Two months ago, I was injured and could no longer watch film. Isolated from my own world, I longed for the entrance into others, something that film has always offered me. Prohibited from even reading, I turned to other methods of staving off boredom and loneliness and constructed visuals in my mind. Staring at the sun through closed eyelids created vibrant images that my mind continued to craft into the language of cinema. Even when humans are denied light, our brains continue to produce luminous images known as phosphenes which derive from the Greek words phos (light) and phainein (to show). The temporary loss of my ability to watch film encouraged me to create a visual that did not necessitate traditional sight and so the sun became my muse, a role it has played for innumerous people over thousands of years. It can be staggering to truly think about human life’s intrinsic dependence on the sun and the extent to which it has permeated the lives before us. The same sun that I know is the same sun my ancestors knew and it was the same sun known to the Greeks. Much like how the sun stains our minds through our closed eyelids, the Greeks continue to stain our minds through the construction of the classics. 

At least in the West, classicism has threaded itself deep throughout our societies, manifesting itself in our architecture, our sports, our inquiries of thought. These threads are so intertwined within our structures that its construction has been used to uphold whiteness and the so-called West. Is its constructed ties to whiteness the reason for its permanency, its refusal to fade, its staining? There is undeniable truth to that question but antiquity’s longevity must also have ties in its liquidity. Liquidity represents a third space to understanding antiquity, a mediation between full embrace and full destruction. Instead it is a deconstruction or perhaps a reconstruction of a stagnant and idol model that refocuses the fluidity and turbidity of the relationship between past and present. My mind has devoured antiquity much like my body has always sung for the sun. It could be explained that due to the problematic construction of classics, the salience and availability of these myths was the reason that I felt a compelling attraction to them as a child. I am sure if other cultures not associated with whiteness were as available and advertised to children as the Greco-Romans were, I would be telling a different story. Yet, despite my conscious understanding of antiquity’s ties to structure, it continues to linger within me, it continues to stain my life much as it does for others. It is because of liquid antiquity’s generative and dynamic nature that it stains. Euripedes' and Sophocles' tragedies continue to cross the streams of time and culture and like the way our minds can craft stories out of sunlight, we continue to create stories out of antiquity.