On awakening next day, he sees approaching the elephant-caravan of Prince Motherth (the representative type of the Buddha). This Prince had once seen three fearful signs of man’s decay—a diseased man, an old man, a beautiful youth dead in his prime—and now roams the world in anguish, seeking to find the answers to evil, death, and decay. Hearing from a faithful slave of the great ascetic in Africa, the Prince had journeyed far to consult him, had pitched his camp close to his retreat, then sent three envoys to make their report. Each envoy returned with a different account of what he had seen: the first, an old man, had seen a baby; the second, a mature man, had seen War; and the third, a young man, had seen an ancient grandfather. When the Prince asked his slave to tell him what happens to a man’s body when it dies, and the slave replied that it is eaten by six waves of worms, the Prince wept, unable to accept the horrors of death.
Odysseus suddenly appears, and Prince Motherth begs to be given some medicine that will prevent him from seeing the face of Death in all things. Odysseus replies that both he and the Prince have looked beyond the gods and all hope into the face of Death, but that though the Prince sinks nerveless to the ground in terror, he holds Death before him like a black banner and marches on, for “Death is the salt that gives to life its tasty sting.” Unable to accept Odysseus’ heroic affirmation, the Prince nevertheless accompanies the ascetic on his journey south, hoping to find a more palatable answer to his despair.
The ascetic’s fame has spread throughout Africa, and all throng to watch him pass. Among these is the Famous courtesan, Margaro, who invites Odysseus and Motherth to dine with her. Odysseus tells her that the secret paths to salvation are seven: the play of the mind, the fruitful drudging goodness of the heart, proud and lofty silence, fecund activity, manly despair, war, and love, and that she has taken the last and most occult, that which strives to merge antitheses as represented by male and female, that which breaks down the barriers of flesh in ecstasy until the lover shouts, “Ah, there’s no you or I, for Life and Death are One!” This is the very answer which the ascetic gives, and Odysseus calls Margaro his “ascetic fellow-toiler,” the martyr of joy, then asks her in turn for the distillation of all her experience. Margaro replies that she tells her lovers, “In all this wretched world, but you and I exist,” and then, “Beloved, I feel at length that we two are but One.” Odysseus replies that there is a third synthesis: “Even this One, O Margaro, even this One is empty air.”
Motherth rejoices because he understands Odysseus to mean that not even Death has meaning, that it, too, is empty air, and decides to reject life in all its aspects and come to complete negation, to the via negativa. But Odysseus rejects both Motherth’s nihilism and Margaro’s affirmation of hope, and merges both views in a declaration that only by facing the hopeless and annihilating abyss of Death may a strong man then affirm life fully and raise the structure of his life on the rim of chaos, giving it himself meaning, beauty, worth, value, even though he knows that this is only an illusion: “Though life’s an empty shade, I’ll cram it full/of earth and air, of virtue, joy, and bitterness.” Margaro cannot soar above the flesh, nor Motherth lift himself above the grave. Odysseus says that the truly free man not only plays with death as with one other element in the vital passing stream of the universe, but that he is even exhilarated by it; this proves too heady a wine even for Death himself, who vomits all he has swallowed. Margaro begins to see a glimmering of Odysseus’ meaning, but Motherth, fully persuaded in negation now, abandons his kingdom, his wife, his newly-born son, and wishes to free himself completely from all the trammels of flesh. But Odysseus again affirms the tragic joy in all of life, and as he says farewell to the prince and the prostitute and goes to cross the threshold, he stumbles, and Motherth burns his golden garments to light the ascetic’s way.
BOOK XIX
The hermit’s avid hand. As Odysseus is traveling through a forest, Death touches him on the shoulder and knocks him to the ground. “He had no god or master now: The four winds blew,/and in his chest his compass-heart led on toward Death.” Within him a third, an inner eye, gazes on the world as for the first time, where no past, no present, and no future exist. He spies Death in the form of an old companion awaiting him under the shadow of a fig tree, but begs him to wait a bit more until they reach the sea, and when he continues his journey, Death follows at a proper distance as Odysseus bids the world farewell in a mystic trance where all opposites are joined in love. Again Death fells him, but Odysseus begs him to follow seven paces behind him until he can reach the edge of the continent and there build himself a skiff in a shape of a coffin, that he may return once more to the sea as to the womb. One day as he eats honey plundered by a bear to keep himself alive and to strive for freedom, he asks and replies: “What freedom? To stare in the black eyes of the abyss/with gallantry and joy as on one’s native land.”
