Lost in the Funhouse
“ ‘ “Doubt no more,” said Helen. “Your wife was never in Troy. Out of love for you I left you when you left, but before Paris could up-end me, Hermes whisked me on Father’s orders to Egyptian Proteus and made a Helen out of clouds to take my place.
“ ‘ “All these years I’ve languished in Pharos, chaste and comfy, waiting for you, while Paris, nothing wiser, fetched Cloud-Helen off to Troy, made her his mistress, got on her Bunomus, Aganus, Idaeus, and a little Helen, dearest of the four. It wasn’t I, but cold Cloud-Helen you fetched from Troy, whom Proteus dissolved the noon you beached him. When you then went off to account to Aphrodite, I slipped aboard. Here I am. I love you.”
“ ‘Not a quarter-hour later she asked of suspended me: “Don’t you believe me?”
“ ‘ “What ground have I for doubt?” I whispered. “But that imp aforementioned gives me no peace. ‘How do you know,’ he whispers with me, ‘that the Helen you now hang onto isn’t the cloud-one? Why mayn’t your actual spouse be back in Troy, or fooling in naughty Egypt yet?’ ”
“ ‘ “Or home in Lacedemon,” Helen added, “where she’s been all along, waiting for her husband.”
“ ‘Tresently my battle voice made clear from stem to stern my grown conviction that the entire holocaust at Troy, with its prior and subsequent fiascos, was but a dream of Zeus’s conjure, visited upon me to lead me to Pharos and the recollection of my wife—or her nimbus like. For for all I knew I roared what I now gripped was but a further fiction, maybe Proteus himself, turned for sea-cow-respite to cuckold generals …
“ ‘ “A likely story,” Helen said. “Next thing, you’ll say it was a cloud-Menelaus went fishing on the beach at Pharos! If I carry to my grave no heart-worm grudge at your decade vagrance, it’s only that it irks me less just now than your present doubt. And that I happen to be not mortal. Yet so far from giving cut for cut, I’m obliged by Love and the one right action of your life to ease your mind entirely.” Here she led me by the hand into her golden-Aphrodite’s-grove, declaring: “If what’s within your grasp is mere cloudy fiction, cast it to the wind; if fact then Helen’s real, and really loves you. Espouse me without more carp! The senseless answer to our riddle woo, mad history’s secret, base-fact and footer to the fiction crazy-house our life: imp-slayer love, terrific as the sun! Love! Love!”
“ ‘Who was I? Am? Mere Menelaus, if that: mote in the cauldron, splinter in the Troy-fire of her love! Does nail hold timber or timber nail? Held fast by his fast-held, consumed by what he feasted on, whatever was of Menelaus was no more. I must’ve done something right.
“ ‘ “ ‘You’ll not die in horsy Argos, son of Atreus …’ ” So quoted Proteus’s last words to me my love-spiked wife. “ ‘The Olympic gods will west you in your latter days to a sweet estate where rain nor passion leaches, there to be your wife’s undying advertisement, her espouser in the gods’ slow time. Not fair-haired battleshouts or people-leadering preserves you, but forasmuch as and only that you are beloved of Helen, they count you immortal as themselves.’ ”
“ ‘Lampreys and flat-fish wept for joy, squids danced on the wave-tops, crab-choirs and minnow-anthems shook with delight the opalescent welkin. As a sea-logged voyager strives across the storm-shocked country of the sole, loses ship and shipmates, poops to ground on alien shingle, gives over struggling, and is whisked in a dream-dark boat, sleep-skippered, to his shoaly home, there to wake next morning with a wotless groan, wondering where he is and what fresh lie must save him, until he recognizes with a heart-surge whither he’s come and hugs the home-coast to sweet oblivion. So Menelaus, my best guess, flayed by love, steeved himself snug in Helen’s hold, was by her hatched and transport, found as it were himself in no time Lacedemoned, where he clings still stunned. She returned him to bride-bed; had he ever been in Troy? Whence the brine he scents in her ambrosial cave? Is it bedpost he clutches, or spruce horse rib? He continues to hold on, but can no longer take the world seriously. Place and time, doer, done- to have lost their sense. Am I stoppered in the equine bowel, asleep and dreaming? At the Nile-fount, begging Love for mercy? Is it Telemachus I hold, cold-hearth Peisistratus? No, no, I’m on the beach at Pharos, must be forever. I’d thought my cave-work finished, episode; re-entering Helen I understood that all subsequent history is Proteus, making shift to slip me …’
“ ‘Beg pardon.’
