John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

And then today — from bad to worse, as I was saying — the ephors came to collect our writing. I gave them a list of enemies of Agathon’s; it was all I could think of that might be of any use. There were four ephors this time, but I had no chance to talk to them, because of a circumstance. They brought my mother. I can hardly stand to describe it. Her hair has turned as white as snow and she can hardly walk, her knees are so bad. She could hardly talk, either. She just stood at the bars hanging onto them, crying and crying. It came over me like a spring avalanche that Agathon and I are doomed and my mother knows it. They may have told her, who knows? Anyway, all she said was, “Oh, Demodokos, poor Demodokos! What’s this world coming to?” Sorrow rushed up in me and flooded my chest, hearing my own name, my own mother’s way of saying it. I’ve been an idiot, hating her all these years, or anyway resenting her, or whatever. A boy’s mother is the most precious thing in his life. People should tell people about that when they’re young, so that when their parents get old and poorly they don’t have to be full of remorse at having thrown away the most precious thing the gods have ever given them. “Poor Mama,” I said, over and over, patting her fingers. I couldn’t even put my arms around her, though I tried maybe three different times to reach through the bars and back in around her shoulders. I couldn’t even see her, in fact, because tears were streaming from my eyes like waterfalls from caves. I felt as if my heart would break, the way all she could say was my name and “What’s this world coming to?” All her life she’s been telling people all these useful sayings like “A penny saved is a penny earned” and “Nobody loves a sluggard” and “Zeus helps them that helps theirselves.” She was a nuisance, a chain snarled around my feet, but she was something you could lean on, solid as a wall. But now here I was, sobbing and sobbing and patting her fingers, saying, “Now now! Poor Mama! Now now!”

When they asked Agathon for what he’d written he didn’t give them anything. He said all he had was some drawings which it would embarrass them to show them. You could see they thought he was playing some prank, and he swore a number of solemn oaths to convince them, which he didn’t.

But he learned some news. I didn’t hear it at the time, I was so distraught about poor Mother, but he told me after they left. The ephor that hadn’t come before was an old man that Agathon used to see often at Lykourgos’s house, and because he was a friend and elderly, less rigid than most of Lykourgos’s men — so Agathon says — he let my master in on something. Before Lykourgos left for Delphi, he called a meeting of the whole city. In what was for him a very long speech, Lykourgos reviewed all his laws and discussed the extent to which his reformation of the State had proved successful. He told them that he now thought everything reasonably well established, both for the happiness and the virtue of the State, but he said there was still one thing to be done, a thing of the greatest possible importance — a thing so important he thought it not fit to impart until he had consulted the oracle. In the meantime, he asked that they observe all his laws without the slightest alteration, despite all pressures of riot, war, and natural catastrophe, until his return from Delphi, and then he would act as the god directed him. Agathon says the ephor says they all agreed and wished him well, but that wasn’t enough. He insisted that the two kings, the senators, and all the commons take an oath that they would abide by and maintain the established form of polity until he, Lykourgos, should return. They did as he asked.

A strange business. What has Lykourgos got up his sleeve? I wonder.

Another strange business, and worse than strange: It appears that we’re to rot here in prison until Lykourgos himself either releases or condemns us. Considering the oath he made them take, I have a feeling we may be here longer than we like. It’s better than execution, of course. But then, if he himself had us arrested — Lykourgos, who seemed to be our hope …

I witnessed the end of the conversation myself. It was so disgusting that even my mama’s grief couldn’t distract me from it. Agathon thanked the old man for his kindness and said he would gladly pay him — the ephor — if only he had anything to give. “Woe is me,” said Agathon, “I have nothing left but my good name!” The ephor took it very soberly, though the other three ephors looked slightly suspicious of Agathon’s sincerity, and when the old ephor shook Agathon’s hand there were tears in Agathon’s eyes. Agathon looked to me a little ashamed of himself, but as usual he blundered on, making it worse. “I only regret that my children are not here to see me in my misery! It would serve as an excellent lesson to them, to trust not in the things of this world, neither power nor position, nor puissance nor pelf, nor property nor politics, nor puberty nor pussy.” The ephor looked at him somewhat oddly (Agathon was weeping rivers now) and they shook hands again. The tall ephor — the one I talked to the other times — had his fingertips over his mouth, studying my master.

