Before Poseidon raised his trident and before Neptune mounted the waves on a chariot pulled by creatures that had not yet been named, there was Pontos. Not a god who had been given the sea to rule, not a deity appointed to govern what belonged to someone else — but the sea itself, in the moment before it understood that it was anything other than what it had always been: the oldest and deepest thing in the world, the darkness beneath the surface of a planet that was still deciding what it wanted to become. In the cosmogony of Hesiod, who wrote the Theogony in the eighth century before the common era and who was trying to describe the beginning of everything in terms that the Greeks of his time could hold in their minds without losing the scale of what was being described, Pontos was not created. He emerged. From Gaea, the Earth, without a father, without the participation of any being other than the ground itself deciding that the water needed a consciousness to match the one that the land already had. Pontos was the sea's first thought about itself.
The tradition that Hesiod recorded described Pontos as "the barren sea with its raging swell" — barren not because he produced nothing but because what he produced was not the kind of life that the surface world could see and name and count. He was barren the way that the deep ocean is barren when you look at it from a ship: the surface gives you nothing, and everything is happening below it, at a depth where the light from the world above does not reach and the creatures that live there have developed their own relationship with darkness that has nothing to do with the sun. From his union with Gaea came the first generation of beings who would populate the sea with meaning: Nereus, the old man of the sea, who knew the truth of everything and told it only to those who could hold him long enough to make him speak; Phorcys, the guardian of the deep places where the monsters lived and where the light had never been; Ceto, the mother of all the creatures that the surface world called terrifying because it did not understand them; and Thaumas, who fathered the Harpies and the rainbow, which is the sea's way of reaching into the sky and touching the place where the water goes when it evaporates and becomes something the earth cannot hold.
Pontos did not reign over the sea the way that the later gods reigned over their domains — with a palace and a court and the apparatus of power that divine governance required once the gods had learned it from the humans who worshipped them. He did not need a throne because he was the throne. He did not need a palace because the ocean in its entirety — from the shallowest tidal pool where the anemones opened and closed with the rhythm of the water to the deepest trench where the pressure was enough to crush any material that the surface world considered solid — was the space he inhabited and had always inhabited, not as a resident but as the thing itself, the way that a fire does not live in its flame but is the flame, and the distinction between the fire and the place where the fire burns is a distinction that only makes sense to something standing outside both of them.
The pillar in this piece is the form that Pontos takes when the deep ocean decides to show itself to the surface world — the column of coral and crystal and mineral patience that the sea builds over centuries from the material it accumulates at its floor, rising toward the light not because it needs the light but because the act of rising is the sea's way of demonstrating that it contains the energy for it, that the darkness at the bottom is not the absence of power but the place where power accumulates before it expresses itself. The coral that forms the pillar's body is the architecture of living things that the sea constructed from calcium and time, each polyp adding its fraction of a millimeter to a structure that no individual creature planned but that the collective intelligence of the ocean designed across generations too numerous to count. The crystals and sea glass embedded in the pillar are the mineral record of the water's chemistry — the specific combination of elements that Pontos has been maintaining since before the first living thing existed to notice that the water had a particular taste and that the taste was consistent and that the consistency was a kind of promise.
Hesiod called him the barren sea, but what Pontos was barren of was not life — it was the need for acknowledgment. He existed before there was anyone to name him, and he continued to exist after the gods who replaced him in the myths had been given names and stories and temples and the elaborate apparatus of worship that the Greeks constructed around their divine figures. The pillar rises from its resin base the way that Pontos rose from Gaea at the beginning of the world: without being asked, without being directed, without the participation of any will other than its own. The sea at the back of the piece is the sea that Pontos is — turquoise where the light reaches, deep and dark where it does not, moving at the surface with the specific restlessness of something that has been moving since before the concept of stillness existed to contrast with it. The pillar stands in front of it not as a monument to Pontos but as Pontos himself, in the form that the deep ocean takes when it chooses to be seen.
"And the barren sea, seething with its swell, Pontus, she bore without sweet union of love."
— Hesiod, Theogony, c. 8th century B.C.
Artist's Note
This is the piece that began the gallery — the first one I built without knowing I was building a gallery, the one that taught me what the series was going to be about. I assembled the coral and the crystals on the resin base and understood that what I had made was not a decorative object but a presence: something that occupied the space differently from the objects around it, that had a weight to it that was not physical. I did not know, when I made it, that the Greeks had a name for the sea before it had a name. When I found Pontos in Hesiod, I understood what the piece had been trying to tell me from the beginning. The pillar was already there. I just built it in the right material.
At CuepoxyGift, the gallery began here — with the oldest god, the deepest water, and the pillar that the sea raises when it wants to remind the surface world that it was here first. "The Pillar of Pontos" is for those who understand that the most powerful things in the world are the ones that were never created — the ones that simply began, and have not stopped since.
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A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Pillar of Pontos" is part of the artist's private collection and is not currently available for sale.
However, very soon you will be able to bring this work into your home in different sizes and formats. Subscribe below with your email address and be the first to know when it becomes available. Great works of art are worth the wait.
— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift