‘Peace? Never! I know no peace! War is peace! Peace is war!’ I came out with it again, the terrible Troy war-cry, and swooped down on them like an eagle.
It took a thunderbolt to convince me. Zeus, the old flame-thrower, let loose. The earth rose to meet the clouds and cratered between me and the enemy. Pallas Athene pointed to the huge hole in the ground.
‘Don’t cross that line, Odysseus – unless it’s to shake hands. You’ve had your war. And you’ve had your revenge. A double whammy. Epic enough for one man, I should say. And for a lifetime, don’t you think? No more soldiering for you, old son. And no more roving either. You can go home.’
Sometimes you do think you hear gods speaking to you. Sometimes you listen to the voices in your head. Other times you don’t.
EXODE
THE LAST VOYAGE
Blue water and the four points – and the skylines all around, empty, alluring, inklings of adventure, impossible to abjure. That was the old life, the easy life, tough as it seemed at the time. Once it was all that mattered. Fill the benches, grip the oars, set a course for nowhere, pulling as one on the polished pine, bury the blade in the waves and feel the whole ocean suddenly make love to you, sweet as the first thrust, mysterious, deep. Nothing to equal it, the magic of that moment, not knowing where it will take you, but knowing it will be new, forbidden, forbidding, fresh as first love.
And now? Now I sit here on the hillside under the sun, waiting for death and thinking, thinking now of the dead seasons turning over like waves in my head. My head . . . Ah, yes, I had a head once like the ways of the sea. I was wily, I could slip through your fingers. They used to call me the old fox, the one of twists and turns, the man of many guiles, the talker, the thinker, the teller of stories. Thought and action make strange benchmates, but they teamed up, a fine match, a marriage for life, so I thought once.
Once there was no parting, no separating them, one from the other, the hand quick as the brain, the arm supple and strong, and the long blue straits and barren fields of the sea suddenly a bursting harvest – monsters, gods, women, wine, songs, the whole catastrophe, remember?
I remember, yes. And luck? Was there luck on my side too? No, there’s no such thing as luck; there’s only bad luck. Like losing your head. Hector’s head once trundled in the dust and heaps of men keeled over. And the killers were killed in their turn. The difference between me and Hector or Paris or Achilles? I survived. Simple. That was the trick. Survival.
That meant keeping your head. It meant resisting the temptation to sleep, to forget yourself and your humanity. That was all too easy. The forgetters were everywhere; the sea swarmed with them – Aeolian incest, the Cimmerians in their oblivious mist, the Sirens in their specious fields, the Cyclops in his stoppered cave, Circe, Calypso, hidden deep in the sea’s blue navel, the whole ocean their loom. Easy to have stayed. But I’d sooner have died where the spears flew thickest.
Except that I never wanted to be a hero, not me. Heroes are not survivors. Heroes are dead meat. They’re losers. They get great big grave-mounds, huge ones on headlands. Sailors salute them on approach. Then they sail on, leaving them grinning in their graves, beneath the bluebell and the bee. Sailors are survivors. They’ve learned the trick of passing by, or of leaving islands, islands that incarcerate, incinerate, turn you to ash. Even Nausicaa’s. And she was a good girl. Standing naked in front of her as she kissed my briny beard and saw a husband beneath the sea-scum – yes, that was thrilling, I admit. But not thrilling enough, not enough to keep me, not enough to beach the keel and leave the oar to flake and blister in the sun and rain.
The way home was strewn with thrills. But there was nothing to compare with that first night back, the night I spent with the swineherd in his hut, when the workers came home tired, and we all lay by the fire after supper with the rain pounding down outside and the winds howling and me telling stories of Troy, lies mostly. That was a lot more tempting. That, you could say, was the real thrill – returning to the world of hard work and sore rest and meat and drink, with the fire blazing and the wild weather rattling the roof.
Not that even that was enough to hold me, though it was poetry enough at the time, for a man like me. Not for me the poetry of heroes – all those proud captains who were the cocks of their own middens, the plumed glory boys. Where are they now? Hell’s crawling with them. I had more nous, more brain than bronze. They were brilliant in action. But they never hunkered down on a hillside beneath stars, like me, and thought, and thought. . .
