temple
to be called the Temple of Concord as long as the world
may last.’
We did so—poured libations out and, touching the
sacrifice,
swore by the solemnest oaths that we’d stand by one
another
forever. A moving ceremony. I did not say as much as I thought to Orpheus after he’d ended it.
“We travelled on, young Orpheus stroking his lyre as
though
it counted for more than the sails. And did he expect to
stir up
rancor in me by his proof that art may also serve morale? Then that was a difference between us. I use
what means
I can to achieve my ends; I no more resented his help than the wind’s. If the quality of acts concerns him, the
smell and taste,
the moment to moment morality of it, let him take care of those. What he’d done to show me up, make a fool
of me,
was just what I’d sought myself. So who was the fool?
But I
was Captain, and not required to give explanations.
“And so
we came to the river Lykos and the Anthemoeisian lagoon. The Argo’s halyards and all her tackle quivered as we flashed along; but during the night the wind died
down,
and at dawn we moored at the Cape of Akherusias, a towering headland with sheer rock cliffs that blindly
stare out
across the Bithynian Sea. Beneath the headland, at sea
level,
a solid platform of smooth-swept rock where rollers
endlessly
break and roar; at the crown of the headland, plane
trees rising
stretching their great, dark beams to blot out the sun.
We went in.
I watched our pilot. He was restless, too silent.
I remembered the words
of Orpheus. I took Idmon aside, younger of the seers, and spoke to him. Said: ‘Idmon, look over at Tiphys,
there.
Tell me what you see.’ He turned his head away quickly,
refused
to hear. Then he said, ‘If you’ve come for hopeful news,
you’ve come
to the wrong man. There is no hopeful news—not on
that
or anything.’ He tipped his face. He was weeping.
I frowned,
baffled again, and left him. How could I have guessed
what grief
the poor man had on his mind? We had work, in any
case—
the usual repairs, the usual gathering of wood and
leaves. …
“On the landward side, the vaulting sea-naes sloped
away
to a hollow glen, a cave with overhanging trees and
rocks,
the Cavern of Hades. From its pitchdark hollows an icy
breath
comes up each morning, covering rocks, trees, ferns
with sparkling
rime that clings three hours, then melts in the sun.
We listened.
A rumble like voices, the far-off murmur of rollers
breaking
at the foot of the cliff, the whisper of leaves as the wind
from the cave
pressed by, and perhaps some further voice, like a
voice in a dream,
a memory. We stood at the mouth of the cave looking
down
at darkness, musing. Shoulder to shoulder we stood,
peering in,
Ankaios, the boy in the bearskin; old Mopsos; wise old
Argus,
artificer; huge Telamon; Orpheus; Tiphys (his breathing was short and quick); myself, all the others… . We
stood peering in,
shoulder to shoulder, each one of us, that instant, alone, thinking of his personal dead, his private death. But
Idas
widened his eyes, leered wildly, whispering, ‘Ghosts!’
He clung
to my arm, clowning even here. I shook him free.
My cousin
Akastos touched my shoulder to calm my wrath.
“Not long
thereafter, one of our number would go down through
that door
alive, in search of his love, as Theseus had gone already for a friend, when both of them were young. It’s said
that Orpheus
willingly moved past Briareos, with his hundred
whirling arms,
moved past the terrible nine-headed Hydra and the great
flame-breathing
dragon, encountered the colossal giant Tityus, whose great, black, bloated body sprawled across nine
full acres,
and came to the midnight palace of Lord Dionysos
himself,
prince of terror, bull-god, huntsman whom nothing
escapes.
Majestically then, without words, a mere nod, old
Kadmos the Dark
granted what he asked, but after the nod set this
condition:
The harper must lead the way, and Euridike follow—
a woodnymph,
gentlest, most timid of all creatures, a heart more
quickly alarmed
than a deer’s (not two men living have ever seen her
kind:
they vanish in a splinter of light at the sound of a
footfall). She must follow,
and the harper never look back. (How like the gods,
I thought,
when I learned of it, to end his pains with a joke.)
But he agreed.
No choice, of course. Began his slow way back through
the dimness,
stepping past pits where blue-scaled snakes rolled
coil on coil,
their hatchet heads hovering, floating, the whole dark
trogle alive
with rattling and hissing and the seething of the
sulphurous pits. He listened,
harping the guardian serpents to sleep—the horned
cerastes,
the basilisk with its lethal eyes—and he heard her step, timid, behind him, and so, chest pounding, continued.
