Читать книгу Beyond Homer - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 9

Two weeks passed. Not once did I hear a single word from Julene or Carl, or anyone. Even Christine had disappeared. I filled my days with matutinal walks about the Garden of Luxembourg, or through it, if it were open, studied at the Bibliothèque Nationale, translated Pascal and some Baudelaire, and began drafting the first chapters of a new book. I intended to entitle it: From Descartes to Kant: Exploring the Epistemology of Doubt. A university press had already expressed interest in the project, which brought great relief. Consequently, I was able to write every morning on the book, without the anxiety of wondering who would publish it. In the afternoons, I would take long walks through the neighborhood, or take the metro to different arrondissements to revisit my favorite museums, or quartiers and parks.

It was now the third week of April. As I sat in my room, I found myself intrigued by Sullivan’s exposition of the Minotaur story.

Let us tackle the transparency of this myth, first. It has to be at a time prior to Greece’s independence of the Minoan period. Tribute is still being paid to the Island of Crete. No unequivocal archeological evidence exists to support human sacrifice, but it might have occurred. The time frame appears to precede the Doric invasions, as well as the disappearance of fabled Atlantis. These “events” follow the massive volcanic eruptions that happened to the north of Crete and signaled, in turn, its own demise. Perhaps a date of 1500–1300 BC is not out of order. Troy is still on the horizon, but the displaced People of the Sea, who invade Egypt and the coast of Canaan, arrive at this time.

Also to be noted is the secondary role assigned to the labyrinth and the Minotaur. From the rise of the Akkadians to the decline of the Babylonian Empire, a male-warrior society begins to undermine the role of the Goddess. Her symbols recede in significance and are replaced by more violent and virile icons. Among these are the fierce bull, tiered crowns that point to heaven to a dominant Father Sky, to the epics that hail the victory of Marduk over Tiamat (maligned as a feminine chaotic force and goddess of water and the grave). Crete had heretofore been spared this diminution of the Goddess, as witnessed in the graceful depictions of both male and female acrobats, somersaulting over the backs of bulls, who serve the Mother Goddess. Now the bull has become a symbol of terror, of death to be appeased, a fearful icon of malevolence, brutality, and marauding power. Half-man, half-beast, he serves the gods of death. No longer does he grace the enchanting frescoes of Knossos as an aesthetic figure of a gentler age. The subtlety and charm of the Goddess’s realm has been exchanged for a labyrinth of terror.

There is no need to berate the male world for this tragedy. Power had shifted from an agricultural and pastoral society to an expansionist and militaristic one. New migrations were sweeping across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean area. Plowshares and pruning hooks were being beaten into swords and spears; the arched bow and flaming arrow replaced the hoe.

What chords of response resonated in the hearts of those who heard this myth? How did they react, if at all? Perhaps women found value in the self-effacing actions of Ariadne, who willingly risked her life to assist the young Theseus. Her cunning and determination make her a candid exemplar for her gender, her abandonment, a warning to all women. Ambition must be tempered by loyalty. Jung finds a much more disturbing element. For the female, it lies in reconciling her inner anima with her true self. She must break free of her Mother’spower. The labyrinth, the womb, the menacing bull—all bespeak her need to become her own person, guided by her own forces as a woman. Theseus’s role in the “rescue” continues to make her subservient to the male, but his abandonment of her is a mixed blessing. Her sexual impulse toward motherhood has now been freed from the “male mind” within herself. She will become Dionysius’s consort. Her association with him blends her erotic needs with her creative unconscious. Ariadne will fulfill her anima as lover and mother.

A different universal theme commands the male attention. It becomes as deontological as aretetical. For the Greek world, the universal takes precedence over the individual. There are political duties (of the polis) that render ones private life subordinate. The State, or evolving clans of like-minded parties, demands an allegiance that puts the solitary life on hold. Courage, selflessness, magnanimity elbow the self to the side. One gains worth, only to the extent that one sacrifices ones personal will to the exigencies of ones city-state. Homer will make this a major point in contrasting Hector’s valor with his brother Paris’s effete disdain for battle.

