Eros: An Essay
I find Eros sleeping, a boy who is already a man, a man who will always be a boy, a god leaning against a wall in Oxford. Knowing, unknowing. Someone I think I recognize. With wings. His shoulders curve in upon himself, his hipbones cup a power latent, lucent as Aphrodite. Usually we discover desire with our eyes closed. Or we’re in the dark somehow. Here, in the perpetual day of the long gallery in the Ashmolean, desire, with his eyes closed, dreams of us dreaming of him.
Students, women with gray hair and cardigans, small groups of tourists pass by as if the statues were other people and it might be rude to stare. As if these pillars and arcades were merely hauntingly white shops with a Roman matron or two standing in front of one, a hero walking out of a doorway and a famous and vaguely familiar figure pausing at the top of some steps nearby. I seem to be the only person who will stop in the middle of this marble world and gaze at the sleeping god.
His wings shade his face.
Eros forbade Psyche to look upon him, knowing she must look, and lose him, and spend her life looking for him. In the story, she wins him back through her suffering, her quest, her sore feet. In the museum, flash is not permitted. When I raise the camera, my hand is as steady as if I held an oil lamp.
– dana sonnenschein