Hermes’ advice is to choose one of the gods as a sacrifice and to have him sacrificed by people. A little sophistry. After all, it’s a way of animating people that many religions employ. Until now it hasn’t worked, but we can try again. It would be as if God barged into a philosophy professor’s lecture, say, the lectures of an atheist. We aren’t running any risk, in the end. The curtain separating the worlds—supernatural and earthly—has long been riddled with holes.
With curious ease, Dionysus agreed, as an experiment at any rate, to risk the role of sacrifice. He explained that life had long ago lost its charm and meaning for him, and besides, he suffered from migraines and alcohol addiction, which made it very difficult for him to fulfill his responsibilities. The whole thing looked—and indeed was in execution—quick and painless.
But was it really painless? Zeus harbored slight doubts.
“So, tell me exactly how it went,” Hermes asked.
“Well, it all took place without any force or unpleasant, petty scenes.”
“Did Dionysus suffer?” Zeus asked naively.
“Not only did he suffer. He wept. And called God to witness.”
III
TEN PATHS OF VIRTUE
1. One should not appeal to the Gods for help even in extreme cases, for at the time they may be otherwise occupied, and our importunity may provoke an adverse outcome. Besides, it is doubtful whether any human communiqué can reach their ears, because of avalanches and explosions of decibels, not to mention magnetic storms.
2. One should love the Gods, for it purifies the heart.
3. There are many indications that reverence for one’s parents, care for the poor, the elderly, and orphans, and loving care of animals are pleasing to the Immortals.
4. Praying may be done everywhere. The worst place is a house of worship. They’re too stuffy.
5. Do not kill. Try to think well of people, lending them various virtues from time to time. Restrain from backbiting, which is the most despicable form of assassination.
6. In sensual love, avoid excess, but also unnecessary scruples. A pair of happy lovers is better and more natural than a convoluted relationship between delicate neurasthenics. Especially the version with children, who have to watch the melancholy spectacle of their progenitors’ daily torments.
7. Try to be happy, for only such people can make others happy.
8. One may steal in a period in which it is required for bare survival. One shouldn’t make an ideology out of it.
9. Avoid ideologies that promise the ultimate liberation of mankind. Endowed with a particle of freedom, we ought on the contrary to limit it for the good of our neighbor.
10. There are only spiritual sins. The sins of the flesh carry their own punishment with them: the progressive paralysis of lechers, the enlarged hearts of lighthearted gluttons, the splayfeet of informers.
IV From THE KING OF THE ANTS CYCLE (unfinished or abandoned)
ANTI-EPIC
THIS IS HOW it was in the beginning.
The story told by the caveman Homer to sweaty listeners clad in animal hides moaning in terror and delight, was short, true, and final. May those three adjectives stand as the sad testimony to my helplessness, my complete inability to know the source. Told in one breath, it contained everything that can honestly be said about the gods, the world of objects, and the nature of man. And also about a beginning out of chaos, a fragile harmony, and death in chaos. A few hoarse lines of verse, a harsh formula of fate. That’s all. It should be the end of oral, descriptive, personal, erotic, heroic, choral, and philosophical poetry. All poetry.
Human memory is frail. No one is capable of repeating a masterpiece. No one is capable of repeating anything. Particularly as it was barely a sign, the first and last letter of the alphabet, a masterpiece of concision. It did not consist of elements, exchangeable parts, it was itself an element, a particle of proto-history. And from this crippled memory, from this fatal oblivion, literature was born.
To soothe their bad consciences, people began to make epics, first modest ones, a few syllables long, still haunted in the heart of the matter by an echo of the caveman Homer. Later, conscience fell silent. Some puffed-up fellow1 came up with the principle of mimesis.
So writing became increasingly untrammelled, expansive, nebulous, ingratiating itself with nature. Loading on the creaky wagons of art everything that the course of history and human ingenuity brought to it: new gods, machines of death, statues of tyrants, venerated statues and products, hopes, and the monsters of consciousness.
Honest people knew of the existence of the proto-poem and that it was out of reach and impossible to capture, that it distanced itself with the speed of light. They therefore drowned their despair in floods of speech, in artificial illuminations, metastases of style—and let us say it finally—in pretentious babble. The noblest souls chose to open their veins, to keep a suicidal silence. The last tribute paid to the master poet.
The mirror traveling the road is a miserable instrument of cognition, and a clumsy instrument to boot.
….….….…….
fermentation of images
in the end a daredevil was found,
who described clouds
THE GARDEN OF THE HESPERIDES
To Karin Kiwus
IN THE FAR West there is a garden laid out in a sea peaceful as arable fields. The Island of the Hesperides who guard the golden apple.
The sun above them, a moon like a fruit, curious stars.
A sleepy stream crosses the island—Lato, which renews the virginity of the Hesperides when they bathe in it.
Here we also find Lado, a petrified snake with a hundred heads. He speaks every language, including the language of mole, deer, and clover.
The Hesperides sing:
How many happy months are there in a year?
Twelve happy months.
How many fragrant nights are there in a year?
Three hundred, as there are three hundred moons.
