The Physics of Sorrow (8 page)

—
Ancient Greek Myths and Legends

D
OSSIER

Most honorable members of the jury, living and dead, from all times and geographies, ladies and gentlemen collectors and tellers of
myths, and you, most honorable Mr. Minos, the present judge from the underworld.

Over the course of 37 years I have been preparing this case, “The Case of M.,” and writing arguments in his defense. I began at nine, with my grandfather’s indelible pencil in his old soldier’s notebook, which he had long since ceased using. (This does not, however, justify my unauthorized appropriation of the notebook. As we see, in the beginning there is always a crime.)

The first version reads as follows:

The Minotaur is not guilty. He is a boy locked up in a basement. He is frightened. They have abandoned him.

I, the Minotaur.

That was the whole text. Written in large capital letters on two pages from the notebook. I include it with the other materials related to the case. In broad terms, that is the basic thesis. Over the years I have merely added further evidence. And I have collected the signs which have come to me on their own.

It is striking that I have not found any compassion for the Minotaur in the whole of the classics. No departure from the established facts, from the monstrous mask once placed on him. Monster is the tamest word bandied about when it comes to the Minotaur in ancient writings. Doesn’t Ovid in Metamorphoses call him a “double-natured shame” and “disgrace from his abode” . . . Nothing but a disgrace and a freak. Didn’t he suspect that only a few months later he himself would be sent to the Pontus—the depths of the subcelestial Roman labyrinth, from which he would never find his way back. Not all roads lead to Rome when you are in the labyrinth of the provinces, my dear Ovid.

The funny thing is that he is much kindlier toward the Minotaur in one of his earlier books,
Heroides
or
Epistulae Heroidum
. I
prefer the translated title “Heroines,” as it best captures the heroin of despair. There, the abandoned Ariadne writes to Theseus, who is already sailing for Athens. And there, for the first time, this accessory to the Minotaur’s murder, motivated by love, seems to regret what she has done: you would have died in the winding labyrinth unless guided by the thread I gave you, Theseus. You said that as long as we both shall live, you’ll be mine. Well, look, we’re alive, and if you’re alive, too, that means you’re nothing more than a lowdown despicable liar. I never should’ve given you that damn thread, and so on. But the important thing for our case is that in the next line she calls the Minotaur her brother for the first time: “Club that killed my brother, the Minotaur, condemn me too!” Let me note for this honorable court that the monster has been recognized as a brother by another human being.

“My brother, the Minotaur,” let us remember that.

“He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human,” said the gentle and all-knowing Apollodorus (or Pseudo-Apollodorus) at some point during the second century B.C. I believe he’s the only one who didn’t use disparaging epithets against our client.

What does cunning Plutarch do? So as not to sin through his own words, he prefers to speak of the Minotaur through the mouth of Euripides. The latter called him: “A mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape.” And also: “Two different natures, man and bull, were joined in him.” This second statement sounds relatively neutral, which in our case can be taken as compassionate, thus the Minotaur’s human nature can again be seen here.

Unlike him, Seneca, practically an age-mate of Christ, uses language in his
Phaedra
that would make even Roman soldiers blush.
Wretched whore, Hippolytus screams at Phaedra, you’ve outdone even your mother Pasiphaë, who gave birth to a monster, displaying her wild lust to all. But why should I be surprised, you were carried in the same womb where that two-shaped infamy sloshed around . . . It went something like that, to use the jargon of the time.

Does the prosecution object? If it is because of the language, let me note that the words are not mine, while the translation is quite precise. It has nothing to do with our case? You’re mistaken. We’re talking about the abandonment and forcible confinement of a child, branded by his origins, for which he is not to blame. This is followed by slander, abasement, and the public circulation of lies . . . Yet it can be seen, albeit between the lines, in casual suggestions and hints, that the Minotaur’s human nature has been recognized. Despite the fact that his human rights have been taken away. I ask that this be duly noted, your honor, and that you allow me to continue.

The poet Virgil, that favorite of Augustus, sideswipes the victim in passing with the following two lines: “the Minotaur, hybrid offspring, that mixture of species, proof of unnatural relations . . .”

His every word drips with revulsion.

Speaking of Virgil, we can’t help but mention Dante. In
The Inferno
, the Minotaur is placed at the entrance to the seventh, bloodiest circle: “on the border of the broken bank / was stretched at length the Infamy of Crete.” Dante is even more merciless than his guide, Virgil. After being exiled to the labyrinth, after dying under Theseus’ sword, our defendant was tossed in among the bloodsuckers, tyrants, and those who have sinned against the laws of nature. But isn’t the Minotaur merely the fruit of such sin, not a perpetrator, a victim, the most long-suffering victim?

(By the way, that seventh circle was guarded by centaurs. The centaur, with its animal hindquarters and human torso is the mirror image of the Minotaur.)

If literature constantly returns to the Minotaur’s monstrous birth, then visual art is hypnotized by his death. In all the ancient images we have, in all the frescoes, vase-paintings and illustrations of myths and legends, the scene is one and the same—Theseus kills the Minotaur. He is about to be stabbed or is already dead, Theseus dragging him by the horns. Put together, it looks like a series of techniques for close-quarters combat with a sword.

