The Finest Part
Title: The Finest Part
Play: Antony and Cleopatra
Author: speak_me_fair
Recipient: the_alchemist
Rating: M - some imagery, no worse than many of the plays.
Summary: Superstition and religion, science and belief, and the fine-drawn lines between.
Warnings: Makes references to Cleopatra's experiments on embryos, as discussed in the Talmud.
Her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love: we cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.
*
She was the child of superstition and of science mixed, her emotions not half as volatile as she liked them to seem, but thought out and planned down to the barest flicker of their showing. She was Egypt, but none of its blood ran in her veins, she was far from Greece, yet born of its pragmatism. Cleopatra, knowing her nature as well as she knew the time of the Nile's inundation, held her needs to be the same as that of the fertile mud, saw in them the difference between her country's claim to holding the grain-houses of the East and its being the storehouse only of plague and grief and hideous famine. The lines drawn by the seasons and the gods were as clear-cut and simplistic as that which lay within her innate genius - and that reason, that sight of the mirroring of land and body and nature, was chief among those that left her in no doubt that it was a genius she possessed, something more than a mere soul.
That she was only host to it and not its owner, she did not doubt either, nor that it was not always within her power to control, for it was not so much fickle as determined, almost a separate entity that nourished and deserted her at will, either enriching her by love or leaving her bereft and fallow without.
Love was her limitation and her extent, her boundaries and her power, the exceeding of her grasp and the very essence of it at once. She learned those things young, from better tutors than she could have dreamed of in the world of corrupted, shaken power that housed her early years.
Caesar had been the first of them, the great general who had seemed to her untried eyes to be the embodiment of the unsentimental West, who was crowned with laurels and victory, with praise and with honour, and yet disdained kingship to the depths of his being. He was a man who knew the power of words and fame, who taught her - perhaps out of love, perhaps out of his own strange morality that led him to think it would protect her when he left, but still taught her - how to create personal glory and embrace the glowing nimbus of future immortality, and claimed to believe that sentiment was fit only for children. He forgave her the moments when she could not conceal her reliance upon it; he let her call it intuition, with the air of one bestowing a kindness of protection in not challenging her terms.
She learned not to talk of its importance, this other side to knowledge, when the heart cried out more clearly than the mind, and with more force, dictating her actions for good or evil, drawing her into the unknown with an entire lack of trepidation. To the cool marble of Caesar's mind, to his pragmatism that was born of the cruelty of war, and did not always stem from the necessity of survival that she had learned in her youngest days, her actions and responses seemed anathema. To her, though, even then, in her first awakenings to all that she could become and all that she could create and determine, they were essential, needed, a requirement of her continued existence.
It never ceased to amaze him that she saw him as the one who suffered with sentiment, because it was emotion which he felt, displayed, advocated in the behaviour of all Romans, and yet it was shallow and meaningless, a glittering cloak to distract men from seeing his true thoughts, his real bedrock of cold sanity that was so deeply embedded within him that it made men think him mad. She, who displayed her feather-heart at all times, offering it up to the gods that they might always judge its lightness, so that they could balance its purity against her deeds and find her worthy for her transparency if nothing else; she who kept nothing hidden in the full knowledge that the Halls of the Dead knew what she was already, knew he was nothing of the kind - only that no man could bear to live with such an excess of understanding. It was possible for a man to be too sane, too all-seeing; the worship of Dionysius had been created for just that, so that those cursed and blessed with that clarity of vision might be allowed by the god to dissolve that stark light into a more kindly haze.
She believed in the difference between life and the soul, believed that one might live on the earth without that spark of the divine, without that touch of something more that was the essence of philosophy. She knew her heart and mind, knew her emotions for what they were and played to them and upon them, but the soul evaded her attempts at grasp and description, in every way.
There were things she knew about the soul's nature, of course, she could not claim ignorance of what she had seen and experienced as outward phenomena, things greater even than her innate god-granted comprehension could have imagined. That her own soul existed, that those of others held power, that there would always be something beyond the limits even of instinctive, wordless realization, she had long been aware of, even if only because of how her life had changed because of them. Caesar's Roman, intractable soul, his very being, had been deified long since, while Antony's was part of hers and hers of his, in some dissolved and yet indissoluble blend - those things she knew in some deep part of her, the same part that knew herself to be Egypt - and yet she could not put words to how she understood this, could find no other term than knowledge, even though it was so much more than that.