In the evening the Hesperides rest by the sea, which leaves the imprints of its breaths and sighs on the sand.
Three sisters abandon themselves to the ritual of sensual indolence.
They wax Rubensian in the sun.
POSEIDON’S RETINUE
For Zbigniew Biekowski
OF COURSE IT’S quite different from the fancies portrayed by that Swiss painter1 with a brewer’s imagination and the sweaty hands of a bathhouse attendant.
O poor Poseidon! What have we to do with that group portrait of naked bodies splashing around in warm, shallow water? The god, Nereids and Tritons are taking a bath. They show their fat thighs, calfs, heels, torsos. Instead of mythical splendor, oceanic infinitude—a bourgeois Sitzbad2.
In a moment they’ll come up on the beach, disappear into bath cabins (with hearts cut in the doors) and return in piquant costumes to where snow-white cloths are spread out on the sand, with baskets of bread and butter, roast chicken, and bottles of wine.
Smacking noises. Broken-off conversations. Somnolence.
I NEVER PRAYED FOR relief in suffering, for the smile of fortune or an easy death. I prayed with the ardor of a child, the stubbornness of an old man, that I might see the Retinue once in my life. And grace was bestowed upon me, when on the spine of an enormous wave, in a dazzling mane, briefly, between the batting of an eye and nothingness, I glimpsed Poseidon, and the Nereids, and Triton, and it was all as unfathomable as a mosaic of white drops on a white background, as a dolphin’s wedding feast—especially on that memorable Wednesday when a storm was gathering in the West.
PEGASUS
PEGASUS IS A creature beautiful beyond description, virtually perfect, wild, which is to say untamed, unbridled, free, sovereign—truly majestic, but never frozen in the pose of dim-witted leaders.
For centuries it was thought that he was the product of poets’ imaginations. This is an unforgivable error, more—an injury that must finally be redressed.
For whole millennia, n
ameless generations of horses bearing inhuman burdens and fat emperors, fed on the whip, fettered, slaughtered in senseless wars, tormented in hippic games—dreamed of a higher and sacred being—a winged divinity. He was a paradigm.
Ah, from time to time they were thrown some scraps of recognition or gratitude. Alexander named a city after Bucephalus. After his death he gave him a state funeral—and walking behind the mortal remains of his comrade he wept bitterly (which he did often, by the way). Caligula on the other hand appointed Incitatus a consul. Not to honor the horse but to humiliate the consuls. Numerous sculptors portrayed condottieri and cruel generals on horseback—but the horses are nothing but an organic pedestal. Still the downtrodden spirit of the horse labored without rest, in the quiet of stables, in the roar of battles.
Therefore it will not be an exaggeration to say that sacred Pegasus is a product of the collective imagination. Obviously not human, but equine.
It cannot be denied that he is of mixed race. This naturally provokes a hostile response from all fans of racial purity. But let us say it again and with emphasis: he is one of the most beautiful and exemplary cross-breeds of our planet. Perhaps only his medieval cousin the unicorn could compete with him in a contest of beauty, strength, and dignity.
Mythology is populated by genetically deranged monsters (rousing not our fear but our disgust) that could be born only in the mind of a drunken butcher blindly and randomly stitching a lion’s head1 to the trunk of a goat and the tail of a snake. It’s truly unworthy, not to mention the aesthetic horror it constitutes. Scholars argue that semantics may be to blame here. First some uncertain word or vague source was found—and then a figure, name, symbol was made to match it and reconcile the contradictory elements. The Greeks, so sensitive to harmony, suffered the invasions of foreign tribes: Thracians, Persians, Asians, Egyptians, not to mention their own dark Theogony. And precisely for that reason Pegasus cuts a clear and harmonious figure against this background. He is truly not a bastard of the imagination. He is the embodiment of lofty flights, freedom, integrity.
Only once did someone manage to capture him. It was Bellerophon, with the decisive aid of the gods’ technological tricks. It was no heroic act, but a simple stylistic procedure. Pegasus was deliberately turned into a flying horse. He was degraded to a means of transportation, a metaphor. I may expand on this in a treatise on Bellerophon.
It seems to me a real scandal that Pegasus was saddled by poets. In ancient times, neither Homer nor Horace would have dreamed of straddling Pegasus. This happened later, in times when mythology was treated frivolously, as an ornament, a crotchet—when inspiration was dying out and Pegasus was no more than a word—not an unbridled, internally independent being, having nothing in common with what is commonly called literature.
However, there is one detail which may justify the claims of the poets. It is known that by striking his hoof Pegasus created the spring Hippocrene, at the foot of Helicon, the seat of the Muses. But this only means that everyone can drink from the spring: wanderers, oxen—and poets, too, under the condition that they return to the spring, that is to the beginning. There are few of them, and they don’t swim with the stream, which carries with it toppled ideologies, smashed icons and—garbage.
Apart from that, there is nothing, truly nothing that would permit Pegasus to be dragged down to earth, especially for a purpose as ambiguous as writing.
Epiphanies have to have some meaning, after all.
