Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:34:24 +0100
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: On the Plains of Troy, Vying with Gods

On the Plains of Troy, Vying with Gods

"At that moment, with that confrontation," he said, "all our attempts
at interpretation prove to be insubstantial. Interpretation is
revealed for the bloodless thing it is. The only valid response to the
poem, the only response that can make the experience of the poem the
experience of poetry is your experience of the encounter as the
overwhelming visceral illumination it is."

A lock of his dusky golden hair fell over his forehead. Without
thinking or missing a beat and with the hand that did not have a copy
of "The Iliad" open in it, he brushed it back, only to have to do it
again after it defiantly bounced back.

"Apollo does not signify anything allegorical or metaphorical. This is
12th century Greece, B.C.," he continued. "He's one of the Gods. Gods
were not allegorical or metaphorical. They were actual, relentless and
terrifying, terrifying in a thrilling way, in the way that indomitable
power is. When Diomedes hurls himself against Apollo in the ecstatic
fury of his battle fever, hot from his victory over Aeneas, Apollo
thunders a warning to him.

"If you want to make meanings here, go ahead," he admonished the
class. "But all this scene really is, what is at the root of this
story's power," he explained, "is the encounter of a magnificent and
furiously raging mortal striving with and then deferring to an
ineffable and aroused God. There is an explosion of power so intense
that it recoils back on itself. It becomes an implosion.

"That encounter is nothing else but itself, and it is existentially
terrifying. It brings together the forces of anger and eroticism,
joined in a kinetic confrontation between a man and a God."

Edgar Robinson could not have held his audience better had he been a
great star of the theater. His class was charged with drama and
charisma. Students sat on the window sills and radiators. They
crouched on the floor in the corners of the classroom, notebooks
thrown open, but hardly anyone took notes. Everyone was listening.


No one called him Edgar. Everyone called him Eddie. He called himself
Eric. It was his middle name, but nobody even knew that. It was his
mother's name with the 'a' trimmed off in recognition of his
masculinity.

He was not married. He was courtly and flirtatious with women. At the
semi-annual holiday parties he danced with nearly the entire female
complement of the faculty and the administration with courtliness and
gallantry. But he was always out of reach, impervious to any grasp. He
was open, affable, unavailable, and irresistible. He was tenured and
published.


Chris sat in the first row in Eric's class. He was awed by him. He had
adopted his teacher's staccato speaking style. He dressed like him,
too. Like him, Chris wore a well-fitting ribbed cotton turtle neck
under an autumnally-brown tweed jacket and a pair of tight-fitting
jeans.  And he wore a long leather coat.

It was the leather coat that did the work and took Chris where he
never thought he could go.

"I like your coat," Eric said walking beside him down the granite
steps outside Bluehouse Library into the early and perhaps deceptive
springtime. Perhaps deceptive because snow was known to come yet
again, even after such sweetness, before winter could be confidently
forgotten.

Chris blushed. He giggled, and shrugged.

"It looks good on you, too," Eric added.

Before Chris could figure out what exactly Eric was saying, Eric said,
"But the two of us walking together like this, we might be mistaken
for a pair of upper-mid-level Nazi bureaucrats. My rooms are over
there." He was pointing to the upper floors of an old Victorian
mansion across the street and down the block. "Can I interest you in a
pot of tea?"

"Really?" Chris stuttered, but Eric cut him short.

"Really," he said with a happy grin at the boy's sense of being honored.


"Why do you dress like me?" Eric said, carelessly, as he hung Chris's
coat in the closet beside his.

Chris again blushed.

"Please don't be embarrassed," Eric said. "I am flattered."

"Because I admire you and I want to model myself on you," Chris
gulped, figuring bravado with its attendant ambiguity was the best
defense.

But he was to be outdone by his master at the game.

"Have you thought about what it would be like to have me inside you?" Eric said.

The question would have seemed weird, shockingly odd, even
incomprehensible, had not Chris so often imagined slowly stripping
seductively and watching Eric watch him doing it, had he not felt his
rectal muscles clenching and loosening as he imagined Eric inside him.

"Yes," Chris said shyly.

"I thought so," Eric said, smiling. "I'm glad. So have I."

He reached out and brought the boy to him and pressed him to himself.
He kissed him.

"I could see it in your face that I'd gotten to you. I like that kind
of devotion."

