Chimera (23 page)

“Those familiar with my fiction will recognize in this account several pet motifs of mine: the sibling rivalry, the hero’s na
ï
vet
é
, the accomplishment of labors by their transcension (here literal), and the final termination of all tasks by the extermination (here figurative) of the taskmaster; the Protean counselor (Polyeidus means ‘many forms’); the romantic triangle; et cetera. But it was the two central images
—
Pegasus and the Chimera
—
which appealed to me most profoundly. I envisioned a comic novella based on the myth; a companion-piece to
Perseid,
perhaps. To compose it I set aside a much larger and
more complicated project, a novel called
Letters—
It seemed anyway to have become a vast morass of plans, notes, false starts, in which I grew more mired with every attempt to extricate myself. Hopefully I turned to the lesser project, labored at it unremittingly for a full year and a half
—
alas, it, too, metamorphosed into quicksand, not before much good spiritual money had been thrown after the bad. Followed my first real affliction by the celebrated ailment Writer’s Block, a malady from which, in the hubris of my twenties and thirties, I had fancied myself immune; I examined it as one might a malignant growth, with sharp interest and dull fright. For a long time I could not understand it
—
though I did come to understand, to the heart, the lamentations of those mystics to whom Grace had been once vouchsafed and then withdrawn. To the world it is a small matter, rightly, whether any particular artist finds his powers sustained or drained from one year to the next; to the artist himself, however minor his talent, imaginative potency is as critical to the daily life of his spirit as sexual potency
—
to which, in the male at least, it is an analogue as irresistible as that of Grace, and as dangerous.

“Eventually I
did
come to understand what was ailing me, so I believe; in any case the ailment passed
—
for little better or worse from the world’s point of view, but much to my own relief
—
and I found myself composing as busily as ever. What I composed is another story, of no concern to us here; I recount this little personal episode by way of introducing the subject of this afternoon’s lecture: an altogether
impersonal
principle of literary aesthetics, the understanding of the nature of which illuminated for me my difficulty with Bellerophon’s story and, so I must presume, set me free of both the mire and the myth.

“The general principle, I believe, has no name in our ordinary critical vocabulary; I think of it as the Principle of Metaphoric Means, by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value: not only the ‘form’ of the story, the narrative viewpoint, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular genre, the mode and medium, the very process of narration
—
even the fact of the artifact itself. Let me illustrate:?”

A:
“I am.”

Q:
“Sir?”

A:
“I
am
inclined, with you, to sniff in this a certain particular seer, the full history and scope of whose treachery, however, I am still in no position to appreciate at this point in this rendition of this
Bellerophoniad.
The writer’s language is not Greek; the literary works referred to do not exist—wouldn’t I, of all people, know that
Perseid
if there were one? As for that farrago of misstatements purporting to be the story of my life, the kindest thing to be said about its first three paragraphs is that they’re fiction: the brothers are too many and miscast; my name is mishistoried (though ‘Bellerus the Killer’ is not its only meaning); my acquisition of Pegasus is mislocated as to both time and place; the Bellerophonic missive read simply ‘Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world’; et cetera,
d
and
e,
perhaps, are slightly less inaccurate, if no less incomplete, and their events are out of order. I call your attention, earnestly, to the suspension-points following the fifth paragraph: that’s where we are, have been, have languished since the first good night. There’s the sink; there’s the quag; there’s the slough of my despond. Drive me out.”

Q:
“No, sir.”

A:
“That’s a question?” The document disappointed me as much as my students’ unwillingness to follow the Pattern. We’re to the day before my fortieth birthday now, page before Page 1: this particular lecture-scroll I’d pinned great fresh hope upon; sealed with an impression of the Chimera, it was inscribed
For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life;
I’d first come across it twenty years previously, in circumstances about to be set forth at length; newlywed Philonoë had taken it to be a posthumous wedding gift from newly dead Polyeidus, who’d expired in circumstances about to be et cetera, and interpreted its legend to mean either Open at the Midpoint of My Life or Open Halfway Through Our Married Life. Either way, reckoning from the Polyeidic calendar, it meant age thirty-six—four years too late already! I’d put the thing aside many years ago; forgot it existed; then it turned up accountably in my scroll-case this morning in place of my text for this final lecture in the First-Flood series. Crushing, to find it such a mishmash! “Drive me out, sirs, as you love me; exile me from the city; make me wander far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul, et cetera, till I meet my apotheosis in some counterpart of the Axis Mundi or World Navel: in a riven grove, say, where one oak stands in a rock cleft by the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of some hill or other.” This is your best, Polyeidus?

