will he turn
on you? Say no more! I give you my vow, it’s your
destiny.
No harm will come! I swear by Apollo, by my own
second sight,
by my cataracts, by the home of the dead—may the
powers of Hades
blast me to atoms if I die! No ultion will fall on you, no vengeful alastor seek you out by decree of the gods.’
“ ‘Very well,’ Zetes said. And now the brothers backed
off from Phineus,
ready to faint from his stink. At once, we prepared a
meal
for the poor old seer—the last the Harpies were to get.
And Zetes
and Kalais took up their watch, knees bent, a short way
off
from the prophet who squatted by the steps. Before he
could reach for a morsel,
down came the Harpies. They struck and were gone with
no more warning
than a lightning flash—the meal had vanished—and
we heard their raucous
chattering far out at sea. It seemed the whole world
had turned
to stench. But Zetes and Kalais too were gone, we saw— vanished like ghosts. They nearly caught them—
touched them, in fact.
But just as their fingers were closing on the creatures’
throats, the sky
went white, and a voice said: ‘Stop! The Harpies are
the hounds of Zeus!
Don’t harm them! They’ll trouble your friend no more,
swift sons of Boreas!’
And so the brothers turned back, and the curse was
ended.
“We cleansed
the old man’s house with sulphur fire, and washed him
in the creek,
then picked out the finest of the sheep we’d gotten from
Amykos
and made them a sacrifice to Zeus. We set out a banquet
in the hall
and sat with Phineus to eat. He ate like a man in a
dream,
astounded, baffled by the sweetness of life.
“When we’d eaten and drunk
our fill, the old man, sitting among us by the fireplace,
said:
‘Listen. I can tell you many things. Not all I know, but a good deal. I was a fool, once. I used to tell people the whole nature of the universe. Deeper and deeper I plunged into things long-hidden, until for some
strange reason
(which I understand) those Harpies came, called down
from the sky
(not “sent,” mind you: called—called down as surely
as if
I’d raised my hands and cried, “Harpies, snatch away
my food!”). Since then I’ve
learned my place, so to speak, or learned my weakness,
which is
the same: my strength. As the glutton eats till it kills
him, the visionary
sees. (My father, by the way, had a truly amazing eye for omens, though nothing like mine. But I’d rather not
speak of that.)’
He glanced past his shoulder, furtive, then smiled again
and gazed
at the flames with his chalk-white eyes. ‘I could tell you
many things,’
he said again, and smiled. His corrugate hands and
cheeks
glowed in the firelight, shining with joy of life like the
eyes
of a lover. We waited. He said, ‘I knew a man one time who suffered in a somewhat similar way. He murdered
his father
and married his mother, unwittingly. It was a classic
case.
I spoke to him many years afterward. I said, “Come,
come, Oidipus!
Surely you recognized the man you killed! Surely,
in the hindmost
corner of your mind you saw your image in his face
and remembered
his shadow between your mother’s breast and you.”
The king
considered me—or considered my voice (he was
blind)—then answered,
“Doubtless, Phineus. Clearly I was fooled, one way or
another:
if not by reality, then clearly by something in myself.
There are shadows
more than we dream, in the ancient cave of the
mind—dark gods,
conflicting absolutes, timeless and co-existent, who
battle
like atoms seething in a cauldron, each against all, to
assert
their raucous finales. Gods illogical as sharks. We roof their desperate work with the limestone and earth of
reason, but the roof
has cracks: as seepages, springs, dark meres push
through earth’s crust,
those old, mad gods burst through the mind’s thick
floor, mysterious
nightmares, twitches, accidents perverting our gentlest
acts.
I’ve made my peace with them.” I saw that events had
made him
wise. I said: “Perhaps the old man was not your father, merely another of reality’s tricks.” He smiled. “Perhaps. I’ve heard much stranger things. I’ve learned that the
primary law
of Time and Space is that nothing is merely what it is.
The seed
of the flower harbors the poison of the flower. I’ve
watched old lions
pause, befuddled by warring instincts, surrounded by
huntsmen.
I’ve watched my own soul—strange drives forcing me
higher and higher
to goals I can barely discern, and one of them is
beauty of mind,
true majesty; and one of them is death. I am, I’ve found a rhythm, merely: a summer and winter of creation
and guilt.
I’m the phoenix; the world. Thanatos and Eros in
all-out war,
the chariot drawn by sphinxes, one of them black,
one white:
one pulls toward joy, the other toward total eclipse of
pain.
With all that, too, I’ve made my peace. I’ve fallen out
of Time.