For the Greek mind, such fate exercises a paramount role; freedom of choice, a lesser one. Theseus is not really free to delegate the saving of the young Athenians to others. As his father’s heir and champion of the hour, fortune places the burden on his shoulders. With his gifts of strength and daring, come obligations. In addition, great mortal achievements require a proportionate pain. It is the way of Greek wisdom. The gods have not granted glory without suffering, life without death. Again, for Jung, powerful psychological forces come into play. The male, too, acts to fulfill his animus. If he fails, he remains captive to his Mother’s anima. His paralysis will become permanent. He, too, must break free of the Mother’s power and assert himself as a man. That Aegeus kills himself is likewise a mixed blessing, since Theseus can now claim the throne in his own right. He has arrived as a man. The slaying of the bull also represents man’s victory over his animality. He is more than just a beast. He is both subject and object. Unfortunately, Plato will carry this awareness too far, relegating mankind’s sensual nature to the domain of perishable transformation, while locating his true nature in the realm of invisible idealism. Not until the Renaissance would this balance be restored.

Those who heard these stories were able to share in the tragic nature of human existence. Acclamations must be earned; valor is never cheap; it defines the human essence, the human telos, or end. Its price is sorrow, its deeds worthy to be sung in ballads, or enacted on the stage or celebrated at the great festivals that mimic the tumultuous banquets of the gods, of the immortals, who, unlike mortals, never die. Examples for self-fulfillment abound for everyone.

I had just completed reading the section, when someone knocked at the door. “Monsieur Clarke! Le telephone, s’il vous plait. Un Monsieur Sue-li-von wishes to speak to you. Vite! I can’t leave the receiver off the hook all day.” It was the concierge.

“Great!” I blurted. I opened the door and stared into the sallow face of Mme. Angleterre. There she stood, her left arm somewhat deformed, she herself short and stocky in stature and clad in a faded black dress. As usual, she had applied too much rouge and mascara about her eyes and cheeks. Her stiff, wiry, dyed hair shimmered auburn in the hall’s dim light. Streaks of gray lay visible about her hair’s roots. Her candor and simplicity of heart, however, more than compensated for her less than bourgeois class. Often, she would bring me tea in the late afternoons if she knew I was working on my book. She wanted to know as much about philosophie as I would tell her. “I’m not an educated woman, you know, Monsieur, just a hardworking widow.”

I followed her down to the second floor and picked up the receiver. “Hello! Is this Carl? This is Clayton here.”

“Good! I have some intriguing news to run by you and desire your presence at dinner this evening. Can you meet Julene and me at the Golden Lotus near the Cathedral of St. Sulpice, about eight tonight? You’ll be our guest.”

“Of course! I’d love to. What’s up?”

“That’s a secret. We’ll explain at dinner.”

“Ok! I’ll be there.”

I replaced the receiver on its hook. Perhaps he and Julene were going on a jaunt and wanted to invite me to travel along. Or maybe he wanted to publish or edit a book jointly with me. That would be worth coveting.

Being a slave to routine, I resolved to pass my afternoon as originally planned before joining them for dinner. The sky had become metallic, heavy, and overcast, and a light drizzle descended with the fog. I pulled on my cap and slipped into a poncho and headed for the park. Traffic spit the misty mess into convoluted trails that swirled gray behind the vehicles. I dodged between a line of taxis and cars, then strode, head down through the Garden. A surprising number of pre-school children were still at play, and mothers, pushing carriages, seemed oblivious to the light rain. I stopped and bought a warm brown crepe, sprinkled white with powdered sugar, and continued toward my goal—the Pantheon, on the edge of the Latin Quarter and just to the east of the Garden. I walked around the little lake, void of children’s sailboats, crossed the Boulevard Saint Michel, and approached the Pantheon by the Rue Soufflot. I had visited it many times but had never gone down to the crypt. I stopped in front of the building’s massive portico of fluted columns and stared up at the pediment overhead. There Lady Liberty hands out laurels to France’s great heroes and saints. In gold letters, the tribute reads: “To the Great Men, the Nation is Grateful.”

On the steps sat a beggar, wrapped in beggar’s rags. With the coming of Spring, squads of these miserable wretches had left their hibernacula, where they slept over the grates above the metro system, and huddled now on church steps, or crouched beside apartment entrances or wherever they could find refuge. I avoided them whenever I could, for to look on them was to experience a harrowing despair. An individual alone would soon exhaust his coins if pity were king. I stepped around the homeless person—a woman, I realized, and entered the great edifice and wandered toward the transept, under the dome. To my mind, there was nothing appealing about this grand stone structure, except perhaps its dome and the people it honored. I made my way toward the right crypt entrance and ambled down the steps into the long gray hall beneath the church. I passed Voltaire’s vault and looked for Victor Hugo’s and Rousseau’s. These were the two giants of liberty and humanity as far as I was concerned. I paused before the tomb of each.

