Seven Letters to an Unknown Godhead
Dear —,
This letter already contains a false start, as I don't know how to address you. Perhaps that is why, unlike the people who inhabit the town we're in, I have not resorted to prayer. I do not consider myself a believer, so my letter writing must stand in for the intimacy that I now feel, even if I can't address you.
There is intimacy in a name, yes? I wish I had yours. It puts shapes and sounds to something that I knew was there since the moment that I saw your head emerge from the ground. My supervisor, Dr. Morris, was the first to notice the anomaly in the dirt. The patch of land has been marked by our perfect squares for at least a week and a half. We have found many items made from flint, some sea ammonites, and, of course, the ubiquitous coprolite. As it always goes. But the cadence of Dr. Morris was suddenly changed. He was now surprised as we dug through the muck.
I had never heard him surprised. I figured he had been angry, so I attended to my tools. I made sure I had not overstepped my bounds. But he called my name. Then Charles, then Maurice, the other two graduate students he had by his side.
We saw an eye—your eye—under a thin casing of dirt. We could tell that the monument, whatever it was, would be huge. Dr. Morris told us all to come by his square; "forget the bullshit, young men, and help with the king shit." We followed because that is what we were paid to do, and because we hoped to bask in whatever discovery he had found. Though we would only be relegated to a footnote or, perhaps, if he was feeling generous when he writes the book, an acknowledgement, we were eager to help. At least his theft wouldn't be an actual theft of discovery, only of our role in his shadow.
But I feel a sting of regret for being so callous. King Shit. You are far greater, I know now, but perhaps didn’t believe in just then.
As we worked to unearth the rest of your face, I could not place the period when you were made. We scratched our heads and continued to work as the sun disappeared and lanterns came out. Then, as the rest of your body emerged, we were even more perplexed and confused.
"Not exactly a King," Dr. Morris said. "Or a Queen."
"Drag queen?"
Laughter followed. I was silent next to my workers. The shape of your body was unbelievably curved and yet indelibly muscular. It all lead to the swell of the breast and belly, then the strong thighs that framed testicles, a penis cushioned on top. There was no mistake here. This was your perfect form. Both, yet none at all.
And you had been worshipped. That much was clear.
I was captivated. It was the first time I can ever recall feeling reverence. Of course, the items we've unearthed in the past excited me. Of course, the lectures during my youth and the other books of ancient antiquity stirred in me the feeling of being small, of being within history. But this was something else, like a wound that had suddenly been open without realizing the pain. I believed. Not in any object or ideology, but in a sense. A feeling. A world where two could exist in one, and it could be—no, it was—worshipped.
I wanted to know your name.
I wanted to address you.
For now, this will have to do.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
We have talked to the inhabitants of the city today. Our translator did his best to capture the state of the statue. The word hermaphrodite exists, yes, but it never quite worked for me. Aphrodite and Hermes’ child is a mix of them both, but this culture does not use that pantheon. They cannot use that word to describe themselves. Many of them had no idea of what we spoke of; when we showed them photos of the statue, they stared with wide eyes.
One, a small boy of no more than twelve, smiled at the image. I believed I recognized the same sense of reverence in his eyes. I pulled aside our translator so I could ask him what he saw, and what it meant.
"That is the person from my dreams," the translator said for the boy.
"Your dreams? Tus sueños?"
"Sí."
Our brief exchange in a shared language gave me confidence. I asked the statue’s name in his language.
He shrugged. He said something the translator needed to repeat several times, removing colloquial slang, before I understood. "I call the statue by my name, because I first saw them in a mirror."
"And what is your name?" Charles asked. With him came the rest of the researchers, and Dr. Morris.
The boy did not answer. Dr. Morris didn't think talking to school children was worthwhile, so we left in a huff, with no answers and nothing citable for our inevitable paper. I tried to repeat the boy's lengua in my head. I imagined so many names for him, all of which lead me back to you.