It seemed that the very nature of definition frustrated her in her attempts to use it, that she could lay claim to understanding, read others as they tried to formulate what she already knew, and yet she could never find a way of saying more than the mere 'I know, I feel,' always the personal, always the heart and the mind speaking. The soul - her soul - remained silent to the outer world, and spoke too intently to her.
Was this Caesar's cold and ultimate sanity that possessed her, or only her own longing, pushing her across that line towards madness in some mad quest to be more than she should ever have dared attempt? She could not tell, for she had nothing with which to compare it. Antony's soul might be merged with hers, and she might be sure of that as fact, but there could be no proof. Even if their dust were mingled in death, no-one would know where their souls had gone, any more than men could tell now where they resided. She searched for answers, demanded new words, and found none. She knew that she was looking for the impossible, to see what only the gods were ever privileged to behold or touch, the ka that used a body as its host, a glory separate from thought or deed.
She longed to know the moment when the soul came, whether it was integral to life, whether it entered a body and departed it as the Egyptians said, or was something that belonged to one person alone, as the Romans thought, the ideal of meeting their other half a once-born chance only.
She learned of poisons and their effects, learned while she did so the disguising beauty of appearance and why the Romans likened her to such plants. She learned the power of the Jericho rose, that went beyond its deep green leaves and red blossoms, and flavoured even honey made from its innermost sweetness with death. It made even its own destruction lethal to those who dared, for when burning it to ash so that it could no longer harm, the very smoke of it killed.
She touched hemlock without fear, knowing its properties and usage, how the smallest grindings of a leaf could alleviate pains in the chest and shortness of breath - and more than that brought on a creeping, painful paralysis that left time for memorable partings. Socrates's plant, she knew, and one which the herbalist told her, his eyes gleaming with the malicious amusement she came to associate with men of his kind, and also with a terrible, strange, paternalistic pride, was the ideal choice for writers and philosophers.
Claiming to be neither, she disdained it, fascinated more by the spurge laurel, the plant so close and yet so entirely opposite to the leaves which had once garlanded Caesar's brow, begetter of unquenchable thirst and an inner burning so strong that the very skin of the victim peeled off around the heat. She was entranced by the very existence of this poison to which there was no antidote, no other side that could balance the scales. Nothing to it save pain and death, so that death itself became the cure for it.
The beautiful, lily-like flower they called dove's dung even she, who knew herself to be well-versed in sensible behaviour and self-preservation, was alarmed by. Each part of it poisonous, the only hint of warning about it hidden in its common name, it was too blandly secretive, too like the shadow of the assassin behind a silken drape, to inspire anything but an atavistic, crawling fear, such as she heard serpents inspired in others.
She learned of nightshade and henbane, the dog-button that brought on convulsions and left the body with a grimace of death that looked frighteningly like wild laughter, the final jest of approaching eternity etched into the skin by stretched lips. She wore gloves to touch henbane, learning of its power over dreams and visions, and grew to respect the perfectly balanced properties of mandrake, which caught men in its powerful web and held them on the perfect diameter, stretched along the invisible line that separated sleep from death.
All ways of summoning the soul to the lips, that it might be visible, made tangible in that one half-blinked second before it departed - but ah, the skill in keeping it there must be greater, she knew there must be more in the realm that healed rather than harmed. She learned, in disappointment and frustration, the powers of the curative plants, and though she could name aloe and spikenard, wormwood and henna, though she could use each to perform what good was in them, they were all too innocuous. So gentle, so harmless, so free from any powers to cause harm - and as nothing compared to the powerful leafy allies of death.
The answers did not lie in the gardens, and she turned further inwards, to the body and its nature, to bone and sinew and blood, the swiftness with which damage could be brought and the slowness with which it was repaired. There seemed no protection great enough, no answer inherent in the house which the gods had designed for the soul. She wondered if it went further, deeper, back to a point before even breath could be drawn, before a heart could beat alone. She engulfed herself in the ancient, forbidden mysteries, and brought them into the light of modern day, ready to confirm long-held and nebulous belief with hard and undeniable science.
