John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

One last word on all that. The truth is, I was much impressed by Lykourgos’s Sparta when I arrived. Though I came full of scorn, even humanistic outrage — though also full of admiration for any man who could bring it off — I was impressed by the studied simplicity of the world Lykourgos had recreated. I saw his whole scheme, now that I was here, in the simplest and most lucid terms, and I was amazed at my former narrowness of vision. A matter of simple geography. Sparta was agricultural, required a huge labor force — not slaves but something almost slave, because that many slaves would be a threat to the master race — and required, above all, the reactionary temper which keeps a farmer regular of habit and stable. Athens lived by trade, a thing requiring liberalism, tolerance, flexibility. Neither was right or wrong, then: the Just Life was a mythological beast. I would study the world for its images of aspects of myself. I wrote poems about it.

For example:

Is it utter fancy that once one’s mind

was clear, one’s heart pure?

fancy that once one’s will inclined

to what one loved for sure?

On a stone road where donkeys grazed

high slopes above our heads,

and rocks like giant wolf skulls gazed

at the vast march of clouds,

we found a small, improbable

stone shrine — a barren place

where none would watch but a carved wood doll

with a staring, Dorian face.

Carnations bloomed inside the shrine

and coins lay on its stone;

someone had swept to the road’s rim

where the cliff wall rushed down.

A mile beyond that, high in the hills

past ruined silver mines,

juts that once spanned waterfalls,

old houses choked in vines,

we reached a huge gray-granite church

some god had pushed akilter.

Children played at its black mouth;

goats watched from the altar.

On the road, donkey path, two young workmen,

blackened as if by fire,

smiled, holy, then moved on,

patient as old desire.

Well, good. Who past the age of two has not experienced a hunger for simplicity? I wrote many poems of this kind when I first came to Sparta. But enough of that. I have been, like Lykourgos, a desperate man all my life.

“You’ll never make a Seer,” Agathon tells me in a voice of scorn, trying to nag me into it. But I’m no longer fooled. It’s true. I won’t. I don’t even want to be anymore. I watch him sitting at the table, breathing with his mouth open — the August heat’s deadly for a man as old and fat as him — writing, writing, hour after hour, not all the wisdom he’s collected from sages but the squalid details of his onion-stinking life: I see him wake up in the morning and sit up suddenly, with a startled look, remembering his project (he’s writing it all for my sake, he says), and I see him stand up at the side of his bed, trembling all over, tasting his sunken mouth, dusting his lips with his dry tongue — then he splashes water from the corner bowl over his moustache and beard and forehead (like King Soös, I think, and laugh), then wipes it off with the back of his hand — all this absentmindedly, thinking only of his crackpot project; and I think, Where’s your spooky gift gotten you, old man? “Mus’ get busy,” he mumbles, and glances out through the cell door, worried, checking what time it is by the slant of the sun.

It was different, in the beginning. I had personal problems, you might say, and Agathon was some kind of hope. I don’t know. I’d be peddling apples with Mother, and she’d keep saying things to me, trying to make me mind my business: “Mind them baskets, Demodokos. Money don’t grow on trees, you know.” And sometimes, to herself, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” And then she’d holler, “Biffins! Snow apples! Fresh as a day in spri-ing!” I would hurry along behind her, trying to catch up to where she went striding like a war-horse, eyes like a rooster’s, her back loaded like a mule’s. She could carry four times what I could carry, and she liked to remind me of it. “It’s not my fault,” I would say. “When I was little you didn’t feed me right.” “Hah! Accusing his poor mother!” she would say. (But she liked it when I stood up to her. I’d hear her telling people, “He’s not much to look at, good Zeus knows. But he’s got spirit! He’ll be my death!”) I would run along behind her, trying to catch up, and then a bunch of those girls would go past, Spartan girls naked as jellyfish, and I’d look down as long as they were coming toward me but as soon as they passed I’d peek back at them, those beautiful beautiful swinging asses, sleek and powerful and arrogant as the hams of deer, and all the muscle and bone would go out of my knees and the apples would go rolling. “Mind them baskets, Demodokos,” Mother would say. Sometimes as they passed they would swipe a couple of apples from the basket and would smile at me, and that was worse than anything. I wanted to talk to them, ask them what their names were and where they lived. But I was afraid. As I got older — fifteen and sixteen and seventeen — I thought I’d go out of my mind. My mother kept watching me, watching, watching, watching. “Stick to your own kind,” she’d say when she’d see me sort of peeking sideways at a troop of Spartan girls. A laugh. I felt the same thing with Helot girls. I would strip them with my eyes, imagine the blush around the nipples, the softness of bush between their legs, and then when I looked back at their faces I would practically faint from the beauty of their mouths and eyes, wanting to say “Hi!”—wanting to tell them I cared about them, tell them I’d listen to whatever they might wish to express, listen for ninety-nine years. I wanted to know if they were happy, what they dreamed at night, what they liked best to eat. I would watch them talking with good-looking boys or the boys that could always think of something funny, or the moody ones with knowing smiles, and then I’d look at how skinny my arms and legs are and I’d want to kill myself.

Sometimes when we were peddling we’d see Agathon. My mother would give him a wide berth, merely working the crowds that gathered when he talked. Sometimes she stuffed beeswax in her ears to defend her soul. — Not that he always had crowds. Sometimes he’d be sitting all alone, sprawled out over some steps with his thumb hooked in the jug handle, and he’d be singing, louder, more raucous than thunder. Or sometimes he’d just be standing on a corner, like a blind man waiting for help across the street. Sometimes he’d be playing with children. They liked him — they always liked crazy people. He’d try to skip rope with them, clinging with both hands to his jug and gasping for air like a weight lifter as he bounced, kicking out one foot, then the other. He drew large crowds when he wanted to, though, because of the crazy way he talked and because of the way he could mimic people: you’d swear the man he was mimicking was inside him. But naturally what the crowds liked best was his prophecies. He wouldn’t do that often. He had to wait for the mood to come over him, and sometimes, no matter how he strained, it wouldn’t, even if he was leaning on a horse. (Horses make impressions come, he says. He used to make me lean on horses sometimes when he was trying to teach me to get holy impressions. I hate horses. The smell makes me sick, and if I shut my eyes, feeling woozy, they turn around and bite.) Anyway, when we’d see him prophesying I’d go watch from way in back, jumping up and down to see. “Come away from there,” my mother would say. “A man’s known by the company he keeps.” And sometimes he’d preach. “Your bodies are naked, pretty ladies, but your minds are tucked away like things obscene!” Once he said, exactly in the voice of an old woman we knew “Husband, talk to me! You haven’t spoken a word in sixteen years.” The old man Agathon was pointing at was a garrulous fool, but what Agathon said was like an icy wind, and it made the old man cry.