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 Koprophoros’ 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