She commanded what even she knew to be atrocities, claimed in the name of science and advancement and medicine that they show themselves to be above the weakness of what she had learned to call sentiment, even though she still disagreed with the terming of it. She watched death take, slowly and bloodily, those who should have been granted the mercy of a swift execution, and examined the small corpses of the unborn lives they had begun to harbour. She knew the moment when perfect formation had taken place, when each part was whole and beautiful and yet could not survive alone. She watched as impossible breath tried to enter lungs too frail to hold its richness, and watched that first taste of life desert innocence.
But she never saw what the soul could be, never saw that spark of divine fire touch blue lips, nor lighten death-darkening eyes that had not even beheld the world before they saw the light of the gods. It became butchery, science no replacement for faith or love, and as such it was without purpose or need. The doctors praised her insight in ordering this search for knowledge, but they saw only time, measured out in days of development; saw only the abstract of what they were performing. She, seeking the ancient mysteries, the divide between life and death, the purpose of the soul, the needs of the heart, knew what she was denying in her orders, and felt shame. They called what they held in their hands embryos. She could never - quite - stop thinking of them as children, of thinking how she too had held within her that reliance for life, given it to another. Her child, now heir to a Roman god as well as to the throne of Egypt, her Caesarion lived and breathed, and she could no longer contemplate what she saw with equanimity, not when she thought each time of how this had once been hers to protect, how this frailty, this incomprehension of the world had been in her body's care. She, having known that time, could not say it was blind instinct, nor declare the lives secondary in importance to the needs of science.
The search stopped. When they protested, she reminded them of the dual meaning of pharmakon, medicine and poison at once, a cure and death. Like all duality, the search for furthering it must be held in balance, kept in check, the scales of justice in what was done balanced perfectly. For her, it had tilted, meant now only death, caused only pain, was too much akin to hemlock over-used, and that to no good purpose; no longer the faint pinched measure of ease and sleep, but only a slow and torturous path to their more unkind brother.
Her views prevailed, though she doubted if they would have were she not the Queen, and she did not share her other feelings, the hidden, truer ones, with those who had pursued their findings in her company, for she knew that no practitioner of medicine would find her philosophy even half a reason for stopping what they so eagerly learned from.
She had never seen that moment of the soul's alighting, nor, if it ever had touched those poor, perfect, unliving forms, when it had left again, but she had come to believe something else, even while she accepted the impossibility of what she had sought. If the soul was the seat and cradle of love, and not the heart, as she had thought; if its residence could never be discerned, even from the very moments of conception, then she would relinquish science for mocked, blind faith. She would cling and cleave to the old ways of thinking that so many were eager now to despise, as she did in her soul to Antony, even when her tongue said otherwise, even when her heart and mind, in fury and grief for all she was slowly losing, cried out against such a dissolution within another's being.
It had been the vagaries and weaknesses and driving, passionate intensity of her own genius, her own recognised and yet indescribable nature, that had pressed her onwards to attempt this definition. She had never wanted, in the end, to possess some great secret of divinity, nor even to hold another's very essence in her hand, not to be the only one with words to define it. She had wanted only to understand herself, and knew now that she never would.
Was it worth the cost, for that stark confirmation? She could not believe it was so, and yet each time she found herself unable to hold onto her anger and forge it into a weapon to defend herself against the inevitable, each time her resolutions slipped through her fingers like sand, so that she might hold out an open hand to Antony in perfect freedom of all other claims, she felt that perhaps it was, that perhaps it had been the last necessary breaking of ties to false morality, the final proof that science was no more to be clung to than gods or old beliefs or cold, bitter pragmatism; that even the last refuge of the rational mind had proved to be no more durable, no more finite.
Nothing remained but what she had known when she began, the truths that were a part of her and so could not be proved by any means or by any man.
She was Egypt. She loved and was loved. And the divine spark was hers, no matter whether she controlled and owned it or it consumed her in a funeral pyre.
The rest did not matter, any more, for she had exceeded her own grasp, like the sands of her country, and her eyes were dazzled with the beginning glories of something more infinite than knowledge and more absolute than scientific fact; her heart and mind were filled, not with questions, but with the acceptance of all-annihilating desire, of the wonder and the destruction of love.
Before its power, the importance of self fled, and she felt herself, at last, to be entire.