I stumble, a blind man guided by a stick. After all
this—sick,
meaningless, old—I’ve lost my reason at last: gone
sane.”
I said nothing, humbled by the wisdom Oidipus had
won—and not by
gift: by violence and grief. I could have expanded
what he knew.
I did for others. But I bowed, retired in silence. I have
said
to kings that their hope is ridiculous—the hope that
someday
kingdoms, heroes, philosophers, laws, may end forever the natural state—the jungle of the gods in all-out
war—
the secret whispers of the buried man, the violence
of seas,
benthal stirrings of the blind, pythonic corpse of
Atlantis,
the earth in upheaval, thundershouts, whirlwinds, foxes
snapping
at the rooster’s heels, or the silent victories of termites,
spiders,
ants. I have said to other men that the natural state is final. The forces that crack the efficient crust of mind crack nations: no hunger, no evil wish to seduce or kill is lost in the sky god’s brain. This darkling plain we flee toward love is the darkling plain toward which we flee.
But why
say all these things to him? I left him groping,
stumbling
stone to stone, as we all move stone to stone, each step catching the balance from the last, or failing to catch
it, tu
mbling us
humbly home to the dust. Don’t ask of a man like
Oidipus
programs, plans for improvement, praise of nobility.
(What are,
to him, great deeds of heroism? A matter of glands, nerves, old patterns of reaction: —a slight deficiency of iodine in the thyroid [I speak things long-forgotten], a sadistic aunt, a bump on the back of the head, and
the hero’s
a coward.) Every tragedy is fragmentary, a cut of Time in the cosmic whole, the veil without
which
nothing. A man’s inability to flee his father’s guilt, his city’s, his god’s. A man’s coming to grips with his
own
unalterable road to death. Don’t look to the gods for help in that. For the purpose you ask of them, they were
never there.
Earthquakes, fires, fathers, floods make no distinctions: the good survive and suffer, discover their truths and
die,
like the wicked. Indeed, if anyone has the advantage,
it seems
the violent, crafty, unprincipled, who seize earth’s goods while the pious stretch out their arms in prayer, and
leave empty-handed.
I could tell you, Argonauts … Dark, unfeeling,
unloving powers
determine our human destiny. The splendid rewards, the ghastly punishments your priests are forever
preaching of,
have no real home but the shores of their violent brains.
Learn all
your poisons! There’s man’s peace!’ The old seer smiled
and sighed,
gentle as a kindly grandmother. The firelight flickered soft on his forehead and cheeks as he leaned toward
it, stretching
his hands to it. We studied him, polite.
“At last I said:
Phineus, these are strange words of yours. You tell us
tales
of doom, inescapable senselessness, yet all the while you smile, stretching your hands to the comfort of the
fire.’
“ ‘That’s true;
no doubt it’s a trifle absurd.’ But he nodded, smiling on. ‘I was sick to the heart, fighting reality tooth and nail, staggering, striking—and, behold!, you’ve made me well.
My mind
made monsters up, and all the self-understanding in
the world
could no more turn them back than weir down history.’ He paused; then, abruptly, ‘I must muse no more on
that.’ He turned
his head, listening to the darkness in the room behind.
We began
to smell something. His face went pale. And then, once
more,
he smiled, remembered our presence, remembered the
fire. He said:
‘Life is sweet, Argonauts! Behold us, each of us
drinking down
his own unique sweet poison! May each see the bottom
of the cup!
As for myself, I can say this much with good assurance:
I will not
last much longer, now that the Harpies have left me.
The balance
is gone. Death’s not far hence, the death I carry within
me.
One grants one’s limits at last—one’s special strength.
One sinks
and drowns there, tranquil, no more at war with the
universe,
and therefore dying, like poison sumac become too
much
itself, unstriving, released at last into anorexy. —No, no! No alarm, dear friends! No distress! It was
a great service!
There is no greater joy, no greater peace, my friends, than dying one’s own inherent death, no other. The
truth!’
He paused, looked back at the darkness again with his
blind eyes.
He smiled. His smile came forward like a spear. ‘I will
tell you more:
You ask me: How can you smile, reach out to the
warmth, knowing all
you know? Let me tell you another thing about Oidipus. He knows where he is—where humanity is: in the tragic
moment,
locked in the skull of the sky: the eternal, intemporal
moment
which lasts to the last pale flash of the world. There
tragic man,
alone, doomed to be misunderstood by slumbering
minds,
exposed to the idiot anger of hidden and absent forces, nevertheless stands balanced. In his very loneliness, his meaningless pain, he finds the few last values his
soul
can still maintain, drive home, construct his grandeur by: the absolute and rigorous nature of its own awareness, its ethical demands, its futile quest for justice, absolute truth—dead-set refusal to accept some compromise, choose some sugared illusion!’ His face was radiant. He wrung his hands; his voice was unsteady. He was
deeply moved.
