Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.

Look, it seems to say. Here’s Gelon: godlike, broken Gelon. Look and remember beauty isn’t all.

The pain is welcome; friendship’s what I feel.

It’s much easier to do a monster or a god. Childhood is subtle.”

“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”

“Where I come from, we believe that silver is the blood of the night. The stars are silver. The moon is silver. What is gold?” “The sun,” says Gelon.

“Even if the gods don’t know what they’re doing. Something does.”

I tell you, I have a god on this ship, and if you wish to see it, say so now. Most profess belief in the gods, but few have ever seen one in real life, or if they have, they wouldn’t know, for as the stories tell us, the gods love disguises, but here you have a rare opportunity. The rarest of them all. To see a real god in its divine form. Will you take it?”

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?

I don’t hate you. How could I? Even though I know you came to make us slaves. I can’t hate you. I believe any city that gave us those plays has something worth saving. That’s why I’m here.”

“I see that, and I hope you can see me. I’m not much, that’s true, and if you were free, perhaps you wouldn’t think twice, but let’s look at things plain. I don’t have the money now, but I will work for it like a madman to get the coin to buy your freedom. Then it’s up to you. If you want to fuck off, fuck off. If you stick with me, you see this is it. A potter with a crooked foot, but I think if you were with me, I might be something more. I think I’ve never had anything to work for, nothing to believe in, really, and a man needs that more than anything. I’d throw in my lot with you and work till the skin came off my fingers if it were for us and not just me.”

The voice isn’t beautiful, and at first, I’m disappointed, yet as the words tumble out, I feel a tingling on my skin because there’s a wildness to it—an uncommon thirst for life and other things—and I see that I don’t know this woman at all, only wish to. The song is clearly foreign. Putting it in Greek only makes it stranger. It’s about a young shepherd who falls in love with a girl he sees bathing in a lake, but he’s too afraid to say anything to her, because poor and plain as he is, what could he offer? So he decides he will trick her into loving him. He climbs a very tall and leafy tree that grows above the lake, and on that night, there’s a full moon, a huge yellow moon, and the shepherd decides that if he were to speak as the moon, convince the girl that he was not a shepherd at all, perhaps she might consider him worthy, and so he climbs the tree and in his best moon voice tells the girl he’s the moon and has got it bad. As you’d expect, the girl is sceptical at first, but listening to the moon boast of its exploits, how the seas are beholden to it, how wolves and waves and all things of the night fall under its sway, and that its home is in the sky, in proper luxury, waited on by thousands of servants—stars you’d call them—thousands upon thousands of silver flames that have no other purpose but to do its bidding, and listening to this, the young girl believes, is entranced. She had hoped for a handsome husband. A steady job, some land, maybe even a few cows, but to...

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.

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.

Most nights, I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours, and some nights I don’t sleep at all. These are the strangest. I reckon your mind needs to dream, ’cause on the days where I haven’t had a wink, things happen that I can’t rightly credit. The sky often takes on that wild vermilion of the sea in the great harbour during the final battle. At night the moon seems constantly full, and the bats whirling about it are the size of ravens, and yet I know the bats in Syracuse are tiny. It all makes me wonder if exhaustion has torn the firmament in my mind and let them loose. But I think I’m happy. I know I am. Sometimes I feel like crying, but I reckon that’s ’cause at last things are happening, and I care how they unfold.

“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?”

“To Euripides,” says Gelon, raising a jug to toast. “To tragedy.”

He says the best theatre isn’t about showing something but finding it.

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.