I've always been fascinated by Greek mythology, and consider the caryatides a wonder. There they stand at the Acropolis, staid architectural supports for eternity, serving as stoic and civic counterparts to the Danaides. Why? What is the source of the idea and its surrounding culture? I use the handle 'karyatid' as the inheritance of the most stable machine running Redhat 5 ever. I needed a name and 'caryatid' was taken. My first computer, built from scavenged and donated parts, was implausibly stable server for 5 years until the BIOS chip melted. It lived up to its name. True story. But I also use the handle 'karyatid' because of Auguste Rodin's "Caryatid Who Has Fallen Under Her Stone." When I saw her at Musee Rodin, it was raining, she was serene and defeated and it looked as though she were crying.
When most people see that sculpture, they think of the passage that Heinlein wrote in "Stranger in a Strange Land:"
"This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She's a good girl - look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods... and still trying to shoulder her load, after she's crumpled under it.
But she's more than just good art denouncing bad art; she's a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women - this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude until they crumpled under their loads. It's courage... and victory.
Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up... she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her... she's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit."
A romantic idea, for sure. It is one that stuck with me when I was young. What, in this world, is higher than "victory in defeat," and stoic unsung failure, he writes? What is more noble than the enduring, crushing fate and uncomplaining burden shouldered by the Every Man? "Takaru", Vonnegut would say. The elevated Every Man, memorialized in the form of the fallen caryatid, is nothing but a slave.
The real victors in this world are not the ones who are silently crushed under their burdens. When I see Rodin's caryatid, I wish I could roll the stone off of her shoulders and take her home to rest. She was defeated because she had the narrow vision that her burden was the only burden; her task the only task alloted her. Destroyed by determinancy. Another path, albeit a scarier one, would have been to seek victory in the face of uncertainty. She could have thrown off her stone even though it would mean she was no longer a caryatid. I can't blame her for her choice, but I am saddened by it. Unless, of course, she knew something about the worth of her burden that I don't know.
Jess and I were talking, and the uncertainty of choice is probably what we would define to be an American ideal, or even "the American Dream." Not that everyone embraces it, but I feel that the victors and forerunners of humanity are the ones who excel despite their burdens, who move and change despite the predestined function imposed upon them by the conditions of their birth and society. Our heroes are not unquestioning and noble caryatids suffering alone. They are instead the people who turn choose to turn their suffering, strength and gifts towards questioning and freedom - who have the fortitude to shoulder that even greater, uncertain burden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh. The suffragists and the civil rights activists. Evariste Galois. Gay-rights activists and feminists. Pieter-Dirk Uys. Jesus Christ. Captain Sam who joined up with the Marines. James Tiptree, in her way. The women at Holla Back. Hopefully, me. Hopefully, you.
2 comments:
Your most beautiful blog posting.
[When you were at Musee Rodin, did you by any chance step up onto The Momument to the Burghers of Calais? When there is 1974, I did so, taking up a position among the burghers and reaching into it is grip the key to Calais held by the youngest and eldest among them ~ and instantly felt the tension between having to give it up while sacrificing their own lives (the price of not devastating every man, woman, and child within the walls upon entering the city) and the inevitable unwillingness to give up, either the key or their lives. This reverie, I believe, is quite at one for the five burghers and your own classic sense of the truest heroic as described in your blog.] Thank you, The Good Doctor
It is not surprising to me at all that caryatids are all women -- whose job is it to carry the burdens that basically hold up social structures? When children are raised by their mothers, they are socialized by their mothers, and that's how they learn manners, religion, language... women do the unrecognized job of perpetuating society. Which is kind of metaphorically similar to holding up the roofs of civic buildings.
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