Rousseau’s distinction between amour de soi and amour propre had always appealed to me. Man’s “natural sentiment” versus society’s “artificial sentiment” seemed to sum up both his genius and the folly of his era. The first, held Rousseau, leads to self-respect and, when coupled with reason and pity, produces virtue and humanity. The second, overlaid with social manners and customs, inspires greed and evil. If only Louis XVI had done his homework!

I left the crypt and wandered back out to the portico’s steps. The old woman was still there. She was crying, with her hands raised in an imploring manner. I wanted to escape, to be left alone, to return to my room for tea and reflection, for more reading and, perhaps, writing. She was pointing to her mouth. Her hands were filthy and covered with the black grime of the streets. Her tears created dirty red streaks on her face. “Water! Water!” she begged. I was in the process of withdrawing from her, trying to step around her, when a woman next to me said: “She’s calling to you.”

With reluctance, I approached the woman and bent down. Her eyes stared into my own. They were filled with desperation and a mixture of disdain, if not overt anger, that I had sought to avoid her. “I was calling to you! I need water, something to drink, a little wine,” she croaked with cracked lips. I bent forward and placed my right arm about the old woman’s shoulders. “Bien sur, I will get thee something,” I murmured. I hurried to a corner market along Saint Michel, grabbed a bottle of citron or lemonade from a kiosk, gave the startled vendor five francs, and walked quickly back to the church’s steps. The old woman was gone. Her outer wrap was still there, but she was gone. Then I spotted her under the portico. Several people had gathered about her. At first, I thought she was dead. “Ah, la pouvre ame!” exclaimed a woman beside her. “They shouldn’t let these people wander about like this.” I pushed my way through the onlookers and knelt beside the woman. “Your water, Madame.” She managed to sit up. I removed the bottle’s cap and assisted her while she gulped a modicum of swallows. She began to aspirate. Her frail body shook with each cough. The spasms wouldn’t stop. I could smell her body odor and horrible breath. I tried thumping her back with the palm of my hand. All was to no avail. The crowd of gawkers increased. “Allez, find a gendarme!” someone said angrily. “Yes, please!” I agreed. The woman’s face turned ashen. A faint trembling vibrated along her body. Her eyes stared up at mine. They were swollen, watery, red. She was trying to say something. “Madame, we are sending for help.” I heard a claxon’s shrill horn somewhere down the street. A small car with two police officers arrived. It was beginning to rain. The taller of the two officers waved us away with his baton. They picked up the woman, carried her to their car, placed her in its backseat, and drove off. I set the bottle at the base of one of the columns and retrieved her abandoned wrap. Some other wretch would claim both soon enough. I pulled the front piece of the poncho over my brow and walked back slowly to the pension, in the rain.

Back in my room, I drew aside the curtains and opened the windows. A steady rain fell on the balcony and dripped onto the street below. It made a pleasant sound, like the patter of a stream over rocks. I drew up my chair to the table and began leafing through Pascal’s Pensées. I wanted to quote and explicate his thoughts in my new book, but I wanted the translation to be my own. I heard a shuffling outside the door; then a knock.

“Oui?”

“C’est moi. It is only me,” called Mme. Angleterre. “I have your tea.”

I let her in and took the tray from her.

“I want to talk, sometime, when you’re not too busy. It can wait,” she smiled, seeing my books and writing tablets on the table.

“That’ll be fine. Maybe tomorrow afternoon, non?”

“Oh, that would be nice. I’ll bring tea for both of us.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

She left the room and I returned to my table. It could not be called a desk but was sufficiently utilitarian to serve as one. It had a drawer, an inlaid leather top, set within a cherry border, and measured about six-feet long.

My attention having been broken, I picked up a chapbook of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and began reading. I sipped on my tea as I read. The Introduction reminded admirers that Baudelaire was the greatest French poet of the nineteenth century. Both modern and iconoclastic, he had burst upon the Paris scene as a “disgusting” representative of an age “that craved lust and all that is sordid.” Born in 1821, he spent his days in “profligacy, debauchery, indulgence, and opium, living as a bohemian, pursuing a nocturnal life that led to bouts with drunkenness and venereal disease.” His “half-caste lovers, mistresses and a bevy of society whores” supported him; still he died in poverty. It would remain for posterity to discover his genius. He had translated some of Poe’s work, but it had not “influenced his own.” The book contained Baudelaire’s earlier Prefaces, which displayed his open contempt for the Parisian aesthetic tastes of the day. He described Paris as a “universal center for radiating stupidity.” Her elegists were “virile scum.” If beauty were to be found anywhere, it would have to be extracted from evil. The dullards of reason had suppressed rapture far too long.