Dear gods, please in the next life make Agathon a cow.

Love poetry, like anything eke, is simultaneously a cause and an effect. The lover writes because the emotion that charges every line (if the poetry’s decent) will give him no rest until he’s set it down—“immortalized it,” he likes to think — and when he’s set it down the emotion becomes more clear, more pure, than it ever was in Nature. Art is more dignified than life, and, to just that degree, more deathlike. Insofar as it’s able, the poet’s mind rejects any word, any image or subtlety of rhythm or rhyme less grand than what he’s seen in the finest poetry he knows — the flesh-and-blood woman he loves deserves at least the best he can offer her — and so, systematically, he distorts the real experience toward what it perhaps would have been if it had happened between, say, Odysseus and Penelope; and then, rereading, he adopts and remembers the experience in its transmuted form, builds upon it as though it had happened, and, strange to say, becomes a far nobler lover than he was before, still day by day casting his net of words ahead of him to trap some finer vision. He shows the poems to his lady, who sees her admirer in a new light, clearer and paler than heaven itself, and, more important, sees herself too in a new light, and so transcends her humanness, becomes in life the once airy, visionary figure of the poems. All to the good, I am tempted to say. But I do not think the light that illuminates lovers’ verse is the light of omniscient Apollo. The lover remains, for all his fine words, a hungry, fallible, dissatisfied child, badly in need of a fallible, all-forgiving mother; and the lady remains, for all her borrowed dignity and green incandescence, a girl child groping in alarm through a forest, in desperate search for a father. The light of Apollo (I give you my word as his official Seer) gives comfort, resignation, perhaps even peace, but not hope. Visions, like humble pack mules, exist in time, continually relapsing, transmogrifying, forever eluding the stretched-out hand as they guide the heart, by subtle, labyrinthine ways, to the chill and mist of the tomb. It’s the same, of course, with the poetry of Patriotism. Devotion to one’s country, like any other pure emotion, is bloodless art, no healthy business of common mortals! — an affair for gray Phaiakians.

I taught Iona writing. Merely an excuse for almost daily visits. Occasionally when I went there, always around midmorning, Dorkis would be there. He pretended, not only to me but to himself and Iona as well, that nothing was wrong. Nothing was, in a sense. He was a man comfortable with risks. He loved her; we knew that. And he was fond of me; we knew that too. There was nothing more to be said: he laid no claims on life. He told me once that to become an expert swimmer, a man had to try himself sooner or later in deep and dangerous waters. If he survived, it was worth it. If he didn’t, well, the gods hand down no guarantees. There are those who are shocked by such opinions. Old men rocking in their grandchildren’s gardens, their knees wrapped in comforters, their shawls around their heads — old men who drink herbs and observe the elements like worried sparrows — may cough in horror or squeak like bats in righteous scorn of the idea that taking needless risks is a desirable thing, the bedrock of character. But there are many gods, many truths, as Dorkis used to say. This truth was his, and whether he was worried or not — I couldn’t tell — he accepted its demands. I would visit his house and he would welcome me like a favorite brother. We would talk, the three of us — very interesting talks: on neighbors, politics, religion — and then eventually, he would withdraw to the room where he worked his accounts, or he would ride away with his oldest son and an assistant or two to consult with his cooks, repair some breakdown, resolve some dispute, or inspect the farms and storage units which provided the food for the communal halls, and Iona and I would go out to the garden to sit on the secluded, rustic bench overlooking her flowering herbs and roses, and run through our masquerade of education. Sometimes, when I found her alone, we would talk in the house, after the writing lesson. I would sit on the rug with my back against the wall, my crutch on the floor beside me, and she would sit on the pillowed couch with her legs tucked under her, and we would talk about our childhoods. I mentioned, once, my brother’s death, how I closed up like a catatonic’s fist, and how Tuka later calmed me. And I told her about Konon.