Lost in the Funhouse

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.

The song, more or less improvised, had to do with a young man who announces himself, in the first verse, to be a hickly swain new-come from the bosky outback: he sings what a splendid fellow he is, fit consort for a queen. In the second verse he’s accosted by an older woman who declares that while she doubtless appears a whore, she is in fact the Queen disguised; she takes the delighted singer to a crib in the common stews, which she asserts to be a wing of the palace reconstructed, at her order, to resemble a brothel: the trulls and trollops thereabout, she explains, are gentlewomen at their sport, the pimps and navvies their disguisèd noble lovers. Did the masquerade strike our minstrel as excessive? He was to bear in mind that the whims of royalty are like the gods’, mighty in implementation and consequence. Her pleasure, she discloses in the third verse, is that he should lie with her as with a woman of the streets, the newest fashion among great ladies: she’s chosen him for her first adventure of this sort because, while obviously not of noble birth, he’s of somewhat gentler aspect than the lot of commoners; to make the pretense real, he’s to pay her a handsome love-price, which she stipulates. The fellow laughs and agrees, but respectfully points out that her excessive fee betrays her innocence of prostitution; if verisimilitude is her object, she must accept the much lower wage he names. Not without expressions of chagrin the lady acquiesces, demanding only the right to earn a bonus for meritorious performance. In the fifth and sixth verses they set to, in manner described in salacious but musically admirable cadenzas; in the seventh the woman calls for fee and bonus, but her minstrel lover politely declines: to her angry protests he replies, in the eighth verse, that despite herself she makes love like a queen; her excellency shows through the cleverest disguise. How does he know? Because, he asserts, he’s not the rustic he has feigned, but an exile prince in flight from the wrath of a neighbor king, whose queen had been his mistress until their amour came to light. Begging the amazed and skeptic lady not to betray him to the local nobility so well masked, he pledges in return to boast to no one that he has lain with Her Majesty. As I fetched him from the stews wondering mellifluously whether his partner was a queen disguised as a prostitute or a prostitute disguised as a queen disguised et cetera, I was seized by two armored guards and fetched myself to a room above a nearby wineshop. The premises were squalid; the room was opulent; beside a window overlooking the Lion’s Gate sat a regal dame ensconced in handmaids.

What about the minstrel, she wanted to know: Was he a prince in mufti or a slickering rustic? Through my tremble I saw bright eyes in her sharp-bone countenance. I struck a chord to steady my hand, wrung rhymes from alarmed memory, took a breath, and sang in answer:

“As Tyrian robe may cloak a bumpkin heart,

So homespun hick may play the royal part.

Men may be kings in spirit or in mien.

Which make more kingly lovers? Ask a queen!

But don’t ask me which sort of queen to ask,” I added quickly; “I haven’t been in town long enough to learn the difference.”

The maids clapped hands to mouths; the lady’s eyes flashed, whether with anger or acknowledgment I couldn’t judge, “See he goes to school on the matter,” she ordered a plumpish gentleman across the room, eunuch by the look of him. Then she dismissed us, suddenly fretsome, and turned to the window, as one waiting for another to appear.

On with the story, cut corners: Clytemnestra herself it was, wont to rest from her market pleasures in that apartment. Her eunuch — Chief Minstrel, it turned out — gave me a gold piece and bade me report to him in Agamemnon’s scullery when I came to town, against the chance the whim should take Her Majesty to hear me again. Despite the goldhair wonder that rested on my chest as I reported this adventure next day, I was astonished after all that dreams come true.

“The King and Queen are real!” I marveled. “They want me to minstrel them!”

Fingering my forearm Merope said: “Because you’re the best.” I must go to town often, we agreed, perhaps even live there; on the other hand, it would be an error to put by my rustic origins and speech, as some did: in song, at least (where dwelt the only kings and courtiers we knew), such pretense always came a cropper. Though fame and clever company no doubt would change me in some ways, I should not change myself for them, it being on the one hand Merope’s opinion that worldliness too ardently pursued becomes affectation, mine on the other that innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.

“We’ll come back here often,” I told her, “to remind us who we are.”

She stroked my fingers, in those days scarcely calloused by the lyre. “Was the Queen very beautiful?”

I promised to notice next time. Soon after, we bid the goats goodbye and moved to Mycenae. Merope was frightened by the din of so many folk and wagons and appalled by everyone’s bad manners, until I explained that these were part of the excitement of city life. Every day, all day, in our mean little flat, I practiced my art, which before I’d turned to only when the mood was on me; eveningly I reported to the royal kitchen, where lingered a dozen other mountebanks and minstrels just in favor. Ill at ease in their company, I kept my own, but listened amazed to their cynic jokes about the folk they flattered in their lays, and watched with dismay the casual virtuosity with which they performed for one another’s amusement while waiting the royal pleasure. I hadn’t half their skill and wit! Yet the songs I made from my rural means — of country mouse and city mouse, or the war between the ants and the mice — were well enough received; especially when I’d got the knack of subtly mocking in such conceits certain figures in the court — those who, like the King, were deaf to irony — I’d see Clytemnestra’s eyes flash over her wine, as if to say, “Make asses of them all you please, but don’t think you’re fooling me!” and a coin or two would find their way meward. Flattering it was, for a nameless country lad, to hear the Queen herself praise his songs and predict a future for him in the minstrel way. When I got home, often not till sunup, I’d tell my sleepish darling all I’d seen and done, and there’d be love if the day hadn’t spent me, which alas it sometimes had. That first gold piece I fetched to a smith and caused to be forged into a ring, gift to the gods’ gift to me; but I mis-guessed the size, and fearing she’d lose it, Merope bade me wear it in her stead.

1½

Once upon a time I told tales straight out, alternating summary and dramatization, developing characters and relationships, laying on bright detail and rhetorical flourish, et cetera. I’m not that amateur at the Lion’s Gate; I know my trade. But I fear we’re too far gone now for such luxury, Helen and I; I must get to where I am; the real drama, for yours truly, is whether he can trick this tale out at all — not the breath-batingest plot in the world, but there we are. It’s an old story anyhow, this part of it; the corpus bloats with its like; I’ll throw you the bones, to flesh out or pick at as you will.

