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!
âO woeful man,' he teaches us, âall life is a search for death.' âIs 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: âdecay of the extremities,' âthe element of Chance at the heart
of all
our projects.' âUnd Alles Sein ist flammend Leid,' we cry. âO, save us, Jason,' we howl in dismay, âfeed 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 usâwhen he's twisted and turned us by all
his tricks,
baffled our desire, exhausted our willâhe'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 purposeâattacks
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 willâthe mind detached from the dark of tentacles mournfully groping toward lightâis a mind that will
ruin us:
thought begins in the bloodâand 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 areâa 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.
âAnd 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 Thoasâso
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
stared with fierce eyes at Jason. The lord of the
Argonauts
paled, but he neither lowered his gaze nor flinched.
King Kreon
glanced at Pyripta in alarm. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but said nothing, pressing one hand to her
heart. The Northerner
said, grim-voiced: “Treason by treason he undermines morality. He tells of the treason of the Doliones, how they offer, one moment, a feast, fine wine, and
the next moment turn,
forgetting the sacred laws of hospitality, more barbarous even than the spider people, who were,
at least,
within their earthborn natures consistent. Are the
Doliones
condemned in Jason's tale? Not at all! They get
threnodies!
For even the gods betray, according to Jason, as do their seers. So Hylasâwhom Jason excuses by virtue
of his youth
and the soft, warm weather that shameful nightâ
betrays his trust
as squire, goes up to the furthest of the pools. So the
Argonauts
all turn, as one, against Herakles. So Phineus betrays, defying the gods; so Mopsos turns in scorn on dying men; and so all the crewmen, spurred by
the mad
philosophy of Idas, betray the core of humanness,
become
a mindless, fascistic machine. Thus cunningly Jason
persuades
that treason is life's great norm. He pulls the secret wires of our angular heads, makes us empathize with his
own foul sin,
and bilks us all of the heart's sure right to condemn
such sin.
Corrupter! Exploiter! No more such fumets! The world
is alive
with laws, and all who defy them will at last be
destroyed by them.
Think back on the days of old, think over the years,
down the ages.
Are the gods blind? indifferent to evil and stupidity? They've spoken in all man's generations, and they speak
even now:
âYou are fat, gross, bloated, a deceitful and underhanded
brood,
a nation wealthy and empty-headed. Your hills will
tremble
and your carcases will be torn apart in the midst of
streets.
A great fire has blazed from my anger.
It will burn to the depths of Hades' realm.
It will devour the earth and all its produce;
it will set fire to the foundations of mountains' ”
The dark king paused, his words still ringing, and
his eyes had no spark
of humanness in them, it seemed to me. Jason said
nothing.
Then, once more, Paidoboron spoke, more quietly now, his hoarse, dry voice like an oracle's voice through
cavern smoke:
“You've raised up again and again that towering son
of Zeus,
fierce Herakles, as the chief of betrayers, suggesting
that nought
you've done, or might do, could hold a candle to his
perfidy.
Shame, seducer! The ideal of loyalty raged in that man! Loyalty to Zeus, to Hylas, to his friends. He struck
down Hylas'
father from passionate hatred of his evil Stateânever
mind
how cheap his murderous stratagem. He threatened
to lay
all Mysia waste out of passionate sorrow at loss of his
friend.
And in the same mad rage he murdered the sons of
Boreas,
who had loved him weakly, intellectually, and
prevented your ship
from turning back when you'd stranded him.
Wide-minded Zeus
did not bequeath his wisdom to his son: from
Alkmene he got
his brains. But the sky-god's absolutes burned in
Herakles
like quenchless underground fire. They do not burn in
you.
Impotent, wily, colubrine, you'd buy and sell all man's history, if it lay in your power. Ghost ships
indeed!
Civilization beware if Jason is the model for it! When feelings perishâthe wound we share with the
cow and the lionâ
then rightly the world will return to the rule of spiders.”
So
he spoke, and would say no more. And Aison's son said
nothing.
I would not have given three straws, that moment,
for Jason's hopes.
And then, all at once, came an eerie change. The
red-leaved branches
framed in the windows, blowing in the autumn wind,
snapped into
motionlessness. Every man, fly, cricket, the wine that fell streaming from the lip of the pitcher
in the slave boy's hand,
hung frozen. It seemed the scene had become a divine
projection
on a golden screen. Then, in that stillness, Hera leaped
up,
eyes blazing, and, turning to Athena, flew into a rage.
“Sly wretch!”
she bellowed. I flattened to the floor. Her voice made
the rafters shake,
though it failed to awaken the sea-kings, frozen to
marble. Athena
fell a step backward, quaking. I had somehow dropped
my glasses,
so that all I could see of the goddesses was a luminous
blur.
I felt by the wall, furtive as a mouse, and at last I found
them,
hooked them over my ears in haste and peeked out
again.
The queen of goddesses wailed: “What a perfect
fool
I was
to trust you even for an instant! You just can't
resist,
can you!
I think you're my true ally, and I listen to Jason's
cunning,
and I think, That Athena! The goddess of mind is surely
Zeus's
masterpiece!' And what are
you
thinking? You're
dreaming up
answers!
You don't
care!
You don't care about
anything!
He
stops to take a breath
and your quick wit darts to old Fatslats there, and you
inspire him with words
and you ruin all Jason's accomplished! âAnd
you,
you halfwitâ”
She whirled to confront Aphrodite. “You caused the
whole thing! You change
your so-called mind and forget about Medeia and make
our Pyripta
all googley-poo over Aison's son, and Athena can't
help it,
she has to oppose you. It's a habit, after all these
centuries.”
Aphrodite blushed scarlet and backed away as her sister
had done.
âYour Majesty, do be reasonable,” Athena said. Her voice was softâit was faint as a zephyr, in fact,
from fear.
But the wife of Zeus did not prefer to be reasonable. Her dark eyes shone like a stormcloud blooming and
rippling with light. “
Betrayal,” she groaned, and clenched her fists. “That's
good. That's really
good! You make Paidoboron talk of betrayal, how fine true loyalty is, and you, you don't bat an eyelash at how your trick's a betrayal of me! Does nothing in the world
count?
How can you do it, forever and ever manufacturing
structures,
when the whole vast ocean of Time and Space is
thundering aloud
on the rocks, and the generations of men are all on the run, rootless and hysterical?”
“Your Majesty, please,
I beg you,” Athena said. The queen of goddesses
paused,
still angry, I thought, but not unaware of gray-eyed
Athena's
fear and helplessness. Aphrodite kept quiet, her dark eyes large. Hera waitedâstern, 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 rightâwaiting,
waitingâ
while children die in ambiguous causes, and wicked men make warsâwaitingâwaiting for the war to reach