*
Play: Antony and Cleopatra
Author: speak_me_fair
Recipient: the_alchemist
Rating: M - some imagery, no worse than many of the plays.
Summary: Superstition and religion, science and belief, and the fine-drawn lines between.
Warnings: Makes references to Cleopatra's experiments on embryos, as discussed in the Talmud.
Her passions are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love: we cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.
*
She was the child of superstition and of science mixed, her emotions not half as volatile as she liked them to seem, but thought out and planned down to the barest flicker of their showing. She was Egypt, but none of its blood ran in her veins, she was far from Greece, yet born of its pragmatism. Cleopatra, knowing her nature as well as she knew the time of the Nile's inundation, held her needs to be the same as that of the fertile mud, saw in them the difference between her country's claim to holding the grain-houses of the East and its being the storehouse only of plague and grief and hideous famine. The lines drawn by the seasons and the gods were as clear-cut and simplistic as that which lay within her innate genius - and that reason, that sight of the mirroring of land and body and nature, was chief among those that left her in no doubt that it was a genius she possessed, something more than a mere soul.
That she was only host to it and not its owner, she did not doubt either, nor that it was not always within her power to control, for it was not so much fickle as determined, almost a separate entity that nourished and deserted her at will, either enriching her by love or leaving her bereft and fallow without.
Love was her limitation and her extent, her boundaries and her power, the exceeding of her grasp and the very essence of it at once. She learned those things young, from better tutors than she could have dreamed of in the world of corrupted, shaken power that housed her early years.
Caesar had been the first of them, the great general who had seemed to her untried eyes to be the embodiment of the unsentimental West, who was crowned with laurels and victory, with praise and with honour, and yet disdained kingship to the depths of his being. He was a man who knew the power of words and fame, who taught her - perhaps out of love, perhaps out of his own strange morality that led him to think it would protect her when he left, but still taught her - how to create personal glory and embrace the glowing nimbus of future immortality, and claimed to believe that sentiment was fit only for children. He forgave her the moments when she could not conceal her reliance upon it; he let her call it intuition, with the air of one bestowing a kindness of protection in not challenging her terms.
She learned not to talk of its importance, this other side to knowledge, when the heart cried out more clearly than the mind, and with more force, dictating her actions for good or evil, drawing her into the unknown with an entire lack of trepidation. To the cool marble of Caesar's mind, to his pragmatism that was born of the cruelty of war, and did not always stem from the necessity of survival that she had learned in her youngest days, her actions and responses seemed anathema. To her, though, even then, in her first awakenings to all that she could become and all that she could create and determine, they were essential, needed, a requirement of her continued existence.
It never ceased to amaze him that she saw him as the one who suffered with sentiment, because it was emotion which he felt, displayed, advocated in the behaviour of all Romans, and yet it was shallow and meaningless, a glittering cloak to distract men from seeing his true thoughts, his real bedrock of cold sanity that was so deeply embedded within him that it made men think him mad. She, who displayed her feather-heart at all times, offering it up to the gods that they might always judge its lightness, so that they could balance its purity against her deeds and find her worthy for her transparency if nothing else; she who kept nothing hidden in the full knowledge that the Halls of the Dead knew what she was already, knew he was nothing of the kind - only that no man could bear to live with such an excess of understanding. It was possible for a man to be too sane, too all-seeing; the worship of Dionysius had been created for just that, so that those cursed and blessed with that clarity of vision might be allowed by the god to dissolve that stark light into a more kindly haze.
She believed in the difference between life and the soul, believed that one might live on the earth without that spark of the divine, without that touch of something more that was the essence of philosophy. She knew her heart and mind, knew her emotions for what they were and played to them and upon them, but the soul evaded her attempts at grasp and description, in every way.
There were things she knew about the soul's nature, of course, she could not claim ignorance of what she had seen and experienced as outward phenomena, things greater even than her innate god-granted comprehension could have imagined. That her own soul existed, that those of others held power, that there would always be something beyond the limits even of instinctive, wordless realization, she had long been aware of, even if only because of how her life had changed because of them. Caesar's Roman, intractable soul, his very being, had been deified long since, while Antony's was part of hers and hers of his, in some dissolved and yet indissoluble blend - those things she knew in some deep part of her, the same part that knew herself to be Egypt - and yet she could not put words to how she understood this, could find no other term than knowledge, even though it was so much more than that.
