I wanted to end the year with video of a miniature, which (while more than life-sized) this sculpture certainly is; time set in flesh. Once, Athena, Goddess of the City, made Diomedes a superhuman killer on behalf of politics and the city. Now, Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, has told her son Aeneas that the city no longer matters.
The past is gone, it’s okay to flee.
He does so with his father on his shoulders, holding the household Gods, his son by his heel. It’s a touching scene and the erotic answer to Carpeaux’s Ugolino and His Sons, a family line poisoned by dereliction of duty and regret. Here flight is overtly blessed, and love binds generations in a moving human pillar, soul crossing from one world into the next by grace of acceptance and devotion.
It’s a perfect piece for New Year’s Eve, where the Old Man of the past year dies, and the bouncing baby of the new year is born. And where with, as Joyce wrote, “that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things which is the experience of her children in every time”, we all leave the ruined city of the past year, its joy and loss, and cross a threshold into the unknown, a city full of hope, bright and new.
Feliz Ano Novo.
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