that have lost almost everything – except their poetry. But, generation after generation, that poetry has never lost its thrilling, visionary gleam.
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Red Sea shells and polished stones from the pyramid tomb of Queen Khensa — “great of charm, great of praise, possessor of grace, sweet of love” — and other treasures from KUSH, Lost Kingdom of the Nile. A meditation on Art, Time, and the ancient river.
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