❧ Henry Winter ❧ OPEN Voice Test

[tinkertank]

ἀλκυονίδες
A Period of Calm Before the Storm

✘ Leave a Prompt [A Line, a Picture, a Written Post]
✘ Non-TSH Characters Welcome - state if you are AU'ing into Henry's verse (modern college student), or if he should AU into yours.
✘ Let me know if you have a preferred previous relationship in mind (ie. friends, classmates, enemies, student/teacher, lovers I'm so sorry for you if you pick that one though), or if they're just meeting for the first time.
✘ Have a Henry. I'm sorry about that, too.

Comments

[aglaochartos]

[He doesn't quite know why he's agreed to this. A sheen of curiosity, perhaps, the way that a fine sweat sheens; light, quick to evaporate, slightly irritating. Or maybe it is even a more pressing sense of wonder: What will the artist see, what will he depict onto canvas, what will remain of himself in a reflective state of oil or charcoal long past when he is gone? A good painter could cut to the theme of the person, through the eyes. See the Mural in the Tomb of the Diver. The orientalizing phase of Greek cutouts in old, thematic necropolis art; heavy lines, minimalist backgrounds; had nonetheless served the purpose of plainly depicting the nature of man that had rotted beneath it once was. The youth was gone, the art remained. In it, the recently-dead was serene, erect, naked, and jumping seemingly from heaven rather than earth back into the earth, and into the sweetness of death, peaceful and brave.

As a condition of this, he had insisted that the work be done on wooden paneling, and encaustic paint used. With this condition met, the rest was in the hands of the painter himself. He'd agree to what was asked of him in the sitting.

To begin, though, Henry was stiff, his hair still matted over the side that covered his scar, his glasses tight on his face and glinting, face expressionless, heavy, well-tailored suit clinging to his finger and making him loom dark.]

Well?

[He would await instruction. If given none, he was glad to simply hold still for the duration, in his preferred presentation of self.]

[idolatrist]

Sometimes, moreso after Dorian defected from his life of angelic purity for Harry's world of excess and indulgence, Basil thinks that he must be cursed. He has no proof of such a thing, no broken mirrors or wicked incantations placed upon him by a gypsy crone with a hump and a glassy eye reflecting his failings. His life up to this point has not been boring, not limited to the live of a husband or a civil servant, but it had not been particularly exciting either. He was an artist from the start, and in spite of his pederastic leanings he had never been inclined, like his friends, towards what was so often considered the artists life. Every lavish party had been merely attended out of courtesy towards an invite from the more hedonistic. He would rather, in most cases, be painting.

Homosexuality aside, he had no real reason to be cursed (though by his estimation to consider homosexuality worthy of cursing was a bit extreme).

And yet, Basil is sure that he is cursed. It's a shadow of a weight that sits on his shoulder, that darkens his colors, that glistens back at him from his sitter's eyes, and what a beautiful sitter he is. He thinks again of Dorian, and how he lost him. Perhaps that was, in essence, his curse: to find beautiful boys, to long for them intimately, and to inevitably introduce them to the Devil named Lord Henry Wotton.

The wood panel insisted on by his sitter, the classical nature of all of this is somewhat encouraging, as if a classical leaning could dissuade the call to decadence. Under his brush the primed wood is rough and uneven; his task is to turn bark to porcelain.

His focus was not truly on his subject as he mixed paint, but on the colors in his skin, of the shade of rouge carried by his lips, on the pale edge of that mostly hidden scar that could never hide from the eyes of an artist. At the sound of Henry's voice, he looks up over the edge of his own glasses. ]

You can sit however you like. I would prefer you to be comfortable.

gives up. cries a lot about chrome killing the original tag.

[aglaochartos]

[Homosexuality as an incalculable sin and a pox upon the mortal soul- when had such a thing blossomed into conception? The first mentions of fraternal love in Western literature came from the ancient Greeks. They danced across the pages of Xenophon and Heroduts, sun dappled and shameless, under the ironically female pseudonym παιδεραστία, paiderastia. The important bit of the heady compound was in the erastês- denoting the man of faculty, authority, and agency. Pais, the boy, the pupil, the tutored, was tempted to his knees and made reverent by the greatness of the learned one, ready and willing to open mind and body, to bend in thought and limb. It was a delicious abstraction, wasn't it? The willing, eager student drinking in the master's vitality physically, spiritually, and mentally. The Greeks thought it a lively facet of good health and breeding, best indulged in by homeric youth and stunning creatures of advanced tragedy, old poets like Agathon.

Sometimes, when he read Plato's Symposium, his own mind trailed to Julian, his shadowy white hair, the distinguished lines at his eyes and mouth, and it was not a pang of sexual frustration or serious desire that Henry felt for his teacher, but a deep, aching love, crippled as it was by his singular heart but beating with such unusual vitality as to make him nearly sick, nearly mad with devotion. If they had been true Greeks, in more than just their souls, he might have been Pais out of empathic respect and darling, where there was no foundation of desire. The man was nearly sixty, after all.

The Romans sullied the practice in shades of slavery, and Theodosius' loyalty to Christianity above tradition- his fear of the one God, which did not exist so acutely in a society where you could merely appeal to another- set screaming fire to the whole dandy fracas. The ashes of those burned Pais, thick and dark and heavy and reeking, was placed like dust across the reputations of men today, as a forehead might bear a gray smear on Ash Wednesday.

Henry was an acute judge of character- Basil was obviously a homosexual. It would not have been very difficult for anyone who was looking to perceive, almost by right of prejudice. Artists had a lean towards the outrageous, after all, they were naturally on the precipice of some screaming volley against normatively, precariously self-loathing, divinely hopeful of humanity, obscenely needy of it, and deeply wary and superstitious at the same time. Could anything better describe the modern homosexual? Snatching at tendrils of beauty, and letting them slip through the fingertips when the fear and loathing became too heavy, leaving only a weak, unsatisfying stain in their place, and the insatiable desire to repeat the process. Yearning for shadows and jumping at shadows. A sort of pathetic, deeply human ailment; the Greek cure had been long unsold to men like this.

Henry tapped a finger once against the fabric at his knee, then tilted his head, expressionless. It would make him comfortable to read- he had brought a book. But.

Perhaps there was more to do here, first.

Reaching into his coat pocket, he pulled out a cigarette case and matches. Striking the head of one, he lit up, pressed the thing between his lips, and replaced the case in its pocket.]

Men are your preferred subject matter.

[Less a question, and less than that a reassurance. A monotone statement, stale on the air, pirouetting as it waited with savage patience for a response, a reaction.]

Plato would say that you suffer not from sickness, but from despots.