The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  In our harassed epoch Securitas can count on multitudes of followers. We value security, this lottery in which the winning number is just a stake in a game, a pitiful token that entitles the holder to continue the game as long as the hand continues to serve him.

  Security, what is security? A faint-hearted formula for happiness. Life without struggle.

  ATLAS

  IT IS DIFFICULT, truly, to be reconciled to sky-high injustice.

  Consider: The names of Achilles, Prometheus, and Heracles immediately evoke a spontaneous reaction. Because of the pen of Camus, Sisyphus became an allegory of our lives. But about Atlas, not a word. He does not speak to our hearts and minds. He is an exile from the imagination, an outcast of gods and of men. A remarkably small number of sculptures, frescoes, and poems have been devoted to him.

  I think the main reason for this neglect is an immobility that is not very attractive; his frozen, silent suffering. Atlas’s brother Prometheus, fastened to his rock, splendidly cursed the gods. The one possible action for those who are fettered is speech. Prometheus understood this very well: he moved the ether, and the ether carried the thunder of his curses.

  Odysseus, Jason, Theseus, and so many other long-distance runners of mythology became the heroes of dramas. Never Atlas. It was Aristotle who closed the doors of art to him; in the Poetics Aristotle1 remarked that there is no tragedy without action, although tragedy is still possible without personalities.

  The whole character of Atlas, his entire being, is contained in the act of carrying. This has little pathos, and moreover it is quite common. The titan reminds us of poor people who are constantly wrestling with burdens. They carry chests, bundles, boxes on their backs, they push them, or drag them behind, all the way to mysterious caves, cellars, shacks, from which they come out after a moment even more loaded, and so on to infinity.

  Atlas supports the heavenly firmament. This is his punishment, his curse and profession. No one is grateful to him for it. No one praises him, no one even encourages him. We have become used to it. This is how it should be. We say: someone must do it.

  We don’t know how he looks. Scholars have devoted so much attention to examining the internal life of the earthworm, the rat, the domestic goose; but they are silent when asked about Atlas’s behavior. Does he ever shift his weight? Are his eyelids tightly clenched together? Is the sound from his chest a hoarse breathing, or a moan? Salty drops run down his face: sweat or tears?

  Many maintain that Atlas is not distinguished by a lavish imagination, and most likely this deters people—there is nothing sensational. Because we know so little about him, let us state cautiously that cunning, a penchant for intrigue, the hatching of plots and coups d’état were not granted to him by nature. But can we reproach him for this? After all, the structure of the world is woven from contradictory elements that mutually support each other: evil and good, inertia and movement, intelligence and dullness.

  What is he thinking? Men sentenced to heavy labor have neither the strength nor desire for thought. With great probability one can suppose that a plan like that of Samson never dawned in the head of Atlas. Samson was put in prison, waited for his sentence, and so had time to forge his revenge. Atlas does not have time. He has only eternity. Atlas endures. Some say, it is good this way.

  He managed to free himself from the oppression of fate only once. The story is known, so we will tell it in a considerably abbreviated version.

  It was like this: Heracles had to obtain a golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides for King Eurystheus. The garden was not far from the permanent station of Atlas; moreover, the Hesperides were his daughters. Complicated transactions depending on trust are best arranged within the family. Heracles promised to take the place of Atlas during his absence, in exchange for friendly help in getting the desired fruit.

  Atlas’s journey to the garden of the Hesperides was certainly his most marvelous experience. He walked lightly—a winged column—through a world rid of the burden as if it was made of dew, of azure air, and light. He felt the wonderful weightlessness of all things. For the first time the accursed sky seemed ethereal, distant, and indeed beautiful.

  When he returned to Heracles, intoxicated and happy, he naively offered to take the apple to Eurystheus himself. The cunning hero agreed. He asked Atlas to hold the vault only for a moment because he had to shift the pillow on top of his head. It was done—and at this point the unscrupulous hero left the titan. Everything returned to the old cosmic order.

