Our beginning and our end. The queen to whom we must all bow at last

[sovay]

OH MY GOD THIS WAS SO STUPIDLY COMPLICATED I COULD HAVE DONE IT FASTER WITH REAL PHOTOGRAPHS AND I COULD HAVE GOTTEN RID OF THE WHITE SPACE TOO.

I made a photoset for Evangeline Walton's She Walks in Darkness (2013).

Specifically, I made a photoset for a fictitious film version of She Walks in Darkness, which could not have existed because Walton wrote the novel in the early '60's and then shelved it until her death in 1996, by which point the actor I kept mentally casting in a central role was also dead. It is completely kludged and would no doubt have been much more attractive arranged by the algorithms of a masonry grid, but I couldn't get one to work on LJ. (Thanks for not supporting JavaScript!) At the moment I am rather proud of it, but I suspect it's just because I've been wrestling with HTML for hours. Behold.



I wrote about this novel in 2013, at which time it first occurred to me to cast it as a movie because Paul di Filippo does so in his foreword and I disagreed with nearly all of his choices. It took until last night for me to care enough about the idea to frustrate myself with trying to make code I don't know very well work on platforms it wasn't designed to. It didn't and I did something else.

First row:

1. Charun and Vanth to either side of the door to the Tomb of the Anina (Tarquinia, 3rd century BCE). Surprisingly for such a chthonic novel, Walton does not mention them anywhere that I could find, but they are the psychopomps of the Etruscan underworld; it seemed appropriate to start with them.

All those dark chambers and corridors beneath the real cellar, God knows how many of them, leading God knows how far down into the bowels of the Earth! Those old Etruscan tombs that Richard was going to study. Not Christian catacombs, such as underlie old houses in the Campagna, but a veritable city of the tombs of men who died before Christ was born, before Rome became an empire. So many dead—and only one live person can be anywhere near us! But it is the living who are terrible . . .

2. Francisco Bosch as Floriano Silveri, the Gothic antihero of the novel. I cheated with him: he is a contemporary dancer, almost exactly a year younger than myself, but he played Bagoas in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) and I have looked for him in other movies ever since. (He's been dancing. I wish I were in the right country to see him.) When he's not being a Persian eunuch, he looks like this.

His own face was as beautiful as any sculpture or painting I have seen since I came to Italy, and it was not carved or painted—it was warm, human flesh.

3. Dancers from the Tomb of the Lionesses (Tarquinia, 6th century BCE). The narrator sees something very like them in her descent through the hissing, labyrinthine shrine to Mania beneath the Villa Carenni, although filtered through Walton's perceptions of the Etruscans as an ancient unknowable race, nearly alien—decadent, beautiful, cruel.

The painted walls swarmed with myriad forms; sometimes demons glared at us, sometimes dancers rioted along beside us, men red as American Indians clasping milk-white women. One could almost see their delight in their bodies, in their leaping, spinning, amorous strength, although those bodies were only paint on stone. Crazily I wished that I could jump onto the wall too, and dance away with them, happy and safe. Then, looking a little closer at some of those fiercely joyous red faces, I knew that I couldn't have said "No" to those men as long as I had said it to Floriano. They would simply have grabbed me.

Second row:

1. Etruscan chamber tombs from the Necropolis of the Banditaccia in Cerveteri (Roman Caere, Etruscan Cisra, 9th–3rd century BCE). The novel takes place outside of Volterra, so geographically we're in completely the wrong part of the Twelve Cities, but I wanted some visible ruins in here somewhere.

We were glad when the car finally came within sight of Volterra, D'Annunzio's famous "City of Silence," that old Etruscan city whose power and splendor the Roman butcher Sulla wrecked. Its tremendous walls still stand, the walls that even Sulla could not storm; he had to starve out the city. We drove into it through the Porta all' Arco, that true Etruscan gateway deep as a small house . . . Three giant stone heads crown the cyclopean archway, midnight-black against its yellowish-white stone. Time has eaten up their faces, but they still seemed to stare down at us, full of a quiet, terrible power.

2. Samantha Eggar as the heroine and narrator, Barbara Keyes. I thought of her because of the 1972 giallo The Dead Are Alive, whose Italian title is L'etrusco uccide ancora—The Etruscan Kills Again—but then she had the right face. I took a screenshot from William Wyler's The Collector (1965) because I wanted her underground, which means that Terence Stamp is accidentally cameoing as Floriano here. He's dark-haired; it's not too out of key with Bosch. And the unease of the emotions between them is correct.

