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and even if one of them pressed me against his heart,
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence,
for beauty is the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disclaims to annihilate us.
Rilke, Duino Elegies
When I was a child of three, my father denied me wine.
Another tradition I forgot to mention. We have so many, eh? We mantle and shroud and bundle ourselves in them, tirelessly; putting them on like layers to soothe the elements into warmth, and Them that stalk the elements. So. In my Athens, now receding in my heart like the faraway blur of a coast, picture a spring festival. All children who live up to the age of three attend it, and then they’re given gifts to the number of three. One is a toy cart; one is a wreath of vine and flowers to put on their heads. And the last and most of note is a chous - that small round jug - filled with wine. Each little child drinks a little wine, a mere sip, just enough to let him out of his child-sized grief - over the death of a pet goose, say, or Father’s glare in a naughty hour. Even among the poor (and we were of them) a child can enjoy the release of wine and flowers - not the rich man’s roses, but the asters, the violets, the wild parsley plucked from a neighbour’s hedge and tied in woollen threads all over the house - as a gentle introduction to Dionysus.
All children but one.
… An atheist? Oh no, oh no indeed! Try the other end. My father was gods-aware; very much so, or he wouldn’t have kept them so obsessively at arm’s length. Something to do with Mother, I guess. He never spoke of her, and since her death marked my day of birth, she’s another blurry coast - dying further away with every passing day, e’en as I sail closer to her shore. But Father said the gods had a hand in her fate; and he feared and fled them. On those spring days all I tasted was the wet salt of frustration; that must yet have addled my head, or I wouldn’t have spent every hour I could steal away from the crops on the sea. I would steal - aye, once a pirate! - a small boat for an evening hour, to let the darkening swell have its way with me. There’s a scent to the moonlit sea that roused and frustrated me to no end, then... no poet has done justice to it. Bit like - forgive my Greek - that of a young woman on her flow, that may go to a man’s head quicker than his cups and leave it reeling none the less. Dark; heady; a more secret wine. Now may be the time to confess that I’ve never known a woman, never been sheathed and passaged again between her legs, though they sometimes forced me to watch. I couldn’t; even now I couldn’t.
Still. This was my time of innocence, no matter how many times I found my father on the shore, poised to catch me and turn his glare into a palpable burn. (The fishermen only laughed.) It came to an end on an night when the Sea, on her flow (and they do say that’s when a lass is at the height of her might, body and spirit), tightened her grip and would not let me go. Maybe that was part of His design: a god’s revenge can work forward and backward in time, using the son to punish the father. Our dramatists know it well, and I’ve often wondered...
Anyway. You know the rest - how a pirate ship came, and made my rescue conditional on my apprenticeship. Their helmsman was half blinded from a skirmish with Notus, who loves to mix his gales with Zeus’s autumn showers, three parts salt to one part water. Too strong a brew, even for pirates. These indentured me to their sick man until I could ply the tiller, after which they threw him overboard. My days as a landlubber were done, officially, since a pirate never brings his ship to anchor but for an hour of plundering, and I myself never partook of that. Aye, they had one of their own stand guard over me while they did the deed, and I found it a boon in time, even as the salt took root in my hair and the wood hardened my palms. The tiller became my landmark: wobbly, floating, something of a life pillory; but solid, too, but graspable. I still had the gut urge for safety ingrained in me by Father, and the pirates saw it, and trusted me to point out the safe places as we sailed in exchange for blood immunity. I was their accomplice, but I was never red-handed - until.
Fill that crater again, willya? He ’ll lend me strength to steer my tale, although His strength is devious, like the sum of him. I need my head well and truly rocked, and my speech on the slur end of truth, if I am to tell all.
I can’t remember the hour or day. Noon, probably; the Lord Sun at its highest, which was always when their blood got the bad craving. I can’t name the coast either. But I can name the feeling, the strange familiarity when I first saw that crest of mountains, more jagged than a wave’s crest, very unlike my Athens’ round hills. They waited upon a shore, the mountains, and on that shore… blurry at first...
