Springtime
Happy Spring!! In this issue: Pierre Auguste Cot and Ancient Greek Romance, Zine Fest, Crocheted Earrings, Jane Eyre and Antoinette Mason, Apples, Annie Dillard and Gorgeous Graphic Novels
What have we been making?
Anna
This month I had the exciting opportunity to teach a workshop on Comics as part of the annual Iowa Youth Writing Project writing conference for middle school students, which is hosted by the University of Iowa. It was an amazing experience and I’m so impressed by what the kids came up with during the class!
Last month I mentioned I was selling zines and earrings at the Iowa City zine fest, and it went great! I had a blast, everyone was masked, and the earrings were a big hit. Here's me at my booth just before doors opened:
I also just finished putting together a re-stock box of zines and earrings to send to South Street Art Mart (SSAM) in Philadelphia. SSAM is an amazing store supporting local and indie artists. I started selling with them when I lived in Philly a few years ago. It's run by the nicest women, so be sure to check them out if you're ever in the area.
I'm on a mini-break from icons at the moment, but my assistant coloring gig for the graphic novel is in full swing. The title is now public - Evil Eye by Özge Samanci. It won't come out for a little while now, but here's a promo image to get you excited, and you can check out Özge's first graphic novel Dare to Disappoint if you're interested.
Rachel
I signed another contract this month with Thimble Lit Mag for my short story “Waves.” In a future issue, we will look at that story and the art that informed it. (I want to make sure it is accessible to readers before I discuss its creation.)
For now, I want to revisit Anne Carson’s theories of Eros, and how they inform our creation of art and literature.
“I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else.”
— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (61)
“You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
“The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.”
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (68, 74)
There is enough writing about writing. The discourse on how to write, and how to write well, seems as varied as the craft itself. Still, I cannot help but wonder, Can desire teach us something new?
Eros, Carson tells us, can show us new ways of being, show us who we mean to be. I think fiction can do the same. But how can we use desire to create art and writing that reaches out to people? In short, how do we grow wings?
In about 1870, Pierre Auguste Cot begins what will come to be known as one of his most famous portraits: Springtime. The painting depicts two young lovers completely enthralled with one another. They sit enamored, “drunken with first love.” The exact inspiration is unknown, but many suspect it is influenced by Longus’ ancient Greek prose romance, Daphnis and Chloe: “the story of a boy and girl discovering eros” (EtBS, 87).
In the second-third century A.D., Longus himself encounters “a painted image of the history of Eros.” Looking at it, he thinks, This must be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Of course, he thinks this in Greek. Desire, the pang of the very Eros pictured before him, seizes him, and he resolves to “create a rival image in writing.” So he begins the tale of Daphnis and Chloe. Longus reaches out with his writing towards the image of Eros himself, from that which is present (the painting) to what is desired (the figure of his imagination).
In the summer of 2015, the spring of my own love story, I visited the MET and stood below Auguste Cot’s Springtime - in awe and unable to look away - thinking, This must be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. “All lovers believe they are inventing love: Daphnis and Chloe actually do invent love” (EtBS, 87). I had thought I was inventing love. I knew of the feelings the young lovers share in the portrait, the wonder, the blooming. But looking up at the painting, it seemed I was centuries late. Even still, desire was not lost on me, not the desire of the lover and not the desire of the artist. I will admit, like Longus, I was seized by the desire to write a story.
Eros seems to flit among us: writers, painters, and lovers. He will not settle down. His work is never done.
When I talk about writing into desire, the first question to ask is whose desire? In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson writes of the elongated reach of desire in fiction thusly: “‘But not yet!’ say the readers to the writer. ‘But not yet!’ says the writer to his hero and heroine. ‘But not yet!’ says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues.” (EtBS, 81).
There is a duality between fiction and desire. Desire requires fiction, what Anne Carson calls a “necessary fiction.” All writing is about desire; in its most basic form, writing is about the writer’s desire. The same can be said of all art.
Carson compares the act of inspiration and creation (“imaginative effort”) to metaphor:
“The two icons [the image of Eros Longus sees and the novel he writes] are like the two parts of a metaphor: an already existing image or sense and a novel image or sense are brought close by an act of imagination. Together they compose one meaning. Longus’ imaginative effort, like the verbal innovation that we call metaphor, is an erotic action, reaching out from what is known and present to something else, something different, something desired. The meaning he composes is a dynamic meaning, not a still point.” (EtBS, 86)
Like Eros, it moves.
