John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

“Let me ask you to join me for a minute or two in pondering these opinions. Begin with the second.

“No decent man, no man of sober judgment, I venture to say, can fail to be moved to tears of profoundest sympathy by the process which led to Jason’s rejection of physical desires. We might of course argue, if we wished to be abusive, that from start to finish the problem revealed in Jason’s story is not physical desire but unsound assessment. Which of us here — I do not mean to be unduly critical — would stake all he had on a priestess of Hekate, that is, a witch? — even promising marriage and everlasting praise of her virtue! Which of us, seeing his beloved wife in a very crucible of fiery pain, would creep unfeelingly into a slavegirl’s bed? And which of us here would entertain for a moment the notion that revealing his deepest hostilities to a woman for whom murder is as easy as mumbling six words of Sumerian at midnight, or thirty seconds with a few venene herbs, a sorceress for whom all grammary begins with the abrogation of commoners’ morals, embrace of the deep’s hyphalic causes — which of us, I say, would imagine that such revelations could be wholly innocuous? But to focus on trifles of this kind obscures the darker issue.” He gestured all trivialities away.

“Lord Jason’s theory — an extremely popular one these days, it seems to me — is that mind and body are by nature, and in principle ought to be, totally divorced, an opinion we may trace in Jason’s thought to the punch-addled king of the Bebrykes — not that it matters. An opinion that existence precedes essence. — Don’t laugh too quickly! The most outlandish cacodoxy can take on the seeming solidity of stone if its argument is given with sufficient flourish — a proper appeal to our delight in symmetry, with pedal tone notice of our universal dissatisfactions, cut off from Nature by our conscious choice to eat Mother Nature’s bears and apples (King Oidipus’ problem in its noblest disguise), cut off till we doubt that we’re anything at all but our hearts’ sad swoons and deliquiums. ‘I think, therefore I am not,’ is the gist of the argument. If I can think about a thing, I am not that thing, the argument goes, if only because subject is one word and object is another and therefore there must be two things involved, not one. And since I can in solemnly spectable fact stand back and think about even my mind, it must be the case, however befuddling, that I-who-think am not even my mind: I am emptiness! My consciousness is a firmly established prison wall between myself and all Nature, even my own. A terribly depressing thought, I grant you. But the cave to which we’ve wandered has even darker places. Since my consciousness depends upon words, formal structures, the reality outside me is what it is because of the words I frame it in — in other words, there’s no possibility whatsoever of perceiving the objective truth of anything, there is only my truth: my understanding of what words and the objects they grope toward mean. The tiger’s rays are my mind’s illations, his tectonics the hum of my braincells.” He gestured.

“I suggest to you, gentlemen, that however my personal vision may construct the hungry tiger, however boldly I assert (as my scrupulous logic may require) that the tiger I sense is not really there, the tiger will eat me, and I’ve known it all along, whatever my logic may asseverate. I suggest, in short, that Jason’s theory is a deep-seated lie: I do not, in fact, think merely with my mind. If I did, I could not explain to myself why you hate me for cooking the stranger. I suggest that philosophers, whose chief business is to think things through, not slog on by faith, like the rest of us, make dangerous, nay, deadly kings. Ideas quite harmless in the philosopher’s attic, mistaken opinions which time can easily unmask, can turn to devouring dragons if released on the world.

“What I claim, with respect to Jason’s idea — though I do not pretend to prove my claim, being no true philosopher myself but only a man philosophically equipped to defend himself against philosophers — is that man is whole, his passions as priceless as his crafty mind, and mysteriously connected, if not, indeed, identical — so that rejection of the body is a giant step toward madness. If evil actions are transparently evil, the reason is that I can feel them as surely and concretely as I feel a cow or a pang of love. That, I suspect, and nothing baser, is the reason we make cities. Not to flee raw experience of Nature, but to arrive at it, to escape the drudgery of hunting and gobbling so that when we sit down to supper we can take our time and notice it. Show the crude country singer the noblest achievements of our epic poets, and he’ll shame all critics in his praise of it.” He looked at me again, and again winked. I looked around in alarm and embarrassment. He continued: ‘The crude balladeer King Paidoboron praises — where are his verses most quoted and loved? In the city, of course. There, there only, have clodpate mortals the time and experience to perceive and appreciate artlessness, or be moved by plain-brained message.

“But I was speaking of Jason.” Gesture. “He would curb the flesh in iron chains, deny all passions for the common good. I ask you one question. Can a man make laws for other men if he’s purified out of his blood all trace of humanness? I can say to god-struck Paidoboron, ‘I disagree,’ and no one is overmuch offended by it. But let him constrain me by inflexible laws to behave and frame my affirmations exactly as he does, and you know very well what the upshot will be. Let the tyrant gird his loins and cement his alliances, because make no mistake, I am coming for him!

“Though I’ve no intention of crushing light-winged opinions into staggering and groaning legislation, I have opinions of my own that I value as dearly as Jason does his — and between you and me and the gatepost, I think mine more tenable. I celebrate the flesh unashamedly: I watch and guide it with mind as a doting mother does her child. I celebrate dancing and the creation of images and uplifting fictions; I celebrate among other bodily sensations, health and wealth and power, which does not mean I’m unmoved by sickness and poverty and weakness. Search high and low through this moaning world, you’ll find no man’s illachrymable but the man of stern theories, the ice-cold slave of mere intellect, donzel with a ponderous book, or six loosely knotted opinions he’s fashioned to a whip. Don’t tell me, when you speak of such men, of their liberalism.

“So much for that. Return to Jason’s more important principle. He claims we should balance idealism with pragmatic awareness of the changing world. No man of sense would deny the point.” He gestured wearily. “But gentlemen, consider. As once all the princes of Akhaia rallied around Jason for pursuit of the golden fleece, so now all the princes have rallied around King Agamemnon, to avenge the ravishing of Helen by Paris of Troy. The morality of the war may be right or wrong — I take no stand — but one thing seems certain: when the Trojan war is won or lost, those princes who bravely stood together to fight it will emerge a league as powerful as any the world has ever seen. How is it that Jason— given his theory of power by alliance — sits here in comfort, drinking Kreon’s wine — though a man no older than Hektor, I think, and no less wily than Odysseus— when the men he’ll need to ally himself with, if he ever achieves a position as king, are wading knee-deep in dear friends’ blood toward Troy? Not that I mean to criticize unduly. I express, merely, my puzzlement. He has given us difficult and complex reasons for believing what we all believe anyway, as surely as we believe, for no explicable reason, that we ought not to bake harmless strangers in our ovens — yet he seems to me not to live by them. The matter needs clarification.”