You Must Change Your Life
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
-Rainier Maria Rilke
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler's protagonist teachers her followers that "God is change." In this view, God as Everything is in process, nothing is fixed except the fact of fluidity. Living in the material cosmos, all that exists is ever-changing. Our human psyches develop myriad ways to convince ourselves that either this isn't true, or that somehow we can escape this reality. Finding perfect love. Writing a work of art that will last beyond our deaths. Adhering to some rigid moral code or practice in the hopes of achieving an eternal, fixed existence beyond death. As a pagan, I am not sure I believe in any kind of heavenly existence that exists beyond the natural cycles of life and death. Yet I do think that I have a soul that is more than the physical body, that may survive the death of this life and move on to another. There may well be a realm outside of the cycles of life and death, or a dimension of existence that includes all these things and thereby transcends it, but it does not feel useful to me while I'm figuring out how to manage the changes of this life.
The torso of Apollo, Greek god of music, medicine, poetry, plague, and light, animates the poem above. Time has dismembered the sculpture, as in a way it had dismembered the ancient religion celebrated by the sculpture. Yet the passion and fervor with which the artist created the icon still suffuses the curves of the sculpture's body. The power of the god beams out like light through the power of its curves, a facet of sun embodied, stretched further by the power of poetry. Here the power of the sun elicits further change for you, the viewer-reader, by virtue of being seen. Being seen, completely and totally, necessitates change.
The work of psychology and many great spiritual traditions requires the participant to develop the capacity to see. To see themselves more clearly, and thereby to see the world without the blinders of personality and history. We go through every day of our lives doing some behavior that makes us unhappy, never quite understanding why, until the day comes when a sharp insight into our own nature penetrates so deeply that there is no way we can act as we have, though we may not yet have the will to become who we wish to be.
Such change is not easy. It's not the inevitable, passive, entropic change, or even the explosive change of volcanoes. Any change inspired by such seeing, by the light of Apollo, is best bent toward the conscious becoming of one's brightest self. In this process, it may be we can tap into some eternal quality, that light that radiates from the torso of Apollo in spite of age, damage, and the loss of history.