“I suggest to you, gentlemen, that however my personal vision may construct the hungry tiger, however boldly I assert (as my scrupulous logic may require) that the tiger I sense is not really there, the tiger will eat me, and I’ve known it all along, whatever my logic may asseverate. I suggest, in short, that Jason’s theory is a deep-seated lie: I do not, in fact, think merely with my mind. If I did, I could not explain to myself why you hate me for cooking the stranger. I suggest that philosophers, whose chief business is to think things through, not slog on by faith, like the rest of us, make dangerous, nay, deadly kings. Ideas quite harmless in the philosopher’s attic, mistaken opinions which time can easily unmask, can turn to devouring dragons if released on the world.
“What I claim, with respect to Jason’s idea—though I do not pretend to prove my claim, being no true philosopher myself but only a man philosophically equipped to defend himself against philosophers—is that man is whole, his passions as priceless as his crafty mind, and mysteriously connected, if not, indeed, identical—so that rejection of the body is a giant step toward madness. If evil actions are transparently evil, the reason is that I can feel them as surely and concretely as I feel a cow or a pang of love. That, I suspect, and nothing baser, is the reason we make cities. Not to flee raw experience of Nature, but to arrive at it, to escape the drudgery of hunting and gobbling so that when we sit down to supper we can take our time and notice it. Show the crude country singer the noblest achievements of our epic poets, and he’ll shame all critics in his praise of it.” He looked at me again, and again winked. I looked around in alarm and embarrassment. He continued: ‘The crude balladeer King Paidoboron praises—where are his verses most quoted and loved? In the city, of course. There, there only, have clodpate mortals the time and experience to perceive and appreciate artlessness, or be moved by plain-brained message.
“But I was speaking of Jason.” Gesture. “He would curb the flesh in iron chains, deny all passions for the common good. I ask you one question. Can a man make laws for other men if he’s purified out of his blood all trace of humanness? I can say to god-struck Paidoboron, ‘I disagree,’ and no one is overmuch offended by it. But let him constrain me by inflexible laws to behave and frame my affirmations exactly as he does, and you know very well what the upshot will be. Let the tyrant gird his loins and cement his alliances, because make no mistake, I am coming for him!
“Though I’ve no intention of crushing light-winged opinions into staggering and groaning legislation, I have opinions of my own that I value as dearly as Jason does his—and between you and me and the gatepost, I think mine more tenable. I celebrate the flesh unashamedly: I watch and guide it with mind as a doting mother does her child. I celebrate dancing and the creation of images and uplifting fictions; I celebrate among other bodily sensations, health and wealth and power, which does not mean I’m unmoved by sickness and poverty and weakness. Search high and low through this moaning world, you’ll find no man’s illachrymable but the man of stern theories, the ice-cold slave of mere intellect, donzel with a ponderous book, or six loosely knotted opinions he’s fashioned to a whip. Don’t tell me, when you speak of such men, of their liberalism.
“So much for that. Return to Jason’s more important principle. He claims we should balance idealism with pragmatic awareness of the changing world. No man of sense would deny the point.” He gestured wearily. “But gentlemen, consider. As once all the princes of Akhaia rallied around Jason for pursuit of the golden fleece, so now all the princes have rallied around King Agamemnon, to avenge the ravishing of Helen by Paris of Troy. The morality of the war may be right or wrong—I take no stand—but one thing seems certain: when the Trojan war is won or lost, those princes who bravely stood together to fight it will emerge a league as powerful as any the world has ever seen. How is it that Jason— given his theory of power by alliance—sits here in comfort, drinking Kreon’s wine—though a man no older than Hektor, I think, and no less wily than Odysseus— when the men he’ll need to ally himself with, if he ever achieves a position as king, are wading knee-deep in dear friends’ blood toward Troy? Not that I mean to criticize unduly. I express, merely, my puzzlement. He has given us difficult and complex reasons for believing what we all believe anyway, as surely as we believe, for no explicable reason, that we ought not to bake harmless strangers in our ovens—yet he seems to me not to live by them. The matter needs clarification.”
