Stone Lives

An image has entered my life with new things to say. Or perhaps I should say re-entered, as a framed print of it has hung in the hallway to my home-office for the last seven years. How many times do we walk by stories or histories or paintings with messages we do not hear, until their time?

The painting-print is Pygmalion and Galatea, an 1890 oil-painting by French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. He offers us three renditions of his work, so you can almost imagine the sculpture at the center ‘in the round.’ You can see the version I’m imagining in my mind’s eye here, though Google shows a whole collection of paintings about this story. 

The story goes: Pygmalion was a sculptor in Cyprus, Greek mythological times, who had become disenchanted with women. Different sources give different reasons for this state of affairs, none interesting enough to explore here. As he works his art, a version of his ‘ideal woman’ comes to form in ivory. He spends time in the temple of Aphrodite—Venus, in other mythological terms—with prayers to find a woman like that in his life. Venus hears him, views the sculpture and sees her likeness in it, and grants him his prayer. He returns home to his studio and kisses the ivoried woman. He startles at the warmth of the stone. Each touch brings more of her to life and voilá! a love-match made in Greek myth. Contemporary versions abound, of course. My favorite is the George Bernard Shaw play that I’ve never read. Most know it as Broadway’s and then Hollywood’s “My Fair Lady,” sung-said by Rex Harrison and actually sung by one of my early imprints for impish wisdom, Julie Andrews. The movie showed Audrey Hepburn, which was a disappointment to Andrews who then landed the famous Sound of Music role instead. It all works out as it will, even in show-business.

This Pygmalion and Galatea re-entered my life as I browsed the NYC Met Museum’s gift-shop for a little souvenir for a new friend, but it quickly moved itself into my own practice-life, well on its own. It’s not insignificant that this story rests within or is associated with (I’m too lazy to actually research it to know) Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in literary history. I’m beginning to think the image has become an icon of metamorphosis, in broad brush-strokes, for me. A gradual awakening in body, in life. The touch of a creator, or Creator, if you allow it. The embers of desire that are stoked into devotion, from time to time, for holy purpose. The strongest statement I hear from it, as it has moved from the hallway to the wall in front of my office desk, is the malleable unfolding of life from what had been stone. Such a good image for the sensation of awakening. Stone lives.

Media-culture urges us to see and hear this ‘icon’ within a frame of erotic love, sculptor-creator to sculpture-wife, but what a disservice to the sculpture that is! Not to mention women, in their own sense of agency and power. Women may be brought to new life by the kiss of a male partner, but it could just as easily be said that the woman’s form & life drew the man into new life. Except that’s not part of the myth traditioned by men over a history written largely by men. So we are easily impoverished, inoculated from seeing what might be seen anew. This painting has its partial truths, given voice in its history of interpretation. I’m interested in what the icon is speaking to me today, as a woman at a bit of a threshold in life and work.

Awakening has fascinated me these last several years. The mind-body experience of coming to new awareness, through insight or percolated wisdom flowing forth in new forms like poetry, prose, music, and more. The sculpture here is not unlike my mind, unfolding or opening anew into paths of encounter I could never have anticipated, imagined. What had been shaped in certainties of stone within my received tradition(s) of faith/profession has become much more malleable, if no less durable. Way has opened to dance back and forth across the line of knowing and unknowing, with assurance from elsewhere that all will be well and all manner of things will be well (thank you, Jean-Luc Marion and Julian of Norwich—a strange pairing!).

The path I yearn to note here, however, is the more literal speak of the icon: what is the awakening of bodysense that always seems on the cusp of revelation for me these days? Is my own body-wisdom coming to life from the stone imposed by my tradition(s)? How will I know? Or how will I unknow enough of what I’ve received—in all its beauty and toxicity—to even find out? If I come to know anew, do I flatten the knowledge then in prose, here or elsewhere?

For now, I will sit with the image. I will (perchance) listen alongside a new friend. I will show up at the page, as Julia Cameron says, and the mat/elliptical/track. If I’ve learned anything in this strange liveliness that is a practice-path, way does open for those who listen well. Thich Nhat Hanh has said even a stone can be our teacher. How much moreso a stone that comes to life within a creator’s—Creator’s—care. 


Perhaps there's even new visual form for what I mean. After all, sometimes it's finally time for life come out of our frame(s) and on its own accord.