What I had in mind was an Anonymiad in nine parts, reflecting (so you were to’ve nudged your neighbor and observed) the nine amphorae and ditto muses; or seven parts plus head- and tailpiece: the years of my maroonment framed by its causes and prognosis. The prologue was to’ve established, hopefully has done, the ground-conceit and the narrative voice and viewpoint: a minstrel stuck on some Aegean clinker commences his story, in the process characterizing himself and hinting at the circumstances leading to his plight. Parts One through Four were to rehearse those circumstances, Five through Seven the stages of his island life vis-à-vis his minstrelling — innocent garrulity, numb silence, and terse self-knowledge, respectively — and fetch the narrative’s present time up to the narrator’s. The epilogue’s a sort of envoi to whatever eyes, against all odds, may one day read it. But though you’re to go through the several parts in order, they haven’t been set down that way: after writing the headpiece I began to fear that despite my planning I mightn’t have space enough to get the tale told; since it pivots about Part Four (the headpiece and three parts before, three parts and the tailpiece after), I divided Helen’s hide in half to insure the right narrative proportions; then, instead of proceeding with the exposition heralded at the tail of the headpiece, I took my cue from a remark I’d made earlier on, began in the middle, and wrote out Parts Five, Six, and Seven. Stopping at the head of the tailpiece, which I’m leaving blank for my last words, I returned to compose Parts One, Two, and Three, and the pivotal Part Four. But alas, there’s more to my matter and less to my means than I’d supposed; for a while at least I’ll have to tell instead of showing; if you must have dialogue and dashing about, better go to the theater.

So, so: the rest of Part One would’ve shown the minstrel, under the eunuch’s tutelage, becoming more and more a professional artist until he’s Clytemnestra’s pet entertainer. A typical paragraph runs: We got on, the Queen and I, especially when the Paris-thing blew up and Agamemnon started conscripting his sister-in-law’s old boyfriends. Clytemnestra wasn’t impressed by all the spear-rattling and the blather of National Honor, any more than I, and couldn’t’ve cared less what happened to Helen. She’d been ugly duckling in the house of Tyndareus, Clytie, second prize in the house of Atreus; she knew Agamemnon envied his brother, and that plenty of Trojan slave-girls would see more of the Family Jewels, while he was avenging the family honor, than she’d seen in some while. Though she’d got a bit hard-boiled by life in Mycenae, she was still a Grade-A figure of a woman; it’s a wonder she didn’t put horns on him long before the war.…

In addition to their expository function, this and like passages establish the minstrel’s growing familiarity and preoccupation with affairs of court. His corresponding professional sophistication, at expense of his former naive energy, was to be rendered as a dramatical correlative to the attrition of his potency with Merope (foreshadowed by the earlier ring-business and the Chief Minstrel’s eunuchhood), or vice versa. While still proud of her lover’s success, Merope declares in an affecting speech that she preferred the simple life of the goat pasture and the ditto songs he sang there, which now seem merely to embarrass him. The minstrel himself wonders whether the changes in his life and work are for the better: the fact is — as he makes clear on the occasion of their revisiting the herd — that having left the country but never, despite his success, quite joined the court, he feels out of place now in both. Formerly he sang of bills and nans as Daphnises and Chloes; latterly he sings of courtly lovers as bucks and does. His songs, he fears, are growing in some instances merely tricksy, in others crankish and obscure; moreover, the difficulties of his position in Mycenae have increased with his reputation: Agamemnon presses on the one hand for anti-Trojan songs in the national interest, Clytemnestra on the other for anti-Iliads to feed her resentment. Thus far he’s contrived a precarious integrity by satirizing his own dilemma, for example — but arthritis is retiring the old eunuch, and our narrator has permitted himself to imagine that he’s among the candidates for the Chief-Minstrelship, despite his youth: should he be so laureled, the problem of quid pro quo might become acute. All these considerations notwithstanding (he concludes), one can’t pretend to an innocence outgrown or in other wise retrace one’s steps, unless by coming full circle. Merope doesn’t reply; the minstrel attempts to entertain her with a new composition, but neither she nor the goats (who’d used to gather when he sang) seem much taken by it. The rest of the visit goes badly.

2

Part Two opens back in Mycenae, where all is a-bustle with war preparations. The minstrel, in a brilliant trope which he predicts will be as much pirated by later bards as his device of beginning in the middle, compares the scene to a beehive; he then apostrophizes on the war itself:

The war, the war! To be cynical of its warrant was one thing — bloody madness it was, whether Helen or Hellespont was the prize — and my own patriotism was nothing bellicose: dear and deep as I love Argolis, Troy’s a fine place too, I don’t doubt, and the Trojan women as singable as ours. To Hades with wars and warriors: I had no illusions about the expedition.

Yet I wanted to go along! Your dauber, may be, or your marble-cracker, can hole up like a sybil in a cave, just him and the muse, and get a lifeswork done; even Erato’s boys, if they’re content to sing twelve-liners all their days about Porphyria’s eyebrow and Althea’s navel, can forget the world outside their bedchambers. But your minstrel who aspires to make and people worlds of his own had better get to know the one he’s in, whether he cares for it or not. I believe I understood from the beginning that a certain kind of epic was my fate: that the years I was to spend, in Mycenae and here [i.e., here, this island, where we are now], turning out clever lyrics, satires, and the like, were as it were apprenticeships in love, flirtation-trials to fit me for master-husbandhood and the siring upon broad-hipped Calliope, like Zeus upon Alcmena, of a very Heracles of fictions. “First fact of our generation,” Agamemnon called the war in his recruitment speeches; how should I, missing it, speak to future times as the voice of ours?