Moved past
terrors to make a man sick—much less a nymph,
coming after him,
alone. And still he gazed forward. Imagine it! Shrieks,
screams, cackles,
flashes of light, sudden forms, quick wings, sharp hisses
of air,
bright skulls (Was that my Euridike’s scream?) …
How the gods must have howled,
rolled in the dirt on their bellies. —However, he’d agreed, one capable of death, therefore of dignity, and so, solemn in the Funhouse (behind him the
beautiful woodnymph,
white arms reaching, yellow hair streaming in the
cavern’s wind,
eyes like a fawn’s), he moves past grisly shapes,
indecent
allegories—Grief, Avenging Care, and (look!) there’s Pale Disease, the back of his hand to his forehead
(woe!),
and lo, there’s Melancholy Age, his hand on his pecker,
shrunk
to a stick. Step wider, Orpheus! That’s Hunger there! Snaps like a dog! And by him, Fear, trembling, pressed
close
to Pain and Poverty and Death! So past them all they
moved,
those lovers, and he saw the first faint light of day.
They’d made it!
No more horrors, not even a spider, a hornèd ant between where he stood and the green-edged light of
freedom! He turned.
She ran toward him … and vanished. He stared in grief
and rage
and then, with a groan, remembered. And so he left the
; Funhouse,
walked out into the light. He died soon after, a wreck. Go there now and you’ll see two shades together, alone on a flat rock ledge, holding hands. There are sounds
of dripping springs,
faint moans farther in, the whisper of spiders walking.
“A tale
most spiritual, most moving. And yet I’ll tell you the
truth:
He wouldn’t have done it at forty, or even at thirty.
He’d have wept
and ordered a monument for her, or started a fund.
Shall we say
hooray for youth, inexperience? Shall we grieve our
loss,
splendor in the grass, mourn that we’ve passed
twenty-three? I’ve seen
small boys tease snakes, dive into torrents, eat poison, planning to survive. The innocent are fools, and the wise are cowards. Between those
two grim lots
we construct, out of paper and false red hair, our
dignity.
“Never mind. We stood by the cave, looking in. Old
Mopsos said:
‘Shade you’d care to converse with, lord of the
Argonauts?’
He was smiling, food in his beard. I shook my head.
He turned
to Tiphys, and his smile was wicked now. ‘Maybe you
then, Tiphys!
Something tells me you’re eager to see inside.’ But
Idmon,
younger of the seers, broke in. ‘Old witch, enough of
this!’
His voice cracked. He was enraged. Bright tears
splashed down his cheeks.
His fists were clenched, and if Telamon hadn’t reached
out and restrained him—
he and the boy, Ankaios—we might have lost Mopsos
right then.
I spoke up quickly: ‘We’ve wood to gather.’ We turned
away.
And so, at that Cape, we passed six days. Unprofitably.
“We left two graves on the island. We saw the first
night that Tiphys
was not himself—irritable, testy, unable to keep warm though sweat stood out on his forehead. From old King
Lykos’ city,
nearby, we called physicians. They came—great fat old
mules.
With their fingertips they opened the sick man’s eyes,
peeked in
and solemnly shook their heads. ‘Here’s a dying man,’
they said.
We watched with him, praying to Apollo, god of healing.
But Idmon,
younger of the seers, refused to come close. He knew
that his time
had come, and he meant to stay far from the thing, give
fate the slip.
He would not walk in the woods with us, nor go where
there might be
vipers, spiders, bees. He went out to a wide, low field and set up an altar to Apollo and, wailing, threw
himself over it,
moaning, pleading for mercy; his face and chest were
bathed
in tears. Not all his prophetic lore, not all his prayers could save him. By a reedy stream at the edge of the
water-meadow
there lay a white-tusked boar—he was big as an ox—
cooling
his huge belly and his bristly flanks in the mud. He lived alone, too old for sows; an isolate. There young Idmon went, cutting reeds for his altar fire. The boar rose up with a jerk, a grunt of annoyance; with one quick,
casual tusk,
opened the young seer’s thigh. He fell to the ground,
shrieking.
Those who were nearest him rushed to his aid. Too late,
of course.
The boar had opened his belly now, from the bowels to
the chest.
Peleus let fly his javelin as the boar retreated; he turned, charged again. And now crazy Idas wounded
him,
and unsatisfied when the boar went down on his knees,
impaled,
Idas threw himself over him, screaming like a boar
himself,
seized the boar by the knife-sharp tusks and twisted till
he broke
its neck. Moaning, they carried Idmon to the ship, and
there,
in Idas’ arms, he died. Idas raged, beat the planks with
his fists.
