There, to my surprise, he let it drop.
And then I too heard, breaking through the smoky dark, the
queer sound Oidipus
strained to catch: a rhythmic cry and the faint whisper of oars swinging. He leaned both hands on the crook of
his cane.
“More company,” he said, and braced himself. A moment
later
I saw the Argo’s silver fangs come gliding out of
darkness,
the long oars swinging like the legs of a huge, black
sea-insect,
crusted with ice. The sail was stiff. On the island
around us
the ice and dark snow reddened, as if the war had
come nearer,
riding in the black ship’s wake.
Straight in toward shore she came, the oars now lifted like wings, and as soon as the
keel-beam struck,
down leaped a man in a great brown cape that he
swirled with his arm
as if hoping to frighten the night. His icy beard and
mane
were wild, his bright eyes rolling. When he saw me he
halted and covered
his eyes with both hands, then carefully peeked through
his fingers at me.
At last, convinced that the curious sight was no
madman’s dream,
he bowed to me, then turned and tip-toed over, through
the snow,
to Oidipus. He whispered, smile flashing, “My name is
Idas,
or so men call me, and I answer to it. Why increase,
say I,
the general confusion? Which is, you may say, an
immoral opinion.”
He glanced past his shoulder to the ship, then whispered
in Oidipus’ ear:
“I deftly reply, after careful study: I burned down the
city
of Corinth, sir, in the honest opinion it belonged to a
man
who’d sorely grieved me—but found too late that the
fellow had left it
to my dear old friend, in whom I was only, at worst,
disappointed,
which is not, you’ll agree, just cause for destroying an
old friend’s town.
But what’s done is done, as Time is forever inkling at us.
And, being a reasonable man, within limits, I turned
my faltering
attention to doing him good. I must make you privy to
a secret:
He’d had it worse than I, this friend. He’d lost his lady.
A nasty business. She murdered his sons and reduced
him to tatters—
it’s the usual story. In the merry words of our old friend
Phineus,
‘Dark, unfeeling, unloving powers determine our
human
destiny.’ He was beaten hands-down, poor devil. She
made
considerable noise about oath-breaking, and believed
herself,
as well she might, since she spoke with enormous
sincerity,
which is to say, she was wild with rage. She called down
a curse,
that Jason should die in sorrow and failure, on his own
Argo—
a curse that may well be fulfilled. On our sailyard,
ravens perch,
creatures beloved of the master of life and death,
Dionysos.
Having struck, she fled to Aigeus’ kingdom in
Erekhtheus,
which now we seek. Our luck has not been the best, as
you see.
Winds play sinister games with us; familiar landmarks change in front of our eyes, outrageously cunning—no
doubt
ensorcelled by Jason’s lady. From this it infallibly
follows,
if you’ve traced all the twists of my argument, that
we’ve landed here
to gain some clue to our bearings.” He smiled, eyes slyly
narrowed,
pulling at his fingers and making the knuckles pop.
King Oidipus
with his old head bent as if looking at the ground, said
nothing for a time.
At last he said, “Let me speak with this man.” Mad Idas
bowed.
“Of course! I had hoped to suggest it myself!” He
and a moment later Lynkeus jumped down, and after
him Jason.
They came toward us. “You must understand,” mad Idas
said,
“that my friend cannot speak. He was once the most
eloquent of orators,
but a secret he suspected for a long time, and
continually resisted,
eventually got the best of him and took up residence in his mouth. Look past his teeth and you’ll see it there,
blinking like an owl,
huddled in darkness. He’s grown more mute than Phlias,
who could answer
the anger of the world with a dance. A terrible
business.”
The blind king listened as Lynkeus and Jason approached. When they
stood before him,
he reached out to feel first Lynkeus’ features, then
Jason’s. No man
was ever more ravaged—grayed and wrinkled, hunched.
Oidipus
dropped his hand to his side again and nodded. “I see it’s broken you, this sorrow. And yet you hunt her.”
Jason
nodded, a movement almost not perceptible
even to a man with sight, but Oidipus went on, as if he too had caught it: The world is filled with curious
stirrings.
I feel all around me some change in the wind. I see
things,
here on this hyperborean island a thousand miles from home. I catch queer rumors. Remote as I am, in
this place,
from the traffic and trade of man, you’re not the first to
touch here,
though the change struggling toward life in you is the
weirdest of them all.
That much I sense already. Yet what it is your life is groping toward I’ve not yet understood. It may come. It will come, I think. I feel myself almost closing on it, though of course I may not. I set great store by my
intellect once;
thought I was wiser than all other mortals.” He laughed
to himself.