It was the reference to the “half-caste lovers,” however, that caught my eye. Were they as beautiful as Julene? I hoped so. He had dedicated one of his poems to his favorite traveling companion. I scribbled down its translation as I read it:

My child, my sister,

Imagine the pleasure

Of life’s journey together,

Loving each other in scandalous leisure

Embracing life’s joys and forbidden treasures

Free from fear, to the last dark measure.

Why was that appealing? I found it so. Reason demands discrimination, decision, and action. Rapture seizes upon the moment; it requires no dichotomy between the self and the other, the subject and objectivity. One is simply immersed in the course of being, in its ontological waves and rhythms. It is immediate, intense, emotional, subliminal, if not subconscious. As Julene had observed about art, it requires no explanations, nor judges between right and wrong. It is beingness in itself; beauty without evil; ecstasy soaring in flight above the tethers of reason.

I let out a slow, prolonged breath and picked up the Pensées. It was still raining outside; I finished the tea. My mind drifted. We were in Augusta, at a restaurant. Her short, black curly hair possessed all the qualities of a scruffy brillo pad. Her little nose seemed crazily too small for her lovely, rounded face and elongated eyes. A smile of perfect white teeth filled her mouth. Soft, gentle, strapless shoulders sloped away into the shadows and down her arms of pale peach. She slumped in her chair and smiled. Her black, V-neck dress revealed the faintest outline of small breasts. We were in love. Or was it infatuation? We were having an affair, behind her husband’s back. He was the provost; we professors. We were teaching in a small state university, in a modest Georgia town. We had ordered dinner. It had begun to rain. We asked the waitress to box our dinners. We scooted out of our chairs and ran, laughing, across the parking lot to our room in the motel. Our clothes dripped with water. We undressed, dried each other off, and climbed into bed. Her lips met mine with a burning eagerness. We fondled and rolled in each other’s arms. She climbed atop my torso and scooted down about my loins, her eyes fixed on me, smiling all the while. She rose and fell in slow motion, tilting her head downward; her dark eyes sparkled with fire; her tiny breasts bobbed back and forth across my mouth. “Gravity girl!“ I teased her. “How I love you!” I was too enchanted with euphoria to think, or reason, or discriminate between subject and objectivity, good and evil, wisdom or folly. It rained and kept raining. We drove back, passed the campus, to our own places of lodging, in our respective and separate cars. I never knew what she told her husband.

I snapped out of my reverie, carried the tray down to Mme. Angleterre’s cramped office, and knocked at the door. It was my turn to announce: “C’est moi!” There was no answer. I set the tray down and left a note on the pad on her door. Remember, I won’t be here for dinner this evening. M. Clarke. The “monsieur” part was necessary, as even Mme. Angleterre observed those meticulous, formal, and antiquated rules of French propriety—that ritualized world of the petit bourgeois et la Fonction Publique. Civility has its virtue, though, I well knew, as I scrawled the note.

Just then, Mme. Dufavre, the pension’s proprietress, came out of her suite near the dining hall.

“Professeur Clarke, what a coincidence!” She stared down at the tray. Displeasure darted from her eyes. Her tall, slender body, which she held stiffly erect, seemed to corroborate her opinion. “I’ve warned Angleterre. You know it’s not permissible to take tea in your room. What if everyone insisted on egalité?”

“Please, Mme. The fault’s entirely my own. She’s not to blame. I have acquiesced in accepting it. That makes me culpable, too. I trust that that’s all right?”

“Well, non! But you have been an enchanting guest, and an engaging gentleman. And have paid faithfully. You know, clientele have to be evicted from time to time. They can be quite demanding and cheap. This is a tight business, Monsieur.”

“I’m very pleased to room here, and I’ve found all the guests congenial and très agréable.” How I hated the insincerity of my own voice! But I wanted to defend the concierge as best I could. Plus, I did enjoy the two Frenchmen whose dinner table was next to mine. “You can be very proud of Mme. Angleterre, I think. She’s dependable and a worthy servant. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“Mais oui. Well, enough of that,” she smiled. She looked at me, surprisingly, with something of interest. She brushed her dyed rusty-blonde hair to one side and then back across her neck. She was wearing a long burnt-red dress, black hose, and black low heels. Actually, she wasn’t bad looking, but her chin seemed a little too large for her face. “Till a later time,” she said, as she reentered her apartment.

What am I getting into now? I wondered.

I glanced at my watch. It would be nice seeing Julene again, as well as a pleasant challenge to converse with Sullivan. Why had Julene been so silent, and for so long a time? I would soon find out, I reasoned, as I reclimbed the stairs to my room.