From Mutabor

Abstract

From Mutabor KARL KIRCHWEY Palmyra for Roger Michel Its name from the Semitic tamar, “palm date,” or even from the Hurrian tad, “to love,” imagine it as an explorer first saw it, travelling with an armed escort of the Agha’s best horsemen: the hills, opening, discovered a great number of Corinthian pillars unmixed with any wall or solid building, all at once the greatest quantities of ruins we had ever seen, impossible to imagine anything more striking than the vision of them, all in white marble, in a flat waste showing neither life nor motion. There are cities that live in memory longer than their ruins do. Troy, Babylon— they are more famous than the limestone scree, the thyme and tamarisk that now remain. For other cities, though, the testament of standing architecture is greater than what survives in history, more eloquent and beautiful: and this was Palmyra, courted and caressed by Parthia and Rome, its cult and exhibition guarded by the desert, in their equilibrium, just as island nations are by the sea. arion 25.1 spring/summer 2017 Its luxury Persian, arts and letters Greek, its funerary customs were Egyptian and its language Palmyrene Aramaic— the syllables of which are still spoken by the ancient fountain called Ephca where it flows in a shallow basin and lulls the listener with its sulphurous water before it loses itself in the sand in reticulated images that shiver, running out, like lives of Queen Zenobia, beside the bema dedicated to Jupiter. Hers was reputed to be a great beauty; she painted the ends of her fingers red, her eyes and lashes black, and her lips blue. She claimed descent from the Ptolemies and Seleucids, from Cleopatra and from Queen Dido, a warrior but also a survivor. Displayed at Rome captive in golden fetters then given a new name, Julia Aurelia married and lived at Tibur and in peace. The fountain’s water feeds the barren soil; its rivulets sink, fleeing the command of all those who would cut off or control the branching silver spread of what has happened: today, built where David killed Goliath, Palmyra is a wound, a place of partisan murder and the mad will to deny both monuments and human recollection. With TATP, a hammer or a sledge, they have decapitated the statue of Al-lât mutabor: palmyra 164 (sister to Athena) with her huge dilated eyes, her features chisel-cut, as the god Baalshamin watches, at his side Nemesis, who slowly draws apart her robe and spits on her own naked chest to avoid the evil eye for those who would disturb even the funeral banquet for Zabdibôl, son of Moqîmu, ’Aliyyat his daughter attending on him, in a rescued grave stele, who is herself commemorated later as she stares down the unknown where the drill has freed her limbs, lifted her veil and earring, and parted her lips to speak, the nefeš or soul in this way remembered among the living. A whole ecology of touch and sight is being destroyed: the quick intelligence that in the sculptor worked to imitate the human form, using nature’s evidence; whereas the architect sought a proportion that, once found, could be preserved and copied, so sculpture sooner reached its perfection and lost it sooner, while you took for granted the buildings you moved through, in your collective distraction. They became habitual by use and by perception; you learned love by an appropriation that was tactile. But now, in the orchestra of the Roman theater (gift of an Emperor to Hellenize a free city), terrorism as violent propaganda slaughters an old man, aiming to express Karl Kirchwey 165 all that will separate you and estrange one from the other. The manipulators of spectacle, however, post no images of this carnage, of life negated by the ideological. What is shot in the head and heart and groin is lost forever. Sullen fear disperses the crowd. Yet from your technologization, you may call up a thousand images; and even now, in an Italian quarry, a robot carver is moving to and fro against a flank of stone continuously, like the mind in silence. The work is...