About Troy. And all that. I had to go back, naturally, as veterans do. Truth is, we never really left. Or we left something big behind us. Even so, it was strange to stand again on the site of all that conflict. So little to show for the suffering. Still some bones beneath the once high battlements. Small bones. And then there were the Greek war dead, the mounds, a cemetery under the clouds, cared for by lizards.
The sky stands empty over Troy. Looking at it now, you can’t help thinking that there could have been peace. We all wanted an exit strategy. Instead, Greeks and Trojans and all their allies lay sprawled in the dust, face down, belly up, next to one another. Agamemnon was why. And he said Helen was why. But in the end, nobody needs a why. We go along with it because deep down war is what we need and it’s what we do. Peace is what we put up with once we’ve done it, once we’ve held the funerals for all those shattered lives and all that waste of people.
I broke down in Scheria when I remembered it, and the pity of it, and I wept real tears. Penelope stitched them in threads of silver, big glittering beads and droplets on the web. If only she could see me now, she’d give me golden tears, more precious than greed or glory or the dreams of wine, and I’d cry all over again as I did years ago for my fallen friends, while the gods, fiery, flaky, elements of ourselves, sat on our prows and laughed, spat on by sea-spire, drenched with spray, laughing their old heads off and reaching out to us as we toiled at the oars, still laughing amid the spindrift, shaking their immortal locks, extending their easy, chiselled and indulgent arms.
Oh, I could have wept at many a revisited scene of past exploits, scenes that lacerate, as the poet says, simply by being over, and not because they meant so much at the time. Why would I wax sentimental, for example, about a cannibal? And yet the cave of the Cyclops was the scene of one of my best triumphs. And there I was friends with perished people. Can’t a man enjoy his great deeds? And even make out of them some sweet philosophy? I could tell you, if you wanted to believe me, that I did go back to Crete and found Polyphemus still alive, and much changed.
‘Ah, is it you, Odysseus? Or Noman, should I say? I thought I recognised your voice. Let me assure you, the volcano you made of my eye no longer troubles me. The eye is extinct. It’s long plugged – only cold ash now, and silver scarring, rather like Calypso’s loom and hearth will look like when you get there, as I know you will. I know many things now, which were forbidden to me in my ignorance and my brutality. So you see, I have to thank you. And I can promise you Poseidon will not be pursuing you. These days I’d find sight something of a distraction, I must confess. I’m content to sit and think.’
Believable? It’s asking a lot, and I was always such a liar. That was another of my survival instincts. But I did go back to Circe’s place, and I could have cried there too for the lady who learned to love me, the maker of spells who fell spellbound herself when she met her destiny, the only man who could set her free to love and not to conquer, not to subdue. I could have cried because I failed to stay with her. But I knew I was not in love again. If I’d cried I’d have been crying for myself, for lost life, for beautiful youth, not for the girl but for the passing of things, not just love and vigour and hope, but all things.
I came to Calypso’s cave. The hearth was cold, the lyre strings shattered and tangled, the loom cobwebbed. Where was she? Gone was Eros, gone was Himeros, gone were love and desire for the nymph of the lovely locks. But I’d made that decision long ago. There was a price to be pa
id in her bed, and the price was forgetting. Even Argus didn’t forget. And is a man any better than a dog? Some men are worth a lot less. While I slept there with Calypso, there on that very bed, Penelope was weeping for a pile of white bones, rotted by the rains, when the bones not only had flesh on them, and made passionate love, but had the chance to live forever, as we long to believe that bones will do. I was on an island of immortality which kept me from the mud and muddle of life, cut me off from flesh and blood, the fury and the mire. But what man wants the cool nudity of the sex goddess? I wept then because I wanted to return to real life – sweet simply because it ends, because it’s fragile, precarious, unpredictable. And I yearned again for the trials and wanderings renewed time and again, the earth flinty beneath my feet and the slow ocean rolling underneath me as it has rolled under others for centuries, millennia, rolling me on to the next experience.
And Helen. What of Helen? Yes, I stopped there too, on my last journey, a fly on the wall in Sparta, because I needed to know what it all adds up to when a thousand ships are launched, and thousands die, and cities fall. Was it all for love? They said the long connubial years became a bore – to both, and to all who stayed, and to those who danced attendance on the pair. But I wanted to find out for myself if that was true.
