Jason and Medeia

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Jason and Medeia Page 45

by John Gardner


  he said.

  From wall to wall through the infinite palace, the

  gods gasped,

  and instantly all the earth was filled with the rumble

  of dragons

  growling up out of the abyss, all the oldest, gravest

  of terrors

  from the age before hunters first learned to make peace

  with the bear they killed,

  the age when the farmer in Eden was first

  understanding remorse

  for the tear he made in Nature when he backed away,

  became

  a man, devourer of his mother and bane of his father,

  his sons,

  outcast of all Time-Space—Dionysos’ prey, and scorn of the endlessly fondling, fighting baboons. All progress,

  like the flesh

  of the sick old trapper in the lair of his daughters,

  those dragons rose,

  like violent sons, devouring. The sky went black

  with smoke.

  “No!” I whispered, “it mustn’t be allowed!” The

  goddess said nothing.

  I grew more excited. I would do something foolish in a

  moment, I knew,

  but the knowledge failed to check me. I snatched off

  my glasses and whispered,

  “Where are those others, those three goddesses who

  danced? They must help us!”

  “They’re here,” she answered, “but obscured, weighed

  down.” She nodded at the three

  by Zeus’s throne, and I saw that it was so: Vision

  burned dimly,

  like a hooded candle, in Athena’s eyes, and Love

  flickered

  in Aphrodite’s, and Life fought weakly, like a failing

  blush,

  in Hera’s cheeks. “But you,” I said then, my excitement

  rising,

  “you, Goddess of Purity and Zeal—surely you at least are one and unchangeable! Your power could save us,

  yet here in the house

  of the gods, you’re silent as stone.” Then, horribly,

  before my eyes—

  no surer than anything else in my vision’s deluding

  mists—

  the shadowy figure altered, became like a heavy

  old farm-wife,

  sly-eyed, smiling like a witch. She croaked: “Come,

  see me as I am.

  The crowd of the living are phrenetic with business.

  I alone am inactive.

  My mind is like a dolt’s. All the world is alert; I alone

  am drowsy.

  Calm like the sea, like a high wind never ceasing.

  All the world

  is tremulous with purpose; I am foolish, untaught. Tentative, like a man fording a river in winter; hesitant, as if fearful of neighbors; formal like a guest; falling apart like thawing ice, as vacant as a valley.…” I stared in amazement, though a moment’s reflection

  would have shown me the truth:

  even the goddess of purity and zeal had her earthen side, sodden and selfish, determined to endure, outwitting

  the world

  by magically becoming it. The two moon-goddesses,

  Artemis and Hekate,

  were secretly the same.

  I turned, despairing

  of the purity drowned in that warty, fiat-headed lump.

  But the farm-wife

  reached to me, checking my impulse to flee, and argued

  with me further,

  queerly indifferent herself, I thought, to the argument. Her few teeth were like a dog’s; her withered hands

  were palsied.

  “ ‘On disaster,’ the brave and ambitious say, ‘good

  fortune perches.’

  But I say, ‘It is beneath good fortune that disaster

  crouches.’ ”

  She leered again, and by a gesture incredibly simple

  and subtle—

  no more, perhaps, than the slightest perceptible

  movement of her eyes—

  she suggested a huge and obscene bump and grind.

  She cooed, eyes closed,

  “The further one goes

  the less one knows

  for hustle and bustle,

  for hustle and bustle;

  Therefore the wise man moves not a muscle.”

  She chuckled, foolish and apologetic, and I determined

  to waste no more time on her.

  Reckless and honest as a madman, I burst

  through the seething ocean of gods to Zeus’s feet,

  where Apollo,

  shining like the mirroring sea, sat tuning his lyre

  for a song—

  gentle Apollo with the dragon tusks of Helios.

  “Stop!” I cried out—and all motion stopped, even

  the movement

  of Apollo’s sleeve in the gentle cosmic wind. I shouted, angrily slamming my right fist into my left-hand palm, “I object! This palace is a mockery! The whole creation is a monstrous, idiotic mockery! The silliest child on

  his mother’s knee

  knows good from evil, selfishness from love.” Nothing

  stirred, no one moved.

  I turned around, gazed at the gods stretching out in

  all directions from the throne,

  and my soul was filled with amazement and ecstasy at

  my power to instruct and lecture them.