He adds: Later I was to accept that I wasn’t of the generation of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and those other giant brawlers (in simple truth I was too young to sail with the fleet), nor yet of Telemachus and Orestes, their pale shadows. To speak for the age, I came to believe, was less achievement than to speak for the ageless; my membership in no particular generation I learned to treasure as a passport out of history, or exemption from the drafts of time. But I begged the King to take me with him, and was crestfallen when he refused. No use Clytemnestra’s declaring (especially when the news came in from Aulis that they’d cut up lphigenia) it was my clearsightedness her husband couldn’t stick, my not having hymned the bloody values of his crowd; what distressed me as much as staying home from Troy was a thing I couldn’t tell her of: Agamemnon’s secret arrangement with me … his reflections upon and acceptance of which end the episode — or chapter, as I call the divisions of my unversed fictions. Note that no mention is made of Merope in this excursus, which pointedly develops a theme (new to literature) first touched on in Part One: the minstrel’s yen for a broader range of life-experience. His feeling is that having left innocence behind, he must pursue its opposite; though his conception of “experience” in this instance is in terms of travel and combat, the metaphor with which he figures his composing-plans is itself un-innocent in a different sense.

The truth is that he and his youthful sweetheart find themselves nightly more estranged. Merope is unhappy among the courtiers and musicians, who speak of nothing but Mycenaean intrigues and Lydian minors; the minstrel ditto among everyone else, now that his vocation has become a passion — though he too considers their palace friends mostly fops and bores, not by half so frank and amiable as the goats. The “arrangement” he refers to is concluded just before the King’s departure for Aulis; Agamemnon calls for the youth and without preamble offers him the title of Acting Chief Minstrel, to be changed to Chief Minstrel on the fleet’s return. Astonished, the young man realizes, as after his good fortune at the Lion’s Gate, how much his expectations have in fact been desperate dream:

“I … I accept [I have him cry gratefully, thus becoming the first author in the world to reproduce the stammers and hesitations of actual human speech. But the whole conception of a literature faithful to daily reality is among the innovations of this novel opus]!“—whereupon the King asks “one small favor in return.” Even as the minstrel protests, in hexameters, that he’ll turn his music to no end beyond itself, his heart breaks at the prospect of declining the title after all:

Whereto, like windfall wealth, he had at once got used.

Tut, Agamemnon replies: though he personally conceives it the duty of every artist not to stand aloof from the day’s great issues, he’s too busy coping with them to care, and has no ear for music anyhow. All he wants in exchange for the proffered title is that the minstrel keep a privy eye on Clytemnestra’s activities, particularly in the sex and treason way, and report any infidelities on his return.

Unlikeliest commission [the minstrel exclaims to you at this point, leaving ambiguous which commission is meant]! The King and I were nowise confidential; just possibly he meant to console me for missing the fun in Troy (he’d see it so) by giving me to feel important on the home front. But chances are he thought himself a truly clever fellow for leaving a spy behind to watch for horns on the royal brow, and what dismayed me was less the ingenuousness of that plan — I knew him no Odysseus — as his assumption that from me he had nothing to fear! As if I were my gelded predecessor, or some bugger of my fellow man (no shortage of those in the profession), or withal so unattractive Clytemnestra’d never give me a tumble! And I a lyric poet, Aphrodite’s very barrister, the Queen’s Chief Minstrel!

No more is said on this perhaps surprising head for the present; significantly, however, his reluctance to compromise his professional integrity is expressed as a concern for what Merope will think. On the other hand, he reasons, the bargain has nothing to do with his art; he’ll compose what he’ll compose whether laureled or un, and a song fares well or ill irrespective of its maker. In the long run Chief-Minstrelships and the like are meaningless; precisely therefore their importance in the short. Muse willing, his name will survive his lifetime; he will not, and had as well seize what boon the meanwhile offers. He accepts the post on Agamemnon’s terms.

Part Three, consequently, will find the young couple moved to new lodgings in the palace itself, more affluent and less happy. Annoyance at what he knows would be her reaction has kept the minstrel from confiding to his friend the condition of his Acting Chief Minstrelship; his now-nearly-constant attendance on the

No use, this isn’t working either, we’re halfway through, the end’s in sight; I’ll never get to where I am; Part Three, Part Three, my crux, my core, I’m cutting you out; _____; there, at the heart, never to be filled, a mere lacuna.

4

The trouble with us minstrels is, when all’s said and done we love our work more than our women. More, indeed, than we love ourselves, else I’d have turned me off long since instead of persisting on this rock, searching for material, awaiting inspiration, scrawling out in nameless numbhood futile notes … for an Anonymiad, which hereforth, having made an Iphigenia of Chapter Three, I can transcribe directly to the end of my skin. To be moved to art instead of to action by one’s wretchedness may preserve one’s life and sanity; at the same time, it may leave one wretcheder yet.

My mad commission from Agamemnon, remember, was not my only occupation in that blank chapter; I was also developing my art, by trial, error, and industry, with more return than that other project yielded. I examined our tongue, the effects wrought in it by minstrels old and new and how it might speak eloquentest for me. I considered the fashions in art and ideas, how perhaps to enlist their aid in escaping their grip. And I studied myself, musewise at least: who it was spoke through the bars of my music like a prisoner from the keep; what it was he strove so laboriously to enounce, if only his name; and how I might accomplish, or at least abet, his unfettering. In sum I schooled myself in all things pertinent to master-minstrelling — save one, the wide world, my knowledge whereof remained largely secondhand. Alas: for where Fancy’s springs are unlevee’d by hard Experience they run too free, flooding every situation with possibilities until Prudence and even Common Sense are drowned.

Thus when it became apparent that Clytemnestra was indeed considering an affair — but with Agamemnon’s cousin, and inspired not by the passion of love, which was out of her line, but by a resolve to avenge the sacrifice of Iphigenia — and that my folly had imperiled my life, my title, and my Merope, I managed to persuade myself not only that the Queen might be grateful after all for my confession and declaration, but that Merope’s playing up to coarse Aegisthus in the weeks that followed might be meant simply to twit me for having neglected her and to spur my distracted ardor. A worldlier wight would’ve fled the polis: I hung on.