Theseus grasps the Minotaur by one horn and jabs at his chest with the double-edged sword.

The Minotaur has laid his unnaturally large head in Theseus’s lap, exposing his neck to the sword’s blow.

Theseus is behind the Minotaur’s back, holding his neck with his left hand, while driving his short sword somewhere into the soft tissue beneath the rib cage with his right. The body is human. You’re killing a human being, Theseus. The sword goes in smoothly. Yes,
in all these scenes the supposedly terrifying body of the Minotaur is vulnerable, there’s no hiding this fact.

On the bottom of one of the kylixes, those shallow glasses for wine, the Minotaur is even beautiful, he looks more like a Moor, with sensual lips and handsome nostrils, he is kneeling, imprudently exposing his body to Theseus’s sword, while the latter’s right foot steps upon the Minotaur’s groin.

In several preserved frescoes on wine vessels we see Theseus dragging behind him the Minotaur’s mild-mannered corpse . . . He scarcely defended himself, as the other lawyer-by-correspondence in the case, Mr. Jorge, shall also testify.

In some of the scenes the murder is even more brutal, harsher, and more barbarian—committed with a heavy staff, a gnarled wooden mace, a crude prototype of today’s bat. The murder of an ox or bull, as they still do it in the village slaughterhouses, is a blow with the butt-end of an axe to the forehead.

Only childhood and death. And nothing in between. Except darkness and silence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I beg that all this be taken into consideration.

V
IRUSES

                
Billy goats and lilies courted all around me

                
I cried out afeared—Dear Lord have mercy!

                
Such a sin simply cannot be.

                
God’s right hand He placed in between.

                
O, world, from a second Sodom ye are redeemed!

—Gaustine of Arles, seventeenth century

A few words about Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship, which made possible that which nature had forbidden. He crafted a wooden cow, covered it in real cowhide and stuffed Pasiphaë, Minos’s wife, who was crazed with lust for the bull, into its empty womb. He put the cow on wheels and took it to the meadow where the bull normally grazed. What happened next is clear. “The bull came up and had intercourse with it, as if with a real cow. Pasiphaë gave birth to Asterios, who was called Minotauros,” as Pseudo-Apollodorus tells it.

However, the myth keeps mum about another hidden consequence. Could the Trojan Horse have been born from the Cretan wooden cow? Again hollow, on wheels, but quite a bit larger, fitting a whole thirty armed soldiers in its womb—not to seduce, but to subjugate. A cow giving birth to a horse, a woman giving birth to a man-bull—Daedalus slips a Trojan horse into the history of species. And a few millennia later, yet another new heir will crop up, without a wooden body, without any body at all—the Trojan horse, a malicious computer virus. It pretends to be a useful program, lies low for a day or two before unleashing its fury—erasing files, opening doors, smashing defenses, letting foreign eyes into your virtual Troy. And all of that—born of Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship. Which goes against the natural order that the mysterious Gaustine from the seventeenth century insisted upon.

                
There is Order here and God makes no mistake,

                
Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.

M
YTH AND
G
AME

Shall we talk about the Minotaur and videogames? Just enter any one of the games that have multiplied in recent years. Clichés and classics. The Minotaur looks like your average B-movie thug.
Short-legged and beefy, with a short, thick neck, hairy, with the terminator’s trapezoidal face and absurd little horns. And sometimes, as an added bonus, a crooked boar’s tusk. As if the rest wasn’t enough, they had to go and cross the bull with feral pig.

My dearest Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch, Euripides, and you, Mr. Dante “Inferno” Alighieri (to spell out your nickname, too), come see what mythology has become. See the character you so despised. You’ve contributed greatly to his present image. Behold him and weep, you proto-gamers from antiquity. Some day we can play a round, when we get together in real time. In real time, ha ha ha . . . We’ll play “The Minotaur in the Labyrinth” or
World of Warcraft
or
God of War
or . . . some 3-D game. Then, however, only the Minotaur will be three-dimensional, while we’ll all be two-dimensional shades (we’ll be in the Kingdom of the Shades, after all, right?), pathetic cartoons with faded colors from the beginning of the digital era.

T
HE
M
ADONNA WITH
M
INOTAUR

A child is sitting in his mother’s lap. She is holding him in her left arm, she has most likely just nursed him and is now waiting for him to burp. The child is naked. The scene is iconic, so well known and repeating in all images after the birth of the Christ Child. There is one difference, however, which makes this drawing unique. The
child has a bull’s head. Little horns, long drawn-out ears, wide-set eyes, a snout. The head of a calf. Pasiphaë with the Minotaur Child. Centuries before the Virgin Mary.

The image is one of a kind. It was discovered near the erstwhile Etruscan city of Volci, in present-day Lazio. It can be seen in the collection of the Parisian National Library. Someone dared to recall the obvious, which the myth would quickly forget. We’re talking about a baby. Carried and delivered by a woman. We’re talking about an infant, not a beast. A child, who will soon be abandoned (sent to the basement). Most likely Minos needed time, months, even a year or two, to decide what to do, how to hide this marked child from the world. If we peer at the faces of the mother and the son, we can see that both of them already know.