John Powys - Atlantis

How far gone was her pregnancy old Moros was not experienced enough in the child-bearing of ladies to have the least idea; but he saw enough for his habitual sympathy to beset him. Most tenderly he warded off the excess of wine offered the woman by the tallest of the three sons of Nemertes. All the three were attired in some exquisitely-washed white stuff that somehow gave old Moros the feeling that he was surrounded by male Sirens in the depths of the sea, who were always wanting to refill both his own and his neighbour’s wine-cup, the neighbour for whose sake, so as to keep her repeated refusals from being observed, for luckily the wine did not incommode his own stomach, he succeeded in keeping their two glasses on his side of her plate.

“For the third time!” cried Zeuks, rising to his feet and striking the black bull’s horn, rimmed with massive silver, from which he was drinking, against the golden goblet that had been so carefully chosen by Okyrhöe for Odysseus, “I call upon you all to join with me in defeating the ultimate design of this Monster, Enorches, who has dared to wrench half the life from these two celestial Horses!

“What is it I heard you say in your heart just now, great king, that you want us all to do? I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you now, and I’ll tell you once and for all!

“Yes, yes! You can look at me with that everlasting look of yours, which says to the entire universe ‘Stop this business of acceptance as if there were no such thing as choice. Come! come! Do something about it!’ That’s what your pointed beard, sticking out like the sword of a sword-fish is forever saying: ‘For the sake of all the gods in the sky do something about it!’

“But when we ordinary people want ‘to do something about it, we simply don’t know what to try to do!’ Listen, therefore, O great king, to the word of one of the humblest of your subjects, and stick your beard into me when I go wrong in what I say!

“What we all want in our hearts, men and women alike, is a peaceful and at the same time an active life. There are too many prophets and oracles too, who always tell us to crown some king, to obey some law, to follow some hero, to embrace some system, to accept some philosophy, to invade some country, to sack some city!

“Well then, O great King, well then, dear Lords and Ladies, what happens? We burn that city, we over-run that country, we change our name, our language, our manners, our dress, our habits. But what is the result? Are we any happier? Not a bit of it! Are we any richer? Not by a farthing! Are we any wiser? Ask our wives and children! Are we honester, nobler, braver, kinder, tenderer, more sympathetic, more long-suffering, more enduring, more unconquerable, more impregnable? We are not!

“And yet we have invaded Persia, sacked Ecbatana, gutted Syracuse, burnt Troy! And yet we have accepted the philosophy of Parmenides. We have offered sacrifice to the God of Israel. We have bowed our heads in the Temple of Baal. We have given our maidens to Pan and our boys to Moloch. And are we the happier for it? Are we the wiser for it?

“Not a jot! Our eyes still weep salt tears! Our slaves still sweat blood! Our women still bear abortions! Our grapes are still sour! Our hives still lack honey! Our figs still lack sweetness! Our fountains are still slow to run, and our streams still sink in the same sand and dry in the same desert!

“What therefore is the word for the unenlightened and the sign for the uninspired? What is the clue for the lost in the wilderness; and the secret of recovery for the heavy of heart? Is it what Enorches calls the Mystery of Love that will save us? Is it the holy ecstasy of Dionysos that will set us straight in the path of happiness?

“Never on your life, great King! Never on your lives, my lovely companions! The only thing that can set us on the path of happiness is to create carvers of joy in our own secret selves and moulders of delight in our own hidden souls. And we must do it by the countering and confounding of the most extreme contradictions.

“We can’t do it, I tell you, by trying to mingle these opposites in confused conglomeration! No! we must keep our lives in natural advances and retreats, in ebb and flow, in up and down, in pull devil and pull tailor, till the end of the only round we know in this crazy planetary game! Shall I tell you O great King, shall I tell you most sweet and beautiful ladies, what, in spite of this Priest of Orpheus with his Eros and his Dionysus, is the real secret of the whole of life, of the whole of experience, of the whole of existence, of the whole of everything?

“I mean of course the secret of it for each and every one of us? I mean the ultimate word that eventually, when we have all been dead for a hundred-thousand years, will still describe the idea, the feeling, the emotion for every single consciousness possessed of what we call life? I have decided to announce to you tonight a word of my own which at least expresses one aspect of the complicated meaning that some magic word must eventually possess, when in a hundred-thousand years it is invented. My poor word is a common and an extremely simple word. It is — do not smile, most grave King!

“Yes! I will boldly utter it! — It is the word ‘Prokleesis’. And now I must struggle to make clear some of the beautiful, terrible, stirring, satisfying, comforting, restoring, consoling, redeeming, creating meanings that I have put into this natural and simple word, Prokleesis! For I do here and now, O great King! I do here and now, most lovely ladies! I do here and now, Moros my old friend, Nisos my young friend, and you three, heroic sons of the lady Nemertes, who is the friend of all of us, as indeed this banquet, which is the grandest banquet I have ever enjoyed, proves up to the hilt, I do here and now proclaim, to all living creatures in all the innumerable worlds, that for each and every one of us, whether human, super-human, or sub-human, whether male or female, whether old or young, that the word Prokleesis whose simplest meaning is a ‘defiance’ or ‘challenge’ is the best clue to life we can have!

“Yes, Prokleesis is the word. We must ‘challenge’ life from our childhood to our old age! We must ‘defy’ life to quench our spirit and to beat us down! We must ‘challenge’ it, whatever it may be, to a fight to the finish! Don’t you see, O great King, don’t you see, my sweet friends, how the crafty and wicked Enorches is really advocating an escape into death in place of a battle with life? His Eros and his Dionysos are both different names for the same plunge into the same Nothingness.

“One is a plunge into it by way of love, and the other by way of drink. Whatever else to be alive upon earth, or above earth, or under earth, may mean to those who are landed in it or sunk in it or confronted by it, it is clear that it means a challenge to a battle! O my friends, my friends, we have not got the secret of life, I mean the secret of our experience of life for ourselves , till we’ve defied it to make us cry, ‘Hold! Enough!’ This challenge, this ‘Prokleesis,’ is the secret of life for us.

“As to what the secret of life is for life itself , who can answer such a question? We can only answer for ourselves. The animals and birds and fishes can only answer for themselves. Whatever it is that calls itself the cause of life, or imagines itself to be the cause of life, or is supposed to be the cause of life by the tribal tradition of this race or that race, or by the geographical tradition of Northern or Southern life, or of Eastern or Western life, or Middle-Eastern life, or of life at the bottom of the ocean, or of life among the Gods in the sky, or of life among the Titans in Tartaros, or of life among the ghosts of Hades — if Ghosts have any life and if there are any ghosts left there now; for the story runs that they have all escaped, even as this wise lady here has come back to her own from the Latin cavern of the Nymph Egeria!