And composed! Painful irony, that anguish made my lyre speak ever eloquenter; that the odes on love’s miseries I sang nightly may have not only fed Clytemnestra’s passions and inspired Aegisthus’s, but brought Merope’s untimely into play as well, and wrought my downfall! He was no Agamemnon, Thyestes’s son, nor any matchwit for the Queen, but he was no fool, either; he assessed the situation in a hurry, and whether his visit to Mycenae had been innocent or not to begin with, he saw soon how the land lay, and stayed on. Ingenuous, aye, dear Zeus, I was ingenuous, but jealousy sharpens a man’s eyes: I saw his motive early on, as he talked forever of Iphigenia, and slandered Helen, and teased Merope, and deplored the war, and spoke as if jestingly of the power his city and Clytemnestra’s would have, joined under one ruler — all the while deferring to the Queen’s judgments, flattering her statecraft, asking her counsel on administrative matters … and smacking lips loudly whenever Merope, whom he’d demanded as his table-servant at first sight of her, went ‘round with the wine.

Me too he flattered, I saw it clear enough, complimenting my talent, repeating Clytemnestra’s praises, marveling that I’d made so toothsome a conquest as Merope. By slyly pretending to assume that I was the Queen’s gigolo and asking me with a wink how she was in bed, he got from me a hot denial I’d ever tupped her; by acknowledging then that a bedmate like Merope must indeed leave a man itchless for other company, he led me to hints of my guiltful negligence in that quarter. Thereafter he grew bolder at table, declaring he’d had five hundred women in his life and inviting Clytemnestra to become the five hundred first, if only to spite Agamemnon, whom he frankly loathed, and Merope the five hundred second, after which he’d seduce whatever other women the palace offered. Me, to be sure, he laughed, he’d have to get rid of, or geld like certain other singers; why didn’t I take a trip somewhere, knock about the world a bit, taste foreign cookery and foreign wenches, fight a few fist-fights, sire a few bastards? ‘Twould be the making of me, minstrelwise! He and the Queen meanwhile would roundly cuckold Agamemnon, just for sport of it, combine their two kingdoms, and, if things worked out, give hubby the ax and make their union permanent: Clytemnestra could rule the roost, and he’d debauch himself among the taverns and Meropes of their joint domain.

All this, mind, in a spirit of raillery; Clytemnestra would chuckle, and Merope chide him for overboldness. But I saw how the Queen’s eyes flashed, no longer at my cadenzas; and Merope’d say later, “At least he can talk about something besides politics and music.” I laughed too at his sallies, however anxioused by Merope’s pleasure in her new role, for the wretch was sharp, and though it sickened me to picture him atop the Queen — not to mention my frustrate darling! — heaving his paunch upon her and grinning through his whiskers, I admired his brash way with them and his gluttony for life’s delights, so opposite to my poor temper. Aye, aye, there was my ruin: I liked the scoundrel after all, as I liked Clytemnestra and even Agamemnon; as I liked Merope, quite apart from loving or desiring her, whose impish spirit and vivacity reblossomed, in Aegisthus’s presence, for the first time since we’d left the goats, and quite charmed the Mycenaean court. Most of all I was put down by the sheer energy of the lot of them: sackers of cities, breakers of vows, scorners of minstrels — admirable, fearsome! Watching Clytemnestra’s eyes, I could hear her snarl with delight beneath the gross usurper, all the while she contemned his luxury and schemed her schemes; I could see herself take ax to Agamemnon, laugh with Aegisthus at their bloody hands, draw him on her at the corpse’s side — smile, even, as she dirked him at the moment of climax! Him too I could hear laugh at her guile as his life pumped out upon her: bloody fine trick, Clytie girl, and enjoy your kingdom! And in Merope, my gentle, my docile, my honey: in her imperious new smile, in how she smartly snatched and bit the hand Aegisthus pinched her with, there began to stir a woman more woman than the pair of Leda’s hatchlings. No, no, I was not up to them, I was not up to life — but it was myself I despised therefor, not the world.

Weeks passed; Clytemnestra made no reference to my gaffe; Merope grew by turns too silent with me, too cranky, or too sweet. I began to imagine them both Aegisthus’s already; indeed, for aught I knew in dismalest moments they might be whoring it with every man in the palace, from Minister of Trade to horse-groom, and laughing at me with all Mycenae. Meanwhile, goat-face Aegisthus continued to praise my art (not without discernment for all his coarseness, as he had a good ear and knew every minstrel in the land) even as he teased my timid manner and want of experience. No keener nose in Greece for others’ weaknesses: he’d remark quite seriously, between jests, that with a little knowledge of the world I might become in fact its chief minstrel; but if I tasted no more of life than Clytemnestra’s dinner parties, of love no more than Merope’s favors however extraordinary, perforce I’d wither in the bud while my colleagues grew to fruition. Let Athens, he’d declare, be never so splendid; nonetheless, of a man whose every day is passed within its walls one says, not that he’s been to Athens, but that he’s been nowhere. Every song I composed was a draught from the wine jug of my experience, which if not replenished must anon run dry.…

“Speaking of wine,” he added one evening, “two of Clytie’s boats are sailing tomorrow with a cargo of it to trade along the coast, and I’m shipping aboard for the ride. Ten ports, three whorehouses each, home in two months. Why not go too?”

At thought of his departure my heart leaped up: I glanced at Merope, standing by with her flagon, and found her coolly smiling meward, no stranger to the plan. Aegisthus read my face and roared.

“She’ll keep, Minstrel! And what a lover you’ll be when you get back!”

Clytemnestra, too, arched brows and smiled. Under other circumstances I might’ve found some sort of voyage appealing, since I’d been nowhere; as was I wanted only to see Aegisthus gone. But those smiles — on the one hand of the queen of my person, on the other of that queen of my heart whom I would so tardily recrown — altogether unnerved me. I’d consider the invitation overnight, I murmured, unless the Queen ordered one course or the other.