One day, Odysseus comes upon a blind hermit who asks him if he is the savior and ascetic renowned throughout Africa, but Odysseus replies that he is the savior of the world where no salvation exists. As in the woods about them the grim struggle for survival persists, the hermit confesses that all his life he has pursued answers to the eternal questions: “Why were we born and toward what goal?” yet has found nothing but a fearful abyss which he cannot interpret. He begs the ascetic for the final truth, but Odysseus replies that if he were to give the true answer and his answer were understood, it would crush the hermit’s mind, and advises him only to press his ear against Mother Earth and to listen with care. By this Odysseus means that man must accept the earth’s, or nature’s, laws of necessitous strife, survival of the fittest, and ultimate annihilation, before he can hope to build bravely on the abyss. The hermit now regrets his abstemious life, his search for God, and wishes he might have lived like a mighty king replete with the joys of life, dispensing justice and goodness, asking no questions about life’s purpose. As he falls asleep, he dreams of what he would have liked to have been.
He dreams of a great king replete with all the joys of peace and home who suddenly turns melancholy; nothing can give him pleasure, neither jesters nor women nor wise men. He hears a minstrel’s song, but understands only that it is a lament, and crying out, “It’s true!” casts away his crown and tries to escape from his kingdom, but finds that he cannot, for it is an island bounded everywhere by the roaring sea, by the abyss. Then a monster, the Law, attempts to constrain him within its confines, but the king’s mind swallows the monster. God then tries to stop him, at the last limits of the world beyond which man cannot go, but behind God the king hears the sea still roaring, a further eternity, until God also sinks in the mind of man. Then the Mind itself rises and declares, “I only, man’s great mind, exist on earth and sky,” but even behind man’s mind the annihilating sea roars and mocks, and the mind quakes. Reaching the sea at length, the king hews an image of himself as a tragic unlaughing man, sets it up as a sign, and speeds on his search, but one day, when he trips over his own image, he realizes that man is forever caught in the round trap of his own existence, his world, his mind, his given limitations. He strikes inland, climbs to the peak of a mountain of human skulls, and contemplates his long evolution from the sea and various forms of life to his present eminence as the Tragic Man. He cries out that the universe for each man is valid only in so far as a man is there to apprehend it, yet when he sniffs Death approaching, he suddenly stretches out a still-un-sated hand and clutches his mother, Earth.
At this moment in his dream, the hermit cries out “Mother!” and dies with his hand stretched out, avid and unsatisfied. When the nearby villagers try to bury him, they find they cannot close the outstretched hand, and Odysseus tells them that it will not close until they have filled it with their dearest treasure. The elders cast their gold into the hand, the youths their weapons, the chieftains the bronze keys of the city, the mothers their tears, the maidens their kisses, a child its toys, but the hand still gapes, unsatisfied. Then Odysseus stoops and fills the avid hand wi
th earth, and the hand closes, sated at last. Acceptance of Earth’s necessitous law of annihilation is the bitter answer.
Odysseus continues his journey south and broods on the hermit’s dilemma, knowing that some invisible force stamps us out the way a man’s foot stamps out an ant heap. He travels amid scenes of massacre and destruction until he comes to a jostling village of oriental color and zest for living where even a passing girl will distract sons from their father’s funeral. There he hears a minstrel singing about a Prince Elias whose father seemed as if he would never die or give up the crown. When a cock-pheasant sings to Prince Elias in a human voice that only through song, the loftiest crown of all endeavor, may he hope to become glorious and immortal, the prince orders a lyre made with seven chords, but it remains silent whenever he strikes the strings. The cock-pheasant then informs Prince Elias that songs are paid for dearly, that each chord must be baptized in the blood of each of his seven sons. One by one Prince Elias takes his sons to battle, and one by one, as they are slain, he drenches each chord with their blood until the lyre bursts into ecstatic song. Cursed by his father, Prince Elias in turn curses all of life, flings his lyre across his back, and roams throughout the world. The minstrel declares that one day he saw Prince Elias sitting by a cliff’s edge playing his lyre as the chords leapt “like man’s sometime laughing sometime weeping heart.” In this book Kazantzakis has contrasted the useless cyclical pursuit of the hermit with the answer given to one who listens closely to the earth’s annihilating response. A man is imprisoned in the kingdom of his earth and in his own identity; behind man’s attempts to control phenomena by Law, by concepts of God, by the encompassing mind, the eternal sea of annihilation roars. With his works, nevertheless, with a song sung joyfully and gallantly above this abyss, a man may hope to keep his “deathless flame” burning a while longer. Thus the tragic affirmation of life in joy is once more symbolized.
