For many days now she has followed her. Through books, poems, and paintings. She has looked for her in ancient landscapes, in cypress forests and yellow ruins. She has seen her on Attic cups and encountered her likeness in stone. She once glimpsed her unwittingly, a girl on the street whose loneliness marked her out. She has sensed her in many places, both momentarily and more enduringly, sometimes almost to the touch. Slowly she has drawn her out. She has picked up the shards of the story and gathered them around her. She has, I suspect, seen Leda in herself, one who has gone to the ends of the earth and who has travelled through darkness and light. And where she has seen Leda she has also seen the Swan. It is there in the shadows that gather at dusk and in dreams as a red-rimmed iris, a persistent but strange dying light. For many days now she has held these images in her mind but they continue to circle and splinter. She determines to make Leda three times and the Swan three times. She works hard to articulate form. She listens closely and intently. She puts her ear to the ground, she holds her finger to the wind. Only now has she emerged from searching into stillness.

 ~

As a child my mother read to me aloud from a book of Greek myths. In a lamplit room she brought the stories to life, an ancient past called into the present by her beautiful, lilting voice. The classicist Robert Calasso believed that myths were no mere fairy tales but ‘essential allegories of what we were and are’.[1] ‘We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their moulds’, he writes, drawing from Plato, in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.[2] Looking back at this girl I now see how the stories fed imagination and memory at once; how they fell around her form so perfectly as she slept, as if she had come from them, and they from her.

If myths speak to our humanness, if they are the forms from which we are cast, then what is the significance of Leda’s myth, the connection between she and the Swan? For theirs is a complex story and a changeable one with many versions and variations.

In Leda and the Modernists, Helen Sword writes of the divergent retellings of Leda’s myth, of the ways her story is endlessly reborn by poets and artists through time.[3] For some, her rape by Zeus, disguised or embodied as a swan, was an act of submission through which the human encountered the divine; a painful violation that saw Leda give birth to Helen, the most exquisite woman in the world, and an allegory that told of the artist’s duty to yield to a higher creative power in order to produce things of beauty. To others, the story was an Annunciation, a visionary episode that foretold Helen’s conception, her abduction by Paris, and the consequent waging of the Trojan War.[4] But considered without the glittering distractions of symbols and visions, Leda’s story is simply that of a girl who is abused and badly hurt. In her essay The Public Voice of Women, Mary Beard forms a lineage of stories drawn from Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which girls are rendered mute or turned into animals, suddenly unable to cry or declaim. These myths, she states, are the templates of the ‘active and loaded’ silencing of women today.[5] Leda’s story, too, reveals how terrible acts are ingeniously rationalised and readily remade as virtues in the service of art.

While the poet Robert Graves believed the divergent retellings of myths were attributable to errors of interpretation perpetuated through time, Leda’s manifold incarnations too often betray the artist’s desire to reshape her according to individual will.[6] Indeed, she has become a form so malleable that she is sometimes a peripheral figure in her own story. In poetry she appears as a part or is implied—in Rilke she is an opening; in Lawrence a marsh-soft belly; in Yeats a staggering girl.[7] In painting, the frequent, sensual pairing of the Swan’s elegant form with Leda’s body makes it almost impossible to believe that their union was ever dangerous but only one fated. (As Calasso observes, the Greek phtheirein, meaning to seduce, also means to destroy.)[8]

There are few renderings of Leda’s myth that inhabit her experience with the same intensity as that with which Zeus embodied the Swan. But there are some who approach her story with compassion. Hilda Doolittle’s poem, ‘Leda’, is distinguished by an atmosphere of ‘dream like eerie calm’, its ‘linguistic opacity’ causing time and image to coalesce.[9] It is in this space, suggests Sword, that the visionary and symbolic meanings of Leda’s myth are consciously denied, and in which ‘forgetfulness becomes a blessing’.[10] While the poem may not equate to a tabula rasa, it is one in which the savageries of the story are momentarily suspended.

Perhaps it is here that the work of Heather B. Swann emerges. From the vestige of a poem where distant memory is gradually drawn up and dusted off; its remnants held, considered, and thereafter reimagined with profound subjective force.

 ~

Going down to Delphi, at Lebadeia

Splashed my face where the two springs met,

One for Forgetfulness and one for Remembrance.

Much I remember and much forget.[11]

The scene is set.