“I think the voyage is a good idea,” Clytemnestra said promptly, and added in Aegisthus’s teasing wise: “With you two out of the palace, Merope and I can get some sleep.” My heart was stung by their new camaraderie and the implication, however one took it, that their sleep had been being disturbed. The Queen asked for Merope’s opinion.

“He’s often said a minstrel has to see the world,” my darling replied. Was it spite or sadness in the steady eyes she turned to me? “Go see it. It’s all the same to me.”

Prophetic words! How they mocked the siren Experience, whose song I heeded above the music of my own heart! To perfect the irony of my foolishness, Aegisthus here changed strategy, daring me, as it were, to believe the other, bitter meaning of her words, which I was to turn upon my tongue for many a desolated year.

“Don’t forget,” he reminded me with a grin: “I might be out to trick you! Maybe I’ll heave you overboard one night, or maroon you on a rock and have Merope to myself! For all you know, Minstrel, she might want to be rid of you; this trip might be her idea.…”

Limply I retorted, his was a sword could cut both ways. My accurst and heart-hurt fancy cast up reasons now for sailing in despite of all: my position in Mycenae was hot, and might be cooled by a sea journey; Agamemnon could scarcely blame me for his wife’s misconduct if I was out of town on her orders; perhaps there were Chief-Minstrelships to be earned in other courts; I’d achieve a taintless fame and send word for Merope to join me. At very least she would be safe from his predations while we were at sea; my absence, not impossibly, would make her heart fonder; I’d find some way to get us out of Mycenae when I returned, et cetera. Meantime … I shivered … the world, the world! My breath came short, eyes teared; we laughed, Aegisthus and I, and at Clytemnestra’s smiling hest drank what smiling Merope poured.

And next day we two set sail, and laughed and drank across the wine-dark sea to our first anchorage: a flowered, goated, rockbound isle. Nor did Aegisthus’s merry baiting cease when we put ashore with nine large amphorae: the local maidens, he declared, were timid beauties whose wont it was to spy from the woods when a ship came by; nimble as goddesses they were at the weaving of figured tapestries, which they bartered for wine, the island being grapeless; but so shy they’d not approach till the strangers left, whereupon they’d issue from their hiding places and make off with the amphorae, leaving in exchange a fair quantity of their ware. Should a man be clever enough to lay hold of them, gladly they’d buy their liberty with love; but to catch them was like catching at rainbows or the chucklings of the sea. What he proposed therefore was that we conceal us in a ring of wine jugs on the beach, bid the crew stand by offshore, snatch us each a maiden when they came a-fetching, and enjoy the ransom. Better yet, I could bait them with music, which he’d been told was unknown on the island.

“Unless you think I’m inventing all this to trick you,” he added with a grin. “Wouldn’t you look silly jumping out to grab an old wine merchant, or squatting there hot and bothered while I sail back to Mycenae!”

He dared me to think him honest; dared me to commit myself to delicious, preposterous fantasy. Ah, he played me like a master lyrist his instrument, with reckless inspiration, errless art.

“The bloody world’s a dare!” he went so far as to say, elbowing my arm as we ringed the jugs. “Your careful chaps never look foolish, but they never taste the best of it, either!” Think how unlikely the prospect was, he challenged me, that anything he’d said was true; think how crushinger it would be to be victim of my own stupendous gullibility more than of his guile; how bitterer my abandonment in the knowledge that he and Merope and Clytemnestra were not only fornicating all over the palace but laughing at my innocence, as they’d done from the first, till their sides ached. “On the other hand,” he concluded fiercely, and squeezed my shoulder, “think what you’ll miss if it turns out I was telling you the truth and you were too sensible to believe it! Young beauties, Minstrel, shy as yourself and sweet as a dream! That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Meropes by the dozen, ours for the snatching! Oh my gods, what the world can be, if you dare grab hold! And what a day!”

The last, at least, was real enough: never such a brilliant forenoon, sweet beach, besplendored sea! My head ached with indecision; the rough crew grinned by the boat, leaning on their oars. Life roared oceanlike with possibility: outrageous risks! outrageous joys! I stood transfixed, helpless to choose; Aegisthus snatched my lyre, clubbed me with a whang among the amphorae, sprang into the boat. I lay where felled, in medias res, and wept with relief to be destroyed at last; the sailors’ guffaws as they pulled away were like a music.

5

Long time I lay a-beachèd, even slept, and dreamed a dream more real than the itch that had marooned me. My privy music drew the island girls: smooth-limbed, merry-eyed Meropes; I seized the first brown wrist that came in reach; her sisters fled. Mute, or too frightened to speak, my victim implored me with her eyes. She was lovely, slender, delicate, and (farewell, brute dreams) real: a human person, sense and flesh, undeniable as myself and for aught I knew as lonely. A real particular history had fetched her to that time and place, as had fetched me; she too, not impossibly, was gull of the wily world, a trickèd innocent and hapless self-deceiver. Perhaps she had a lover, or dreamed of one; might be she was fond of singing, balmed fragile sense with art. She was in my power; I let her go; she stood a moment rubbing her wrist. I begged her pardon for alarming her; it was loneliness, I said, made my fancy cruel. My speech was no doubt foreign to her; no doubt she expected ravishment, having been careless enough to get caught; perhaps she’d wanted a tumbling, been slow a-purpose, what did I know of such matters? It would not have surprised me to see her sneer at a man not man enough to force her; perhaps I would yet, it was not too late; I reached out my hand, she caught it up with a smile and kissed it, I woke to my real-life plight.

