by John Gardner
when the city, towering like a mammoth oak—great
shining bartizans,
pennons of crimson and gold like leaves in autumn
on her high-
spired parapets—an oak majestic in its ignorant pride, rotten at the core—shudders suddenly at an odd
new wind,
and trembles, incredulous, shaken by the gale of
exploited men’s howls,
and to all the world’s astonishment, siles down.
So it’s gone
for a thousand, thousand years, and so it will continue.
“You may say, ‘Nevertheless, there is good in cities: Where else
can men
support great art? The complexity of music, the
intrinsicate craft
of poetry? Who else can pay for architecture,
the gifts of science, ennobling pleasure of philosophy?’
I answer this: To a hungry man, all food is food, sufficient to his need. Trembling with weakness, he
does not ask
for meats denatured by subtle rocamboles. But the
man well-fed,
as short of breath as a boar at the trough, dull-headed
with wine,
bloated on the blood of his workers’ children—that
man has tastes
more particular: not taste for food but for taste itself. An art has been born. So the poet whose hunger is
simply to speak—
tell truths, right wrongs—what need has he for the
lipogram,
for colors of rhetoric, antilibrations of phrase on phrase?
Only to the fool who believes all truths debatable, who believes true virtue resides not in men but
in eulogies,
true sorrow not in partings but in apopemptic hymns, and true thought nowhere but in atramentaceous
scrollery—
only to him is elegant style, mere scent, good food.
The city, bedded on the sorrows of the poor, compacts
new sweets
to incense the corpse of the weary rich.
“—And as for science, cure my disease and I’ll thank you for it. Yet I do
not think
you mix your potions and juleps for me. By the ebony
beds
of the old loud-snoring mighty you wring your hands
and spoon out
remedies—dole out health for the coin of convalescent
spiders
in a kingdom of hapless flies. For the spider, health itself becomes not need but taste, where the treatment of
fevers and chills,
chapped lips, a slight but debilitating dryness of the
palate while eating
cake, are men’s chief griefs. So it is with all the arts; so even Queen Theology turns a casual amusement for the pornerastic sky- and earth-consumer, a flatulence past the power of all man’s remedies. Such is my
judgment.
I may be in error—a man as remote from the bustlings
of cities
as a stylite praying in his cloud. Refute these doubts
of mine,
prove that the moral and physical advance of the
citified man
outruns the sly proreption of his smoking garbage
dumps,
or the swifter havoc of his armies, and I’ll speedily
recant. Meanwhile,
the past of the world is what it is—read it who likes. As for the present, I can tell you this, by the sure augury of stars. The minarets of Troy will burn—vast city
of tradesmen
buying and selling, extorting and swindling, callipygious
peacocks
whose splay touches even the jade traffic. And out of
its ashes
will come new cities, and new destructions—a pyre
for the maiden
who now rules white-walled, thundering Carthage, and
afterward a city
on seven hills, a seat of empire suckled by she-wolves, mighty as Olympos itself. But that throne too will fall.
And so through the ages, city by city and empire by
empire,
the world will fall, rebuild, and fall, and the mistake
charge on
to the final conflagration. I will tell you the truth:
the mistake
is man. For his heart is restless, and his brain a
crisis brain,
short-sighted, mechanical, dangerous. And the
white-loined city
is man’s great temptress: hungry for comfort at
whatever the cost,
hungry for power, hydroptic-souled, conceiving dire
needs
till the last of conceivable needs is sated, and nothing
remains
but death; and desiring death. There’s pride’s
star-spangled finale!
The fool who says in his heart ‘There is no God’
makes God
in his own image, and God thereafter is Corinth, or
Carthage—
a sprawling bawd and a maniac—a brattle of voices in one sear skull—a tyrant terrified by shadows. If gods exist, they must soon overwhelm that whore—for
their weapons, barns
of famine. They will send sharp teeth of beasts, and the
venom of serpents;
lay bare the beds of seas, and reveal the world’s
foundations.
The earth will wither, polluted beneath its inhabitants’
feet,
and the false god made in the image of man will
lie slaughtered.
“But the man
who submits to the gods and abandons himself, refuses
his nature,
who turns from the city to the rocks and highground—
by mastery of his heart
denies the lust to rule and oppress, the fool’s-gold joy of the sophisticate—to him the gods send honey of
the cliffs
and oil from the flinty crag. Like eagles caring for
their young,
the gods will spread their wings at the rim of the nest
to hold him
and shore him safe in their pinions.
‘This heaven requires me to speak. No one requires you to hear me, or understand.”
With that the tall, black-bearded Northerner ceased and stiffly
sat down,
and he glared all around him like a wolf. He was,
it seemed to me,
eager to be gone, the labor the stars had demanded
of him
finished. The sea-kings glanced at each other and here and there men laughed discreetly, as if at
some joke
wholly unrelated to Paidoboron’s speech. The Argonaut’s
face
was expressionless, Pyripta’s baffled. Old Kreon at last stood up, enfeebled giant. He rubbed his hands together,
hesitant and thoughtful, and pursed his lips. With
a solemn visage
and one eye squeezed tight shut, the king of Corinth
said:
“I’m sure I speak for every man in this room when I say, true and straightforward Paidoboron, that we’re
deeply grateful
for the message you’ve brought us, distressing as it is.
