Athena’s
fear and helplessness. Aphrodite kept quiet, her dark eyes large. Hera waited — stern, but not tyrannical,
at last;
and at last Athena spoke, head bowed, her lovely arms stretched out, imploring. “You’re wrong, this once, to
reproach me, Goddess.
I do know the holiness of things. I know as well as you the hungry raven’s squawk in winter, the hunger of
nations,
the stench of gotch-gut wealth, how it feeds on children’s
flesh.
I’ve pondered kings and ministers with their jackals’
eyes,
presidents sweetly smiling with the hearts of wolves.
I’ve seen
the talented well-meaning, men not chained to greed, able to sacrifice all they possess for one just cause, fearless men, and shameless, earnestly waiting, lean, ready to pounce when the cause is right — waiting,
waiting—
while children die in ambiguous causes, and wicked men make wars — waiting — waiting for the war to reach
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,