And like Eros, “Longus’ page makes love to the reader,” and not just because the story itself is about love. In order to see how Longus manages this, we must place ourselves at the oblique angle where Eros moves: at the point of metaphor where we see both what is and what is meant to be.
“There stood one apple tree whose apples had all been gathered. It had neither fruit nor leaf. All the boughs were bare. And a single apple floated on the very top of the topmost boughs: big and beautiful and more fragrant in itself than many others. The applepicker was afraid to go up so high, or he overlooked it. And perhaps the beautiful apple was saving itself for a shepherd in love.” (DaC, 3.33)
Daphnis braves the bough to pick that last floating apple (though the Greek verb used, epeteto, is more directly translated as flying – a strange verb that gives the apple an unworldly quality, the quality of Eros himself: winged and aloft), and when he delivers it to Chloe he says, “This is the prize Aphrodite won for beauty, this I give to you as a victory-prize.” (DaC, 3.34). This act wins him a kiss from Chloe, his own sort of victory-prize.
The apple is a real apple, the kiss just as real. And yet, the scene is rife with metaphor and implications. Daphnis and Chloe are perfect symbolic lovers. Daphnis enacts the reach of desire as he goes to pick the apple, a symbol itself replete with meaning. A typical love gift of the era, the apple is a favorite offering from lover to beloved. Daphnis evokes the erotic tale of Aphrodite and the judgment of Paris. The apple is itself an object of desire. Longus also expects us to recall this fragment of Sappho:
As a sweet apple turns red on the high branch,
High on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot –
Well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach …
— Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (ed. E. Lobel & D. Page), fr. 105a
This poem remains, on purpose and by necessity, incomplete; it never arrives. The poem is a severed clause, never finished. Like desire, and like the applepickers, it reaches fruitlessly.
To Longus’ reader, the apple is all these things: symbol, referent, a metaphor for Chloe herself, and floating (flying) above all, a real apple, really picked and freely given. Longus’ text puts the reader at the juncture of what is real and what is ideal. Longus’ text is alive at all these levels, and so he positions his reader at the blind point of Eros where we float above even the highest bough, where we can see everything at once. A dizzying view: “As you read the novel your mind shifts from the level of characters, episodes and clues to the level of ideas, solutions, exegesis. The activity is delightful, but also one of pain […] Yet your mind is unwilling to let go of either level of activity, and remains arrested at a point of stereoscopy between the two. They compose one meaning. The novelist who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing” (EtBS, 90).
What have we been enjoying?
Anna
This month I've thoroughly enjoyed watching the show Heartstopper on Netflix. It's a cute 8 episode coming-of-age story that is apparently adapted from a series of graphic novels, so now I have to hunt those down and read them!
I also just finished reading the graphic novel Squire by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas, which came out not too long ago. Sara - the artist - is one of the heads at One More Multiverse, so I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her virtually a few times. Squire is a cute fiction YA adventure about a young girl finding her path despite an ongoing war in her country. And the art is amazing!
Rachel
Most people who know me well are painfully aware of my love for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I have read it four times, and have listened to the Spotify Audiobook (which I cannot recommend highly enough for Sarah Coomes’ incredible reading) two full times. I have spoken to my family and friends ad nauseam about my love of the book. It is a text not without its problems, but one I still hold very dear.
In this vein, I recently read Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. For those of us who have trouble stomaching the antiquated style and relatively slow momentum of Jane Eyre (you know who you are!!), Wide Sargasso Sea offers the story from a new perspective, one of pain, violence, unrequited love, and beautiful, brutal, almost breathless, simplicity.
Also, because it is spring, I am re-reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. While not strictly about spring, I find this book puts me deeply in touch with nature, which I always find myself drawn to as the weather turns warm.
Your newsletter never disappoints~Thank you Anna. Thank you Rachel. Love, BarBara
Anna, What fun seeing all your work. Can't wait to see Evil Eye. Rachel, What an amazing piece you wrote on Springtime. Your moments of cognitive and emotional intersections are pure love.