How Ainoha became the Mistress of Semper Vero is one of those stories as definitive as it is open-ended. Priam’s marriage to Calliope Eriphyle, a woman of much neck but not much else, was barren, indeed barely civil; and Priam spent most of his time in the upcountry, hunting for rare Bonsai-type stunted evergreens on the Astingi plains of Crisulan. But one day upon his return from a month’s absence, there was seated in his break, along with a freshly dug cedar, windsculpted into the shape of a lyre, a gorgeous girl of nine with a basketful of adorable red-golden puppies. While obviously as proud of her as a cavalry charge, Priam never complained or explained, though his mustache had turned half-white. Calliope Eriphyle, for her part, was prepared to adopt a pragmatic solicitude, but the ethereal child showed no interest in her whatsoever, sitting upon the grass with her legs splayed carelessly about, tipping the litter basket over in her lap as one by one the dogs leapt up to kiss her, nip her, the largest male hanging for a moment from her earlobe. She had everyone’s attention, but at arm’s length, just the way she liked it. As the sun sank into the smoky, lilac-colored Mze, the child’s eyes turned green-orange, and seeing there a restless vivacity and a cynical boldness, as well as a shard of powerful melancholy skepticism, the wife was properly horrified and withdrew. As the dogs grew stranger than poets, they ran off into every corner of the house, each securing for itself a den which could be defended, reconvening only in the evenings when they bathed, gamboled, and danced like holy fools in the shallows of the Mze. The girl-child never asked for a thing, never spoke of her people or former home, but showed great interest in Priam’s ancestors, as well as the smallest details of running the estate. (The idea being that even if the past might not accept you, it didn’t mean that the past wasn’t yours.) She was, in fact, perfectly behaved, while exhibiting a healthy derision of every lofty conviction. She seemed to view humans as a remote if interesting species, well worth studying in some depth.
There were the usual rumors—that Priam had fathered her with a now disgraced Astingi maiden, that he had bought or kidnaped her, or more plausibly, that she was a gift from the Astingi Shaman to ingratiate themselves with the gentry, and to place a spy among us. Priam never bothered to refute any of the charges, and as the girl brought light and life into a house where theretofore no one had ever listened to music, read a book, climbed a mountain, looked at the sea, or been alone for a minute, no one really cared how she came to be there. She had arrived as had our ancestors from the East, on a cart drawn by buffaloes, and she learned her gait from geese.
When her preternatural teenage beauty captivated the cineastes, and cameras whirred and phosphorus flares ignited in every corner of the property, Priam seemed to think it was all some harmless ancient ritual, until he was shown an album of stills of his own family, as well as day laborers in their embroidered cloaks, and well-washed gypsies from the fringe of the village. These were the first photographs which he actually saw as photographs, which made everything flat, small, and quiet, and he realized immediately that his way of life was over and his class and character were doomed. Indeed, it was not long after that he disappeared from Semper Vero, and certainly I inherited his aversion, for if there is one thing I have always been utterly sure of it is that I am not a camera. And I have never permitted a photograph to be made of me.
Mother was not much interested in the attachment theorists. “To be the beloved is the only way you can learn anything about a man, though whether it’s worth it is another story,” she often said to me. What she loved in men was their simple bark of pure ambition, their getting down on all fours to howl at Rome. And in particular she loved Father’s selfishness without self-absorption, for it takes enormous courage to be happy. But she also knew that in the end, men have to be roped in to satisfy the demands of cruel conservative Nature and her strange imperatives. And with her nest of golden wires, no one was ever better at it.
What she was especially good at was frisson and lèse majesté. Her sense of nest spanned solar systems. One had the distinct impression from Ainoha that we were all going to live together forever, and I must say I could only admire this great intrusive female, always trying to civilize and sensitize my father and I, and always failing. Yet I was doomed to Mother’s revenge; her creaseless face and indomitable spirit would give me the bad habit of incessant rebirth. And if the muses are always pictured carrying something—a globe, a flute, a lyre, a mask, a scroll, a reversed torch—Ainoha could often be found walking alone with her tennis racket and a pensive look.
