John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

with me further,

queerly indifferent herself, I thought, to the argument. Her few teeth were like a dog’s; her withered hands

were palsied.

“ ‘On disaster,’ the brave and ambitious say, ‘good

fortune perches.’

But I say, ‘It is beneath good fortune that disaster

crouches.’ ”

She leered again, and by a gesture incredibly simple

and subtle—

no more, perhaps, than the slightest perceptible

movement of her eyes—

she suggested a huge and obscene bump and grind.

She cooed, eyes closed,

“The further one goes

the less one knows

for hustle and bustle,

for hustle and bustle;

Therefore the wise man moves not a muscle.”

She chuckled, foolish and apologetic, and I determined

to waste no more time on her.

Reckless and honest as a madman, I burst

through the seething ocean of gods to Zeus’s feet,

where Apollo,

shining like the mirroring sea, sat tuning his lyre

for a song—

gentle Apollo with the dragon tusks of Helios.

“Stop!” I cried out — and all motion stopped, even

the movement

of Apollo’s sleeve in the gentle cosmic wind. I shouted, angrily slamming my right fist into my left-hand palm, “I object! This palace is a mockery! The whole creation is a monstrous, idiotic mockery! The silliest child on

his mother’s knee

knows good from evil, selfishness from love.” Nothing

stirred, no one moved.

I turned around, gazed at the gods stretching out in

all directions from the throne,

and my soul was filled with amazement and ecstasy at

my power to instruct and lecture them.

I stretched out my hands like a preacher addressing

multitudes, and I felt aglow

like a winter sun. “If the truth is so clear even dogs

can see it, how dare the gods

be baffled and befuddled, raising up time after time mad

idiots to positions of power,

filling the schools with professors with not one jot or

tittle of love for the things

they pretend to teach; filling the pulpits with atheists

and cowards who put on their robes

for love of their mothers, merely; and filling the courts

with lawyers indifferent to justice,

the medical schools with connivers and thieves and

snivelling, sneaking incompetents,

the seats of government with madmen and bullies — all

this though nothing in the world is clearer

than evil and good, the line between justice and

unselfishness (the way of the decent)

and cowardice, piggish greed, foul arrogance, the

filth-fat darkness of the devil’s forces!”

As I spoke, declaiming, making existence as clear

as day—

saying nothing not spoken by the noblest of poets and

sages since time

began (and I said far more than I’ve set down here,

believe me—

revealed to the gods all the wisdom of the Hindus,

the secret rediscovered

by Schopenhauer, how man must perceive that the

spirit in himself

is a spark of the fire that’s in all things living, so that

hurting another

means hurting himself; told them how Jesus was angry

at the tomb

of Lazarus, how the awesome Tibetan Book of the Dead has a lower truth and a higher truth; told them of

the poetry

of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Homer and Virgil, Chia Yi

and Tu Fu,

and the anonymous Kelts— The hall of Cynddylan is

dark tonight,

without fire, without candle. But for God, who’ll give

me sanity? —

all this and more) — as I spoke I felt more and more

filled with light,

more filled with the strange and divine understanding

of the mystery of Love

that Dante spoke of in his Paradiso, all the

scattered leaves

of the universe gathered— legato con amore —and as

I spoke, I seemed

to rise without effort, like an eagle with his wings

spread wide on an updraft

past Zeus’s shins to his bolt-square knees, past his belly

and chest

(still gesturing, lecturing, compressing all life to the

burning globe

of a family knit by unalterable love — my own

humble family,

for where but in a wife, after twenty-one years of

loyalty and faith,

sorrows and shocks that would shake down mountains,

and a joyous holiness

that theory and defense leave empty and foolish as

program notes

or the weight in ounces of a lily at twilight — where

else can a man

learn surely of things inexpressible?), and I rose

to the very

brow of Zeus, high above drifting haze, above life, and stopped mid-sentence. I gazed all around me

in alarm.

I was standing on a mountain, miles past the timber, a place cased

thickly in ice,

snowdust everywhere like fire in a furnace. My shoes

were frozen,

my fingers were blue. “Goddess!” I howled. The

old fat farm-wife,

whiskered like a goat and as dull of eye as a child

without wits,

came smiling toward me like a ship’s prow sliding

out of mist. She stood

and looked at me awhile with her drooling grin,

then turned her back

and squatted, inviting me to ride. I climbed on.

Immediately I seemed

much warmer. As we started down she sang a foolish

sort of song,

its music vaguely like an echo of Apollo’s tuning of

his harp:

“On Cold Mountain

The lone round moon

Lights the whole clear cloudless sky.

Honor this priceless natural treasure

Concealed in five shadows,

Sunk deep in the flesh.”

We came down to the clouds, then down to the

timberline;

came to a view of high villages — goatsheds, barns

on stilts.

We came to a river. The foul witch sang:

‘When men see old Lill

They all say she’s crazy

And not much to look at —

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don’t get what I say

And I don’t talk their language

All I can say to those I meet:

“Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

Hmmmmm.’“

My double appeared at the door of a cowbarn, pulling

at his hatbrim.

“I think your vision has no rules,” he said. “Mere

literary scraps.

The somnium animale of a man who reads too much.

I see traces of a fear that literature may be nothing

but a game,

and stark reality the chaos remaining when the

last game’s played.”

What could I say to such cynicism? My heart beat wildly and I jumped from the old woman’s back to snatch up

a handful of stones.

He saw my purpose — my double, or whoever— and clutching the brim of his hat in one hand he went

limping for the woods.

“Is nothing serious?” I yelled, pelting him. He squealed

like a pig.

He was gone. I wrung my fingers, whispering,

Is nothing serious?

The goddess had vanished. “Sirius! Sirius!” the dark

trees sang.

“Let it be,” the deep-voiced thunder rumbled, beyond

tall pillars,

beyond tall oaks like skeletal hands still snatching

at nothing

in the cockshut sky. They lighted the torches, for

the day had gone dark

prematurely, grown sullen as a nun full of grudges.

King Kreon rose,

stretched out his hands for silence, but the flashing sky

boomed on,

drowning his announcement, drowning the applause of