Thrust: A Novel

Aurora, my uncontainable dawn,

I accept the transaction. My Darwin for your Shelley. How your words move me. As always. And I am grateful beyond language for your assessment of the drawings.

I remain haunted by that question that so vexes me and so bores you as the point of origin: What does an abstract idea look like? Is it possible to bring the ideal to life?

I have a horror of all frippery of detail in sculpture. The forms and effects of that art should be broad, massive, and simple. “Virtue” and “courage” and “knowledge” cannot take shape directly in stone or metal. Least of all “freedom.” By their very nature, concepts have no shape, design, or texture. They shoot the mind outward into space and time, leave it hanging there without traveling anywhere real. To make ideas visible, an artist must personify them, reduce them to a form recognizable to the beholder. Think of the Pietà, of the Venus de Milo. A mother’s sacred grief and love, or the so-called figure of desire.

Yet in this project something made my imagination falter. Bodies like those are beautiful, but not right for the ideas. That is, until the first time I clapped eyes on the Winged Victory of Samothrace — and I dropped to the floor. I stared up at her, this headless, armless woman larger than life. How how how, I wondered, did the Christ figure ever beget a faith, compared to this glory? This true figure of worship! For me, she conjured every idea — action, forward momentum, triumph — all in Thasian and Parian marble. In her body, the violence of motion meets a profound and eternal stillness. Before she lost her arms, her right arm was believed to have been raised, her hand cupped around her mouth to shout, Victory!

Those lost pieces of a woman — pieces of woman — troubled my vision. Her head never found. Her hands lost to history. A wing partially gone. And though they continue to haunt me, the concept that haunts me is not victory. Victory is not my commission.

It is freedom.

Is freedom a man, a woman, neither, or both?

—

My first memory of my cousin Aurora is a scene from her bedroom when we were children. She was twelve, and tall for her age. I was just ten. She stood in front of an extraordinary pair of deep-red velvet curtains.

Aurora had recently undergone surgery for a partially cleft lip. In this and other ways, her body has always carried the trace of things gone wrong in the world. Unable to eat solid foods, she’d been fed for days on nothing but milkshakes and ice cream and porridge, which made me painfully jealous, even though she shared what she had.