The Furies

Close down the party; take away the coloured masks. Your enemies, your acquaintances, even those most dear to you whom you profess to love but have always shrunk from with a tenderness more destructive than hate – bundle them out of doors; shut off the radio; pull down the blinds; lie back and listen, alone as you have been from the start.

That murmuring out of the abyss – what is it? Those cries and clanging wings, growing more terrible as silence deepens. They come, the Furies: sad eyes and knotted brows, crowned with grey snakes that drop their slime on the furniture you chose so carefully thinking that its clear lines and bright colour, or the Van Gogh print above the mantelpiece, would serve as a rowan branch to keep them at bay. Arch-enemies of man. Yet looking at vulture wings and gorgon heads with the calm of a long despair, one must grant them their status of goddess; for they come of a noble house, more ancient than ours. Though they have at times assumed the role of subordinates (priestesses of disaster, Eumenides in the Greek chorus) this was a subterfuge, polite in an age of many gods. To us who own no master but the diseased will, they reveal themselves naked and triumphant, our supreme arbiters.

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Fate carries scales, to preserve the form of justice. But these have claimed the right to avenge a crime never committed, a crime more hideous than any massacre of innocents, the crime for which we have no defence since we recognise even in our stammering self-justification an avowal of guilt – the crime of being born.

Their cry is an echo of that first cry of horror which rose at the breaking of the virgin sleep of Mother All. Our immortal companions, they are those forms to whom the child stretches his hands with his first inarticulate croaking, and the last mourners visible to his dying eyes. Especially they haunt the bed of love, with its mirage of Freedom beyond the last horizon – Fear, Guilt and Pain, the guardians of an imagined Eden never known in the act but anticipated in dreams. Yet those dreams are surely the dreams of the damned, since they express a perpetual lack rather than an expected fulfilment. They flower in an everwidening circle of desolation, as the dunes of the Sahara march over an oasis; the body is destroyed by the mind’s sanity.

. . . But the night’s still young. Turn on the music and let the lights go up, bring back the boys and their girl-friends. It is important to maintain a good atmosphere – the jokes mild in mixed company, growing a little broader as time steers on. There are two dozen of beer by the chest-of-drawers; remember to save a bottle for the morning. Jack will be looking for a fight soon; Tony will go into the next room with Kath. We must keep out all gate-crashers.

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