John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

of air,

bright skulls (Was that my Euridike’s scream?) …

How the gods must have howled,

rolled in the dirt on their bellies. — However, he’d agreed, one capable of death, therefore of dignity, and so, solemn in the Funhouse (behind him the

beautiful woodnymph,

white arms reaching, yellow hair streaming in the

cavern’s wind,

eyes like a fawn’s), he moves past grisly shapes,

indecent

allegories— Grief, Avenging Care, and (look!) there’s Pale Disease, the back of his hand to his forehead

(woe!),

and lo, there’s Melancholy Age, his hand on his pecker,

shrunk

to a stick. Step wider, Orpheus! That’s Hunger there! Snaps like a dog! And by him, Fear, trembling, pressed

close

to Pain and Poverty and Death! So past them all they

moved,

those lovers, and he saw the first faint light of day.

They’d made it!

No more horrors, not even a spider, a hornèd ant between where he stood and the green-edged light of

freedom! He turned.

She ran toward him … and vanished. He stared in grief

and rage

and then, with a groan, remembered. And so he left the

Funhouse,

walked out into the light. He died soon after, a wreck. Go there now and you’ll see two shades together, alone on a flat rock ledge, holding hands. There are sounds

of dripping springs,

faint moans farther in, the whisper of spiders walking.

“A tale

most spiritual, most moving. And yet I’ll tell you the

truth:

He wouldn’t have done it at forty, or even at thirty.

He’d have wept

and ordered a monument for her, or started a fund.

Shall we say

hooray for youth, inexperience? Shall we grieve our

loss,

splendor in the grass, mourn that we’ve passed

twenty-three? I’ve seen

small boys tease snakes, dive into torrents, eat poison, planning to survive. The innocent are fools, and the wise are cowards. Between those

two grim lots

we construct, out of paper and false red hair, our

dignity.

“Never mind. We stood by the cave, looking in. Old

Mopsos said:

‘Shade you’d care to converse with, lord of the

Argonauts?’

He was smiling, food in his beard. I shook my head.

He turned

to Tiphys, and his smile was wicked now. ‘Maybe you

then, Tiphys!

Something tells me you’re eager to see inside.’ But

Idmon,

younger of the seers, broke in. ‘Old witch, enough of

this!’

His voice cracked. He was enraged. Bright tears

splashed down his cheeks.

His fists were clenched, and if Telamon hadn’t reached

out and restrained him—

he and the boy, Ankaios — we might have lost Mopsos

right then.

I spoke up quickly: ‘We’ve wood to gather.’ We turned

away.

And so, at that Cape, we passed six days. Unprofitably.

“We left two graves on the island. We saw the first

night that Tiphys

was not himself — irritable, testy, unable to keep warm though sweat stood out on his forehead. From old King

Lykos’ city,

nearby, we called physicians. They came — great fat old

mules.

With their fingertips they opened the sick man’s eyes,

peeked in

and solemnly shook their heads. ‘Here’s a dying man,’

they said.

We watched with him, praying to Apollo, god of healing.

But Idmon,

younger of the seers, refused to come close. He knew

that his time

had come, and he meant to stay far from the thing, give

fate the slip.

He would not walk in the woods with us, nor go where

there might be

vipers, spiders, bees. He went out to a wide, low field and set up an altar to Apollo and, wailing, threw

himself over it,

moaning, pleading for mercy; his face and chest were

bathed

in tears. Not all his prophetic lore, not all his prayers could save him. By a reedy stream at the edge of the

water-meadow

there lay a white-tusked boar — he was big as an ox—

cooling

his huge belly and his bristly flanks in the mud. He lived alone, too old for sows; an isolate. There young Idmon went, cutting reeds for his altar fire. The boar rose up with a jerk, a grunt of annoyance; with one quick,

casual tusk,

opened the young seer’s thigh. He fell to the ground,

shrieking.

Those who were nearest him rushed to his aid. Too late,

of course.

The boar had opened his belly now, from the bowels to

the chest.

Peleus let fly his javelin as the boar retreated; he turned, charged again. And now crazy Idas wounded

him,

and unsatisfied when the boar went down on his knees,

impaled,

Idas threw himself over him, screaming like a boar

himself,

seized the boar by the knife-sharp tusks and twisted till

he broke

its neck. Moaning, they carried Idmon to the ship, and

there,

in Idas’ arms, he died. Idas raged, beat the planks with

his fists.

He didn’t remember then that he’d wanted to kill poor

Idmon

once. We dug the grave. Where Tiphys lay, the

physicians

talked. One spoke of a curious case. He sat in the

corner,

fingers interlaced on his belt, his eyes half shut. He said, droning, blinking his red-webbed eyes, familiar with

death:

‘… a case of decay of the extremities. On the hands the tipjoints and in part even the second joints of the fingers were wanting, having rotted off, and the remaining stumps of the fingers were much swollen and in part nearly ready to fall off. The right-hand knuckle joint of the youngest child’s forefinger was already rotting away, and the feet of the two older brothers were in still a more horrible state. They were mere shapeless masses surcharged with foreign matter, with several deep, consuming sores going down to the bone and discharging bloody, putrid water. The children’s arms and legs had lost all sense of feeling below the elbows and knees. Some fellow before me, in order to ascertain the insensibility of the members, had pierced one boy through the hand up the arm with a long needle to a point where pain was felt, which occurred at the elbow. The patients’ exhalations were positively unbearable, the true odor of putrescence. The digestion was utterly prostrated.’

The other was more metaphysical. He smoothed his

beard,

pacing, occasionally rolling an eye toward Tiphys. His

heavy

robe trailed on the planking, occasionally snagged. He

said:

‘… deal of nonsense been spoken about death, if you want my professional opinion. For instance, “Dying is the only thing no one can do for me.” Grotesque banality! If to die is to die in order to achieve some end — to inspire, to bear witness, for the country, or some such, then anyone at all can die in my place — as In the song in which lots are drawn to see who’s to be eaten. There is no personalizing virtue, so to speak, which is peculiar to my death. Or again, they say, “Death is the resolved chord which ends the melody.” Sentimental tripe! Hogwash! An end of a melody, in order to confer its meaning on the melody, must emanate from the melody itself, as any fool should be able to recognize. The perpetual appearance of the element of Chance at the heart of each of a given man’s projects cannot be apprehended as that man’s possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of all his possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of his possibilities. Death is the end, the putrification, of freedom.’

So they spoke, waiting out the night, doing all they

could for us.