  I stretched out my hands like a preacher addressing

  multitudes, and I felt aglow

  like a winter sun. “If the truth is so clear even dogs

  can see it, how dare the gods

  be baffled and befuddled, raising up time after time mad

  idiots to positions of power,

  filling the schools with professors with not one jot or

  tittle of love for the things

  they pretend to teach; filling the pulpits with atheists

  and cowards who put on their robes

  for love of their mothers, merely; and filling the courts

  with lawyers indifferent to justice,

  the medical schools with connivers and thieves and

  snivelling, sneaking incompetents,

  the seats of government with madmen and bullies—all

  this though nothing in the world is clearer

  than evil and good, the line between justice and

  unselfishness (the way of the decent)

  and cowardice, piggish greed, foul arrogance, the

  filth-fat darkness of the devil’s forces!”

  As I spoke, declaiming, making existence as clear

  as day—

  saying nothing not spoken by the noblest of poets and

  sages since time

  began (and I said far more than I’ve set down here,

  believe me—

  revealed to the gods all the wisdom of the Hindus,

  the secret rediscovered

  by Schopenhauer, how man must perceive that the

  spirit in himself

  is a spark of the fire that’s in all things living, so that

  hurting another

  means hurting himself; told them how Jesus was angry

  at the tomb

  of Lazarus, how the awesome Tibetan Book of the Dead has a lower truth and a higher truth; told them of

  the poetry

  of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil, Chia Yi

  and Tu Fu,

  and the anonymous Kelts—The hall of Cynddylan is

  dark tonight,

  without fire, without candle. But for God, who’ll give

  me sanity?—

  all this and more)—as I spoke I felt more and more

  filled with light,

  more filled with the strange and divine understanding

  of the mystery of Love

  that Dante spoke of in his Paradiso, all the

  scattered leaves

  of the universe
gathered—legato con amore—and as

  I spoke, I seemed

  to rise without effort, like an eagle with his wings

  spread wide on an updraft

  past Zeus’s shins to his bolt-square knees, past his belly

  and chest

  (still gesturing, lecturing, compressing all life to the

  burning globe

  of a family knit by unalterable love—my own

  humble family,

  for where but in a wife, after twenty-one years of

  loyalty and faith,

  sorrows and shocks that would shake down mountains,

  and a joyous holiness

  that theory and defense leave empty and foolish as

  program notes

  or the weight in ounces of a lily at twilight—where

  else can a man

  learn surely of things inexpressible?), and I rose

  to the very

  brow of Zeus, high above drifting haze, above life, and stopped mid-sentence. I gazed all around me

  in alarm.

  I was standing on a mountain, miles past the timber, a place cased

  thickly in ice,

  snowdust everywhere like fire in a furnace. My shoes

  were frozen,

  my fingers were blue. “Goddess!” I howled. The

  old fat farm-wife,

  whiskered like a goat and as dull of eye as a child

  without wits,

  came smiling toward me like a ship’s prow sliding

  out of mist. She stood

  and looked at me awhile with her drooling grin,

  then turned her back

  and squatted, inviting me to ride. I climbed on.

  Immediately I seemed

  much warmer. As we started down she sang a foolish

  sort of song,

  its music vaguely like an echo of Apollo’s tuning of

  his harp:

  “On Cold Mountain

  The lone round moon

  Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.

  Honor this priceless natural treasure

  Concealed in five shadows,

  Sunk deep in the flesh.”

  We came down to the clouds, then down to the

  timberline;

  came to a view of high villages—goatsheds, barns

  on stilts.

  We came to a river. The foul witch sang:

  ‘When men see old Lill

  They all say she’s crazy

  And not much to look at—

  Dressed in rags and hides.

  They don’t get what I say

  And I don’t talk their language

  All I can say to those I meet:

  “Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

  Hmmmmm.’“

  My double appeared at the door of a cowbarn, pulling

  at his hatbrim.

  “I think your vision has no rules,” he said. “Mere

  literary scraps.

  The somnium animale of a man who reads too much.

  I see traces of a fear that literature may be nothing

  but a game,

  and stark reality the chaos remaining when the

  last game’s played.”

  What could I say to such cynicism? My heart beat wildly and I jumped from the old woman’s back to snatch up

  a handful of stones.

  He saw my purpose—my double, or whoever— and clutching the brim of his hat in one hand he went

  limping for the woods.

  “Is nothing serious?” I yelled, pelting him. He squealed

  like a pig.

  He was gone. I wrung my fingers, whispering,

  Is nothing serious?

  The goddess had vanished. “Sirius! Sirius!” the dark

  trees sang.

  22

  “Let it be,” the deep-voiced thunder rumbled, beyond

  tall pillars,

  beyond tall oaks like skeletal hands still snatching

  at nothing

  in the cockshut sky. They lighted the torches, for

  the day had gone dark

  prematurely, grown sullen as a nun full of grudges.

  King Kreon rose,

  stretched out his hands for silence, but the flashing sky

  boomed on,

  drowning his announcement, drowning the applause of

  the assembled sea-kings.

