The Writer's Journey

http://www.daviddelbourgo.com/blog/

As I work on my novel I will post the revised work I have done and the notes I have made for my next revision. At this point the Novel's proposed name is "The Golden Astarte." This fiction is partly the result of the work I have done researching idolatry (see my "Idolatry" blog). I hopefully will post more under the "Idolatry" blog later. I am still researching it, but most of my research has gone into developing my fiction. If anyone has any thoughts for the questions I am asking myself on how to proceed with shaping the novel, I would appreciate the input. Thanks. (Toward the end you will notice repetitions and faltering as I try to work out my direction. It is particularly difficult for me to put myself in the persona of a woman reflecting on her sexuality.)



Chapter One



I leaned over the Cassandra’s brass railing. Thirty feet below, the ocean was a cool inviting blue. To jump or not to jump? That had become my question. Even if my husband Ben ordered somebody to rush in after and “rescue” me, I’d finally be acting alone and it would be the first real leap I’d ever taken on my own.

True, I’d found the gumption to leave home against my father’s wishes and live in Manhattan while studying Art History at Columbia. Yet when he threatened to disown me I was about to buckle under and return home. Then I met Benjamin Hasson.

That was on a sunny afternoon in Morningside Park where I often went to eat lunch. I usually avoided restaurants and cafeterias. It was difficult in a college neighborhood for a girl to sit down without being slobbered over by a bunch of pigs. And although I no longer kept strictly Kosher, I felt more comfortable preparing my own food and taking it off to some quiet place to eat.

Ben sat on the lawn a respectable twenty or thirty feet away and opened a Tupperware care package from a Greek Aunt. He later confessed he’d been following me for weeks. When I accused him of being a secret stalker, he said he wasn’t all that secret about it: “Don’t you remember how many times I accidentally bumped into you? Maybe you noticed me just a little and are playing innocent?”

When he got up off the grass and approached me, his face did seem kind of familiar, and that’s probably why I didn’t give him the your-invisible-to-me look I’d gotten so good at with incoming males. He claimed I’d smiled invitingly, and I said if I smiled at all, it was at his lame approach. What self-respecting man comes on to a girl cradling a container of moussaka?

I held up a half-eaten apple to let him know I’d brought my own lunch. (“Like a B-movie actress shrinking behind her cross to keep away a vampire,” Ben later said.) My mouth was full of sweet pulp, otherwise I was sure I would have told him off, saying something like: “I’ve been fed quite enough, thank you very much.”

Before I had a chance to say anything, though, he fell to his knees and took a huge bite out of my apple—not from the untouched side, either! His bite very much overlapped mine. I sat there struck dumb by my violated fruit as he plopped down next to me, hip to hip, and held a forkful of drooping eggplant up to my mouth.

When I pulled away he said, “Don’t worry, it’s not traif.”

Despite the fact that Ben was one of the most sought-after bachelors (society page and all) in Manhattan, he waited patiently for me. After I got my degree he swept me off to his home in Thessalonica where we had a Greek-Jewish wedding; of course not nearly Jewish enough for my parents to attend. I did insist, though, that he break the glass under a hoopa and we be lifted on chairs during Hava Nagila, tied together by a white handkerchief I later kept in a corner of my underwear drawer.

After our wedding, Ben’s father Aaron presented me with a 124-foot luxury yacht. “For our zaftig shaineh maidel,” he said in the little Yiddish he’d picked doing business with those “Ashkenazi sharks.” He often teased me about not being Sephardic. “You know the business will always be here,” the plucky little man said, somehow seeming to look down on his taller son. “I’m in no hurry to retire, so take your time and enjoy your new bride.”

As Aaron Hasson turned his heavy-lidded eyes on me, they teared up in what I first took to be paternal appreciation; yet I couldn’t shake the suspicion that without drifting from my face, they were appraising my female assets.

A flag was draped over the yacht’s starboard bow. With a flourish Ben and his father unveiled her name: Cassandra.

“But Cassie is short for Cassia,” I said. “It means something like cinnamon in Hebrew.”

My father had wanted to name me Chasidah, which meant devout. My mother had the good sense and perseverance to get him to compromise on Cassia. She’d called me Cassie ever since I could remember. My father mostly avoided my name altogether, unless he was trying to make some all-encompassing point about my character, which I was convinced he thought would have been radically different if he’d held his ground and insisted that I be named Chasidah.

