The Physics of Sorrow

by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

  “My brother, the Minotaur,” let us remember that.

  “He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human,” said the gentle and all-knowing Apollodorus (or Pseudo-Apollodorus) at some point during the second century B.C. I believe he’s the only one who didn’t use disparaging epithets against our client.

  What does cunning Plutarch do? So as not to sin through his own words, he prefers to speak of the Minotaur through the mouth of Euripides. The latter called him: “A mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape.” And also: “Two different natures, man and bull, were joined in him.” This second statement sounds relatively neutral, which in our case can be taken as compassionate, thus the Minotaur’s human nature can again be seen here.

  Unlike him, Seneca, practically an age-mate of Christ, uses language in his Phaedra that would make even Roman soldiers blush. Wretched whore, Hippolytus screams at Phaedra, you’ve outdone even your mother Pasiphaë, who gave birth to a monster, displaying her wild lust to all. But why should I be surprised, you were carried in the same womb where that two-shaped infamy sloshed around . . . It went something like that, to use the jargon of the time.

  Does the prosecution object? If it is because of the language, let me note that the words are not mine, while the translation is quite precise. It has nothing to do with our case? You’re mistaken. We’re talking about the abandonment and forcible confinement of a child, branded by his origins, for which he is not to blame. This is followed by slander, abasement, and the public circulation of lies . . . Yet it can be seen, albeit between the lines, in casual suggestions and hints, that the Minotaur’s human nature has been recognized. Despite the fact that his human rights have been taken away. I ask that this be duly noted, your honor, and that you allow me to continue.

  The poet Virgil, that favorite of Augustus, sideswipes the victim in passing with the following two lines: “the Minotaur, hybrid offspring, that mixture of species, proof of unnatural relations . . .”

  His every word drips with revulsion.

  Speaking of Virgil, we can’t help but mention Dante. In The Inferno, the Minotaur is placed at the entrance to the seventh, bloodiest circle: “on the border of the broken bank / was stretched at length the Infamy of Crete.” Dante is even more merciless than his guide, Virgil. After being exiled to the labyrinth, after dying under Theseus’ sword, our defendant was tossed in among the bloodsuckers, tyrants, and those who have sinned against the laws of nature. But isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?

  (By the way, that seventh circle was guarded by centaurs. The centaur, with its animal hindquarters and human torso is the mirror image of the Minotaur.)

  If literature constantly returns to the Minotaur’s monstrous birth, then visual art is hypnotized by his death. In all the ancient images we have, in all the frescoes, vase-paintings and illustrations of myths and legends, the scene is one and the same—Theseus kills the Minotaur. He is about to be stabbed or is already dead, Theseus dragging him by the horns. Put together, it looks like a series of techniques for close-quarters combat with a sword.

  Theseus grasps the Minotaur by one horn and jabs at his chest with the double-edged sword.

  The Minotaur has laid his unnaturally large head in Theseus’s lap, exposing his neck to the sword’s blow.

  Theseus is behind the Minotaur’s back, holding his neck with his left hand, while driving his short sword somewhere into the soft tissue beneath the rib cage with his right. The body is human. You’re killing a human being, Theseus. The sword goes in smoothly. Yes, in all these scenes the supposedly terrifying body of the Minotaur is vulnerable, there’s no hiding this fact.

  On the bottom of one of the kylixes, those shallow glasses for wine, the Minotaur is even beautiful, he looks more like a Moor, with sensual lips and handsome nostrils, he is kneeling, imprudently exposing his body to Theseus’s sword, while the latter’s right foot steps upon the Minotaur’s groin.

  In several preserved frescoes on wine vessels we see Theseus dragging behind him the Minotaur’s mild-mannered corpse . . . He scarcely defended himself, as the other lawyer-by-correspondence in the case, Mr. Jorge, shall also testify.

  In some of the scenes the murder is even more brutal, harsher, and more barbarian—committed with a heavy staff, a gnarled wooden mace, a crude prototype of today’s bat. The murder of an ox or bull, as they still do it in the village slaughterhouses, is a blow with the butt-end of an axe to the forehead.

  Only childhood and death. And nothing in between. Except darkness and silence.

  Ladies and gentlemen, I beg that all this be taken into consideration.

  VIRUSES

  Billy goats and lilies courted all around me

  I cried out afeared—Dear Lord have mercy!

  Such a sin simply cannot be.

  God’s right hand He placed in between.

  O, world, from a second Sodom ye are redeemed!

  —Gaustine of Arles, seventeenth century

  A few words about Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship, which made possible that which nature had forbidden. He crafted a wooden cow, covered it in real cowhide and stuffed Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, who was crazed with lust for the bull, into its empty womb. He put the cow on wheels and took it to the meadow where the bull normally grazed. What happened next is clear. “The bull came up and had intercourse with it, as if with a real cow. Pasiphaë gave birth to Asterios, who was called Minotauros,” as Pseudo-Apollodorus tells it.

