The Couple: The Rider Quintet, vol. 4

PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA

PERSEUS AND ANDROMEDA I. PERSEUS SURPRISED, ANDROMEDA UNBOUND The gods have not created men. Men have created the gods. H O L D E R L I N How Perseus Caught Himself Before He Fell In order that this story occur and another flight not be delayed by weather's chaos, Aeolus ordered the wind to give wayto stillness at dawn. The morning star pried open Perseus' eyes,and in the grip of this magnetic radiance he leapt out ofbed, grabbed his saber, clamped wings to sandals, and was soon at cruising altitude. He found nothing more intoxicating than to be up where the air wasclear. Horizonless distances: pure possibility. He passed over Nubia and the Nile. Remembered the headlines: TROUBLED GOVERNMENTS. A cliff drew near. A relief came into view: a female form; bare but for a woven silver band around her neck; a stone woman—hands and feet chained to a rockface where wind lashed her hair across her face. He hovered like a hummingbird. 61 1 If he'd known it was rude to stare he would not have seen her eyesfill with warm tears and, as the jutting frieze unfroze, he was seized:stricken. High-minded, fearless, yet fragile, and veryyoung, he wasutterly at the mercy of having seen a woman as a woman for the first time. That she was gorgeous beyond belief tore Perseus out of his body: the half-god courted free fall, almost forgetting that to stay aloft he had to beat hiswings. Recognizing his life's love the instant he sawher come alive he resolved to win her hand. Appalled to seeone so innocent chained down for her mother Cassiopeia's inexcusable gaffe instead of being bound—to him—in love and marriage, he barraged her with questions: "Where are you from? What isthe reason that they use you thus? Who tied you to this rockface in these desolate heights?" He was so much inside his own story he noted only her physical bind and wasblind to what another hero more experienced in stuff like love at first sight might have asked himself: "Does she love me too?" 62 Since Andromeda was taking the fall for her narcissisticmother's absence of impulse control in telling Neptune that her beauty exceeded any of the Nereids- "women's beauty" had become her least favorite subject;and had her hands not been tied, shewould have acted now with age-appropriate modesty and covered her face. Immobilized, she was stillresourceful, and filled her eyeswith tears to stay his impatience. Rescue Mission: Code Name, Andromeda Carlo Collodi would have relished that Perseus didn't recognizehis own erection and thought some creatureof the air must have— but when?—stuck ajavelinin his groin! Ovid, swifter and more mischievous than Sophocles, Virgil,orLucretius, packed a lot of action into lines that go by in about—one-tenth of a second. Mortified, he maintained air-space as he hovered at eyelevelto his love— with nothing, not even abackpack, like any high school boy, to press against his groin until his boner subsided: never mind that her tears blurred her vision, or that she couldn't think properly until her rescuewassecure. Perseus stifled a laugh as the immense gap between inner and outer worlds, opened, 63 2 and how until this precise moment in time he'd lived his life on automatic pilot, basking in the status the others conferred upon him for performing tasks which they found terrifying and he executed with such consummate grace and ease he'd repressed his contempt for these superstitiousslackers bearing stupid trophies and unctuous praise. Like athletes and actors, the hero performs in a realm set apart from the real, where, when people die they don't return for curtaincalls. That's why there are funerals. You re lookingfor a myth of origin. A truth that would survive transformations. I don't want to criticize your Jewish heritage, but prophecy— EzekieVs aphoristic thrust— is not commensurate withpoetry. Jewish cultureis—a survival code for wanderers—still pre-dialectical. Greek culture is advanced— and Roman architecture hasnever been equaled—. Is there something in language that inclines the mind toward imprecision— because ifyou mean aqueducts, funneling water from underground streams and lakes, it's inseparable from survival. Yet in the service of a higher order. 64 Perseus' Bout of Altruism Andromeda feared that he could take her silence as an admission of guilt and chose...