John Powys: Atlantis

“No, I can’t understand it, Kleta old friend. Do you remember how the other day you asked me why I didn’t go to the Agora over there and make a public oration calling upon the people to collect all the sail-cloth they could get hold of and bring it to me? There are thousands and thousands of pieces of it woven into the huts and hovels of slaves in our city and hanging idly in the chambers of our merchants, when they ought to be filled with all the winds of heaven and carrying good well-benched ships over all the waves of the ocean.”

He picked up his torch and looked about him. The torch had begun to burn badly and its smoke had an unnatural smell because of the moisture rising from the wet ground into which it had been thrust; but as he brandished it in the air to quicken its flame this badly-smelling cloud of smoke drifted away towards the Temple of Athene.

The old king followed its departure with his eyes while his head remained turned to the West. Slowly that small cloud of evil-smelling vapour floated away over the Temple towards the Agora. With his imagination conjuring up his speech to the assembled people of Ithaca he followed that small cloud to the low walls of their compact little city and to the amphitheatre outside those walls, with its stone seats and wide stone platform, where the citizens of the whole island, if once gathered together in a popular “ekklesia”, could be conveniently harangued.

Then turning once more to the troubled old Dryad who had taken to heart so bitterly this invasion of the Naiads’ cave by the monster-wife of the oldest of the “Old Men of the Sea” he saw that she was weeping silently with her forehead pressed against her knuckles and her hands clinging tightly to that uneven edge of rottenness, so frayed and so fragile and so soft and crumbling that it looked as if it had ceased to be a substance and had become a momentarily objectified taste or smell, such as, together with the aged transparency sobbing in its midst, might vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.

As the king turned his back upon her and moved off towards the stair-way to his chamber he had the feeling that the bowed old creature were nibbling her own flesh as if it were a bread of phantom-sorrow made of the crumbling wood of an ancestral oak.

Back in his room, however, Odysseus behaved exactly as he had declared to his old friend he would behave. He loosened his belt, wrapt his blanket more evenly round him, and lay down on his bed, shutting his eyes so as to replace any sort of steady staring into darkness by an absolute blindness to the whole phenomena of the visible world.

Thus he remained, and no one but himself could possibly have told whether he were awake or asleep, till dawn was more than well advanced. In fact the sun was high above the horizon, and all the paths and vineyards and gardens and woods and desert-places were illuminated by full daylight when he rose from his bed and shouted for his ancient nurse.

It was indeed in magnificently pleasant sunshine that Odysseus found his circular bath of polished stone awaiting his appearance. Eurycleia had already seen to it that no fewer than eight great water-jugs of carefully varied temperature were arranged in order round that hollow circumference of polished stone.

From the surface of some of these jars the steam rose in clouds into the air, while, in other cases, ripples from newly dissolved circles of vanishing bubbles, all tinged with rainbow colours, proved from what clear fresh springs they had come. Here Eurycleia awaited him herself, and as, with the help of Leipephile and Arsinöe, the old nurse poured in alternation the cold and lukewarm and hot streams over him as he crouched and bent and straightened himself and moved this way and that, under the varying temperatures of those jars of water, his thoughts took shape and formulated themselves into a resolution to quicken to a much more rapid speed his preparations for hoisting sail once more and setting out to explore the world again.

“Yes,” he thought, “I’ve given this pleasant routine of the beautiful seasons repeating themselves, and the beautiful days following the beautiful nights in beautiful succession as Themis the great Goddess of order under the will of Zeus decrees, its full opportunity to soothe this itching, fretting, chafing, gnawing, fermenting, biting, seething ache in my wicked old midriff!

“But this happy easy lazy time has not done it! The marrow in my bones howls and growls for the random odds of the old great Circus! I must, I must taste again the salty taste of real plotting and real planning and real deceiving and real achieving!”

In his massive, caustic, long-sighted, super-human and yet subhuman way Odysseus had acquired the power of what might be called a “postponement of thought” while a series of instinctive impulses directed his actions. This power which would certainly appear an odd one to most clever people, had not so much been forced upon him by the particular nature of his experiences as by the prevailing mood of his reactions to these experiences.

This power was not essentially a philosophical one, nor was it even a predominantly intellectual one. What it really might be called was the controlled release of that deep intimate rush of life which at special moments takes possession of us all with what feels as if it were a wild prophetic force under the direction of a calm calculating will.

While he gave himself up, therefore, to all the small physical movements which the process of being bathed by a commanding and rather cantankerous old woman, a beautiful, secretive, middle-aged woman, and a lovely but incredibly simple young woman, his whole nature was gathering itself together, not so much to follow a thought-out plan of action as to have his nervous, electric, magnetic soul kept, in intensely conscious reserve, just under his physical skin and ready for any event, a soul that was not necessarily composed of a single compact consciousness but retained the power of dividing itself at will.

It was indeed a very curious power that his soul possessed, of splitting itself up, if need were, into an array of square-headed conscious souls that still were Odysseus “pro tem”, though they were Odysseus in multiplicity rather than Odysseus in unity!

By the time the old hero was seated on his simple throne in the great open dining-hall of the palace, to which hidden steps descended from the upper chambers, and had begun to break his fast with bowls of red wine thickened by various powdered nuts and sweetened by a particular kind of honey, while he accompanied this rich beverage, after pouring out a libation to Zeus, by devouring greedily — for this first meal of the day was a good deal later than usual — the particular portion of the backbone of a fatted hog which best pleased him, he was fairly at rest in his mind.

He knew more or less what he was going to do, and he left the details of the thing to chance and occasion. Never in the history, not only of Ithaca, but of all Hellas, had there been such a born opportunist as Odysseus was. He had always been a difficult one for women to mould to their will.

It was because her powerful personality took the line of indomitable independence that Penelope had suited him so well; and it was probably because she had brought up their only child to live his own life independently of each of them that as a mature man Telemachos was so reserved and self-centred.

On this particular day therefore the old king had already thrust clean out of his contemplated groove of action any visit to or visit from his ritual-absorbed offspring. What he had to do was to visit the Naiads’ Cave and find out if Keto the Sea-Monster had meddled in any way with the building of his ship of escape. “How queer,” he told himself as he swallowed his final bowl of enriched and thickened wine, “that I should think of my ship as a way of escape ! Escape from what? Have I acquired a hatred for an honoured, peaceful, well-regulated life? Is it now again just as it was on the Isles of Circe and Calypso where women’s love was my accursed chain?