I could never discover the exact nature of her relationship to the Astingi, or where she actually stood in their pagan hierarchy, for they had very little contact owing to her marriage outside the tribe—and it is probably not in a goddess’s interest for things to be too clear or consistent. Her Astingi given name was Tritogeneia (“Thrice-born”), from changing her nature with the seasons. The Greeks imply that she was descended from Nyx, daughter of Chaos, mother of Sleep and Death, and feared even by Zeus. But the Astingi never had much of a taste for cosmogonical rhetoric, and one thing they knew for certain was that beauty was a real power, inseparable from terror, and nothing like a myth. The Astingi patrolled our property as if it were theirs, enforcing the poaching laws with swift and silent dispatch, leaving an unlit votive candle where a trespasser had been snuffed out. Ainoha was from the Naiad line, who presided over three thousand rivers roaring as they flow, and depending on your sources are capable of abrupt death by drowning or everlasting sexual bliss. But river goddesses have little or no mythology and disappear only when their rivers cease—so the only thing they fear is drought.
But it must have been frustrating to be goddess to a people who had no need of goddesses. Worship for the Astingi simply meant a silent gratitude that the higher powers walk among you, and the people you revere, you leave alone. They had no need for a leader, and thus were free in the only way that counts: free to worship her without expecting favors and without coveting her relative privilege. This respect was enforced by millennia of primogeniture, in which the eldest child inherited the house and land, gender notwithstanding, thus insuring a great number of women heads of household—a small and obscure concession, which over a period of time worked enormous changes in everyday relations. But as the eldest child also had the obligation to house and provide for their siblings, this guaranteed that domestic quarreling would, à la Tchekov, completely subsume the energies which would otherwise flow toward the overthrow of the state or contests of rival political factions. In Astingiland, all the battles of the Central Empires were fought out in the arena of the family. And ours was no different in that respect, except perhaps that as all three of us were only children, we were spared the care of poor elderly relations, and thus lived an unreal existence without the daily object lessons of declining powers and abject failure.
When an Astingi girl approached puberty, she was taken by the older women to a central repository in the forest, and given paint to color their village houses as she would, a collection of deep-hued pastels which would give even a color-blind bear pause. In the late autumn, when the tribe returned from the mountains, they found the village houses glowing like jewels, and in each second-story window, chin in cupped hands and elbows on the sill, a young woman perusing the passing young men for her life companion.
Once betrothed, the compromises with the chosen men were worked out rationally. The women controlled the daily and generational markets, the shortest- and longest-term trading, thirty-day accounts and thirty-year mortgages, while the gentlemen were allowed to work off their slash-and-burn instincts in the large intervening middle-distance, an arrangement which apparently forestalled and managed crises better than in any of those bloody pockets of history that surrounded them.
You could tell an Astingi across a field, no matter how he was dressed, simply by his self-sufficient and dignified posture, punitive on the one hand, protective on the other. Their manners were based upon an ideal manliness so palpable they could dispen
se with any show of warrior virtues. Their survival was based apparently upon their absolute unwillingness to become a folk, their belief that folk wisdom is always wrong, those out-of-the money bets that tree moss reveals true north or that menses are triggered by asparagus. No faux naïve embroidery or window boxes full of one-dimensional pansies for them, no feast days (every day is a feast day), no hopping dances or gravitas processions, no moldy costumes in the attic. As a people they prided themselves not so much on their inclusiveness but on their aerodynamics.
In the summers the men would go to the mountains with their flocks and dogs. In the spring floods they would return to play pirate for a month on six-inch seas. In the fall, they would hunt and kill their feral pigs. In the short winter, they would renew fierce, earsplitting connubial relations with their women, who had come to ovulate every six months. While the men were off grazing or fighting, the women moved their entourage from town to town, reopening new ones or closing down old ones—it was all the same to them. And when they fought, the women and children were put in the first rank. If you have never heard an Astingi woman’s war cry, you have missed the human drama.
