The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The whole so-called gigantomachy was invented by the Olympians’ hireling court poets, those shrewd poetasters, a revolting tribe that will go on for centuries conceiving its odes and epics in honor of any tailor who became a prince…

  I greet you, Giants, who never wore a human mask and whose names are pronounced correctly only by mountain goats, eagles and the delicate voice of water falls, the whisper of stone avalanches. Remain remote, alien, fossilized [the only attitude worthy of gods] like a of red sky, the inexpressible beauty of a nest of amethyst, chilly as early dawn on the seashore Andromeda’s pupil…

  Greetings, Giants, you who were disowned by human…and its cowardly Olympian gods

  A great blood-shot eye

  Farewell, ancient time of Giants, faded tapestry, banner

  INTRODUCTION TO “ATLAS”

  (Autobiographical Note)

  MYTHOLOGY AS IT was taught in school filled him with disgust, for it was the triumph of an anthropomorphic beast

  —he collected fossils, claw prints

  —he hated the race of victors and his covenant with the vanquished seemed to him an inheritance

  from the mountain, the stream, the hunted insect, and the melancholy giant

  —all his sympathy was directed toward

  weary and ambiguous heroes

  He guessed at the hell of immortality, the flames that do not consume, the desert plateaus, the never-ending incantations

  They (the gods)

  grant us a generous and thoughtless indifference, not understanding that we wait for punishment—as we do for grace

  —he loved the monster and the injured man

  he loved the injured man

  was the knowledge of monsters for him not propadeutical to history?

  Annex (variants)

  NARCISSUS

  THIS MYTH LAY dormant in me for decades on end, lay there but didn’t grow, didn’t unfold like a baby’s fist around a motionless rattle.

  For what can one say about Narcissus? That he existed, that he was beautiful, that he stared at his own reflection in a pool and, ravished by beauty, drowned. Where is the lofty message, the envoy, the moral? He’s gawking at the water and suddenly—plash. Just right for a modish haiku, such as a certain classicist has commended for years to rein in the garrulity of our native poets. In fact the myth was unbearably static. It lay there.

  Nevertheless, attempts were made to resuscitate Narcissus. A bent was invented for him, an erotic bent of course. A forest nymph, Echo, fell in love with Narcissus. For reasons unknown, Narcissus rejected her love and in her sorrow Echo became the divinity of forest retreats. Her name suited excursions of fat city dwellers. And thus the nymph became a stewardess of nature.

  Evidently Narcissus lacked the character profile or the germ of tragic guilt, for us to treat him seriously and follow his fate with compassion or outrage. At most he can explain the name of a flower, a seductive flower of course—but the rose, who has no chevalier or troubadour of its own, as we know, does without myths.

  And what happened first? Probably delight in a new natural phenomenon, the search for a name, and then an attempt to adapt the story, without which it existed anyway, and therefore the story was arbitrary and meaningless, unnecessary. That is how Narcissus became the emblem of tautology.

  Such a fate had to befall Narcissus, whose only virtue was in his looks.

  SACRIFICE—DIONYSUS

  1

  “WE’RE GROWING OLD, DIONYSUS,” said the father of the gods.

  “No doubt about it,” Dionysus replied, more seriously than ever and disinclined to argue. “But even stones grow old,” he added, though even to him the comparison seemed a little pointless.

  “We age faster than stones—and in worse style. The worst thing is that we realize it ourselves. Some idiot from Ionia1 said six centuries ago that we didn’t exist, and at that time we were in top form. I could have sworn that I threw thunderbolts and could actually kill an unbeliever or make a city go up in flames.”

  “So—the world as will and representation,” Dionysus added sententiously, anticipating the development of philosophy. The gods had no sense of time. Time for them consisted of an unbroken chain of days and nights. Years, decades, centuries, seasons were without measurable form or value to them.

  “It all started with Aphrodite getting that flu. We didn’t understand what a high temperature was, and that’s why she was coughing like an old fishwife.”

