The reading was drab and cautious, though Stephen had picked a simple translation of the play. Maia and Vincent both sulked, and most alarmingly, Aron was anything but godlike. In fact, Stephen quickly came to believe that Vincent was right, that the boys should switch roles, but Aron seemed sold on divinity. He would probably quit the production if the swap took place, and again, after many years, force Stephen to deal with Dolores.
After a long and non-productive two hours, the director dropped his copy of the play on the table, gazed dolefully at George Castille, and scheduled the next reading for Friday.
“Can’t do it,” Vincent said. “We all have plans, Mr. Thorne.”
And again he heard Jack Rausch’s name, this time with more substance. For the boy had invited his new friends to the theatre at the Antioch Church, asking them to critique and coach his performance as George Gibbs in a particularly Baptist production of Our Town.
15 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia and the Muses
Muses: Now, in the aftermath of meetings, the park seems animate, beyond vegetative. The stage—nothing more than drywall—bristles with moonlight and borrowed life. At the foot of the ruins, water pools and bubbles, life refocillant from the sodden ground, bursting through the boards of the stage.
The whole park is coiling. Sometimes there are convergences, conspiracies of eyes, so that the unseen, which is always implicit, always suing for light and evidence, burgeons into a consent of gazes. The backstage waters bunch and take on substance and scales, the dark eddies at the heart of it condensing to black, glittering points and scanning the slopes of the theatre as the python unwraps and stretches in astonished moonlight.
We watch it happen. The god taking first form in a spring night, in the charged Elaphebolion. So consuming this first transformation that human eyes cannot look on it.
Out of the veil of cannabis we had warned Stephen, do not look upon it, mortal, and T. Tommy, caught between stages of being, knew by instinct to turn away. So now we alone watch the water pulse and take on solidity.
Polymnia: There is no god out there. Nor is there anything but the god.
The same mind-body problem the philosophers have tried to get hold of since Heraclitus. The radical wind that fills the park—that lifts the song of T. Tommy’s entourage onto Fourth Street—is hot and circuitous.
It rolls all the way south past Stephen’s apartment, where he sits at his table now, whiskied and contemplative.
And north it rolls to Oak Street and the intersection the locals call Fourth and Fellini, where crackheads and whores look up, expecting something in the sky, some thunder or rumble of a delivery jet above them.
They see nothing for the street lamps, which are there to help them see, of course.
In the back yard of a brownstone, an incongruous rooster crows, as though the breath of the god brings sun into the artificial day.
The nonexistent god speaks as a blind surge in our blood, as the impulse to live and engender life, to wrestle for power in an unraveling world. But we never meet face to face, never get from the outside to the inside. We dive toward the dark diastole and come up with images and names, like a man who goes round a mirrored stage, looking in vain for a place to stand, seeing only himself on the boards, looking back.
But to see through into the heart of the god, as you yearn to see? Art and religion conspire to keep it from you, the streetlamps that mask your stare into the hollow of heaven. Because it is not pretty there—not your dream of self-actualization nor communion with something that thinks and behaves like you. Ask Moses, whose God passed by him in a dangerous light. Ask Ramprasad, transformed and glowing with the vision of Kali. Ask Apuleius on his knees before Mother Isis, those witnessing the explosive end of the Gotterdammerüng. Or Jagger at Altamount. Or Spielberg’s cinematic Nazis when they open the Ark.
But ask Semele first. Always ask the mother of the god.
Clio: Youngest and most beautiful of Cadmos’ daughters, Semele drew the eye of Zeus, because beauty draws all energies in its gaps and caesuras. You know it is breakable because your heart moves toward it, and your heart moves toward it because it is breakable. If Zeus is a metaphor, nonexistent but implicit in the space between things, surely that is part of the meaning when he courts a beautiful mortal: that he stands for our yearning that what we see can last, but he stands at the same time for our knowledge that such things are frangible.
Our desire to worship them goes hand in hand with our desire to break them.