“ ‘Telemachus? Come back?’
“To.’
“ ‘Thought I hadn’t noticed, did you, how your fancy strayed while I told of good-voyaging your father and the rest? Don’t I know Helen did the wine-trick? Are you the first in forty years, d’you think, I ever thought I’d yarned till dawn when in fact you’d slipped me?’
2
“Fagged Odysseus’-son responded: ‘Your tale has held us fast through a dark night, Menelaus, and will bring joy to suitored Ithaca. Time to go. Wake up, Peisistratus. Our regards to Hermione, thanks to her magic mother.’
“ ‘Mine,’ I replied, ‘to chastest yours, muse and mistress of the embroidrous art, to whom I commission you to retail my round-trip story. Like yourself, let’s say, she’ll find it short nor simple, though one dawn enlightens its dénouement. Her own, I’d guess, has similar abound of woof—yet before your father’s both will pale, what marvels and rich mischances will have fetched him so late home! Beside that night’s fabrication this will stand as Lesser to Great Ajax.’
“So saying I gifted them off to Nestored Pylos and the pig-fraught headlands dear to Odysseus, myself returning to my unfooled narrate seat. There I found risen Helen, sleep-gowned, replete, mulling twin cups at the new-coaxed coals. I kissed her ear; she murmured ‘Don’t.’ I stooped to embrace her; ‘Look out for the wine.’ I pressed her, on, to home. ‘Let go, love.’ I would not, ever, said so; she sighed and smiled, women, I was taken in, it’s a gift, a gift-horse, I shut my eyes, here we go again, ‘Hold fast to yourself, Menelaus.’ Everything,” I declare, “is now as day.”
1
It was himself grasped undeceivèd Menelaus, solely, imperfectly. No man goes to the same Nile twice. When I understood that Proteus somewhere on the beach became Menelaus holding the Old Man of the Sea, Menelaus ceased. Then I understood further how Proteus thus also was as such no more, being as possibly Menelaus’s attempt to hold him, the tale of that vain attempt, the voice that tells it. Ajax is dead, Agamemnon, all my friends, but I can’t die, worse luck; Menelaus’s carcass is long wormed, yet his voice yarns on through everything, to itself. Not my voice, I am this voice, no more, the rest has changed, re-changed, gone. The voice too, even that changes, becomes hoarser, loses its magnetism, grows scratchy, incoherent, blank.
I’m not dismayed. Menelaus was lost on the beach at Pharos; he is no longer, and may be in no poor case as teller of his gripping history. For when the voice goes he’ll turn tale, story of his life, to which he clings yet, whenever, how-, by whom-recounted. Then when as must at last every tale, all tellers, all told, Menelaus’s story itself in ten or ten thousand years expires, yet I’ll survive it, I, in Proteus’s terrifying last disguise, Beauty’s spouse’s odd Elysium: the absurd, unending possibility of love.
ANONYMIAD
HEADPIECE
When Dawn rose, pink as peerless Helen’s teat,
which in fact swung wineskinlike between her hind legs and was piebald as her pelt, on which I write,
The salty minstrel oped his tear-brined eye,
And remarking it was yet another day …
Ended his life. Commenced his masterpiece. Returned to sleep.
Invoked the muse:
Twice-handled goddess! Sing through me the boy
Whom Agamemnon didn’t take to Troy,
But left behind to see his wife stayed chaste.
Tell, Muse, how Clytemnestra maced
Her warden into song, made vain his heart
With vision of renown; musick the art
Wherewith was worked self-ruin by a youth
Who’d sought in his own
art some music truth
About the world and life, of which he knew
Nothing. Tell how ardent his wish grew
To autograph the future, wherefore he
Let sly Aegisthus ship him off to see
The Wide Real World. Sing of the guile
That fetched yours truly to a nameless isle,
By gods, men, and history forgot,
To sing his sorry self.
And die. And rot. And feed his silly carcass to the birds.
But not before he’d penned a few last words,
inspired by the dregs and lees of the muse herself, at whom, Zeus willing, he’ll have a final go before he corks her for good and casts her adrift, vessel of his hopeless hope. The Minstrel’s Last Lay.
Once upon a time
I composed in witty rhyme
And poured libations to the muse Erato.
