Some people cannot feel at ease around me until they know what they want to know. People stare, mostly without realizing it. If I wear my hair in a long ponytail, it whips back and forth like a pendulum. I walk by rolling my hips, which gives me a side-to-side gait. This hurts, and I’m never not aware of it pain plays a note I hear in all my waking moments. I have hip dysplasia, which means my hip joints are misaligned and unstable - the ball part of the joint grinds on a flat plane of bone in search of a socket that never formed. My spine is curved, which makes my back arch forward. Then they notice the way I walk, then that my legs from the knees down and my feet are underdeveloped and disproportionate to the rest of my body. Agenesis, from the Greek, meaning a lack or failure to generate. I was born without a sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis. The medical name for my disability is sacral agenesis. Pain transforms the floor’s stubborn slant reorders it, distorts, unmoors the plane is changed, both breadth and pitch. The straps of my backpack are slightly uneven, and I can already feel the pressure causing the muscles on the right side of my spine to cramp. If I don’t find a place to lie down, stretch and rest, my body will start to lock up. I’ve been standing too long, and my right hip begins its familiar twinge. The statue hums with the energy of the aggrieved - Venus who hurts Pluto who hurts Proserpine this transmissible hurt, placed on Proserpine’s thigh, her stone flesh yielding below the god’s grasp. Ovid’s myth tells of two forced transformations, and Bernini shows us two people in motion, struggling unsuccessfully against their fate. Bernini leaves Pluto dazed, off-balance, faltering, reminding us that Cupid’s arrow kidnaps his agency, too. She smashes the hardest part of her palm into Pluto’s face.
#Frozen fever free bottle cap images free#
Her body is strong, and she torques it forcefully against the god, trying to free herself. Rembrandt’s Proserpine limply claws at Pluto’s face from a vacant state. Rubens bends her back over the edge of Pluto’s speeding chariot, her will lost in the blur of momentum. Alessandro Allori shows her placid and blank, seemingly bored by her kidnapping. Dürer etches Proserpine (Proserpina to Bernini, Persephone to the Greeks) as a dizzying pinwheel of limbs, the center point of which are her breasts, bulging comically like bugged-out eyes. In other depictions of this myth, artists paint a weaker heroine. But he moves on without me, and I stand alone a while longer and stare at the goose bumps raised and rippled, carved by a tool onto Proserpine. A thought toward pleasure: to see him kneel and lick Rome’s dust from my bare leg. He leans closer, and a budding warmth in me blossoms. I imagine the stranger grasping me as Pluto grasps Proserpine. The stranger and I take breaths in unison, suspended in anticipation of the other’s gesture.
Fine hairs and ridged red flesh rise to bridge the gap between my body and his. Then his arm parts from mine, just barely, and the world expands to that narrow space that separates us, and through that space the possibility of adventure trembles forth. Where we touch becomes a whole sensate world made of heat, weight, a scent like wet leaves. The way marble fingers sink into marble flesh, the eroticism of this aggression - it makes me uneasy, but I don’t look away, and neither does anyone else. He wraps a hard hand around her thigh, and at that point of contact Bernini has made metamorphic rock soft, impossibly. Pluto, god of the Underworld, abducts her, forcing her away from nature and toward the safety of the dark and isolated world he rules.īernini stills, for our consideration, the moment when Pluto sees Proserpine and takes her, holds her roughly. Proserpine, the daughter of the goddess Ceres, is nearby picking flowers.
Venus, the goddess of love, tells Cupid to send an arrow through Pluto’s heart, afflicting him instantly with a lovelike madness. The sculpture depicts a story the Romans adapted from Greek mythology.
0 kommentar(er)
