Crumbling Moon

Non servata fides cineri promessa Sychaeao. (Aeneid IV, 451) In a way, I murdered Alathea. To requite me, she pursued me as the Furies did the blood-boltered Orestes until I became the Oedipus I am today. Allow me to explain. The above quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid is spoken by Dido, Queen of Carthage, just before she immolates herself on her funeral pyre. “I have been unfaithful to the promise I made to the ashes of Sychaeus,” he being her late husband. A little later, she is ashes herself. Now I was unfaithful both to the living Alathea and to her ashes, and also responsible for reducing to ashes about a dozen others, but the analogy ends there. Dido is enacting a melodrama, a sonorous, declamatory Roman epic meant for the ears of a newly installed Emperor, and intent on instilling patriotic virtues into its readers, whereas I was sucked into the vortex of an ancient Greek tragedy, a metaphysical Void cathartically evoking not just Aristotelian pity and terror, with the latter predominating, but also a glimpse into the way the universe is ordered which has left me permanently traumatized. Greek tragedies spring from Greek religion. The Greeks could not have been comforted by their religion, for the ultimate truth revealed by all religions is hideous, black and terrifying. Hence the ‘dark night of the soul’ known to the saints. The rest of us, luckily, are not saints, and can go pretending that life is beautiful, even when the grinning skull stares in on our banquet. Alathea, however, was in my present opinion quite close to sainthood, and hence fully aware of what the rest of us are too stupid or too cowardly to confront. As she once remarked to me about Buddhism, “What it reveals is so ghastly, it just has to be true.” Typically, she went on to embrace it; I went out for a beer. When I say I murdered her, this is not to imply that I did anything as crude as actually dispatch my lover with an Orestean sword or a modern firearm. Nor did she resort to pestering me later with wailing and chain-rattling, prowling the stairs and corridors of my country house like some ghostly White Lady of Raynham Hall, and making a psychic nuisance of herself. This is a Greek story, not a Gothic tale. Perhaps that explains why Alathea – I refuse to call her by any other name – didn’t haunt me openly in Cambridge, where it all started, but waited until I revisited our old haunt, Athens (do forgive the pun), twenty-four years after she disappeared from there. Were we such a stuffy crowd, that even our ghosts were too well bred to flaunt themselves at home? “Not the done thing and all that,” as my generation used to say, “Damned bad form!” Now we’d say we had “more hang-ups than you could poke a fucking stick at.” Such vulgarisms reign supreme today, amid this general coarsening of society, where the hoi polloi has come to power. “Odi profanum vulgus…” Not a PC tag, I’m afraid; but then for me that brainless acronym still stands for “parsec,” or 3.26 light years, roughly the astronomical gulf between the human race and reality. Writing this, I am confronting another ghost – that of my dead self. Though none too keen on the man I am now, at least I’m no longer the academic “dweeb” I used to be – an expression I learnt from poor Cassandra, with her street-wise vocabulary. I suppose one could say I sacrificed her too, as I did Alathea, through crass stupidity and thoughtlessness. And I am still tormented by dreams of hapless Chloe, her beautiful, broken body contorting and blackening as it writhed in the flames. That brings the count to three, to say nothing of my four friends, whom I might have saved had I been quicker. One might say I was instrumental in slaying all seven of them. I do not count the others, for I killed them in self-defence. When that phantom came floating towards me that unforgettable night in Aegina, over two decades ago, gliding just above the polished floor; hair, face, body and robe all modelled from the same deathly-white ectoplasm, I felt like an ancient Athenian watching a tragedy by Aeschylus. Strangely, I cannot recall feeling afraid, though that would have been an understandable reaction, perhaps because since I had not feared her in life I could not fear her in death. So I was overcome, not just with Aristotelian pity and terror, but rather with pity, terror and horror, along with a sickening sense of irreparable loss and grief. Disconcertingly, her eyes had retained their lustrous emerald green, shining terrifyingly from that otherwise colourless death mask. I remembered only too well how during our lovemaking she would roll her eyeballs upwards in ecstasy, until only the whites were showing, scream, and rake my back with her painted nails. Her phantom hands were so meticulously sculpted that I could clearly discern those nails, as well as joints, veins, sinews, and even the fate-line and life-line on the palms. Only her feet were missing, for the swirling drapery that covered her body formed a full-length skirt that rippled and billowed in the icy draught blowing through that sealed and shuttered room. She would certainly have laughed at that classical apparel. “I wouldn’t be like seen dead in that gear,” she would say, referring to the clothes she disliked. Most of the short time she was with me, she wore very little. “I’m like a natural nudist,” she used to say, in that flat, nasal Valspeak I found intriguingly amusing, “It’s so totally awesome!” I recalled her words as she floated towards us that balmy September night. In life, she might well have been amused by our stricken faces, for she had a strong sense of humour. But her likeness as it floated towards us was as serenely impassive as that of a corpse. Who or what is she now? I kept thinking, as I stared at that pallid mask. A gaping gash in her slender throat had severed larynx, trachea and jugular, running in a jagged, bloodless rent up to the stump of her mutilated right ear. Yet her body, clearly discernible through those filmy robes, was as voluptuous as ever in its perfect curves and hollows. Even in death, it still had the power to stir me. Had I been able to weep, I would have done so later, out of pity, but such solace had long been denied me. I recalled her words to me when we first met: “When you’re dead you’re like long gone and totally nowhere.” Who are the dead? Or rather, what are the dead when they return like this? Are they merely the emanations of our minds? Or do they really have an existence of their own? Ganz anders. As Cassandra would have said, “Like totally awesome, man! Awesome!” None of the others has returned, except in my dreams, where the men I killed relive their deaths over again. I regret nothing; they deserved to die and I would kill them all again, as I do night after night, without hesitation, felling there even the one who put me where I am today, the one I would have slain like the Thracian king, slain as I had slain him before. I have sat in this house, day after endless day, for almost twenty-five years now, listening to Poseidon, Earthshaker, his huge combers pounding endlessly upon the glistening, black rocks below, while first my wife, and then, later, my daughter, soft-voiced and comforting as John Milton’s girls, read or talked to me patiently. “When I consider how my light is spent…” It all began and ended at an airport. Airports, those gateways to the void! The lesson I learnt there: Nothing is coincidence; everything is ordained, fated. The Greek goddess, Heimarmene – inexorable Fate – rules, as the Stoics and Gnostics averred. I should have guessed that from the moment that I first stood in the doorway of the Olympic Airways 727, shielding my eyes against the dazzling Athenian sunlight of that afternoon in early September 1985. Each downward step on that metal stairway led me deeper into that labyrinth in which I had lost Alathea.