“‘Cassie,’ no, no,” Aaron said with his finger lifted and shoulders thrown back like a young, strutting cock. “Not for our stolen princess.”

I thought of the prescient Cassandra as she sat obediently by Agamemnon’s side after he returned home from being away at war for ten years. He was the great Greek general; why shouldn’t he have taken the beautiful Trojan princess as part of his spoils? I wondered if Cassandra appeared proud despite her foreknowledge of her tragic future. Was she able to hold her royal head high when Agamemnon’s daughter Electra glared down at her as if she were no more than a common whore? Could Cassandra have kept her composure knowing that Clytemnestra’s smile was as deceptive as her red-and-purple raiment, under whose folds a dagger was hidden, hungry not only for her husband Agamemnon’s blood, but also that of his captive odalisque?

“You feel slighted,” Aaron said to me with sagging shoulders that made him look older, sunken.

“I told you we had no right,” Ben said to his father.

“We will change the name tomorrow, Benjamin,” Aaron said. “We will call her the Cassia, which means almost the same in Greek as it does in Hebrew.”

“Or Cassie, if you like,” Ben said, putting an arm around my shoulder, which I was sure he meant to be protective.

“No,” I said, grabbing the bottle of Champaign from Aaron and smashing it against the ship’s bow. “From now on, I will be Cassandra.”

***

Like all other peoples, the Jews have a word for fate: bashert. It comes from the human wellspring where mysticism was born, but is not interwoven through Biblical history the way fate is threaded throughout Greek mythology. The good and bad that befell the Jews and their enemies had to do with God’s oft-changing response to their behavior: a jealous God destroyed the kingdom of his chosen people for worshipping Astarte statues; a forgiving God later allowed just as profligate a people to return home from Babylonia. The Jewish God was never subject to fate; as far as any future events were concerned, it was solely up to His will.

For the Greeks, though, fate held sway over the gods as well as mortals, and both suffered the consequences of their actions. The course of future events had as much to do with the gods’ craven desires as the misbehavior of their mortal underlings. The Trojan princess Cassandra had foreknowledge of the imminent bloodbath that would take her life because her death was part of a fabric the fates had begun weaving many generations before. She knew that she was not the only innocent woman who would suffer for the earlier deeds of greedy men and horny gods. Her destiny had already been written in blood across the stele of time and there was nothing she or anyone else could do to erase it.

After I accepted the name Cassandra, I too began to have visions. If my father had succeeded in naming me Chasidah, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see beyond the threshold of his home, and later on, my hand-picked husband’s. As my mother’s Cassia there was no need to speculate on the future since it was simply going to be a predictable extension of past generations. But now, as I contemplated my leap into the sea, one of these visions appeared to me:

Taking shape in the water’s foam I could see the Egyptian goddess Isis made of lapis lazuli, which Ben had given me for our second anniversary. As she took form—high headdress sprouting cone-like above dark brow, right arm crooked to hold a scepter—the burgeoning curves of her perfectly symmetrical body rippled the water, and those ripples continued to spread across the entire Aegean Sea. When they had reached every sandy-and-rocky shore, they reflected back. Outgoing ripples crisscrossed incoming ripples in such mesmerizing patterns that eventually the entire sea froze into a sheet of mourning-blue lapis. I could see through transparent aquamarine surface layers to once deeper currents that had now frozen into spider-webbed azure veins with hues of stone.

Then just as quickly as the sea had frozen, she once again became an undulating temptress, calling to me like the Siren’s song, which took possession of my eyes as well as ears. I saw all of the thousands of years of shipwrecks at her bottom, while hearing the ululations of older drowned spirits who were clawing at the newly disembodied for surface light.

As nightmarish as this vision might have seemed, it tempted me even further: if I jumped, I’d finally open myself up to these “pagan” souls and accept them as part of my ancestry. I ached to join my fellow Canaanites, Minoans, Phoenicians, Dorians, Ionians and all the other peoples excluded by my father’s jealous Yahweh. I felt liberated—as promiscuous as a raindrop falling any damn where she pleased.

I wouldn’t have hesitated if it hadn’t been for two pairs of eyes pressing down on me: two questioning male faces, each expressing their own brand of wonder and confusion. Yet just as pressing, a storm was moving in. Only thirty minutes earlier I’d stood on the ship’s stern, dazzled by a dawn sky bursting with fuchsias and gold. Now the horizon looked like a tumultuous Turner whose dark violet sky was smeared with black clouds and streaked with dirty white swirls. Storms over the Aegean could be deadly swift and I imagined this one approaching at the speed of an attacking Greek trireme with all one-hundred-seventy oarsmen pulling under threat of the lash.