  However, the myth keeps mum about another hidden consequence. Could the Trojan Horse have been born from the Cretan wooden cow? Again hollow, on wheels, but quite a bit larger, fitting a whole thirty armed soldiers in its womb—not to seduce, but to subjugate. A cow giving birth to a horse, a woman giving birth to a man-bull—Daedalus slips a Trojan horse into the history of species. And a few millennia later, yet another new heir will crop up, without a wooden body, without any body at all—the Trojan horse, a malicious computer virus. It pretends to be a useful program, lies low for a day or two before unleashing its fury—erasing files, opening doors, smashing defenses, letting foreign eyes into your virtual Troy. And all of that—born of Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship. Which goes against the natural order that the mysterious Gaustine from the seventeenth century insisted upon.

  There is Order here and God makes no mistake,

  Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.

  MYTH AND GAME

  Shall we talk about the Minotaur and videogames? Just enter any one of the games that have multiplied in recent years. Clichés and classics. The Minotaur looks like your average B-movie thug. Short-legged and beefy, with a short, thick neck, hairy, with the terminator’s trapezoidal face and absurd little horns. And sometimes, as an added bonus, a crooked boar’s tusk. As if the rest wasn’t enough, they had to go and cross the bull with feral pig.

  My dearest Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch, Euripides, and you, Mr. Dante “Inferno” Alighieri (to spell out your nickname, too), come see what mythology has become. See the character you so despised. You’ve contributed greatly to his present image. Behold him and weep, you proto-gamers from antiquity. Some day we can play a round, when we get together in real time. In real time, ha ha ha . . . We’ll play “The Minotaur in the Labyrinth” or World of Warcraft or God of War or . . . some 3-D game. Then, however, only the Minotaur will be three-dimensional, while we’ll all be two-dimensional shades (we’ll be in the Kingdom of the Shades, after all, right?), pathetic cartoons with faded colors from the beginning of the digital era.

  THE MADONNA WITH MINOTAUR

  A child is sitting in his mother’s lap. She is holding him in her left arm, she has most likely just nursed him and is now waiting for him to burp. The child is naked. The scene is iconic, so well known and repeating in all images after the birth of the Christ Child. There is one difference, however, which makes this drawing unique. The child has a bull’s head. Little horns, l
ong drawn-out ears, wide-set eyes, a snout. The head of a calf. Pasiphaë with the Minotaur Child. Centuries before the Virgin Mary.

  The image is one of a kind. It was discovered near the erstwhile Etruscan city of Volci, in present-day Lazio. It can be seen in the collection of the Parisian National Library. Someone dared to recall the obvious, which the myth would quickly forget. We’re talking about a baby. Carried and delivered by a woman. We’re talking about an infant, not a beast. A child, who will soon be abandoned (sent to the basement). Most likely Minos needed time, months, even a year or two, to decide what to do, how to hide this marked child from the world. If we peer at the faces of the mother and the son, we can see that both of them already know.

  Perhaps this is the very moment of separation? Her left arm no longer embraces him, but pulls away, waving farewell gently behind the child’s back.

  Later the myth will transform the child into a monster, so as to justify the sin of his abandonment, the sin against all children, whom we will abandon in the future.

  CHILD-UNFRIENDLY

  The absence of children in Greek mythology is striking.

  If we agree that antiquity is the childhood of mankind, then why is that childhood so devoid precisely of children? Apparently where everybody is acting childish, real children are unwelcome. Insofar as they exist, they are most often devoured by their fathers. Any left undevoured will devour their fathers. That’s how it’s been since the beginning of time, since Chronos and his children.

  It’s clear that Time always devours his children. But there is time where there is light, where lightness and darkness, day and night alternate. So it turns out that the only place hidden from time is the absolute darkness of the cave. That’s where the child Zeus was hidden away. It was the only place where Chronos (Time) did not rule.

  The Minotaur, too, is hidden away in the dark underground labyrinth. And since time does not pass there, he remains a boy forever.

  We were also locked up in the basement, that late urban cave, like momentary Minotaurs amid the jars of pickles and jam.

  I had an aunt who always threatened to eat me up every time she came to visit. Huge and hulking, a distant offshoot of the Titan’s line, she would stand in front of me, spread wide her enormous arms with their rapaciously painted nails, bare her teeth malevolently, two silver caps sparkling, and would slowly step toward me with a deep growl coming from her belly. I would curl up into a ball, screaming, while she shook with laughter. She didn’t have any children, she must have devoured them.

  DEVOURED CHILDREN IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY (AN INCOMPLETE CATALOGUE)

  In the beginning, of course, there were Chronos’s children, devoured by the old man himself: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. And one long stone, wrapped in swaddling clothes in place of Zeus.

  Zeus, who swallowed up his wife Metis, because of Athena (as of yet unborn and hence also swallowed up), who was hidden in her womb. She was then born from his head in full battle array.

  Itys (Ityl)—the young son of the Thracian king Tereus, killed by his mother and aunt and served up as a meal to the unsuspecting father. Ovid recounts this in the sixth book of his Metamorphoses in lurid detail: the child trustingly embracing the murderess, the blow of the sword, some of the warm body boiled up in pots, other parts roasted on hissing spits . . . And in the end the feasting Tereus “gorged himself with flesh of his own flesh.”

