Of course, fuck you, you may have a better idea. I went ahead and paged Thumper again. Again she didn't call me back. Then this morning, .
I discovered a message on my machine. It startled me. I couldn't remember hearing the phone ring. Turned out some girl named Ashley wanted to see me, but I had no idea who she was. When I finally rolled into the Shop, I was a good three hours late. My boss flew Offthe handle. Put me on probation. Said I was an ass hair away from getting .
fired, and no he didn't care anymore how well I made needles. Unfortunately, I'm not too hopeful about improving my punctuality.
You wouldn't believe how much harder it's getting for me to just leave my studio. It's really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Puck. Puck. Puck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. - .
All the images Navidson finds during this period are beautifully concise. Every angle he chooses describes the agony of the wait, whether a shot of Tom sleeping on the couch, Reston listening more and more intently to the nonsense coming over the radio, or Karen watching them from the foyer, for the first time smoking a cigarette inside the house. Even the occasional shot of Navidson himself, pacing around the living room, communicates the impatience he feels over being denied this extraordinary opportunity. He has done his best to keep from resenting Karen, but clearly feels it just the same. Not once are they shown talking together. For that matter not once are they shown in the same frame together.
Eventually the entire segment becomes a composition of strain. Jump cuts increase. People stop speaking to each another. A single shot never includes more than one person. Everything seems to be on the verge of breaking apart, whether between Navidson and Karen, the family as a whole, or even the expedition itself. On the seventh day there is still no sign of the team. By the seventh night, Reston begins to fear the worst, and then in the early A.M. hours of the eighth day everyone hears the worst. The radio remains an incomprehensible buzz of static, but from somewhere in the house, rising up like some strange black oil, there comes a faint knocking. Chad and Daisy actually detect it first, but by the time they reach their parent's bedroom, Karen is already up with the light on, listening intently to this new disturbance.
It sounds exactly like someone rapping his knuckles against the wall: three quick knocks followed by three slow knocks, followed by three more quick knocks. Over and over again.
Despite a rapid search of the upstairs and downstairs, no one can locate the source, even though every room resonates with the distress signal. Then Tom presses his ear against the living room wall.
"Bro', don't ask me how, but it's coming from in there. In fact, for a second it sounded like it was right on the other side."
... _ _ _ ....
Ironically enough, it is the call for assistance that eliminates the jump cuts and reintegrates everyone again into a single frame. Navidson has finally been granted the opportunity he has been waiting for all along. Consequently, with Navidson suddenly in charge now, declaring his intent to lead a rescue attempt, the sequence immediately starts to resolve with the elimination of visual tensions. Karen, however, is furious. "Why don't we just call the police?" she demands. "Why does it have to be the great Will Navidson who goes to the rescue?" Her question is a good one, but unfortunately it only has one answer: because he is the great Will Navidson.
Considering the circumstances, it does seem a little ludicrous for Karen to expect a man who has thrived his whole life under shell fire and .
napalm to turn his back on Holloway and go drink lemonade on the porch. Furthermore, as Navidson points out, "They've been in there almost eight days with water for six. It's three in the morning. We don't have time to get officials involved or a search party organized. We have to go now." Then adding in a half-mumble:" I waited too long with Delia!. I'm not going to do it again."
The name "Delial" and its adamantine mystery stops Karen cold. Without saying another word, she sits down on the couch and waits for Navidson to finish organizing all the equipment they will need.
It takes only thirty minutes to assemble the necessary supplies. The hope is that they will locate Holloway's team nearby. If not, the plan is for Reston to go as far as the stairway where he will establish a camp and handle the radios, serving as a relay between the living room command post and Navidson and Tom who will continue on down the stairs. As far as photographic equipment is concerned, everyone wears a Hi 8 in a chest harness. (Short two cameras, Navidson has to take down one of the wall mounted Hi 8s from his study and another one from the upstairs hail.) He also brings his 35mm Nikon equipped with a powerful Metz strobe, as well as the 16mm Arriflex, which Reston volunteers to carry in his lap. Karen unhappily takes over the task of manning the radios. A Hi 8 captures her sitting in the living room, watching the men fade into the darkness of the hallway. There are in fact three quick shots of her, the last two as she calls her mother to report Navidson's departure as well as his mention of Delial. At first the phone is busy, then it rings.
