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,
coming more
to life, with each fresh gust. No one could explain. The
huge boy
grinned, managing the steering oar as Tiphys alone could do, or so we’d thought.
“Then up from the magic beams
of the Argo, singing at our feet, there came new tones,
a majestic
hymn, as if all the choiring trees of Athena’s grove, and all the gods, and all the fish of the sea had come
together to sing
their praise of the queen of goddesses.
Hera never sleeps!
She fills the world
with beauty, goodness, danger. At a word
from her the gods lure men to the highest
pinnacles of feeling. By her command
the wolf drags down the lamb, and the shepherd
shoots the wolf,
and the adder joyfully strikes at the shepherd’s heel
She is never spent! She moves
like light, from atom to atom, forever changing
forever
the same.
Queen Hera
consumes the land and sea with beauty
and danger. Stirs
the dragon in his lair (vermilion scaled),
awakens the timorous butterfly,
the many-hued heart of man.
She never rests:
Poseidon is her servant, the Earth-shaker,
and Artemis, huntress;
and Love and Death and Wisdom are all in her retinue.
Sparrows, hawks, bulls, deer, trees, roses—
Hera is in them!
Songbirds whistle on the eaves: Praise Hera!
Exalt her, hills and rivers!
Praise Hera!
Honor her, kingdoms!
Praise Queen Hera!
Honor her all that soars, or walks, or creeps.
Thus sang the Argo, Athena’s instrument;
and suddenly something was clear: It was not my will
resolving
the many wills, and not Orpheus’ will, but a thing more
complex.
We on the Argo were the head, limbs, trunk of a
creature, a living thing
larger than ourselves (it was Amykos’ idea), a thing
puzzling out
its nature, its swim through process. What powered its
mammoth heart
was not my will or any other man’s, but the fact that
by chance
it had stumbled into existence. Confused, diverse desires hurled the beast north to Aietes’ city: my scheme of
the fleece,
however important to all of us once, was a passing
dream,
less than a ghost of a word in the gloom of the beast’s
weird mind
(flicker of a bat, frail hint of order, some pious saw). ‘We’re after the fleece,’ the black leviathan could
remind itself,
lumbering north, old lightning in its eyes, its monster
fins
stretched wide, groping into darkness. But it wasn’t the
fleece we sought.
Nor anything else. The mind of the beast had no center
— had only
its searchingness, its existence. Old Hera was in us—
and in
the mysterious ships behind us, travelling in our wake,
still following
hungrily, booming, from another time and place. (Say it was a dream.) We were — and the black-scarped
ships behind us were—
the world according to Phineus: cavern of warring gods, the delicate crust of reason. Thanatos. Eros. And had no choice, then, but submission: submit and obey was
the beast’s
cruel law. — And if it was tyrannical law, unsubtle as
a fist,
it was freedom, too: we were children in the shelter of
the kind, mad father’s
yard. I had cracked my wits too long on why we were
driving
north, affronting all reason. It was merely the creature’s
will.
It was our business, our custom, our destiny. Too long
I’d bathed
in the torrents, streams, still pools of each novel emotion.
No more
such lunacy! Sensation, sleep! Imagination, give up your stolen chair, cold throne of the terat. I was, I saw at last, the demon’s agent, merely — enslaved as the cords in an orator’s throat, or as the Argonauts, turning in the wind of my words, were tools of my
own — or all
but Orpheus. I would overwhelm him as surely as once we struck down, not out of hate but by force of destiny, poor Kyzikos, King of the Doliones, or Amykos, famous boxer who proved inferior and therefore died, as later, Polydeukes died of his weakness, excessive humanity,
tainted
blood.
‘The ghost fleet gloomed behind us, assenting. And then
it vanished. If there was some meaning in that, we
evaded it;
blinked twice, stared fiercely ahead.
“We’d come to Kallikhorus;
we passed the tomb of Sthenelos, son of Aktor, who