  The whole story is not very edifying morally, and socially it is even distasteful. No one knows why it is told to children. Also, it is difficult to understand why the hero of the beautiful metope at Olympia, “Atlas Bringing the Apple of the Hesperides,” is the deceitful Heracles, the one who is guilty. He is represented as a handsome man and an athlete, while Atlas, on the other hand, is shown as a rather rough-hewn, clumsy hulk. Implacable time has damaged the metope, and the figure of Atlas has suffered the most.

  Later the motif was taken up by generations of architects, and in the temples of Agrigentum2, Atlas was given the subordinate role of a cantilever—a male caryatid. His mythological dimension was reduced. Once again he was treated unjustly—it was forgotten, it seems, that supporting the heavens is something completely different from serving as an ornament of a façade. He was given the ambiguous, abject function of holding up balconies and stairs in the palaces of lazy aristocrats and wealthy parvenus, not to mention banks, police headquarters, and ministries of public cruelty.

  His solitude is desertlike. Neither day nor night brings him relief. Like all those who fulfill an unattractive duty for a long time, he is beyond the limits of our compassion and understanding. The only companion to Atlas is his burden.

  It is not even certain if he would be happy to learn that in a recently discovered Hittite epic, a distant cousin has been found with the sonorous name of Upellura3. He, too, carries. This may be verified in reports of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, these appear in very limited editions and are not intended for manual laborers.

  Gods, titans, heroes—O what a fascinating and rich gallery of psychological deviations! Their world swarms with monomaniacs, paranoiacs, melancholics, schizophrenics, not to mention such gentle deviations as alcoholics and erotomaniacs. Against this colorful background, Atlas appears as a faintly etched figure. He is the catatonic of mythology. A catatonic, and a porter.

  And yet I think he deserves a better place in human memory. Nor am I certain that he was justly refused the status of a symbol. After all, Atlas represents a very large part of humanity. With minimum good will on our part, and with imagination, he could become the patron of those who are terminally ill, patron of those condemned to life in prison, those who are hungry from birth to death, the humiliated, all those who are deprived of rights, whose only virtue is mute, helpless, and immovable—up to a point—anger.

  PROMETHEUS

  A WASTE LAND. HERMES to Prometheus:

  “Now you see why it all ended up like this. You were too impatient, Prometheus.” When he says this, the air is filled with the condemned man’s cry. Hermes allows it—so that the dialogue can be harmonious and fluent.

  “So now you understand. You should have carried out your plan gradually, slowly, one five-year-plan after another, from time immemorial to time immemorial. Initiating ever new circles of humankind, so that if it was ever exposed, it would be necessary to set up a monstrous show trial to punish those guilty of stealing the gods’ secret.

  A cry from Prometheus.

  “If the truth be told, the gods reconciled themselves easily with the theft of fire. It was quickly degraded and chased into the kitchen. All it could achieve was to heat a pot. So it wasn’t the heavenly fire that consumed cities. By now everyone has forgotten that the gods’ ire was provoked by Prometheus’ theft of memory.”

  A cry. The dialogue continues.

  “And from memory, conscience is born,” Hermes goes on, drawing
out the vowels as if the word itself was delectable, “at first inconspicuous, it grows like fire and envelops the entire soul at moments of trial. Once awakened, it cannot be extinguished. It’s what makes Orestes wander the roads seeking forgiveness. That’s what you have made of man. The gods have no conscience.”

  A cry from Prometheus.

  Hermes departs. He has never come to know the charms of conscience, either.

  OLD PROMETHEUS1

  HE IS WRITING his memoirs. In them he tries to explain the position of the hero in a system of necessity, to reconcile the mutually contradictory concepts of existence and fate.

  The fire is crackling cheerfully in the hearth; in the kitchen his wife is bustling—a gushy girl who couldn’t bear him a son but consoles herself that she will enter history anyway. Preparations are underway for a dinner to which the local priest has been invited as well as the pharmacist who is now Prometheus’s closest friend.