Even in textbooks and other histories, we cannot find your origin. A lost relic, as if sprung up out of nothing but dreams and ideas and lost names. It hurts me in a way that I never expected to be hurt, but it also fills me with hope.
I wish to stop writing, if only to try and see what I can dream up.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
There is no dream of your name. Only a fleeting image of myself as a boy, when my sister first arrived in our house. My mother dealt with a difficult birth. She needed to stay in the hospital for a week and a half longer than everyone anticipated. My father shuffled back and forth to keep her company and to visit with my new baby sister Rachel. I was left with my grandmother. We both had the duties of putting her room together.
The colour pink stretched out in my mind like a void. A beautiful colour, but one that my father had told me used to be associated with royalty. "Back in older times, kings wore red. When their sons came along, they were to be wrapped in royal colours--but obviously not given the same power. Add a dab of white to red and the whole composition changes. Pink was a boy's colour, a strong colour. Now I cloaked in my daughters room. Women are getting more power. It is good."
One tiny spec of something can change the course of everything. The history of red is truly the history of civilization.
I think about his speech again now. In my dream, I was adding white to red and watching it dilute. One tiny spec of something can change the course of everything. The history of red is truly the history of civilization.
But maybe I am reading too much of myself into this work.
It was too hot to interview the town's inhabitants today; our translator passed out under a tree and went home early. The other relics in the dirt have no meaning. The only discovery to report is that, on the feet of your statue, are words we are still waiting to fully comprehend.
Already, I hear them in my father's voice.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
Look up at me and become me. Look down and worship yourself.
Those are the words on the bottom of your statue. Yes, you were worshipped, it seems, so our speculation was right. But it may not be for what we thought. And it may change the course of our entire mission here.
All the assumptions Dr. Morris had are being questioned. Even he resents calling them assumptions, since "one can only stand on the shoulders of the research that came before. You cannot always go back to reinvent the wheel or to even see the wheel being born. We have to just trust that the wheel is round. It's what academia is for." This is his long way of saying that he was never wrong, but men before him might have been wrong. Perhaps. A little bit.
The other graduate students waited for his rant to be over. Our dreams as some footnotes on a greater paper slipped away, only to come back into clearer focus. When Dr. Morris disappeared into town, Charles turned to us with a wide smile.
"If this thing is truly new, then we should write it down first. We should start phoning the media."
"Why would the media care?" Maurice asked. "No one cares about scholarship unless it's a sound-bite."
"And a he-she statue isn't a worthy call?"
When no one answered, Charles started to hum the first few verses of "When Doves Cry" by Prince. I remembered it as the hit of the summer before I disappeared into books.
"The statue could be famous, just like that little man on stage in purple," Maurice added moments later, the idea stirring something in him. I wondered how much of his memories of Purple Rain differed from my own. "This could be what women and the feminists have been waiting for, too. We are the future of research. Of the academy."
When they both turned to me, however, I merely shrugged. My mind was a blank, nothing but purple. I wondered how much mixing of red and blue it would take until the colour emerged.
We went to bed that night with the radio on, a luxury we hadn’t used in a while. Every song confirmed their discovery, while only anticipating my own fear.
Fame means I can no longer have you for myself. Fame means that your name is no longer my own.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
Dr. Morris has not returned from his trip to the city's archives. I wondered aloud if his absence was deliberate, and then as the hour grew later, if it was a curse. What if this was like what everyone, even my sister, warned us about when I told them about the trip? The Tutankhamun curse. Deaths. Plagues. Perils. Or even just the natives becoming sick enough of us to make us sick.
"Why would the city dwellers care?" Charles asked. "They have no idea who this is."
"But we discovered it, and they didn't. That's enough to get people angry. They need something to do since they didn't do anything at all. And people often rush to fill a void like that with hostility."
"Well, Dr. Morris is rushing to fill his void with alcohol," Maurice said. "Or women. Women are good at filling voids as much as they are voids."
‘Women are good at filling voids as much as they are voids.’
