III
As Dr Hunt says, we can probably assume that in the gaps of the papyrus Hermes appeared and appeased Apollo by the gift of the lyre, and certainly in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes the infant inventor makes a mollifying benefaction to the god. The story goes as follows in Shelley’s version of the hymn:
LXXXI
‘Thou canst seek out and compass all that wit
Can find or teach; – yet since thou wilt, come take
The lyre – be mine the glory giving it –
Strike the sweet chords, and sing aloud, and wake
The joyous pleasure out of many a fit
Of tranced sound – and with fleet fingers make
Thy liquid-voiced comrade talk with thee, –
It can talk measured music eloquently.
LXXXII
‘Then bear it boldly to the revel loud,
Love-wakening dance, or feast of solemn state,
A joy by night or day – for those endowed
With art and wisdom who interrogate
It teaches, babbling in delightful mood
All things which make the spirit most elate,
Soothing the mind with sweet familiar play,
Chasing the heavy shadows of dismay.
LXXXIII
‘To those who are unskilled in its sweet tongue,
Though they should question most impetuously
Its hidden soul, it gossips something wrong –
Some senseless and impertinent reply.
But thou who art as wise as thou art strong
Canst compass all that thou desirest. I
Present thee with this music-flowing shell,
Knowing thou canst interrogate it well.
LXXXIV
‘And let us two henceforth together feed
On this green mountain slope and pastoral plain,
The herds in litigation – they will breed
Quickly enough to recompense our pain,
If to the bulls and cows we take good heed; –
And thou, though somewhat over fond of gain,
Grudge me not half the profit.’ Having spoke
The shell he proffered, and Apollo took.
But there is an alternative version to this story of the tranquil takeover of the lyre, just as there is an alternative version of the story of the peaceful transition of the shrine of Delphi from Gaia to Apollo as told, for example, in the Oresteia. In some stories Apollo bludgeoned his way into possessing what was once a female shrine. ‘And Apollo took’! In the Valley of the Muses, near Askra, the birthplace of Hesiod, in Euboea, which I visited in 1987, and again after the premiere of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, there was once, according to Pausanias, who saw it, a bronze of Apollo and Hermes fighting for the lyre.
In these thorn-strewn slopes leading up to the summit of Helicon there were not only statues to the Muses, looted by Constantine, and the one mentioned by Pausanias representing the struggle of Apollo and Hermes for the lyre. There were also other cautionary bronzes. There was a statue of Thamyris shown blind, with his lyre shattered at his feet. He was blinded for his presumption in offering competition on the lyre. Near by was a statue of Linus, killed by Apollo for offering him rivalry in singing. Pausanias doesn’t mention that there was a bronze of Marsyas, the satyr flayed alive for competing on the flute against Apollo’s lyre. For the divine patron of music and poetry, the Parnassian supremo, this is appalling savagery, but this pugnacity and paranoid possessiveness are characteristic of Apollo’s early transition from macho cowpoke to cultural impresario. Rival lyre players, singers, upstart satyr flautists, flayed, butchered, blinded, were set up as deterrents in the Valley of the Muses and elsewhere. Herodotus says that the skin of Marsyas was pegged out in a public square in Celaenae (in what is now Turkey), and though it vibrated sympathetically to any Phrygian air, remained stubbornly silent when hymns in praise of Apollo were played in its vicinity. We are told that Apollo had the flute of Marsyas hung up as a trophy in his temple at Sicyon in the Peloponnese. Apollo was only reconciled to the flute he always abhorred after his competition with Marsyas, when it was used by the flute player Sakadas to play a hymn to the god in Delphi. Flute players are admitted if they play the Paean to Apollo. It seems that the flute of Marsyas did not show the same loyalty to its first animator as ‘the auld Orange Flute’ or indeed the skin flayed from the flautist himself.
The Roman emperors Augustus and Nero both loved to dress up as Apollo, and it was probably the lyre of Apollo that Nero ‘fiddled’ on while Rome went up in flames, a cool behaviour long endorsed by Apollo himself. A few months ago in Nicosia I saw a sign saying ‘APOLLO: quality underwear’, and I suppose the Y-front endorsement is appropriate, as the male ego has had aeons of Apollonian support. His contemporary endorsements include an answering machine and a particularly repellent form of torture used in the prisons of Iran. In some manifestations Apollo would not have shied away from the vast statue that Hitler had planned for him in Berlin. And yet, everywhere, his image is at the apex of the pediment of our palaces of art.
IV
It was in Delphi, so powerfully presided over by Apollo, that The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus had its unique one-performance world premiere on 12 July 1988 in the ancient stadium. It was a joint production between the National Theatre Studio and the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. I have always wanted to prepare a piece for one performance. This was what the ancient dramatists did. In the theatre I most admire, poets, and I stress poets, wrote for actors they knew and for a space they knew.