He smiled, waiting. I saw that the Asian was
serenely certain
he’d carried the day. I was half-inclined—even I—
to believe it,
though I knew the whole story. Athena herself looked
alarmed, in fact,
uncomfortably watching at Jason’s side. Above all,
Kreon,
it seemed to me, was shaken in his faith. Though no
one had doubted
that Jason’s victory was settled from the start,
Koprophoros’ words
had shattered the old man’s complacency as a few
stern blows
of Herakles’ club could loosen trees. He stared with eyes like dagger holes at Koprophoros. He seemed to be
seeing for the first time
the wealth and splendor of the Asian’s dress, white and
gold impleached,
majesty and taste unrivalled in Akhaia. He seemed
to grasp
the remarkable restraint of that master of tricks. Though
he might have astonished
the hall with a battery of startling illusions, and
dazzled the wits
of the sea-kings with bold transformations and
vanishings no one—no mortal,
not even the wily Medeia—could match (for
Koprophoros’ skill
as an illusion-maker was known far and wide) he had
used no weapon
but plain argument, and by that alone had made
Jason appear
a fool. As the hall sat restlessly waiting, Jason
drew shapes
with his fingernail on the tablecloth, deep in thought.
At last,
the king turned to him, evading his eyes, and asked,
his voice
almost a whisper, toneless except for a hint of irritation: “Would you care to offer some comment, Jason?” He
smiled too late,
and Jason saw it, and returned the smile; and the
whole room knew
that instant that Jason would win.
He let a long moment pass, then rose, head bowed, regally handsome and, you
would have sworn,
embarrassed as an athlete praised. With an innocent
openness
that no mere innocent boy could match, he said,
“ I confess,
Koprophoros is right.” He smiled, not harmed in the
least by that;
glad to be instructed. “I’ve admitted already that my
judgment was faulty,
though by no means consistently so, I hope. (That
you must decide.)
And Koprophoros would be right, too, if I claimed,
indeed,
what he seems to believe I claimed. I’ve spoken
of marriages just and unjust: the king and state,
the gods
and nature, mind and body. I meant no attempt
to split off
mind, as if body and mind were not one—as surely
as Orpheus
and Eurydike were one, while they lived, and are one
even now
in the cool and dark of the Underworld—or as Theseus and Hippolyta are one. The world is rife with
inadequacies—
imperfect creatures starving for completion. To survive
at all,
weakling must fadge with weakling, and out of that
marriage win strength.
Not all unions
are therefore holy. The blazing
trumpet-vine
clinging to the elm may drive the branches of the tree
toward light,
leaning on the strength of the tree for its own
expansions; but at last
both fall together. We therefore prudently hack down
the vine
in its earliest stages, and tear up its underground tubers
and burn them.
I intended no more than that when I spoke.
“As for the business of Troy—” He paused, looked straight at the Asian, then
down, much troubled,
for all the world like a man betrayed by an old,
old friend,
and confounded by it. He said at last, too softly
for many
in the hall to hear, “I cannot fathom his attacking me
with that.
I’m an exile, a man with no army to lead and no
leader willing
to take me with his troops, though I’ve formally pleaded
and sworn with oaths
that no past glory of mine would impede his leadership.
Koprophoros knows all that. I told him myself. Why
he now
forgets it, and twists my misfortune to shame …”
His voice trailed off.
When, little by little, they grasped the force of what
he was saying,
the kings were astounded. Those in the back who’d
missed what he said
whispered to be told. Shock at Koprophoros’ treachery
rolled
to the outer walls like a wave. Only three in the room—
Koprophoros,
Jason, and I (for all that Artemis knew, I knew)— were aware that—for all his wounded but forgiving
innocence
(army or no army, lord or no lord)—Jason had spoken a cold-blooded lie. He’d told Koprophoros nothing
of the kind.
The effect of the lie was immediate and deadly, as he
knew it would be.
Not a man there had one single word of good he
could say
for Koprophoros.
(So once King Arthur, playing the demonic Other King, understood that to lose the game
meant death,
and with powerful fists he ground the chessmen of gold
to dust
and smashed the board. In horror the Other King
reached out wildly,
and, the same instant, vanished. So Jason too refused to play the game—he who had played so many far
so long.
What was I to think? )
Kreon rose, politician to the last. As if he’d seen nothing, as if merely finishing one more
evening
of banqueting, he thanked all who’d spoken and,
pleading the lateness
of the hour, dismissed the assembled kings to their beds.
As they left
the kings talked earnestly, bending to one another’s ears.
With Koprophoros,
no one exchanged a word. He gazed at the floor, furious and smiling, torn between anger and rueful admiration.
In his room, Ipnolebes watching like a man turned stone, old Kreon
talked,
pacing, wildly gesticulating as his slaves undressed him.
