Jason and Medeia (25 page)

There are shadows

more than we dream, in the ancient cave of the

mind—dark gods,

conflicting absolutes, timeless and co-existent, who

battle

like atoms seething in a cauldron, each against all, to

assert

their raucous finales. Gods illogical as sharks. We roof their desperate work with the limestone and earth of

reason, but the roof

has cracks: as seepages, springs, dark meres push

through earth's crust,

those old, mad gods burst through the mind's thick

floor, mysterious

nightmares, twitches, accidents perverting our gentlest

acts.

I've made my peace with them.” I saw that events had

made him

wise. I said: “Perhaps the old man was not your father, merely another of reality's tricks.” He smiled. “Perhaps. I've heard much stranger things. I've learned that the

primary law

of Time and Space is that nothing is merely what it is.

The seed

of the flower harbors the poison of the flower. I've

watched old lions

pause, befuddled by warring instincts, surrounded by

huntsmen.

I've watched my own soul—strange drives forcing me

higher and higher

to goals I can barely discern, and one of them is

beauty of mind,

true majesty; and one of them is death. I am, I've found a rhythm, merely: a summer and winter of creation

and guilt.

I'm the phoenix; the world. Thanatos and Eros in

all-out war,

the chariot drawn by sphinxes, one of them black,

one white:

one pulls toward joy, the other toward total eclipse of

pain.

With all that, too, I've made my peace. I've fallen out

of Time.

I stumble, a blind man guided by a stick. After all

this—sick,

meaningless, old—I've lost my reason at last: gone

sane.”

I said nothing, humbled by the wisdom Oidipus had

won—and not by

gift: by violence and grief. I could have expanded

what he knew.

I did for others. But I bowed, retired in silence. I have

said

to kings that their hope is ridiculous—the hope that

someday

kingdoms, heroes, philosophers, laws, may end forever the natural state—the jungle of the gods in all-out

war—

the secret whispers of the buried man, the violence

of seas,

benthal stirrings of the blind, pythonic corpse of

Atlantis,

the earth in upheaval, thundershouts, whirlwinds, foxes

snapping

at the rooster's heels, or the silent victories of termites,

spiders,

ants. I have said to other men that the natural state is final. The forces that crack the efficient crust of mind crack nations: no hunger, no evil wish to seduce or kill is lost in the sky god's brain. This darkling plain we flee toward love is the darkling plain toward which we flee.

But why

say all these things to him? I left him groping,

stumbling

stone to stone, as we all move stone to stone, each step catching the balance from the last, or failing to catch

it, tumbling us

humbly home to the dust. Don't ask of a man like

Oidipus

programs, plans for improvement, praise of nobility.

(What are,

to him, great deeds of heroism? A matter of glands, nerves, old patterns of reaction: —a slight deficiency of iodine in the thyroid [I speak things long-forgotten], a sadistic aunt, a bump on the back of the head, and

the hero's

a coward.) Every tragedy is fragmentary, a cut of Time in the cosmic whole, the veil without

which

nothing. A man's inability to flee his father's guilt, his city's, his god's. A man's coming to grips with his

own

unalterable road to death. Don't look to the gods for help in that. For the purpose you ask of them, they were

never there.

Earthquakes, fires, fathers, floods make no distinctions: the good survive and suffer, discover their truths and

die,

like the wicked. Indeed, if anyone has the advantage,

it seems

the violent, crafty, unprincipled, who seize earth's goods while the pious stretch out their arms in prayer, and

leave empty-handed.

I could tell you, Argonauts … Dark, unfeeling,

unloving powers

determine our human destiny. The splendid rewards, the ghastly punishments your priests are forever

preaching of,

have no real home but the shores of their violent brains.

Learn all

your poisons! There's man's peace!' The old seer smiled

and sighed,

gentle as a kindly grandmother. The firelight flickered soft on his forehead and cheeks as he leaned toward

it, stretching

his hands to it. We studied him, polite.

“At last I said:

Phineus, these are strange words of yours. You tell us

tales

of doom, inescapable senselessness, yet all the while you smile, stretching your hands to the comfort of the

fire.'

