Long, long ago in the Greek city of Thebes, a Sphinx – half woman, half lioness – guarded the city's ancient gate, asking a riddle of travelers seeking refuge from their long journey.
"Which creature in the morning goes on all four legs, at midday on two, in the evening upon three. The more legs it has, the weaker it becomes?" she demanded, with feline cunning, and saffron-lidded, hungry searching eyes.
Those men who could not answer her riddle – and they were many – the Sphinx indifferently tore to pieces. For 99 lifetimes she reigned, tirelessly keeping her city safe from intruders, mere mortals who refused to ponder life, ignorant of sacred philosophies.
She met her match one careless summer day, when bright Oedipus – who would blind himself later for violation of an intimate bond of maternal kinship – gave answer in one all-encompasing breath. "Humankind."
Angered that she no longer had victims to challenge, a duty to perform, nourishment to sustain her (however meager those torn-apart limbs) she quickly vanished from sight, tail between her sinew'd legs.
Missing her cunning duplicity, the gods decreed that the Sphinx might reappear, if foolishly woo'd by a poet, a master of enchantment, a teller of gifted tales. So, with this promise goading her pagan heart, she began again – across arid Christian centuries – to purr longingly, coquettishly. Ready to pounce and feed.
So, in the year before his infamous 1895 trials for gross indecency, affronting society – Oscar Wilde deigned to write, "The Sphinx," a poem much along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," that he so admired.
"My poem," fancied Wilde, "will have a limited circulation. My first idea was to print only three copies. One for myself. One for the British Museum. One for Heaven. I had some doubt about the British Museum." Three hundred copies saw print. (Heaven's copy, gilt-edged.)
Like "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," Wilde wove together "The Sphinx" with erotic symbolism. Exotic words. Scarlet hints of forbidden pleasures. "My beautiful beast has no secrets. But there are, to be sure, many curious questions for straightkind to think about."
He teased the Sphinx: "What songless, tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night, and saw my taper burning bright, and knocked and bade you enter in?" The Sphinx, in turn, merely purred – played her cat and mouse charade – and as was her wont – no friend to soft-sexed poets – abandoned Wilde to Fate…
For the detestable and curious crime of buggery, he was condemned to prison. For two years at hard labor he counted his egregious sins. Rehearsed in his mind the glory and exultation of former days. Upon release he fled to France. In exile he called himself Sebastian Melmouth. (Perhaps to outwit the ever-watching, clever beast.)
In 1900, he died and was buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Forgotten by most. Mourned by few. And – alias or not – his nemesis persisted. In 1911, the controversial sculptor Jacob Epstein designed a tomb to shelter Wilde, and four decades late later his first lover, Robert Ross.
Wilde's tomb, yet another sphinx! – this time part man, part lion – with folded, concrete wings. Its body – irony of irony – was given a small penis, a penis that over the years has been chipped, chipped away …
Today, this Transgendered Creature guards a tomb of pilgrimage, visited at midday each year by hundreds and hundreds of visitors, all seeking a blessing on their carefree youth. Somehow, fittingly, the silent guardian is covered with dozens of red-rose lipstick kisses, mostly from women.
And, not too surprisingly, a few from men.