  “It doesn’t matter how it started. One thing is important: people ceased to need us.”

  “It’s our fault. We completely neglected the state of the priesthood. Nowadays they’re bodies of puffed-up ignoramuses, and the church treasuries are nothing but banks, shady gambling halls, exchange bureaus, money laundrettes. And on top of that they all take bribes.”

  “It’s true our intermediaries have lost their independence, which was predictable, but that’s not the real cause of our downfall.”

  “What about the scandals on Olympus? That complete lack of basic decency. We started persecuting people without offering models of behavior. We didn’t even come up with a decent decalogue, or at least a table of values.”

  “Oh, Dionysus, you’re getting tedious and principled, like a young graduate of the Sorbonne. What you’re talking about depends on man. We have to retain some kind of division of labor, that is, an elementary division and hierarchy. Who knows if…”

  “I don’t agree, Zeus,” Dionysus burst out. “Since we took part in the war at Troy I see no real reason we should stand by in cowardly indifference and watch the tribal war of the Hutus and Tutsis…”

  “Dionysus,” said Zeus reprovingly, “when you start on politics, I lose my patience.”

  They walked on a long while, silent as stones, along the winding path at the bottom of a shady ravine that suddenly led up to the mountain and led to a pass, from which spread out, a view of the sea furrowed by the wind. The sun hung low on the horizon. Sunset was approaching.

  “À propos,” said Dionysus, and fell silent again. Nothing came to mind.

  Another moment passed, and Zeus spake, cleaving his vowels, in a celebratory tone, a little too celebratory, particularly for such an inappropriate setting, as even the cicadas were silent. They were walking in the green shade amid a great silence.

  “One of us has to die, so that the rest can live on.”

  “I don’t quite understand, Zeus.”

  “One of us has to give his life.”

  “Forgive me, Zeus, but…”

  “One of us must be sacrificed. Not to put too fine a point on it, one of us has to be put to death at the foot of an altar, like a sacrificial animal. Humankind will understand that we are prepared to do something for them.”

  Silence.

  Dionysus spake: “I understand you want me to be the sacrificial animal.”

  Another silence. Only longer and deeper. You could hear their hearts racing.

  Dionysus, in a calm voice, but not without a note of sadness:

  “We both know we’re not immortal. Two hundred or three hundred years sooner or later doesn’t make much of a difference.” And after a moment of silence: “All right, Zeus, Dionysus consents to be an animal sacrifice.”

  Zeus took a deep breath.

  “I have to tell you I’m even curious about it. How a man feels. I’ll have a moment to enter a human being’s skin. I think that before the execution there will be some kind of priestly drivel, something like that.”

  “I want to assure you,” said Zeus, “that the ceremony will be sublime and moving.”

  “To hell with that,” Dionysus snorted.

  Then he added: “So—when?”

  “Soon,” said Zeus.

  “They walked on to the highest point of the pass.

  2

  ON THE DAY OF Dionysus’ sacrifice, Olympus was deserted. All the gods had come up with some incredibly important and urgent business to attend to. Apollo took off for Egypt. Athena had an
important conference with Poseidon on the island of Thasos. Zeus took refuge in the woods of Epirus. The one remaining was Hermes, the most trustworthy of the gods, whose responsibilities moreover required him to accompany souls into the underworld.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK, Hermes, did he suffer?”

  “Hard to say. At the beginning he behaved as if it were all a game, but later…”

  “Did he scream?”

  “Worse than that, Zeus. He wept.”

  LABYRINTH ON THE SEA

  To Kasia

  translated by

  Alissa Valles

  LABYRINTH ON THE SEA

  I

  One of the great islands of the world1

  in midsea, in the winedark sea, is Krete:

  spacious and rich and populous, with ninety

  cities and a mingling of tongues…

  and one among their ninety towns is Knossos.

