Jason and Medeia (55 page)

so horribly.”

   Zeus said, “If Artemis wishes to speak let her speak.”

But the goddess

at my side said nothing. ‘Then I will speak,” said

Zeus crossly,

disdaining to shift his glance to tearful Aphrodite.

“The fire

of zeal has never had a purpose. It is what it is, simply, and any ends it may stumble to it's indifferent to. As for Medeia, make no mistake, nothing on earth is more pure—more raised from self to selfless

absolute—

than a woman betrayed. For all their esteem,

immortal gods

follow like foaming rivers the channels available

to them.

Enough. Annoy us no more, Goddess.” She backed off,

curtsying,

glancing furtively around to see who might be snickering

at her.

   And now gray-eyed Athena spoke, the goddess of cities and goddess of works of mind. In her shadow professors

crouched,

stern and rebuking, with swollen red faces and

pedantic hearts;

lawyers at the edge of apoplexy from righteous

indignation;

poets and painters with their pockets crammed full of

sharp scissors and knives;

and ministers cunning in Hebrew. With a smile

disarming and humorous—

but I knew her heart was troubled—she said, “Father

of the Gods,

no one has firmer faith than I in your power to keep all promises—complex and contradictory

as at times they seem.” She glanced at the goddess

of love and smiled,

then added, her tone too casual, I thought, and her teeth

too bright,

“But I cannot deny, my lord, that my mind's on fire

to understand

how you can hope to keep this one, for surely your

promise to me,

that Jason shall rule in Corinth, must cancel the

opposing promise

that Jason will cleave to Medeia. I beg you, end

our suspense

and explain away this mystery, for my peace of mind.”

   For the first time, the beams of the eyes of Zeus

swung down

and he met the gaze of his cunning child Athena.

He said,

his voice dark beyond sadness, “By murder and agony on every side, by release of the dragons and the burning

of Corinth,

by shame that so spatters the skirts of the gods that

never again

can any expect or deserve man's praise—by these

cruel means

I juggle your idiot demands to their grim

consummation.” So he spoke,

So he spoke,

and spoke no more. The goddesses gazed at each other,

aghast,

then looked again, disbelieving, at Zeus.

   It was Hera who spoke, queen of goddesses. “Husband, your words cut deep,

as no doubt

you intend them to. But I know you too well, and I

think I know

your disgusting scheme. You told us at the time of

your promises

that our wishes were selfish and cruel. In your bloated

self-righteousness,

you imagine you'll shock us to shame by these terrible

threats, pretending

we've brought these horrors on ourselves. My lord,

we're not such children

as to tumble to that! The cosmos is fecund with

ways and means,

and surely you, who can see all time's possibilities— such, if I'm not mistaken, is your claim—surely you

could find

innumerable tricks to provide us with all we desire,

without

this monstrous bloodbath and, at last, this toppling of

the whole intent

of our three wishes. O Master of Games, I remain

unpersuaded

by your floorless, roofless nobility. You want no more

or less than
we
do:

triumph and personal glory. It's to spite us you do these things. Like the spiteful bigot who

dances in the street

when the brothel burns and the wicked run screaming

and flaming to the arms

of Death, you dance in your hell-cavern mind

at the terrible sight

of hopes-beneath-your-lofty-dignity shattered, proved

shameful.

Well I—for one—I'll not bend to that high-toned

dogmatism!

Bring on your death's-heads! Kindle your hellfires!

Unleash the shrieks

of humanity enraged! Prate, preach, pummel us!

I'll not be fooled:

from rim to rim of the universe, all is selfishness

and wrath.”

So saying, she struggled to free her hand from the

arm of the throne

and Zeus's grip, but his hand lay on hers as indifferent

and heavy

as a block of uncut stone. Then Hera wept. And before my baffled eyes her form grew uncertain, changing

and shadowy,

as if hovering, tortured, between warring potentials,

and one of them

was
Life.
I remembered Phineus.

   Gently and softly Athena spoke. Her eyes were cunning, watching

her father

like a hawk. “My lord, your words have upset us,

as you see. If we speak

in haste, our words not carefully considered, I'm sure

your wisdom

forgives us. Yet perhaps the queen of goddesses is right

after all

that there may be some way you've missed that could

lead to a happier issue—

satisfaction of our wishes without such deplorable

waste.”

“There's none,” said Zeus. She glanced at him, sighed,

then began again.

“Perhaps now—knowing what our wishes entail—we

might modify them.”

She glanced at Aphrodite. The goddess of love with

a fiery glance

at Hera said, “It was you—you two—if you care

to remember,

who begged me to
start
this love affair. But now,

just like that,

I'm to turn my back on it. “Run along, Aphrodite, dear, you've served your purpose.' ” She stretched out an arm

to Zeus. “I ask you,

would
you
put up with such treatment? Am I some

scullery-slave,

some errand runner? What have they ever done for me?”

Zeus sighed,

said nothing. Athena pleaded, “But what are we to do?

Am I

to grovel at the sandals of this cosmic cow? And

even if I did,

would Hera do it?” The queen of goddesses flashed,

“Don't be fooled!

If tragedy strikes, there's no one to blame but Zeus!”

Then they waited,

leaving the outcome to Zeus. He stared into space. At last he lowered his fist slowly from his chin. “Let it be,”

he said.