You’ve made explicit, it seems to me, the chief
implication
of Jason’s tragic story: we’re fools to put all our faith in fobs and spangles no firmer than the heart of man—
satisfactions
of animal hungers, or the idealism of the dim-brained
dog.
I have seen myself such mistaken idealism:
the fair white neck of Jokasta broken for a foolish
prejudice,
she who might, through her people’s love, have saved
mad Thebes.
As we talk, with our usual flip
pancy, of kingdoms
and powers,
you bring us up short; you recall us to deeper purposes.
If our hearts are disturbed—as surely all sensitive
hearts must be
by much you say—we thank you profoundly
nonetheless.”
So saying, he clapped, bowing to Paidoboron, and
quickly, at the signal,
all those sitting at the tables clapped—and even Jason.
How could I blame them? His rant was, after all,
outrageous—
his presumption flatly intolerable. Step warily even with the noblest of prophets—baldhead Elisha
who once
when his dander was up, had the children who chanted
songs in scorn of him
eaten alive by bears. What can you say to the wild-eyed looney proclaiming on Fillmore Street,
THE END OF THE WORLD
IS AT HAND!
REPENT!?
Throughout the hall, the applause swelled,
and Paidoboron sat fuming, scornfully silent.
At length Koprophoros rose. Those nearest me frowned to hush
my mutterings,
and I hushed. The Asian spoke, great rolls of abdomens and chins, his long-tailed turban of gold and
snow-white samite
splendid as the ruby that glowed on his forehead like
an angry eye.
His tone was gentle, conciliatory. He opened his arms and tipped his head like a puppet, profoundly apologetic but forced by simple integrity to air his disagreement He said:
‘Your Majesties; gentlemen:
“Imagine I approach a stranger on the street and say to him, ‘If you please, sir, I desire to perform an experiment with your aid.’ The stranger is obliging, and I lead him away. In a dark place conveniently by, I strike his head with the broad of an axe and cart him home. I place him, buttered and trussed, in an ample oven. The thermostat reads 450°. Thereupon I go off to play at chess* with friends and forget all about the obliging stranger in the stove. When I return, I realize I have overbaked my specimen, and the experiment, alas, is ruined.” He made himself seem a man unspeakably disappointed. Then, eyes wildly gleaming, he dramatically raised an index finger.
“Something has been done wrong. Or something wrong has been done.”
He smiled. His enormous eyes squeezed shut, relishing the juices of his cunning wit. The sea-kings smiled with him. At last, with a gesture:
“Any ethic that does not roundly condemn my action,
I’m sure you’ll agree, is vicious. It is interesting that none is vicious for this reason. It is also interesting that no more convincing refutation of any ethic could be given than one which reveals that the ethic approves my baking the obliging stranger.” He tipped his head, smiled again.
“That, actually, is all I have to say, but I shall not desist on that account. Indeed, I shall commence anew.
“The geometer”—he gestured—“cannot demonstrate that a line is beautiful. The beauty of lines is not his concern. We do not chide him when he fails to observe uprightness in his verticals, when he discovers no passions between sinuosities. We would not judge it otherwise than foolish to berate him for neglecting to employ the methods successful in biology or botany merely because those methods deal fairly with lichens and fishes. Nor do we despair of him because he cannot give us reasons for doing geometry which will equally well justify our drilling holes in teeth. There is a limit, as ancient philosophers have said, to the questions which we may sensibly put to each man of science; and however much we may desire to find unity in the purposes, methods, and results of every fruitful sort of inquiry, we must not allow that desire to make mush of their necessary differences.
“I need not prove to you by lengthy obs and sols, I hope, that no ethical system conceived by man can explain what is wrong in my treatment of the obliging stranger. It should be sufficient to observe how comic all ethical explanations must sound.
“Consider:” (Here he gestured with both hands.)
“My act produced more pain than pleasure.
“Baking this fellow did not serve the greatest good to the greatest number.
“I acted wrongly because I could not consistently will that the maxim of my action become a universal law.
“God forbade me, but I paid no heed.
“Anyone can apprehend the property of wrongness sticking plainly to the whole affair.
“Decent men remark it and are moved to tears.”
(Everyone was laughing.)
“But surely what I’ve done is just as evil if, for instance, the man I have wronged was tickled to laughter the whole time he cooked.” Koprophoros looked puzzled, slightly panicked in fact. “Yet it cannot be that my baking the stranger is wrong for no reason at all. It would then be inexplicable. I cannot believe this is so, however.”
He pretended to be startled by illumination.
“It is not inexplicable, in fact. It’s transparent!”