  Here lived King Minos whom great Zeus received

  every ninth year in private council…

  HOMER, ODYSSEY

  THESEUS, THE SHIP THAT is supposed to take me to Crete, has not yet arrived at the port in Piraeus and no one can tell me when it will. Ordinary timetables do not hold good in the homeland of myths, in a country where the clocks measure millennia. Nothing is left me but a choice between a peasant’s patience or a tour of the port’s tavernas. And so I sit in Piraeus waiting for the ship without anything to do but look at faces. These are not the faces we know from ancient vases, nor—I imagine—bodies resembling Praxiteles’ statues. The admixture of Albanian, Bulgarian, and Turkish features is striking and has wholly effaced the Hellenic physique a traveler expects to find here.

  Was Herr Doktor Fallmerayer perhaps right to claim that the Slavic invasions of Greece, which started in the seventh century A.D., completely altered the ethnic composition of its inhabitants?

  And here I am reminded of an anecdote about Shelley. The great Romantic was working on his poem Hellas when his friend Trelawny proposed he come along to meet a real Greek. Together they went to Livorno to visit a Greek ship loaded with “a crowd that looked like Gypsies, yelling, gesturing, smoking, eating and playing cards like barbarians.” And to top it off, the captain of that ship had left his homeland after becoming convinced that the war of independence was not in his interest.

  I think one conclusion should be drawn from this anecdote: peoples have more important, more basic things to worry about than whether or not they resemble the ideals dreamt up by Romantic humanists.

  After a wait of six hours, Theseus arrives at the quay. Crushed in the dense throng, with a bleating goat underfoot and enormous bundles overhead, I make my way on board. I will cross the lovely Aegean Sea on this jittery ship full of noise, filth, unbearable odors, and wonderful life.

  Early in the morning I step out onto the upper deck of our ship. On the planks stained with tar and oil the bodies of men and women are strewn in disarray, as if some feast had ended in a slaughter. I am alone amid sleepy exhalations. I want to see Crete emerge from the sea.

  High up, over the misty horizon, barely visible, something faint, an opacity of the sky, a gray mark taking on a shape, and then I see clearly a mountaintop suspended in the heights like in a Japanese landscape painting. It is inexpressibly beautiful, this piece of distant rock carried in the air by the mist. I go on watching as the mountain grows, descends slowly, majestically, as if down a staircase, until a mountain chain settles on the sea before my eyes, filling the horizon.

  And there is the island.

  This is how Crete began for me, from the heavens, like a deity.

  Heraklion. A Venetian port and its walls, bastions surrounding a city of white houses. The silence of closed shutters.

  I walk into town on an uphill road that seems to go on forever, though the evidence of one’s eyes refutes it. The dimensions of light have frozen and though I hear the crunch of gravel under my feet and the sound of my own steps, I seem not to be moving at all, sunk up to my neck in the heat, drowned in the glare. I begin to suffer a painful loss of reality. I see now as if in a dream, askance, unable to communicate with my body, moving like a pendulum—motionless, bound to blank space, fixed once and for all as if on a photograph, caught in the trap of appearances, with a heavy shadow on my back. I will be haunted for many years by this image and the memory of the walk up steep Handakos Street, an image of being fettered, as if death had just then touched me for the first time, in the blinding midday sun.

  I rented a white room with an iron bed above which hung a terrifying Saint George killing a dragon, and rushed to the museum without delay, to surround myself with objects, many objects, in the hope that I would forget that shameful episode and the nauseating sense of being cast out of reality.

  II

  THE MUSEUM IN HERAKLION held a surprise in store for me, a surprise of the unpleasant kind such as I had never had in any museum or in the presence of any work of art. I was not then a youth thirsting for originality, which as we know is easiest to achieve if you are an iconoclast, if you scorn recognized works and don’t respect either authorities or tradition. This stance had always been alien to me—even odious, if I leave aside the short phase between my fourth and fifth year that psychologists describe as the phase of negativism. I always wanted to love, to adore, to fall to my knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelms and terrifies, for what kind of greatness would it be that didn’t overwhelm and terrify.

