of Pyripta
that Jason’s story was winning them. Indeed, not a soul thought otherwise. It seemed no contest now. He’d seized their hearts and minds by his crafty wit and clung
like a bat
to his advantage. His thoughts were dangerous, and they
knew it. His scheme,
now clear, was impossible to block. When men sit
talking by the fire,
exchanging opinions of interest, discussing betrothals, curious adventures, and one, by the moving
of his sleeve,
reveals a scorpion, all mere trading of civilized insights stops: Death takes priority. So Jason, spinning his web of words, closed off all other business. They
must hear it through, approve
or not. Yet fat Koprophoros wouldn’t give up his hopes entirely. As Jason waited, the ghastly creature rose, his eyelids drowsily lowered on his dark and brilliant
eyes,
and spoke.
“My lords, this Jason is rightly renowned for his cunning!
See what he’s done to us! Penned us up like chickens in
a coop
by his artistry! First he seduces our girlish emotions with a tale of love—the poor sweet queen of Lemnos!—
and wins
Our grudging respect by disingenuous admissions of
his cruel
betrayal in that grungy affair. But that was mere
feinting, test
of the equipment! For behold, having shown us beyond
all shadow of a doubt—
so he made it seem—that solemn Paidoboron and I
were wrong,
two addlepates, you’d swear—myself no better than a
tyrant,
and my friend from the North a coward (like one of
the gods’ pale shuddering
nuns’ was, I think, his phrase), he uses our chief ideas to create an elaborate hoax, a dismal drama of anguish in which he—always heroic beyond even Orpheus!— encounters monsters more fierce than any centaur—
monsters
of consciousness. Have I misunderstood? Is not his tale of poor young Kyzikos and the Doliones an allegory attacking all human skills—the skills of sailors, armies, even augurers?—Skills like mine, like Paidoboron’s? It’s a frightening thought, you’ll confess, that the
essence of humanness—
man’s conviction that craft, the professional’s art, may
save him—
is drunken delusion! We hunch forward in our chairs,
ambsaced,
waiting for Jason, who conjured the bogy, to exorcise it. But ha! That’s not his strategy. Pile on more anguish, that’s the ticket! The tales of Herakles and Hylas, and
poor Polydeukes.
Human commitment, love of one man for another—
that too
goes up, by his trickery, in smoke. Ah, how we
suffered for Jason,
watching him through those losses! Who’d fail to award
poor Jason
whatever prize is available, guerdon for his sorrows!
And while
we wait, we children, for proof that true love exists,
as we hoped,
he stifles our life-thirsty souls in old Phineus’
winding-sheet!
‘O woeful man,’ he teaches us, ‘all life is a search for death.’ —Is that the fleece for which we blindly sail chill seas? And yet we believe it, since Jason tells us so, Jason of the Golden Tongue! And even the skeleton’s
sickle
is meaningless! So Jason’s physicians preach: ‘decay of the extremities,’ ‘the element of Chance at the heart
of all
our projects.’ ‘Und Alles Sein ist flammend Leid,’ we cry. ‘O, save us, Jason,’ we howl in dismay, ‘feed us with
raisin cakes,
restore us with apples, for we are sick with loss!’”
Koprophoros
gaped, eyes wide. “Are we wrong to think there’s a life
before death?”
He shuddered. “We wring our hands, cast up our eyes to
heaven
whimpering for help. But heaven will not look down.
No, only
Jason can save our souls, sweet Golden Lyre. And in our need, what does he send us? Another great bugaboo! We’re victims: we’re groping cells in the body of a
monster seeking
its own dark, meaningless end! What man can believe
such things?
No man, of course! And soon, when the time is right,
be sure
he’ll rescue us—when he’s twisted and turned us by all
his tricks,
baffled our desire, exhausted our will—he’ll discover the
secret
of joy exactly where he hid it himself, in some curlicue of his death-cold python of a plot. Nor will we object,
if we,
as Jason supposes, are children.
“But I think of Orpheus …”
The Asian paused, looked thoughtful, his hand on his
chin. Then: “
Jason’s revealed it himself: there are artists and artists.
One kind
pulls strings, manipulates the minds of his hearers,
indifferent to truth,
delighting solely in his power: a man who exploits
without shame,
snatches men’s words, thoughts, gestures and turns
them to his purpose—attacks
like a thief, a fratricide, and makes himself rich, feels
no remorse:
lampoons good men out of envy, to avenge some trivial
slight,
or merely from whim, as a proof of his godlike
omnipotence.
His mind skims over the surface of dread like
a waterbug,
floats on logic like a seagull asleep on a dark unrippled sea. But the sea is alive, we suddenly remember!