When Ben had first noticed the storm, he’d ordered us to take off our scuba gear. Avi, our archeologist, argued that the storm might dislodge the precious artifact sitting on an underwater ledge overlooking a precipice; if it fell into the gorge below, the rarest find of the last hundred years would be lost to us. Ben told Avi he didn’t care if King Tut’s tomb was down there, he wouldn’t risk his wife’s life.

Yet here I was poised to leap off the ship with only my wetsuit on.

Ben glanced up at the tumultuous sky and then back at me again. His huge black eyes were filled with a boyish simplicity. His parted lips (that had communicated wordlessly so often and so well with mine) seemed confounded by cryptic syllables. If we’d been ensconced in our cabin, secreted by darkness, under the cover of commingled sweat, I would have spoken for him as he had so often spoken for me:

Why would you want to abandon me, Cassie? I who led you forth from enslavement and renamed you Cassandra? I who gladly accepted your gifts that your father wanted you to hide. You know that I saw their depths in your golden eyes when you sat dazed like a stone goddess bewitched by the timeless night. I took your hand and led you into the light. I admired your beauty so much you no longer had to wander the maze of self-doubt. Why would you want to leave me Cassie, when I brought you the first happiness you’d ever known?

It was true: Ben had brought me my first happiness—so much so that I sometimes wondered if I deserved it. Ben said that those doubts proved that my father still had sway over me. And that too was true. I could never forget my father’s bald pronouncements; like Elijah’s, their deep resonance seemed to come directly from God. One of the last things he said, when he was still talking to me, was that my profligacy would come back to haunt me. Without another word he turned and left, but I understood what hadn’t been spoken: I’d get my comeuppance for becoming a Jezebel. The dogs would find me prostrate at the castle wall, and by the time they were done I’d be reduced to pieces of tainted flesh—a rotting face here, feet and hands tossed aside there.

The second pair of male eyes pressing down on me belonged to Avi. Quite the opposite from Ben’s swarthy face, Avi’s pretty pointed features arranged themselves around a sardonic I-dare-you smile. I didn’t take it personally, though; he smiled like that at everyone. And anyway, I’d written it off as an Israeli thing. But now there seemed to be something more beneath it. A promise, perhaps, of what fate might have in store for me if I dared to tempt my fate.

But if Avi was as smart as he thought he was, he would have known that I didn’t need to be dared—like the Cassandra of old I had no choice but to sail swiftly into my future over glassy seas with the wind at my back. Of course, her “protector” Agamemnon had to sacrifice his sweet young daughter Iphigenia in order to be given such cooperative seas. That was the defining act that sealed his cowardly character as well as his bloody fate. Should I have blamed such stupid negligence on him or the gods’ curse on the House of Atreus?

Blame it on all the arrogant bastards! I thought as I leaped off the ship’s railing, looking defiantly at my husband. And from now on I take full responsibility for my own future, even if it only lasts one minute more.

Yet just the leap itself seemed to last longer than that.

It stretched out timelessly like the last moment when your life is supposed to flash before your eyes:



1) The obedient little girl who inwardly wanted confirmation that she was pretty, while outwardly pulling away and acting as if she didn’t care what others thought

2) The bigger girl whom father could not look in the eye; and I following him around with endless questions that would have been welcomed from a boy

3) The disowned girl who left her home and community, looking for some other man to claim ownership

4) The young woman just ready to step into her body, found by the slender Benjamin of ravenous appetites

5) And finally the rebellious wife who needed desperately to act absolutely alone so she could become… what… ?



Splat!

I’d dived off the ship’s railing more times than I could remember with just a skimpy bathing suit on; now, even in a full wetsuit, it stung like never before. But worst of all was the ache in my skull. It felt as though my head had split in two. I think I passed out for a moment and awoke with a kind of double vision. I don’t know how else to describe it. My eyes each went their own way, one looking up at the light that threaded through the ocean’s surface and the other looking down to where those rays braided and tumbled out of sight into the water’s depths.

My body also suffered from this schism, opposing arms and legs working at cross purposes. One side of me pulled up toward the light while the other fought to descend into that delicious darkness. The more I struggled the more I wheeled like a porpoise at play, but for me this was serious business, so I stopped struggling and allowed my body to float, suspended about thirty feet under. I had to conserve air. I had to think. What was I so torn about? What I might discover at the bottom?

