“Yes!” she said. “It failed. The good wine of truth cannot be poured out of filthy old bottles. I will quote something. Our largest intellectual powers are almost realized in Adam who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. It causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedbals, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body does he need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creation. Ha! You have done nothing but reaffirm the old lie that a big man made the world, then created a small man to take charge of it, then begot a woman on him to mass-produce replicas of himself. What could be more perverse? You have been deceived, Mr. Pollard. There is a great garden in your brain which is in total darkness. You have been taken in by the status-quo of men and women and what sex is about, much as people were taken in by the Empire and the Church. You don’t know how you have been oppressed because you have a penis.”
I was silent for a while then said, “Correct. You have put your finger exactly upon my weakness, which is sexual. Speak of work which does not refer to the sexes. Speak of my dictionary.”
She said, “It liberated me. My education was thoroughly religious in the worst sense but a cousin lent me de Beauvoir’s memoirs and your dictionary and they liberated me. At university you were my special study. Do you know how the professors use you? Not to free, but to bind. You are understood to support their systems. The students study commentaries on your book, not the book itself. I defended your assertion of the radical, sensual monosyllable. I was not allowed to complete the course.”
I nodded sadly and said, “Yes. I support common sense with uncommon intelligence so the bourgeois have appropriated me, as they appropriate all splendid things. But my book is called A Child’s Plainchant Dictionary of Abstractions. I wanted it set to music and sung in primary schools throughout France. Impossible, for I have no friends in high places. But if children sang my definitions with the voices of thrushes, larks and little owls they would get them by heart and easily detect fools and rascals who use words to bind and blind us. The revolution we require would be many days nearer.” “A dictator!” she cried scornfully. “You! A dwarf! Would dictate language to the children of a nation!” I laughed aloud. It is a rare relief when an interlocutor refers to my stature. She blushed at her audacity, then laughed also and said, “Intellectually you are a giant, of course, but you do not live like one. You live like the English authors who all believe the highest civic virtue is passivity under laws which money-owners can manipulate to their own advantage. The second Charlemagne3 has made our country a near dictatorship. In Algeria, Hungary, Vietnam and Ireland governments are employing torturers to reinforce racial, social and sexual oppression. The intelligent young hate all this and are looking for allies. And you, whose words would be eagerly studied by every intelligence in Europe, say nothing.”
I said, “I have no wish to be the mundane conscience of my tribe. Our Sartre can do that for us.” I was sublimely happy. She saw me as a position to be captured. I longed for captivity; and if I was mistaken, and she only saw me as a barricade to be crossed, might she not, in crossing, be physically astride me for a few moments? My reference to Sartre was making her regard me with complete disdain. I raised an imploring hand and said, “Pardon me! I have no talent for immediate events. My art is solving injustice through historical metaphor and even there I may be defeated.”
“Explain that.”
I looked directly into her eyes. I had expected sharp blue ones, but they were mild golden-brown and went well with the straw-coloured hair. I said, “You asked for my help to become a better poet. I need yours to finish my last and greatest work. I lack the knowledge to complete it myself.”
She whispered, “What work?”
“Prometheus Unbound.”
I hoped this conversation would be the first of a series lasting the rest of my life. Her curt, impetuous words, together with a haunted look, as if she must shortly run away, had led me to speak of Prometheus at least a year before I intended, but it was now too late to speak of less important things. I asked her to be patient if I told her a story she perhaps knew already. She glanced at her wristwatch then nodded.
The early Greeks (I said) believed the earth was a woman who, heated by his lightningstrokes, fertilized by his rain, undulated beneath her first off-spring, the sky. She gave birth to herbs, trees, beasts and titans. The titans can be named but never clearly defined. There is Atlas the maker of space, and Cronos whom Aristotle identifies with time. There is also Prometheus, whose name means foresight and torch. He was a craftsman, and moulded men from the dust of his mother’s body. The multiplying children of earth could not leave her. She tired of her husband’s lust, needing room for her family, room to think. She persuaded Cronos to castrate his dad with a stone sickle. The sky recoiled from her and time became master of the universe. When people came to live in cities they looked back on the reign of Cronos as a golden age, for in those days we were mainly shepherds and food-gatherers and shared the goods of the earth equally, without much warfare. But we had cyclops too, great men who worked in metal. Cronos feared those and locked them in hell, a place as far below the earth as the sky is above her. And when Cronos mated with his sister Rhea he became a cruel husband. He knew how dangerous a man’s children can be and swallowed his own as soon as they were born. The earth disliked that. She advised Rhea to give her man a stone when the next child came. Time, who has no organs of taste, swallowed this stone thinking it was yet another son. The boy’s mother called him Zeus and had him privately educated. When he was old enough to fight his father for the government of the universe he tricked the old man into drinking emetic wine and vomiting up the other children he had swallowed. These were the gods, and Zeus became their leader. The gods were more cunning than the titans, but less strong, and only Prometheus saw that cunning would replace strength as master of the universe. He tried to reconcile the two sides. When this proved impossible he joined the rebels.
The war which followed lasted ten years. Prometheus advised Zeus to release the cyclops from hell and when this was done they equipped the gods with helmet, trident and thunderbolt. Zeus won, of course, being supported by his brothers, by the earthmother, by the cyclops, by Prometheus and by men. What followed? The new boss of the universe confirmed his power by threatening mankind with death. Prometheus saved us by giving us hope (which allows us to despise death) and fire (which the gods wanted to keep to themselves). So Zeus punished Prometheus by crucifying him on a granite cliff. But Prometheus is Immortal. He writhes there to the present day.
“Madam,” I asked my woman, “do these matters seem savage and remote from you? This oppressed mother always plotting with a son or daughter against a husband or father, yet breeding nothing but a new generation of oppressors? This new administration crushing a clumsy old one with the help of the skilled workers, common people and a radical intellectual, and then taking control with the old threats of prison and bloody punishment.” She nodded seriously and said, “It is savage, but not remote.”