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The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.
I put my arm around Gelon and close my eyes. “We’re in Egypt, man. The Sphinx is just ahead. Can you see it?” He shakes me off. “Will you ever cop on, Lampo?” But I won’t. If I’m honest, some days I still come here to sniff and stroll and lose myself in other worlds, and like when I was a kid, I wonder if the real places are anything like I’m imagining, and just like then, I wince, for something tells me I’ll never know, but it’s still a buzz.
The light on the water is different from any I’ve ever seen in this world, yet it seems I know it. Gelon says that’s what the best plays do. If they’re true enough, you’ll recognise it even if it all seems mad at first, and this is why we give a shit about Troy, though for all we know, it was just some dream of Homer’s, and I walk towards this green soul river, and for a moment it’s like I’m going home.
“Interesting choice. That’s for an actor playing a little boy. It’s a tricky one to get right. It’s much easier to do a monster or a god. Childhood is subtle.”
And then the strangest thing happens. The rope on his knee begins to glow and pulse like a coil of flame, and he understands that his pain, all that stuff with his ma, and what followed, they were part of the gods’ plan, that even the worst of it was sacred, but then the rope darkens, and he looks up at the sky and sees it was just the moon and a cloud had passed over.
“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”
Too much money’s flooding into this city, and it’s losing something, though perhaps that’s just what a man feels when he can’t see what he’s won.
I set my attention back to the task at hand and refill my cup; a beetle plops out of the jug and starts doing the breaststroke along the surface of my vintage. Its black legs paddle madly, and I think maybe I should give it a hand, blow it to the other side so it can climb out and live—bestow a deus ex, but that’s not how life is. You’re always alone, and the beetle needs to learn this.
Gelon had a memory like soil, everything absorbed.
The singer offered to take him on as a real apprentice, but Gelon’s da was having none of it. He was a potter’s son, simple as.
I take a seat, and the cushions are so soft it’s unsettling. Like my arse is on some thick cloud, and there’s a sense that you’re about to fall.
“You talk strange.” He laughs that quiet laugh, almost like he’s holding it in his chest, and says this world is strange, and any talk that is to capture it is liable to strangeness and sometimes incomprehensibility.
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.
It smells different; the sweat off the people is even different. Healthier and sweeter ’cause it’s not mixed with dirt, and it leaks from the well-fed.
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?
Most people believe in the myths ’cause we attach them to real places, and it adds to what’s already there, but with Gelon, it’s the contrary. He believes in what’s right in front of him through the stories we tell.
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.
A proper wreck the buzz is Cassandra. It’s rivers of blood with a hole in the boat, and you can’t swim.
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.
“Why do you act the fool? You’re not a fool.” “I am. I just know it. I reckon that makes me cleverer than most.”
He says the best theatre isn’t about showing something but finding it.
“You’re on the music so?” The old man nods and takes a hit of wine. “Are you decent?” He pulls back his straw hat so I can see pale blue eyes squinting merrily, and he chuckles to himself. “What’s so funny?” My voice is irritated, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Too late to be asking that,” he says. “I’m here, though. That’s for certain.”
There’s always something left for the person who remembers. And Hecuba and her go back and forth, and it seems just an agon between madness and reason, but it’s not only that. It’s despair and meaning that are being pitted against one another, and it’s asking, if meaning departs from reason, might there not be wisdom in a faith-filled lunacy?
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.”
Small skirmishes at first, of no real consequence, but each loss, each near miss took a little bit of their faith away, unspooled a thread of soul, so that when the real battles came, the ones that would decide it all, they no longer believed and you could taste their doubt in the air, like fetid rain on the wind, and the only deal we were interested in was hawking their possessions after total and utter surrender.
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.
Maybe her age will help. Maybe Alekto will figure she’s not long left, and it’s best to do the right thing, but this is just a wish. Some people don’t believe they’ll die, not really, and no amount of years and wrinkles will convince them otherwise.
I play, though of course you couldn’t really call what I’m doing playing, but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren’t just rats, they’re everything in the world that’s broken. They’re things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to. They’re the Athenians burning Hyccara and the Syracusans chucking those Athenians into the quarry. They’re the invisible disease that ate away at the insides of little Helios till he couldn’t walk or, in the end, even speak, just cry with the pain. Those rats are the worst of everything under an
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“Do you know what your problem is, Lampo?” “I’m too good-looking.” Gelon smiles and shakes his head. “Apart from that. It’s that you’ve no imagination.”
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.
Thank you to my son, Aaron, who, being four months old during the final revisions, was limited in his editorial feedback and yet I think he helped and is continuing to help me on my way.