It seemed that the very nature of definition frustrated her in her attempts to use it, that she could lay claim to understanding, read others as they tried to formulate what she already knew, and yet she could never find a way of saying more than the mere 'I know, I feel,' always the personal, always the heart and the mind speaking. The soul - her soul - remained silent to the outer world, and spoke too intently to her.
Was this Caesar's cold and ultimate sanity that possessed her, or only her own longing, pushing her across that line towards madness in some mad quest to be more than she should ever have dared attempt? She could not tell, for she had nothing with which to compare it. Antony's soul might be merged with hers, and she might be sure of that as fact, but there could be no proof. Even if their dust were mingled in death, no-one would know where their souls had gone, any more than men could tell now where they resided. She searched for answers, demanded new words, and found none. She knew that she was looking for the impossible, to see what only the gods were ever privileged to behold or touch, the ka that used a body as its host, a glory separate from thought or deed.
She longed to know the moment when the soul came, whether it was integral to life, whether it entered a body and departed it as the Egyptians said, or was something that belonged to one person alone, as the Romans thought, the ideal of meeting their other half a once-born chance only.
She learned of poisons and their effects, learned while she did so the disguising beauty of appearance and why the Romans likened her to such plants. She learned the power of the Jericho rose, that went beyond its deep green leaves and red blossoms, and flavoured even honey made from its innermost sweetness with death. It made even its own destruction lethal to those who dared, for when burning it to ash so that it could no longer harm, the very smoke of it killed.
She touched hemlock without fear, knowing its properties and usage, how the smallest grindings of a leaf could alleviate pains in the chest and shortness of breath - and more than that brought on a creeping, painful paralysis that left time for memorable partings. Socrates's plant, she knew, and one which the herbalist told her, his eyes gleaming with the malicious amusement she came to associate with men of his kind, and also with a terrible, strange, paternalistic pride, was the ideal choice for writers and philosophers.
Claiming to be neither, she disdained it, fascinated more by the spurge laurel, the plant so close and yet so entirely opposite to the leaves which had once garlanded Caesar's brow, begetter of unquenchable thirst and an inner burning so strong that the very skin of the victim peeled off around the heat. She was entranced by the very existence of this poison to which there was no antidote, no other side that could balance the scales. Nothing to it save pain and death, so that death itself became the cure for it.
The beautiful, lily-like flower they called dove's dung even she, who knew herself to be well-versed in sensible behaviour and self-preservation, was alarmed by. Each part of it poisonous, the only hint of warning about it hidden in its common name, it was too blandly secretive, too like the shadow of the assassin behind a silken drape, to inspire anything but an atavistic, crawling fear, such as she heard serpents inspired in others.
She learned of nightshade and henbane, the dog-button that brought on convulsions and left the body with a grimace of death that looked frighteningly like wild laughter, the final jest of approaching eternity etched into the skin by stretched lips. She wore gloves to touch henbane, learning of its power over dreams and visions, and grew to respect the perfectly balanced properties of mandrake, which caught men in its powerful web and held them on the perfect diameter, stretched along the invisible line that separated sleep from death.
All ways of summoning the soul to the lips, that it might be visible, made tangible in that one half-blinked second before it departed - but ah, the skill in keeping it there must be greater, she knew there must be more in the realm that healed rather than harmed. She learned, in disappointment and frustration, the powers of the curative plants, and though she could name aloe and spikenard, wormwood and henna, though she could use each to perform what good was in them, they were all too innocuous. So gentle, so harmless, so free from any powers to cause harm - and as nothing compared to the powerful leafy allies of death.
The answers did not lie in the gardens, and she turned further inwards, to the body and its nature, to bone and sinew and blood, the swiftness with which damage could be brought and the slowness with which it was repaired. There seemed no protection great enough, no answer inherent in the house which the gods had designed for the soul. She wondered if it went further, deeper, back to a point before even breath could be drawn, before a heart could beat alone. She engulfed herself in the ancient, forbidden mysteries, and brought them into the light of modern day, ready to confirm long-held and nebulous belief with hard and undeniable science.
