Elizabeth Costello полностью

She too is not without curiosity about the intercourse of gods and mortals, though she has never written about it, not even in her book about Marion Bloom and her god-haunted husband Leopold. What intrigues her is less the metaphysics than the mechanics, the practicalities of congress across a gap in being. Bad enough to have a full-grown male swan jabbing webbed feet into your backside while he has his way, or a one-ton bull leaning his moaning weight on you; how, when the god does not care to change shape but remains his awesome self, does the human body accommodate itself to the blast of his desire?

Let it be said for Susan Mitchell that she does not shrink from such questions. In her poem, Eros, who seems to have made himself man-sized for the occasion, lies in bed on his back with his wings drooping on either side, the girl (one presumes) on top of him. The seed of gods would seem to gush hugely (this must have been Mary of Nazareth's experience too, waking from her dream still slightly trembly with the issue of the Holy Ghost running down her thighs). When Psyche's lover comes, his wings are left drenched; or perhaps the wings drip seed, perhaps they become organs of consummation themselves. On occasions when he and she reach a climax together, he breaks apart like (Mitchell's words, more or less) a bird shot in flight. (What about the girl, she wants to ask the poet – if you can say what it was like for him, why not tell us how it was for her?)

What she had really wanted to talk about to Robert Duncan, however, that night in Melbourne when he indicated so firmly that whatever she offered did not interest him, was not girls visited by gods but the much rarer phenomenon of men condescended to by goddesses. Anchises, for instance, lover of Aphrodite and father of Aeneas. One would have thought that, after that unforeseen and unforgettable episode in his hut on Mount Ida, Anchises – a good-looking boyo, if one is to believe the Hymn, but otherwise just a cattle herder – would have wanted to talk about nothing else, to whoever would listen: how he had fucked a goddess, the most succulent in the whole stable, fucked her all night long, got her pregnant too.

Men and their leering talk. She has no illusions about how mortal beings treat whatever gods, true or feigned, ancient or modern, have the misfortune to fall into their hands. She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn't: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes a time with her. 'I wanna fuck a movie star!' pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them. In his voice the ugly underside of idolatry: malice, murderous resentment. Bring an immortal down to earth, show her what life is really like, bang her till she is raw. Take that! Take that! A scene they excised from the televised version, so close to the bone of America does it cut.