A Note About Gods
(trying to be subtle so they don't smite me)
Bow down in supplication, fellow mortals:
I commemorated the anniversary of my mother-in-law’s passing by visiting with her final mentee at the Met - and it struck me that there are a lot of icons of gods in that museum.
In a way, the Met itself is a place of worship… It even looks like a temple.
Which of course made me think about the ways that we mortals worship—and what it is we worship and why.
When and why did we decide that gods are infallible?
It occurred to me today that Hera, the goddess of marriage (and the person that ancient Greeks prayed to for happiness of hearth and home), was constantly being cheated on. Aphrodite was perpetually losing beauty competitions. Even all-powerful father-of-the-gods Zeus was being tricked all the damned time….sometimes even by mere mortals!
As the earthly avatar of a pagan goddess myself (Milda is the Lithuanian goddess of free love/passion while I agreed to marriage) I wonder at the fallibility of the old gods.
Religious people these days tend to be monotheists and frequently pray to God for peace. For patience.
But have you read a Bible? There is a lot of loss of divine temper for one reason or another.
Perhaps we should reconsider what it is that we admire in our gods - maybe what’s actually impressive is their ease of snapping back to a sense of divine, centered self.
WRITING NEWS:
This week went by so quickly!! I wrote a lot of short pieces and sent them out, but haven’t heard back from any of them.
I wrote a tiny ode to NYC and put it on Twitter:
I do have weird art news that isn’t about writing—if you follow my Facebook author page you know I take a lot of photographs (in fact the above little ode was accompanied by a photo showing an expansive wide gray sidewalk in the foreground of of a glittering night scene of Downtown NYC). Well, this incredible painter Alida Wilkinson, who I began to follow in 2021 (I “went” to a LOT of online art meetings, movies, theater, and opera performances during pandemic via the internet), had an open call for photographs that she would turn into an art project called Tender Archive, so I sent in this photo I took of my daughter’s best friend holding a doll’s head that she was borrowing to make a film for school:
And I got this back:
One of the core joys of being an artist in any medium (words, clay, sounds, movement, all of it) is the ability to inspire other artists.
But that’s kind of it for writing news this week.
Next week should have more - my son is at the Bringing Together Lithuania program in Vilnius, interning with a filmmaker, and my daughter just left for the summer - she’s teaching Circus at ILC camp. There is Time in my future.
Though, to be honest, I’ve been pretty busy even so - I saw a truly fantastic small film that is at IFC center called Ghostlight. If you have EVER done theater or if you love theater, I highly highly highly recommend this quiet little movie. I was overcome. (It was a SAG-AFTRA screening and truly - most of the audience was in tears because we felt so SEEN—do go see it.)
I also went to a comedy club (Second City student showcase—you did great, A!) and I went to something called a Circadian Dance Party—which was pretty much music in the basement, decorations on the ground floor, and the world’s quietest and most packed rooftop. (I loved it)
RANDOM FINAL THOUGHT:
Isn’t it cool the way you notate the places you want to remember on the internet and call them “bookmarks”?
I wonder how many decades it will be before screen-users replace that term with something else. After all, we don’t say we are “reading the internet.”
From reading "The Republic", I learned that Plato thought the fallibility often ascribed to gods in Greek literature was incoherent and corrupting. So there were different understandings of theology, even then.