Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: a sculpture of Hercules and the Nemean lion (c 1580's CE, Southern Germany). It's in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow.
Hercules Strangles the Nemean Lion
Max Mitchell
Parallel geometric planes, each plane a hologram of an ocean’s surface, the holographic slices of ocean stacked vertically like the storeys of a building, in infinite series. All motion here is frictionless, inarticulate: you can glide over the surface of a plane until the shadowed horizon recedes or pass through each hologram to the ocean above or the one below. The oceans have a cloudy translucence in which phosphorescent filaments of blue, white, gold, red, orange, and violet glint like the scales of fish. Often the iridescence synchronises across whole tracts of water and you can make out proto-forms in the glimmering churn. But look now yonder: islanded by the fluxing swell, a membrane of water is lighting the rude outlines of a landscape, an encoded mathematical memory of events from eons past: irregular spits of pitchy rock forked in the gritty, weedy soil of an olive-hued scrubland beneath a bleached, cancelling sky. Extruding ribcages of mauled oxen sticky with congealed blood and swarming with blue-green flies lie between tufts of wild grass, and a shepherd’s dog is barking dementedly, and bubbles of blood inflate and deflate on the lips of a shepherd boy who is still alive, his eyeballs, brow, and the bridge of his nose torn from his face, and something is loping in the periphery, its mane and head dark umber and slick with blood, and it has been chased twice on horseback and pelted with arrows and stones back to its cave a league distant from the nearest settlement, but it smells the sweat of the livestock on the breeze. His greaves jag into the flesh of his ankles as he pounds uphill, the loose chalky topsoil giving way underfoot and scattering backwards in dusty cones. In his right hand is a truculent wooden club honeycombed with dull nails, the weighted end pointing downwards like a third leg or a pendulum, which he periodically drives into the earth whilst climbing to keep his footing. Nearing the crescent lips of the cave mouth he relaxes his pace, uncords his vast shield from his back, and rights his club. The entranceway is hooded like a monk’s cowl, and he sidles through it while his eyes adjust to the grainy darkness inside. Amid the black organs of the chamber he sees two golden zeroes hanging in mid-air, and with its long, shadowed, rutted face it is as though the luminescent eyes of some minor rustic deity are peering from behind a carved wooden mask. He rushes it with his shield, hoping to lame its front legs with his club before it can react, but it is lying atop a flat-topped, chest-high rock, and as he raises his club it throws itself at his head and lands on his shield and clings to his shield’s top edge with one paw and with the other paw swipes at the arm holding the club, and ribbons of flesh open on his forearm and he drops the club, and its claws lacerate his bowed neck and shoulders as he carries it clinging to his shield like some monstrous baby and slams its back against the cave wall. With its limbs pinned and splayed under the bronze oval, he starts thumping its head with the bottom of his fist like a shipwright nailing planks into a ship’s hull. After twenty blows it writhes free and with its bloodied head makes for the white pool of the cave mouth. He throws aside his shield and jumps on its back. He reaches around the soft underside of its huge neck with his right arm and with his left hand palming the back of his right hand grapples it into a chokehold, and it struggles demonically, but null its face and claws it is nothing but blind, striated ropes of muscle pulling on rods of bone, and his face is pressed into its matted mane and he breathes the hot musk of its body as its life ebbs away.
Today's poem:
The Death of Hercules, by Edwin Morgan.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: Hercules prepares to wrestle Antaios; he hangs his cloak up on a herm, depicting Pan, before the bout.
Hercules and Antaeus
Seamus Heaney
Sky-born and royal, snake-choker, dung-heaver, his mind big with golden apples, his future hung with trophies,
Hercules has the measure of resistance and black powers feeding off the territory. Antaeus, the mould-hugger,
is weaned at last: a fall was a renewal but now he is raised up – the challenger's intelligence
is a spur of light, a blue prong graiping him out of his element into a dream of loss
and origins - the cradling dark the river-veins, the secret gullies of his strength, the hatching grounds
of cave and souterrain, he has bequeathed it all to elegists. Balor will die and Byrthnoth and Sitting Bull.
Hercules lifts his arms in a remorseless V, his triumph unassailed by the powers he has shaken,
and lifts and banks Antaeus high as a profiled ridge, a sleeping giant, pap for the dispossessed.