BOOK XX
The impractical idealist, the hedonist, and the primitive man. Captain Sole (the type of Don Quixote) takes up his rusted armor once more and sets out on his decrepit camel, Lightning, to save the world from slavery and injustice. Captured by cannibals, he is bound to a stake by their slaves and prepared for cooking, but Odysseus spies him and runs to his rescue. The cannibals, in fear of the renowned white ascetic, set Captain Sole free, but the black chieftain tells a fable to indicate that savage mankind can never be taught civilized ways, but will simply devour its idealistic saviors. Nevertheless, as soon as Captain Sole is freed, he dashes in frenzy once more to free the slaves, and though Odysseus admires this rash and rebellious heart, the imagination that dares to leap beyond the possible, he spurns it because it dwells far from reality, in wish-fulfillment and fancy only. Odysseus wishes Captain Sole well, and plods on. Passing villagers drugged with hashish, he broods: “Man’s whole submission to all great necessities/alas, may be the only outlet Freedom has!”
Continuing his journey, he comes to great marshlands and an island with an ivy-wreathed tower set amidst turbid waters. He is taken to the Lord of the Tower, a fat and sluggish hedonist who has longed to converse with the famous ascetic, and has prepared him a gourmand’s feast, but first entertains his guest with a cockfight He marvels that Odysseus, unlike his other guests, gazes on the cruel battle with neither pleasure nor disgust, and Odysseus replies that his real eyes are indeed moved with joy and anguish at the death-struggle on earth, but that he also gazes on all things with an inner, a Third Eye, which remains serenely unmoved. The Lord of the Tower replies that best is the unconcerned mind which gleans its honey from every flower of experience but is never itself involved. Odysseus understands that this is a man who has. never loved or hated, who mocks all spiritual values, the last dregs of a decadent and hedonistic existence. He then tells the Lord of the Tower that he had himself looked long on Death until be transformed all fear, joy and God into a spiritual flame, but the Lord misunderstands Odysseus to mean that life is without value, that the free mind keeps sterilely aloof. (The Lord of the Tower, Prince Motherth, and Odysseus have all confronted Death and the Abyss, but in different ways: the Lord with ironic and mocking indifference, concerned only to reap what passing pleasure he can; Motherth with negation and withdrawal; Odysseus with agony and the transforming joy which are both part of the onrushing creative drive.) Odysseus replies: “Both of us know the secret, but you in great exhaustion/play with both life and death with sluggish mocking heart;/I rush, clasp in my arms the smallest worm, and shout: /’Dear brother, I’m your companion in both life and death!’” As Odysseus leaves, he recalls the bastard youths in Sparta who had fought with such vitality, and praises all striving, violent, evolving life.
In the woods one midnight, he watches the eleven sons of a black chieftain (who had previously killed one of his twelve sons) hunt down their old and sterile father in order to kill him according to traditional ritual, and then to possess his wives and kingdom. After they have slain him and each son has eaten in communion that portion of his father which contains the strength he covets, they resolve to fight among themselves until but one remains to possess both kingdom and wives. An ancient sorceress, however, proclaims the laws of a more civilized procedure: “Don’t kill!” “Don’t touch your father’s wives,” and bids them take their women from other tribes. As Odysseus watches, he feels that he, too, in distant ages long past, had evolved from such primitive origins and had once killed his own father. (The poet here deliberately contrasts the highly sophisticated and decadent Lord of the Tower with the everpresent atavistic primitivism in man.) Odysseus now hears Mother Earth crying for help to be freed from her primordial origins.