It was. Menelaus out-Nestored Nestor in garrulity. He sacked a hundred Troys between noon and supper, and sacked each one a hundred times. He grew deaf to her nagging, she grew shrill to his deafness. Her golden voice cracked. And both were old. He sometimes asked himself why Paris ever came to Sparta. Or left with her. Or why he went to Troy, went after her. She wept a lot, wept for her wrinkles. Her eyes, viscous, sticky, dropped tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinal gum, as they say. They lay together through the useless years, trapped by time, dry-shanked and impotent. Sometimes he muttered in his sleep between the snores and whistles . . . Troy . . . Paris . . . and at his name her withered loins twitched and she cried in her dreams. And Paris slept on by Scamander side.
At last she came to die. A ghost sees all. They wove her white hair, washed her face, bathed the long crinkled eyelids in cool rosewater to let them open for the last time on the almond eyes, bleary now. Blonde-locked granddaughters bent over the fallen breasts, baring them a little to let her breathe more easily, while in at the opened window crept the old scents of the sea.
She remembered. She asked to see her shroud. They lifted the cedar-chest lid, inlaid with ivory, and showed her the work she’d woven so long ago, bent over the loom, not thinking then that the day would ever really come when she’d be wrapped in it, embroidered as it was with the scenes so lovingly recreated by her remembering hand: a blue sea crowded with ships, towers toppling, heroes cut down, children killed, women enslaved, all for her sake. Now the day had come. The years rushed back – and suddenly she was a young braided girl again, with buds for breasts, and Theseus was buggering her by Eurotas’ green banks . . .
Was that her last memory? Even a ghost has no window into a dying brain, a dead, dreamless head.
The laments and lacerations start up, and the gem-covered corpse is borne away along the long lobby, subterranean, dark, except for the flickering lamps and torches. The dead tresses are strung with amber beads, the perished breasts bejewelled, the waist girdled with gold. Slippers cover the horny feet, and only one cold hand is on show, holding her favourite mirror, cold bronze clasped by colder fingers to the blind face, hiding the crow’s feet, the shrivelled neck. Golden bowls are brimming all around the body, and the wine cups glimmer with mingled resin and wine, a bumper farewell, a generous pledge to toast the long journey into night. The lingering incense fades, the last lamps gutter, the last clang on the golden string echoes eerily, leaving the tomb a trembling memory, all sealed up. They leave her to herself and to the dark. Now she can gaze into the glass, admire herself again for all eternity. If only she could lift that hand. If only she could open her eyes.
Helen. The madness of love, without which life could not continue. Why did Medea fall in love with Jason? Why did she hack her own brother to pieces and hurl him into the sea? Why was Agamemnon axed in his bath? What made Ajax rape Cassandra and enrage Athene? What made Achilles love Penthesilea and murder Thersites? Who made Eros after all? Ares and Aphrodite, love and war. Eros subjugates the heart, assaults the intellect, breaks the will, kills the soul. It lures sailors to sirens and litters the meadows with their rotting corpses, rolls their bones in the ocean. It’s what bewitched the suitors when they saw Penelope and listened to her siren talk, so that the palace hall could be strewn with dead. It’s the madness that caused the most famous war in history. Helen was the cause but the sexual roots of the carnage at Troy plunged deeper into history, humanity, hell. Zeus lusted after Thetis, Eris sowed strife, Aphrodite cheated. Helen loosened men’s balls, spilling sperm. She loosened their knees, spilling blood. Cupidity made love to Cupid, and Persephone waited in her halls. The war was born of betrayal, sex, intrigue. Sex and death – how can you part them, after all? Troy was rooted in the pain of their marriage, the madness of desire.
I tried to leave that madness and go home, and found that I couldn’t until I’d found myself again. Who was I? What was I? Beggar, wanderer, outcast, lover, warrior, god. There’s a god in every man. And a beggar. And returning soldiers need mending. Drugs can’t heal them; that’s for sure. Circe offered drugs, Helen had drugs, lotus drugs that eased the suffering memory, the pain of remembering. But that’s not the way home. There’s no identity without pain, and it’s pain that helps you in the end to snatch what you can from the dark. Otherwise you’re a dead man.