  I remember well the day I entered the museum in Heraklion two hours before closing time, ran through (how naive!) the rooms on the ground level where there are ceramics, little statues of bronze, clay and earthenware, seals and jewelry, everything counted as minor or applied art and then, my heart beating fast, I went up to the next floor where my guidebook—the invaluable Guide Bleu—promised me the frescoes I knew from reproductions in innumerable histories of art, those praised by experts as masterpieces of ancient painting.

  And? Nothing. I looked dully, without emotion or sympathy, at the Dolphins in the painted blue of the sea and at the Prince among Lilies. I quickly attributed this to my own indisposition, one way or another the sea journey on the battered Theseus had worn me out, I was stupefied by the heat of noon, and hungry, but not hungry enough to achieve heavenly ascension.

  Above all—I tried to systematize my doubts—the frescoes’ coloring was banal, suspiciously new and flat. The color combinations—the blatant poster-like tans, blues, and reds; in a pinch you could take them for Matisse (of a much inferior kind), if it were not for the slack lines, lines of which my drawing professor would have said they were uuhhh…not, as they should be, ooohhh; lines enclosing with a dull contour line planes painted in local paint. All of this without depth, without gravity or grace—leaving aside the little garden frescoes and the famous Parisienne.

  I called knowledge to the aid of my failing sensitivities. I recalled what experts had said about Cretan painting. They had wisely said that this art showed evidence of eideitic vision like that of the palaeolithic frescoes in France and Spain and the art of Rhodesian bushmen.

  It was possible, and even quite probable, that my instinctive resistance to the Minoan frescoes, my dissent, were due to my suddenly encountering something in no way reminiscent of the Egyptian, Etruscan, or Pompeian wall paintings I knew. For the painting of the Cretan artists appears in fact to be an art without analogue.

  And so—I thought—Geerto Aeilko Snijder is probably right: the Cretans were eideitics. One can test this oddity of vision (universal in children) and thus of the world’s representation by looking at the sun or a lit lamp and then shifting one’s gaze to a bare wall: one sees a pulsing red silhouette of the lamp or the sun. This is approximately how an eideitic person perceives reality, and by this phenomenon, whether ability or deformity, Snijder attempted to explain the oddity of Cretan art: the astonishing facility with which it seizes forms in motion in one contour line, a facility accompanied by a certain weakness—as if the outline of the
object had been wrung from a swooning hand—as well as a lack of bone, flesh, matter, structure (which Renaissance painting renders so wonderfully), that insubstantiality of people, animals, plants without roots, independent of the force of gravity—carried aloft in the air.

  And so the frescoes displayed in the Heraklion museum did not speak to me. I began sniffing them like a dry bone, and I noticed without special effort that there were cracked bulges of indefinite color on the surfaces; they made up only a small part of the surface of the fresco and were, as I later discovered, the only fragments of the originals. From Prince among Lilies or the King-Priest only a piece of a thigh, a torso, a shoulder, and a plume survived. Everything else was reconstruction, guesswork, fantasy. It was as if someone had filled out found fragments of an ancient poem with his own words.

  Later, when I was digging around in the literature on the subject, the whole question was cleared up for me. The wall paintings as they first appeared before the eyes of the archaeologists excavating the palace at Knossos were in very bad shape, covered with a layer of ash, and at the slightest touch they crumbled to dust. Leonard Cottrell in his book The Bull of Minos says that Sir Arthur Evans, the discoverer of Knossos, “quite rightly engaged the excellent Swiss painter M. Gilliéron, who had an extraordinary gift for patiently gathering together the small surviving fragments, recreating with sensitivity and precision what had been lost, and then producing an exact reproduction, which was placed on the wall in the place where the original had been.”

  I have never been able to find master Gilliéron’s own works, or even any reference to the artist, but I suspect that Evans hired him not for the alleged talents listed by Cottrell but because he submitted to the discoverer’s vision. I don’t quite understand why the fantasias of a Swiss on the theme of Cretan frescoes feature in art history textbooks as originals.