PrometheusBoundPrometheus.txt

Prometheus Bound
by Robert Lowell
Derived from Aeschylus (p.55-57)
Collected and Introduced by Stefan Rudnicki
The Actor's Book of Classical Monologues
Created on Dec 6, 2022

Character in the Play
======================
Prometheus


Monologue
===========

That water is turning to ice, a fine dry snow. It dazzles 
me at a moment, then bites my face. I pretend I can bear
it; yet I begin to thik of my enemies.
								Those gods! That
innumerable jumble of upstarts, all screaming with one
voice, all howling for power! Once they filled Zeus with
the stupor of despair. And now? They are almost perfect.
They Sin about the head of Zeus--each as delicate and
cold as a snowflake.

Enough. We know the gods. They watch us. I will tell
you all about the feverish miseries of man. Before he could
reason, he was an animal, perhaps the slowest and least
graceful, a skull with less inside it than the shell of a
turtle. I am not saying this in scorn of men, but to show
the greatness of their change. Men had eyes and saw
nothing: a shapeless presence, a threatning absence,
nearness seeming so distant that it hit them in the eyes,
distance seeming so near, they tried to duck their heads.
No finer shades! They saw little in between the blinding
yellow of the sun and the blank of night. They had ears
and hearing nothing: a splatter, a splash, fizzlings, buzzings,
hissings, mazes of muddled vibration, sounds without
the cutting edge of words. What did men know of houses
built of brick, and turned to face the sun? They swarmed
like ants, though with far less order, through a sunless
underground of eroding holes. Leafless winter, flowering
spring, and fruitful summer were all one season to them.
The stars looked down on them like an aimless sprinkle
of water drops running out into nothing.

I taught men the rising and the settling of the stars. From
the stars, I taught them numbers. I taught women to
count their children, and men to number their murders.
I gave them the alphabet. Before I made men talk and
write with words, knowledge dropped like a dry stick
into a fire of their memories, fed that fading blaze an
instant, then died without leaving an ash behind. Now
the brute forces of the earth obey man slavishly whenever
he thinks and speaks. I have put animals under his
thumb--dog, cat, and cow, horses to plow, horses to
saddle, horses to harness to the warrior's chariot. While
the animals drudge, man sits thinking so idly and so
profoundly that he can hardly be troubled to budge and
sort out the wealth and luxury that drops in his lap. Men
were set floating in boats, a pole to push, an oar to pull,
a sail to hoist. Those windy sails... men thought I'd
turned a plot of wood into a bird!

All these inventions were given to men. Thousands more
followed. I could turn anything into anything.

Man's short life, when I first looked at it, short as it was,
was a long disease. Man was an animal without an animal's
resolution for going on. If a man sickened, he would
usually die. No one mixed medicines, brought cooling
drinks, or knew what food to choose. I searched the
earth, and discovered it was a map of cures, covered up,
mislaid, rotting, but eagarly waiting. A cure was waiting
like a bride for every disease. But perhaps man couldn't
have faced him living out his life, if death had abandoned him.


I stopped teaching cures. I taught men to see into the
future. What future they had was close to death, but
not so certain. They had dreams, some true, some false,
some... I think I taught them which were true. They
heard voices in dreams, awake, anywhere. I made men
listen, they understood what those modest seeping
sounds were trying to tell them. There were signs at
every step along man's way, yet he was trampling them
down, and hurting himself beacause he couldn't read their
message... Look, you cannot see it... a vulture is
swinging nearer to us from the distant sky. Crooked taloned,
fat, with an empty stomach--it seemsto have
found us out. It might be our release. Man would know;
I taught him. I taught him feuds, hungers, lusts of
birds, and why they gather. I made man stare into the
entrails of beasts, see their smoothness, roughness--each
had meaning--see what kind of gall would please the
gods, see that the speckled symmetry of the liver lobe
had meaning, the thighbone swimming in fat, the long
spine jointed these chains. Everything in animals,
even their excrement meant something. Their innards
would be correctly set on fire to appease the gods. I
made men look into the fire. Alone and beamused in the
slothful dark, they studied the fire's whirling and consuming
colors, and believed they would some day taste
the breath of life. No one knows, I haven't told anyone,
the many wonders I have invented. I was out of my mind,
my hand was everywhere. Everything man knows...