“Here’s how it was. As I came in on the glide-path over Halicarnassus into Lycia, Pegasus swept into a sudden curve and went whinnying around what I took to be the plume of a small volcano, in ever-diminishing circles like a moth around a candle, till I feared we must disappear up our own fundaments. When we finally touched down and the world quit wheeling, I found us inside the crater itself, not active after all except for smoke issuing from one small cave; there an old beardless chap in a snakeskin coat, that’s right, was lighting papers one at a time and tossing them into the hole, where they combusted with enormous disproportion of smoke to flame. At sight of Pegasus the fellow panicked, and no wonder: willy-nilly we charged, and Peg nipped him up by the neck-nape. Better to grasp the bridle, I’d been holding Proetus’s letter in my mouth; lost it when I hollered whoa; next instant the man was gone and it was that letter in the horse’s mouth; instant after, when I snatched it from there, I found myself holding sidesaddle the same old man, himself holding the letter. ‘I’m an unsuccessful novelist,’ he muttered hastily: ‘life’s work, five-volume
roman fleuve
—goddamn
ocean,
more like it; agent won’t touch it; I’m reading it aloud to the wild animals and burning it up a page at a time. Never attracted a winged horse before; mountain lions, mostly, at this elevation; few odd goats from lower down, et cetera. Dee dee dum dee dee.’

“What Pegasus held now instead, and chewed on placidly till I took it from him, was the amulet. ‘Passing prophet hung that on me,’ Polyeidus lied; ‘said I ought to try something in the myth way, very big nowadays, three novellas in one volume, say: one about Perseus and Medusa, one about Bellerophon and the Chimera, one about—’ I squeezed him. ‘Polyeidus!’ ‘That was his name, all right,’ Polyeidus said: ‘had a daughter very high on this Bellerophon fellow, said she goes around hollering Bellerus Bellerus all day, that sort of thing. You’re Bellerophon, are you? Told me I should hang that gadget around my neck, fetch me better ideas. What do you hear from your mother?’ When he saw it was for joy I pounded him, he admitted he was Polyeidus and congratulated me on my achievement of Pegasus, which he was pleased to take for a sign that his petitions to Athene on my behalf had not been inefficacious. The fatal amulet virtually
was,
these days—it was the smell of wild mares on it, more than hippomanes, that had attracted Pegasus—and if I’d oblige him with a lift back to the Lycian capital, where he was now employed by King Iobates, he’d be happy to discard it against future impediment to navigation.

“ ‘You’ve heard nothing from Corinth, you say?’ ‘Only that Mother had you arrested. What for?’ ‘Ugly business, that,’ Polyeidus said, and pitched the amulet into the cave. The smoke diminished. ‘Poor woman’s quite out of her tree, I fear. I told her you’d be back one day to reclaim the kingdom; thought that would cheer her up? Not a bit of it! Patriarchal plot, she said: sexual imperialism, et cetera. Clapped me in the keep. I decided to turn into the vaulted cell itself so that the guards would think I’d escaped and leave the door open, whereupon I
would
escape. But something went wrong: I turned into a fierce she-monster here on this mountain, and all but ate myself alive before I could switch back. I just don’t have it any more in the three-dimensional way.’ His best explanation of the phenomenon, he went on to say as we winged off to the Lycian capital, was that Hermes, famous trickster and inventor of the alphabet, must be as well a lover of puns and practical jokes: in keeping with his recent tendency to turn into documents, Polyeidus had changed not directly into his dungeon cell but, intermediately, into a magic message spelling out that objective:
I am a chamber.
Finding himself instead a fire-breathing monster with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail, dwelling in a cave in a dormant volcano called Mount Chimera on the Lycian-Carian border, he could only infer that the god had sported with the proximity of the names
kamara/Chimera.
But being nearly lost in translation was not the end of the difficulty: so violently had Polyeidus dissociated with the monster, his resumption of human form (sans hair and twenty kilos) had left the
Chimera,
as he now called his accidental creation, intact: the first such case in the history of magical transformation, so far as he knew, and he regarded it with mixed feelings. On the other hand, foreseeing that Amisidoros, the Carian king, would attempt to exploit the beast as a new secret weapon to guard the long-disputed boundary, he was able to forewarn Iobates and establish himself in the Lycian court as a special defense-minister; on the other hand, he was obliged not only to conceal his own responsibility for Chimera’s existence, but to make periodic secret field trips to the crater to feed the beast a ream or so of specially composed tranquilizing spells, until he could devise a better way to neutralize her.

