amor color de olvido

It's just occurred to me for the first time that, beyond pomegranates' general VnC-appropriate status as the Death Symbolism Fruit, you can actually map the pomegranate seeds' famous role in the Persephone myth onto Astolfo's story pretty well.

In the story of Hades and Persephone, eating a few pomegranate seeds in the underworld is what traps Persephone in that underworld for half the year. And while Astolfo is not a Persephone-coded character, and his overall narrative doesn't map onto the Hades and Persephone myth, the idea of being trapped in an underworld rings true for him.

the author's framing perplexingly acknowledges the Roman civil wars but seems to suggest that they were about the subjugation and provincialization of Greeks, a process that had been underway for well over a century before Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium

calling Aeneas "a man memorable in the Iliad only for surviving the war" is massively misleading given the role of Aeneas in the wider Homeric tradition. he gets an entire Homeric Hymn (quite likely the oldest of the corpus!) dedicated to his birth story. Vergil did not somehow pluck a minor character from obscurity and Aeneas already had a significant mythological tradition surrounding him both in Greece and in Italy when Vergil produced the Aeneid.

calling the Aeneid "one of the great heists in literary history" is similarly a massive oversimplification that relies on the idea of one-way cultural transmission that can only be framed as theft, rather than a centuries-long process of cultural exchange between Roman, Etruscan, Italic, and Greek peoples in Italy and the wider Mediterranean. this is not to deny the imperialism inherent in the Aeneid, but to suggest that the idea that the Greeks "have" culture and the Romans "steal" it is a pernicious oversimplification akin to "white Americans have no culture" that doesn't actually amount to a real anti-imperialist critique of Roman culture

is suggesting that Lin-Manuel Miranda "turn[ing] the Founding Fathers black" is somehow parallel to Vergil making Homeric myth Roman a useful rhetorical move? how might that be a problematic framing, given both the mass enslavement of Greeks and Greek-speakers in the context of Late Republican/Augustan Rome and the mass enslavement of Black Africans in the transatlantic slave trade? is that really the parallel you want to double down on?

it is necessary instead to sit down and kinda try and quiet that voice, and then start with considering my physical needs, kinda mentally run through the maslow's pyramid from bottom to top as if I'm dealing with a little kid throwing a tantrum. like, did we sleep last night? have we had lunch? am I lonely? should I call my aunt? do I want to finish the book I've been reading? do I want to boil chicken bones today? what's bothering me? I'll then try out a couple of things that seem likely and while they may not be The Thing it's useful to build momentum anyways.

but like, if I give it space, the answer will float upwards into view and it's usually something I've been putting off for a long-ass time.

and it'll sound So Stupid to the Talking Mind, who has important tasks that it's trying to get done, but we're going to tell that voice that the kitchen will wait while we take down the Christmas tree, fold the laundry that's been in the basket for a week, sketch the idea, call my aunt, whatever it is, and inevitably the Linchpin Task will take about half an hour, and once it's done I can feel the weight lifted off my shoulders.

Linchpin Tasks are sometimes that it's time to deal with The Emotions At The Bottom Of The Pile, which is when a pile of stuff builds up to cover whatever is at the bottom being emotionally fraught. (letters, the shirt I wore the day my grandpa died, y'know, The Emotions)

I've gotten better at identifying when those piles are starting to accrete and dealing with them before they get bad, but like, you gotta be able to identify the pile of stuff your eyeballs keep slipping off because it feels too emotionally difficult to deal with right now, and like, learning to ignore the part of the mind that wants to assign task priority levels is a counter-intuitive way to get things done.