The mind
shorn free of its own green deeps of love and hate, desire and will—the mind detached from the dark of tentacles mournfully groping toward light—is a mind that will
ruin us:
thought begins in the blood—and comprehends the
blood.
The true artist, who speaks with justice,
who rules words in the fear of God,
is like “morning light at sunrise filling a cloudless sky,
making the grass of the earth sparkle after rain.
But false artists are like desert thorns
whose fruit no man gathers with his hand;
no man touches them
unless it’s with iron or the shaft of a spear,
and then they are burnt in the fire.
“My friends,
Orpheus was that true artist! He boldly sang the world as it is, sang men as they are—a master of simplicity, a man made nobler than all other men by his
humanness.
There’s beauty in the world,’ he said, and courageously
told of it.
‘And there’s evil,’ Orpheus said, and wisely he pointed
out cures.
We praise this Jason’s intellectual fable: it fulfills our
worst
suspicions. But the fable’s a lie.” He said this softly,
calmly,
and all of us sitting in the hall were startled by the
change in the man,
once so arrogant, so full of his own importance, so
quick
himself to use sleight-of-wits. The hall was hushed,
reproached.
“We may have misjudged this creature,” I thought, and
at once remembered
the phrase was Koprophoros’ own.
Jason said nothing, but sat
with pursed lips, brow furrowed, and he seemed by his
silence to admit
the truth in Koprophoro
s’ charge.
Then Paidoboron rose and said:
“As a man, not as an artist, I would condemn the son of Aison. His betrayals of men are as infamous as
Herakles’ own.
His tale seeks neither to excuse nor explain them, but
only to make us
party to his numerous treasons. We all know well
enough
the theme of his tale of Lemnos: as once, for no clear
reason
(unless it was simple exhaustion, mother of
indifference),
he abandoned the yellow-haired daughter of Thoas—so
now, for no
just reason, he’d abandon Medeia for Lady Mede.”
The wide
hall gasped at the frontal attack. The tall,
black-bearded king
stared with fierce eyes at Jason. The lord of the
Argonauts
paled, but he neither lowered his gaze nor flinched.
King Kreon
glanced at Pyripta in alarm. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but said nothing, pressing one hand to her
heart. The Northerner
said, grim-voiced: “Treason by treason he undermines morality. He tells of the treason of the Doliones, how they offer, one moment, a feast, fine wine, and
the next moment turn,
forgetting the sacred laws of hospitality, more barbarous even than the spider people, who were,
at least,
within their earthborn natures consistent. Are the
Doliones
condemned in Jason’s tale? Not at all! They get
threnodies!
For even the gods betray, according to Jason, as do their seers. So Hylas—whom Jason excuses by virtue
of his youth
and the soft, warm weather that shameful night—
betrays his trust
as squire, goes up to the furthest of the pools. So the
Argonauts
all turn, as one, against Herakles. So Phineus betrays, defying the gods; so Mopsos turns in scorn on dying men; and so all the crewmen, spurred by
the mad
philosophy of Idas, betray the core of humanness,
become
a mindless, fascistic machine. Thus cunningly Jason
persuades
that treason is life’s great norm. He pulls the secret wires of our angular heads, makes us empathize with his
own foul sin,
and bilks us all of the heart’s sure right to condemn
such sin.
Corrupter! Exploiter! No more such fumets! The world
is alive
with laws, and all who defy them will at last be
destroyed by them.
Think back on the days of old, think over the years,
down the ages.
Are the gods blind? indifferent to evil and stupidity? They’ve spoken in all man’s generations, and they speak
even now:
‘You are fat, gross, bloated, a deceitful and underhanded
brood,
a nation wealthy and empty-headed. Your hills will
tremble
and your carcases will be torn apart in the midst of
streets.
A great fire has blazed from my anger.
It will burn to the depths of Hades’ realm.
It will devour the earth and all its produce;
it will set fire to the foundations of mountains’ ”
The dark king paused, his words still ringing, and
his eyes had no spark
of humanness in them, it seemed to me. Jason said
nothing.
Then, once more, Paidoboron spoke, more quietly now, his hoarse, dry voice like an oracle’s voice through
cavern smoke:
“You’ve raised up again and again that towering son
of Zeus,
fierce Herakles, as the chief of betrayers, suggesting
that nought
you’ve done, or might do, could hold a candle to his
perfidy.
Shame, seducer! The ideal of loyalty raged in that man! Loyalty to Zeus, to Hylas, to his friends. He struck
down Hylas’
father from passionate hatred of his evil State—never
mind
how cheap his murderous stratagem. He threatened
to lay
all Mysia waste out of passionate sorrow at loss of his
friend.