"Thank you," Chris said.

"Thank you," Eric returned the compliment with a surprising tender
sincerity, unbuckling Chris's belt, pulling his turtle neck out of his
jeans, and lifting it. "You do it," he said.

Eric watched Chris pull the shirt over his head and then removed his
own, enjoying that Chris was now watching him.

"It will feel like I'm making love to myself," he said, following the
contours of Chris's naked chest with spidery finger-tips and touching
his lips to Chris's and then backing away.

"You like to work out," Eric said, gently taking hold of Chris's firm nipples.

"It turns me on," Chris said with a shiver. "Do you work out?" he said
looking at Eric's smooth, well-wrought torso.

"It turns me on," Eric said.


Daylight was gone. They lay together in Eric's bed, slowly dancing to ecstasy.

"Tell me how you feel," Eric said, looking at Chris looking up at him.

"I feel like I'm worshipping you," Chris said.

Slowly they wound themselves together.


"You don't have a television?" Chris said, returning to the kitchen
with his empty coffee mug, looking for a refill.

"No, I don't have a television," Eric said smiling, looking at Chris'
well-wrought figure, nearly naked except for his black bikini
underwear. With his cup extended as Eric tilted the pot and poured
some coffee out into it he seemed posed to be an old Greek or Roman
marble of a beautiful young man. Michelangelo would have appreciated
him.

"But you do have a laptop," Chris continued.

"I could not live without it," Eric said.

"I'd like to hear you say that about me," Chris said.

"With or without changing the pronoun?" Eric said.

"That's yours to determine," Chris said.

"We'd better get dressed," Eric said.

"What happens now?" Chris said as he looked at himself in the mirror
and brushed his hair.

"What do you mean?" Eric said.

"Are we?" Chris said but shifted from words to gestures, shuttling his
right hand back and forth through the charged and empty air.

"Are we what?" Eric asked.

"I don't know, Chris said, hesitating. "Do you want to see me again?"

"I'm going to see you in exactly one hour and fifty-three minutes from
now and talk to you about Diomedes' third encounter with a God when he
would have slain Ares, if Gods could be slain," Eric said and took a
swallow of coffee.

Chris frowned. Eric was teasing him.

"I mean this way, like this?"

"Like this, too," Eric said.

"You're making fun of me."

"Do you want to see me again?" Eric returned his question.

"In exactly an hour and fifty-three minutes from now every Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Friday until May," Chris answered.

"I mean this way," Eric grinned and took the boy in his arms and kissed him.

"This way, too."

"You're copying me again."

"I mean it," Chris said, caressing Eric's bicep. "But I don't really
feel like it's up to me."

"Who is it up to then?"

"You."

"What I say goes?"

"What you say goes."

"Get dressed. I'll see you in class. Come to my office after your last
class, which is over...when?"

"At three."

"Be there at three."

"Yes, Sir," Chris said.

"Go, now," Eric said.

Chris returned dressed. Eric took him to the door. Naked he stood
there and took the clothed boy in his arms and pressed his lips to
him. He filled him with his breath. Chris collapsed in surrender
against his chest.

"Go," Eric said. Standing behind it, he held the door open. Chris went
out into the morning light-hearted and confident.


"What are you going to do this summer?" Eric said, his hand on Chris's
shoulder as they passed under the marble arch and sauntered through
the alley formed by the facing lines of newly blossoming apple trees.

"I was thinking of going west to pick grapes," Chris said.

"That's not a very good idea," Eric said.

"No?" Chris responded surprised.

"No," Eric repeated. "A better idea is to spend the summer with me in Greece."

"Are you serious?"

"I'm doing a seminar in Athens the last two-week in June. Then I'm
free for the rest of the summer. Our trip would be paid by the
university. I always stipulate a traveling companion. I don't like to
be alone."

"Poor baby," Chris said with an appealing pout.

"Then you'll come with me," Eric said in triumph.

"At your beck and call," Chris said with a graceful swooping bow,
"your devoted warrior and acolyte."


The Aegean Sea breaks its waves on a sable sandy shore. Marvelous
rocky caves and arches tower above it on the beach. Great rock walls,
too, are submerged within the depths of the water. Only their crowns
and peaks break the surface forming alleys and mazes of blue water for
swimmers to negotiate like the narrow streets of antique villages.

