About Lamia.

Lamia is a narrative poem by John Keats and the source of the text my piece displays.
There's a few layers to why I chose this. Layers that reflect how my relationship with
this classical poem evolves. 

	Note: the text underneath is an attempt to portray my feelings about this work
	today, March 13 2021. It touches on difficult subjects where I have no lived
	experience in, where I have no fully matured view on. Nor do I possess the cultural
	gravitas to fully express myself. That in itself is the final layer, my own personal
	journey.

I first learned about this poem because of these lines

"Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade."

Richard Dawkins refers to these lines in his book "Unweaving the Rainbow",
an attempt to refute the idea that science (cold philosophy) destroys beauty.
I used the poem in several talks that revolved around this idea: I believe
science does not remove wonder, but rather adds to it. However, education,
science or otherwise, as we tend to organize it, is quite effective in removing
wonder...

Focussing on the words and rhyme, and guided by Dawkins' interpreation, I
read the poem, and saw nothing but a typical romantic tale of tragic love, 
including the often problematic undercurrents those tales involve. For example, it's
difficult to read Lamia and not see Hermes as anything else but a predator.

When I read up where this myth comes from, a deeper layer is revealed, relevant to
the way we look at these stories. Keats attempts to protect the mythical Lamia from
undoing by cold rationality gets a different perspective when we trace the myth back
to its earliest versions.

A Libyan queen, Lamia, a powerful woman of great beauty, is seduced by Zeus and has
several children with him. She runs afoul of Hera, is forced to eat her children and
cursed with insomnia. However, Zeus takes pity and grants her the gift of prophecy
and the ability to remove her own eyes temporarily to relieve her insomnia - as you
would do when you're an almighty being  trying to correct your errors, I guess..
The ordeal transforms her into a terrifying creature.

Later de-mythologizing rationalizations of the myth, by Diodorus Silicus around 100BC,
explain the blindness as drunkenness, the transformation as the expression of
barbarism, turning the myth from a tale of subversion into a cautionary, cultural story.
Quite the opposite, in popular culture nothing remains of the lamia but a half-snake,
half-woman - prominently half-woman - creature, detached from its mythological background.

It isn't hard to see a more modern analogy in the subversion of a different culture
by western civilization and the subsequent perversion of it; Zeus' symbolic gestures of
compensation that fail to address the underlying  patriarchic, cultural and colonial
power structures; and Diodorus' rationalizations that wash us from guilt.

In extension, Keats poem reflects an ultimately misguided attempt from within the subverting
cultureto romantically salvage the noble savage. The Lamia he depicts is a tragic creature
that needs to be saved by the very culture that took away its agency.

The reason I believe it is appropriate to embed Lamia in a cryptoart piece, is the current
narrative that surrounds NFTs and their reliance on crypto-infrastructure. There is
great potential in decentralization, a potential to equalize power structures and give
agency to underrepresented artists, despite headlines focussing on tales of success firmly
outside the grasp of all but the very few. However, there is an undeniably high ecological
cost to its current state, although how high in a broader perspective is still a matter of
debate. Centering around these two foci, the voices most loudly heard, seem to be either
Diodorus, Keats, or Dawkins, three sides of the same demography. Unironically discussing
whether the costs outweigh the benefits, or taking the narrative away from the real need
for decentralization because taht aspect doesn't affect them, while the voices of those
that stand to benefit are lost.

Let the tales of the present and the future be about empowerment and agency, not romantic
musings on lost, unfortunate souls in need of our protection.

Frederik Vanhoutte
21-03-13