From the beginning, this text was created for two actors, both Yorkshiremen, who had worked with me before in The Oresteia and The Mysteries. I created the part of Grenfell/Apollo for Jack Shepherd and the part of Hunt/Silenus for Barrie Rutter. It is more than half the battle of creation to know the instruments you are writing for. The space too was important. The International Meeting of Ancient Drama, which takes place in Delphi every year, was inspired by the first festival at Delphi, set up by the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife, Eva Palmer, in 1927. For their dramatic performances they used the ancient theatre, lower down the slope and closer to the Temple of Apollo. Nowadays the ancient stadium is used, but with a wooden platform at one end of the racetrack, as if that differently structured curve at one end were the seating of an ancient theatrical space. I resolved to dispense with the platform and use the entire stadium space. This helped to dramatise a contemporary division in our culture between sport and art. In the Pythian Games, with its athletics and flute contests, poetry and drama, held on this site, such a division would have been incomprehensible. As would the division between tragedy and satyr play, ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art. And in honour of that ancient wholeness we performed our piece, and we became Ichneutae, ‘Trackers’, seeking in fragments of our past and present a common wholeness, a common illumination, a common commitment to survival.
V
Our ‘technical’ rehearsals lasted throughout the night of the 11th until after dawn on the 12th. The night had had unusually wild weather and the rocks of the Phaedriades surrounding the stadium concentrated and confined the winds there. The expedition tent of Grenfell and Hunt was blown away. Our papyrus flapped and struggled to be free and fly off to join the eagles that hung over Delphi. We never finished our rehearsal. I had to cover the possibility that the same thing might happen on the 12th. The relay race I had planned, to define the space of the stadium and give us ghosts of its ancient function to awaken the roars of the thousands who once sat at the Pythian Games, had unfortunately dwindled down to one solitary runner, who ran like an ancient Marathon runner bearing an Olympic, or should we say Pythian, torch.
Three hours before our premiere, I wrote and gave the following lines to Barrie Rutter to cover both for the expectation of new destructive gusts and to accommodate the solitary, message-bearing runner:
Everything we’ve searched for, everything we found
goes in Grenfell’s mania
, round and round.
Grenfell’s recurrent nightmare recreates
careering caravans of Oxyrhynchus crates,
crates of papyri in a never-ending train,
and fragments like a hurricane hurtling through his brain
and voices, thousands, from the ancient past
exhorting him to find the ‘Ichneftes’ FAST!
That’s Grenfell’s nightmare and I could add
another like it that could make everybody mad.
That the play in the papyrus should reach the light
in the Stadium of Delphi on a very windy night.
Last night the wind blew and it stripped
the stage of everything but actors and a script.
Let’s concentrate, and despite the gusty weather,
reconstruct the ‘Ichneftes’ mazi ‘together’.
Memory runs a marathon, a human mind relay
from century to century to recreate our play.
Memory, mother of the Muses, frees
from oblivion the ‘Ichneftes’ of Sophocles.
[Newcastle-upon-Tyne]
Hecuba to Us
* * *
1991
The one performance, the unique occasion of an ancient Greek play may strike us now as an almost reckless encounter with the inexorability of transience, yet in its very uniqueness lies the secret of the glory of the continuously passing present of performance. We know, in proscenium terms, that once the curtain has risen it has to fall. The current obsession with televising and videoing stage performances almost inevitably undermines the true nature of the theatrical. But the play published here, conceived as it was for the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, entered oblivion rather as unlucky players of Monopoly enter jail without passing GO. It entered the stream of oblivion without ever having been buoyed on it for even the brief unique performance that most Greek tragedies and comedies were designed to have.
My previous piece, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, although it later found a brief life on the same NT stage, had been originally conceived in this spirit, for one unique performance in the ancient stadium high up the slope of Delphi, a site considered by the ancients as the centre of the world. How differently the energies of performer and audience are concentrated if they know there is only one chance to give or receive the occasion. It was in this spirit too that the papyrus of the ancient play was in that version literally destroyed by fire, and it was in this spirit that the company prevented three rather peeved TV crews from filming what we all thought then would be the first and final performance, so that everything was committed to the care of memory, that last resort in the ruins of time. As Spenser wrote in ‘The Ruins of Time’:
For deedes doe die, how ever noblie donne
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay,
But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne,
Recorded by the Muses, live for ay …
And elsewhere,
For not to have been dipt in Lethe Lake
Could save the sonne of Thetis for to die:
But that blinde bard did him immortal make
With verses, dipt in deaw of Castalie.