_ _ ....
Navidson names this sequence SOS which aside from referring to the distress signal sent by Holloway's team also informs another aspect of the work. At the same time he was mapping out the personal and domestic tensions escalating in the house, Navidson was also editing the footage in accordance to a very specific cadence. Tasha K. Wheelston was the first to discover this carefully created structure: At first I thought I was seeing things but after I watched SOS more carefully I realized it was true: Navidson had not just filmed the distress call, he had literally incorporated it into the sequence. Observe how Navidson alternates between three shots with short durations and three shots with longer durations. He begins with three quick angles of Reston, followed by three long shots of the living room (and these are in fact just that - long shots taken from the .
foyer), followed again by three short shots and so on. Content has on a few occasions interfered with the rhythm but the pattern of three-short three-long three-short is unmistakable."
[118-Tasha K. Wheelston's "M.O.S.: Literal Distress," Film Quarterly, v. 48, fall 1994, p. 2-11.]
Thus while representing the emergency signal sent by Holloway's team, Navidson also uses the dissonance implicit in his home-bound wait-the impatience, frustration, and increasing familial alienation-to figuratively and now literally send out his own cry for help.
The irony comes when we realize that Navidson fashioned this piece long after the Holloway disaster occurred but before he made his last plunge into that place. In other words his SOS is entirely without hope. It either comes too late or too early. Navidson, however, knew what he was doing. It is not by accident that the last two short shots of SOS show Karen on the phone, thus providing an acoustic message hidden within the already established visual one: three busy signals, three rings.
In other words: .
... _ _ _.
(or) .
SO?.
[119-Pretty bitter but I've said the same thing myself more than a few times. In fact that word helped me make it through those months in Alaska. Maybe even got me there to begin with. The woman at the agency had to have known I wasn't close to sixteen, more like thirteen going on thirty-three, but she approved my application anyway. I like to imagine she was thinking to herself "Boy does this kid look young" and then because she was tired or really didn't care or because my tooth was split and I looked mean, she answered herself with "So?" and went ahead and secured my place at the canning factory.
Those were the days, let me tell you. Obscene twelve hour days cradled in the arms of stupefying beauty. Tents on the beach, out there on the Homer Spit, making me, not to mention the rest of us honorary spit rats.
Nothing to ever compare it to again either. An awful juxtaposition of fish bones & can-grime and the stench of too many aching lives & ragged fingers set against an unreachable and ever present beyond, a life-taking wind, more pure than even glacier water. And just as some water is too cold to drink, that air was almost too .
bright to breathe, raking in over ten thousand teeth of range pine, while bald eagles soared the days away like gods, even if they scavenged the mornings like rats, hopping around on gut-wet docks with the sea at their backs always calling out like a blue-black taste of something more.
Nothing about the job itself could have kept you there, hour upon hour upon even more hours, bent to the bench, steaming over the dead, .
gouging for halibut cheeks, slabs of salmon, enduring countless mosquito bites, even bee stings-my strange fortune-and always in the ruin of so many curses from the Filipinos, the White Trash, the Blacks, the Haitians, a low grade-grumbling which is the business of canning. The wage was good but it sure as hell wasn't enough to lock you down. Not after one week, let alone two weeks, let alone three months of the same .
mind-numbing gut-heaving shit.
You had to find something else.
For me it was the word "So?" And I learned it the hard way, in fact right at the very start of that summer.
I'd been invited out on a fishing boat, a real wreck of a thing but supposedly as seaworthy as they get. Well, we hadn't been gone for .
more than a few hours when a storm suddenly came up, split the seams and filled the hull with water. The pumps worked fine but only for about ten minutes. Tops. The coast guard came to the rescue but they took an hour to reach us. At the very least. By then the boat had already sunk. Fortunately we had a life raft to cower in and almost everyone survived. Almost. One guy didn't. An old Haitian. At least sixteen .
years old. He was a friend too or at least on his way to becoming a friend. Some line had gotten tangled around his ankle and he was dragged down with the wreck. Even when his head went under, we could all hear him scream. Even though I know we couldn't.
Back on shore everyone was pretty messed up, but the owner/captain was by far the worst off. He ended up drunk for a week, though the only thing he ever said was "So?"
The boat's gone. "So?"