  Then Jason rose, smiling, and spoke—gray rain on

  the palace grounds

  pounding on flagstones and walls, filling lakes with

  activity, drumming

  on the square unmarked tomb of the forgotten king—

  and the crowd applauded,

  rising to honor him as he reached for the hand of

  the princess. She rose,

  radiant with love, as joyful as morning, all linen

  and gold,

  flashing like fire in the light of the torches,

  her glory of victory.

  In the vine-hung house below, the fleece lay singing

  in the gleam

  of candlelight, and the women gathered as seamstresses

  stared

  in awe at the cloth they must cut and sew. To some

  it seemed

  they might sooner cut plackets in the land itself, make

  seams in the sky,

  for the cloth held forests whose golden leaves flickered,

  and extensive valleys,

  cities and hamlets, overgrown thorps where peasants

  labored,

  hunched under lightning, preparing their sheds for

  winter. Among

  the seamstresses, the daughter of Aietes walked,

  cold marble,

  explaining her wishes, not weeping now, all carriers

  of feeling

  closed like doors. It seemed to the women gathered

  in the house

  no lady on earth was more beautiful to see—her hair

  spun gold—

  or more cruelly wronged. When the scissors approached

  it, the cloth cried out.

  That night there was music in the palace of Kreon—

  flourishes and tuckets

  of trumpets, bright chatter of drums. In the rafters,

  ravens watched;

  in the room’s dark corners, fat-coiled snakes, heads

  shyly lowered,

  drawn by prescience of death. Tall priests in white

  came in—

  white clouds of incense, hymns in modes now fallen

  to disuse

  mysterious and common as abandoned clothes. In

  the lower hall

  a young bull white as snow, red-eyed, breathed

  heavily, waiting

  in the flickering room. His nose was troubled by smells

  unfamiliar

  and ominous, his heart by loneliness and fear. He

  watched

  human beings hurrying around him, throwing high

  shadows on the walls.

  One came toward him with a shape. He bellowed in

  terror. A blow,

  sharp pain. A dark mist clouded his sight, and

  his heavy limbs fell.

  Medeia said now, standing in the room with her

  Corinthian women,

  no jewel more bright than the fire in her eyes,

  no waterfall,

  crimsoned by sunrise but shining within, more lovely

  than her hair,

  her low voice charged with her days and years (no

  instrument of wood

  or wire or brass could touch that sound, as the

  singer proves,

  shattering the dome of the orchestra, climbing on

  eagle’s wings,

  measured, alive to old pains, old joys, in a landscape

  of stone-

  cold hills, bright flame of cloud), “I would not keep

  from you,

  women of Corinth, more than I need of my pu
rpose

  in this.

  If my looks seem dark, full of violence, pray do not

  fear me or hate me,

  remembering rumors. I am, whatever else, a woman, like you, but a woman betrayed and crushed,

  fallen on disaster.”

  Silence in the palace. And then the sweet

  shrill-singing priest,

  his soft left hand on Pyripta’s, his right on Jason’s.

  When he paused,

  a flash of lightning shocked the room, and the room’s

  high pillars

  sang out like men, an unearthly choir. Deaf as a stone, the priest held a golden ring to Pyripta, another to Jason.

  The towering central door burst open, as if struck

  full force

  by a battering ram. Slaves rushed to close it. A voice

  like the moan

  of a mountain exploding said, “No, turn back!”

  But the panelled door

  was closed. And now the floor spoke out, roaring,

  “No! Take care!”

  There was not one man in the hall who failed to

  hear it. I saw them.

  But Jason and the princess kissed; the kings applauded.

  His eyes

  had Hera in them, and Athena. And old King Kreon

  smiled.

  Medeia said: “Now all pleasure in life is exhausted. I have no desire—no faintest tremor of desire—

  but for death.

  The man I loved more than earth itself, his leastmost

  wish

  the wind I ran in, his griefs my winters—my child,

  my husband—

  has proved more worthless than the world by the

  darkest of philosophies.

  Surely of all things living and feeling, women are

  the creatures

  unhappiest. By a rich dowery, at best—at worst by deeds like mine—we purchase our bodies’ slavery,

  the right

  to creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down, labor in the night—and we say thank God for it,

  too—better that

  than lose the tyrant. You know the saw: “No

  wise man rides

  a nag to war, or beds a misshapen old woman.’ Like

  horses

  worn out in service, they trade us off. Divorce is

  their plaything—

  ruiner of women, whatever the woman may think

  in her hour

  of escape. For there is no honor for women in divorce;

  for men

  no shame. Who can fathom the subtleties of it? Yet

  true it is

  that the woman divorced is presumed obscurely

 

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