John Powys - Atlantis

Dramatizing herself and gesturing and posing in front of that shield of Kadmos there was absolutely nothing in the consciousness of Okyrhöe that had the faintest resemblance to the self-adoration, the self-intoxication, the self-worship of the unfortunate Narcissus. Okyrhöe’s mind was as cold and hard and ruthless as one of those short sharp Latin swords that the Nymph Egeria in her Italian cave would know more about than any Achaean woman.

Okyrhöe used her beauty purely, solely, and simply as a weapon. She fought with her beauty as if it were a sword. She sacked cities with her beauty. She dried up deep seas with her beauty. She blighted harvests, she devastated vineyards, she up-rooted forests with it. She was prepared to blacken shining stars and to put out burning suns with her beauty. Beauty for her was something wherewith to carve out empires or to drown continents.

The cloak she had extracted from the Phoenician’s most sacred and secret caravan was made of the white skin of a huge pre-historic animal called a Podandrikon whose peculiarity was that round its waist it had shining scales and round its neck it had thick white feathers. Wrapped in the Podandrikon’s skin the completely reassured Okyrhöe told herself with one last glance at the Shield of Kadmos that if this fond and foolish old king thought he would ever sail from Ithaca again he was mad.

With the face the gods had given her and in the cloak she had discovered for herself she would rule all Argos and all Boeotia and all Hellas from this old fool’s rock-cave island palace! Thus thought Okyrhöe.

But the oldest of the Fates, as it used to be said at any special pinch concerning the goddess Athene, who now was so wrought up — and who can blame her — by the blind folly of her own people in the face of all this cosmic confusion that she had taken refuge with the blameless Ethiopians, “took other counsel”. Yes, Atropos, the weakest, the oldest, but the wisest of the Moirai, or Fates, came, invisibly rushing, as she always did, to the crisis-spot and prompted Odysseus to make one of his own decisions independently of everyone. And such a decision he made; and it was so wholly material and practical, and so absolutely free from any general theory about the matter at issue, from any logical sequence of reasoning about the problem at stake, from any principle of action, from any “mystique” of action, from any philosophic metaphysic of action, that it could hardly be described as a decision at all.

Of course in his past there had been occasions, there had to be occasions, when he was forced to act according to some practical plan of action, when in fact to act at all implied a plan of action; but this was different, and the truth was that Odysseus behaved now like a skilful carpenter who has already taken the measure of the adjustments, of the shaping, the trimming, the nailing, the thickening, the thinning, the rounding off, the hammering, the polishing, which in this particular case he would be forced to employ.

Those who knew him intimately however — and of these there were perhaps now living only two persons, namely his nurse Eurycleia, whose extreme old age interfered with the expression of what she knew, and the goddess Athene, who had her own ethnological undertakings independent of any individual man or woman — would have been in a position to explain to us that there had been in this extraordinary man’s life certain far-off but quite definite, concrete and material projects to the realization of which the whole complicated organism of his formidable identity was basically aimed.

Of these vast projects, like huge islands on immeasurable horizons, Eurycleia would probably have pointed to the taking of Troy, while Pallas Athene might conceivably have named the immense but misty and cloudy notion, like an old and battered world-sailor’s fantasy, that at present loomed in the darkly-brooding background of his consciousness, the notion of sailing Westward, far past the Pillars of Herakles and the place where Atlas holds up the Sky, past even the shores of Ultima Thule where exiled Kronos awaits the day of his awakening, the notion in fact of steering his ship over the very waves of the very sea under which lie the drowned towers and temples and domes and palaces and streets of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

But what Odysseus decided upon now as his most prudent line of action was to accept Okyrhöe’s astonishing offer to share with Zeuks and himself the wounded back of Pegasos on condition that her tender maternal arms should firmly encircle the awkwardly-moulded form of the prophetic orphan Pontopereia.

He was in fact wily enough to decide then and there to use to the limit the obviously possessive power of this beautiful woman so as to make sure that no sudden, wild, girlish impulse such as might very well spring up in a daughter of Teiresias should deprive him of her as an aid to the baffling of his enemies and the furtherance of his sailing.

“Oh, I’m so glad‚” cried this same eager girlish prophet, when she found Zeuks alone with Pegasos waiting for Okyrhöe and the old king, “to have a chance to ask you what you really meant by your terrifying story of those horrible pirates putting ropes round us all and deliberately chopping us to death one by one. I couldn’t bear to see it done to anybody, however much I hated them; and it’s certain I couldn’t bear it myself. I should just go shrieking-mad, and struggle wildly and bang about till I was killed or killed somebody else!”

The girl’s directness and simplicity had its effect. The expression upon the face of Zeuks would have suggested to anyone who had the particular kind of penetration that the great Theban prophet seems to have been not quite able to pass on to his progeny, that within the bloated mask of humorous relish for every conceivable aspect of human existence and of animal sensation that was Zeuks’ nature there had been suddenly roused from sleep a small active insect-like second nature that was a drastically honest commentator upon all the man’s impressions and was a pitiless exposure of all his own self-deceptions and all his own exaggerations and all his own boastings.

“I’ll tell you the whole thing, my dear Pontopereia,” Zeuks blurted out hurriedly. “I was glorying, you see, in my own mind over this idea of mine which I call Prokleesis or ‘defiance’. I’m proud of this idea, which has become very important to me and which is something I’m constantly trying to practise. But I’m a terrible one for seeing everything as comic and I suddenly saw my own life-method, my own life-philosophy, my own private and special defiance of life as a comic thing; and I thought: ‘How can I show up this prokleesis of mine as I love to show up all those other philosophic cure-alls that aim at dispending with Themis, treating old Auntie Atropos as a doting hag, discounting Necessity, and putting Chance to shame as a negligible wanton?’

“And I decided that the only way I could do this was by imagining a situation in which only a very few heroic human souls, and they probably already half-crazy, could possibly practise my philosophy of ‘prokleesis’, or defiance of the whole of existence, and so I conjured up the picture of those murderous pirates on the brink of chopping us all to death one after another, as much as to say: ‘Well! If you can defy life while watching your best friends chopped to bits and waiting your own turn, you have to be something more than a clowning antic like me, whose head’s been turned by a good idea!’”

The kidnapper of Pegasos with his hand on that Gorgonian Wonder’s solitary wing must have drained at that second the ambrosial dregs of true philosophic glory, for the awkward figure of the daughter of Teiresias hunched itself into a shapeless heap of girlish admiration before the knees that had bent so faithfully all those years serving the aged Nymph deserted by Pan.