If one regards the matter pedantically, as the Germans do, expertly, from the angle of Literaturwissenschaft2—it is Matteo Maria Boiardo3 who is to blame. In his unfinished courtly epic Orlando innamorato he used Pegasus as an infallible means of communication. One must do him justice. He took in vast regions and moved across an extensive terrain in time and space—from the Song of Roland to the Arthurian cycle and the courtly poetry of the Renaissance—not to mention private passions, or love, to which he wished to lend astral dimensions. I have the impression that he had no bad intentions.
Naturally, he couldn’t have imagined that Pegasus would become the favorite quadruped of the literati. That he would endow hacks with a crumb of personal dignity. Shackled to their stools, they multiply their tedious verse and useless romances, miserably paid, barely tolerated by their environment—and they feel they are astride a venerable steed. What a delusion! Hackney cabbies have more dignity.
The old mare metaphor was put out to pasture, they thought she was no longer good for anything. This was not done without great losses in the sphere of poetics, which does not at all mean playing the poet, but craft. In a shipwrecked world, nothing can be compared to anything else. That’s why, the innovators think, one must multiply the tautologies (the spiritual self-sufficiency) of egotists. Ego + Ego= Ego. E + E = E. And then the world is perfectly futile, that is, coherent—consistent.
Pegasus is lonely and one of a kind.
Poor Pegasus! You are indifferent to all this. You are an immortal horse. You freed yourself from the yoke of the pretenders who claim you. You know very well that people are always trying to hitch the divinities—good and evil ones—to their carts, to get them to pull those silly carts down to forbidden dives.
For now, if nothing changes substantially, stay where you are.
Pegasus should be left in his place.
In August nights, near the constellation of Andromeda, his immaculate hide shimmers.
DRAGON
SOMETIMES I REALIZE that I am very old. Being old is not only having arthritis, but above all belonging to a world of concepts not understood by the present day, as if one had a different dog-eared dictionary, published long ago, a different old atlas, a different book of the world. No one believes, for example, that I had a nanny, like Odysseus. The king of Ithaka and I had nannies. Once upon a time it was a powerful institution.
One of the important responsibilities of a nanny was putting children to sleep. A very few, the laziest and most slovenly ones, sang silly songs in a monotonous voice, with endless refrains, demonstrating what Professor Schultz of Berlin called autogenous training, as most often they fell asleep before their patients (to be precise, these attempts at putting children to sleep most often ended in the loud snoring of the nannies). The overwhelming majority told fairy-tales. In the beginning it was stories about flowers, little roses, lilies of the valley, daisies, industrious dwarfs (a perfidious representation of a working class deprived of class-consciousness), later about animals, the furry ones of course—bunnies, baby hares, and kittens (sweetness and goodness). The only accent of evil was the occasional appearance, in the background, of a death cap mushroom. Good children fell asleep after those first hypnotic measures. If, on the other hand, they still resisted, the nannies (one must add that they were not students of psychology, often not even students of the alphabet) set the machine of atrocities in motion. An escalation of horror followed, filled with skeletons, musty cellars, owls, hanged men, severed heads, graveyards, and devils. And then the little heads with their haloes of golden locks fell onto the pillows, their eyes shut tight, for they would rather die than go on listening.
The peak of horror were the stories about dragons. I fought off sleep to catch the beloved finale. I liked dragons a lot. They aroused in me feelings of tenderness and brotherhood. I couldn’t understand why they were killed so mercilessly. I dreamed that when I grew up I would free dragons from people.
I fell into a dreamy state and didn’t want to sleep at all—just do battle. Because the reliable dragon ploy didn’t work on me, I was marked as a bad child—and after that, consistently—a bad pupil, a bad youth, a bad citizen of the best state. And in the end I will be a bad-tempered old man (old men are usually called bad-tempered, not bad, because they can no longer hurt women in a manly way). I still have a little time left.
When I was ten years old, I went on a school trip to Kraków. We visited the Royal Palace. Not far from the Palace is the Dragon’s Lair. Sadly, it has been empty for centuries—for as the legen
d goes, a clever (to me not very sympathetic) cobbler threw the dragon an eviscerated ram in whose insides he had stuffed tar and sulphur. It was the first bomb, still primitive, later perfected by the anarchists. The dragon naturally died of dyspepsia.
The legend further has it that every year, the dragon was offered a certain number of the loveliest virgins as a sacrifice. I have long speculated that this was a way of distracting society’s attention from the fact that the ruler of Kraków—excitable, insatiable in his erotic fantasies—was taking the virginity of his subjects’ daughters and then blaming the dragon for it all.
The dragon became a symbol of all human crime and injustice. And because he was a living symbol, he was killed. It is quite extraordinary that he lasted as long as he did. Stamped out like a heretical sect, like the Jews, like all those who are other, who think differently.
In the beginning, or rather in Genesis, he was an ordinary snake.
GIANTS1
GREETINGS TO YOU, Giants. Across thousands of years of silence, across an ocean of human oblivion, across the rejection and hatred whispered [hissed] at you by the usurpers, those of took the title of Olympians, a dynasty boasting of the cunning of small animals, a corrupt generation, petty as the…of a guide, a generation devoid of dignity, a generation that knew…
I greet you, who…
The Collected Prose Page 48