  The fire crackles in the hearth. On the wall, a stuffed eagle and a letter of gratitude from a tyrant of the Caucasus, who succeeded in burning a rebel city thanks to Prometheus’s invention.

  Prometheus chuckles to himself. This is now his only way of expressing his quarrel with the world.

  ARACHNE

  ARACHNE WAS THE daughter of a paint merchant in one of the cities of Ionia. She studied in the weaving department of the Divine Academy of Fine Arts in Athens, where she graduated summa cum laude and was told she would have a dazzling career. Who could have guessed that this forecast would be fulfilled in such a catastrophic fashion. The status quo is a fragile tissue.

  Even more so, however, in Arachne’s imprudent head. Her father quite understandably kindled her fame for the sake of advertising, so that both of them strode together across the scrap of Ionian land torn apart by barbarians, as if passing through time in a cloud of Melian white, Synopian ocher, Sorrento blue, and Tintoretto green, as yet unrealized, it is true, but already intuited.

  Her unabashed and excessively loud renown reached the ears of Athens’ patroness of the arts, who demanded that there be a competition. In an altered aspect she appeared in Arachne’s studio. They were both to weave a veil with a name that sounded banal but turned out to be deceptive. Arachne was unaware of the strategem and showed a juicy piece of work, representing the erotic life of the gods. Her knowledge of erotic figures and other details of the gods she portrayed was truly rich and unsettlingly bold.

  Athena, sensitive to the curious relation between art and truth, did not want art to conflict with manners. She violently rejected those daring scenes, ripped out Arachne’s weaving—and it is said the bold artist hanged herself on the yarn. According to another version, Athena transformed Arachne into a spider.

  Diego Velázquez de Silva was an artist who in incomparable fashion reconciled the contradictory phases of art and life at court in his life; loyalty—and betrayal, heat—and cold. In his great canvas Las Hilanderas1 we see the interior of the royal workshop of Saint Elizabeth, where young girls are spinning yarn. In the background there is a scene that may represent Athena’s judgment of Arachne. It does not represent it, but removes it into a curious isolation.

  And here strays the mystery of that extraordinary judgment: abstraction, death, geometry, a turning away from all the various and diverse forms of life.

  THE HISTORY OF THE MINOTAUR1

  THE TRUE HISTORY of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A. He was—despite later rumors—the authentic son of King Minos and Pasiphaë. The little boy was born healthy, but with an abnornally large head—which fortune-tellers read as a sign of his future wisdom. In fact with the years the Minotaur grew into a robust, slightly melancholy idiot. The king decided to give him up to be educated as a priest. But the priests explained that they couldn’t accept the feeble-minded prince, for that might diminish the authority of religion, already undermined by the invention of the wheel.

  Minos then brought in the engineer Daedalus, who was fashionable in Greece at the time as the creator of a popular branch of pedagogical architecture. And so the labyrinth arose. Its system of pathways, from elementary to more and more complicated, its variations in levels and rungs of abstraction, was supposed to train the Minotaur prince in the principles of correct thinking.

  So the unhappy prince wandered along the pathways of induction and deduction, prodded by his preceptors, gazing blankly at ideological frescos. He didn’t get them at all.

  Having exhausted all his resources, King Minos resolved to get rid of this disgrace to the royal line. He brought in (again from Greece, which was known for its able men) the ace killer Theseus. And Theseus killed the Minotaur. On this point myth and history agree.

  Through the labyrinth—now a useless primer—Theseus makes his way back carrying the big, bloody head of the Minotaur with its goggling eyes, in which for the first time wisdom had begun to sprout, of a kind ordinarily attributed to experience.

  ACHILLES. PENTHESILEA1

  WHEN ACHILLES PIERCED Penthesilea’s breast with his short sword, he twisted it—as is proper—three times in the wound, and saw—in a sudden exaltation—that the queen of the Amazons was beautiful.

  He laid her carefully on the sand, took off her heavy helmet, shook her hair loose, and delicately laid her hands on her chest. However, he did not have the courage to close her eyes.