When Zeus’s wife Hera found that again he had impregnated a mortal girl, again she plotted harsh revenge. And unable to wreak vengeance on a god, she rose from her throne and headed earthward, wrapping herself in a bright golden cloud and visiting the home of the girl. There she disguised herself as Beroe, Semele’s nurse, taking image and form from mortal yearning, from thoughts shaping white hair and wrinkled skin on the forehead of the goddess. Shaping kindness as well, because mortals baffle divinity in trust. You fashion its contours to bank its fire, render it by words you hope you understand.
Melpomene: Semele, then, deceived by simple theatre, spoke to Hera of Zeus. Confused the performer with the character, actant with acteur. Perhaps something in her confusion jackknifed into the gene pool, because the god her son thrives on misprision such as this.
And in response, the goddess plays at nursemaid, at vague maternal impulse. ‘I hope you are right, my dear,’ she says. ‘But these things frighten me. To be Zeus is not enough; he ought to prove his love, if Zeus he is, in all his power and glory, in the form he takes when heavenly Hera welcomes him.
‘But, Mother, so he does,’ says the girl. ‘For those nights in which his seed spills between my thighs are his testimony, his love’s proof.’
And ‘well, then,’ Hera says, her rage now simmering behind a mask benign and sympathetic. ‘Well, then, my dear. But surely you know that men often claim to be gods as a way into our beds. But the gods need no rhetoric, no coax and cajole as they ride the deep and recondite currents of dark energy. So beg him, my dear, to reveal himself: to assume his godhead as you raise your knees to his mastery.’
So the goddess shaped Semele’s mind, and the girl, in trust that the world was shaped as well by generosity and justice, asked a favor of Zeus as they lay that night in the secret, expectant bed. A favor, any favor, she pleaded, and ‘Choose what you will’ the god replied. ‘I swear by the Power of the rushing River Styx, an oath all gods hold in awe.’
Successful beyond her dreams, happy in her ruin, doomed by charity, Semele answered, ‘Give me yourself in the same glory as when your Hera holds you in love’s embrace.’
He saw it coming too late. He had sworn his oath, allowed the girl her folly, and her words were out, her wish could never be unwished, his vow never unvowed. In bitterest grief Zeus soared into the sky, trailed by storm clouds and gathering to him lightning and thunder and the bolts that never miss. Even so, he tried to curb his might, and would not wield the fire that steers all things, that kindles and extinguishes, but a lesser fire, forged by the Cyclops and called his second armament. With this in hand he went to Semele in Cadmus’ palace. Then her mortal frame could not endure the tumult of the heavens; that gift of love consumed her.
Clio: From her ignited womb the god snatched her baby, still not fully formed, and sewed the child into his thigh, where the young god coiled, foetal and terrible, completing the long gestation. Ino, his mother’s sister, in secret from the cradle nursed the child and brought him up, and then the Nymphae of Nysa were given his charge and kept him hidden away within their caves, and nourished him on milk. Down on earth, these things came to place, and Dionysus, baby twice born, was cradled safe and sound.
16 Stasimon: Strophe: Polymnia
Polymnia: Though some believe there was another, earlier Dionysus. Zeus his father as well, but the mother Persephone, that Queen of the Dead snatched by Hades from a sunny hillside. So the dark current draws innocent creatures into the world of the gods.
This Dio
nysus was Sabazius, or Zagreus. They sacrificed to him at night and in secret, because of the shamefulness of the way Zeus approached his own brother’s bride in the shadows, approaching her as a python or dragon, sliding into the tunnels, adits, and bolgias of Hades’ kingdom, his great coils pulsing with desire and shadow. Past the guardian creatures he moved, lulling to sleep the three-headed dog and Hydra, Briareus, and the triple Chimera.
He crawled to the girl’s bedside, his draconic tongue licked her breasts, her stomach, her warm compliant skin, as her womb swelled with his fecund, godly intentions, and she bore Zagreus the horned baby, heir to the throne of the gods, a child with a brow regal and fulgurant.
