“What local yokels? I thought there was only the swan.”
“Of course there were others,” Charon chided. “I hadn’t yet gotten around to mentioning them. I can’t say everything at the same time, can I? Where was I?”
“Local yokels,” Odysseus reminded him.
“They were actually very nice boys. Aged eighteen, both of them. Working on their uncle’s farm for their summer vacation.”
“What were their names?” Odysseus asked.
“Castor and Pollux,” Charon said.
“I think I know them,” Odysseus said. “Related to Helen of Troy, aren’t they?”
Welcome, Muse, look favorably upon our efforts, fill our throats with song, and our hearts with divine madness, for we attempt no less than to capture images of Odysseus, that curiously human hero with all his faults and foibles, his excellencies and his failings. That is the hero who fills our thoughts at the moment, and we will rest content if this is all we can say about him. Or rather, since the arrow is still in the air, we’ll continue in this direction for a while, with this picture of Odysseus before us, this Odysseus about whom so many curious stories are told. We’d like to tell something about him now.
One of his stories was about being cast up on the island of the Phaeceans. It was there he met Nausicaa. Nothing came of it, but Athene made Odysseus look better due to her godlike powers. She made him taller, did his hair in the hyanthcine locks usually reserved for Olympian Zeus, composed his features, trimmed his beard. She smoothed out his skin, gave him a facial and a backrub, made sure he looked good.
You may ask, what was the goddess thinking of? Why did she want to run things so closely? It was always that way with Athene. No sooner was Odysseus out of her sight than she was thinking about him again. “I wonder how he’s doing.” Her friends warned her, “It’s bad form, a goddess to take a mortal lover. Though some have found the notion irresistible . . .”
“What was it like when you took a human lover?”
Athene asked Aphrodite.
“It was different,” she replied.
“You’d think a god would made the best lover, since he can do what he wants to for as long as he wants to do it.
But the fact is, gods are ruled by caprice. They never use their exceptional powers except to break things. Toss off a few lightning bolts to the nervous system, they think that’s all it takes.”
Zeus, the hidden protagonist, puts down his weapons and goes to a shady tree beside a babbling brook and lies down and dreams with his eyes wide open. Even Apollo, whose name is synonymous with action, spends the greater part of his life dreaming. When Apollo dreams, he puts aside his lyre, which makes the sweetest music any man has ever heard, and plays instead an instrument as yet unconceived. You know that Apollo has had various contests in music? One was with Orpheus, and here Apollo confessed himself bested.
“As a god, I play superlatively,” he said. “But when a mortal plays superlatively, he brings something extra to it, something a god can’t supply. Perhaps it’s foreknowledge of death. It’s that extra something that gives a heart-pang to the music, makes it sweet beyond measure.”
The gods are endlessly infatuated with mankind. They keep on peering into the hollow earth. There are reasons why men, with one or two exceptions, like Hercules, do not become gods. The fact is, in some ways it’s an inferior position. Without the secure possession of death, a man can’t really hope to accomplish anything.
Death puts the finishing touches on things. A man’s death is a mortal’s most precious possession. The jealous gods would even steal that, pretending to bestow a boon where instead a deadly degradation is intended. Immortality is for mountains, not men. A god is more like a cloud than a man. Unless he works very hard at it. Most gods fear hard work. There are only a few like Apollo who are willing to take their natural godlike gifts and raise them to a higher level.
Say there, Odysseus, just what is it you’ve done? What are the main outlines of your adventures?—I can scarcely say. There was that city we sacked soon after leaving Troy. I’m not even sure now what it was called. But we killed and raped a lot. And it was there that our troubles really began.
