Going up, and coming down. Sons of gods who climbed toward their fathers and fell out of the sky, sleepers who went under and did not come back, and the figures whose whole story turns on the distance between heaven and the ground.
Arachne weaves what Athena’s tapestry leaves out, and the goddess tears it rather than answer it. A reading of Ovid’s weaving contest through the disguises of the gods, the looms of Penelope and Philomela, and the spider of the Upanishads.
Epaphus tells Phaethon that his father is a picture his mother made up, and the boy goes to the Sun for proof. Read beside Herod’s oath, the chariots of the sun that Josiah burned, Plato’s Egyptian priest and Peter’s fire, with Lucian’s boatmen on the Eridanus, who had never heard of him.
Endymion chooses to sleep forever, and the moon comes down to him. A reading of the shepherd who charted the moon, through Pliny, Lucian, Apollonius, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Nonnus’s link to Narcissus, and Kierkegaard on sleep as genius.
Narcissus comes to the water thirsty. A reading of Ovid’s myth through Echo, Conon’s rejected lover Ameinias, the twin sister Pausanias records, Hegel on beauty, and the flower that keeps his name.
