Jason and Medeia (32 page)

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

moment. What force

it learned from yesterday's lions is now mere handsel

in the den

of the dragon Present Space. And therefore I raise

opposition

to Jason's will, to temper it. His anguine mind, despite those rueful looks, will find some way.”

The queen

seemed dubious. It was not absolutely clear to me that she perfectly followed the train of thought. But hardly knowing what else to be, she was

reconciled.

Gray-eyed Athena, encouraged, and ever incurably

impish,

turned to the love goddess. “You, sweet sister,” she said

with a look

so gentle I might have wept to see it, “don't take it to

heart

that the queen of goddesses turns on you in her fury

when I,

and I alone, am at fault. If my motives indeed were

those

she first suspected, then well might I call to my dear

Aphrodite—

sitting graveolent in her royal hebetation, surrounded by

all

her holouries—for help. Such is not the case, however. Let there be peace between us, I pray, as always.”

So speaking

she raised Aphrodite's hands and tenderly kissed them.

The love goddess

sobbed.

Then everything moved again—the branches in the

windows,

the people, the animals, wine in the pitcher. Then Kreon

rose.

The roar died down respectfully.

“These are terrible charges,”

the old man said, and his furious eyes flashed fire

through the hall,

condemned the whole pack. “I've lived many years and

seen many things,

but I doubt that even in war I have seen such hostility. When Oidipus sought in maniacal rage that man who'd

brought down

plagues on Thebes—when Antigone left me in fiery

indignation

to defy my perhaps inhuman but surely most reasonable

law—

not then nor then did I see such wrath as has narrowed

the eyes

of Paidoboron and Koprophoros. It's not easy for me to believe such outrage can trace its genesis to reason!

However,

the charge, whatever its source, requires an answer.”

He turned

to Jason, bowed to him and waited. The warlike son of

Aison

sat head-bent, still frowning. At last he glanced up, then

rose,

and Kreon sat down, gray-faced. The smile half breaking

at the corners

of Jason's mouth was Athena's smile; the dagger flash

in his eyes was the work

of Hera. Love was not in him, though his voice was

gentle.

“My friends,

I stand accused of atrocities,” he said, “and the chief is

this:

I have severed my head from my heart, a point made

somehow clear

by dark, bifarious allegory. I have lost my soul to a world where languor cries unto languor, where

cicadas sing

‘Perhaps it is just as well.' In the real world—the world

which I

have lyred to its premature grave—there is love between

women and men,

faith between men and the gods. If you here believe all

that,

believe that in every condition the good cries fondly to

the good,

and the heart, by its own pure fire, can physician the

anemic mind,

I would not dissuade you. Faith has a powerful

advantage over truth,

while faith endures. But as for myself, I must track

mere truth

to whatever lair it haunts, whether high on some noble

old mountain,

or down by the dump, where half-starved rats scratch

by as they can,

and men not blessed with your happy opinions must feed

on refuse

and find their small satisfactions.

“My art is false, you say.

I answer: whatever art I may show is the world itself. The universe teems with potential Forms, though only

a few

are illustrated (a cow, a barn, a startling sunset); to trace the history of where we are is to arrive where

we are.

There are no final points in the journey of life up out of silence: there are only moments of process, and in some

few moments,

insight. Search all you wish for the key I've buried, you

say,

in the coils of my plot, Koprophoros. The tale, you'll

find,

is darker than that—and more worthy of attention. It

exists.

It has its history, its dreadful or joyful direction. The

ghostly allegory

you charge me with is precisely what my tale denies. The truth of the world, if I've understood it,

is this:

Things die. Alternatives kill. I leave it to priests to speak of eternal things.

“And as for you, Paidoboron,

if I claim that the world has betrayals in it, don't howl

too soon.

Every atom betrays; every stick and stone and galaxy. Notice two lodestones: notice how they war. But turn

one around

and behold how they lock like lovers embraced in their

tomb. So this:

some things click in. Some sanctuaries, at least for a

time,

are inviolable. What fuses the metals in the ice-bright

ring

of earth and sky, burns mind into heart, weds man to

woman

and king to state? What power is in them? That,

whatever

it is, is the golden secret, precisely the secret I stalk and all of us here must stalk. I've told you failure on

failure,

holding back nothing. But I still have a tale or two to

tell—

meaningless enough in the absence of all I've told

already—

that you may not mock so quickly.”

He was silent. Had he tricked them again,

danced them out of their wits like a prophet of

gyromancy?

Athena smiled and winked at Jason. Dark Aphrodite glanced at Hera for assurance that all was well.

Then Kreon

rose again, gazed round. When no one dared to speak, he turned to his slave Ipnolebes, who nodded in silence. Kreon rubbed his hands together, furious, and at last pronounced the matter closed. He dismissed the whole

assembly

till the hour of the evening meal, when Jason would

resume his tale,

and, taking the princess' elbow in his hand, bowing to

left

and right, unsmiling, he descended from the dais. As

the two passed

the threshold, the others all rose and followed, and so

the hall

was emptied except for the slaves—near the door the

Northerner

and the boy. The goddess vanished. The vision went

dark. I heard

the nightmare crowd on the move again, in the shadow

of the beast,

smothered in the skirts of the prostitute. Then sound,

too, ceased,

and I hung in darkness, nowhere, clinging to the oak's

rough bark.

