PEGASUS IS A creature beautiful beyond description, virtually perfect, wild, which is to say untamed, unbridled, free, sovereign—truly majestic, but never frozen in the pose of dim-witted leaders.
For centuries it was thought that he was the product of poets’ imaginations. This is an unforgivable error, more—an injury that must finally be redressed.
For whole millennia, nameless generations of horses bearing inhuman burdens and fat emperors, fed on the whip, fettered, slaughtered in senseless wars, tormented in hippic games—dreamed of a higher and sacred being—a winged divinity. He was a paradigm.
Ah, from time to time they were thrown some scraps of recognition or gratitude. Alexander named a city after Bucephalus. After his death he gave him a state funeral—and walking behind the mortal remains of his comrade he wept bitterly (which he did often, by the way). Caligula on the other hand appointed Incitatus a consul. Not to honor the horse but to humiliate the consuls. Numerous sculptors portrayed condottieri and cruel generals on horseback—but the horses are nothing but an organic pedestal. Still the downtrodden spirit of the horse labored without rest, in the quiet of stables, in the roar of battles.
Therefore it will not be an exaggeration to say that sacred Pegasus is a product of the collective imagination. Obviously not human, but equine.
It cannot be denied that he is of mixed race. This naturally provokes a hostile response from all fans of racial purity. But let us say it again and with emphasis: he is one of the most beautiful and exemplary cross-breeds of our planet. Perhaps only his medieval cousin the unicorn could compete with him in a contest of beauty, strength, and dignity.
Mythology is populated by genetically deranged monsters (rousing not our fear but our disgust) that could be born only in the mind of a drunken butcher blindly and randomly stitching a lion’s head1 to the trunk of a goat and the tail of a snake. It’s truly unworthy, not to mention the aesthetic horror it constitutes. Scholars argue that semantics may be to blame here. First some uncertain word or vague source was found—and then a figure, name, symbol was made to match it and reconcile the contradictory elements. The Greeks, so sensitive to harmony, suffered the invasions of foreign tribes: Thracians, Persians, Asians, Egyptians, not to mention their own dark Theogony. And precisely for that reason Pegasus cuts a clear and harmonious figure against this background. He is truly not a bastard of the imagination. He is the embodiment of lofty flights, freedom, integrity.
Only once did someone manage to capture him. It was Bellerophon, with the decisive aid of the gods’ technological tricks. It was no heroic act, but a simple stylistic procedure. Pegasus was deliberately turned into a flying horse. He was degraded to a means of transportation, a metaphor. I may expand on this in a treatise on Bellerophon.
It seems to me a real scandal that Pegasus was saddled by poets. In ancient times, neither Homer nor Horace would have dreamed of straddling Pegasus. This happened later, in times when mythology was treated frivolously, as an ornament, a crotchet—when inspiration was dying out and Pegasus was no more than a word—not an unbridled, internally independent being, having nothing in common with what is commonly called literature.
However, there is one detail which may justify the claims of the poets. It is known that by striking his hoof Pegasus created the spring Hippocrene, at the foot of Helicon, the seat of the Muses. But this only means that everyone can drink from the spring: wanderers, oxen—and poets, too, under the condition that they return to the spring, that is to the beginning. There are few of them, and they don’t swim with the stream, which carries with it toppled ideologies, smashed icons and—garbage.
Apart from that, there is nothing, truly nothing that would permit Pegasus to be dragged down to earth, especially for a purpose as ambiguous as writing.
Epiphanies have to have some meaning, after all.
If one regards the matter pedantically, as the Germans do, expertly, from the angle of Literaturwissenschaft2—it is Matteo Maria Boiardo3 who is to blame. In his unfinished courtly epic Orlando innamorato he used Pegasus as an infallible means of communication. One must do him justice. He took in vast regions and moved across an extensive terrain in time and space—from the Song of Roland to the Arthurian cycle and the courtly poetry of the Renaissance—not to mention private passions, or love, to which he wished to lend astral dimensions. I have the impression that he had no bad intentions.
Naturally, he couldn’t have imagined that Pegasus would become the favorite quadruped of the literati. That he would endow hacks with a crumb of personal dignity. Shackled to their stools, they multiply their tedious verse and useless romances, miserably paid, barely tolerated by their environment—and they feel they are astride a venerable steed. What a delusion! Hackney cabbies have more dignity.
The old mare metaphor was put out to pasture, they thought she was no longer good for anything. This was not done without great losses in the sphere of poetics, which does not at all mean playing the poet, but craft. In a shipwrecked world, nothing can be compared to anything else. That’s why, the innovators think, one must multiply the tautologies (the spiritual self-sufficiency) of egotists. Ego + Ego= Ego. E + E = E. And then the world is perfectly futile, that is, coherent—consistent.
Pegasus is lonely and one of a kind.
Poor Pegasus! You are indifferent to all this. You are an immortal horse. You freed yourself from the yoke of the pretenders who claim you. You know very well that people are always trying to hitch the divinities—good and evil ones—to their carts, to get them to pull those silly carts down to forbidden dives.
For now, if nothing changes substantially, stay where you are.
Pegasus should be left in his place.
In August nights, near the constellation of Andromeda, his immaculate hide shimmers.