Seat of the Muses

By Nino Bonura

 

She was the most beautiful thing I thought I ever would see. It was a safe enough theory, as she was also the last thing I thought I ever would see. Tales of warning and woe clung to her heels as she slithered her way through Athens, from temple to temple, punishing those who would dare to worship the ancient namesake of their city. None of those tales were spun into a happy ending for her victims. No, when you look into the reptilian eyes of the gorgon, it is a sentence worse than death. At least in Hell you are not alone. For the crime of praying for inspiration, there was nothing. No life or death. Only stone.

This fate I knew lurked in wait for me when I heard the rattle and hissing of braided serpents and the mocking, cracked voice of a monster I’d been told was once beautiful. Once beautiful, perhaps, but unlike her skin, her beauty refused to be shed. Even when faced with worse than death, my expression, which lingered for millennia longer than an expression should be held, was one of pure awe. It seemed that all my life I had miscounted, and that the tenth of the Muses had revealed herself to me, and that I would never behold such beauty again if I lived another thousand years.

The moment was snatched from my grip far too soon, though some part of me felt I beheld her visage for more than centuries. But awe leads to shock, and the conscious mind eschews the longing of the soul to remain entreated with fiery passion. As my fear overcame my longing, and I fought to unglue my eyes, I found the world around me transformed. Sunshine was snatched away not by the usual slow, tedious passing of the baton from Apollo to Diana, but with a mercurial speed that invokes darkness quicker than the blinking of mine eyes. But the darkness was not all-consuming, despite Apollo’s ignoble flight.

Not darkness alone, but its accompanying fatigue as well, were enough to lift me from my feet. As I collapsed, my knees weaker than if I had never used them, I caught myself with hands that molted stone, decaying from silver and solid to pink and soft. The ground my hands met was neither cool as stone nor granular as gravel. It was a finished wood, polished so neatly I could see mine own visage reflected within. But Narcissus was I not, so I tossed myself from prone, glancing around in panic with hope of a familiar sight. But alas, my surroundings were more opulent than an impoverished sculptor could ever behold.

I must have stumbled into the palace of a king or a god, for within my reach were more objects of beauty and art than I had ever seen collected under one roof. Marvelous sculptures of marble and metal made rest in all corners, each one’s stare more haunting than the last. Collective centuries had been unspun in the pursuit of these statues of wonder, all for them to find only each other’s company, and my own. Though my stomach demanded my attention, my eyes were far hungrier. I backed away from the room, hoping to take in the sight as one, and to keep a mental sketch of the holistic beauty unmatched even by the monstrous temptation of Medusa herself.

 

I was lightly pierced in the small of my back, but as I turned to cower and beg the forgiveness of the collection’s guardian, only a metal slab adorned with writing faced me in turn. It was an uncanny, foreign text. I was sure of it. I recognized only a few of the words, and even then I could not piece together their meanings, as they were accompanied by unfamiliar suffixes and incomprehensible grammar. But this sign was one of many, for each wondrous statue incurred a label of its own.

I pitied myself for I could not make them out, and indeed even in my own language the written word often eluded me. But that is not to say these signs taught me nothing, for they quite obviously were meant to enlighten the reader in relation to their sculpture. And yet, the plaque I met with my backside accompanied only an empty pedestal. How ironic, then, that after a life spent in toil to create a sculpture worthy of praise, in the end I found myself not among the sculptors, but the sculpted.

Of this long hall of statues I availed myself, the minutes turning to hours as I studied each specimen with vigorous fascination. I was surrounded by statues of legend from times before mine own, as well as busts and towering figures that I recognized, though they had been far from finished when last I inspected them. These were works of art whose culminations I had no hope of seeing, and yet here were the finished complexions of gods and fair folk whose faces I had never expected to find complete, along with others I had heard of only from the lips of daydreaming mentors and brainstorming apprentices.

My frustration with the language grew more potent as I searched for any indication of year. I saw no Is, Vs, or Xs to denote when a given statue was completed, so I was unable to follow sculptural trends or otherwise study the pieces from a critical, historical eye as I once did. I was, however, grateful to my past self for insisting on carrying my own book of sketches even on my farthest pilgrimages. The most impressive of the sculptures soon graced my notes, which I used to compare facial features and other more detailed aspects of the works.

The further I moved down the hall, the more I realized that the sculptures seemed to grow younger. Despite my illiteracy, I was able to recognize telltale signs of influence from sculptures I had already examined. My excitement at this revelation waned into awe as by the thirtieth step I had already entered a future far beyond what I had thought to be my reach. My mind was aflutter with the dizziness that accompanied the stark realization that the statue in front of me had to have been constructed centuries after the previous. As I counted upwards, the art I beheld could less and less be considered art, at the least by my standards.