Your mate's dead. "So?"
Hey at least you're alive. "So?"
An awful word but it does harden you.
It hardened me.
Somehow-though I don't remember exactly how-I ended up telling my boss a little about that summer. Even Thumper tuned in. This was the first time she'd paid any real attention to me and it felt great. In fact by the time I finished, since the day was almost over anyway and we were locking up, she let me walk her out.
"You're alright Johnny," she said in a way that actually made me feel alright. At least for a little while We kept talking and walked a little longer and then on a whim decided to get some Thai food at a small place on the north side of Sunset. She saying "Are you hungry?" Me using the word "starving." Her insisting we get a quick bite.
Even if I hadn't been starving, I would of eaten the world just to .
be with her. Everything about her shimmered. Just watching her drink a glass of water, the way she'd crush an ice cube between her teeth, made me go a little crazy. Even the way her hands held the glass, and she has beautiful hands, launched me into all kinds of imaginings, which I really didn't have time for because the moment we sat down, she started telling me about some new guy she was seeing, a trainer or something for a cadre of wanna-be never-be boxers. Apparently, he could make her come harder than she had in years.
I suppose that might of made me feel bad but it didn't. One of the reasons I like Thumper is because she's so open and uninhabited, I mean uninhibited, about everything. Maybe I've said that already. Doesn't matter. Where she's concerned I'm happy to repeat myself.
"It takes more than just being good," she told me. "Don't get me wrong: I love oral sex, especially if the guy knows what he's doing. Though if you treat my cut like a doorbell, the door's not going to open." She crushed another cube of ice. "Recently though, it's like I need to be thinking something really different and out there to get me crazy. For a while, money made my wet. I'm older now. Anyway this guy said he was going to slap my ass and I said sure. For whatever reason I hadn't done that before. You done it?" She didn't wait for my answer.
"So he got behind me, and he's got a nice cock, and I love the sound his thighs make when they snap up against my ass, but it wasn't going to make me come, even with me touching myself. That's when he smacked me. I could hardly feel it the first time. He was being kind of timid. So .
I told him to do it harder. Maybe I'm nuts, I don't know, but he whacked me hard the next time and I just started to go off. Told him to do it again and each time I got worked. Finally when I did come, I came really-" and she held out the "reeeal"-"hard. Saw in the mirror later I had a handprint right on my ass cheek. I guess you could say these days I like handprints. He said his palm stung." She laughed over that one.
When our food arrived, I began telling her about Clara English, another story altogether, Christina & Amber, Kyrie, Lucy and even the Ashley I have no clue about, which also made her laugh. That's when I decided not to bring up my unreturned pages. I didn't want to get all petty with her, even though secretly I did want to know why she never called me back. Instead I made a plan to stick exclusively to the .
subject of sex, flirt with her that way, make up some insane stories, maybe even elaborate on the Alaska thing, make her laugh some more, all of which was fine and good until for some reason, out of the blue, I changed the plan and started to tell her about Zampano and the trunk and my crazy attacks. She stopped laughing. She even stopped crushing ice.
She just listened to me for a half hour, an hour, I don't know how long, a long time. And you know the more I talked the more I felt some of the pain and panic inside me ease up a notch.
In retrospect it was pretty weird. I mean there I was wandering into all this personal stuff. I wasn't even sharing most of it with her either. I mean not as much as I've been putting down here, that's for .
sure. There's just too much of it anyway, always running parallel, is that the right word?, to the old man and his book, briefly appearing, maybe even intruding, then disappearing again; sometimes pale, sometimes bleeding, sometimes rough, sometimes textureless; frequently angry, frightened, sorry, fragile or desperate, communicated in moments of motion, smell and sound, more often than not in skewed grnnnr, a mad rush broken up by eidetic recollections, another type of signal I suppose, once stitched into the simplest cries for help flung high above the rust and circling kites or radioed when the Gulf waters of Alaska finally swept over and buried the deck for good-Here Come Dots . . .-or even carried to a stranger place where letters let alone visits never register, swallowed whole and echoless, in a German homonym for the .
whispered Word, taken, lost, gone, until there's nothing left to examine there either, let alone explore, all of which fractured in my head, even if it was hardly present in the words I spoke, though at the very least these painful remnants were made more bearable in the presence of Thumper.
