Life Sentences (39 page)

However, we cannot place so much emphasis upon the duration of an image’s operation as to ignore the impact of its initial appearance. The suitors were the first snare, the nooses the last. They were not lured there by Telemachus. Rather, like the hunter, he will enjoy the catch. As for an image’s duration, this one has a distinguished history, for Sophocles will pick it up. In Amelie Rorty’s version:

These women were, first of all then, little birds. The image says that, like little birds, they sought safety. The thickets looked good to them precisely because they would not look good to others. In innocence they entered. Maids, servants, they were certainly without significant strength and sought protection. But were they innocent after all? Did not a dozen go “tramping to their shame, thumbing their noses at me, at the queen herself!” as the vengeful old nurse says, who tattles on them to Telemachus. Then they are strung up on a line like wash—but now I have carried this image cluster like a bunch of grapes, awaiting the critic’s trampling, into another vintage, and its ending, another age.

Clearly our focus word is
bird
and its object the women. As the women undergo their metamorphosis, however, their nature will select from that collection of properties and behaviors that the birds possess only those which best suit their circumstances, for they are birds in the act of seeking such shelter as the shrub offers them, and that they do other things as well will be ruled out. In short, the metamorphosis will be partial. So we see them fluttering and twittering and hopping about until, suddenly, they are enmeshed, bound, their necks snapped, slain. The thicket is not a thicket either. It has become a net and nettled trap. Telemachus is now a hunter, his prey within a fowler’s net, enacting a less arduous, more comfortable transformation. He has only to put on his predator’s purpose.

These three operations—on doves, a thicket, the trapper—to women, ropes, and a bloodthirsty man—occur simultaneously in the reader, and without any recognizable work either, so that a system of similarities will have been picked out and many differences discarded in order to achieve a feeling, as well as an understanding
and a rendering, of the scene. The factual content of this image is considerable, since Telemachus may well have hunted so himself. A modern sensibility may find the massacre pitiful (the text suggests it), and the famous pause—“they kicked up heels for a little—not for long”—cruel, but there is no pity in this passage, only triumph and the exultant glory of revenge. “How it would have thrilled your heart to see him,” the old nurse says to Penelope when she’s hastened to bear her the news of Odysseus’s return and the slaughter of the suitors—“spattered with bloody filth, a lion with his kill!” Sentimentality is not seemly in a hero or a queen. After the carnage, when Odysseus purifies the palace, he does so to further rid himself of his enemies, and such stench or pollution as they might have left, not to cleanse himself of any guilt. Guilt has no harbor in a hero’s heart.

I can only pause here a moment to note how images interconnect—one part of the text with another, one text with another—sometimes over great distances of time and subject matter. In our era, kicking up one’s heels would suggest a return to the original frolic of the women. Another minor example would be the recurrent little twitch that takes place as life leaves its body, as though waving good-bye: the fish who flop about on the sand until sunburned, the spear that shivers in the earth and in the warrior’s chest, the feet of the hanged women that bob about for a moment as leaves rattle in an errant breeze.

Images, like the sentences that contain them, possess—or should possess—a factual core in the form of a comparison: both women and doves are captured and killed; both leeches and suitors drain life-giving resources; both day and life have beginnings, middles, ends; and both the glowing brand in the following passage, and Odysseus in the protective bed of boughs and limbs he finds after his shipwreck, are conserving and saving their vital energies.

Every metaphor, as I’ve said, will violate some fundamental canon of custom, some accepted fact of life or a rule of grammatical regulations that will signal to the reader its presence. Metaphors will create interactive models made of the intermingling of meanings during which the same term will alternately serve as object or as lens, as the field of disorganized data, and as the new ordering system. Odysseus’s action (finding a sheltered place to rest after an arduous adventure) is to be interpreted in terms of an equally common practice (keeping a flame alive in the ashes of a hearth or cooking pit). Homer will carefully explain why one must do this: sometimes one is without a neighbor from whom a spark, like a quarter for the phone, may be borrowed.

As the glowing brand must be buried in nurturing ash, so must the weary body of Odysseus find rest and protection beneath the trees, their boughs and leaves. Another ratio. Another reason for Aristotle to approve of Homer. When Athena showered sleep upon our hero’s eyes (according to Fagles), she would wash his weariness away, for showers have a pleasant reputation for cooling, restoring, reinvigorating. Sleep is to the tired body what showers are to the thirsty earth. More proportions. Another model. More approval. “… blessed sleep that sealed his eyes at last …” Fagles has it. “A slumber did my spirit seal …” Wordsworth put it. “Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, / And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul …” Keats begs. When my eyes or my lips are sealed, it is so that no one else will know, through look or speech, the contents of my mind, but when sleep seals them, it is so that
I
shall not know, for a while, what
I
know.

Metaphors will possess scope and depth; they will be condensed
or expansive; and they will exhibit those qualities of perception, emotion, thought, energy, and imagination that every consciousness enjoys when it is fully functioning. They will sense something; they will feel something; they will think something; they will want something; and they may imagine almost anything. They will see the snare that’s been rigged in the thicket and that way see the women cornered, see them wave their futile arms and cry out; they will feel how deserving the women’s fair necks are to have a noose around them, to have these bodies rise a bit past tiptoe because their previous behavior has earned them their present deadly suspension; metaphors will state the women’s execution as plainly as a judgment, as matter-of-factly, as coolly as a morning dip; they will say so with a rhythm hard and measured as a march, full of drive and satisfaction; and they will unite these qualities to imagine how life, in a twitch, in a pause between words, departs the strangled birds … departs the shivering spear … departs the feet that once felt the reassuring earth … feet whose heels kick up as they may have also done when they were alive and lascivious in the arms of the enemy. All this can be found in that little pause, that moment of surprise that the end has come … just like the pause… … … … that ends this series of talks.