What could I say? It was not for me to pose the
question.
We were guests. He might be of use to us. I was glad,
however,
when Idas asked it. Sweat drops glistened on his ebony
forehead
like firelit jewels.
“ ‘Why?—Why soul? Why values? Why greatness?
Why not “Not love: just fuck”?’
“Old Phineus turned his face,
with a startled look, toward Idas. ‘I will tell you more,’
he said.
“ ‘We should sleep,” I broke in. ‘It’s a long trip, and
dawn near at hand.’
“The stink in the room was suddenly thick as a
dragon’s stench.
“All that day, far into the next night, Phineus talked. I rose, we all did, tiptoed out. By the following morning the stink was more than we could bear. There was
some dark meaning in it.
No matter. Aietes’ city was still a long way north, and that was where we were aimed. We’d gotten used
to it,
rowing, at one with the cosmos, as if we’d emerged
So old comedies end, the universe and man at one. Incorporation, purgation, harmony restored. Well, it wasn’t exactly like that. We had no complaints,
rowing
hard against an eastern wind. Some famous old tale …
Never mind.
Exhaustion was the name of the game.
‘Then came the stranger. I dreamed
(it was no mere dream) a terror beyond all the
wildest fears
of man. I dreamed Death came to me and smiled, and
said:
Fool, you are caught in an old, irrelevant tale. I will
speak
strange words to you, a language you won’t understand.
When you do,
too late! Such is my wile. I will tell you of horror beyond belief; you won’t believe, and so it will come. That is my trick. I will tell you: Fool, you are caught in
irrelevant forms:
existence as comedy, tragedy, epic. The heart divided, the Old Physician who cures the world by his ambles pie; the magician cook (Hamburger Mary), “Eternal
Verities,”
the world as the word of the Ausländer. Those are the
web I’ll
kill you by. And neither will you believe my power, or if you believe, imagine it. When I speak of death, you will think of your own; poor limited beast. What
man can’t face
his paltry private death? The words are, first: Trust not to seers who conceive no higher force than Zeus. And
next:
Beware the interstices. There lies thy wreck. Remember!’ I sat up, trembling in the dark, still ship; I cried out,
‘Wait!
Who are you?’ And then all at once
the shore was sick
with light:
there were cities like rotten carcases black with
children dead;
there were women, befouled, deformed by mysterious
burns; and the burnt ground
glowed, a deadly green. ‘My name is Never,’ he said. ‘My name is: It Cannot Be. My name is Soon.’ I saw his eyes and cried out. Then I was alone. It was
dark.
I racked my wits for the meaning. Old Mopsos had
theories. Said:
‘You’ve listened too much to old Phineus, Jason, with
all his talk
of dark, opposing forces—Love and Death. You’ve
conceived
the final war, the ultimate goal of humanity.’ Then it isn’t true?’ I asked. He sighed. ‘Who knows?
Who cares?
Don’t think about it. It’s millennia off. The dream’s mere
chaff.’
I wasn’t convinced. I could change the outcome. Why
send, otherwise,
the terrible vision to me? He smiled when I asked him
that.
‘Write it down that truth is whatever proves necessary. Write down the dream as a dream. You created your
goblin, Jason,
fashioned him out of your own free-floating guilt and
the babble
of Phineus. Go back to sleep, take a friend’s advice.
—Go to sleep
and don’t give your fears more rope.’ He turned away.
I gazed
through darkness, listening. All still well; no cause for
alarm;
nothing afoot but the wind, as usual—endlessly walking, darkening into the void … Then, far away, a flash, a sun, and the shock of it sent out astounding, sky-high
waves,
and as the first approached our ship I broke into a
sweat; but then
the great wave struck, moved past, and nothing had
happened. Illusion!
I got up, looked in at the darkness of water, and calmed
myself.
All well. Nothing afoot. —And yet I was sure, again, the vision was no mere dream. I stood at the start of
something,
in some way I hadn’t yet learned; and I might yet
change its course.
In my mind I saw myself clambering over the side,
slipping down,
soundlessly sinking in the water. I dreamed I’d done it.
Peace…
“Make a note. The dark of the buried gods has suicide
in it,
black form seeking to crack the efficient crust. I would
not
crack. I lay down again and, this time, nothing.
Darkness.
And so sailed on, putting the Bithynian coast behind
us.
Self-destruction was the name of the game. I wasn’t
playing.