I had no idea what that could be. Avi had kept the treasure a secret even from Ben. I once overheard them talking in the pilothouse, where they spent hours pouring over maps and charts. Their backs were to the door and their heads were as close together as Ben and mine on the pillow, when we sent our childish thoughts out to play in the night.

“Don’t you trust me?” Ben asked Avi.

Avi shook his head as if to say, if no one else understands, God certainly will. Like other Israelis I’d met, Avi could summon Yahweh as his own personal spokesman, without professing the slightest inclination toward a belief in that or any other deity.

“A find of this importance,” he muttered.

“But why not tell me now?” Ben asked. “I’ll see it soon enough for myself.”

“I’m doing it for your own good,” Avi said. He turned to glance at Ben and I felt sure he saw me standing at the door eavesdropping. I wondered if what he said next wasn’t meant for me also. “Like in the Garden of Eden.” He chuckled, turning back to the chart. “Some things you don’t want to know—they will change you forever.”

Ben drew back and furrowed his brow, trying to understand why a seemingly intelligent man would employ such obvious illogic. His eyes caught my image in the door.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Me?” Avi said, laughing outright now. “I’m hopeless anyway, aren’t I?”

He looked at me with veiled eyes, as if he were afraid I might see something beyond them. Sometimes I wondered if he knew about my visions.

***

Somebody broke the surface of the water; it sounded like the muffled splintering of a wedding glass in a handkerchief. I looked up at light trapped in bubbles fluttering around a jetting body. It had to be Ben.

Just then a circular orange fish swam by. She was flat with lacy half-oval white scales and huge black eyes so far back in her head that they seemed to be in the middle of her body, as if she had no division between body and head. She passed by and turned around, coming right up to me, nose to nose.

What shall I call you, my dear orange fish, I thought.

I am not the one who needs to be named, the fish answered back in my thoughts.

With that, I saw through her eyes rather than my own, and experienced a very different sort of double vision from before. Out of one eye I glimpsed an advancing alien figure wearing rubber fins, scuba tank and mask, coming to take me back to his element; through the other, a thick kelp forest growing off a sloping ocean floor. Thinking like my new fish friend, these represented two dichotomous worlds: pursuer and avenue of escape.

My body flipped in perfect sync with she-who-would-not-be-named and together we eased toward the lush seaweed forest. Ben was a strong swimmer, and the fins helped to make his sleek body a lot faster than his zaftig shaineh maidel. It looked as though I wouldn’t be able to make the forest’s shelter before Ben caught up. With the first kelp plants perhaps four feet away and my feet almost within his grasp, I followed the orange fish in a diving maneuver and then shot straight into the forest’s protection.

We slithered between kelp, turning left, then right, then left, then right again, until I’d eluded Ben. The fish slowed down and I had some time to take in my surroundings. As many times as I dived, I’d never explored a kelp forest before. To archeologists they were an annoyance, getting in the way of our “real” work. In our single-minded pursuit of one type of beauty, we excluded most others; yet right now this lush underwater garden teeming with color and life seemed more beautiful than any artifact I’d ever run across.

The forest seemed endless, everywhere filled with sea life, large and small. Foraging wolf eels poked their snouts between plants and under rocks; sea lions played like wild horses running free across a grassy range. Smaller fish swam in schools between the twisting kelp blades eluding the larger ones who hunted singly.

A diving cormorant rocketed by and my orange fish tucked herself under my bosom. I cupped her in my hands for protection. When the bird had continued to the ocean’s floor, the orange fish shot forward, once again taking the lead. I followed my guide, darting in and out of the reedy stipes, getting a chance to look around when she stopped to hide behind yellow-green blades twisting in the gentle underwater current. She swung her body in place so that her side-looking eyes could scout for predators. When she saw none, she shot out into the open and wriggled for cover again.

As we followed the slope of the ocean floor deeper under water, I began to feel a dull ache in my lungs. They weren’t yet screaming for air, but I began to wonder if I could really dive down more than two hundred feet without breathing apparatus. Yet the Greek scuba divers on board the Cassandra had told me about sponge divers who’d been known to go down well over two hundred feet. They often stayed under water three minutes and more. Our divers said they’d heard tell of one diver who’d held his breath for up to ten minutes. Like most men who brag about the heroic exploits of their profession, they left out the negative parts—in this case, the adverse physical affects from ascending too quickly.

