John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

the stars,

for the wombsoft slosh of fat. The corpus of law grows

bloated

like a corpse recovered from the sea; and those who

enforce the law

grow cynical and rich, foxy, wolfish, beyond inculpation by any man, till all but frampold devils are shackled in chains. Then like a thigh-wound festering, the city

overflows

her battlements and coigns — robs all the land

surrounding for victuals,

chops green-forested mountains for timber, quogs out

quarries,

to heave up monuments worthy of the devastating

power of her kings,

tombs for the slyest of her paracletes, the most

celebrated

of her enemy-smashers, deified dragon-men—

sky-high houses

staddled on broken-backed slaves. Consumes the land,

the clouds;

builds ships for trade, extends her scope; finds conquest

cheaper,

more durable. And so that hour arrives at last

when the city, towering like a mammoth oak — great

shining bartizans,

pennons of crimson and gold like leaves in autumn

on her high-

spired parapets — an oak majestic in its ignorant pride, rotten at the core — shudders suddenly at an odd

new wind,

and trembles, incredulous, shaken by the gale of

exploited men’s howls,

and to all the world’s astonishment, siles down.

So it’s gone

for a thousand, thousand years, and so it will continue.

“You may say, ‘Nevertheless, there is good in cities: Where else

can men

support great art? The complexity of music, the

intrinsicate craft

of poetry? Who else can pay for architecture,

the gifts of science, ennobling pleasure of philosophy?’

I answer this: To a hungry man, all food is food, sufficient to his need. Trembling with weakness, he

does not ask

for meats denatured by subtle rocamboles. But the

man well-fed,

as short of breath as a boar at the trough, dull-headed

with wine,

bloated on the blood of his workers’ children — that

man has tastes

more particular: not taste for food but for taste itself. An art has been born. So the poet whose hunger is

simply to speak—

tell truths, right wrongs — what need has he for the

lipogram,

for colors of rhetoric, antilibrations of phrase on phrase?

Only to the fool who believes all truths debatable, who believes true virtue resides not in men but

in eulogies,

true sorrow not in partings but in apopemptic hymns, and true thought nowhere but in atramentaceous

scrollery—

only to him is elegant style, mere scent, good food.

The city, bedded on the sorrows of the poor, compacts

new sweets

to incense the corpse of the weary rich.

“—And as for science, cure my disease and I’ll thank you for it. Yet I do

not think

you mix your potions and juleps for me. By the ebony

beds

of the old loud-snoring mighty you wring your hands

and spoon out

remedies — dole out health for the coin of convalescent

spiders

in a kingdom of hapless flies. For the spider, health itself becomes not need but taste, where the treatment of

fevers and chills,

chapped lips, a slight but debilitating dryness of the

palate while eating

cake, are men’s chief griefs. So it is with all the arts; so even Queen Theology turns a casual amusement for the pornerastic sky- and earth-consumer, a flatulence past the power of all man’s remedies. Such is my

judgment.

I may be in error — a man as remote from the bustlings

of cities

as a stylite praying in his cloud. Refute these doubts

of mine,

prove that the moral and physical advance of the

citified man

outruns the sly proreption of his smoking garbage

dumps,

or the swifter havoc of his armies, and I’ll speedily

recant. Meanwhile,

the past of the world is what it is — read it who likes. As for the present, I can tell you this, by the sure augury of stars. The minarets of Troy will burn — vast city

of tradesmen

buying and selling, extorting and swindling, callipygious

peacocks

whose splay touches even the jade traffic. And out of

its ashes

will come new cities, and new destructions — a pyre

for the maiden

who now rules white-walled, thundering Carthage, and

afterward a city

on seven hills, a seat of empire suckled by she-wolves, mighty as Olympos itself. But that throne too will fall.

And so through the ages, city by city and empire by

empire,

the world will fall, rebuild, and fall, and the mistake

charge on

to the final conflagration. I will tell you the truth:

the mistake

is man. For his heart is restless, and his brain a

crisis brain,

short-sighted, mechanical, dangerous. And the

white-loined city

is man’s great temptress: hungry for comfort at

whatever the cost,

hungry for power, hydroptic-souled, conceiving dire

needs

till the last of conceivable needs is sated, and nothing

remains

but death; and desiring death. There’s pride’s

star-spangled finale!

The fool who says in his heart ‘There is no God’

makes God

in his own image, and God thereafter is Corinth, or

Carthage—

a sprawling bawd and a maniac — a brattle of voices in one sear skull — a tyrant terrified by shadows. If gods exist, they must soon overwhelm that whore — for

their weapons, barns

of famine. They will send sharp teeth of beasts, and the

venom of serpents;

lay bare the beds of seas, and reveal the world’s

foundations.

The earth will wither, polluted beneath its inhabitants’

feet,

and the false god made in the image of man will

lie slaughtered.

“But the man

who submits to the gods and abandons himself, refuses

his nature,

who turns from the city to the rocks and highground—

by mastery of his heart

denies the lust to rule and oppress, the fool’s-gold joy of the sophisticate — to him the gods send honey of

the cliffs

and oil from the flinty crag. Like eagles caring for

their young,

the gods will spread their wings at the rim of the nest

to hold him

and shore him safe in their pinions.

‘This heaven requires me to speak. No one requires you to hear me, or understand.”

With that the tall, black-bearded Northerner ceased and stiffly

sat down,

and he glared all around him like a wolf. He was,

it seemed to me,

eager to be gone, the labor the stars had demanded

of him

finished. The sea-kings glanced at each other and here and there men laughed discreetly, as if at

some joke

wholly unrelated to Paidoboron’s speech. The Argonaut’s

face

was expressionless, Pyripta’s baffled. Old Kreon at last stood up, enfeebled giant. He rubbed his hands together,

hesitant and thoughtful, and pursed his lips. With

a solemn visage

and one eye squeezed tight shut, the king of Corinth

said:

“I’m sure I speak for every man in this room when I say, true and straightforward Paidoboron, that we’re

deeply grateful

for the message you’ve brought us, distressing as it is.

You’ve made explicit, it seems to me, the chief

implication

of Jason’s tragic story: we’re fools to put all our faith in fobs and spangles no firmer than the heart of man—

satisfactions

of animal hungers, or the idealism of the dim-brained

dog.

I have seen myself such mistaken idealism:

the fair white neck of Jokasta broken for a foolish

prejudice,

she who might, through her people’s love, have saved