Jason and Medeia (28 page)

The other was more metaphysical. He smoothed his

beard,

pacing, occasionally rolling an eye toward Tiphys. His

heavy

robe trailed on the planking, occasionally snagged. He

said:

‘… deal of nonsense been spoken about death, if you want my professional opinion. For instance, “Dying is the only thing no one can do
for
me.” Grotesque banality! If to die is to die in order to achieve some end—to inspire, to bear witness, for the country, or some such, then
anyone at all
can die in my place—as In the song in which lots are drawn to see who's to be eaten. There is no personalizing virtue, so to speak, which is peculiar to
my
death. Or again, they say, “Death is the resolved chord which ends the melody.” Sentimental tripe! Hogwash! An end of a melody, in order to confer its meaning on the melody, must emanate from the melody itself, as any fool should be able to recognize. The perpetual appearance of the element of Chance at the heart of each of a given man's projects cannot be apprehended as that man's possibility but, on the contrary, as the nihilation of
all
his possibilities, a nihilation which itself is no longer a part of his possibilities. Death is the end, the putrification, of freedom.'

So they spoke, waiting out the night, doing all they

could for us.

However, for all their wisdom, Tiphys died. We dug a grave, a pit by Idmon's, one more gap in the flow of Space. I had strange dreams that night. I dreamed

I stood

in a silent, twilit land where all was ruled, where there

were

pyramids and pillars and porches, colonnades and

domes;

and I entered the gates and approached. At the center

of the city I found

a great square, with obelisks that quadrasected the square; between the central two stood a stone crypt, the grave, I thought, of a person of some importance.

But as

I stepped more near, I knew it was no mere mortal's

grave.

The door swung open. In the darkness within I saw the

corpse—

monstrous, luminous—of a snake. I forget the rest.

Orpheus

whispered something, old Argus crooked his finger at

me.

I screamed, I remember, and woke with my head in

my cousin Akastos'

scrawny arms. I drew away in anger. No reason.

   “We slaughtered sheep, our due to the dead; and

Argus built

a barrow over their graves. And after all this was done, and no one among us could think of a further rite,

we found

our heaviness more than before. All the Argonauts cast

themselves down

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

fought

with Herakles in his Amazon raid. His dusky ghost rose up and signalled to the ship in his warlike panoply, moonlight gleaming on the four plates and the scarlet

crest

of his helmet. We brailed the sail. The old seer

Mopsos said

we must stay, put the ghost to rest. I was not in a

mood to debate,

still half dazed by my insight into the beast we'd

become

a part of—Mopsos an impulse, an instinct, a pressure

not to be

resisted. I gave the order. We cast our hawsers ashore, paid honor to the tomb. Libations; sheep. Sang praise

of the ghost

invisible except for his armor. And then set forth once

more

on the sea. At dawn, came round the Cape of Karambis, and all that day and on through the night we rowed

the
Argo

north along endless shores. So came to the Assyrian

coast,

and took on water, sheep, recruits—three friends of

Herakles

stranded by him long since, when he fought with the

Amazons.

They bore no grudge, as was right. We took them

aboard in haste—

the wind brooked no delay. So, that same afternoon, rounded the headland that cantled above us like a

stone sheltron

guarding the Amazons' harbor. The old men told us a

curious

story of the place. They said that once there Herakles captured the daughter of Ares, Hippolyta's younger sister Melanippa. He took her by ambush, intending to rape

her,

but Hippolyta gave him her own resplendent cestus by

way

of ransom, and when he saw her naked, that beautiful

virgin—

in later days she was Theseus' queen—the great oaf

wept,

all his virtue in his senses. The queen wouldn't lie with

him;

the man couldn't think what to do. He might have won,

then and there,

his war, but he backed away from her—fled in confusion

to the woods—

abandoning the beautiful sisters, his half-wit head full

of grandiose

booms, such as Innocence, Honor, Dignity, Virtue.

—Not so

when Theseus came. He'd seen a great deal—had walked

through Hades

for his friend, when Peirithoös was taken. He knew the

meaninglessness of things.

Brought the Amazon forces to check and might, if he

wished,

have slaughtered them all. He held back. Observed the

naked virgin

on her knees before him, in chains, surrounded by

Akhaian guards,

men in great plumes, their war gear gleaming in the

tent, and said:

‘I'll speak with her majesty alone.' They laughed. Who

wouldn't have laughed? —

but Theseus' eyes were cool. The guards withdrew. He

said:

‘Queen, don't answer in haste. I've won this dreary war, as you see by the plainest of signs. I could injure

you more, if I wished.

Chained hand and foot, you can hardly resist me. I

could teach you more

than you dream of humiliation. Yet all I've done—or

might

do yet—is nothing to the humiliation of life itself, this waste where men are abandoned to the whims of

gods. I've seen

what games they play with the dead.' And he told of

Briareos

with his hundred whirling arms, a beast of prey more

terrible,

more ludicrous, to divine minds, than the hurricane that makes men scurry like squealing rats to shelter,

trembling,

whimpering obscenely, clinging to one another's bodies

until,

unspeakably, their fear collapses to lust, and under the screaming winds they couple like dogs in a crate. He

told

of the Hydra, from whom the unwoundable dead fly

shrieking, bug-eyed,

chased by the thunderous rumble of the laughing gods.

Told then

of Tityus, whose obscene weight mocks finitude, turns heroes' powerful thighs to ridiculous sticks, and

told

of pitch-black Prince Dionysos and his soundless dance.

‘All this,'

said Theseus, ‘I have seen. I can abandon you to death and all its foolishness, and follow, in time, as all men must; or we can forestall that mockery for now. Choose what you will. Either way, I grant