My memory jumps back and forth, the way memory does. It’s a magician’s trick to produce a clean clear narrative which begins at the beginning and proceeds to the end. You’ll find no such thing here. What I remember is some of the high spots. Calypso. That was one. Nausicaa and the Phaeceans, that was one. My trip to the underworld, where I talked again with Achilles. But I scarcely remember that. And then there was Circe, when all my crew were changed into beasts, the Island of the Cyclops, of course. We made a movie out of that one. And I guess that was pretty much it. Though there were probably a few more. No doubt they’ll come back to me. Or I’ll look them up and tell you what I remember of them. The main outlines of the story are well known. I’ve read those outlines, and I couldn’t remember a thing if they weren’t there to guide me. It makes you wonder who did what around here, and how those people can talk about me with such confidence.
It wasn’t confidence that filled me back in those days when that stuff was coming down. It wasn’t a place to inspire confidence, you know, that world in which I lived so long ago. It’s all different now, this modern world. I suppose I should be glad to be alive. That’s one of the perks you get when you’re a hero of the first rank. They hold you over for the next show.
And there are other stories coming back to haunt me. How they got me to come fight in their stupid Trojan war in the first place. Because I wanted to stay out of that one in the worst way. I’d just taken over the throne of Ithaka from old Laertes. I had my new wife, Penelope, and she was a beauty, let me tell you. It’s no small enterprise, you know, being king of a small classical island. The upkeep on the marble alone. And then they came, Achilles and Agamemnon and that other guy whose name I keep on forgetting—started with a P didn’t it? The one who invented games of chance. He played one of them on me, invented it right on the spot. When I pleaded insanity, and was plowing salt into my fields, they took my newborn son, Telemachus, and threw him into the furrow in front of my plow. How about that for a game? Plow under your own kid to prove that you’re insane. And go insane from what you’ve done. I confess, for a moment I thought about it. I hate being ruled by others. I wanted no part of their war.
I’d had this idea; you stay in your own kingdom, you keep your head down, you sell all your subjects insurance, they pay you protection, you’ve got a white house in a grove of trees, you’re a member of a country club, for summer vacations you go to old Laertes’ farm. You’ve got all that going for you, and whammo, they throw the kid into the furrow and you stop the oxen, and Agamemnon says, “Odysseus, if you know enough to not run over your own kid with a plow, you’ll know how to fight the Trojans.”
No way to get Agamemnon or any of them to change their minds. Dead set at settling matters with the Trojans. Some have said that Helen was the cause, others that she was just an excuse for settling a trade dispute. You were there; you tell us why they fought. They were pig-set on having it out, and everything had a reason and nobody knew what he was doing, and that was a war that really dragged on. It was a doomed war from the start, yet what a war it was.
This cutting of the finger just now was probably some sort of a message. It isn’t too difficult to go on with a bandaid around the finger. The tip is free, and that’s the part you use for typing. The bandaid staunches the blood. But what else does it do? It acts as a reminder. That’s the meaning of something tied around your finger. And the gods must have figured you could use the sign, and made it not too onerous, to give you an objective reason for wrapping something around your finger. And what is this thing you’re reminding yourself of? That your daily work consists of letting a flock of words out to graze. Yours is a two-hour flock, and you shouldn’t dream of taking out some of the words to pasture and leaving others in the corral. Take the whole flock out! This band around your finger is there t
o remind you. To remind you that this is what your day is consecrated to—this task, this matter—and that your job is to do it, and your study is how to learn what you need to know in order to do it. It’s simple enough work, but it takes doing.
Odysseus at the Phaecean court. The adventurer has just broken into tears when King Alcinous’ bard related the adventures of the Trojan War. Alcinous asked Odysseus to take up the song himself. And here we come into one of those regions of the story that are open to misinterpretation. For some say that Odysseus refused to say anything at all, aware that with his imperfect memory and less than perfect poetics, he could not tell a tale about himself as splendid and moving as that which the singer was singing. So poignant was that story that Odysseus himself could scarcely be stopped from feeling sad at the hearing. But it also in some way and to some degree falsified the story, because surely, Odysseus thought, that couldn’t have been me that did all that?
