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