John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

waves,

and as the first approached our ship I broke into a

sweat; but then

the great wave struck, moved past, and nothing had

happened. Illusion!

I got up, looked in at the darkness of water, and calmed

myself.

All well. Nothing afoot. — And yet I was sure, again, the vision was no mere dream. I stood at the start of

something,

in some way I hadn’t yet learned; and I might yet

change its course.

In my mind I saw myself clambering over the side,

slipping down,

soundlessly sinking in the water. I dreamed I’d done it.

Peace…

“Make a note. The dark of the buried gods has suicide

in it,

black form seeking to crack the efficient crust. I would

not

crack. I lay down again and, this time, nothing.

Darkness.

And so sailed on, putting the Bithynian coast behind

us.

Self-destruction was the name of the game. I wasn’t

playing.

We sailed on, sliding northward, the Argo silent in the

night.

“I suppose the truth of the matter is that I was bored, simply. As you’ve seen in everything I’ve said, I was an ambitious young man — a born leader, I wanted to believe — and fiercely impatient. Think how it must have been with me, hour after hour, mile after mile, river after river. I wanted that fleece closed in my fist, Pelias praising me, the people all wildly shouting ‘Hats off!’ Perhaps more. No doubt of it. A small, dull kingdom, mere farming country … I had glories more vast in the back of my mind than Pelias’ kingdom, my fever’s rickety stepping stone. Yet all I burned for, all my wolf-heart hungered for, was outrageously far away. No wonder if at Lemnos I nearly gave up on it. Blind from a vision that even at the time was too bright to get a good picture of, I must slog on now through laborious skirmishes with barbaric fools, wearily manipulate my Argonauts (men big as mountains, worrisome as gnats), moil on north, outfox old Aietes, outfox his snake … I’ve seen shepherds at home sit all day long on a single rock, staring out at hillsides, wide green valleys. Well enough for them! As for me, I wanted a ship that would outrace an arrow, fighters beyond imagination. I wanted the unspeakable. I was hardly aware of all this, of course. But I knew well enough that the hours dragged and the adventures were less in the living than I would make them in the telling, later. (If I were a mute, like Polydeukes, I too would abandon the night to Orpheus’ lyre.) I lost men, lost time, and in secret I shook my fists at the gods tormenting me. Whatever my strength, compared to the strength of Herakles, whatever my craft compared to that of old Argus or Orpheus, I was a superman of sorts: I could not settle for the reasonable. The Good, pale as mist, would be that which even I would find suitable to my dignity, satisfying food for my sky-consuming lust. The fleece, needless to say, would not suffice. The risk — the clear and present danger— was that nothing would suffice.

“And so the nightmare voice came to me — ghostly hint that I was caught up in more than anyone knew, some grandiose ultimate agon. If the crew was caught up, to some extent, in these same weird delusions …

“However, it is also true that the place was strange, uncanny … and true (we’ve begun to learn to see) that explanation is exhaustion: The essence of life is to be found in frustrations of established order: the universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. Though also, needless to say …

“How can the mind accept such a pointless clutter

of acts,

encounters with monsters, kings, strange weather—

no certainty, even,

which things really occur, which things are dreams?

I’ve barely

hinted at the sights we saw, dull shocks to our sanity. I’ve told many times how we slipped through the

Clashing Rocks, and have been

believed; but who would believe me now, if I said to you we slipped in and out of Time, hurled crazily backward

and forward?

A man learns how much truth he can get away with.

Suppose

I leaned toward you, like this, abandoning dignity, and moaned, eyes wide: Oh friends, the worst of it all

was this:

Time swept over us in waves: one moment the hills

were green,

the next, crawling with cities, the next, black deserts

where things

like huge black insects belched out smoke and devoured

one another.

Suppose I reported that, sailing through fog, we heard

dreadful moans,

terrible deep-throated bellows we took to be

sea-monsters,

and all at once we’d see lights coming at us — no

common torches,

but lights blue-white as stars — and even as we gazed

at them,

shaking in terror, believe me, we saw they were eyes—

the eyes

of enormous drifting beasts. And sometimes the lights

would vanish

and the huge sea-beasts would sink, as if for a purpose,

like whales.

Suppose I told you I saw whole seas of dead men

floating—

women and children as well — a smell unbelievable— corpses from shore to shore, and ship prows parting

them.

You’d soon grow uneasy, I think. You’d call me a

tiresome liar,

and rightly. Then only this: we were riding in eerie

waters,

countries of powerful magic. And the strangest part was

this:

all that we saw, or thought we saw, was of no

importance.

At times the river was poison. At times the sky caught

fire.

At times the land we passed seemed virgin wilderness, and the river birds would land on our ship as if never

yet

attacked by the implements of man. The world was a

harmless drunk.

“A ship that reeked of incense drifted by us, filled with sleepy people, eerie music, children in rags or naked, as some of the adults were naked. They smiled

gently,

listlessly waved and jabbered in some outlandish tongue, human livestock packed in rail to rail on the sailless ship. They did not mind. Some coupled publicly, staring nowhere. They filled us, God knows why, with

anger.

Even Athena’s magic ship was changed, beside that rotting barque from the world’s last age. The

planking sang:

“ ‘For men, not earth, the time has run out. Though

oceans die,

meadows and fields, green hills, they hold no grudge

against their murderer.

They drift through time in their long

slumber,

secretly waiting, like beasts asleep in caves. Deep space bombards the poisoned seas with bits of life, and the

seas

grow whole again, renew themselves like a heart

awakening.

Algae forms along shores. Great, dark, ungainly beasts dream from the deeps toward land, and out of the

slime of blood

and bone — witless, charged with sorrow like a dying

horse—

mind comes groping, tentative, fearful, sly as a snake and as quick to love or strike. So spring moves in

again,

as usual, and flowers are invented, and wheels and

clocks,

and tragedies, and eventually, as the mind grows old, familiar with its quirky ways, even comedy is born

again—

fat clowns strutting, alone and ridiculous, shaking

their fists

at mirrors and fleeing in alarm, to teach that the joke

on them

is them. So autumn comes again, as usual: splendid triumph of color, when every tree turns

philosophical

and the seas, dying, past all repair,

provide mankind with jokes. (All consciousness is

optimistic,

even a frog’s. Otherwise who would evolve the handsome

prince?)

So plankton dies, and the whales turn belly up, become one world-wide stench of decaying symphonies; the grass withers. Starvation; plague. A silent planet again, for a time; drifting boulder pocked with old cities till space sends life. And once more goggle-eyed