They laughed. I drew quiet. In the end, they were more correct than myself. Dr. Morris came back into camp stinking of alcohol and with darting eyes that signalled shame. He insisted we would get back to work tomorrow. The statue was still in the ground to the base, and now it needed to be moved into the museum. He had cleared a space for it, he insisted, and others would come to assist.
I wanted more information, but I received slurred words.
I tossed in my camp bed, the void the statue would leave in the ground haunting me. I will admit that I wanted to forget about you. I wanted to replace the whole experience from my mind with academic prose and a solidified story. I wanted you to be removed from the ground so that you could be contained in an archive.
But we cannot forget what we don't know. I feel the hostility brim under my fingertips at all I don't know and can't fathom. In my anger, I would have welcomed the villagers to come and take us away, establish a curse in our name. It wasn't just their lives we were uprooting, doing what we were doing, but all of ours, too.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
I think I understand now.
I had a dream about you. It didn't start that way; it seemed so real that I believed it to be life. I ran my hands through the dirt instead of using tools to unearth a fossil. I picked up a bright pink gem. The light filtered through it and cascaded everywhere. One of the beams fell on your feet. I walked over and realized it was setting on the ground, not on the base of the statue. I touched the feet. I thought of Eurykleia, washing Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey. She sees his scar, recognizes him through the disguise. He is home then.
I stared up at your eyes. I ran my hands up the pillars of your legs, over the swell and hard curve of your body. I cupped the many sexes I saw. In reverence, yes, but also desire. When my hands reached your chin, I ran my fingers around your face like a frame. The whiteness of the eyes, no pupils, startled me at first. I blinked and they became mirrors. I kissed the reflection I saw. My mouth mated with marble.
In my ear, I heard a name.
Eurykleia.
The woman who brings him home—but also the name I wanted for my sister when she was born. They went with Rachel, sturdy and practical, from the Bible. I wanted something so much more fantastic than that. Some bright and caressing, like pink. When my name wasn't chosen, I kept it like a gem in my pocket. It was mine. My discovery. I met no other woman, other than mythology, with it as her first, given name.
Except you.
You.
You are Eurykleia.
When I woke, my body was rigid in my camp bed. Stiff and moulted, like I had become rock. I ran my hands over myself in the same way that I had done for you in the dream. The loss of feeling, that the dream had been a dream and not reality, brought tears to my eyes.
I thought of the village boy.
I thought of the words under your feet.
I wondered if I could swap places.
If I could become you.
I wanted antiquity. I wanted to be remembered.
I cupped my sex and longed for something else. Not like what Charles and Maurice saw in popular culture, or even in the halls of a university gender classroom. I wanted antiquity. I wanted to be remembered.
Worshipped.
I ran a hand along my sex once again. Disappointed. Then to my lips. I swore I felt the bruise of stone. I lingered there, half-inside a dream made real, before I fell asleep.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear —,
I have not used the name given in a dream, because I realize it was more about me. But then again, hasn't this always been about me? Prayer is intimate because we think we speak to the divine and that the divine is listening. But we are merely claiming ourselves through stories, like mothers do for their children at night in bed, in order to prepare them for being alone.
Letters work the same way. They pale in comparison to human contact. Even books, novels, and the pieces of literature we have come to think of as so standard is just aimless chatter. Aimless ways of staving off loneliness.
When I wrote to you, I thought I was addressing a discovery of human history. For a brief moment, I also feared that this discovery was damaging, a curse, and something that would be a downfall. But it's a discovery of beauty, of myself.
In the afternoon, your statue will be carted to the museum. It will be studied. I will become a footnote and a trace to history—as Abraham, anyway.
The rest is underneath the surface, almost at the forefront. When I come home again to my city, everything will change.
In the meantime, this is the last letter I write in this form. Thank you for what you have shown me, in the waking and real world.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Abraham
Dear Eurykleia,
I kissed your lips today, knowing the truth. It was a mirror.
I believe.
Sincerely,
Eurykleia