I came home on a sea of death – it was my element. Each island was deadly because the islands were my own failings, my muddles. And in each encounter I met only the monsters of myself. The true traveller tours death, sees the sights of Hades. I went to the House of the Dead, I spoke with ghosts. I was a dead man, not only to myself but also to those who loved me. I was the white bones on the shore. I was the hole where the hearth was, where the heart was. I longed for life and couldn’t find it, not after Troy. War, like love and death, changes everything. When I heard stories about myself, I buried my head in my sea-blue cloak and cried for all I’d lost and could never recover.
Out on the sea I learned to live again, to stay alive. Then I came home and found insular, intolerable Ithaca – the land of peace, the land of the suitors, men of the land. Me, I was always a ship man, though I farmed. The sea brought me up, a good rough nurse of youth. It gave me dreams, sea-dreams, some of which came true, including the bad ones, the monsters of the unconscious. I was, after all, the child of unhappy anger, or whatever else Autolycus meant when he named me. I keep thinking about him, my grandfather, my disreputable mentor, the one who taught me archery.
‘The big boys despise the bow,’ he said. ‘They think bowmen are cowards and softies. And it’s true that some weaklings like to fight that way and only that way, and they’re afraid of the front line. But just you do a body count of all the dead heroes. You won’t find many bowmen among them. How you stand up, how you fall down – it doesn’t matter. Staying alive is what matters. It’s all that matters.’
He sent me to Thesprotia once to root out a particular poison for my arrows, one that was awkward to come by. I learned early to get in and out of tricky situations.
‘And don’t think you have to escape everything with honour,’ he said. ‘Just get out with your life, that’s all. What’s the use of being an honourable dead man?’
He was a cattle-thief and a rationalist. I took my realism from him. Monsters, narcotics, women who swallow you, the vast loom of the sea – all irrational, all to be overcome. The challenge was the thrill. It gave meaning and purpose to the voyage, not to the arrival, not to Ithaca. It was the beauty and the burden of the journey that counted, the process, the exploration, the taste of life in all its forms, and death on board every hour, every foot of the way, to make the taste seem sweeter, to whet the appetite for lif
e over and over, so that when Persephone finally came for me and held out her pale hand, I could tell her there was nothing she could take because I’d nothing left to give. I’d squandered the lot, done it all, drunk the cup to the dregs and thrown it to the ocean. There wasn’t a drop left for her to pour out onto the embers and ash of my existence on earth. All dross burned away.
And that last journey – carrying my oar and all that? Well, I see it now, clear and simple. This is it, right here and now – it’s started, I’m on my way. Into that desert country where they’ve never heard the sea, or even heard of it. That’s death, to be separated from the scents and shapes and sounds of the sea. Death is the desert. And the oar planted in its sterile earth, the oar in the mound, is the sailor’s only monument. The hauling days are done. The long trick’s over.
Am I wandering? I expect I am. I’m entitled to. And, except in debate, I always was a wanderer. I never set a straight course; sometimes I think I lost my way on purpose. Well, now the spirit’s free to wander off eternally, wherever and whatever that might be, but somewhere somehow out on my own element, absconded from ash, shaking away the last embers underneath the oar, slipping quietly back to sea, utterly engrossed by the opulence of ocean. The spirit can do all that, can’t it? Maybe I’ll be that white gull you see, a flash of wings, high in the blue emptiness. Maybe I’ll put in from non-time to noontime, come ashore with the flowergirl wind on a day when the first petals are sparking the grasses and the lambs are sucking their mothers’ milk, when being surrounded by such simplicity in this beautiful brutal world is much more precious, as a bard once sang, than Pylos or Sparta or Troy or any gathering of metal from slaughtered enemies or the raping of their wives.
And so I’ll be the croak of the frog in the empty well, the lone drone of the bee, the dry grate of the grasshopper, the limestone’s white, burned voice. I’ll be yellow as gold, I’ll be stonecrop on tumulus, cool under cumulus. Maybe I’ll hear the gods talking in the sun, their chatter heady with absinthe, their archaic smiles brightening the sullen sea, the misty olive woods, the weak congenial moon. And I’ll see the tall blue irises again in green fields, and the red geraniums shedding their blood on the old stones of Troy. Or what was once Troy, its marble monuments turned to dust, like the white fistfuls of kings that lie scattered among the ruins, dribbled on now by poppies and rain, mocked by the hills, cold-shouldered by the sea.
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