Page 14 - GALIET Memory and Poiesis: On Apollo's Wings IV

of political death and rebirth. However, just as necessity casts its shadows, so does divine necessity casts hers. The giant Titan goddess, Thea,7 wife of Hyperion, mother of Helios, Moon and Dawn, whose being is wise, strong, and larger than the Amazons and Mnemosyne, spreads a shade. What could this mean? It suggests that she, immortal mother of the eternal heavenly orbs, who is beyond and grander than memory herself, is also subjected to the vicissitudes of temporal existence for only that which is present in time can cast a shadow.
In both poems, the theme of mimesis, of nature imitating reality, is ever-present. When Saturn falls, all of nature mimics his paralysis and silence. As he congeals, no stirring life is heard: only the Naiad’s hushing and her voiceless stream (Hyperion: 1:11). Moments, too, stagnate and are frozen in time as “where a dead leaf falls, there it rests.” (Hyperion: 1:10). A suspension of motion is felt in Thea and Saturn, too, who become like statues. Just as nature imitates the cold, paralyzing reality of the Titans’ fall, the Titans’ limbs are also locked, cramped and screwed. There is no motion in their den of misery, aptly symbolic of Plato’s cavern as a place of alienation, exile and fragmentation. The only motion heard is “heartbeats heaving in pain” whose palpitation remains removed from the
7 Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Trans. M.L. West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 135, 371-4.
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