that school in Athens

Meredith Benjamin

after Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’ (1511) fresco in the Vatican. in ‘School of Athens,’ Raphael imagines the great philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of classical antiquity gathered under one roof. it has come to symbolize the marriage of art, science, and philosophy that defined the Italian Renaissance. in the painting the men argue in a phosphorescent room. i have spent all morning staring at Jesus on the cross. the silence was tense and awkward. so i asked him oh my god how’ve you been?? and hey, have you heard from your dad lately? which was cringey, i know, but in my defense the past few years, God has been a little off the grid. he says i could be his Virgin Mother Mary, that our resemblance is uncanny. i bite my tongue, pretending there’s no gaping difference between her and me. it seems most of my time these days is spent negotiating the sexuality of all of womankind but my feet hurt and my back was aching and i simply didn’t feel like getting into it with Christ today. so when he said that for him it’s been awhile, i just said yeah, i’m waiting for ‘the one’.

in the painting the men argue and compared to all that Jesus stuff, i guess it’s more relatable?

by far the most erratic of all erratic things, the hysterical thirst to be recalled as more than carbon and dust.

and Plato says to Aristotle, that Alex kid is Great but kick his ego down a notch. cause even in antiquity, no one likes a tool.

i like the painting because on some level, it tells me the thing i want most to believe: that everyone interesting who ever lived is gathered together somewhere in a shiny marble room, marveling at the very miracle of having been someone back on earth. that if i can just get the right bearded man to want to paint me, i, too, could spend infinity exploring epistemology and shiftings in the stars. that everyone who deserves it is somewhere in that room.

but then again, do you think Aristotle has ever broken down at the arrival gate in an airport? cause all his robes are packed away, and even with all this in the news about those two degrees of global warming (and how the ice is melting and the polar bears will croak) it is so much colder in New England than he’d remembered, and grief grips like gum stuck to his shoe, he understands that believing something hard enough has never made it true.

because there’s Ptolemy with his celestial orb and we all know i would just come out and say it: eclipsing the space of the people around you won’t make you the fucking sun. and yes, i could’ve been more tactful, but it’s not my name on the plaque. forgive me, Jesus, for not believing in the consecrated power of waiting an eon for a man to come around and carve my own words into stone. and so i’m sure Aristotle deserved his admission to that prestigious School of Athens. and perhaps he really did get there on his own.

but probe at a possibility in which luck has been stitched into his very DNA. in which a person can earn their success without earning their opportunities. in which the painting shows nothing more than the vastness of the Western frontier.

i like to think after that, every prolific contribution he made was honestly just the marijuana talking. was the goosebumps he woke up with after that dead boy hugged him in his sleep. was accidental and anonymous, and fuck the American Dream. was him just trying to crawl out of a hole. i swear if i had a buck for every time i lapsed my feminist religion cause i was trying to make a bitter man feel less sad, a note for every night i didn’t sleep as he baptized me with indecision, a penny for the things i thought, and did not say, i wouldn’t even need to buy my way into that painting; i’d buy the damn Vatican itself.

so maybe Raphael can paint me too?

July | Zoey Nahmmacher-Baum | alcohol ink on paper