But Zagreus did not hold the throne of Zeus for long. Some say it was Hera who egged on the Titans, the defeated and forgotten gods; others say that it was their own darkest impulse—jealousy and resentment and malice simple and deep—that brought them from the recesses of the hells where they lay hidden. They daubed their faces with chalk, found the child rapt in front of a mirror, trying to determine just what he was in this world and underworld. They lured him forth with jointed dolls, bullroarers, tops, and knucklebones, those forerunners of dice. By the enticement of toys they drew him out and destroyed him, rent him apart, and spitting him over a fire, began to roast him ceremoniously.
But the death of a god is inconceivable. They rise from the current, the gods, take shape out of dissolution, condense from steam above the dark surge of ichor and blood. So in this story, one among many, the goddess Athena swooped into the flame-haunted shadow in the form of an owl, snatching the child’s heart from sacrifice, and bearing it up into the light into the hands of the father.
Here the story branches and joins with other stories, like an alluvial fan of urban legends. Here Zeus makes a potion of the heart, which Semele drinks before his fire and glory overwhelm her. Or here Zagreus rises from ash as the new Dionysus, caped and young like his father, heavy-kneed and pouring rain like his grandpa. Now a lion, now an unbroken horse, now a horned serpent and a tiger and at last a bull, charging the Titans, scattering the gibbering old and ancestral forms of the godflow. It was in this last form, some say, that the god stumbled, and his assailants fell on him with knives. But this time a vengeful Zeus, no doubt his dragon form shed like snakeskin, turned the mirror onto the ancient offenders, trapping them in its reflection, consigning them to the mirrors facing mirrors, images extending into infinitude, to a place in which they saw themselves and themselves only.
Because that is the only hell for those immortal in the first place.
So the Dionysus who was born of Semele in more recent times, whether poured from the heart of Zagreus or burned in Zeus’s divine fire and sewn into his thigh to complete the nine-month nightsea journey of gestation….so this Dionysus was feminine, almost delicate, more beautiful than other men. His looks bewitched both male and female, and in turn he was bewitched by them. He would grow into an even more beautiful man, addicted to delights of love. He danced at the head of multitudes, women armed with thyrsus-shaped lances—long-shafted, with the oval heads of pine cones, as if the symbols were not evident already.
So the story in which we find ourselves—my sisters and I. For when all is said and done, aren’t the Muses simply maenads on good behavior? Our father was Zeus as well, our mother Memory, and by our songs and dancing, our plays and stories and histories and geometry of heavens, we delight the heart of the god. We school him in mysteries, and become initiates in the thiasos of his progress as he moves from one branch of the story to another. It is like a season of tragedies: the cast varies more than the actors. Pan and Silenus dwell with him sometimes as guardians, and again and again he grows up like a creature in some eclogue, now meditative and now lively, the judge and the patron of thymelic song: the verses in honor of the godhead, the processional, the sacrifice.
This is the god I have grown to love. I still imagine myself with the child, instructing him in hymnody, in beautiful devotional verses to cruel and lovely indifference.
I imagine rather than remember. For a daughter of memory I recall actually little. There was a wakening in the dark coffin of a crate bound for somewhere I could not figure, and again in this room under glass and bald light. All of the rest comes to us imagined, conjured from the pulse in the veins of marble at my neck and ear, from the presence of my sisters on the frieze and from the slow intaglio of dreaming.
And yet one last story. That the god was entrusted to Hermes, messenger of the gods, who took him to the child’s aunt and uncle, to Ino and Athamas, persuading them to bring him up as a girl, to keep the knowledge of him below the sights of the vengeful Hera. But still in pursuit of her rival’s son, the goddess drove the couple mad. Athamas, mistaking his older son Learkhos for a deer, stalked and killed and gutted the boy. While Ino threw little Melikertes into a basin of boiling water, and then, carrying both the basin and the corpse of the boy, jumped to the bottom of the sea. Now they rise to help sailors beset by storms: they surface, broken and water-beguiled, from deep and indifferent tides.
