John Powys - Atlantis

“Why should I laugh at life rather than challenge it or defy it when all I’ve really got to do is just to enjoy it?” This was. what he was telling himself as he hugged the tree and the gold and the flesh and the bone together. And the very form of his. countenance became changed as he did so. The physiognomy of Zeuks has been, as we have seen, designed and dedicated, devoted and destined for the ribald reduction of everything in. existence to a monstrous jest.

But something had risen just then out of the depths of his being that was neither solemn nor comical; something that found its account in quite a different direction from that of either defiance or mockery. And the advantage of this direction was its freedom from the necessity of any effort except the effort of will. It needed absolutely no mental effort at all; not even the mental effort of realizing just exactly what it was he was defying, or towards what particular thing he was directing his mockery. “To will,” Zeuks told himself, “is simply to do a little more vigorously what we are already doing spontaneously. These efforts naturally occur when we grow consciously aware of some exercise in ourselves of the life-energy which moves in every offspring of the ancient earth. All we have to do is to use our will to intensify this.”

Nor was the expression upon the face of Zeuks that accompanied this revelation lost on the air. It was on the contrary inwardly digested. It was one of the luckiest moments in the philosophical life of the creature that always so proudly called itself “the Worm of Arima” that just when the adventurous consciousness of the son of Arcadian Pan had dived deep enough among the mysteries of the multiverse to discover a clue-word, or rather a clue-act, that was more intimate and more effective than “defy” or “mock”, the protruding, perspiring, and palpitating proboscis of the Worm of Arima happened to be above-board rather than in any of its convoluted labyrinths below. For since the illumination upon the countenance of Zeuks at this second of time communicated itself by the usual aerial vibration to everything within reach, it was natural enough that the Worm of Arima, being so near to it, carried away into its underground world when it returned there, though the form of its own visage was so much simpler, a celestial exultation worthy of the noblest zodiacal sign.

“These motions of the will,” said Zeuks to himself, “are motions of the life-energy within us, sometimes enduring and patient, sometimes violent and desperate. But, whatever these motions of the life-energy are, if they’re to give us that thrill of enjoyment we need, we’ve got to acquire the trick of forcing ourselves to forget the particular afflictions that spoil such enjoyment.”

And it was at this point in what might have been called his pearl-diving in the ensorcerized earth-mould of Arima that Zeuks felt himself to be, at one and the same time, a god, a man, a beast, a bird, a fish, a worm and an insect. And in his heart he cried out: “O gods, O men, O beasts, O birds, O fish, O frogs, O ferns and funguses, I, Zeuks, have you all in me, and I, Zeuks, am within you all! But, O Maia, mother of Hermes and grandmother of Pan, teach me to forget! Teach me, O youthful Maia, the heavenly tracks and heavenlier side-tracks of the sacred art of forgetting! Don’t let me ever, O Maia most holy, O Maia most blessed, O Maia eternally youthful, don’t let me forget how to forget!

“Yes, to forget the disgusts! Yes! to forget the horrors! yes! to forget the loathings! Mother of Hermes, hear the prayer of thy great-grand-son Zeuks, and grant unto him, and that not too late, the power of forgetting the madness, the loathsomeness, and the horror! I should require,” thus did the thoughts of Zeuks run on, “I who am a god, a man, a beast; a bird, a fish, a frog, a worm, an insect, I who have suffered such horrors from the sky, my begetter, from the earth, my mother, from the elements, my aunts, from Space my grandmother, from Time my grandfather, I should require a draught of forgetfulness so obliterating that it could turn every hell that all my separate natures necessitate into every paradise that all my separate natures crave! Mother of Hermes”—thus did the heart of Zeuks still jerk forth its desperate prayer to the multiverse around it—“cannot you see that for a manifold creature such as I am, a creature who is a god, a man, an insect, a frog, a newt, an ass, a camel, a bear, a monkey, an elephant, if I am really to drink a draught of pure Lethe, if I am really to obtain the power of forcing myself to forget the horrors, it can only be done by my own will to forget !

“O thou ‘still youthful Maia’, cannot you see that what I need is to strengthen my will to forget till it is ten thousand times more powerful than any god as yet discovered by us whether in earth or in air or in fire or in water? If I had this power, O thou ‘still youthful’ great-grandmother of mine, I could enjoy sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, each one of them separately or all together, and in the pleasure of satisfying hunger and thirst, and in the pleasure of satisfying lust and desire, and in the pleasure of diving into earth and air and water and fire, and through them and out the other side, if there is another side, I beseech thee, O Maia, thou Nymph forever young, let me learn the greatest of all the arts, the art of forgetting!”

By one of those pure caprices and casual happenings that occur under the dispensation of Tyche the great goddess of chance such as we mortals call “a stroke of luck” when they suit us and “the cruel irony of things” when they don’t, it happened that when Zeuks began heaving up the body of Ajax, with a view to carrying it to the Corridor of the Pillars, there occurred a faint but unmistakable flicker at the outer corner of the dead man’s left eyelid.

This incident was solely and simply due to the sudden jerk to the corpse’s head when Zeuks lifted up that long, lean, painfully muscular body preparatory to making the effort, which was not at all an easy one, of balancing it on his shoulder. But this negligible and unimportant accident made, for a special reason, a most agitating impression on the mind of Zeuks.

What it did for him was to set going a peculiarly morbid infirmity of his imagination; namely the fantastic illusion that his own automatic blinkings and pulse-beats and heart-throbs and blood-circulations, yes! and even the naturally drawn breathings from his lungs might suddenly be intensified to a degree beyond bearing and he might be driven so wild by all these reiterative pulsings, pumpings and poundings that he’d be sent raving through Arima like a naked madman!

His face was contracted into a desperately grim scowl as he staggered off from the Hector-Tree with the body of Ajax on his back. “And so,” he told himself, “it has now come to the point; and the question is, can the great-grand-son of immortal Maia keep his ‘will to forget’ intact when his whole taut skin drums from within to the tune of ‘remember!’

Staggering along for a dozen strides at a time, every few seconds Zeuks had to stop to take breath. His shoulders were broad enough; but his legs were short; and the corpse he carried was so tall that its toes, for he carried it face downwards, kept tapping against his own heels.

But it was the horrible feeling that at any moment this repetitive pounding and pulsing and blinking might split his skin that was spoiling that moment for him rather than any effort of carrying Ajax. And it was at his tenth stop that he made a really desperate attempt to deal with this insane attack. He planted his feet firmly in a patch of damp and mossy soil, not far from the spot where Eurybia used to exercise her curious sedentary witchcraft, and where she used to argue with Echidna from twilight to twilight as to whether this breaking loose out of Tartaros, about which all the Attic world was now talking, was due to feminine wiles or to titanic straining.