sang:
the warmth of a family well provided for, a wife grown old without a slip from perfect faithfulness. I have heard it said by wise old men that ‘history’ is all you have left in the end, the fond memories shared by a man and a woman who’ve seen it all, survived it all, together. There is no nobler reward, they say. Perhaps. But that was not the unthinkable hope they lured
us with.
They sang of known and possible evils driven beyond all bounds, slammed home like crowbars driven to the
neck in great, thick
abdomens of rock. Oh, not like sailors’ whores,
who whisper with girlish lust, the nebulous verge of love, what wickedness they mean. (She arches her back
to you,
her breasts grow firm, packed tight with passion, as if
they’re filled
to the bursting point with milk. She seizes your mouth
with hers;
plunged in, you can’t break free, clamped in by a fist,
her legs
closed on your hips like jaws.) All that, for the moment
at least,
is love. They did not sing to us of love. They sang … terrible things. No generous seaport prostitute, whispering, screaming — whatever her tricks — could
satisfy
our murderous, suicidal lust from that day on. Nothing (by no means islands forever green) could quench,
burn out
our need beyond that day. It was pain and death they
sang:
terrible rages of sex beyond the orgasm,
blindness, drunkenness bursting the walls of
unconsciousness,
the murderer’s sword plunged in beyond the life-lock,
down
to life renewed, midnight black, imperishable.
Such was the song, cold-blooded lure, of those
cunning sly-
eyed bitches. Orpheus’ fingers jangled the lyre,
but couldn’t
blot from our minds their music’s deadly mysticism.
One of our number, Butes the spearman, went
overboard,—
snapped steel chains and plunged. We’d have followed.
him down, if we could.
We couldn’t. We strained at our shackles and raged; we
frothed at the mouth;
the Argo sailed on, and Orpheus played, immune to
our wrath
as he was to their song. He took no stock in absolute
evil,
or good either. (The god of poets, the Keltai say, is a sow, rooting, rutting with boars, able to converse with wind.)
Orpheus sighed, endured by his harp-playing.
Which was well enough for him, but what of the rest
of us?
“We sailed on, sorrowing, Medeia blaked with a fury
that had
no possible vent: fury at the father she loved; at herself; at me for the murder of the brother whose murder she’d
engineered …
And so we came to the terror of Skylla and Kharybdis.
On one side,
sheer rock cliff, on the other the seething, roaring
maelstrom.
We looked, Ankaios sweating. I scarcely cared. My soul was thick with the torpor of those who have listened to
the sirens and failed
to act. Was I half asleep? On the left, rock scarp as steep as the walls of a graveyard trench, and as certain to
grind our dust:
call it death by rectitude. On the right side, turning like an old constrictor, a woman enraged, — death by
violence,
bottomless shame; between — barely possible — death by
indifference,
soul-suffocation in the corpse that stinks, plods on.
Ankaios
wept, abandoned the steering oar. I called on Asterios, son of an endless line of merchants. He seized the oar, tongue between his teeth, his brown eyes luminous. I laughed — God knows, without joy. And clumsy as he
was with the oar,
he knew the line and kept it, who cared for nothing in
life
but the clinquant possible of profit tomorrow. The heavy
ship
was as easy for him as a lighter by the quay.
Short-sighted fool,
valueless, podging, unfit for the company of thinking
men,
I give you this: You kept possibilities open, so that, plodding, stinking, we may yet have time to reconsider—
perhaps
oppose you, perhaps turn tradesman and find
amusement in it.
“We came to the wandering rocks. The sky was
choked. Hot lava
shot up on every side through spicious, roiling steams. Great islands loomed around us, rowelled like brustling
whales,
sank once more into darkness. The sails were like ruby,
like blood.
By the light of explosions from the hills surrounding
we chose our channels
— there, and there — the options shot up like partridges, wide roads, keyholes of daylight, all of them fair, all fine in the instant’s vision of the possible. But the black
sky closed
like a curtain, and the steam came swirling again, and
the channel was gone,
another one gaping to the right of us, sucking us in—
in the distance,
sky. Yes, this then! Good! — But a belch of flame,
cascade
of boulders, and the sea was revised once more. Old
Argus watched it,
fascinated, too preoccupied for fear. Again and again
he glanced
from the tumbling seas to the sky. He shouted, swinging his eyes to me, shaggy beard splashed red by
the sea,
‘It’s all Time-Space in a duckpond, Jason! See how it
moves
by law, yet unpredictably. So the galaxies turn
in their aeviternal spans, some bodies wheeling to the
left,
some wheeling right, some rolling head over heels like
bears,
a few — like the overintellectual moon — staring, as if with a mad idée fixe, at a single point. It’s food for thought, this sea. It teaches of terrible collisions,
the spin
of planets battered to chaos by a dark star drifting free, the plosion of a sun in the northwest corner of the
universe,
flash of a comet, collapse of a cloud of dust. Like
colliding
balls, the planets scatter in dismay, then quickly settle on a new course, new synchysis, and feel secure.
Then CRASH!
an instant later (as the ends of the universe read their
clock)
a new, more terrible collision — new cries of alarm in the
heights …
We here, who assess durabilities by clicks too brief for the mind of space to vision except by number theory, we watch the sun sail west, and we nod, approve the
stupendous
rightness of things, “Choose so-and-so,” say we, “and
we bring on
such-and-such.” We frigate the hills with purpose: “This
oak,
meaningless before, I delimit as wood for my cart.”
We move,
secure, never glancing down, on precarious stepping
stones,
Mondays and Tuesdays a-shiver in the torrent of Time.’
He laughed,
indifferent to grim implications. He meant no harm
in life,
Argus, observer of mechanics, creator of machines.
A man
who hated war so long as he thought as a citizen, but fashioned the mightiest engine of war yet built,
with the help
of the goddess. A man who lived by order, fashioned
by his grasp
of predictables, but observed, cold-blooded, and laughed,
that order
was illusion, a trick of timing. Incredible being!