At one point I managed to get past all those private images and .
just glance at her eyes. She wasn't looking around at people or fixing on silverware or tracking some wandering noodle dangling off her plate. She was just looking straight at me, and without any malice either. She was wide open, taking in everything I told her without judgment, just listening, listening to the way I phrased it all, listening to how I felt. That's when something really painful tore through me, like some old, powerful root, the kind you see in mountains sometimes splitting .
apart chunks of granite as big as small homes, only instead of granite this thing was splitting me apart. My chest hurt and I felt funny all over, having no idea what it was, this root or the feeling, until I suddenly realized I was going to start sobbing. Now I haven't cried since I was twelve, so I had no intention of starting at twenty-five, especially in some fucking Thai restaurant.
So I swallowed up.
I killed it.
I changed the subject.
A little while later, when we said goodnight, Thumper gave me a big, sweet hug. Almost as if to say she knew where I'd just been.
"You're alright Johnny," she said for the second time that night. "Don't worry so much. You're still young. You'll be fine."
And then as she put her jeep into gear, she smiled: "Come down and see me at work some time. If you want my opinion, you just need to get out of the house."]
IX.
Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error - Virgil laboriosus exitus donius - Ascensius laboriosa ad entrandum - Nicholas Trevet X [X -"Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering" Aeneid 6. 27. "The house difficult of exit" (Ascensius (Paris 1501)); "difficult to enter" (Trevet (Basel l490)).135 See H. J. Thomson's "Fragments of Ancient Scholia on Virgil Preserved in Latin Glossaries" in W. M. Lindsay and H. J. Thomson's Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries (London: St. Andrews University Publications, 1921). [120-In fact all of this was quoted directly from Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiauitv throuah the Middle Aaes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) p. 21, 97, 145 and 227. A perfect example of how Zampano likes to obscure the secondary sources he's using in order to appear more versed in primary documents. Actually a woman by the name of Tatiana turned me onto that bit of info. She'd been one of Zampano's scribes and-'luclcy for me' she told me over the phone- still had, among other things, some of the old book lists he'd requested from the library.
I do have to say though getting over to her place was no easy accomplishment. I had trouble just walking out my door. Things are definitely deteriorating. Even reaching for the latch made me feel sick to my stomach. I also experienced this awful tightening across my chest, my temples instantly registering a rise in pulse rate. And that's not the half of it. Unfortunately I don't think I can do justice to how truly strange this all is, a paradox of sorts, since on one hand I'm laughing at myself, mocking the irrational nature of my anxiety, what I continue in fact to perceive as a complete absurdity-'! mean Johnny what do you really have to be afraid of?'- while on the other hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular-there were no particulars as far as I could see-then of the reaction itself, as undeniable & unimpeachable as Zampano's black trunk.
I know it makes no sense but there you have it: what should have negated the other only seemed to amplify it instead.
Fortunately, or not fortunate at all, Thumper's advice continued to echo in my head. I accepted the risk of cardiac arrest, muttered a flurry of fucks and charged out into the day, determined to meet Tatiana and retrieve the material.
Of course I was fine.
Except as I started walking down the sidewalk, I watched a truck veer from its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily redirect itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me. Suddenly I understood what it meant to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity & mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it. I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still hurtling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you're not going to believe this-'I can't believe this aeshole just totaled my fucking carl Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!' even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.
People started screaming.
Though not about me.
Something to do with the truck.
It was leaking all over the place.
Gas.
It had caught fire. I was going to burn.
Except it wasn't gas.
It was milk.
Only there was no milk. There was no gas. No leak either. There weren't even any people. Certainly none who were screaming. And there sure as hell wasn't any truck. I was alone. My street was euipty. A tree fell on me. So heavy, it took a crane to lift it. Not even a crane could lift it. There are no trees on my block.
This has got to stop.
I have to go.
I did go.