He didn’t remember then that he’d wanted to kill poor
Idmon
once. We dug the grave. Where Tiphys lay, the
physicians
talked. One spoke of a curious case. He sat in the
corner,
fingers interlaced on his belt, his eyes half shut. He said, droning, blinking his red-webbed eyes, familiar with
death:
‘… a case of decay of the extremities. On the hands the tipjoints and in part even the second joints of the fingers were wanting, having rotted off, and the remaining stumps of the fingers were much swollen and in part nearly ready to fall off. The right-hand knuckle joint of the youngest child’s forefinger was already rotting away, and the feet of the two older brothers were in still a more horrible state. They were mere shapeless masses surcharged with foreign matter, with several deep, consuming sores going down to the bone and discharging bloody, putrid water. The children’s arms and legs had lost all sense of feeling below the elbows and knees. Some fellow before me, in order to ascertain the insensibility of the members, had pierced one boy through the hand up the arm with a long needle to a point where pain was felt, which occurred at the elbow. The patients’ exhalations were positively unbearable, the true odor of putrescence. The digestion was utterly prostrated.’
The other was more metaphysical. He smoothed his
beard,
pacing, occasionally rolling an eye toward Tiphys. His
heavy
robe trailed on the planking, occasionally snagged. He
said:
‘… deal of nonsense been spoken about death, if you want my professional opinion. For instance, “Dying is the only thing no one can do for me.” Grotesque banality! If to die is to die in order to achieve some end—to inspire, to bear witness, for the country, or some such, then anyone at all can die in my place—as In the song in which lots are drawn to see who’s to be eaten. There is no personalizing virtue, so to speak, which is peculiar to my death. Or again, they say, “Death is the resolved chord which ends the melody.” Sentimental tripe! Hogwash! An end of a melody, in order to confer its meaning on the melody, must emanate from the melody itself, as any fool should be able to recognize. The perpetual appearance of the element of Chance at the heart of each of a given man’s projects cannot be apprehended as that man’s possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of all his possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of his possibilities. Death is the end, the putrification, of freedom.’
So they spoke, waiting out the night, doing all they
could for us.
However, for all their wisdom, Tiphys died. We dug a grave, a pit by Idmon’s, one more gap in the flow of Space. I had strange dreams that night. I dreamed
I stood
in a silent, twilit land where all was ruled, where there
were
pyramids and pillars and porches, colonnades and
domes;
and I entered the gates and approached. At the center
of the city I found
a great square, with obelisks that quadrasected the square; between the central two stood a stone crypt, the grave, I thought, of a person of some importance.
But as
I stepped more near, I knew it was no mere mortal’s
grave.
The door swung open. In the darkness within I saw the
corpse—
monstrous, luminous—of a snake. I forget the rest.
/>
Orpheus
whispered something, old Argus crooked his finger at
me.
I screamed, I remember, and woke with my head in
my cousin Akastos’
scrawny arms. I drew away in anger. No reason.
“We slaughtered sheep, our due to the dead; and
Argus built
a barrow over their graves. And after all this was done, and no one among us could think of a further rite,
we found
our heaviness more than before. All the Argonauts cast
themselves down
by the sea and lay like figures hacked out of stone.
I lacked
the heart to move them, and Orpheus gave me no help,
prepared
to let all the crowd of them rot for his artist’s
self-righteousness,
his pleasure in seeing the cool politician helpless.
They refused
to eat—no spirit left. So they lay for days, staring, and I, their captain, with them, awash in Time and
the doctors’
words: the element of chance. Decay of the extremities.
12
“Ankaios, child in a bearskin, leaned on the steering oar, all smiles, hell-driving his cargo of half-dead Argonauts. They knew no more than I. It seemed some god
possessed him,
pricked him to whimsy. He’d thrown us aboard, pushed
the Argo out,
climbed on, drawn down the sail to the wind. He came
from a line
of sailing people. Watched his father, his grandfather,learned their tricks. If the boy lacked judgment—
teasing the rocks,
tempting the wind, the waves—we were none the
worse for it.
He believed himself indestructible, great Zeus his friend, as if they’d made some pact between them—and maybe
they had,
that moment: a blast from the god’s nostrils, and the
Argo’s sails
were filled, and all our enslaving griefs devoured like
stubble:
We were moving again; caught in the mill of the
universe—youth
and age, wisdom and stupidity, sorrow and joy—the
ancient
balances, wheels of the age-old meaningless grinding.
Time
washed over us in waves. Say it was a dream. Behind our stern a fleet assembled, black ships taller than
mountains,
sailless, laboring north as if in their flagship’s wake. We turned to each other, questioning, baffled to discover
that here
we were, on the move again, coming more awake,