   “ ‘That's true;

no doubt it's a trifle absurd.' But he nodded, smiling on. ‘I was sick to the heart, fighting reality tooth and nail, staggering, striking—and, behold!, you've made me well.

My mind

made monsters up, and all the self-understanding in

the world

could no more turn them back than weir down history.' He paused; then, abruptly, ‘I must muse no more on

that.' He turned

his head, listening to the darkness in the room behind.

We began

to smell something. His face went pale. And then, once

more,

he smiled, remembered our presence, remembered the

fire. He said:

‘Life is sweet, Argonauts! Behold us, each of us

drinking down

his own unique sweet poison! May each see the bottom

of the cup!

As for myself, I can say this much with good assurance:

I will not

last much longer, now that the Harpies have left me.

The balance

is gone. Death's not far hence, the death I carry within

me.

One grants one's limits at last—one's special strength.

One sinks

and drowns there, tranquil, no more at war with the

universe,

and therefore dying, like poison sumac become too

much

itself, unstriving, released at last into anorexy. —No, no! No alarm, dear friends! No distress! It was

a great service!

There is no greater joy, no greater peace, my friends, than dying one's own inherent death, no other. The

truth!'

He paused, looked back at the darkness again with his

blind eyes.

He smiled. His smile came forward like a spear. ‘I will

tell you more:

You ask me: How can you smile, reach out to the

warmth, knowing all

you know? Let me tell you another thing about Oidipus. He knows where he is—where humanity is: in the tragic

moment,

locked in the skull of the sky: the eternal, intemporal

moment

which lasts to the last pale flash of the world. There

tragic man,

alone, doomed to be misunderstood by slumbering

minds,

exposed to the idiot anger of hidden and absent forces, nevertheless stands balanced. In his very loneliness, his meaningless pain, he finds the few last values his

soul

can still maintain, drive home, construct his grandeur by: the absolute and rigorous nature of its own awareness, its ethical demands, its futile quest for justice, absolute truth—dead-set refusal to accept some compromise, choose some sugared illusion!' His face was radiant. He wrung his hands; his voice was unsteady. He was

deeply moved.

What could I say? It was not for me to pose the

question.

We were guests. He might be of use to us. I was glad,

however,

when Idas asked it. Sweat drops glistened on his ebony

forehead

like firelit jewels.

“ ‘Why?—Why soul? Why values? Why greatness?

Why not “Not love: just fuck”?'

“Old Phineus turned his face,

with a startled look, toward Idas. ‘I will tell you more,'

he said.

   “ ‘We should sleep,” I broke in. ‘It's a long trip, and

dawn near at hand.'

   “The stink in the room was suddenly thick as a

dragon's stench.

   “All that day, far into the next night, Phineus talked. I rose, we all did, tiptoed out. By the following morning the stink was more than we could bear. There was

some dark meaning in it.

No matter. Aietes' city was still a long way north, and that was where we were aimed. We'd gotten used

to it,

rowing, at one with the cosmos, as if we'd emerged

from something.

So old comedies end, the universe and man at one. Incorporation, purgation, harmony restored. Well, it wasn't exactly like that. We had no complaints,

rowing

hard against an eastern wind. Some famous old tale …

Never mind.

Exhaustion was the name of the game.

‘Then came the stranger. I dreamed

(it was no mere dream) a terror beyond all the

wildest fears

of man. I dreamed Death came to me and smiled, and

said:

Fool, you are caught in an old, irrelevant tale. I will

speak

strange words to you, a language you won't understand.

When you do,

too late! Such is my wile. I will tell you of horror beyond belief; you won't believe, and so it will come. That is my trick. I will tell you:
Fool, you are caught in

irrelevant forms:

existence as comedy, tragedy, epic. The heart divided, the Old Physician who cures the world by his ambles pie; the magician cook (Hamburger Mary), “Eternal

Verities,”

the world as the word of the Ausländer.
Those are the

web I'll

kill you by. And neither will you believe my power, or if you believe, imagine it. When I speak of death, you will think of your own; poor limited beast. What

man can't face

his paltry private death? The words are, first:
Trust not to seers who conceive no higher force than Zeus.
And

next:

Beware the interstices. There lies thy wreck. Remember!'
I sat up, trembling in the dark, still ship; I cried out,

‘Wait!