When I reached Tatiana's place, she'd just gotten back from the gym and her brown legs glistened with sweat. She wore black Spandex shorts and a pink athletic halter top which was very tight but still could not conceal the ample size of her breasts. I said 'hello' and then explained again how I had come into possession of the old man's papers and why in my effort to straighten them all out I needed to trace some of his references. She happily handed over the reading lists she'd compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she'd made relating to the etymology of 'lr When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke. I guess she didn't understand my sense of humor or understood it perfectly. She appeared with the drink and poured herself one as well. We spoke for another hour, ended up finishing all the Jack, and then right out of the blue she said, 'I won't let you fuck me.' Time to get going, I thought, and began to stand up. Not that I'd expected anything mind you. 1But if you want, you can come on me,' she added. I sat back down and before I could think of something to say, she had tugged off her top and stretched herself out in the middle of the floor. Her tits were round, hard and perfectly fake. As I straddled her, she unbuttoned my pants. Then she reached for some extremely aromatic oil sitting on her coffee table. She squeezed hard enough to release a thin stream. It dripped off of me, a warm rain spilling down over her toned belly and large brown nipples. Pleased with what she'd done, she settled back to watch me stroke & grind myself into my own hands.
At one point she bit down on her lower lip and it amped me up even more. When she started to caress her own breasts, small groans of pleasure rising up from her throat, I felt the come in my balls begin to boil. However only when I got ready to climax did I lose sight of her, my eyes slamming shut, something I believe now she'd been waiting for, a temporary instant of darkness, where vulnerable and blind to everything but my own pleasure, she could reach up beneath me and press the tip of an oil soaked finger against my asshole, circling, rubbing, until finally she pushed hard enough to exceed the threshold of resistance, slipping inside me and knowing exactly where to go too, heading straight for the prostate, the P spot, the LOUD button on this pumping stereophonic fuck system I never knew I had, initiating an almost unbearable scream for (and of) pleasure, endorphins spitting through my brain at an unheard of rate, as muscles in my groin (almost) painfully contracted in a handful of heart stomping spasms-not something I could say I was exactly prepared for. I exploded. A stream of white flying across her tits, strings of the stuff dripping off her nipples, collecting in pools around her neck, some of it leading as far as her face, one gob of it on her chin, another on her lower lip. She smiled, started to gently rub my semen into her black skin and then opened her mouth as if to sigh, only she didn't sigh, no sound, not even a breath, lust her moon bright teeth, and finally her tongue licking first her upper lip before turning to her lower lip, where, smiling, her eyes focused on mine, watching me watching her, she licked up and finally swallowed my come.]
Having already discussed in Chapter V how echoes serve as an effective means to evaluate physical, emotional, and thematic distances present in The Navidson Record, it is now necessary to remark upon their descriptive limitations. In essence echoes are confined to large spaces. However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction. In other words the concept of a labyrinth.
It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan [So sorry.] [121-German for "building plan." - Ed.] for the house. Of course this is an impossibility, not only due to the wall-shifts but also the film's constant destruction of continuity, frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort of accurate mapmaking. Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.
Curiously enough, if we can look to history to provide us with some context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages. [122-For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santarcangeli's Livre des labyrinthes; Russ Craim's "The Surviving Web" in Daedalus, summer 1995; Hermann Kern's Labirinti; W H. Matthews' Mazes and Labyrinths; Stella Pin icker's Double-Axe; Rodney Castleden's The Knossos Labyrinth; Harold Sieber's Inadequate Thread; W. W. R. Ball's "Mathematical Recreations and Essays"; Robinson Ferrel Smith's Complex Knots-No Simple Solutions; 0. B. Hardison Jr.'s Entering The Maze; and Patricia Flynn's Jejunum and Ileum.]For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul. Most famous of all, however, was the labyrinth Daedalus constructed for-King Minos. It served as a prison. Purportedly located on the island of Crete in the city of Knossos,-the maze was built to incarcerate the Minotaur, a creature born from an illicit encounter between the queen and a bull. As most school children learn, this monster devoured more than a dozen Athenian youths every few years before Theseus eventually slew it.
[123-At the risk of stating the obvious no woman can mate with a bull and produce a child. Recognizing this simple scientific fact, I am led to a somewhat interesting suspicion: King Minos did not build the labyrinth to imprison a monster but to conceal a deformed child- his child.