Today's Flickr photo with the most hits: this dedicatory herm of Heracles, from Messini, on the Peloponnese. It's housed in the archaeological museum, on site. It incorporates the usual penis (flaccid in this instance).
Today's Flick photo with the most hits: this Pompeiian fresco from the villa of Augustus' grandson, Agrippa Postumus. It shows a drunken Hercules - those little blighters are stealing his club and quiver.
Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits: the Hercules sarcophagus, Archaeological Museum, Antalya.
Pillar
rosy-fingered dawn (18 / Tokyo / Toronto)
atlas– your shoulders crack and crumble; dust and dirt fall from the corners of your aching joints; you are ageing like stone. your body, quivering, is not made of marble, but the fissures like tree roots on your arms glimmer golden and blue and green–and you are forced to stand still, tall, sturdy; as if you were nothing but a pillar, reaching up to heaven, grounded forever to the earth. atlas– the weight of the world is an anchor on the curve of your spine. shaking, shaking, like the scattered rings of saturn– oscillating. atlas– collapse. atlas– crumble, fragment; dream of feathers and dust and billowing air, and all that is light and gentle– and melt. atlas– loosen your fingertips, let the world slip from your shivering hands. atlas– even stone can turn to dust. atlas– disintegrate.
The Voice of Hercules
JD Debris
Remembering that heavyweight we’d call Hercules, a mellow steroid fiend who never sparred, just raised
barbells ‘til he was swollen as that solemn British killer from Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear. He’d flex, hit vacuum poses in ringside mirrors, taking photo
after photo, & lounge in the locker room, nothing but a sideways Sox hat on. A garden-variety goon with a garbled, guttural monotone
& shrivelled steroid balls: so Hercules seemed, on the surface. But every word he spoke was praise— “So sick, bro”—softly, near-inaudible.
One night, the gym screened a pay- per-view—De la Hoya or Money May. All us gym rats came back in jewellery, jeans, & the reek
of cologne instead of sweat to cozy up between dormant heavy bags & watch the fights projected on industrial concrete.
I brought my old acoustic for between-fight amusement, background-strumming a soundtrack to our cacophony. Hercules sat
beside me, saying, “Bro, can you play a corrido beat?” I started to strum a stock waltz-meter, & Hercules, in a bass bel canto
that could rumble the cheap seats of an opera hall, began a Spanish ballad about a lost bantamweight named Amen, who had disappeared,
the lyrics went, to Mexico last spring, whom no one had heard from since. The gym was quiet one verse in. Pay-per-view muted, everyone listening
to this supposed bonehead channel beauty. To his ballad, its fragility—Fly, little dove, fly, he’d sigh
at verses’ end. I’m amazed that no one laughed at him— insults, back then, our lingua franca & form of praise—
in that moment so holy & ridiculous, when his lips formed O’s on long, pure tones, & every chord
perfectly—somehow— harmonized. I can’t tell you which prize- fighter won that bout,
or if we gorged on pizza & beer, blowing off our weight-making regimens. I can’t tell you if it rained, I can’t pretend to know if sparks flew inside all those ears
bent in unison toward the amen Hercules incanted. As for him, his trainer, a hardass marine, got sick of his preening
& told him go find another gym where he could kiss his biceps in the mirror, & drink his creatine & beast his endless deadlift reps.
How many songs has he sung since, in the shower of a distant gym where he still takes his sweet time soaping every ropelike vein?
What I know, I’ll tell: around the campfire of the muted fights that night, he was our horn of Gabriel, our nightingale mid-flight.
Sing it again, Hercules? “Aight.”
Today’s Flickr photo with the most hits is this little 8″ figure of a weary Heracles. It is in the Agora Museum, Athens.
This motif provided inspiration for generations of sculptors. Looking very similar to the Athens figure is this monumental sculpture from the Farnese collection, housed in the Archaeological Museum, Naples.
This titanic figure was commissioned for the Baths of Caracalla, in Rome. It cites a well-known Greek original - cast in bronze by Lysippos (4th BCE) which was still extant in 1205. It was melted down by Crusaders, in the sack of Constantinople.
The artist who sculpted the Athens figure would also have known of Lysippos’ bronze original. His domestic statue allowed a purchaser to have a little piece of mythology at home, one that had a fine pedigree.