The current became stronger and it got difficult to hold my position. The storm must have arrived. The orange fish continued darting for the cover of leaves and branches, her tail fin beating hard to fight water surging in the opposite direction. Each time she stopped, I grabbed onto a kelp stipe to hold my position against the current.

We must have descended well over a hundred feet; even though we’d followed a steeply sloping ocean floor, we were still well within sight of the sandy bottom. I was surprised at how clearly I could the strawberry and rose anemones unfurling feathery tentacles like come-hither fingers. I could gauge the slug-like pace of pastel-colored sea urchins as they slithered toward kelp holdfasts attached to rocks, where like other urchins they would make a home on these hairy attachments.

Now that I was seeing out both sides of my head like the orange fish, my vision was as good as my guide’s, I thought, looking around for her. She was gone. Perhaps she’d gotten swept away by the current? I considered searching for her, but instead resumed our old pattern of movement, either fighting against the current or being swept forward by it, and then stopping to rest by holding onto the next kelp plant. My heart beat faster as the oxygen in my blood thinned. I needed to find a way out, but in every direction all I saw were purplish stipes and yellow-green blades. Without thought, I flipped around and somehow within seconds had darted free of the forest.

I was out into the clear sea and for a moment felt home free, until I was buffeted by a very strong, very cold current. I tumbled head over heel like a leaf twirling in a storm. Terrified by the loss of control, I panicked, wanting desperately to surface, but no longer knew which way was up. When the current eased I righted myself, visually finding the ocean’s floor to get my bearings. I spread my arms like wings to sweep me up toward air, but was stopped by another visitation of the orange fish.

Actually, I was visited by a whole host of orange fish that all looked exactly alike: flat, round with lacy half-oval scales and eyes large enough to fall into. My orange fish separated herself from the others and stopped in front of me with her body sideways, giving me one last look out of her left eye. As if I’d turned the channel on a TV set, I was now seeing like a human again, one unified image in front of me, staring into a huge black eye that reflected back my image like a looking glass.

{There is a lot of information here and I have to make a plan in what order I want to put this information, then what information I need to put and then flesh it in.}

I never liked being taken by surprise by my reflection. I needed prepare to see myself. If I was shopping I’d have already formed the image I wanted to project with the clothes I was picking out. When I was younger that image conformed to the pious girls my father thought looked proper. But when I developed the body of a woman and he stopped looking at me, I hoped dressing improperly would get his attention. That simply got his wrath, and not only did he not look at me, I could imagine him spitting on the ground when I walked by. Not that he ever did so, but that’s how I saw him in my mind. If dressing that way didn’t get his attention, it certainly got the attention of boys and later I would see in the mirror how I thought they would see me.

When I approached the mirror to make up, I avoided taking in my entire face when I made up in the mirror. Like a doctor, I’d learned to maintain objectivity by isolating the feature I was operating on. I’d stare only at my lips, applying a light gloss so as not to accentuate their fullness. Or concentrate on one cheek at a time, adding just a touch of blush to hint at the hollowness that I hoped would someday appear when my baby fat had melted away. The only feature I accentuated were my eyes, adding heavy liner that overshot the lid with a slight upsweep that strained toward the tail end of my descending brow. {I’m not so sure about the placid face thing. I think she feels faceless and that’s worse. I would she approach her face if underneath it all she felt faceless? She’d try to accentuate all features. I think that Ben might have told her that she didn’t need so much makeup. She was naturally beautiful and the makeup only hid what nature had given her. She quit wearing so much makeup after she met Ben and made up as above, the tension is that she feels faceless when she doesn’t make up. Does she feel that way or does she just mention that in some other way… like placid… although I don’t think that does it.}I felt this added an unresolved tension to an otherwise pleasant, but placid face. How about if her face is invisible until she applies makeup? She cannot see herself without the makeup. When Ben asked her not to wear it, then she committed to his being the only one to see her.}

When I did dare to take in my whole face—my entire look—I would inevitably compare myself to those tall Nordic beauties with high cheekbones that Ben had dated before he’d met me. After we got together, and I found out exactly who he was, I got my hands on some old tabloids that showed him with a long succession that all looked the same—fine blond hair swept casually back or falling in bangs above pencil-thin eyebrows. No question, I was not one of those long-legged blondes Ben had gallivanted around Manhattan with.



