REMBRANDT: DAVID AND URIAH

Uriah has risen from the table At which they have been talking. He is beginning to walk away.

His right hand is laid across his breast The way a Diva might take a bow. Or the President salute the flag His left hand clasps his belt, A soldier’s grip.

Like everything else in Rembrandt It is the moving moment he conveys, The motif of motion: happening action. And this, the moment, is fissile.

‘I was this morning early at your door While sleep still held you unawares...’

But now he knows his heart Has been inundated, his dreams Are couriers to nightmare.

The moment is turning hard, And the moment slowly Astonishes his heart, Slowly, inexorably, as coral.

David Broadbridge

video sleepovers, Hallowe’en), as well as into dozens of nightmares about genetic engineering. But if Frankenstein’s Creature embodied for the early Romantics the victims of unchained rational science, what myth could be re-awakened and re-cast as a warning by reasoning imaginations today? It seems to me that Erichsychthon makes a strong candidate in the world of eco-disaster: he’s the tycoon in Ovid who cuts down a whole forest even after he has been warned of the consequences, and is then cursed by the outraged goddess of nature with unappeasable hunger; he ends up selling his daughter for food, and when that no longer works, consuming himself bite by bite. Other myths of our time could be the wanderers and fugitives – Io chased from country to country; Leto forbidden from resting anywhere to give birth to her children; Aeneas

leaving Troy in burning ruins with his father on his back, like Dido leaving Tyre, both of them fleeing westwards. Last year, the most recently discovered planet, ‘2003UB313’, was renamed Eris after the Goddess of Strife, whose actions catalyse the Trojan War. The matter of Troy never goes away. However, it turns out that astronomers weren’t inspired to this choice by the state of the world, but by the state of their profession. In a spirit of resistance to Eris’s planetary hold, I hope another body is orbiting into view, dreamed up by a fabulist’s reasoned imagination and bringing with it new creatures out of the mirror of myth.

Marina Warner is mythographer and cultural historian. Her most recent book, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media, is published by Oxford University Press.

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 37