Merope would croon,
“Minstrel mine, a lay! A tune!”
“From bed to verse” I’d answer; “that’s my motto.”
Stranded by my foes,
Nowadays I write in prose,
Forsaking measure, rhyme, and honeyed diction;
Amphora’s my muse:
When I finish off the booze,
I hump the jug and fill her up with fiction.
I begin in the middle—where too I’ll end, there being alas to my arrested history as yet no dénouement. God knows how long I’d been out of writing material until this morning, not to mention how long altogether I’ve been marooned upon this Zeus-forsaken rock, in the middle of nowhere. There, I’ve begun, in the middle of nowhere, tricked ashore in manhood’s forenoon with nine amphorae of Mycenaean red and abandoned to my own devisings. After half a dozen years of which more later I was down to the last of them, having put her sisters to the triple use aforesung: one by one I broke their seals, drank the lovelies dry, and, fired by their beneficence, not only made each the temporary mistress of my sole passion but gave back in the form of art what I’d had from them. Me they nourished and inspired; them I fulfilled to the top of my bent, and launched them worldward fraught with our joint conceits. Their names are to me now like the memory of old songs: Euterpe! Polyhymnia! I recall Terpsichore’s lovely neck, Urania’s matchless shoulders; in dreams I hear Melpomene singing yet in the wet west wind, her voice ever deeper as our romance waned; I touch again Erato’s ears, too delicate for mortal clay, surely the work of Aphrodite! I smile at Clio’s gravity, who could hold more wine than any of her sisters without growing tipsy; I shake my head still at the unexpected passion of saucy Thalia, how she clung to me even when broken by love’s hard knocks. Fair creatures. Often I wonder where the tides of life have fetched them, whether they’re undone by age and the world or put on the shelf by some heartless new master. What lovers slake themselves now at those fragile mouths? Do they still bear my charge in them, or is it jettisoned and lost, or brought to light?
With anticipation of Calliope, the last, I consoled me for their casting off. Painful state for a lover, to have always before him the object of his yen—naked, cool, serene—and deny his parchèd sense any slake but the lovely sight of her! No less a regimen I imposed upon myself—imperfectly, imperfectly, I’m not made of stone, and there she stood, brimful of spirit, heavy with what I craved, sweating delicately where the sun caressed her flank, and like her sisters infinitely accessible! A night came, I confess it, when need overmastered me; I broke my vow and her seal; other nights followed (never many in a season, but blessed Zeus, most blest Apollo, how many empty seasons have gone by!) when, despite all new resolve and cursing my weak-willedness even as I tipped her to my will, I eased my burden with small increase of hers. But take her to me altogether I did not, or possess myself of the bounty I thirsted for, and which freely she would yield. Until last night! Until the present morn! For in that measureless drear interval, now to be exposed, I had nothing to write upon, no material wherewith to fashion the work I’d vowed she must inspire me to, and with which, in the last act of our loveship and my life, I’d freight her.
Calliope, come, refresh me; it’s the hour for exposition!
I’ll bare at last my nameless tale, and then …
Hie here, sweet Muse: your poet must dip his pen!
1
Ink of the squid, his obscure cloak; blood of my heart; wine of my inspiration: record on Helen’s hide, in these my symbols, the ills her namesake wrought what time, forsaking the couch of fairhaired Menelaus, she spread her legs for Paris et cetera.
My trouble was, back home in ’prentice days, I never could come out straight-faced with “Daughter of Zeus, egg-born Clytemnestra” and the rest, or in general take seriously enough the pretensions of reality. Youngster though I was, nowise sophisticated, I couldn’t manage the correct long face when Agamemnon hectored us on Debts of Honor, Responsibility to Our Allies, and the like. But I don’t fool myself: if I never took seriously the world and its tiresome concerns, it’s because I was never able to take myself seriously; and the reason for that, I’ve known for some while, is the fearsomeness of the facts of life. Merope’s love, Helen’s whoring, Menelaus’s noise, Agamemnon’s slicing up his daughter for the weatherman—all the large and deadly passions of men and women, wolves, frogs, nightingales; all this business of seizing life, grabbing hold with both hands—it must’ve scared the daylights out of me from the first. While other fellows played with their spears, I learned to play the lyre. I wasn’t the worst-looking man in Argolis; I had a ready wit and a good ear, and knew how to amuse the ladies. A little more of those virtues (and a lot more nerve, and better luck in the noble-birth way), I might have been another Paris; it’s not your swaggerers like Menelaus the pretty girls fall for, or even your bully-boys like Agamemnon: it’s the tricky chaps like Paris, graceful as women themselves almost, with their mischief eyes and honey tongues and nimble fingers, that set maiden hearts a-flutter and spit maidenheads like squablings. Aphrodite takes care of her own. Let that one have his Helen; this musicked to him in his eighteenth year milkmaid Merope, fairest-formed and straightest-hearted that ever mused goatherd into minstrelsy.
