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:
â⦠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 endâto inspire, to bear witness, for the country, or some such, then
anyone at all
can die in my placeâas 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
corpseâ
monstrous, luminousâof 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 eatâno 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.
“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 judgmentâ
teasing the rocks,
tempting the wind, the wavesâwe were none the
worse for it.
He believed himself indestructible, great Zeus his friend, as if they'd made some pact between themâand 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
universeâyouth
and age, wisdom and stupidity, sorrow and joyâthe
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
â
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). âWe'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
âhad only
its searchingness, its existence. Old Hera was in usâ
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 wereâand the black-scarped
ships behind us wereâ
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. âAnd 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, merelyâenslaved as the cords in an orator's throat, or as the Argonauts, turning in the wind of my words, were tools of my
ownâor 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.
âThe 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 ofâMopsos 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, recruitsâthree 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 hasteâ
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
virginâ
in later days she was Theseus' queenâthe 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 herâfled in confusion
to the woodsâ
abandoning the beautiful sisters, his half-wit head full
of grandiose
booms, such as Innocence, Honor, Dignity, Virtue.
âNot so
when Theseus came. He'd seen a great dealâhad 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:
âI'll speak with her majesty alone.' They laughed. Who
wouldn't have laughed? â
but Theseus' eyes were cool. The guards withdrew. He
said:
âQueen, 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 doneâor
might
do yetâis 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.
âAll this,'
said Theseus, âI 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