“There it is, you see. Right from the start!” His bald
head gleamed
in the candlelight. His shadow leaped up, stretched
on pillars,
the shadows of the slaves reaching out to him like
ghostly enemies
clutching at his life. He paused, hiked up one foot
to relinquish
a sandal, then paced again, short-legged. “We two
know better,
you and I,” he said, “than to lay our bets on wealth
alone,
honor like Jokasta’s, genius like that of—” Ipnolebes
watched
like a wolf; said nothing. The king prattled on.
Ipnolebes’ eyes
fell shut, his spirit more fierce than a god’s. “There
is no anger,”
the voice of the moon-goddess whispered in my ear,
invisible beside me,
“more deadly than a slave’s.” She laughed, aloof.
‘There lies the evil
in tyrannous oppression. It ends in the gem-pure fury
of the man
who has tolerated the intolerable, no longer loves himself or anything living.” I observed that the rest
of the slaves
were the same, as if Ipnolebes’ emotion, ravaged and
inhuman,
inwardly burning like a coal that appears (at first
glance) ash,
had crept into all their veins through the shadowed,
impotionate air.
He broke in abruptly: “Suppose your magnificent Jason
was lying.”
Kreon, in his nightcap, fat arms stretching to receive
his nightgown,
seemed not to hear him at all.
In the wide-beamed banquet hall, dark and abandoned except for one figure, moonlight
fell—
cold shadow of Artemis—mottled on the tables and
floor. A slavegirl,
servant of Pyripta, watched in the shadow of the
doorway as the man
who remained, though the others had left, paced
musingly back and forth.
She watched for some while, then hurried to her
mistress to report what she’d seen.
Quickly, silently, the princess arose, her heart pounding like a drawn kestrel’s, and, moving more softly than
a huntress in the night,
she went to discover for herself if the message were
true. Alone,
her quick mind rushing more swiftly than her small
and silent feet,
she entered the hall where Jason paced. He saw her
coming
and paused, his eyes averted from the shimmer of hex
gown. She spoke
in a whisper, a-tremble with the thought that she
might be discovered with him,
a-tremble with the thought that she might say more
than she ought to say.
Speaking, she half by accident reached out shyly for
his hand.
“My lord, what can this mean, that you stay when all
others have gone,
pacing the floor like a man tormented by doubts?
Though we’ve asked you
on many occasions to stay with us here, you have always
refused us,
insisting on duties elsewhere. So now you make me fear that my father and I have offended you, stirred up
some cause
well-known kindness,
reproach us with. Or perhaps your heart is still troubled
by the cruel
and shameful behavior of Koprophoros. If it’s so, let me
soothe you
with my father’s own words not an hour ago: There’s
no man in Corinth
not shocked to the soles of his feet by that fat swine’s
treachery.”
As she spoke, her fears melted, and she gazed at him
only with tenderness,
like a loving sister. She was unaware that her servant
had gone
to Kreon, propelled by duty perhaps, perhaps by cruelty, and told of Pyripta’s meeting with Jason in the
moonlit hall.
As fast as his feet would carry him, the king ran down and now stood, barefoot and in sleeping dress, peeking
from the doorway,
slyly observing their mutual temptation and blessing
&
nbsp; heaven
for his rare good luck.
He held her hand, aware of her virginal fear of him, and answered softly, “Princess, you
need not
frighten yourself with such gloomy thoughts. If I
tell you the truth,
I remain here for no other reason than pleasure in
the place.” He smiled,
looked down at her. “But now—you’re right—I must
go find some bed.
Forgive me for giving you a moment’s alarm.” He
had not missed,
I knew by his half-checked smile, the fact that she
spoke in a whisper,
not sorry to be caught here alone with him. Nor did
he miss
her searching look now, desire she newly understood.
He met
her gaze and, after a moment, kissed her. Her hands
moved hungrily
on Jason’s back. The pillared room hung frozen like
a crystal
in the light of the vengeful moon. The princess
whispered in his ear.
He frowned, as if torn, and studied her, and could give
her no answer.
The hall gleamed dully. She whispered again, sweet
blue-eyed princess,
with the voice of a child, a curious droplet of moonlight
shining
on her forehead. And again he gave no answer, but
held her in his arms,
looking at her, listening thoughtfully, biding his time.
__________
* Greek, zatrikion.
21
The oak where I clung with my eyes tight shut like
a terrified lizard,
bruised and battered, kicked like old rubbish from
pillar to post,
went flat suddenly in the screaming gale, and I lost
my hand-hold—
I pressed up closer and hunched my back, but there
was nothing to cling to.
The rough-barked tree became a road of stone on a steep
rock mountain,
endless—the labor of emperors—but humbled by
pebbles,
cluttered at the sides with bramble bushes and with
shining scree.