The Astingi theology was as vague as Ainoha’s peculiar status within it. All that can be said with certainty is that their bucolic and commonsensical existence had been disturbed in the thirteenth century by the Pope, who, for reasons unclear, sent them a crown as a bribe, and granted them apostolic status. They associated the crown’s crude craftsmanship with their tormented past, a kind of aesthetical pounding on the table which they had had enough of, and filed it away respectfully. Over the next few centuries, as the tribes further intermingled, Jesus and the saints coexisted happily with the devils and fairies, the forest pig and totem—and as a hedge on the safe side, white horses were still occasionally sacrificed on holidays. On every crossroads appeared the vulvar crèche with a sweating black Madonna, and while the rest of Europe cremated itself in the throes of feudal dynasties and religious wars, throughout the Dark Ages the Astingi were especially healthy and prosperous.
It cannot be said that they subscribed to the church in either its eastern or western forms. Of the Christians it was noticed that those who preached the Gospel of Love the loudest tended most piteously to destroy those reluctant to subscribe. And as for those who developed a principled resistance to the Judeo-Christian order (with its facile hyphen) those eastern cults which promised a utopia on this earth as an attractive heresy, it was noticed that they tended to show up at functions without being invited, manifesting an undifferentiated rudeness which even in those quarters where it most succeeded, made every simple social exchange a kind of torture. They knew all accounts of fallen warriors to be made up or worse. And they were suspicious of a vital oral tradition which could turn anything into a kind of pathetic, faded inner experience.
So it cannot be said exactly that the Astingi retained their loyalties to paganism. To be fair, they embraced the rituals of both churches—the perfume and sensuality of the East, without its liturgy and hierarchy, as well as the emotional asceticism and graphomania of the West, without its odd texts and even odder foreign policy. The Cannonians and the Astingi went to the opera on Friday nights and sang the same arias on Sunday to Bible verses. The services at Muddy St. Hubertus had the mysticism and iconography of the orthodox, but the music of the gothic, dispensing with tempo markings and adding thirty more characters to the Latin alphabet of the psalters, as well as an inscription over the altar: “All things are three.”
What is the meaning of this creed beneath the inverted pyramid, the Astingi mystery, “All things are three”? It means, as far as I can see, the opposite of the hypostatic trinity, which promises only infinite regress. It means there is no unity, nor holy relation between the three, only contingency. For the human mind is capable of holding within itself only two beginnings, and can merely acknowledge a third, like a man waving his cap at a thundercloud. The Astingi went as far as they could go, acknowledging the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost, but not the Father and the Son—and of the four, they certainly found it easiest to accept the Ghost. After all, one can believe in the end of the credo “Look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” without even considering all that hard-to-follow persiflage which precedes it. Does it really matter who begot whom? “Skip to the end, my sweet,” the Astingi proverb goes, and that is what my mother sang to me. The Astingi kiss is a triple kiss, plus or minus one makes all the difference, one on the left check, one on the right, and the third where you will. One’s feelings about a deed are of more interest than the fact of it; that is the Astingi philosophy. The Astingi’s only essentially religious idea, as far as I could tell, seemed to be that Europe’s biggest problem was too much Christianity—even in Cannonia, where Jews played soccer, Muslims made moonshine, and the Catholics were tougher than the Turks.