Ah, but that pull! E’en as we sailed closer, that merciless pull - as if my heart cradled its own tide! Close, close, closer, whipped on by the captain’s guttural cry, close enough now to the figure on the shore that I knew the purple of his robe as the full-bodied red of my country’s wine. Aye, the Athenian bloom and none other. Don’t laugh; don’t think I’m doddering, even though I was past the flush of youth even then. There wasn’t a warehouse we hadn’t pillaged, from Thrace to Lesbos; and I knew - abstemious as I was, forever on sailing duty - I knew that no two wines are alike to the eye. His robe was the grave gay red of the Chios wine that we call “black wine”, so deep it is. What? Aye, and drink Dionysus’ health with. It must have been spring, then; a tryst fulfilled, finally - after so many years.
Still, I wouldn’t drink. They sought to bind him as they’d done me when I was his age; and he turned his head, making sure he had and held my gaze, before he let the ropes fall from him. He made them into vines and tied true love’s knots of blossoms to our sail, and drenched the deck with my native wine so that my heart felt warm and swollen. He had my gaze, and he filled it with a longing that wasn’t for my age, and pitted his terror - the gods’ reviver - against my age. I cried out - who wouldn’t, at close quarters with Him ? And shut my eyes tight, but His smile lit them from the inside.
You’ve heard the tale - how Dionysus made a lion, a bear, a killing of my captain, whose father had once seized me. Trust me, you don’t want me to… Bloody? Aye, sure; but the entire scene had turned to red by then. And the scent was still of flowers, of May and morn. He wouldn’t suffer a mortal’s stench to ruin his proscenium. A god likes his theatricals, provided he sits centerstage, his body gloved in mirth and no mercy. And if the sight brands you, what of his touch?
I wouldn’t let your Thebes make an Oracle of me. Ridiculous, really. Let the young people crash as many cymbals as they like and writhe over laurel smoke - I’m three quarters deaf and my limbs half deadwood; my cheeks have lost the memory of their beardless selves. Even then, I was the farthest thing from a kouros you could picture. And yet, He…
Don’t envy me. Don’t pray for a god to seize you, his mercy unbridled, his breath on your eyes, your gaping mouth, the flesh of your chin that hasn’t seen the sun for half a life. A god gathers you to his heart, and that’s terror incarnate; a god calls you radiant, and you are hung and quartered in a pleasure that’s beyond any rack to produce. I never fought. I had let the rapt swell have its way once, in my time of wanting; and now desire was granted back to me in his dark embrace. One arm around my waist, he plucked a grape from the stern and pressed it high above… no, not mine. His mouth. His pity, you see - for who could touch a god’s naked tongue and live? And so he let the wine glaze his own, its humid redness a shield. My mouth has been parched ever since, but I have lived.
He pitied me, I say. He gave me but one kiss - that sundered me. He kissed me at high noon and I felt cleft by the sun; made a king, made a woman, made to feel every sensation born to pleasure us since Aphrodite came onshore; made to feel at once infinite and infinitely vulnerable. It’s a good thing He tied the kiss to our time, else I’d have been liquefied, ultimately, gulped and melted down a god’s beautiful throat. As it was, He laid me out on the deck, oh! so very gently, before He laid his hand over my eyes. When I came to, the sea was a lighter cobalt; the breeze a far cry from His pet whirlwinds. But the tiller was cleft in two, both halves lying useless on the deck. I was free; I was directionless. They do like their gifts two-edged, eh? The gods.
Luckily, the dolphins had stayed. They raised their wet snouts above the foam, motioning to me; having received, I reckon, their swimming orders from the god, for they carried me to your land - His land - readily enough. A greybeard of an Arion! And you good Thebans have taken care of me ever since, for the which your vineyards have grown and multiplied.
… The dolphins? No idea. If you ask me, they got off lightly. There are worse punishments than a daily staple of saltwater.
Aye, but your wine is an honourable red! Pour it on, my host, and we’ll drink to time and tide. Your fire is warm; winter is on its last legs. Let me see one more spring before the sea returns, and carries me over to that final shore - and the figure, perchance, on it, smiling and waiting.