As worthy of the gaze as these rocks and caves or the resonant horizon
filled with an immense emptiness of blue that brings the gaze to it
and fastens it there -- were the two masculine figures standing in the
wet sand by the edge of the water gazing at the declining sun that was
turning the blue sky purple.

Their lithely muscled, supple, sun-brazed bodies glittered with
perfection. Their scant black bathing suits showed that perfection.

Swimming, they broke their strokes against the strong Aegean, the
hard-breasted, blue-chested Aegean.They embraced its shining waters.
They returned happily winded to the beach. Clasped in each other's
grasp, body pulsed on body as breathing, dancing, settled to a steady
joy.

"I'm sorry we have to go back to Athens tomorrow," Chris said, "even
though I like Athens."

"You like picking up dope at dusk on Sophocles Street," Eric said kissing him.

"It was good grass," Chris grinned and became aroused thinking of how
powerfully Eric had taken possession of him. Neither of them had ever
felt it like that before. Now it had become the way it was with them
always. They lived for each other.

"You could stay here forever."

"I could."


Tired from the sea and the sun, they lay stretched out in their bed
only covered by a sheet. They turned and embraced. They kissed as if
they were dreaming. Chris looked up at Eric dazed. They fell asleep
still joined.

They woke and began to dance inside their glow, rushing together into
a bright gold pneumatic landscape. They faced each other like ancient
warriors. Their skin was like breast plates. The way they touched each
other was like the hurling of lances.

They subsided into each other's arms. They slept again. They woke again.

The moon was full. It shone thru the window. The window opened on to a
terrace. The terrace gave out onto the vast and black Aegean. It was
nearly two o'clock.

The night sky beckoned. They kissed and smiled. They pulled on white
shorts and white tank-tops, slid into sandals, and walked facing
traffic – but there was hardly any – along the side of the road. It
wound around the mountain following what had been a dirt path only,
before automobiles.

Now, Eric had his arm round Chris's waist. Chris walked snuggled
against Eric, his cheek pressed to Eric's.

They stopped. They kissed. They looked at the moon. They embraced.
They flared at the touch of their muscular flesh.


They arrived in Athens in the heat of the day and took a cab to their
hotel and fell asleep. When they awoke, they walked in the falling
light to the coffee shop Eric knew at the foot of the Acropolis and
drank frothy iced coffees.


The snows of January hemmed them in, but in the farmhouse Eric owned a
short drive from the college, they burned wood in the stove and in the
several fireplaces.

Eric lay with his head in Chris's lap, drew in upon the joint that
pointed upwards from his lips and passed it up to Chris. Chris took it
with his left. With his right he continued to caress Eric's forehead,
followed the outlines of his eyebrows with his fingers, and gently
ruffled the curtains under his closed eyelids with the gentle sweep of
his fingertips.

"This has been so wonderful. Thank you," Chris said.

"Thank you," Eric said. Lifting his arm, he took Chris round the neck
and drew him down to him. He pressed his lips lightly to his, then
more intensely, until they were lost, swirling within each other's
swirl.

"Are you surprised?" Eric asked him.

"About us?" Chris said.

"Uh-huh."

"I can't believe it, but it feels exactly like what ought to be. No
one batted an eyelid when they found out. I imagine there are quite a
few women on the campus who feel deflated, though," Chris said

"I'll still dance with them at Christmas and Easter."


Next morning, Eric received an e-mail from his publisher that his
edition/translation of Simone Weil's "The Iliad or The Poem of Force"
was being published.

His celebrity was just what the campus needed in January to give the
place some life.

There was a champagne reception for him the evening a television crew
from New York came to shoot scenes of his daily life as a teacher. But
the press were less interested in Eric's thoughts on "The Iliad" than
on his open and apparently accepted relationship with Chris. Questions
quickly turned from classical antiquity to contemporary issues.

"The strange thing about the passage of proposition eight," Eric said,
and it was broadcast nationally on television and posted in varying
chunks on YouTube, "and I'm sure it is an unintended consequence, is
that it has regularized and familiarized homosexual relationships of
whatever sort and dimension far more than the failure of its passage
would have. Consequently it will soon be rescinded and marriages
between gay people will become routine. As momentarily disheartening
as proposition eight is, it may be the signal of the beginning of the
end of wide-spread individual prejudice and legalized bigotry."

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