A blore of wind, like the breeze at the entrance to a cave,

tore

at the ragged tails of my overcoat, sheathed my

spectacles in ice.

14

I stood, by the goddess' will, in Medeia's room. Pale

light

fell over her, fell swirling, burning on the golden fleece beside her, and then moved on, moved past the two old

slaves

to the door where the children watched. I could not

look at them

for pain and shame. Dreams they might be, as old and

pale

as ghosts in the cairns of Newgrange, but dream or

solid flesh,

they were children, inexplicably doomed. How could

I close my wits

on truths so weird? (Who can believe in the spectre

who walks

leukemia wards, who stands severe above laughing girls whose hearts pump dust? Who can believe those

pictures in the news

of a million children, senselessly cursed, dying in

silence,

caught up in Dionysos' wars, or the refugee camps of Artemis? ) All time inside them … And then I did

look,

searching their eyes for the secret, and found there

nothing. Softly,

my guide, invisible around me, spoke. “Poor dim-eyed

-stranger,

you've understood the question, at least. Look! Look

hard!

Study their eyes, windows of the world you seek and

they

have not yet dreamed the price of: the timeless instant.

They have

no plans, only flimmering dreams of plans, intentions

dark

as the lachrymal flutter of corpse-candles. Their time

is reverie.

But already will is uncoiling there. They flex their

fingers,

restless at the long dull watch. The garden is filled with

birds,

bright sunlight. They remember a cart with a broken

wheel, a cave

of vines by the garden wall. They have now begun to be of two minds. Now love and hate grow thinkable, sacrifice and murder, mercy and judgment. And now,

look close:

with a glance at each other—sly grins, infectious, so

that we smile too,

remembering, projecting (for we, we too, were children

once,

slyly becoming ourselves, unaware of the risk)—they

step,

soundless as deer, to the doorway and through it to

their liberty.

Or so they guess, unaware that the house will vanish,

and the garden—

and the palsied slaves they've slipped they will find

transmogrified

to skulls, bits of ashen cloth, dark bone. And they'll

wring their hands,

restless again, and search in children's eyes for peace, in vain. Yet there is peace. Strange peace: from the

blood of innocents.

You'll see. The gods have ordained it.” I stared, alarmed

at that,

and snatched off my glasses to hunt with my naked

eyes for the shade—

she-witch, goddess, I knew not what—but no trace

of her.

I turned up the collar of my coat, for the room had

grown chilly. And then

she spoke one brief word more: “Listen.”

On the bed, eyes staring,

Medeia spoke, ensorcelled—death-pale lips unmoving. I glanced, alarmed, at her eyes and my glance was held;

I seemed

to fall toward them, and they weren't eyes now but

pits, an abyss,

unfathomable, plunging into space. I cried out, clutched

my spectacles.

The wind soughed dark with words and the pitch-dark

wings of ravens

crying in Medeia's voice:

“I little dreamed, that night,

sleeping in my father's high-beamed hall, that I'd

sacrifice

all this, my parents' love, the beautiful home of my

childhood,

even my dear brother's life, for a man who lay, that

moment,

hidden in the reeds of the marsh. Had I not been happy

there—

dancing with the princes of Aia on my father's floors of

brass

or walking the emerald hills above where wine-dark

oxen

labored from dawn to dusk, above where pruning-men

crept,

weary, along dark slopes of their poleclipt vineyard

plots?

I'd talked, from childhood up, with spirits, with

all-seeing ravens,

sometimes with swine where they fed by the rocks

under oak trees, eating

acorns, treasure of swine, and drank black water,

making

their flesh grow rich and sweet and their brains grow

mystical.

No princess was ever more free, more proud and sure

in the halls

of her father, more eager to please with her mother.

But the will of the gods

ran otherwise.”

The voice grew lighter all at once, the voice

of a schoolteacher reading to children, some trifling,

unlikely tale

that amuses, fills in a recess, yet troubles the grown-up

voice

toward sorrow. She told, as if gently mocking the

tragedy,

of gods and goddesses at ease in their windy palaces where the hourglass-sand takes a thousand years to

form the hill

an ant could create, here on earth, in half an hour. She

told

of jealousies, foolish displays of celestial skill and

spite;

and in all she said, I discovered as I listened, one thing

stood plain:

she knew them well, those antique gods and mortals,

though she mocked

their foolishness. I peered all around me to locate the

speaker,

but on all sides lay darkness, the infinite womb of

space.

She told, first, how Athena and Hera looked down

and, seeing

the Argonauts hidden in ambush, withdrew from Zeus

and the rest

of the immortal gods. When the two had come to a

rose-filled arbor,

Hera said, “Daughter of Zeus, advise me. Have you

found some trick

to enable the men of the
Argo
to carry the fleece away? Or have you possibly constructed some flattering