From wall to wall through the infinite palace, the

gods gasped,

and instantly all the earth was filled with the rumble

of dragons

growling up out of the abyss, all the oldest, gravest

of terrors

from the age before hunters first learned to make peace

with the bear they killed,

the age when the farmer in Eden was first

understanding remorse

for the tear he made in Nature when he backed away,

became

a man, devourer of his mother and bane of his father,

his sons,

outcast of all Time-Space—Dionysos' prey, and scorn of the endlessly fondling, fighting baboons. All progress,

like the flesh

of the sick old trapper in the lair of his daughters,

those dragons rose,

like violent sons, devouring. The sky went black

with smoke.

“No!” I whispered, “it mustn't be allowed!” The

goddess said nothing.

I grew more excited. I would do something foolish in a

moment, I knew,

but the knowledge failed to check me. I snatched off

my glasses and whispered,

“Where are those others, those three goddesses who

danced? They must help us!”

“They're here,” she answered, “but obscured, weighed

down.” She nodded at the three

by Zeus's throne, and I saw that it was so:
Vision

burned dimly,

like a hooded candle, in Athena's eyes, and
Love

flickered

in Aphrodite's, and
Life
fought weakly, like a failing

blush,

in Hera's cheeks. “But
you,”
I said then, my excitement

rising,

“you, Goddess of Purity and Zeal—surely you at least are one and unchangeable! Your power could save us,

yet here in the house

of the gods, you're silent as stone.” Then, horribly,

before my eyes—

no surer than anything else in my vision's deluding

mists—

the shadowy figure altered, became like a heavy

old farm-wife,

sly-eyed, smiling like a witch. She croaked: “Come,

see me as I am.

The crowd of the living are phrenetic with business.

I alone am inactive.

My mind is like a dolt's. All the world is alert; I alone

am drowsy.

Calm like the sea, like a high wind never ceasing.

All the world

is tremulous with purpose; I am foolish, untaught. Tentative, like a man fording a river in winter; hesitant, as if fearful of neighbors; formal like a guest; falling apart like thawing ice, as vacant as a valley.…” I stared in amazement, though a moment's reflection

would have shown me the truth:

even the goddess of purity and zeal had her earthen side, sodden and selfish, determined to endure, outwitting

the world

by magically becoming it. The two moon-goddesses,

Artemis and Hekate,

were secretly the same.

I turned, despairing

of the purity drowned in that warty, fiat-headed lump.

But the farm-wife

reached to me, checking my impulse to flee, and argued

with me further,

queerly indifferent herself, I thought, to the argument. Her few teeth were like a dog's; her withered hands

were palsied.

“ ‘On disaster,' the brave and ambitious say, ‘good

fortune perches.'

But I say, ‘It is beneath good fortune that disaster

crouches.' ”

She leered again, and by a gesture incredibly simple

and subtle—

no more, perhaps, than the slightest perceptible

movement of her eyes—

she suggested a huge and obscene bump and grind.

She cooed, eyes closed,

“The further one goes

the less one knows

for hustle and bustle,

for hustle and bustle;

Therefore the wise man moves not a muscle.”

She chuckled, foolish and apologetic, and I determined

to waste no more time on her.

Reckless and honest as a madman, I burst

through the seething ocean of gods to Zeus's feet,

where Apollo,

shining like the mirroring sea, sat tuning his lyre

for a song—

gentle Apollo with the dragon tusks of Helios.

“Stop!” I cried out—and all motion stopped, even

the movement

of Apollo's sleeve in the gentle cosmic wind. I shouted, angrily slamming my right fist into my left-hand palm, “I object! This palace is a mockery! The whole creation is a monstrous, idiotic mockery! The silliest child on

his mother's knee

knows good from evil, selfishness from love.” Nothing

stirred, no one moved.

I turned around, gazed at the gods stretching out in

all directions from the throne,

and my soul was filled with amazement and ecstasy at

my power to instruct and lecture them.

I stretched out my hands like a preacher addressing

multitudes, and I felt aglow

like a winter sun. “If the truth is so clear even dogs

can see it, how dare the gods

be baffled and befuddled, raising up time after time mad

idiots to positions of power,

filling the schools with professors with not one jot or

tittle of love for the things

they pretend to teach; filling the pulpits with atheists

and cowards who put on their robes

for love of their mothers, merely; and filling the courts

with lawyers indifferent to justice,

the medical schools with connivers and thieves and

snivelling, sneaking incompetents,

the seats of government with madmen and bullies—all

this though nothing in the world is clearer

than evil and good, the line between justice and

unselfishness (the way of the decent)

and cowardice, piggish greed, foul arrogance, the

filth-fat darkness of the devil's forces!”

As I spoke, declaiming, making existence as clear

as day—

saying nothing not spoken by the noblest of poets and

sages since time

began (and I said far more than I've set down here,

believe me—

revealed to the gods all the wisdom of the Hindus,

the secret rediscovered

by Schopenhauer, how man must perceive that the

spirit in himself

is a spark of the fire that's in all things living, so that

hurting another

means hurting himself; told them how Jesus was angry

at the tomb

of Lazarus, how the awesome Tibetan
Book of the Dead
has a lower truth and a higher truth; told them of

the poetry

of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil, Chia Yi

and Tu Fu,

and the anonymous Kelts—
The hall of Cynddylan is

dark tonight,

without fire, without candle. But for God, who'll give

me sanity?
—

all this and more)—as I spoke I felt more and more

filled with light,