by John Barth
A bad night. I couldn’t speak to explain the difference between lies and myth, which I was but beginning to comprehend myself; how the latter could be so much realer and more important than particular men that perhaps I must cease to be the hero of my own, cease even to exist, cease somehow even to have existed. In fact I couldn’t speak at all. Melanippe either, having spoken. Sadly and fiercely we made love: Medusa winked down at us; Pegasus snorted; my darling came as never in her life, sure sign of her passage. Me too. She slept; by full-moon light I wrote Part Two; just before dawn, as Perseus and company sank over Asia Minor, we gently made love again; she gave me the last of her First-Quarter hippomanes, an enormous stash, and bade me go kill Chimera for real.
“Are you sure you’re not Polyeidus?” I asked her, and she responded: “Are you sure you’re Bellerophon?”
Heh. I wrapped up in the prophet’s Pattern the story thus far—which if less than Perseid-perfect was anyhow clear, straightforward, and uncorrupted at that time—hauled up on sleepy Pegasus, slipped him his quid of hip, winged west.
3
Polyeidus here: shape-shifting, general prophecy.
No one who sees entire the scope and variety of the world can rest content with a single form. Gods and seers have such sight; hence our propensity for metamorphosis. Yet Zeus in all his guises is still Zeus, “presiding god of classic Greek mythology”; I in mine only Polyeidus, advisor to, perhaps father of, a minor hero in that same local corpus. Being Old Man of the Marsh was irksome. I grew bored to death with Bellerophon. What Zeus sees I don’t know, but I saw (in bits and pieces, to be sure, like runes on my scattered daughter’s oak leaves or scrambled bits of satellite photography) the fore and aft of the whole vessel of human history; as I swatted spiders and pulled leeches off me there in the Aleïan flats, I came understandably to wish myself not only out of that particular swamp, but out of Greek myth altogether—that tiresome catalogue of rapes, petty jealousies, power grabs; that marble-columned ghetto of immortals. Why couldn’t I turn myself, I wondered, not into another personage-from-the-future (no more than a disquieting anachronism), but into Scheherazade, “Henry Burlingame III,” or Napoleon in his own time and place? Recollecting the odd document I’d briefly been on Bellerophon’s second try (a happy chance; I don’t by any means always read the pages I turn into), I petitioned Zeus himself to give me a hand (promising the customary quid pro quo, to spread his fame in the new world), concentrated as one must on a single image—that verbo-visual pun of a honeybee which appears on Napoleonic flags and, stitched in gold, on the violet pall of the casket that transported his alleged remains from St. Helena back to Paris—and grunted hard.
I woke up at the back door of heaven, an odious large insect, Tabanus atratus perhaps, with noisy wings and wicked mandibles, buzzing about a mound of godshit. Great Zeus (from my perspective) towered over me disdainfully and thundered: “You’re a shape-shifter: think of it as transmogrified ambrosia. Heh heh.”
Until one is beyond their reach, the Olympians’ whims are our directives. I tried; no luck. No matter, either: my newly compound eyes showed me more aspects of the future—mine, Bellerophon’s, the world’s—than I’d ever seen. I tried to groan; Zeus grinned.
“Now you see it, eh, Heironymous? By imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, your man Bellerophon has become a perfect imitation of a mythic hero. That sort of thing amuses us. But look again at your famous Pattern. It says Mystery and Tragedy: Mystery in the hero’s journey to the other world, his illumination, his transcension of categories, his special dispensation; Tragedy in his return to daily reality, the necessary loss in his translation of the ineffable into sentences and cities, his fall from the favor of gods and men, his exile, and the rest. Now look at Bellerophon’s story thus far: it’s not Mystery and Tragedy, but confusion and fiasco, d’accord?”
A gadfly (so I was, Heironymous hight, imperfectly magicked once again, into a name without initial in our alphabet) doesn’t quibble with the god of gods. I buzzed neutrally, shrugged some shoulders.