All of us in the Trackers of Oxyrhynchus company drank literally the ‘deaw of Castalie’ before the performance, at the sacred spring beneath the towering, red-hued Phaedriades at the beginning of the Sacred Way in Delphi. It was to give inspiration for that one occasion. But then surprisingly the play, although in a form altered for the specifics of the South Bank, was given more performances, and what was intended to have been the last took place, again with local textual additions, in Carnuntum, near Vienna, Austria, on 19 May 1990. Carnuntum was a former frontier post of the Roman Empire and the military base of three emperors, as commemorated on the label of the local Grüner Veltliner, wine grown by Josef Köck, the Dreikaiserwein, emblazoned with the heads of Marcus Aurelius (161–80), Septimius Severus (193–211) and Diocletian (284–305). Marcus Aurelius, when he was in Carnuntum in AD 173, during his campaign to keep the marauding Marcomanni and Quadi respectful of the imperial border and stay on their side of the Danube, wrote, in his quieter moments, what became Chapter Three of his Meditations in Greek. My original intention for the one performance in Delphi had been extended to Carnuntum, and on both sites there were associations of transience, in the spirit of which I had originally conceived the unique performance. At Carnuntum, Marcus Aurelius was thinking about the inexorability of time and he wrote:
Hippocrates, after curing many sicknesses, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldean astrologers foretold the death of many persons, then the hour of fate overtook them also. Alexander, Pompeius and Julius Caesar, after so often utterly destroying whole towns and slaying in the field myriads of horse and foot, themselves also one day departed from life. Heraclitus, after many speculations about the fire which should consume the Universe, was waterlogged by dropsy, poulticed himself with cow-dung and died. Vermin killed Democritus; another kind of vermin Socrates.
Around that same time, Pausanias, the physician from Asia Minor who wrote a guide to Greece in the second century AD, saw the ancient stadium of Delphi, where we had played our first performance. It must then have just been refurbished with marble from Mount Pentelicus by Herodes Atticus, who died around the same time as Marcus Aurelius. All that is left of that marble refurbishment is the chisel marks in the quarry from which the marble was taken. When Sir James Frazer, who edited Pausanias and checked on his descriptions at the end of the nineteenth century, stood on the site of the stadium he reflected that the marble had ‘probably gone in the way of so many other ancient marbles in Greece, into the lime kiln’.
Whenever I work at the National Theatre I usually walk to the South Bank, and every morning as I walk along the Thames from Vauxhall I pass groups of Japanese tourists doing the same thing, taking pictures of each other from a position that gives them a shot of Big Ben in the background. The succession of clicks like an orchestra of clave-wielders tuning up always makes me go forward to rehearsals committed to the essential transience of theatre. Theatre can only celebrate its presented moments by embracing its own ephemerality. In that is the glory of performance. Theatre has to be given and received at the moment of delivery. This is its essence. The mythologies of fame are mere yellowing calling cards. When the world-famous conductor Herbert von Karajan died in 1989, his fellow conductor Sir George Solti observed: ‘This year everyone talks about him. Next year it’ll be 50 per cent less. The third year no one will say anything. This is the human fate, to be forgotten.’ Heinrich Heine was appalled by the vision that he had of his Book of Songs being used by the grocer for packets into which to pour tobacco and snuff, rather as Ragueneau’s wife, Lise, uses the manuscripts of her husband’s poetic friends to wrap pastries and tarts in, in Act Two of Cyrano de Bergerac. Addison, reviewing a show at Drury Lane for the Spectator in 1714, wrote of ‘a dozen showers of snow which, I am informed, are the plays of many unsuccessful poets artificially cut and shredded for that use’. At the National Theatre stage door I came across a rehearsal draft of The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, torn into three-inch squares, being used to write telephone messages on. And Jack Shepherd, who played Grenfell/Apollo in the production, told me that when he had been filming a legal drama, the brief that his lawyer character carried was made up of old pages of a script of mine for a film poem about death in Naples called Mimmo Perrella non è piu. None of these fates is quite the indignity that Lord Chesterfield mentions in his letters of 1747, where, advising his son not to waste time, he cites the good example of a gentleman who purchased ‘a common Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina’. The Egyptian fellaheen employed by Grenfell and Hunt in the excavations in Trackers used the papyri of Plato and Euripides as compost for their greens, and in the final version for the NT in 1991 the rubbish tips of the South Bank contained the poster, programme and te
xt of the play being performed. The play contained the rubbished version of itself. Sometimes, walking from rehearsals, either via Covent Garden or via Waterloo, I came across other emblems of the ephemerality of theatrical endeavours I had been associated with. Walking past the now padlocked, dilapidated Lyceum I look up and take wry note of a piece of flapping poster saying ‘The Best Show in Britain, no less’ of the National’s Mysteries that transferred there in 1985. Or walking through Cardboard City to catch the Underground at Waterloo I see the now scarcely recognisable features of Edward Petherbridge and Sian Thomas and the fragmentary letters ‘ON … IS’ of my own name on what was once a poster for my version of The Misanthrope, revived at the NT in 1989. On a concrete pillar in front of the crates and cartons that are the refuge of the homeless is the already disintegrating papyrus of a Trackers poster: ‘… CKERS’, it says. It is also heavily graffitied, and in one place in smaller writing, to accommodate the message to the medium, the phallus of the leaping Silenus has been pencilled ‘Mrs Thatcher’ – who has herself now entered the stream of oblivion meditated upon by Marcus Aurelius.
This contemplation of the ruins of time is a common theme in all literature and thought. As the philosopher George Santayana wrote:
The spectacle of inexorable change, the triumph of time, or whatever we may call it, has always been a favourite theme for lyric and tragic poetry, and for religious meditation. To perceive universal mutation, to feel the vanity of life, has always been the beginning of seriousness. It is the condition of any beautiful, measured, or tender philosophy.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 18