“ ‘So here we are,’ he concluded; ‘you keep my little secret, I’ll keep yours’—by which he meant, you understand, my responsibility for the death of Glaucus and my brother. ‘You’ve learned to read and write, I see?’ He indicated the letter. I confessed I had not, except for an odd half-dozen alphabetical characters. ‘Just as well,’ he said; ‘only mischief in letters—Q.E.D.! Look where the birth-certificate trick got us! I’ll deliver this for you. Any idea what’s in it?’

“I shook my head and, for shame, volunteered only that I was doing a kind of purificatory labor for King Proetus, perhaps unnecessary, but a good trial run in any case for whatever true labors lay ahead. At his suggestion we landed here in the main square of Telmissus, for maximum effect. A crowd assembled, also the court, to admire Pegasus; Polyeidus took several bows and introduced us to Iobates, describing me as a former protégé and an up-and-coming mythic hero. The King was cordial, inquired after Anteia and his granddaughters, thanked me for the letter, insisted on feasting me for nine days before opening it. He introduced me to his younger daughter, Philonoë, at age sixteen an undergraduate mythology major here at the University (though we had no department then, only a couple of course-offerings), who shyly asked me to autograph her syllabus. I drew a careful upper-case Beta, best I could do, with her curious writing tool, a lead-pointed stick Polyeidus had given her that made marks on things. A charming girl, by turns demure and bold, she sat next me at dinner; told me her father’s nine-day custom drove her buggy—she always tore into
her
mail the second it arrived; bade me describe in detail her little nieces, whom she was dying to visit; confessed an absolute passion for the study of mythology; asked me would I visit her senior seminar if she okayed it with her professor—no need to prepare anything, just rap with the kids, et cetera; pressed me particularly for anecdotes about Perseus, her favorite among contemporaries in the field.

“In the days that followed we became great friends. My intellectual superior, she nonetheless deferred to me as an example of what she called ‘the imaginative embodiment of otherwise merely intellectual conceptions, you know?’ What I saw as small embarrassments—my then illiteracy, for example—she was pleased to interpret as marks of authenticity, though she volunteered to tutor me in writing if I’d give her flying lessons. Indeed, she told me frankly that the only thing that bothered her about me, hero-wise, was my articulateness and apparent gentleness of manner: heroes, she fancied, should be rougher-edged and less ready for speech. But she soon had it reasoned out that her preconceptions in this regard were no doubt due to the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it compressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera. Besides, who could stroll the palace gardens, play catch, sing duets, and have long talks with a
mere
Golden Destroyer?

“At her coaxing, King Iobates shortened the feasting period from nine days to seven, seven to five, in case the letter contained news from Anteia. But as it was after all government business, on the fifth evening he gave it to Polyeidus, his official state-message reader (Iobates shared my limitation), to read to him. The seer opened it, paled, glanced at me sharply, pled for a moment to consider the accurate Lycian equivalents of a few Tirynish idioms, then read what amounted to a note of introduction from Proetus in my behalf:
Pray remove the bearer of these letters from the world of blood-guilt which he fancies himself to carry in consequence of his innocent role in the deaths of his father and brother; kindly permit him to do for you some heroic service, the more hazardous the better. Yrs, P.
I had been anxious that the letter might allude to my contretemps with Philonoë’s sister; at the news I smiled, thought better of Proetus, affirmed my willingness to attempt whatever Iobates wished. The company drank my health; Philonoë glowed; Polyeidus smiled, quite in command of himself now, and held a whispered conference with Iobates, who at first flushed angrily and seemed about to rise from table, then—on further whispers from the seer—composed himself and coolly requested me to rid the coast, if I would, of a band of Carian pirates lately infesting it. Perhaps I could set out immediately after dinner?