{Here’s where I must begin to consider the changes in Cassie from my psychological exploration, which I must continue. Actually, what she’s trying to say is that she objectifies herself in a mirror for several reasons: 1) so she will not see what her father would not look at—her deep power as a woman; 2) so she will not disappear to herself, the way she disappeared to her father; 3) So she will not see the ugliness in herself that she projected onto her father, or thought he saw in the sublimated parts of herself—she thought he did not want to look at her because she was ugly, but somewhere deeper she knew it was because of the power he was afraid of in her—power over him. So she would not see herself as fat when she caught her image by surprise. She would see what she wanted to project, the rebellious image to put her father in his place. Except! When something had happened that penetrated that façade. Then she would see her female “assets” as ugly, just as we see the Astarte statues as ugly.

So what would she see in the fish’s left eye? What’s under all those layers—see herself as we see the primitive Astarte goddesses. She does not need to describe her father here, simply talk about the Jews themselves, which would obviously point to her father and include him. But first I must refer to how she otherwise sees her image in mirrors. Can she talk about how she sees herself when she purposely looks in mirrors, going from the costume, mask, to the individual parts, objectifying herself in other words, but how after she has had a fight with her father she sees herself as ugly or when she tries to fight with him and he does not look at her, she sees herself as ugly and then when she finally provokes him how does she see herself? As powerful—the costume worked, she is how the pagans saw Astarte. So, in other words, she goes from how we and her father would see Astarte today, as ugly, in the old days the Jews saw her as a threat, compared to how those who believed in her saw her, as powerful. So I think let’s just have those two sides of her reaction to her father: 1) how we see Astarte today, as ugly, vs. how she was seen by those who believe in her, with a dark power.

So in the fishes left eye she sees herself exaggerated, even without a face, rather than concentrating on the features, faceless with an exaggerated body. She can refer to how she isolates herself in a mirror or sees what she wants to convey, but she is faceless in the fish eye. Huge breasts and lumpy distorted hips, as if the stone had been melted by a disapproving God. Through the other eye she sees the same Astarte statue, but this time she feels its power, the same power that made her father look away.}

I’d never liked being surprised by a reflection of myself. Whenever I accidentally caught sight of my body in a shop-front window, I immediately looked away from that fat girl pretending to be me. It was silly, I knew. I wasn’t fat. I didn’t even choose clothes that hid my figure. When I went shopping, I was able to see myself through the eyes of the salesgirl or imagine how Ben would see me in a tight-fitting dress. It’s just when I was caught short without being able to prepare myself.

Yet no matter how I tried, I could not isolate my features in the fish’s eye; and I was confronted with a far uglier face than I’d ever imagined on myself or anyone else. When I was a girl, my friends and I slandered a classmate named Sandra behind her back. She’d never done anything to harm any of us; all she wanted was any crumb a “pretty” girl might throw her way. Yet we tarred her with the worst insult we could think of: fish-face.

We joked about her bulging eyes, hungry for approval that would never come; and how they were set so closely together, right on top of her shark-like snout. We joked about how long it must have been since she’d washed her slimy hair. Once we tried to bet a boy that he couldn’t kiss her fat puckering lips for just a second; we laughed about how no one would take us up on the bet. Now I looked far uglier than she did, and all I wanted to do was swim to the surface and escape this vision of myself.

But before I could move, the fish had flipped around so I could gaze at myself in her right eye. And what I saw so mesmerized me that if she hadn’t left first, I think I never would have moved. It was the woman that Ben saw when we were just about to have sex. This was a wordless time for us, and we never talked about what we thought of each other. It was too embarrassing. Although most people would have thought of us as confident with ourselves, this was the obverse of the secret self I projected onto Sandra. We were simply drawn in wordlessly like magnets. And yet subliminally, I could see how Ben saw me.

It was something that could not be captured in words, perhaps only images, for example how would you describe the Mona Lisa smile, without referring to it as the Mona Lisa smile? It is at that point where we are gods and goddesses in one another’s eyes, at that point where we are about to embark on the creation of life, and like any passionate creation it is beyond words. All I can talk about is the affect I had on somebody else, an unbelievable affect.

