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.
“And so the nightmare voice came to me — ghostly hint that I was caught up in more than anyone knew, some grandiose ultimate agon. If the crew was caught up, to some extent, in these same weird delusions …
“However, it is also true that the place was strange, uncanny … and true (we’ve begun to learn to see) that explanation is exhaustion: The essence of life is to be found in frustrations of established order: the universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. Though also, needless to say …
“How can the mind accept such a pointless clutter
of acts,
encounters with monsters, kings, strange weather—