In the days thereafter, I imagined several endings to the dream: she fled with a laugh or hoot; I pursued her or did not, caught her or did not, or she returned. In my favorite ending we became friends: gentle lovers, affectionate and lively. I called her by the name of that bee-sweet form I’d graced her with, she me my own in the clover voice that once had crooned it. I tried imagining her mad with passion for me, as women in song were for their beloveds — but the idea of my inspiring such emotion made me smile. No, I would settle for a pastoral affection spiced with wild seasons, as I’d known; I did not need adoring. We would wed, get sons and daughters; why hadn’t I Merope? We would even be faithful, a phenomenon and model to the faithless world.…

Here I’d break off with a groan, not that my bedreamèd didn’t exist (or any other life on my island, I presently determined, except wild goats and birds), but that she did, and I’d lost her. The thought of Merope in the swart arms of Aegisthus, whether or not she mocked my stranding, didn’t drive me to madness or despair, as I’d expected it would; only to rue that I’d not been Aegisthus enough to keep her in my own. Like him, like Agamemnon, like Iphigenia for all I knew, I had got my character’s desert.

Indeed, when I’d surveyed the island and unstoppered the first of the crocks, I was able to wonder, not always wryly, whether the joke wasn’t on my deceivers. It was a perfumed night; the sea ran hushed beneath a gemmèd sky; there were springs of fresh water, trees of wild fruit, vines of wild grape; I could learn to spear fish, snare birds, milk goats. My lyre was unstrung forever, but I had a voice to sing with, an audience once more of shaggy nans and sea birds — and my fancy to recompense for what it had robbed me of. There was all the world I needed; let the real one clip and tumble, burn and bleed; let Agamemnon pull down towns and rape the widows of the slain; let Menelaus shake the plain with war-shouts and Helen take on all comers; let maids grow old, princes rich, poets famous — I had imagination for realm and mistress, and her dower language! Isolated from one world by Agamemnon, from another by my own failings, I’d make Mycenaes of which I was the sole inhabitant, and sing to myself from their golden towers the one tale I knew.

Crockèd bravery; I smile at it now, but for years it kept me off the rocks, and though my moods changed like the sea-face, I accomplished much. Now supposing I’d soon be rescued I piled up beacons on every headland; now imagining a lengthy tenure, in fits of construction I raised me a house, learned to trap and fish, cultivated fruits and berries, made goatsmilk cheese and wrappings of hide — and filled jar after jar with the distillations of my fancy. Then would come sieges of despair, self-despisal, self-pity; gripped as by a hand I would gasp with wretchedness on my pallet, unable to muster resolve enough to leap into the sea. Impossible to make another hexameter, groan at another sundown, weep at another rosy-fingered dawn! But down the sun went, and re-rose; anon the wind changed quarter; I’d fetch me up, wash and stretch, and with a sigh prepare a fresh batch of ink, wherein I was soon busily aswim.

It was this invention saved me, for better or worse. I had like my fellow bards been used to composing in verse and committing the whole to memory, along with the minstrel repertoire. But that body of song, including my Mycenaean productions, rang so hollow in my stranded ears I soon put it out of mind. What are Zeus’s lecheries and Hera’s revenge, to a man on a rock? No past musings seemed relevant to my new estate, about which I found such a deal to say, memory couldn’t keep pace. Moreover, the want of any audience but asphodel, goat, and tern played its part after all in the despairs that threatened me: a man sings better to himself if he can imagine someone’s listening. In time therefore I devised solutions to both problems. Artist through, I’d been wont since boyhood when pissing on beach or bank to make designs and clever symbols with my water. From this source, as from Pegasus’s idle hooftap on Mount Helicon, sprang now a torrent of inspiration: using tanned skins in place of a sand-beach, a seagull-feather for my tool, and a mixture of wine, blood, and squid-ink for a medium, I developed a kind of coded markings to record the utterance of mind and heart. By drawing out these chains of symbols I could so preserve and display my tale, it was unnecessary to remember it. I could therefore compose more and faster; I came largely to exchange song for written speech, and when the gods vouchsafed me a further great idea, that of launching my productions worldward in the empty amphorae, they loosed from my dammèd soul a Deucalion-flood of literature.

For eight jugsworth of years thereafter, saving the spells of inclement weather aforementioned, I gloried in my isolation and seeded the waters with its get, what I came to call fiction. That is, I found that by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed who didn’t, I could achieve a lovely truth which actuality obscures — especially when I learned to abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events: Menelaus, Helen, the Trojan War. It was as if there were this minstrel and this milkmaid, et cetera; one could I believe draw a whole philosophy from that as if.

Two vessels I cargoed with rehearsals of traditional minstrelsy, bringing it to bear in this novel mode on my current circumstances. A third I freighted with imagined versions, some satiric, of “the first fact of our generation”: what was going on at Troy and in Mycenae. To the war and Clytemnestra’s treachery I worked out various dénouements: Trojan victories, Argive victories, easy and arduous homecomings, consequences tragical and comic. I wrote a version wherein Agamemnon kills his brother, marries Helen, and returns to Lacedemon instead of to Mycenae; another in which he himself is murdered by Clytemnestra, who arranges as well the assassination of the other expeditionary princes and thus becomes empress of both Hellas and Troy, with Paris as her consort and Helen as her cook — until all are slain by young Orestes, who then shares the throne with Merope, adored by him since childhood despite the difference in their birth. I was fonder of that one than of its less likely variants — such as that, in cuckold fury, Agamemnon butchers Clytemnestra’s whole ménage except Merope, who for then rejecting his advances is put ashore to die on the island where everyone supposes I’ve perished long since. We meet; she declares it was in hopes of saving me she indulged Aegisthus; I that it was the terror of her love and beauty drove me from her side. We embrace, sweetly as once in rosemaryland.… But I could only smile at such notions, for in my joy at having discovered the joy of writing, the world might’ve offered me Mycenae and got but a shrug from me. Indeed, one night I fancied I heard a Meropish voice across the water, calling the old name she called me by — and I ignored that call to finish a firelit chapter. Had Merope — aye, Trojan Helen herself — trespassed on my island in those days, I’d have flayed her as soon as I’d laid her, and on that preciousest of parchments scribed the little history of our love.

