John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

he stifles our life-thirsty souls in old Phineus’

winding-sheet!

‘O woeful man,’ he teaches us, ‘all life is a search for death.’ —Is 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: ‘decay of the extremities,’ ‘the element of Chance at the heart

of all

our projects.’ ‘Und Alles Sein ist flammend Leid,’ we cry. ‘O, save us, Jason,’ we howl in dismay, ‘feed 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 us — when he’s twisted and turned us by all

his tricks,

baffled our desire, exhausted our will — he’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 purpose — attacks

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 will — the mind detached from the dark of tentacles mournfully groping toward light — is a mind that will

ruin us:

thought begins in the blood — and 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 are — a 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.

‘And 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 Thoas — so

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 Hylas — whom Jason excuses by virtue

of his youth

and the soft, warm weather that shameful night—

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:

‘You 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