While the Minotaur has often been depicted as a creature with the body of a bull but the torso of a man-centaur like-the myth describes the Minotaur as simply having the head of a bull and the body of a man, [127-W. H. Matthews writes similar small labyrinth, with a central Theseus Minotaur design, is to be found on the wall of the church of an Michele Maggio at Pavia. It is thought to be of tenth century construction. This is one of the few eases where the Minotaur is represented with a human head and a beast's body as a sort of Centaur, in fact." See his book Mazes & Labyrinths: Their History & Development (New York: Dover Publications. Inc., 1970), p. 56. Also see Fig. 40 on p. 53.] or in other word a man with a deformed face. I believe pride would not allow Minos to accept that the heir to the throne had a horrendous appearance. Consequently he dissolved the right of ascension by publicly accusing his wife Pasiphae of fornicating with a male bovine.
Having enough conscience to keep from murdering his own flesh and blood, Minos had a labyrinth constructed complicated enough to keep his son from ever-escaping but without bars to suggest a prison. (It is interesting to note how the myth states most of the Athenian youth "fed" to the Minotaur actually starved to death in the labyrinth, thus indicating their deaths had more to do with the complexity of the maze and less to do with the presumed ferocity of the Minotaur.) I am convinced Minos' maze really sees as a trope for repression. My published thoughts on this subject (see "Birth Defects in Knossos" Sonny Won't Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1968) [124-"Violent Prejudice in Knossos" by Zampano in Sonny Will Wait Flyer, Santa Cruz, 1969.] [125-I have no idea why these titles and cited sources are different. It seems much too deliberate to be an error, but since I haven't been able to find the "flyer" I don't know for certain. I did call Ashley back, left message, even though I still don't remember her.] inspired the playwright Taggert Chiclitz to author a play called The Minotaur for The Seattle Repertory Company. [126-The Minotaur by Taggert Chielit, put on at The Hey Zeus Theater by The Seattle Repertory Company on April 14. 1972. ] As only eight people, including the doorman, got a chance to see the production I produce here a brief summary: Chiclitz begins his play with Minos entering the labyrinth lute one eveiing to speak to his son. As it turns out. the Minotaur is a gentle and misunderstood creature, while the so called Athenian youth are convicted criminals who were already sentenced to death back in Greece. Usually King Minos had them secretly executed and then publicly claims their deaths were caused by the terrifying Minotaur thus ensuring that the residents of Knossos will never get too close to the labyrinth. Unfortunately this time, one of the criminals had escaped into the maze, encountered Mint (as Chielitz refers to the Minotaur) and nearly murdered him. Had Minos himself not rushed in and killed the criminal. his son would have perished. Suffice it to say Minos is furious. He has caught himself caring for his son and the resulting guilt and sorrow incenses him to no end. As the play progresses, the King slowly sees past his son's deformities, eventually discovering an elegiac spirit, an artistic sentiment and most importantly a visionary understanding-of the world. Soon a deep paternal love grows in the King's heart and he begins to conceive of a way to reintroduce the Minotaur buck into soeicty.f Sadly the stories the King has spread throughout the world concerning this terrifying beast prove the seeds of tragedy. Soon enough, a bruiser named-Theseus arrives (Chielitz describes him as a drunken virtually retarded, frat boy) who without a second thought hacks the Minotaur into little pieces. In one-of the play's most moving scenes. King Minos, with tears streaming down his face, publicly commends Theseus' courage. The crowd believes the tears are a sign of gratitude while we the audience understand they are tears of loss. The king's heart breaks, and while he will go on to be an extremely just ruler, it is a justice forever informed by the deepest kind of agony. [128-Even in Metamorphosis, Ovid notes how Minos, in his old age, feared young men.
Qui, duni/u,t integer oeiti, terrucrat nwgnas 1/550 guoque Iwflhine gelUe3 i'une ert i,nwlidu.v, DeIniknqut I rn tar robore julie turn Pibgue parente superbuin pirlitnuil, eredcnstjue suis insurgere ignL haut tun,n Cs! palriis LIr rcpncaihus ausux.
("When Minos was in golden middle age! MI nations feared the mention of his name,/ but now he'd grown so impotent. so feeble! He shied away from proud young Miletus. The forward son of Phoebus and Deione;/ Though Mines half suspected Miletus/ Had eyes upon his throne and framed a plot! To make a palace revolution, he feared to act,/ To sign the papers for his deportation." Horace Gregory p. 258 259.) Perhaps Miletus reminded Mines of his slain son and out of guilt he cowered in the presence of his youth.]