Here are the korai, the maidens in marble, the markers of death and of offering, around whom we now move with the rhythm of a song.[12] Within this space, myth (which accrues) and poetry (which distils), form a ‘syntax of enticing illogic’ in which meaning is felt ‘through obliqueness and adjacency’.[13] It is here that Leda appears three times, and the Swan appears three times. It is here they are flanked by relics and memories, icons and insignia, a split story in which each part holds ‘a shining fragment of the truth’.[14]

The first story of Leda is one in which she stands equal to the Swan. She is upright, serene, full of equanimity, her hair thick and silent, a speaking tongue stilled. Beside her the Swan is vast but hollow. It echoes the form of the Trojan Horse, deceit and cunning victory all at once. Within the void of the Swan lies Nemesis, fraught and shapeless black, her goddess cloak embedded with one hundred watchful eyes.

In the second story of Leda she is Janus, god of beginnings, transitions and time, with eyes at the back and the front of her head. She peers from a rock that resembles a veil. At her side is a prickly pear, an emerald wall rising and blazing with brightness.[15] Nearby glides the Swan, while a waterfall spills with dark ribbons. Here Leda is held between dullness, sharpness and coolness. She is attuned to danger but unsure if flight is warranted, if blood will soon run fast with dread or slow with calm relief.

The third story of Leda is one in which she and the Swan are in union but not in agreement. The bird nestles within the nape of her neck. The space between them forms the shape of a broken heart. For better or worse they are bound together, she and the Swan and its maddening cloud of encroachment. Beside Leda and her Swan are the tooth and the nail, a delicate allusion to vagina dentata, an ancient image that speaks of fear as much as strength.

The space in which these stories unfold is curiously silent. Whereas one may expect a cry from the Swan or the patter of Leda’s tears, all is held in perfect, poised containment.[16] A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice. But this is the caesura, the pause that forms an integral part of the structure, a steadying breath taken before one can go on.

~

To you it may be silent but there are aeons of stories bound up in these bodies. Perhaps the silence is not silence at all but a kind of white colour and noise, all of the frequencies audible to the human ear, all of the wavelengths of visible light reflected and scattered. It is a burden to carry even though it may seem effortless. Some pictures refuse to take shape and this one has been difficult to make.[17] In fact, there are some pictures that rely more heavily on the empty spaces between forms to give force and musicality, and this picture is certainly one of those.

Another intriguing aspect of this image is that it appears as a moment taut with anticipation, but actually, it holds many prior moments of expectation and dissolution, repeating. And so in some ways it is astonishing that this particular set of images can hold so many things and yet appear so beautifully composed.

Often beauty is a demand, something expected and coerced. But in hands such as these it is revealed as something truly necessary, and ‘almost like knowledge’, which is to say ‘it is what we are born for’.[18] It is both consoling and empowering to have beauty returned to one, and for it to be handled as a strength that endures and perhaps even intensifies, rather than one that diminishes over time.

There are some who believe that a myth undergoing transformation (as all myths are wont to do) in the end becomes attenuated.[19] This is a sad and cutting thing to think, but it is a compelling premise too, that myth could exist in some multifarious way, like the white light and colour hitherto mentioned which endlessly and invisibly refract. Sometimes attenuation is a not a process through which a story is diminished, but dispersed and therefore enlarged, and by which its lesser parts, meaning those parts without beauty, lose value.

After a while, myths, like all things, are destined to lose their original purpose but it is difficult for them to forfeit their capacity to generate and reflect meaning altogether. For whether they become part of an historical episode or poetical treatment (etcetera) it seems to be the case that they will always mirror the time in which they appear. It is strange but also satisfying to embody time and timelessness, form and formlessness.

It is believed that the transformation of myth occurs in sites called ‘thresholds’, also known as mountain ranges and rivers, which prevent the uninhibited passage of the myth and often work to disrupt or even invert its original form.[20] But increasingly it seems that mountains and rivers are replaced by dreams, imagination, and other ways of knowing or gleaning significance that are perhaps rather more intuitive and independent of topographical quirk.

In this sense it is true to say that ‘I have opened myself up to being whipped by the wind’.[21] And that the whirr of wings[22] and the snap of the Swan’s indifferent beak[23] are part of a past that is ‘the beginning of a future that is only now in the process of taking shape’.[24]

Certainly, it is important that this picture has appeared at this precise moment in time.

~

[1] Stuart Jeffries, ‘Roberto Calasso obituary’ in The Guardian, 31 July 2021, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/30/roberto-calasso-obituary accessed 11 October 2021.

[2] Robert Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1994), (trans. by Tim Parks), London: Penguin Random House, 2019, p. 164.

[3] Helen Sword, ‘Leda and the Modernists’ in PLMA, published by Modern Language Association, vol. 107, no. 2, March 1992, pp. 305–318.

