Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Pygmalion went out into the yard and dipped his head in the fountain of cold water that played there. Returning refreshed to the studio he looked again at his work in progress and could only shake his head in bewilderment. The general, when Pygmalion had been permitted to go round to his villa to study the great man’s features, had struck him as being constructed more on the lines of a warthog than anything human, and yet here he was emerging from the marble as nothing short of a refined and miraculous beauty. A distinctly feminine beauty at that.

Picking up a chisel, Pygmalion ran his artist’s eye over the work and knew that with some merciless and well-aimed blows he could easily enough get back on course and not waste the valuable block of marble for which he had paid a month’s income.

Crack, crack, crack!

This was more like it.

Tap, tap, tap!

Must have been some weird subconscious urge.

Chip, chip, chip!

Or indigestion perhaps.

Now, let’s step back again and see …

No!!!

Far from rescuing the work and bringing the general’s masculine and martial glare back to the face of his sculpture he had somehow managed only to amplify its soft femininity, grace, sensuality and – goddammit – sexiness.

He was in a fever now. Deep inside he knew he was no longer rescuing the general. He was on a mission to see through to the end the madness that had seized him.

The madness was of course the work of Aphrodite. She had not been pleased when one of the handsomest and most eligible young men of her island had chosen to turn his back on love. A young man moreover, whose seaside dwelling happened to be exactly where Aphrodite had made landfall after her birth in the waves and, she reasoned, ought therefore to vibrate with a special intensity of amorousness. Love and beauty, as most of us find out in the course of our lives, are remorseless, relentless and ruthless.

For days and nights Pygmalion laboured on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink – no conscious thought at all – came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered and hummed.

At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: somehow, yes certainly, at last – it was finished.

He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed – the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked.

He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel.

From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage.

Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagination was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet.

His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love.

The expression and posture of the girl – whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk – were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her? Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. An inner loveliness of soul sang from her very core. Her lines were sweepingly, swoopingly, swooningly smooth, supple and sensuous. Her breasts seemed softly to be pushing out, her nakedness made so much more alluring by the way her hand touched her throat in a gesture of sweetly modest alarm.