The Lonely Sculptor, being a Modern Pygmalion with Obvious Elements Borrowed from such sources as Frankenstein and Narcissus

Once upon a time, and a fairly mediocre time it was, there lived a sculptor named Pygmalion. He was an old-fashioned sculptor, carving human figures out of large pieces of rock, and a distaste for the amorphous or monolithic structures passing as modern sculpture drove him to work as far removed from the art world as he could. Since people in le monde used various gallery openings as an excuse to suck down cocktails and sleep with one another in whatever combination came to mind, Pygmalion chose to live an abstemious, hermetic lifestyle, locked alone in his large studio with blocks of marble and a bed.

This living arrangement proved satisfactory enough, as Pygmalion could order groceries over the internet, cook and clean for himself, masturbate when necessary, and wasn’t the especially talkative anyway, preferring to express himself through visual means. So Pygmalion amused himself as well as he could and got by. But he did not work, and after a few months he remembered that he was supposed to be an artist and that his lack of production would have to stop.

So he tried sculpting things, but as he was dedicated to the idea of sculpting the human figure his decision to seal himself off from all human contact left him completely bereft of anything to sculpt. He wasn’t particularly imaginative, but for argument’s sake let’s pretend that he was: even if he could imagine something with incredible precision and turn that mind’s-eye vision into a sculpture that portrayed, say, a very successful 90% of what he saw in his head (and let’s see you do better!), well, there’s a reason that even the greatest artists needed a model. His sculptures would have turned out rather like the modern art he detested, and that would be no good. So it’s better that his imagination was as underdeveloped as a pike’s feet, isn’t it?

Though this one method of turning in on himself was denied to Pygmalion, he had others, and the one most developed by his months spent in isolation was an obsessive focus on his thoughts – which, we have already agreed, he could not sculpt even if he had had some – and appearance. He had, you see, not been exercising regularly and had added quite a bit of weight onto his originally not-particularly-slim frame, had let his hair grow into a tangle, his beard into a brambles, and his eyes resembled a toddler’s first foray, with a fresh red crayon, over the lovely eggshell walls of his father’s new girlfriend’s living room when left alone to color in the hopes that he wouldn’t notice the affair. And he didn’t. So Pygmalion was somewhat self-conscious at this point, and while he wanted to improve his looks, he was under no stress to do so because his lifestyle kept him from the prying eyes of judgmental pricks.

The idea, when it came, seemed so simple: he would sculpt himself! And he would not simply sculpt himself as he was, but rather as he would like to be – he would put the energy he neglected to use for himself in fashioning a statue over his idea of what he should be. With the help of fitness magazines, movie magazines, old photographs, and not a single mirror, he began his task. He finished rather quickly, because I would prefer not to describe in detail his work, so let’s say that within a few weeks (he was quite a talented sculptor in a technical sense) he had achieved his perfect Pygmalion: a lovely Adonis with proportions Jim would envy, shown in the act of sculpting a piece of granite into the form of a more cartoony-looking idealization of Pygmalion.

Pygmalion looked upon his creation in wonder, falling to his knees before it and trying desperately to hide (but from whom?) his growing erection. Immediately he gave up, in offering to the statue, the following items: a half-loaf of rather stale ‘French’ bread, a hunk of Cracker Barrel cheese, a half-bag of Oberto brand jerky, a six-pack of 7-Up, and a tortoise-shell comb. The statue received these items gracefully, though declining to use any of them.

Pygmalion, still awed by his creation, began to plan his re-entrance into the world: he would send out this idealized version of himself and let it interact with the people around him as though it were actually he himself, and he would thereby win over the art world and generally rule at life. But an alternative plan presented itself to him: if he could animate this statue, could he not cause it to fall in love with him? He prayed to the gods to act for him, deciding between the two options he was too weak to choose between. In the meantime, he set to work on an idealized-Pygmalion suit to walk around in, so he could once more go out into the world.

He quickly finished this suit and began wandering around, interacting with people whom he impressed with his beauty and physique and with the various stories he made up about himself to cover the year or so he’d lived, holed up in his studio. However, whenever a person would get closer to him the artifice would show, and Pygmalion lost all his friends if he let them penetrate through the artificial relationship afforded by his suit. Moreover, the existence of other people with these suits made people wary of this kind of stunt, and Pygmalion, in his superficial joy, found himself as unhappy as ever. So he continued praying, even though his life had been getting progressively worse since he started.

Finally one of the gods, the one writing this story, took pity on him and made the statue a real person. It was, however, disgusted with Pygmalion’s repulsive appearance, and soon struck off on its own, leaving Pygmalion desperate and alone to plan a final revenge on the world. In the meantime, the statue found that its possibilities in the world had all been dried up by Pygmalion’s impersonation while it was imprisoned in stone, and it bought a pistol and went to face its maker. Both sculptor and sculpture planned to commit a murder/suicide, but as fate would have it the real Pygmalion slipped on a banana peel in his studio, falling against a hunk of granite that then fell upon him. The statue Pygmalion was riding the bus home and was stabbed by a mugger.

The End