“I answered the riddle of the Sphinx—sat pondering,
wringing my fingers,
and suddenly got it, leaped up shrieking, ‘It’s a man!
A man!’
Poor idiot! I thought after that that my crafty eye could
pierce
all life’s mysteries: Set myself up as a sage, became (gloating in my prizes—the throne of Thebes, and her
beautiful queen)—
became the most foolish of kings, unwitting parody of
one
who was truly wise in Thebes, the seer Teiresias, blinded for sights forbidden—the bosom and flanks of
Athena—
as I, too, would be blinded for knowledge not lawful.
I now
hold myself in less awe.” He smiled. “I have no virtue except, perhaps, humility. ‘Know thou art a man’ the
god warns—
Apollo, strangler of snakes. And I know it. Smashed to
the ground,
to wisdom. With every hair I lose, a desire dies; with every eyelid flicker, I forget some fact.” Abruptly, remembering the cold and his guests’ discomfort, the
old man said:
“Come in my cave, good sirs. There’s a fire, and stones
for chairs.”
He led the way, tapping with his stick, and
we followed
him.
He’d shielded the entrance to the cave with scraps of
wood (old crating,
the salvaged planking of ships) till it looked like the
shacks you see
by the city dump. But the glittering walls of the cave
were warm.
Idas and Lynkeus stirred the coals, found logs to add. Jason stood quiet as a boulder, white-bearded, staring.
intensely
at something deep in the fire. Then all but Oidipus sat
down.
I sat in the shadow of the others and reached out
timidly for heat.
Oidipus tipped down his head, both hands on his cane,
his forehead
furrowed like a field. “That was not the least of visits when Theseus came with his Amazon, after his cruel
betrayal
of the beautiful Ariadne, whom Theseus swore he’d
praise
forever. He felt no remorse at that. All the world
betrays.
The fibers binding the oak together or the towering
plane tree
sever, sooner or later; or a life-giving storm from Zeus turns to an enemy and tears up the tree by its roots. In
Nature
steadfast faith is an illusion of fools. So Theseus
claimed,
and scorned her, despite all she’d done for him. But
later, seeing
how deep that emptiness runs—how the center of the
universe
is Hades’ realm, where the absence of meaning lies
bitter on the tongue
as a taste of alum—he changed his opinion. He fought
his way back
to the kingdom of the living and made his own heart a
law contrary
to the world’s. And at last he subdued that passionate
Amazon
by laying plain the deadness at the core, the all-out
battle
of dark gods seething, each against all, like atoms.
Like you,
a metaphysician to the bone, he knew, that scorner of
vows,
the smell of mortality in promises. Without that
knowledge
nothing of importance can begin, though knowledge, if
it goes no further …
The rest is murky. So I saw myself—I, who answered the Sphinx’s riddle and swore by unflagging intelligence to keep Thebes firm. I was shown soon enough the
absurdity
of hopes so overweening. The ground underneath me
shifted,
and all I perceived and reasoned about was a mirror
trick.
I learned that the way of the universe is dim,
unnamable,
shape without shape, image without substance, a dark
implication
from silence….
“And yet it is also true that Herakles was right— with Herakles too I passed a day—who believed his
father
was loving and always near, assuaging torments. (In a
world
confused and contradictory, everything is right, and all potential is real possibility.) By the character of Zeus as he understood it, he judged all things. When he seized
the initiative,
judging for himself, as if Zeus were not there, he was
filled with darkness,
loneliness, sorrow, and fear. Many times he fell, by his
standard,
and many times climbed back, bellowing, striking all
around him
with his wild-man’s club. He was wrong, of course, in
believing his father
was there, or that Zeus felt concern—one more blind,
feelingless power—
but the sorrow and joy in redemption were real enough.
So the Trojan
Aeneas thought, who abandoned the woman he loved
for duty
and sailed out of Carthage, take it as she might. His
voice grew wild,
telling me the story: ‘What pure serenity I felt,’ he
said.
