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The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.
He’s beneath a tree just past the Achradina, hanging from a rope, and in the red light of dawn, the rope seems a stem and he some dreadful flower. Gelon stops and says a prayer. I don’t. For I’ve no time for a fucker who kills dogs. We walk on.
“It’s poetry we’re doing,” he whispers. “It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.”
Not much, you think? But great things are made up of a load of not much, and that battle was the greatest thing of all.
IT STARTS TO rain not long after we leave Alekto’s. A drizzle that thickens and quickens till it becomes the mood of the city, and the sky takes on that mourning quality you get from weeping black clouds and shrieking winds that make the old buildings whistle and chatter like drunks in a tavern.
“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”
Music: Doesn’t need to be a dithyramb or anything, but still. A tragedy without a tune is like a sun that doesn’t give off heat: dead, and nothing will grow from it. When men go to war, they do it to music. When they set sail for better shores and row into the vast blue, they do it to music. Even our hearts beat to some rhythm, and the director who neglects it neglects what makes us men.
Hunger, what an odd thing it is. Is the source of all love a lacking? Is that what creates emotion? Not a presence but an absence. Do you need to be emptied to be filled?
But this isn’t the silence that comes from comfort; no, it’s that strained silence, where you can feel the throb of the other’s thoughts and stillborn sentences that die on the lips before they’re spoken.
The gods have brought me low, just like Heracles, yet thinking this raises my spirits some, and though it hurts like a bastard, putting a spin on the pain makes it my own.
Later, walking the lonely road to the quarry, I listen to the sound the coins make in my pocket—much fainter than the din from the pouch Gelon gave me, yet its music is all the sweeter, ’cause it’s mine, and it’s hers, and I know in time we can make it a song.
and that is why we call those who are mad with longing lunatics. It’s not the moon moving them, but the mad shepherd who’s forgotten who he is.
Anything is possible, and it always has been. For the world was once just a dream in a god’s eye, and the man who gives up on himself makes that very same god look away.
Tonight we’re not drinking to forget, but to remember and dream. It’s hope that makes us afraid, and I remind myself that a man should be grateful for his fears, ’cause it means he has something to lose and to win.
Other days I’m last and hear laughter before I see them: the kids chasing about the wheelbarrow, Dares yapping to Gelon as Gelon listens with a contented grin, and I wonder is it Euripides we’re saving at all?
That child’s face in the painting above the bed is a masterful touch. You might miss it. You could watch the whole play and not know it’s there, but I think you’ll feel somehow that it is, and if you do spot it out of the corner of your eye, well, I think you’re not likely to forget.
“What’s wrong with you? You degrade a man’s suffering like that for coin. Don’t you see it’s all of us who lose?”
These Athenians haven’t worn new clothes in months, and when we hand them the costumes, they just hold them confused, rubbing them slowly like blind men, and then holding them up, smiles of naive delight, and it strikes me that they’ve returned to a second childhood. That suffering has stripped away the years in the way carpenters can uncover the youth of a tree by scraping the plane against the old bark. Yes, I think they’ve found a sort of innocence in their ruin.
He says the best theatre isn’t about showing something but finding it.
“The luckiest man who ever lived died in his mother’s womb.”
It’s the maddest thing. ’Cause for the briefest moment, Syracusans and Athenians have blended into a single chorus of grief for this make-believe.
There’s nothing in that eye but its colour, and I reach out and take his hand.
No, it was in a land of rain and woods, a green-growing world, but yet it happened in almost exactly the same way. The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”
What people expect rarely happens. Things that seem impossible come to pass. It’s always been the way. The gods have the best seats in town, and we’re their favourite show.
Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.
Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.