  There’s more . . . The story of the child Pelops, Tantalus’s son, who was hacked to pieces by his father, stewed up, and offered to the gods. And only grief-stricken Demeter ate part of his shoulder in her melancholy haze.

  Here, too, figures that murky story with Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, who served up his grandson Arcas to Zeus in order to test him.

  You won’t find the youths and maidens devoured by the Minotaur in this list—I don’t believe in that part of the myth. Besides, bulls are herbivores.

  P. S.

  And one wacky echo in modern times.

  It’s an ordinary baking pan, large, with indelible traces of endless use. The rice has been washed and lightly steamed, amid the white—little balls of black pepper. You can clearly see that the stove has been switched on, the oven door is open, and two hands are carrying the tray toward it. There’s just one unusual detail—that’s no chicken or turkey on top of the rice, but a baby, naked and alive. I almost said raw. It’s lying on its back, its arms and legs in the air. It is clearly only a few days old and weighs no more than a middling turkey.

  I own this photo (black and white) and the story, bought as a package deal. The woman who received this photo in the mail just about fainted. “Here is your new grandson. Isn’t he sweet?” The letter was from her daughter in Canada, who had sent the first photo of the long-awaited baby. Back when she was little, they used to teasingly tell her: “you’re so sweet, I’m going to eat you up. With rice, with rice . . .” It was a family saying. And now, twenty years later, the daughter had decided to literalize the joke.

  A myth, deboned, mocked, yet still scary.

  THE VOICE OF THE MINOTAUR

  The defendant has the floor.

  Silence.

  Does the defendant have anything to say in his own defense, or does he prefer to remain silent?

  The Minotaur’s voice has not been preserved anywhere in all of recorded antiquity. He doesn’t speak, others speak for him. There where everything animate and inanimate refuses to shut up, where the voices of gods and mere mortals, of wood nymphs and heroes, of crafty Odysseuses and naïve Cyclops are constantly swarming, where even the despised Centaurs have the right to speak, only one remains silent. The Minotaur. No voice, no sound, no whimper or threat, nothing anywhere. Not even in the hexameter of Homer, that Minotaur among poets, who in the long nights of his blindness wandered through the labyrinths of history. Nor in Ovid, the exile, who knew very well the fate of an outcast, nor in Vergil, nor in Pliny the Elder, nor in Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles . . . no one gives voice to, no one preserves the voice of the Minotaur. It’s easy to feel sorry for Icarus, it’s easy to sympathize with Theseus, with Ariadne, even with old King Minos . . . No one pities the Minotaur.

  Does the defendant have anything to say? Otherwise . . .

  He does. Why shouldn’t he be worthy of the heroic hexameter?

  THE MINOTAUR’S SPEECH IN HIS OWN DEFENSE (A FRAGMENT)

  Some words I have for you o’er which so long I’ve mused

  In night’s embrace, O Minos, Hades’ judge most cruel

  My tongue has longed to say just once: O father mine!

  Yet I discern your scorn and swallow back my cries.

  Forsooth! The truth outshines your deepest, darkest fears

  Your blood I share—a freak by birth, my lineage’s clear.

  Your father’s likeness true, I’m kin to all you all

  The first true bull in our damned house was Zeus; recall

  how he seduced the fair Europa, dam to you

  from Grandpa Zeus I got my bullish form so true.

  His very spit and image, to my curving horns,

  As Cretans crones in tales so love to wail and mourn.

  A god was he, while I am but a freak; but know

  O Minos, father dear, you wanted bulls like snow

  so white far more than my sweet mother ever hath

  and now you cringe disgusted by your son their calf . . .

  Minos: The court will now break for a recess . . .

  Moooo . . .

  Take away the defendant . . .

  Moooooo . . .

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  III.

  THE YELLOW HOUSE

  ASYLUM

  A yellow, peeling building, far past the last houses, long and low, with barred windows, the fence girded with barbed wire. An “asylum for the mentally ill,” as they officially calle
d the place, which everyone in that Podunk southeastern town simply called the nuthouse. Rumor had it that the fence was electrified at night and that several people had been fried. I was afraid, yet at the same time it was precisely this fear that drove me to hang around nearby.

  One evening, passing by there, I heard a chilling howl. There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Ooooooooohhh . . . That endless Oooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening. It was Sunday. The fallen leaves blanketed the whole street, still emitting a faint scent of rot and acetone, which preceded the corpse of autumn. Only the light above the gate scattered the damp dusk. The nurse had gone home, while the head doctor only came once a week in any case. The porter more or less had to be there, but he was probably dozing drunk in the doctor’s office. In this case, that saved the howler, who would otherwise undergo the traditional ice-cold shower under the garden hose. It was said that they sprayed them with water directly in their rooms (“cells” is the more precise term) through the bars of the window, as a natural curative procedure for cooling down demons. The head doctor had long since made peace with the fact that he would end his career here in this Podunk town. And he didn’t worry about any inspections or sanctions, just as a man who finds himself in hell is freed from the fear that something worse could befall him.