Hymn to Pan

 

Appropriate, perhaps, to have this story published now—dealing as it does with a seemingly dreadful man, a famous breakcore musician, a torturously disruptive neighbor, who the heroine must write up for the upscale music review she works for.

 

Carly has been ordered to make her article positive (“Capital P”), and can’t imagine how she’ll manage that, the way she feels about the man and his excruciating entourage next door.

 

“Maybe Antonio Zugasti thought himself some kind of warlock or vodouisant.  He wore his warpaint often, hung around his scraggly neck some kind of charm pendant with snakes worn on a length of nylon climbing rope.  He kept those witchy Cayuga ducks, shimmery emerald green, on a black-hearted water pond beside his neo-Soviet Brutalist house.  My daughter was intrigued by the green waterfowl, but I couldn't let her go anywhere near.”

 

One idea she explores is classical—

“Maybe metaphor, or myth?  I pulled my laptop toward me, balancing it on my knees, following a desperate train of thought.  I found the words to the Homeric hymn to Pan my classicist mother once read to me: 

         "Muse, tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goat's feet 

            and two horns—a lover of merry noise. Through wooded glades he 

            wanders with dancing nymphs who foot it on some sheer cliff's edge, 

            calling upon Pan, the shepherd-god, long-haired, unkempt." 

Could I expand on that?  Pan, the god of music, was Antonio Zugasti's sort.  Maybe somehow I could worm out lots of jocund Pan-like details without having to actually interview the man.  I liked that, smiled.  Humor or my sense of the absurd might after all save me.”

 

Her journey to a workable answer, acceptable to everyone, can be read in the “Second Look” themed issue of Constellations, Vol. 14, Fall 2024 (print only).  And of course the half-goat Pan has his own constellation—Capricorn.

 

 

image:  Pan, mythologysource.com