He paused and formally shifted his weight as a writer shifts paragraphs. With a gesture, he said: “All this, I confess, must seem an intolerably roundabout approach to the point I would like to make to you. The point is simply this. Our hyperborean friend has put forward two simple assertions: that cities are by nature evil, and that the feelings of men—the feelings responsible for the creation of cities—are to be rejected in favor of the noble attitudes of gods—attitudes we cannot experience, as human beings, except as we are informed of them by visionaries like Paidoboron, men who are, for mysterious reasons, infinitely our superiors.” He bowed solemnly, with an appropriate gesture, in Paidoboron’s direction, then looked straight at me and, for no fathomable reason, winked. He continued:
“You can see, I’m sure, gentlemen, what troubles me—or rather, the many things troubling me. I’ll gladly trust an algorist like Paidoboron to tell me most minutely and precisely of sidereal eclipses, 19-year cycles, storms on the surface of Helios, or the lunar wobble. But even if I could grant in theory (as I’m reluctant to do) that the stars send moral advice to me, I wonder, being a stubborn sort of person, what the stars’ apogees and perigees—stiff and invariable tracings of geometry, if I’m not mistaken—can have to do with my moral behavior. How, that is, does an astral apogee come to know more about upright action than a vertical line or the loudest physically possible thump? Again, I’m puzzled about the mathematics of why I should turn against human nature when every man here in this room condemns me for my manner of dealing with the stranger— whom you hardly knew!” Gesture. “Indeed, I can think of no one who would settle down soberly to cook a man, discounting the benighted anthropophagi, but a zealot of religion.
“I suggest that we may have been somewhat maligned—that cities, in fact, are a complex expression of the very attitudes involved in your hearty condemnation of me for the way I employ my oven. I suggest that the faults in city life, which Paidoboron points out, are the sad, accidental side-effects of a noble attempt—indeed, a magnificent achievement—which ought not to be washed down the gutter with the unwanted baby in impulsive haste.” He slid his eyes up, ironically pious, and delicately tapped his fingertips together.
“Let me assume you agree with me in this. Then our question becomes, ‘What kind of rule is most likely to make man’s noble and social attempt successful, keeping unfortunate side-effects to the barest possible minimum?’ Jason has given us some pointers in this matter. He argues, if I’ve rightly understood him, that the first principle is simply this: Balance a steadfast concern for justice with unfailing common sense, an intelligent use of alliances, a capacity to change as situations change. And his second principle would seem to be: Sternly reject all emotional urges, let the abstract, calcifying mind wrap the wicked blood in chains—if it can. If it can! For all man’s nature, save only his god-given mind, is a fetid and camarine thing, unfit to fish or swim in. So he tells us. Is he right? Is a Philosopher King conceivable who is not an old
madman like Amykos?
“Let me ask you to join me for a minute or two in pondering these opinions. Begin with the second.
“No decent man, no man of sober judgment, I venture to say, can fail to be moved to tears of profoundest sympathy by the process which led to Jason’s rejection of physical desires. We might of course argue, if we wished to be abusive, that from start to finish the problem revealed in Jason’s story is not physical desire but unsound assessment. Which of us here—I do not mean to be unduly critical—would stake all he had on a priestess of Hekate, that is, a witch?—even promising marriage and everlasting praise of her virtue! Which of us, seeing his beloved wife in a very crucible of fiery pain, would creep unfeelingly into a slavegirl’s bed? And which of us here would entertain for a moment the notion that revealing his deepest hostilities to a woman for whom murder is as easy as mumbling six words of Sumerian at midnight, or thirty seconds with a few venene herbs, a sorceress for whom all grammary begins with the abrogation of commoners’ morals, embrace of the deep’s hyphalic causes—which of us, I say, would imagine that such revelations could be wholly innocuous? But to focus on trifles of this kind obscures the darker issue.” He gestured all trivialities away.
“Lord Jason’s theory—an extremely popular one these days, it seems to me—is that mind and body are by nature, and in principle ought to be, totally divorced, an opinion we may trace in Jason’s thought to the punch-addled king of the Bebrykes—not that it matters. An opinion that existence precedes essence. —Don’t laugh too quickly! The most outlandish cacodoxy can take on the seeming solidity of stone if its argument is given with sufficient flourish—a proper appeal to our delight in symmetry, with pedal tone notice of our universal dissatisfactions, cut off from Nature by our conscious choice to eat Mother Nature’s bears and apples (King Oidipus’ problem in its noblest disguise), cut off till we doubt that we’re anything at all but our hearts’ sad swoons and deliquiums. ‘I think, therefore I am not,’ is the gist of the argument. If I can think about a thing, I am not that thing, the argument goes, if only because subject is one word and object is another and therefore there must be two things involved, not one. And since I can in solemnly spectable fact stand back and think about even my mind, it must be the case, however befuddling, that I-who-think am not even my mind: I am emptiness! My consciousness is a firmly established prison wall between myself and all Nature, even my own. A terribly depressing thought, I grant you. But the cave to which we’ve wandered has even darker places. Since my consciousness depends upon words, formal structures, the reality outside me is what it is because of the words I frame it in—in other words, there’s no possibility whatsoever of perceiving the objective truth of anything, there is only my truth: my understanding of what words and the objects they grope toward mean. The tiger’s rays are my mind’s illations, his tectonics the hum of my braincells.” He gestured.