By the seventh jug, after effusions of religious narrative, ribald tale-cycles, verse-dramas, comedies of manners, and what-all, I had begun to run out of world and material — though not of ambition, for I could still delight in the thought of my amphorae floating to the wide world’s shores, being discovered by who knew whom, salvaged from the deep, their contents deciphered and broadcast to the ages. Even when, in black humors, I imagined my opera sinking undiscovered (for all I could tell, none might’ve got past the rocks of my island), or found but untranslated, or translated but ignored, I could yet console myself that Zeus at least, or Poseidon, read my heart’s record. Further, further: should the Olympians themselves prove but dreams of our minstrel souls (I’d changed my own conception of their nature several times), still I could soothe me with the thought that somewhere outside myself my enciphered spirit drifted, realer than the gods, its significance as objective and undecoded as the stars’.

Thus I found strength to fill two more amphorae: the seventh with long prose fictions of the realistical, the romantical, and the fantastical kind, the eighth with comic histories of my spirit, such of its little victories, defeats, insights, blindnesses, et cetera as I deemed might have impersonal resonation or pertinence to the world; I’m no Narcissus. But if I had lost track of time, it had not of me: I was older and slower, more careful but less concerned; as my craft improved, my interest waned, and my earlier zeal seemed hollow as the jugs it filled. Was there any new thing to say, new way to say the old? The memory of literature, my own included, gave me less and less delight; the “immortality” of even the noblest works I knew seemed a paltry thing. It appeared as fine a lot to me, and as poor, to wallow like Aegisthus in the stews as to indite the goldenest verses ever and wallow in the ages’ admiration. As I had used to burn with curiosity to know how it would be to be a Paris or Achilles, and later to know which of my imagined endings to the war would prove the case, but came not to care, so now I was no longer curious even about myself, what I might do next, whether anyone would find me or my scribbles. My last interest in that subject I exhausted with the dregs of Thalia, my eighth muse and mistress. It was in a fit of self-disgust I banged her to potsherds; her cargo then I had to add to Clio’s, and as I watched that stately dame go under beneath her double burden, my heart sank likewise into the dullest deep.

6

A solipsist had better get on well with himself, successfullier than I that ensuing season. Time was when I dreamed of returning to the world; time came when I scattered my beacons lest rescue interrupt me; now I merely sat on the beach, sundried, seasalted: a survival-expert with no will to live. My very name lost sense; anon I forgot it; had “Merope” called again I’d not have known whom she summoned. Once I saw a ship sail by, unless I dreamed it, awfully like Agamemnon’s and almost within hail; I neither hid nor hallooed. Had the King put ashore, I wouldn’t have turned my head. The one remaining amphora stood untapped. Was I thirty? Three thousand thirty? I couldn’t care enough to shrug.

Then one noon, perhaps years later, perhaps that same day, another object hove into my view. Pot-red, bobbing, it was an amphora, barnacled and sea-grown from long voyaging. I watched impassive while wind and tide fetched it shoreward, a revenant of time past; nor was I stirred to salvage when the surf broke it up almost at my feet. Out washed a parchment marked with ink, and came to rest on the foreshore — whence, finally bemused, I retrieved it. The script was run, in places blank; I couldn’t decipher it, or if I did, recognize it as my own, though it may have been.

No matter: a new notion came, as much from the lacunae as from the rest, that roused in me first an echo of my former interest in things, in the end a resolve which if bone-cool was ditto deep: I had thought myself the only stranded spirit, and had survived by sending messages to whom they might concern; now I began to imagine that the world contained another like myself. Indeed, it might be astrew with islèd souls, become minstrels perforce, and the sea a-clink with literature! Alternatively, one or several of my messages may have got through: the document I held might be no ciphered call for aid but a reply, whether from the world or some maroonèd fellow-inks-man: that rescue was on the way; that there was no rescue, for anyone, but my SOS’s had been judged to be not without artistic merit by some who’d happened on them; that I should forget about my plight, a mere scribblers’ hazard, and sing about the goats and flowers instead, the delights of island life, or the goings-on among the strandees of that larger isle the world.

I never ceased to allow the likelihood that the indecipherable ciphers were my own; that the sea had fertilized me as it were with my own seed. No matter, the principle was the same: that I could be thus messaged, even by that stranger my former self, whether or not the fact tied me to the world, inspired me to address it once again. That night I broke Calliope’s aging seal, and if I still forwent her nourishment, my abstinence was rather now prudential or strategic than indifferent.

7

That is to say, I began to envision the possibility of a new work, hopefully surpassing, in any case completing, what I’d done theretofore, my labor’s fulfillment and vindication. I was obliged to plan with more than usual care: not only was there but one jug to sustain my inspiration and bear forth its vintage; there remained also, I found to my dismay, but one goat in the land to skin for writing material. An aging nan she was, lone survivor of the original herd, which I’d slaughtered reckless in my early enthusiasm, supposing them inexhaustible, and only later begun to conserve, until in my late dumps I’d let husbandry go by the board with the rest. That she had no mate, and so I no future vellum, appalled me now; I’d’ve bred her myself hadn’t bigot Nature made love between the species fruitless, for my work in mind was no brief one. But of coming to terms with circumstance I was grown a master: very well, I soon said to myself, it must be managed by the three of us, survivors all: one old goat, one old jug, one old minstrel, we’d expend ourselves in one new song, and then an end to us!