My desires were never allowed to reach the lust level. That doesn’t mean I don’t know what lust is, for lust is an essential ingredient in life. Like most of the vices, lust is fundamental and necessary. Deep down it is a virtue, whereas the virtues themselves are surrounded by vices as boxers are by their sycophantic sponging entourages. This is why people with lots of “faults” are often loved, and why saints are despised while they live, frequently tortured to death, and admired only after they have expired.

Just as there are the greater and the lesser Antilles, so there are greater and lesser virtues. Neatness is one of the latter, and a handy example. The neat person believes that there is a place for everything and that everything should be in its place. The neat person is an enemy of history, erasing evidence of every party, pretending nothing happened—especially lust. Few things are sexier or more inviting than a rumpled bed. Neat people are fascists of the mop and bucket, the tight sheet, the silver chest. They never use the good dishes. They like the way it was yesterday. The order that neat people prefer is not creative; it is stifling. We need neat people, but only a few at a time. To pick up after picnickers in parks.

Yes, I’m afraid we need some neatness—to keep us from chaos. So long as neatness is not a cloak for custom. So long as neatness is
not a nanny for the status quo. There is nothing neat about lust. Lust hates regulatory agencies. And when our children describe a situation as
neat
—a word they use, like
cool
, with infantile approval—they mean “easy,” “that’s a problem solved.” Meanwhile, the disorder of their rooms keeps parents from discovering anything but confusion when they pry.

Truthful people are a big pain. That is their aim in life: to be a big pain. Because we naturally love lies. Lies are more fun, far pleasanter to hear, for the most part, and certainly more effective. In fact, they are called for. Parents pretend they want to know whether Gertie is screwing in the parlor and whether Peter is smoking pot in the barn. And if the kids tell the truth, as they are beseeched to do, they will be ragged and snagged and grounded unmercifully. So the kids learn. Lying promotes freedom. Lying guards privacy. Lying saves lives and wins elections. It describes things as they ought to be. Of course, we need to be truthful, but only on occasion.

Lying is a vice that succeeds, as so many other vices do, only in an environment of truthfulness. Remember the paradox: Cretans are liars, the Cretan swore. And retell to yourself the fable about the boy who cried, “Wolf … wolf …” one too many times. Vices need virtues and vice versa.

I am speaking, of course, about the little lies of daily life, not the big lies of priests and politicians, those who want to fix things and those who want things fixed. People who publically complain of sin so often privately enjoy it. Lutherans, for instance, don’t like lust. Catholics and Calvinists are both against it. Mormons allow us several wives but it’s not on account of lust. Baptists are not on lust’s side. If you measure a man by the quality of his enemies, Casanova figures well.

The trouble with temperate people is that they are rarely temperate. All the temperance societies I know promote abstinence. “Nothing too much yet everything a little bit” is not their motto. No.
Nothing
is the operative word. “Masturbation in moderation” is not their motto. A truly temperate person doesn’t play golf every day. A
truly temperate person doesn’t run more than a block a week. A temperate reader won’t read all of Austen or a lot of Balzac. Temperate persons eat sensibly, which means they never diet. But those whose profession is temperance only rail against sex and alcohol, drugs and atheism. Professionally temperate people are cranks. Atheism they ought to like. Atheists admire the word
nothing
. But they probably don’t admire lust much. Not a single favorable vote from the Methodists. Pietists—nix.

Piety is a nasty little virtue. Reverence for Pa the father, Ra the god, and hurrah the flag. Piety is respect for power and privilege, ancestors and the dead-and-gone deities. There is nothing in the world worth worship.

Adultery, on the other hand, cannot be too frequently practiced. If adultery were understood to be a virtue, and committed whenever opportunity offered, then we’d soon be unsure whose kid was whose, the hierarchical character of families would be disrupted, and the succession of paternal property would not succeed. Lust would be at last separated from the coarse and common activity of begetting. Going to bed with one person for the rest of your life? You’ve got to be kidding. Kidding … yes, kidding is the problem.

So what about lust? Let’s compare it with gluttony. That will get us off to a good start. Satisfied lust isn’t fattening. Satisfied lust may mean two people are happy. “It’s the restiest thing thar are,” Granddad used to say. It improves the skin, all that blood rising to the top like cream. It detenses the limbs so that all one’s aches feel far away and in the past. Common courtship costs. You take one another to dinner, gluttonize, pay up, the heart burns. But lust is easily relieved without any outlay. You can easily eat too much, grow round as the earth, break wind, ache, but there is no penalty for coming twice. Sexual satisfaction raises self-esteem, produces a healthy languor, and leads to a happy life.

Sometimes sexual insecurity, rage, or various repressions masquerade as lust, but brutality and runaway promiscuity are not signs of an overpowering appetite, for appetites can be at least momentarily
assuaged; rather such rampages are indications of sexual weakness, not strength. The glutton eats past satiation and should be carefully distinguished from the connoisseur, whose concern is in quality, not amount.

Traditionally, lust has had a touch of greed’s indifference to its object, since it is, of course, the sexual impulse dialed up … and in its grip one is alert and on the prowl; one feels rapaciously alive, paying loving attention to one’s friends and companions and anyone else who may relieve the itch. There are always those undiscovered chests, those untouched tummies, the straits of paradise.

Why would one want to put a stop to such a healthy high-powered connection to life?

There are practical reasons: babies, diseases, babies. But these problems can be readily solved. If we had the will for it. There are other things at stake: patrimony, power, possession, pride. Anyway, it isn’t lust that is really being proscribed. The aim of lust’s enemies is to deny lust its satisfactions in the hope that more governable behavior will replace it. Lust is thereby exacerbated, strengthened, multiplied.