Self Portrait as Fragments of Ancient Greek Statuary
I. Self Portrait as Head of Aphrodite
The Acropolis Museum’s galleries burst with bodies missing arms and legs and heads, but I’m drawn to a head without a body.
Aphrodite, the experts postulate, but these goddesses are all interchangeable, aren’t they? The eyeless sockets gaping. The otherwise flawless features, the smooth white marble, darkened by a smear of makeup dripping down those chiseled cheekbones. The interpretive sign notes that this streaking is caused by bronze eyelashes that have since been lost to time. My mascara too claws its way down my face every morning, whether I scrub with makeup remover the night before or fall into bed exhausted and made up, like starlets in black-and-white films who sleep with a full face. As this avatar, Aphrodite looks more like a gorgon than the goddess of beauty, despite the serene expression playing on her lips.
I find I like her better this way.
After becoming chronically ill, I started wearing a dash of eyeliner and siren red lipstick to fend off well intended comments and questions: You look so tired. Or, you seem run down, are you getting enough rest? I bear few outward signs of illness except this haggardness. Politically, I want to visibilize life with an invisible disability—though it turns out I am not so committed to the cause as to let myself go. Am I lying to the world about who I am, passing myself off as a regular person? A healthy person.
Sick people can look sexy too, I tell my reflection, as I fastidiously apply makeup before my doctors’ appointments so I am taken seriously, my pain is taken seriously.
II. Self Portrait as Nike Adjusting Her Sandal
On the south side of the parapet at the Temple of Nike Athena, Nike leans down to take off her shoe, presumably so that she can enter the sacred space barefoot. Yet how much harder this simple action must be now that she’s missing one hand and a head, and moved from the temple to a museum across the street. This sculpture is a masterwork; her chiton is diaphanous, even carved out of stone. She’s known as the Sandalbinder. I wonder if she could borrow Aphrodite’s head. But the scale is off.
Better, upon reflection, to have no thoughts at all.
I’ve been dismembered, like a character in an airport thriller, the kind of novel with girl in the title, and I’m the eponymous girl, a full-grown woman we only meet through flashbacks, because by the time the story starts she’s been hacked into pieces and scattered in the woods. One doctor spelunks in my intestines, another investigates my bladder, one listens to my heart, one casually mentions my cervix is “twisted”, which makes it hard for him, because it’s my body that’s the problem, the inconvenience. The doctor who tells me my wrist could be in a textbook. The doctor who googles my rare blood disease. Finally I break down and beg my rheumatologist to tell me about my whole body, if she can, and she smiles and shakes her head.
Her expression unreadable as Athena’s.
III. Self Portrait as Female Figurine of the Canonical Type
The day I visited the Museum of Cycladic Art I’d dressed for the summery weather outside, but the galleries were freezing. I wandered among female figurines that predate Aphrodite and Nike Athena by two millennia, clutching my arms around my stomach to stoke my own body heat. My body warped into the same shape as the statues: long face, torso holding itself, a faint suggestion of breasts. Familiar yet inscrutable. This resemblance amused me until I read that the figures, too narrow to stand on their own—like Bronze Age barbies—are theorized to be dead, or offerings for the dead. They’re also associated with fertility goddesses and rites. But so much about them remains a mystery. The relationship between birth and death. The body whittled away as if by time or illness. The true nature of these relics.
This is the problem with being reduced to parts. It’s impossible to make sense of your life, even when you appear, to the casual viewer, intact.
I yearn to reclaim my own sense of wholeness on these figures’ behalf. Because most Cycladic art has been looted, there’s almost no way to know the provenance of a specific work, to connect a statue, a woman, to her original context.
To make heads or tails out of what she was meant for.