17 Stasimon: Antistrophe: T. Tommy Briscoe
T. Tommy: Lao Tzu tells us, children, that the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, that the name that can be named is not the eternal name. And Chuang-tzu, he says that the Tao is beyond words, that the more you talk about it, the farther away from it you get.
But Wang Chung saith that the words we use are strong: they make reality.
That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.
Up on the court I am a safety net for middle-aged men. When disappointment and failure come, and you rise a last time toward what you can never be—could never of been in the first place—just as you sink for the last time, you can tell yourself…
At least I’m not that glitterin’ fat bastard over to the park.
But even I can see the textures of things. I make some reality, children, out of layers.
Time to draw the snake forth from backstage.
It is the way I am gifted. Why I awaken in the hour right before sunrise, while y’all sleep it off and dream of the god. Why you are the entourage and I am the luminary, instead of the other way around.
You learn your gifts of a summer morning. As I did in 1981, on a Southern Parkway easement, two miles from the old city.
It was signified on the overpass that day in August.
I had forgotten the anniversary, the sixteenth, the white-trash national holiday. Was headed north toward town, toward where South Third flows into the Parkway and where there used to be rolled oysters at a place called Bennie’s Back Room.
I saw the name ELIVS, spray-painted in black on the concrete like a moving finger had thereon writ.
For a moment, children, I thought it was Elius, who told Job how God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed, then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man.
But it turned out just to be someone misspelling the name of the King. It gave me evidence and a license. LIVES and EVILS, when you turned the letters right. It was a source of great wonderment. Who could of known, after all, how the three could abide together? ELVIS and LIVES and EVILS, and it made me speculate on the uncertainty of letters.
Wise men will tell you that the spelling of things is an arbitrary sign, that the name “Presley” might just as well have been “Boone” or “Bennett” or “Briscoe,” that “Elvis Aaron” might have, with simply the alphabetical shifts, been named “Jesse Garon” like his dead twin, and that it would of made no difference. But there is deep and gregarious magic in naming, children, magic that draws us and embraces us, where we could almost lie in its lovin’ arms, and we can’t help falling for it. So maybe there would of been no “Love Me Tender” for Jesse Garon, no “Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love,” no Doctor Nick pumping him with amphetamines and consolation.
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br /> No T. Tommy Briscoe to carry him on.
Naming him otherwise could of made him otherwise. Could have had everything to do with LIVES and EVILS. And how all of us, including the King himself, draw a veil between ’em, so that, for a brief moment, one cannot touch the other.
18 Stasimon: Antistrophe: T. Tommy & Brischords
T. Tommy: The gods are not the past, children. Nor are they far away. And they ain’t the gods of your believing, ain’t no United Way nor self-help deities out there, but something else.
Something that has nothing to do with you. Barely anything to do with me.
But can you hear it? That pipe in the distance, rising up over the Led Zeppelin? I know…you didn’t hear the Zep; it was “In the Light” and that bowed guitar of Page’s that starts it off before the Bonham drum line. On a tape somewhere. And the pipe playin’ beneath it, then gliding over it like a snake out of a Hindu basket. Music coming from over to the Cabbage Patch. All about wine and muted violence.
I don’t know when the piping begun. It’s like starlight, because the eye believes it shines right this instant when the science says it left the surface of the star before the earth was made. So what is the truth of the light: now or then?
Makes me shudder with the prospect of it.
A song all hushed and filled with portents. Like the night Syrine Landon run into the devil on the way home from church. I swear she did, children, and though it was years ago and she’s been forgotten because she wasn’t pretty and blonde, the outrage still plays through the air this part of town.
Falcon Shine: I heared that story. I heared the devil chased her till she turn into a tree. That it’s that big, spreading mulberry other side of this park. The one near Sixth.
Get a haircut, Daddy Chrome. Your business in front caught up with the party in the back.
Vine: An Urban Legend Page 5