‘ “Let nobody fool you,” I said to the sailors around me
in the ship,
“though the mind yaw this way and that, anchorless,
the heart can be sure
what’s right and wrong, what the gods require. I’ve
proved it myself,
when I turned sternly on selfish desire for that loveliest
of queens
who lulled my noble and difficult purpose to sleep,
seduced
my lion-ambition with presents and comforts, till I’d
half-forgotten
my people’s destiny, my arms grown flabby, the back
that once
easily carried my father from burning Troy grown frail and flimsy as a girl’s, my mind once keen grown soft
with love
and wine and poetry. ‘Who can say what’s best?’ I
sighed,
sunk in the softness of Dido’s scented bed. But a voice outside my life and larger than life came urging me
onward,
peremptorily ordering ‘Up! To Italy!’ And now that my
legs
stand balanced on the deck of the ship again, I know
the truth,
know it by the salt’s sharp bite in the spray, by the
soul-reviving
pressure of the wind. There is no personal pleasure—
none!—
that touches the joy of duty! The man who claims the
gods
are remote, indifferent—the man who feels no presence
of the gods
in all he does—is a man half dead. They exist; they
reveal
their character and will in every leaf and flower. Woe to the fool who closes his heart to them! His heart will
be dark,
his deeds puny and ridiculous!” So I spoke on the ship, ploughing north toward Italy,’ he said. ‘But that was
before.’
He laughed, furious, when he spoke with me now of his
former opinions.
‘Stark madness,’ he said, and gnashed his teeth, pacing
back and forth.
‘I could hardly know that as soon as I left her she’d
killed herself,
though we saw, three nights out of Carthage, the glow
of her funeral pyre.
Not all the magnificent kingdoms on earth are worth
the death
of a single beautiful woman—nay, the death of even a sick old man. When I met her shade I came to my
senses,
but understood too late. And with nothing remaining
but duty,
I followed duty—followed what once I’d known by
feeling,
I thought, as the gods’ command. Came no such feelings
now.
Turnus dead, my better, but a man in my destiny’s way; Lavinia my wife, a useful ally—her bed no Dido’s. Loveless, friendless. A compromiser for the good of the
state,
selfless servant of the gods as a burning stick is servant to the chilly, indifferent shepherd. Such is the sorrow
of things.’
So he spoke, full of anger, longing for death. Nor was
it much better
for Ticius, or Lombard, or Brutus, or the others
dispersed but of Troy,
obedient to what they imagined the high gods’ will.
But each,
sick with betrayals, too cynic for love such as Orpheus
had,
made his peace, built up weary battlements—for all his
scorn
of pride, made his stand of proud banners. And rightly
enough. No worse
th
an Akhilles’ way—if Odysseus told me, in that much,
the truth.
He would not bend for the pompous bray of civilities,
that one!
Would let all Akhaia go down for one woman, his prize
of war
whom dog-eyed Agamemnon stole, supported by
lordlings,
Akhaians gathered from far and near for a high moral
purpose,
they pretended—lying in their teeth. They did not fool
the son
of Peleus, raging in his tent and cursing their whole
corrupt
establishment. He set his pure and absolute passion beyond the value of all their chatter of community effort till Patroklos died, and Akhilles’ passion made him hate
all Illium
and battle for Akhaia in spite of himself. He wagered
his soul
on love and hate, and let duty be damned. But Priam, bending in sorrow for his headless, mutilated son,
made Akhilles
shudder at last with sanity, crying aloud to the gods. He too, the gentle and courageous Hektor, was a lover—
loved
both justice and the people of his city and house.
Constrained to fight
for an evil cause or abandon loved ones, he wiped
the lines
from his forehead, gave up on metaphysics, played
for an hour
with his son, then put on his armor. So goes the universe, disaster on this side, shame on that … Yet not
even these
are trustworthy.
“For ten long years Odysseus debated, tossed like a chip by the lunatic gods—not the least
of them
the gods in his sly, unsteadfast brain. Defend him as
you will,
Odysseus couldn’t be certain himself that he truly
intended
to make his way back to Penelope. He bounced from wall to wall down the long dark corridor of chance to that
moment of panic
when Alkinoös’ daughter found him by the sea and fell
in love with him. Then swiftly that quick brain lied:
told tales
of battle with the Cyclops, the terror of Sirens,
debasement on the isle
of Circe—fashioned adventures, each stranger than
the last, to prove
that all this time he’d had no end but one, return
to Ithika
and his dear lost wife. And so, assisted by the
wily Athena,
he explained away his drifting and eluded the sweet,
light clutches
of Nausikaa—but committed himself to the older, half-forgotten prison, and there Alkinoös sent him, laden with gifts on that oarless barque. But though he
reached the hall
itself and learned who was loyal to him, he could
find no way
to win back his power from the suitors there, fierce
men who’d kill him
gladly if he dared to reveal himself. So hour on hour, disguised as a beggar in his own wide hall, he