Daily then I pastured with that audience, two-score nans and my doe-eye nymph, to whom I sang songs perforce original, as I was ignorant of the common store. Innocent, I sang of innocence, thinking I sang of love and fame. Merope put down her jug, swept back her hair, smiled and listened. In modes of my own invention, as I supposed, I sang my vow to make a name for myself in the world at large.
“Many must wish the same,” my honeyhead would murmur. But could she’ve shown me that every browsy hill in Greece had its dappled nans and famestruck twanger, I’d’ve not been daunted. My dreams, like my darling, perched light but square on a three-leg seat: first, while I scoffed at them myself, and at the rube their dreamer, I sucked them for life; the world was wide, as my songs attested, its cities flocked with brilliant; I was a nameless rustic plucker, unschooled, unmannered, late finding voice, innocent of fashion, uneasy in the world and my own skin—so much so, my crazy hope of shedding it was all sustained me. Fair as the country was and the goatboy life my fellows’ lot, if I could not’ve imagined my music’s one day whisking me Orionlike to the stars, I’d have as well flung myself into the sea. No other fate would even faintly do; an impassioned lack of alternatives moved my tongue; what for another might be heartfelt wish was for me an absolute condition. Second, untutored as I was and narrow my acquaintance, I knew none whose fancy so afflicted him as mine me. Especially when I goated it alone, the world’s things took a queer sly aspect: it was as if the olive hillside hummed, not with bees, but with some rustle secret; the placid goats were in on it; asphodels winked and nodded behind my back; the mountain took broody note; the very sunlight trembled; I was a stranger to my hands and feet. Merope herself, when these humors gripped me, was alien and horrific as a sphinx: her perfect body, its pulse and breath, smote me with dismay: ears! toes! What creature did it wrap, that was not I, that claimed to love me? My
own corse was a rude anthropophage that had swallowed me whole at birth and suffered indigestion ever since; could Merope see what I couldn’t, who it was spoke from his gripèd bowles? When she and I, the goats our original, invented love—romped friggly in the glens and found half a hundred pretty pathways to delight, each which we thought ourselves the first to tread—some I as foreign to the me that pleasured as goatherd to goats stood by, tight-lipped, watching, or aswoon at the entire strangeness of the world.
And yet, third prop of revery, there was Merope, realer than myself though twice my dreams: the ardent fact of her, undeniable as incredible, argued when all else failed that the gods had marked me for no common fate. That a spirit so fresh and unaffected, take my word, no space for details, in a form fit to warm the coach of kings, should elect to give not only ear but heart and dainty everything to a lad the contrary of solipsistic, who felt the world and all its contents real except himself.… Perched astride me in a wild-rosemary-patch, her gold skin sweating gently from our sport, her gold hair tenting us, Merope’d say: “I love you”; and while one of me inferred: “Therefore I am,” and another wondered whether she was mymph doing penance for rebuffing Zeus or just maid with unaccountable defect of good sense, a third exulted: “Then nothing is impoissible!” and set out to scale Parnassus blithely as he’d peaked the mount of Love.
Had I known what cloak of climbers mantles that former hill, so many seasoneder and cleverer than I, some schooled for the ascent from earliest childhod, versed in the mountain’s every crag and col, rehearsed in the lore of former climbers.… But I didn’t, except in that corner of my fancy that imaged all possible discouragements and heeded none. As a farm boy, innocent of the city’s size, confidently expects on his first visit there to cross paths with the one inhabitant he knows among its scores of thousands, and against all reason does, so when at market-time I took goats to golden Mycenae to be sold at auction, I wasn’t daunted as I should’ve been by the pros who minstrelled every wineshop, but leaned me on the Lion’s Gate, took up my lyre, and sang a sprightly goat-song, fully expecting that the Queen herself would hear and call for me.