There were choices and techniques applied to these later works that would have been sacrilege in my time, but as the years wound on, the very definition of art seemed to have gone through an impossible number of twisting transformations as every artist added their brief touch, such that by the end of the hall the art was unrecognizable from a professional standpoint. But they carried with them a shocking truth that further cemented me as a relic of the past worthy of my pedestal. While these sculptures of the unseen past that divined my future were alien and predicated upon a cultural context for which I had no grasp, they were nonetheless beautiful. More than beautiful, they were legendary.

 

They as much as the Greek statues of old deserved to be on display. Though to me it had only been mere hours since I last perused the earlier pages of my sketches, they had become dated by far too long. I hesitated to peruse my notes, but upon steeling myself I opened to the first page. It was rudimentary, as would be expected, but in this temple to the Muses, surrounded by the great art that came before and after, it looked to me as refuse. The next page was no better, and neither was the one after, and following that.

 

I turned page after page frantically, and though my imagination burgeoned and bubbled on the pages, clawing for the breath of life, it was spawned from a mind so small and unbending that it starved and wilted in the winter of my talent. Why had not I carved the eyes like this bust of Mark Antony, who stared at me with more stoic judgment than anyone else deserved? Why had not I given attention to the fingernails of my statues, while on even this towering figure of Zeus you could make out every hangnail?

In my passionate shame and sickening envy, I tore at the infernal pages. Each one did I rip to tatters and scatter at my feet, to mingle with my tears. On my knees I cried and cried out, damning the Muses for cursing me with passion and abandoning me to my own mediocre work. They committed not to me, instead sprinkling their inspiration on the eyes of dreaming men with reckless abandon. Did they not trust my power to construct? Did they find me unable to produce a Great Work worthy of the palace I now found myself dwarfed by?

Just as I had for what now seemed to have been centuries, the statues around me stared unmoved by my hysterical fit. Just as the Muses themselves, they stood above my plight. It would have been a kindness to turn away, but the Muses are not kind. They do not flinch when faced with man’s despair. I was surrounded by dispassionate monuments to a world I had failed to capture, and they mocked me with their silence as I sunk further than prone, into the wood beneath me. Not even the stars were around to comfort me, for at that moment, when I fell in ruin and gazed at the sky, I saw artificial, flickering facsimiles of the stars above winking back at me.

Lying prostrate as I was it was all I could do to lift my head, and when I did, I could follow the trail from unfamiliar and alien back to the works I found familiar. They stretched away to infinity, entirely unreachable. On a pedestal of honor, surrounded by works no less stunning, was a monument to beauty itself. The pure visage of Venus shamed me with silent scorn as I hobbled over in a trance and knelt at her feet.

 

I cried out in apology to her, that my greatest love, not of flesh but of stone, could never capture her essence as they had in the centuries after my time. I grew envious of her, as many had before, not of her face but of her arms, which had been severed over time. For if I were without hands as she, I would never have put them to heinous work.

But as I wept and clutched at her feet like her sniveling child, I looked past the pedestal that had served as my home to meet the eyes of a familiar, joyous sight. The gleaming white marble reflected my soul back at me, and after a moment of paralysis, I rushed to meet my progeny. It was barely up to my shoulder in height, and the texture of the piece was rough as an amateur’s, but it was lovely enough to be seen alongside these other monuments to creation.

 

It was a child, wild and nude, with hair in waves and arms thick with muscle. When I had carved it, all those years ago, I had envisioned myself as this young boy and channeled that vision through my fingertips into the marble. His arms wrapped tightly around a frightened goose, honking and squirming under the tight grip of the child, who wrangled the bird to the best of his immature, untested ability.

This sculpture of a boy strangling a goose meant much to me as I sculpted it, but even then I was a young fool. I knew the boy was I, but now, surrounded by testaments to the artists of my past and my future, I knew the truth behind my goose. I, like every sculptor whose work flanked me now, had wrestled and forced the wild and free gift of inspiration into the beauteous shapes they became through sheer force of my will. Though my goose had long since slipped free from my grasp and flown on, continuing its eternal migration, I and others like me may delight in the brief, momentous headlock that restrained her just long enough to capture her in rock.

 

These stretching, labyrinthine halls did not only prove mine own insignificance, but that of any man who dared to affect something larger than himself. For the artist will always be dwarfed by the art. Though we may catch swift, fleeting glances of the Muses, it is only because they allow it. My boy and my goose are not my own. I was merely a conduit to an awesome, honking force of nature, fortunate enough that the fruits of my snaring was worthy enough to rest within this glorious seat of the Muses.

 

Nino Bonura from US lives in New Orleans and graduated with a BFA in Dramatic Writing. He specializes in writing novels in the science-fiction, mystery and fantasy genres. Outside of writing, Nino also does a fair amount of stage acting, and he spends his free time crafting more personal stories with tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.