PIGMALION
Between the ages of six and eighteen months, children develop the capacity to recognize themselves in mirrors, demonstrating a connective awareness of their specular counterparts. Images filled with possibility, ideal figures of integration and unity. Yet the mirror stage is a primary alienation that ominously figures into future relationships. From this point onward, the child-being conceives its identity in fictional terms. Even as it dies.
* * *
Pigmalion thrust once again into the vagina he had built, but encountered no response. Lifeless acquiescence. The dry hump. The body had grown a silent voice, and the voice had birthed a silent disagreement. There was indeed an opening, but no desire. The disagreement escalated into a dilemma. His spirits punctured, Pygmalion put his pants back on.
“Back to the board,” he muttered, spreading blueprints across an expansive desk. There the nameless invention lay, crudely expressed by Pigmalion’s less-than-expert lines. He scratched his head, pondering the monstrous feminine.
"I started with the nude form. Moved from there. I’m not born with clothes, neither is she. Started with the nude body. It stirred something in the pants. The story began there. The end is nowhere in sight."
Pigmalion had refashioned the female after an initial disappointment. After copulating with her cold cast, working feverishly for a response, he found that the body remained mute, and his unilateral sensuality dissipated. When he looked into her eyes, he found himself looking at himself.
“I love a corpse. My love is cold and unresponsive,” his rediscovered notes lamented, centuries after his scientific endeavor. He tried much on his way to intercourse, including clothing, jewels, rouge. Anything that might call attention to her form beneath. He studied music, mastered instruments, composed songs of love and desire. Spent hours practicing the art of courtship as laid down in manifestos of the period.
After years spent in vain, Pigmalion eventually wrote of this enterprise: “I am a bad son of Nature. My craft has reached mastery only of crude and inessential materials. I cannot, to this date, create a companion worthy of companionship. I am a disheartening failure.”
The day Pigmalion’s nameless creation awoke, she found him slumping in the study, empty bottles at his extended fingertips. Questioned later on the breakthrough, he admitted that he knew not what propelled the monster towards consciousness. Nor did he care when he heard her first words.
“I am your servant, your sweetheart, for nothing will I cease to please you.”
Pigmalion performed barely interrupted intercourse for thirty days and thirty nights, pausing only to write in his diary.
“Disregard previous journal entries discussing the failed experiment. I have overcome my inability to master the natural world. It is my only regret that I do not understand fully the method by which I have achieved this.”
"Master, I am ready to receive you,” his companion uttered, emerging scrubbed from her toilette. There was no request that she turned down, nothing she refused him. When he objected to her actions, she surrendered to his argument. If he commanded her, she obeyed him. If she commanded, and he agreed, then he obeyed. Pigmalion had found happiness.
A generation later, Pigmalion’s son Cynaras would be seduced by his own daughter, an act of intercourse that doomed his hard-fought seniority in political hierarchy. History provided perspective, however. More than 200 years after his rule collapsed, he would be described as a “good man” who “fell under the deception of Others.” The seduction, objective dissent explained, was an accident blamed chiefly on his “generous and giving spirit, which found no end or unsuitable purpose.”
His daughter, killed immediately upon Cynaras' revelation, would however continue to be vilified by the state well into the 20th century. "Slut. Whore. Wench,” the papers seethed. “Harlot. Hole. Bitch.”
* * *
Thus
he gan make a mirour of his mynde/
In which he saugh al holly hire figure/
And that he wel koude in his herte fynde/
It was to him a right good adventure.
(evocative
of the “clear pure fountain [II, ix, 20867] which furnished Narcissus
with his love object)