She commanded what even she knew to be atrocities, claimed in the name of science and advancement and medicine that they show themselves to be above the weakness of what she had learned to call sentiment, even though she still disagreed with the terming of it. She watched death take, slowly and bloodily, those who should have been granted the mercy of a swift execution, and examined the small corpses of the unborn lives they had begun to harbour. She knew the moment when perfect formation had taken place, when each part was whole and beautiful and yet could not survive alone. She watched as impossible breath tried to enter lungs too frail to hold its richness, and watched that first taste of life desert innocence.
But she never saw what the soul could be, never saw that spark of divine fire touch blue lips, nor lighten death-darkening eyes that had not even beheld the world before they saw the light of the gods. It became butchery, science no replacement for faith or love, and as such it was without purpose or need. The doctors praised her insight in ordering this search for knowledge, but they saw only time, measured out in days of development; saw only the abstract of what they were performing. She, seeking the ancient mysteries, the divide between life and death, the purpose of the soul, the needs of the heart, knew what she was denying in her orders, and felt shame. They called what they held in their hands embryos. She could never - quite - stop thinking of them as children, of thinking how she too had held within her that reliance for life, given it to another. Her child, now heir to a Roman god as well as to the throne of Egypt, her Caesarion lived and breathed, and she could no longer contemplate what she saw with equanimity, not when she thought each time of how this had once been hers to protect, how this frailty, this incomprehension of the world had been in her body's care. She, having known that time, could not say it was blind instinct, nor declare the lives secondary in importance to the needs of science.
The search stopped. When they protested, she reminded them of the dual meaning of pharmakon, medicine and poison at once, a cure and death. Like all duality, the search for furthering it must be held in balance, kept in check, the scales of justice in what was done balanced perfectly. For her, it had tilted, meant now only death, caused only pain, was too much akin to hemlock over-used, and that to no good purpose; no longer the faint pinched measure of ease and sleep, but only a slow and torturous path to their more unkind brother.
Her views prevailed, though she doubted if they would have were she not the Queen, and she did not share her other feelings, the hidden, truer ones, with those who had pursued their findings in her company, for she knew that no practitioner of medicine would find her philosophy even half a reason for stopping what they so eagerly learned from.
She had never seen that moment of the soul's alighting, nor, if it ever had touched those poor, perfect, unliving forms, when it had left again, but she had come to believe something else, even while she accepted the impossibility of what she had sought. If the soul was the seat and cradle of love, and not the heart, as she had thought; if its residence could never be discerned, even from the very moments of conception, then she would relinquish science for mocked, blind faith. She would cling and cleave to the old ways of thinking that so many were eager now to despise, as she did in her soul to Antony, even when her tongue said otherwise, even when her heart and mind, in fury and grief for all she was slowly losing, cried out against such a dissolution within another's being.
It had been the vagaries and weaknesses and driving, passionate intensity of her own genius, her own recognised and yet indescribable nature, that had pressed her onwards to attempt this definition. She had never wanted, in the end, to possess some great secret of divinity, nor even to hold another's very essence in her hand, not to be the only one with words to define it. She had wanted only to understand herself, and knew now that she never would.
Was it worth the cost, for that stark confirmation? She could not believe it was so, and yet each time she found herself unable to hold onto her anger and forge it into a weapon to defend herself against the inevitable, each time her resolutions slipped through her fingers like sand, so that she might hold out an open hand to Antony in perfect freedom of all other claims, she felt that perhaps it was, that perhaps it had been the last necessary breaking of ties to false morality, the final proof that science was no more to be clung to than gods or old beliefs or cold, bitter pragmatism; that even the last refuge of the rational mind had proved to be no more durable, no more finite.
Nothing remained but what she had known when she began, the truths that were a part of her and so could not be proved by any means or by any man.
She was Egypt. She loved and was loved. And the divine spark was hers, no matter whether she controlled and owned it or it consumed her in a funeral pyre.
The rest did not matter, any more, for she had exceeded her own grasp, like the sands of her country, and her eyes were dazzled with the beginning glories of something more infinite than knowledge and more absolute than scientific fact; her heart and mind were filled, not with questions, but with the acceptance of all-annihilating desire, of the wonder and the destruction of love.
Before its power, the importance of self fled, and she felt herself, at last, to be entire.
*