The great appeal of paganism, after all, is that it was not necessary to be loyal to it. It is simply an attractive guess at matters hidden from history requiring neither laws nor tithes, whose basic tenet remains that it is not worth dying or killing for. In any case, the oak trees were disappearing at a fantastic rate, and those little spirits, elves, and fairies reminded the Astingi too much of their own vulnerability. While one of the most attractive aspects of nature worship was its absence of clergy, they came to notice among their own self-appointed druids a certain smug sanctimony and conformity, which would infect for all time all progressives who opposed the prerogatives of Christendom. So while they recognized the lack of consistency in their own beliefs, they nevertheless came to miss the attractive mixture of pagan sexes, the little shrinelets in the forest, the lapidary and contradictory stories, the expansive gestures and the short parades, not to mention the grand entertainment of lesser deities competing for social standing with all their human foibles. This company of competing gods not only seemed to accord more to the reality of things, but also encouraged a warm responsiveness, rather than the wail of the saved. To replace this extended family of overlapping authority with one stout fellow who no doubt had his thrilling moments, but seemed to have taken on rather too large an entity to administer, encouraged a kind of immaturity where enforcement was concerned. Why replace this drama of contesting rulers with a weak omnipotence? Why cut down a forest and replace it with a lone tree with a single veinous leaf? The Astingi were thus rather pagans by default. And gradually their taste for slitting the throat of a white horse abated, one of those rare periods of history where the executioner does not willingly step forward.
The only Astingi shrine equipment consisted of unpainted biconical vases of local materials. While their now extinct neighbors had embarked upon an orgy of glazes and dyes, ransoming themselves to the markets of the trading routes, their ceramics remained severe as a note struck with a mallet, grouped together in the air, forest glen, cave, or vitrine, in no apparent order or necessary number, the new mixed with the old, unclear as to their original purpose—perhaps simply an object to gently remind one of one’s heretic self. (And that the self, too, is a perishable sort of commodity with shifting value; we appear on earth only for a second, while even our rudest utensil outlives us.)
So if Mother had a theogony, it would boil down to something like this: the long-term consists of a great number of short-terms, and truth, like the vases, can only be beheld as a somewhat manufactured and random entity. All creation is hybrid, no one is really chosen by anyone, there is no direct line of development, so the best one can hope for is to string together a medley of old favorites and new quirks, a genuine confusion of the higher and the lower—an arbitrary grouping of somewhat bedraggled epiphanies, each propping the other up—and this was just the sort of thing, a kind of music-hall review, which ought to be worshiped. It is wrong to use punishment in another world as a threat, because the world of punishment is in this one for each of us. The world is mostly inertia, where all the best-intentioned nurturing does not guarantee as much as a burp. Only the present is divine,
and the fairest order a heap of random sweepings. The Goddess’s job is, after all, to turn the prayer into a blessing. And what is the prayer? “More life!” That is the prayer. Always, more life. And what is the blessing? “More life! This life!” So you can see there was nothing in the least mystical in our worship of her.
Naturally I came to see my mother as a kind of work of art, no matter how strongly this was at odds with her own tastes. Just as my father had been put on this earth to take exception as a non-conformist, she was here to attest that the conventional wisdom of the herd is also deserving of representation. For if the key to life is only in resisting the herd, how can you learn to love? Mother, I suppose, played the Catholic to my father’s Protestant materialism, if for no other reason than the rules of the primitive matriarchy always gave the church pride of place. I never saw her near the prayer station in the corner of her suite with the chamber pot beneath, atomizers of cologne, earrings, and her favorite clepsydra (water clock) upon the altar. Nor as far as I know did she ever attend a mass. But a visit to the chapter house of the great cathedral at Razacanum would show every other face in its gallery of archbishops to be of Priam’s family. And yet a hundred years before, they had all been Protestants. One tends to forget that the Church was the most democratic institution of that time, offering advancement upon merit to the poorest man, and only in finance were there men more obscure and lowly. There seemed to be, at any rate, no hiatus in her adoptive paternal lineage, no waffling or skepticism; only conversion or reconversion. Her ancestors had gone from animal worship to pyrolatry to Catholicism to Protestantism and back to Catholicism, and in the section of her orbit in which I was acquainted with her, she was veering, come full circle from a lapsed high church infatuate back to a lush and goofy heterodoxy, her mysterious Naiad side, in which the point, apparently, was to be your own ancestor.
In Partial Disgrace Page 14