The Physics of Sorrow. Georgi Gospodinov

a woman giving birth to a man-bull—Daedalus slips a Trojan horse into the history of species. And a few millennia later, yet another new heir will crop up, without a wooden body, without any body at all—the Trojan horse, a malicious computer virus. It pretends to be a useful program, lies low for a day or two before unleashing its fury—erasing files, opening doors, smashing defenses, letting foreign eyes into your virtual Troy. And all of that—born of Daedalus’s unnatural craftsmanship. Which goes against the natural order that the mysterious Gaustine from the seventeenth century insisted upon.

       There is Order here and God makes no mistake,

       Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.

      MYTH AND GAME

      Shall we talk about the Minotaur and videogames? Just enter any one of the games that have multiplied in recent years. Clichés and classics. The Minotaur looks like your average B-movie thug. Short-legged and beefy, with a short, thick neck, hairy, with the terminator’s trapezoidal face and absurd little horns. And sometimes, as an added bonus, a crooked boar’s tusk. As if the rest wasn’t enough, they had to go and cross the bull with feral pig.

      My dearest Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plutarch, Euripides, and you, Mr. Dante “Inferno” Alighieri (to spell out your nickname, too), come see what mythology has become. See the character you so despised. You’ve contributed greatly to his present image. Behold him and weep, you proto-gamers from antiquity. Some day we can play a round, when we get together in real time. In real time, ha ha ha . . . We’ll play “The Minotaur in the Labyrinth” or World of Warcraft or God of War or . . . some 3-D game. Then, however, only the Minotaur will be three-dimensional, while we’ll all be two-dimensional shades (we’ll be in the Kingdom of the Shades, after all, right?), pathetic cartoons with faded colors from the beginning of the digital era.

      THE MADONNA WITH MINOTAUR

      A child is sitting in his mother’s lap. She is holding him in her left arm, she has most likely just nursed him and is now waiting for him to burp. The child is naked. The scene is iconic, so well known and repeating in all images after the birth of the Christ Child. There is one difference, however, which makes this drawing unique. The child has a bull’s head. Little horns, long drawn-out ears, wide-set eyes, a snout. The head of a calf. Pasiphaë with the Minotaur Child. Centuries before the Virgin Mary.

      The image is one of a kind. It was discovered near the erstwhile Etruscan city of Volci, in present-day Lazio. It can be seen in the collection of the Parisian National Library. Someone dared to recall the obvious, which the myth would quickly forget. We’re talking about a baby. Carried and delivered by a woman. We’re talking about an infant, not a beast. A child, who will soon be abandoned (sent to the basement). Most likely Minos needed time, months, even a year or two, to decide what to do, how to hide this marked child from the world. If we peer at the faces of the mother and the son, we can see that both of them already know.

      Perhaps this is the very moment of separation? Her left arm no longer embraces him, but pulls away, waving farewell gently behind the child’s back.

      Later the myth will transform the child into a monster, so as to justify the sin of his abandonment, the sin against all children, whom we will abandon in the future.

      CHILD-UNFRIENDLY

      The absence of children in Greek mythology is striking.

      If we agree that antiquity is the childhood of mankind, then why is that childhood so devoid precisely of children? Apparently where everybody is acting childish, real children are unwelcome. Insofar as they exist, they are most often devoured by their fathers. Any left undevoured will devour their fathers. That’s how it’s been since the beginning of time, since Chronos and his children.

      It’s clear that Time always devours his children. But there is time where there is light, where lightness and darkness, day and night alternate. So it turns out that the only place hidden from time is the absolute darkness of the cave. That’s where the child Zeus was hidden away. It was the only place where Chronos (Time) did not rule.

      The Minotaur, too, is hidden away in the dark underground labyrinth. And since time does not pass there, he remains a boy forever.

      We were also locked up in the basement, that late urban cave, like momentary Minotaurs amid the jars of pickles and jam.

      I had an aunt who always threatened to eat me up every time she came to visit. Huge and hulking, a distant offshoot of the Titan’s line, she would stand in front of me, spread wide her enormous arms with their rapaciously painted nails, bare her teeth malevolently, two silver caps sparkling, and would slowly step toward me with a deep growl coming from her belly. I would curl up into a ball, screaming, while she shook with laughter. She didn’t have any children, she must have devoured them.

      DEVOURED CHILDREN IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY (AN INCOMPLETE CATALOGUE)