AN INSURRECTION OF GODS: IANTO’S REDEMPTION

(The Graeco-Catholic Meta-Narrative Redux PART II)

John Russell Herbert

                Ianto stepped into the relative darkness of Sts. Philip and James, and contemplated “light” while he waited to give his confession.  He threw some peculiar memories at that poor priest, but he was absolved.  A cigarette pack he dropped made a loud noise, and he bumped his head while getting up from the confessional’s kneeler.

                The priest had been . . . constructive; shocked, responsive to Ianto’s “insights”, he’d segued into “unconditional love”, as a motif on which to base meditation.

                A well-tanned white man, with a nearly shaven head, wearing an immaculately dramatic white dress shirt, cut past Wyman Dell, around Hopkins, then down into the forests of Wyman Park proper.

                He planted olive seeds below Hampden, down along parts of Jones Falls, knowing the long-shot of their growing, but thinking of the treasure that olive trees would be for some unknown people, near that stream, centuries on.

                A well-tanned white man, with a nearly shaven head, wearing an immaculately dramatic white dress shirt, cut through Hampden and got one of those big pizza slices at 36^th and Keswick.

                Past his old statue of The Virgin, through his room’s southern window, he saw air conditioners, chimneys, satellite dishes, and the top half of a huge tree that was older than Post-Modernism.

Apollo despaired,

                Contemplating the chances of turning humiliation into/

                                                                                                              freedom,

                                But the trees of Arcadia died from lack of sun,

                And mountains that’d been snow-capped grew scorched.

Still, Apollo refused the Sun Reins that only he could handle,

                But, half-lifeless, a God,

                                Half as free as Man to getting lost in pleasure,

                                                Twice as bound to the awareness of/

                                                                                universal consequence,

                He wandered in malaise to the East, the East,

Always east.

                Apollo came to a point at which the forests ended, and he saw one spectacular roebuck on the terrain that rises towards the Steppe.

                He notched an arrow, pulled the bowstring, held steady, saw the animal in beautiful aim, and let the arrow fly.

                He struck some far-distant earth.  Some gust, some fluke, some unusual deer-quickness, caused to happen something that had never happened before; Brilliant Apollon missed his mark.

Our Pheobus missed his mark,

                And still he was compelled irresistibly to the East,

While those in supposed league with him drifted here, then there, and gradually resumed their lives and actions under their sundry yokes of destiny.

                Apollo wandered, still to the East, where sparse evidence always remained of herds, and of men on horseback, but never of marble or of the things we know as civilization.

                In mad melancholy he wandered to Scythia, to Prometheus, to the end of the world.

                Through all of this Zeus raged, in a state between absolute rashness and black despair tinged with the sorrows of love, for He knew that it was his Noblest Son, this one Who rebelled.

                But our Pheobus still wandered east, away from shepherds, and fishermen, and markets, and civilization that crouches richly around the rich, rich sea; he wandered on towards waste.

                Hephaestus grumbled,

                As long before,

                And with a broken heart He knew vaguely that He’d one day/

                                                bind again a Divinity higher than His own,

                                A Divinity higher also than the One He obeyed.

                So Apollo wandered the Steppe, and there were only herdsmen that didn't know him, and there was waste, and there was a sun that beamed flatly onto the earth, from above, without him, an the desolation froze at night, and it sweltered in the day.

                Still he wandered slowly east, slowly because all that could await was Destiny, the destiny that was subsequent to all attempts at forsaking it.

                And Moira was not a lovely goddess;

                                All he saw was desolation.

                It rained through Friday and grew clear before dawn on Saturday.

The heavy wind battered tree branches against his house all through the night, but the cosmos knew nothing of his heart,

                and Apollo tied tormented horribly for ten thousand years to come, and Prometheus finally freed,

“…I only baptize you in water; He Who comes after me shall baptize you in Light, and in Life, and in Blood, and in Fire.  The Kingdom of God is at hand, and He shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit,” (extrap. from

      Matthew 3:11)

                Nearing the summit Apollo saw only Prometheus, perfect, bound, and Hephaestos, hunched and world-weary, standing with his smelting tools, the tools that would set one God free and bind another to the torture of millennia.

                No one else awaited, there on those crags half-shrouded by wisps of fog that suggested little of mystery, for how could there have been mystery, with vultures on the horizon, and with new shackles forged by the Divine Smith?

                But, finished trudging east, and finished with all that lay behind him, Apollo walked the last yards of that slope, and nodded to Noble Prometheus, whose Immortal eyes welled half to tearing, while the cold and broken Smith, always employed, looked on in grim resignation.

Apollo shone,

                With destiny bound,

                                But intellect free in its sight of oblivion,

                And he stood,

                                Tied and tormented,

                       For ten thousand years,

                                Or until the end of time,

Tied and tormented in daily agony,

                So the Bringer of Fire could go free.

                The Lame One, the Jilted One, the Faithful, Hephaestus the Smith, clanged and soldered the shackles on the limbs of the Prince of Light.

                Eloquent Pheobus, then, was nothing but a torn and fallen man.

                Dionysos and Aphrodite wept for their* half-brother, and forgot him.

                The Scythian Steppe stretched out, infinitely, housing none but savage hordes, men without telos, without song, without light, . . .

                                                Illiterate,

                                Strong.

                The sun was still hot and strong, but the chill of autumn began to undercut the days’ breezes and to settle deeply in the hours of late night and well into those of morning.

                Then there was a nighttime drizzle so light and diaphanous that it bordered on being fog.

                Saturday was clear and sunny, again with only a light chill that seemed to undercut every second or third breeze and to thereby speak of autumn.

                Though the Church and street were Classically designed, the Wind and Sun were strong, and they too spoke of Nature that is not Man.

                He went to Confession.

                Waiting, he walked to the place at which worshippers can light candles.  From economic and personal stress, from sleep-deprivation, from thoughts of his Dying Father’s asking, “Where’s Ianto?”, he cried when he saw The Virgin.

                He confessed, nothing at all other than not having been at his father’s deathbed.

                When he left the church, the sun outside was strong, clear, beaming between strong columns that spoke of Greece and Rome.

                (Here ends the Reconciliation of the protagonist’s soul as he half-aligns it in readiness for the possibility, the possible desirability, of Death.)

He regretted weakness,

                And he regretted accidents,

                                And he regretted moments without grace,

And he regretted “fate”, or a seemingly/

                infinite complex of chain reactions/

in the world and in hearts/

                that weren’t his,

But he did not regret sacrifice.

The End

John Russell Herbert

(tous droits réservée par l’auteur en 2008)