[4] In ‘Leda and the Swan’ by W. B. Yeats the Trojan War is foretold in the moment of Helen’s conception: ‘a shudder of the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning tower/ And Agamemnon dead’. In W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, London: Vintage Random House, 1992, p. 221.

[5] Mary Beard, ‘The Public Voice of Women’ in Women and Power: A Manifesto, London: London Review of Books, 2017, pp. 3–45.

[6] Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 1 (1955), Middlesex, England: Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 21.

[7] In ‘Leda’ by D. H. Lawrence she is a ‘marsh-soft belly’; in Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Leda’ she is ‘she, opened’; in W. B. Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’ she becomes a ‘staggering girl’ after the Swan’s ‘sudden blow’.

[8] Calasso, p. 18.

[9] Sword, p. 314. The poem ‘Leda’, 1918, by Hilda Doolittle reads in full: ‘Where the slow river/ meets the tide,/ a red swan lifts red wings/ and darker beak,/ and underneath the purple down/ of his soft breast/ uncurls his coral feet./ Through the deep purple/ of the dying heat/ of sun and mist,/ the level ray of sun-beam/ has caressed/ the lily with dark breast,/ and flecked with richer gold/ its golden crest./ Where the slow lifting/ of the tide,/ floats into the river/ and slowly drifts/ among the reeds,/ and lifts the yellow flags,/ he floats/ where tide and river meet./ Ah kingly kiss—/ no more regret/ nor old deep memories/ to mar the bliss;/ where the low sedge is thick,/ the gold day-lily/ outspreads and rests/ beneath soft fluttering/ of red swan wings/ and the warm quivering/ of the red swan's breast’, URL: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47927/leda-56d228c3a5948, accessed on 11 October 2021.

[10] Sword, p. 315.

[11] Rosemary Dobson, ‘The Dark and the Clear’ in Greek Coins, URL: https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/dobson-rosemary/poems/greek-coins-0192116, accessed on 11 October 2021.

[12] The purpose and meaning of the kora (singular) and korai (plural), young girls made in stone, has been contested. However it is generally believed that they were created during the Archaic period (600–480 BCE) as votive or commemorative statues.

[13] Email correspondence from Heather B. Swann to the author 18 September 2021.

[14] Calasso, 1994, p. 119.

[15] In her story ‘A Bright Green Field’ Anna Kavan vividly describes a luminous stretch of grass ‘that blazes with jewel brightness’. In The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, London: Penguin, 1996, p. 98.

[16] Natsume Sōseki, Kusamakura (1906), (trans. by Meredith McKinney), New York: Penguin Classics, 2008, p. 37. The passage reads in full: ‘The ideal of classical Greek sculpture, I understand, can be summed up in the phrase ‘poised containment’, which seems to signify the energy of the human form held poised for action. The resonance of such a figure subtly inheres in that moment before the figure moves and changes into unguessable energies, swirling cloud or echoing thunder. All the dignity and solemnity to be found in the world lies hidden beneath this quality of poised containment. Once the figure moves, what is implicit becomes revealed, and revelation inevitably brings some resolution into one thing or another. Any resolution, of course, will always contain its own particular power, but once the movement has begun, matters will soon degenerate into mere sludge and squalor, and there will be no going back to the harmonious serenity of the original form. For this reason, whatever has motion is always finally vulgar.’

[17] In her story ‘The Wall’, Josephine Saxton refers to the difficulty with which her protagonist tries to picture an alternate life. In The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, London: Penguin, 1996, p. 179.

[18] Toni Morrison interviewed by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, 1992, for The Paris Review, excerpted in The Paris Review (podcast) episode 13: Before the Light, 23 October 2019.

[19] Claude Lévi-Strauss and F. C. T. Moore, ‘How Myths Die’ in New Literary History, vol. 5, no. 2, Winter 1974, p. 280.

[20] Lévi-Strauss and Moore, 1974, p. 272.

[21] Heather B. Swann interviewed by Nikki van der Horst, July 2021, STATION Gallery, Melbourne.

[22] The final stanza of ‘Leda’ by Raymond Ellsworth Larsson reads: ‘A shadow/ sharply cleaved the brassy sky/ and silence thickened/ to a whirr of wings.’ In Poetry. A Magazine of Verse, May 1927, p. 69, URL: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=30&issue=2&page=12, accessed on 11 October 2021.

[23] The final couplet of Leda and the Swan by W. B. Yeats reads: ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power/ Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ In W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, London: Vintage Random House, 1992, p. 221.

[24] Lévi-Strauss and Moore, 1974, p. 281.