Who are you?' And then all at once the shore was sick

with light:

there were cities like rotten carcases black with

children dead;

there were women, befouled, deformed by mysterious

burns; and the burnt ground

glowed, a deadly green. ‘My name is Never,' he said. ‘My name is: It Cannot Be. My name is Soon.' I saw his eyes and cried out. Then I was alone. It was

dark.

I racked my wits for the meaning. Old Mopsos had

theories. Said:

‘You've listened too much to old Phineus, Jason, with

all his talk

of dark, opposing forces—Love and Death. You've

conceived

the final war, the ultimate goal of humanity.' Then it isn't true?' I asked. He sighed. ‘Who knows?

Who cares?

Don't think about it. It's millennia off. The dream's mere

chaff.'

I wasn't convinced. I could change the outcome. Why

send, otherwise,

the terrible vision to me? He smiled when I asked him

that.

‘Write it down that truth is whatever proves necessary. Write down the dream as a dream. You created your

goblin, Jason,

fashioned him out of your own free-floating guilt and

the babble

of Phineus. Go back to sleep, take a friend's advice.

—Go to sleep

and don't give your fears more rope.' He turned away.

I gazed

through darkness, listening. All still well; no cause for

alarm;

nothing afoot but the wind, as usual—endlessly walking, darkening into the void … Then, far away, a flash, a sun, and the shock of it sent out astounding, sky-high

waves,

and as the first approached our ship I broke into a

sweat; but then

the great wave struck, moved past, and nothing had

happened. Illusion!

I got up, looked in at the darkness of water, and calmed

myself.

All well. Nothing afoot. —And yet I was sure, again, the vision was no mere dream. I stood at the start of

something,

in some way I hadn't yet learned; and I might yet

change its course.

In my mind I saw myself clambering over the side,

slipping down,

soundlessly sinking in the water. I dreamed I'd done it.

Peace…

   “Make a note. The dark of the buried gods has suicide

in it,

black form seeking to crack the efficient crust. I would

not

crack. I lay down again and, this time, nothing.

Darkness.

And so sailed on, putting the Bithynian coast behind

us.

Self-destruction was the name of the game. I wasn't

playing.

We sailed on, sliding northward, the
Argo
silent in the

night.

11

“I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was bored, simply. As you've seen in everything I've said, I was an ambitious young man—a born leader, I wanted to believe—and fiercely impatient. Think how it must have been with me, hour after hour, mile after mile, river after river. I wanted that fleece closed in my fist, Pelias praising me, the people all wildly shouting ‘Hats off!' Perhaps more. No doubt of it. A small, dull kingdom, mere farming country … I had glories more vast in the back of my mind than Pelias' kingdom, my fever's rickety stepping stone. Yet all I burned for, all my wolf-heart hungered for, was outrageously far away. No wonder if at Lemnos I nearly gave up on it. Blind from a vision that even at the time was too bright to get a good picture of, I must slog on now through laborious skirmishes with barbaric fools, wearily manipulate my Argonauts (men big as mountains, worrisome as gnats), moil on north, outfox old Aietes, outfox his snake … I've seen shepherds at home sit all day long on a single rock, staring out at hillsides, wide green valleys. Well enough for them! As for me, I wanted a ship that would outrace an arrow, fighters beyond imagination. I wanted the unspeakable. I was hardly aware of all this, of course. But I knew well enough that the hours dragged and the adventures were less in the living than I would make them in the telling, later. (If I were a mute, like Polydeukes, I too would abandon the night to Orpheus' lyre.) I lost men, lost time, and in secret I shook my fists at the gods tormenting me. Whatever my strength, compared to the strength of Herakles, whatever my craft compared to that of old Argus or Orpheus, I was a superman of sorts: I could not settle for the reasonable. The Good, pale as mist, would be that which even I would find suitable to my dignity, satisfying food for my sky-consuming lust. The fleece, needless to say, would not suffice. The risk—the clear and present danger— was that nothing would suffice.