Alcinous said, “We want to hear your story, Odysseus, and in your own words, but never mind about the pauses and hesitations and second readings with which you’re sure to deform your narrative. Don’t worry about the discrepancies between what you remember happening and what someone else remembers happening; we’ll take care of all that. Here in Phaecea, myths and stories are what we do. We produce them for the Pan-Hellenic Psychic Wavelength Band, the finest network conceived by man. Here your story will receive its proper due, and we’ll touch it up where it needs to be touched up. I can already see some places where we can improve on your story, make it more like the way you would have actually done it, had you only possessed the hindsight that would allow you to go backwards.”
“It’s a hell of a job you give me here,” Odysseus said. Although Athene had made him bigger, taller, handsomer than before, Odysseus still didn’t have any confidence. “If I really were these things,” he thought, “I wouldn’t need a goddess to do it for me. I don’t know why she bothers with me, anyway.” And that led him to wonder what the goddess’ motivations were in this. Did she love him? He scarcely dared believe it. But there it was. And if that were so, what did it say about Athene? That she had a nasty perversion there, this taste for glorifying mortals past all reckoning of what they deserved. He wondered why no one had thought of setting up as the psychiatrist of the gods. It was something they obviously needed. Tell me, Athene, why do you keep on bothering with these mortals? I don’t know, Doctor. I go along being happy and comfortable, and then something comes over me. I know I’ll never be happy again. Being a goddess seems so sterile, so useless. Then I want a human lover, I want to be a human myself.
And the next best thing to being human is to love one.
Odysseus had just settled down for a nice nap when they came for him. Too bad about you, Odysseus, you’re going to go on anyhow. That is what it’s like in the classical world. When you’ve got to, you go on. Look at Sisyphus.
It isn’t generally realized that he’s actually a writer named Asmoderious, who suffered from writers’ cramp. He went from being the most successful writer of love romances in the ancient world, to total zilch. What went wrong? We don’t know. Psychology hadn’t been invented yet. What the ancient world had was mythical, allegorical explanations for things. If you lusted after your mother, that wasn’t your fault, a god was responsible. And so in Asmoderious’ case, his writer’s block wasn’t his fault. A god had put the geas on him. Which god? There can be no doubt. It was Apollo. He was always a jealous god.
None of Apollo’s compositions for lute and lyre were ever published in the human world. Everybody praised them, but they didn’t publish them in the great music publishing industry center in Bythinium. Gave them lip worship, but turned for publication to such tried-and-true performers as Orpheus. Hah, Orpheus! A lot he knew. For wise guys like that we had a trick or two. Came to his wife. Congratulations, you have won a half acre lot in Sunny Acres, Florida, complete with ten room house and carport. There’s a fun room and everything. And you also get a free pass to Disneyland. You just have to come with us to collect your present.
Eurydice, unsuspecting, went with them. They had all the right credentials, badges, stamped papers. And they were tall, imposing briefcase-toting men in black suits who looked at you directly and couldn’t be lying.
Alas, those were the worst kind, the honest-looking ones. And if they themselves thought they were honest, but were in turn being tricked by vengeful Apollo, whose scheme it was, who could tell? Thus it was that she went with them, lovely Eurydice with the long dark hair, with the beautiful melancholy eyes, with the trim figure in the dark blue satin wrapper, beautiful Eurydice was taken out and led away.
They led her down a path that tended downward and grew increasingly dark.
“This isn’t Kansas any more,” she said.
“No,” they told her.
“Where am I?” Eurydice asked.
“This is the kingdom of the dead,” they said.
Eurydice looked around. “Why, this place is filthy!”
They shrugged. “What do you expect from us? We are dead!”
“Well, you can still handle a broom, can’t you?”
And Eurydice set a good example by finding a broom—the one Hecate usually rode—and wielding it with a vengeance, cleaned up the piles of soot—even sweeping under Nemesis, something no one had dared to do.
And there she was, far from Kansas, close to nowhere, in the kingdom of the dead.