I imagined that Sandra and I would be equal in this vortex, where suddenly parts of our bodies were not longer separated (and objectified) but became the whole, the essence, the way Jews believe the soul is. {Jewish belief in the soul compare to that sexual hole people fall into, comparing the physically sublime with the spiritually sublime. The way the soul is separate from the body, this female essence is also separate from the body, yet fills it with beauty. When I am looked at like this, I cannot imagine myself being more beautiful. The hunger for me is almost terrifying, so terrifying that it is exciting. The woman’s excitement is to excite. The woman sees herself in the man’s reaction. What does the man’s beauty have to do with it? Remember, woman wants two things: good DNA and a caretaker for her children. She can veer away from good DNA and get turned on by the other. How about if I do it this way, she is turned on by the way Ben looks at her, but she looks at Avi somewhat the same way, admiring his beauty, and he is turned on by her getting turned on by him, rather than other men, who get turned on by the woman and simply assume that they are turned on by them. Avi is more like a woman and she is more like a man with him in this respect.

{Establishing the Astarte comparison here will accomplish two things: one tell how she feels and secondly set up the difference in the statue she’s about to find.}

Back to Ben and Cassie. Let’s say she could describe herself in that wordless vortex. First, it is one time that as a woman she does not mind being objectified. The irony will be that in the statue she will not be objectified. So I think it might be appropriate to bring up those Astarte statues to set the stage for what she’s about to find. So let’s go there, comparing herself to an Astarte statue and how ugly they were, like Sandra, and yet how basic for the impulse that drives people toward passion. And Cassie has all of the Astarte qualities, in a modern beautiful woman. Here she would shine more than those blond model types that Ben used to hang out with, and she can see it in him, that he is more desirous than he ever could have been with those tall cool models. She is the Astarte to him.

Okay, so how does she describe that feeling? First she describes how women do not like to be objectified—no how she hates to be objectified—it is against everything she grew up with, both as a Jew and a modern woman. First of all, a Jewish woman is not to be thought of at all physically, even by her husband. As God is insubstantial, the woman she be almost insubstantial and pure in their thoughts. This should go back to how she feels about her body image:

Let’s think about how she thinks of her body image in terms of how she grew up a Jewish woman. Her father would not look at her. He kept his eyes toward God and the insubstantial. He was dissatisfied with her because she was a girl. But deep down she knew that her father objectified her, and that was the power she had over him, the way to push his buttons. Since she was a rebellious girl, let’s think about how she might have done that. First by wearing clothes that he did not approve of. Revealing more modern clothes. He would have preferred that she dress like an Orthodox girl and cover herself. Also, since she was voluptuous, it was worse.

Her mother must have had talks with her about how to be appropriate with her father and younger brother. A woman talk. It is important for men to think of God and we mustn’t distract them. At first she did not understand this. How was she distracting them? She thought of herself as a daughter and sister, not a distraction. Then she saw how her father would not look at her and how her brother caught glimpses out of the corner of his eye when he thought she wasn’t noticing. What was that all about? Her mother would not explain beyond the explanation of competing with God.

How could she compete with God? At first she felt as though she was being blamed for something she never did, like people putting words in her mouth. Her reaction to that would have been what? Since she didn’t understand it, and felt insulted, to do it even more. Therefore, I would say that she dressed provocatively. So that would affect the way she saw herself in the mirror, or rather to say, didn’t see herself. How can that work?

We must remember that she also had school. A girl’s Jewish school I think. So she would have hung out with the “wilder” girls, although she was not really totally wild. Just leaned in that direction to get attention from her parents, especially her father, who gave her less attention the more she asked for it. So getting Ben’s attention for her body must have been a big deal, since her body was the very reason her father wouldn’t give her attention.

Okay, back to her body image. What she sees in the mirror is a provocateur, the reaction she thinks she’ll get from what she wears. But underneath that she sees an ugly girl or an invisible girl or not a girl at all? A rejected girl, that’s for sure, and rejected because of her body, her voluptuous body, so she must have thought something was wrong with it. She exaggerated it in the mirror, and made it ugly. She thought her father thought she was ugly. And so she would get any kind of reaction she could, by dressing provocatively. So, when she looks in the mirror she either objectifies herself or she sees the ugly girl underneath. Not just fat, but unlovable.



{It’s not really the her that Ben talks about, but the one she knows he sees, or she wordlessly sense that he sees, the one she is when they are beyond talking about how he sees her. This could be any woman, really, it does not have to be a super beautiful woman. This is the goddess in all women, the Asherah in all women.}

{Now she should describe herself accurately, but positively, perhaps how Ben must have seen her, and also so that she precurses the statue. I think how Ben or Avi see her, or the sexual side of herself, and I think maybe she should not want to see that anymore than the ugly side, but it fascinates her. Hair wild and wanton instead of slimy; eyes large and approving instead of bulging; lips warm and welcoming. Perhaps what she should do is hear Ben’s words as she looks at each feature. What Ben loves to do with her hair, lips, etc. Do not leave out her nose

The fish flipped around so I could gaze upon my image in her right eye, and what I saw was exactly the opposite of what I had seen on the other side. It wasn’t that I suddenly appeared beautiful; I was simply a woman, perfectly a woman.