BOOK XXI
The gentle Negro fisher-lad. After several months, Odysseus sights the ocean, and as he hurries toward the shore, he passes a yellow and slanteyed race which he has never seen before, and a god with a huge emerald belly squatting cross-legged with half-closed sluggish eyes. When Odysseus reaches the shore, he plunges into the waves joyfully and plays with them for a long time, as with his faithful dog, Argus, then proceeds at night to the bustling harbor town and enters a tavern where sturdy sea captains are depicting their native lands. One, from the far South, tells of the snowlands; a red-skinned captain tells of a flame-drenched land of gardens and merchantmen; and Odysseus in turn tells them nostalgically of Greece. At this moment all rush to the door to watch a passing procession, and Odysseus is told that some shipwrecked Cretans, who have settled here, are celebrating their new god, whom some call Slayer, some Savior, but whom the priests in their secret rituals name Odysseus. In ironic mockery, Odysseus realizes that he has now been reduced to the stature of a god: “I’ve been reduced to a god and walk the earth like myth!/O wrteched soul of man, you can’t stand free on earth /or walk upright unless you walk with fear or hope./Ah, when will comrade souls like mine come down to earth?” The symbols of the new god are fire, a bow, a full-rigged ship, the feather of a white peacock, and the Pole Star stuck on a white skull.
Next morning, after playing with the sea again, he walks through the town with a begging bowl, rejoiced to be brought to this state of essential simplicity, he who once had made love to the goddess Calypso and been offered immortal youth. As he stops to watch an old gardener forcing and training a dwarf pine into shape, he considers that just such a skillful, pitiless, erotic hand “fights with our hearts, and some men call it God, /some Fate and humbly bow, but I call it man’s soul /that now has freed itself and takes what shape it wills.” As the young whores in the redlight district mock his aging body and his white hair, an old prostitute, Dame Goody, takes pity on him and gives him some pomegranates. He then knocks on the door of a newly-wed couple, and when the young bride opens, tells her that there are three kinds of charities: the first and most modest gives only in terms of deeds done, the second identifies itself with the beggar until he is well fed, but the third and greatest feeds souls and gods till all merge into One, then abandons hearth and husband in a ruthless quest.
> At dawn one day Odysseus fells some trees to build his last skiff. Rumors spread that he is assisted by spirits; the townspeople bring him food and votive gifts; and when a fisherman observes that his vessel resembles a coffin, Odysseus replies that he has measured his body, his heart, his mind, all earth, sky, fear, love, happiness and pain, and that this coffin-skiff is the result of all his measurements. His old crew comrades crowd round him now in the form of ghosts, but he refuses to take them with him on his last voyage, even in memory. Contemplation of an intricately wrought seashell evokes for him the slow evolutionary progress of the universe. In dream he shoots a roe-buck with his arrow and then feels that he has pierced his own heart, but nevertheless he eats the meat with relish, for “A great and mighty tigress rules the living world.” Although next day he fails to hunt down a stag in order to shape his last bow from its horns, he does find some stag-horns amid the votive gifts left by the townspeople, and with them shapes his bow.
One day amid some fishermen he hears a young Negro fisher-lad speak of One Eternal Father who is Love, of the earth as a path that leads into the sky. Another young fisherman opposes this as an unrealistic view of life, insisting that injustice rules the world and that evil thrives. An old man replies that only with good deeds may one enter the Lord’s gates, but the fisher-lad answers that man will enter heaven only by God’s grace. When he says softly that if someone were to strike him on one cheek he would turn the other, Odysseus hits him hard, confident that even this sickly boy will rise to defend himself, but when the lad does indeed turn his other cheek meekly, Odysseus shakes with terror at such a revolutionary view of the world. The two converse by the sea all night long, Odysseus upholding the path of war and strife, and the Negro lad (the type of Christ) upholding the path of love and peace, of selflessness, of an ultimate realm where man and God merge into One. Odysseus replies that even this One is empty air, but the lad insists that only this final One is real, “as the pure soul that broods on the world’s sacred egg.” Odysseus accuses the boy of loving only man’s soul, whereas he loves man’s flesh also, his stench, the earth, and even death, denying that the soul has value apart from the flesh, for it must evolve and purify itself in and through the flesh. When they part affectionately at dawn, Odysseus takes as his only weapons his bow, two flints, an ax, and whatever the townspeople had left him for food, then launches his skiff. Dame Goody runs up with a last gift of pomegranates. Leaping into his boat, Odysseus bids the earth a last farewell, tasting it slowly like a drop of dripping honey.