The Son of Silence by Han Ryner

Author:Han Ryner [Ryner, Han]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

In the house of Friends, the poet Lysis, the most loving and most beloved of disciples was waiting for Pythagoras.

“Master, my heart is overflowing, and I have so many things to tell you.”

“Speak then, my son.”

“The poem in which I am attempting to put your thought, I finished this morning on the road to Croton. I would like to sing it to you.”

“I am listening with my ears and with my heart.”

“O Master, O Pythagoras, O you who my thought names Golden-Thigh….”

The philosopher was saddened. “If Lysis speaks like the people, then who will understand me?”

“O Master, the amphora that the people carry and the amphora that I carry are similar, but perhaps they do not contain the same wine. Listen. When I saw you for the first time, on the day that my silence calls the day of my birth, it was in Olympia, and I had arrived from Eleusis. I bore within me coffers that I did not know how to open, the discourse of the hierophant and the mute spectacle of the mysteries.

“You spoke. You believed that you were only speaking about justice, but the words of others contain less than they believe and your words contain more than you believe. While you were speaking, the coffers opened in a dream of light to show me treasures and marvels. But that light was fleeing lightning, not durable sunlight. The coffers and the darkness closed inexorably, and my impoverished eyes retained a regret rather than a memory.

“The treasures that were in me, you alone, I understood, could give me. That is why I followed you; that is why I have loved you with hope, and I love you with gratitude.

“Now, that first day, while I gazed at you and while I listened to you, my thought was a confused emotion, a joyous intoxication and a dancing chorus. I thought about the vulgar Dionysus who, after the death of Semele, Zeus, a strange mother, carried in his thigh. I also thought about the Dionysus of the mysteries, the child folded in the pure human heart, who will one day surge forth in the triumph of justice and love. I thought about his reign, the golden age that the lying poets have placed in the past, but which our hopes and our desires create in the future. That future, more that all other men combined, you bore within you. A ray of sunlight that played, like living gold, over your right thigh, came to mingle with the golden dance of my thoughts. To revive by a single word the multiple emotion of that moment, Master, my silence often calls you Pythagoras of the golden thigh.”

“I desire to hear your poem, not the praises of a pious son who sees his father more handsome than a man.”

“O Golden-Thigh, do you think that my poem does not direct any praise toward you? Do you think that one can speak the truth without naming it Pythagoras, of justice without naming it Pythagoras, of

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