And in the same mad rage he murdered the sons of
Boreas,
who had loved him weakly, intellectually, and
prevented your ship
from turning back when you’d stranded him.
Wide-minded Zeus
did not bequeath his wisdom to his son: from
Alkmene he got
his brains. But the sky-god’s absolutes burned in
Herakles
like quenchless underground fire. They do not burn in
you.
Impotent, wily, colubrine, you’d buy and sell all man’s history, if it lay in your power. Ghost ships
indeed!
Civilization beware if Jason is the model for it! When feelings perish—the wound we share with the
cow and the lion—
then rightly the world will return to the rule of spiders.”
So
he spoke, and would say no more. And Aison’s son said
nothing.
I would not have given three straws, that moment,
for Jason’s hopes.
And then, all at once, came an eerie change. The
red-leaved branches
framed in the windows, blowing in the autumn wind,
snapped into
motionlessness. Every man, fly, cricket, the wine that fell streaming from the lip of the pitcher
in the slave boy’s hand,
hung frozen. It seemed the scene had become a divine
projection
on a golden screen. Then, in that stillness, Hera leaped
up,
eyes blazing, and, turning to Athena, flew into a rage.
“Sly wretch!”
she bellowed. I flattened to the floor. Her voice made
the rafters shake,
marble. Athena
fell a step backward, quaking. I had somehow dropped
my glasses,
so that all I could see of the goddesses was a luminous
blur.
I felt by the wall, furtive as a mouse, and at last I found
them,
hooked them over my ears in haste and peeked out
again.
The queen of goddesses wailed: “What a perfect fool
I was
to trust you even for an instant! You just can’t resist,
can you!
I think you’re my true ally, and I listen to Jason’s
cunning,
and I think, That Athena! The goddess of mind is surely
Zeus’s
masterpiece!’ And what are you thinking? You’re
dreaming up answers!
You don’t care! You don’t care about anything! He
stops to take a breath
and your quick wit darts to old Fatslats there, and you
inspire him with words
and you ruin all Jason’s accomplished! —And you,
you halfwit—”
She whirled to confront Aphrodite. “You caused the
whole thing! You change
your so-called mind and forget about Medeia and make
our Pyripta
all googley-poo over Aison’s son, and Athena can’t
help it,
she has to oppose you. It’s a habit, after all these
centuries.”
Aphrodite blushed scarlet and backed away as her sister
had done.
‘Your
Majesty, do be reasonable,” Athena said. Her voice was soft—it was faint as a zephyr, in fact,
from fear.
But the wife of Zeus did not prefer to be reasonable. Her dark eyes shone like a stormcloud blooming and
rippling with light. “
Betrayal,” she groaned, and clenched her fists. “That’s
good. That’s really
good! You make Paidoboron talk of betrayal, how fine true loyalty is, and you, you don’t bat an eyelash at how your trick’s a betrayal of me! Does nothing in the world
count?
How can you do it, forever and ever manufacturing
structures,
when the whole vast ocean of Time and Space is
thundering aloud
on the rocks, and the generations of men are all on the run, rootless and hysterical?”
“Your Majesty, please,
I beg you,” Athena said. The queen of goddesses
paused,
still angry, I thought, but not unaware of gray-eyed
Athena’s
fear and helplessness. Aphrodite kept quiet, her dark eyes large. Hera waited—stern, but not tyrannical,
at last;
and at last Athena spoke, head bowed, her lovely arms stretched out, imploring. “You’re wrong, this once, to
reproach me, Goddess.
I do know the holiness of things. I know as well as you the hungry raven’s squawk in winter, the hunger of
nations,
the stench of gotch-gut wealth, how it feeds on children’s
flesh.
I’ve pondered kings and ministers with their jackals’
eyes,
presidents sweetly smiling with the hearts of wolves.
I’ve seen
the talented well-meaning, men not chained to greed, able to sacrifice all they possess for one just cause, fearless men, and shameless, earnestly waiting, lean, ready to pounce when the cause is right—waiting,
waiting—
while children die in ambiguous causes, and wicked men make wars—waiting—waiting for the war to reach
their streets,
waiting for some unquestionable wrong—waiting on
graveward …
Precisely because of all that I’ve done what I’ve done,
raised men
to test this lord of the Argonauts. I have never failed
him
yet, and I will not now; but I mean to annoy him to
conflict,
badger till he racks his brains for a proof he believes,
himself,
of his worthiness. I mean to change him, improve him,
for love
of Corinth, Queen of Cities. You speak of Space and
Time.
No smallest grot, O Queen, can shape its identity outside that double power: a thing is its history, the curve of its past collisions, as it locks on the