After yesterday's lecture, I have come to appreciate Ovid from an entirely new perspective than I had previously seen. I had been reading the stories of the great divinities and how they have affected common people. I had been feeling shock at his uncanny descriptions of sparagmos and the brutality of adultery, rape, crime, and sabotage. I had come to look at the characters he described as something of heroes, taking on monsters, or facing the great gods and challenging them like Arachne or Lycaon. I was attempting to connect these historic heroes with a modern day hero and describe how an ordinary person or situation can become life-altering and "holy". However, I'm pretty sure I was trying too hard. Why look for something so prodigious when the connections to the past are "plain as the nose on your face"?
In Ovid's illustration the story of the Minotaur, he only briefly touched on the hero's perspective, and focused more on "the man behind the curtain". The artist and the craftsman, the puzzle builder, the person who can pick any object or being and manipulate it to make others see it they way he does. The artists trains us to see they way things really are. This is where I found my new appreciation of the stories in the Metamorphosis, he twists the thoughts and the actions of the characters in the stories to make us see it the way he wants us to. He is the artist, the craftsman, and the puzzle builder. How clever!
I found a quote yesterday that was so relevant to this topic:
"Art is anything we can get away with" --Andy Warhol
I realize this blog is completely discombobulated, my attempt to make it cohesive is beyond my words right now, perhaps I have experienced my lovely epiphany, a sublime moment, indeed.
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