  He looked at her once more with a valedictory gaze and, as if compelled by a strange force, began to weep—as neither he himself nor any other hero of that war had ever wept—with a voice subdued and incantatory, low-pitched and helpless, resounding with lamentation and a cadence of remorse unknown to the son of Thetis. The vowels of that lament fell on Penthesilea’s neck, breast, and knees like leaves and wrapped themselves around her cooling body.

  She herself was preparing for the Eternal Hunt in forests beyond. Her eyes not yet closed looked from far off at the victor with stubborn, clear blue—loathing.

  HECUBA1

  TIME—IN EVERY DECENT epic story it stands aside like a valet, beyond people and beyond objects. Only catastrophes make it leap up from a place, then all of a sudden it forces its way inside with all its destructive power—it breaks, tramples, changes everything to ruins.

  Here is Troy—burning briskly in the crash of collapsing roofs. The time of fire: fast, like wind out of breath, the color of black and red roses. One can hardly hear the moans of the defeated and the victors’ shouts.

  In the foreground sits desperate Hecuba. A Greek thug has thrown the bloody corpse of her small grandson2 onto her lap.

  Now we expect the cloak binding sky and earth together to be torn by a voice so powerful that—for a moment—everything stands motionless. But there is no voice, just excruciating silence.

  Hecuba tears her peplos to shreds, and with tender carefulness her long, agile fingers wrap the little body in bandages, so no blood can be seen, nothing to cause dread. She whispers the name of the boy as she does it, and the whisper, of three repeated syllables, is like a lullaby.

  Her rough skin of an old woman has locked itself tightly shut, and she returns to the remote time of childhood, that time of miracles when it is possible to bring every inanimate object to life.

  In a moment the slaughterers will come to Hecuba and remove her toy from her hands. Then the kind-hearted gods will transform her into a dog, a bitch, because only the great heart of an animal can contain so much misfortune. Then to find consolation she will throw herself into the sea.

  PHYA1

  EVERYTHING HAPPENED SO suddenly that in sacred legend Phya was irrevocably the girl kidnapped and taken to heaven in full daylight.

  This happened without any visible cause, at least for the inhabitants of the part of Attica where there were vineyards, and sheep were pastured—this was Phya’s melancholy chore, in the bright sunlight and the shade gently shifting as on a sundial, which did not exist at that time.

  One day some riders on lathered horses arrived at her parents’ fence. A shor
t while later they vanished as quickly as they’d appeared, taking Phya with them. From beginning to end, the heroine of the situation was entirely unaware of what was going on around her. Which was quite a lot.

  Taken to a barracks built near the city walls she had no time to cool off, before she was dressed in a gold-embroidered white robe and put on a chariot. In her right hand she held the reins, in her left, a lightning flash ending in a glittering knife edge.

  The team drove out into the streets of Athens. It proceeded silently amid thickening crowds, from which cries of enthusiasm and hostility could be heard. The name of Pisistratus was shouted.

  Escorted by pages, the team moved slowly. It turned into the street where pan-Athenian processions2 were moving along.

  And here the first stone hit it.

  SACRIFICE

  STAINED TABLECLOTHS, TRACES of cigarettes around the small plates on the conference table of Olympus, unchanged napkins, wilting flowers in crystal vases, and a monotonous menu, a poor choice of wine—that in itself bore witness to the gods’ profound crisis. Gods didn’t turn up or willfully left the conferences, they partook of the gods’ gifts unaesthetically (and against the rules), they slept at the table or emitted loud bodily noises. The fate of the world was slipping out of their hands.

  Zeus met with Hermes tête à tête more often than usual.

  “We could have foreseen such an end of the world,” Zeus said to Hermes, “we’re not immortal, hélas, but the way this is proceeding is abominable in form; it’s shocking. We will leave nothing behind, not even a fond memory. But not everything in our time was bad—we have to do something about it,” Zeus said to Hermes.