Thursday, March 19, 2009

Corabastos

Corabastos is a place out of time; a place where everything that is going there seems as it’s been happening since immemorial age. The premises consist of thirty bays distributed by the goods they sell from potatoes to bananas. The bays' interiors glows side of the basy which are loaded and unloaded by an army of men and women who classify, wash and pack. The market closes only three days a year, of course.
  
 
I drew a map of the Corabastos market to give it to the crew and I realised how similar it was to that of the mythological city of Tartarus. In ancient mythologies, Tartarus became the place where the punishment fits the crime. For example Sisyphus, who was a very crafty king who defied the gods and tried to elude death. His punishment in Hades was to endlessly roll a huge stone up a hill -- as soon as it reached the top, it would fall back to the bottom. The poor king spawned his own adjective, Sisyphean, meaning an impossible task. The Greek writer Homer describes him thus:
And I saw Sisyphus at his endless task raising his prodigious stone with both his hands. With hands and feet he tried to roll it up to the top of the hill, but always, just before he could roll it over on to the other side, its weight would be too much for him, and the pitiless stone would come thundering down again on to the plain.


No comments:

Post a Comment