Something made me look up; I saw his eyes watching me. Assured again, gloatingly expectant . . . and I knew. He might be innocent in his way, but so is the tiger that stalks the jungle at twilight; he only wants his evening meal.

Third row:

1. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses (Caere, 6th century BCE). I have loved this sculpture—sarcophagus, cinerary urn—ever since I read Rika Lesser's "Degli Sposi" in her first collection Etruscan Things (1983). Walton gives a more ambiguous vision to Roger Carstairs, the English archaeologist and escaped POW who stumbled into the cellars of the Villa Carenni in 1945.

Funeral urns lined the walls and, by turning his head, he could see the sarcophagus built against the massive central pillar, beneath the glaring Gorgon's head. Here the master and mistress of some ancient household slept, their dependants around them. Their painted, life-sized effigies half-sat, half-reclined upon the sarcophagus, side by side. In the dim light, the two looked startlingly, almost threateningly alive, capable of rising to chastise an intruder.

2. The goddess Thesan with the youth Kephalos in her arms (Val di Chiana, Archaic period). She is the dawn, often syncretized as such with the Greek Eos; she is also the goddess of divination. (Illumination, revelation. Dawn breaks over Marblehead. I named an alt-historical diviner after her.) She is frequently depicted on the backs of mirrors. Sometimes she is grieving for her son Memnun, slain in the Trojan War; sometimes she is abducting Kephalos or Tithonos (Tinthun) to be her lover. Barbara sees a statue of the latter story in the gardens of the Villa Carenni, her first afternoon on Etruscan land.

Statues gleamed ghost-pale among a glowing riot of roses and jasmine. One was a gigantic, white-winged woman carrying in her arms a life-sized youth of red terra cotta . . . This was not Homer's rosy-fingered Eos; I remembered the story now. All the tender radiance of the Greek dawn-goddess was gone. This giantess's mouth, bent to her unwilling prey's, seemed more likely to bite than to kiss. One felt immense appetite, savage strength, but no tenderness. Her very whiteness made her seem like death, seizing upon warm human life.

3. Funeral games on the walls of the Tomb of the Augurs (Tarquinia, 6th century BCE). Because blood is shed in these games; there is sacrifice taking place on the nearer wall, the unequal contest of a blindfolded, rope-bound man and a maddened dog at the end of a masked figure's leash. Walton's Etruscans—and their descendants—are refined in their cruelties.

. . . damned ugly sight . . . Wish I had stayed in my room today . . . A good old Etruscan punishment, of course; Virgil mentions it; and all of them must have been proud of their Etruscan blood, even if they weren't obsessed by it, like Prince Mino. God knows what obsessed or possessed a man who could do a thing like that . . . heard the yarn years ago: How whenever an heir of the Carenni comes of age, his father brings him down to see those two skeletons . . . lesson against treachery. And Prince Mino calls other people barbarians . . .

Fourth row:

1. Peter Cushing as Prince Mino Carenni. Because I can't imagine who else he could be.

He set it down and I had my first good look at him. At a tall lean man with white hair and piercing black eyes. His profile, stern and finely chiseled, might have been cut out of an ancient frieze; it had none of the softness of living flesh . . . The face of that last high priest who buried himself with his threatened temple and its treasures never can have looked more dedicated, more terrible, in its all-sacrificing exaltation.

2. The Inghirami tomb from Volterra, once Velathri. It is named after the two brothers who discovered and excavated it in the mid-nineteenth century: they found it filled with alabaster funerary urns from five or six generations of the same family. It was moved to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence in 1901, where it is currently accessible to the public. I have never seen it. I have no idea about Walton, but it is of the same construction as the tomb that forms the entrance to the Villa Carenni's maze.

The vast cavern was gone forever, and so was the snake-like hissing of that steam-crowned abyss. We were out of that suffocating passage, back in the Tomb of the Priests. My lantern still stood there, lighting the great round chamber, even lessening the darkness of some of those niches that for ages had been beds of the dead.

And everything else is a function of finding an aesthetic way to stick the images together.

Questions, comments, criticisms welcome; I've never done this before. OH MY GOD I MIGHT NOT DO IT AGAIN UNLESS I CAN GET SOME DECENT IMAGE SOFTWARE STAT.