First, however, the doe had to be caught; it was no accident she’d outlived the others. I set about constructing snares, pitfalls, blind mazes, at the same time laying ground-plans for the masterwork in my head. For a long time both eluded me, though vouchsafing distant glimpses of themselves. I’d named the doe Helen, so epic fair she seemed to me in my need, and cause of so great vain toil, but her namesake had never been so hard to get: Artemis had fit her cold fleetness better; Iphigenia my grim plans for her, to launch with her life the expedition of my fancy. Tragedy and satire both deriving, in the lexicon of my inventions, from goat, like the horns from Helen’s head, I came to understand that the new work would combine the two, which I had so to speak kept thitherto in their separate amphorae. For when I reviewed in my imagination the goings-on in Mycenae, Lacedemon, Troy, the circumstances of my life and what they had disclosed to me of capacity and defect, I saw too much of pity and terror merely to laugh; yet about the largest hero, gravest catastrophe, sordidest deed there was too much comic, one way or another, to sustain the epical strut or tragic frown. In the same way, the piece must be no Orphic celebration of the unknowable; time had taught me too much respect for men’s intelligence and resourcefulness, not least my own, and too much doubt of things transcendent, to make a mystic hymnist of me. Yet neither would it be a mere discourse or logic preachment; I was too sensible of the great shadow that surrounds our little lights, like the sea my island shore. Whimsic fantasy, grub fact, pure senseless music — none in itself would do; to embody all and rise above each, in a work neither longfaced nor idiotly grinning, but adventuresome, passionately humored, merry with the pain of insight, wise and smiling in the terror of our life — that was my calm ambition.

And to get it all out of and back into one jug, on a single skin! Every detail would need be right, if I was to achieve the effects of epic amplitude and lyric terseness, the energy of innocence and experience’s restraint. Adversity generates guileful art: months I spent considering and rejecting forms, subjects, viewpoints, and the rest, while I fashioned trap after trap for Helen and sang bait-songs of my plans — both in vain. Always she danced and bleated out of reach, sometimes so far away I confused her with the perchèd gulls or light-glints on the rock, sometimes so near I saw her black eyes’ sparkle and the gray-pink cartography of her udder. Now and then she’d vanish for days together; I’d imagine her devoured by birds, fallen to the fishes, or merely uncapturable, and sink into despondencies more sore than any I’d known. My “Anonymiad,” too, I would reflect then (so I began to think of it, as lacking a subject and thus a name), was probably impossible, or, what was worse, beyond my talent. Perhaps, I’d tell myself bitterly, it had been written already, even more than once; for all I knew the waters were clogged with its like, a menace to navigation and obstruction on the wide world’s littoral.

I myself may already have written it; cast it forth, put it out of mind, and then picked it up where it washed back to me, having circuited Earth’s countries or my mere island. I yearned to be relieved of myself: by heart failure, bolt from Zeus, voice from heaven. None forthcoming, I’d relapse into numbness, as if, having abandoned song for speech, I meant now to give up language altogether and float voiceless in the wash of time like an amphora in the sea, my vision bottled. This anesthesia proved my physician, gradually curing me of self-pity. Anon Helen’s distant call would put off my torpor; I resumed the pursuit, intently, thoughtfully — but more and more detached from final concern for its success.

For just this reason, maybe, I came at last one evening to my first certainty about the projected work: that it would be written from my only valid point of view, first person anonymous. At that moment Anonymiad became its proper name. At that moment also, singing delightedly my news, I stumbled into one of the holes I’d dug for Helen. With the curiosity of her species she returned at once down the path wherealong I’d stalked her, to see why I’d abandoned the hunt. Indeed, as if to verify that I was trapped or dead, she peered into my pit. But I was only smiling, and turning on my finger Merope’s ring; when she came to the edge I seized her by the pastern, pulled her in. A shard of deceasèd Thalia, long carried on me, ended her distress, which whooped deaf-heavenward like glee.

TAILPIECE

It had been my plan, while the elements cured her hide, to banquet on Helen’s carcass and drink my fill of long-preserved Calliope. And indeed, for some days after my capture I sated every hunger and slaked every thirst, got drunk and glutted, even, as this work’s headpiece attests. But it was not as it would have been in callower days. My futile seed had soured Calliope, and long pursuit so toughened Helen I’d as well made a meal of my writing-hand. Were it not too late for doubts — and I not flayed and cured myself, by sun, salt, and solitude, past all but the memory of tenderness — I’d wonder whether I should after all have skinned and eaten her, whom too I saw I had misnamed. We could perhaps have been friends, once she overcame her fright; I’d have had someone to talk to when Calliope goes, and with whom to face the unwritable postscript, fast approaching, of my Anonymiad.

Whereto, as I forewarned, there’s no dénouement, only a termination or ironical coda. My scribbling has reached the end of Helen; I’ve emptied Calliope upon the sand. It was my wish to elevate maroonment into a minstrel masterpiece; instead, I see now, I’ve spent my last resources contrariwise, reducing the masterpiece to a chronicle of minstrel misery. Even so, much is left unsaid, much must be blank.

No matter. It is finished, Apollo be praised; there remains but to seal and launch Calliope. Long since I’ve ceased to care whether this is found and read or lost in the belly of a whale. I have no doubt that by the time any translating eyes fall on it I’ll be dust, along with Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Agamemnon … and Merope, if that was your name, if I haven’t invented you as myself. I could do well by you now, my sweet, to whom this and all its predecessors are a continuing, strange love letter. I wish you were here. The water’s fine; in the intervals of this composition I’ve taught myself to swim, and if some night your voice recalls me, by a new name, I’ll commit myself to it, paddling and resting, drifting like my amphorae, to attain you or to drown.

There, my tale’s afloat. I like to imagine it drifting age after age, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire. Now, perhaps, it bumps the very wharfpiles of Mycenae, where my fatal voyage began. Now it passes a hairsbreadth from the unknown man or woman to whose heart, of all hearts in the world, it could speak fluentest, most balmly — but they’re too preoccupied to reach out to it, and it can’t reach out to them. It drifts away, past Heracles’s pillars, across Oceanus, nudged by great and little fishes, under strange constellations bobbing, bobbing. Towns and statues fall, gods come and go, new worlds and tongues swim into light, old perish. Then it too must perish, with all things deciphered and undeciphered: men and women, stars and sky.

Will anyone have learnt its name? Will everyone? No matter. Upon this noontime of his wasting day, between the night past and the long night to come, a noon beautiful enough to break the heart, on a lorn fair shore a nameless minstrel

Wrote it.