For her, it was no big deal that she’d been able to move from living to dead without a lapse of consciousness. That sort of thing was the concern of philosophers; it had nothing to do with her. She only knew that she was dead and that her civil rights had been violated.
Yes, Sisyphus, and Tantalus, all of those guys, all that trouble, and it wasn’t enough for them to have it personally in their own time; someone had to go and make myths of them, and now everyone suffers to some degree from Sisyphonitis and Tantalization, twin discomforts of our modern age.
We’re talking rude forerunners of the Hamlet sleep here. We’re talking Oedipus and other big hitters. We’re talking the beginning of our Western way of doing things. We’re talking the hero’s journey, with all its vicissitudes. Above all we’re talking self-transcendence, the very best kind. “Now I see myself above myself,” thus spake Zarathustra. We’re talking Talos, world’s first robot, with a single vein that ran from his top to his bottom and back again. We’re talking nervous gods looking ahead into the dark and dubious future, and seeing that it ends badly every time. We’re talking the birth of comedy in the squalor of goatsong, the real thing, the madness which the classical temper casts over us. Because it’s all horror, those clean white classical cities with their stupid lack of television and their sacred kings. We’re talking about times irretrievably out of order, until our modem world came along with its put-downs and one-liners. These are the things that made life possible. No more the flowing sentences of Odyssean oratory. Now we have the one-line grunt and the expletive squeal. And we have the end shaping up before the beginning has even been fairly started, but we push it back, go away, Mr. Ending, we’re here at the beginning. But ole Ending, he know a thing or two, too. He say, well, mumble mumble, little children, it’s no fault of mine that the gift of gab was put at my disposal, thus permitting me to talk to you now while the feast is on, to ask you to pause with the drumstick raised halfway to your lips, and ask you to contemplate matters of the tomb. The tomb, you see, is cool, and damp, and filled with women in black with purple lips, who aren’t there to do the laundry, like Eurydice there—and so it goes.
Well, you can imagine how we felt when we heard that. We only asked for a little order, some control among the chaos, “Let us lead, if you can’t do it,” we said. “There’s a perfectly reasonable way to deal with all this. We can put aside the ghouls and other unclean creatures. They’re not classical, and we don’t need them. We can find our way back to a clean well-lighted place where the antelope roam (and the prelope also roam) and th
e postlopes feed on the tender jimson weed, and we’re back in the saddle again of deformed features in a saloon that must have been shipped straight from hell, and the bartender looked us in the eye saying, “What’ll yuh have, stranger?” And then we knew we would never escape; that the whole construct was just one saloon after another, places filled with darkness and raddled, interwoven features, places which we didn’t want to go to—so badly that we imagined they didn’t exist, hoping that by an act of the imagination we could cause them to cease to be. You can’t tell what the laws of the universe are at any given moment, but it’s plain enough what works and what doesn’t.
PERSEUS
CITY OF THE DEAD—Installment 3
Perseus was born in the ancient world in Greece. His parents were king and queen of Tiryns. His childhood was spent as a well-loved boy with many friends. His uncle, the sinister Jeremiah, also lived with them, and his uncle’s wife, Lettice, a woman from Crete about whom little was known. He also had a sister, Mary Jane, but she is not supposed to be mentioned, so forget about her.
Perseus was a fairly bright boy, but not a very good student; his mind was always on fooling around outdoors, hunting and fishing. He was bright, however, and very good with weapons. He was a nice boy, well-mannered for the most part, and inclined to be a bit hasty. He could get real mad, real fast—then cool down again real quick. This led him to a certain brashness in action, and an inclination to melancholy when brooding over his major and minor indiscretions.
He was raised as a prince, and considered it his duty to be somewhat more than that—a hero. He read hero magazines all the time and admired other heroes, especially Theseus and Jason, whom he wished to emulate. We will talk about his relationship with his Uncle, and the new young man, at first without a name, who moved into Tiryns soon after one of Perseus’s late teen birthdays. We see him now just hanging around his father’s court, which is made entirely of white marble and gets very hot in direct sunshine.
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