Suddenly, like a flock of birds without forethought, all the fish took off, leaving me alone, and I felt utterly lost. I had no idea how deep I was and without my guide I was beginning to have grave doubts about what I was doing. I’d never dived without a plan before. I’d made plans for this dive, detailed plans, but they involved using scuba tanks. Avi had helped me to make an exact mixture for going down 230 feet. He said at one-hundred-forty feet I should shift from the tank holding air to a second one with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium calculated for my body weight. The helium was added to mitigate nitrogen narcosis, which occurs at depths over 150 feet. Divers were known to do crazy things under nitrogen narcosis. I’d heard of one who’d taken out his mouthpiece and tried to feed air to a fish.

Thinking about air made my lungs ache very badly. I knew it was time to surface, but something held me back. It was that perfect self I’d seen in the fish’s other eye; I felt I had to go down to rescue her. I remembered what my father had told me about names: God takes a portion of himself—a portion of his name—and creates every soul by uttering its name. Whatever God had uttered when I was born had gotten lost in the confusion of my family. Now was my chance to find out who she really was.

A beam of light passed over my body and illuminated the water in front of me. I glanced back. It came from Ben’s flashlight, which reflected off the ocean floor, now only twelve feet below, where I saw the bright glint of a metal object. Instinctively I knew that was what I’d been looking for. It’s why I’d jumped off the ship and risked my life by swimming down over two hundred feet without scuba gear.

I kicked as hard as I could, pushing myself toward the bottom. As Ben swam after me his torch beam wavered, passing back and forth across the ocean floor. To the right the light got lost in the gorge Avi had told us about. The object I’d seen was only a few feet from the precipice that led to that gorge. Ben’s torch beam fixed on me again, as I swam closer to the ocean floor to uncover the object I’d seen reflect in his light.

I glanced back again. He was hovering about feet above me. He pulled out his mouthpiece and pointed to the bubbles it made in the water, waving at me to get some air. I looked back down at the ocean floor. A large crab came into view and began sweeping sand off the bright object, until it was almost totally exposed. When the crab had finished his work he scuttled away, exposing an eighteen inch golden statue.

As if I’d been given new air and a new body, I kicked with unbelievably strong stroke that took me upon it. I grabbed around the statues narrow waist and lifted it out of the sand. She was a goddess that looked so modern and lifelike, unlike anything I’d ever seen connected to Bronze Age, yet Avi had said that we were looking for a Phoenician ship from around 1,000 B.C.E. I thought I’d found the most unique Astarte statue until I turned it over and saw stamped on its base Elyaqim in Hebrew. I could not believe that this was an Aserath or a Jew made this statue. Something was wrong. As I studied the statues face, I became even more astounded. Was I having another vision or could what I was seeing be true.

{I must describe the statue, what pose she is in, is she holding the things that goddesses hold? Something in each outstretched hand, or has he left those symbols off and he’s absolutely just making a figure? She had nothing in either hand, no leaf or scepter as one would expect of a statue. Nor were anything about her proportions distorted, as they were with Astarte statues. I might have thought she was from the Greek period, she looked so lifelike, but the Greek female statues of Venus and {whoever} were much more stiff and formalized. This statue had her weight thrown onto one hip the way Degas might depict a woman. And she was no slender-hipped boy-woman like many of the Greek statues of Venus, who were I always thought much more comfortable doing male statues, and it showed in their work that in their mind the male body was perfection, not the human body. {No need to mention the Minoans yet here. Leave that for our sculptor’s travels.}

I felt a strong tug at my leg and the statue fell from my hand and rolled toward the precipice. I could not see if it went over into the gorge or not, because Ben pushed my leg down so that I was forced to go upright. Then he shoved the mouthpiece between my lips and I took in so much air that it made me dizzy and I think I passed out again.

• Added on: Aug 7th, 2009
• Country: United States
• Language: English

• Author: David Del Bourgo
• Listed in: Writing Adventure
• Tags: judaism archeology idolatry astarte