The Uncensored Secondary Elaboration of The Fabula of Properzia* and The Peach Seller
A Minimalist Piece (4) followed by soul-work assignments
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Nor have they been too proud to set themselves with their little hands, so tender and so white, as if to wrest from us the palm of supremacy, to manual labours, braving the roughness of marble and the unkindly chisels . . . . Vasari
A) Text
She was going to sleep with Victor from the other side.
We all knew that she had her beautiful, musical eye on the exotic one who brought her, one at a time, the peaches† for her crucifix. She had more of them now, placed about in her studio, than she could carve the kernels of. They lie assigned to their shadow basins and soccle lightbeams in the languid September air, which is ballooned together by the wood pannelling, the damask drapes and her tooth and point chisels, to glow, to ooze, to sit full and plump, like permanent yellow-orange, alizarin-gold velvet balls of fruition. Pregnant with sweet longing.
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. I watched Properzia take him into her chambers,
drawing him into the amniotic magenta of the night, the peaches inebriated. I heard them speak in low voices.
He spoke in future terms, juggling with our days that number us, about his responsibilities. She spoke of the past that still lay between them. Uncomprehendingly, I listend closely to hear the artist unable to refuse his care for her person, while she intoned his presence as if he was not there.
There would be child but not this time. There would be no harm, or it would have incubated itself by now, blistering his senses into crusts. But his touch was smooth. And as the crow flies.
The curtains billowed, I feared detction, but the sough slid him between the baleens and the wood creaked. I watched him find the belly of her heart, bedazzled by its violet vapour. They were silent at this point of congregation for a while, she calming the surge into ripplings. He reflecting his sparkling eye over the ruching of her cave.
But no sooner was it calm, when in this midst came another. Properzia grinned like I’ve seen her when busy cutting obliquelywith the marble vein.
It was nothing, he hurriedly wished this other away.
It is not about you, she arrested his wafting hand.
She liked you a lot.
He went to protest but she repeated musingly: it is not about you.
He confessed they couldn’t help but bump into eachother, but again she hushed him, more admonishingly this time, that it was not about him.
You cannot once given take back your generosity, she whispered.
He squeezed her arms to bring her back to him. She squeezed his. It would take courage to to be this kind while being cruel.
While you still think you are standing in my studio, it will never be about you and always about those you knew. Or it would not be love; and I could just as well delight in my peaches while you admired my craft.
He bowed his head confounded.
She lifted it gently. Tenderly: Where else can I find you if not in the people who need you? How to draw you elsewhere while you still stand a man and I am already fragrance?
I have already found you as my completion, so you are mine. It cannot be about you. You are not my marble for which I must cross the distance, chipping it away.
If I were to go looking for you it would be for having lost my self. But I am anchored by the the twelve. So I can only invite the others to be finished with you, that we might be left for dust.
This is not a water chamber that you have slipped into with your funerary boat, but a dodecahedron sanctum sanctorium of memory unrecorded, not set in stone, but the chippings on the floor. The spillings as they overflow to seep where blood cannot go and form must be structured like bone by love alone.
And then I heard no more. I think I fainted from my coughing fit, choking on the calcium carbonate dust particles swarming, spinning, whirling dervishily hot the air.
footnotes
*If you are wondering who Properzia is take a quick look here
†Find more on peaches and a succinct summary of Properzia de Rossi’s life here. And Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is, indeed, worth a read for a flavour of the rivalry and reputation issues the Renaissance art period, easy to pick up from the animated bias lent each artist according to the author’s taste and leanings.
B) Now watch and listen:
Victor
C) Assignments
- Read the text through again and underline all the anachronisms.
- Can you think of anything more intimate than watching Lynden shave or hearing Gilham D. Erickson talk about how to use your sculpting tools?
- Who do you think you have in your bed? Are they the same one they think they are?
- How deep is your pool of love? When do you expect it to overflow?
- Have you remembered your spirit today? Get on your mat and lie in Savasana (corpse pose) and remember the text backwards.
- Who is your favorite Vasari character?