“All which is as it should be, in his case,” Zeus rumbled on. “But see what’s coming up! I’ve had Amazons in my time; take it from me, that girl Melanippe’s hippomanes is the real thing. Look at Bellerophon climbing on that crazy horse, straight for heaven, a kilometer a minute! He’s high enough already to see Mystery and Tragedy plain; give him a few more pages and he’ll rise above both and be a star boarder here forever! That’s the sort of thing we’re not amused by, and there’ll be no bugging out for you until it’s taken care of.”
“Mm.”
He tested the zigzag edge of a thunderbolt with his thumb. “Pegasus, on the other hand, is my natural nephew and a pretty piece of horseflesh, just what I need for packing these bolts from the Cyclops’ smithy when somebody’s hubris wants a bit of smiting. But if I shoot down your Bellerophon with one of these babies, there’ll be nothing left of the winged horse except a few hundred kilos of viande de cheval bien cuit. You follow me?”
“Mm.”
“Okay: if you want an exit visa out of that pile, wait till your boy gets this far and then give Pegasus a bite in the crupper. The rest will take care of itself: new country, new language, new myths—three millennia from here. It’s that or eat shit forever. Done?”
I readily M-hmm’d.
“Good. Then you only need to eat it while you wait. Mortals, I swear.”
I swore too, in available nasals, as he left, rubbed my wings furiously with two back legs, and looked with all my eyes for ways to turn the letter of his law to my advantage, like a cunning wrestler his adversary’s Reset But there were none, and lunchtime came, and I was famished, but dared not leave the sill for better fare. Presently the Queen of Heaven herself came out, under pretext of emptying the royal thundermug. As best one can in mm’s and hm’s I buzzed for pity.
“Don’t worry,” Hera said, breathing through her mouth. She set the pot aside and pointed down to Corinth. “See that sexy little white heifer grazing near Nemea? How’d you like to have her for lunch?” It was, I saw, Io, her husband’s latest mistress, by him disguised: in my then condition (and by contrast with my doorsill menu) an appetizing morsel, the more so for its relish of revenge on my tormentor. “Bellerophon won’t be here for a while yet, as you know,” the Queen went on. “I’ll cover for you. Go to it.”
I did, made a long lunch of squealing Io from Dodona to the sea since named after her, across the Bosphorus ditto, up into the Caucasus (where big Z’s buzzards made their lunch of foie Prométhe), back to Colchis, off to Joppa (crashing through Perseid 1-F-5 like a bull through a china shop), as far east as Bactria and India, then west through Arabia Deserta with a caravan of stories picked up along the way, to Ethiopia and down the Nile. At Chemmis, gorged, I let her go, paused to wash my mandibles at a drinking fountain near the empty temple, then sped burping up to Olympus just in time to see, with my left eyes, wrathful Zeus, thunderbolt in hand, sitting on the sill among the shit and shards of the celestial chamberpot, smashed either by himself in anger or by his overtaken wife in fright; and with my right, bold Bellerophon casting away the golden bridle, feeding Pegasus the final leaves of Melanippe’s herb, and with the scroll-rolled Pattern for his riding crop, whipping the grand beast up those thin last leagues to heaven.
“Just in time!” I tried to call to both. “Let me give you a little goose there, Bell-boy! Heh! Sorry about Miss Io, Zeus, sir: your missus had me sort of cornered. But I saw to it she got to Egypt safely in time to have your child; she’s in a nice little spiral temple down in Chemmis: pretty pictures on the wall, et cetera. I didn’t bite her hard; just a tickle, really; not the way I’m going to bite this horse here, to put him over the old finish-line for you! Heh. Here goes!”
I dived in and gave Pegasus a good one under the tail, bleh, as Zeus raised his bolt and Bellerophon his Pattern-scroll. The god stayed his hand when the winged horse bucked and whinnied; not so the hero, who in the instant before he pitched
from that seat forever let me have it, then let go all. Pegasus bolted to his final ditto’d master; I changed, postswatly, into a fading copy of the Greek seer Polyeidus, falling with his fallen son to death. Zeus laughed down after us (the drop from heaven takes a dizzy while):
“A hundred eyes, a hundred blind-spots, Polyeidus! We gods can’t break our vows, but we can make you wish we could. One way or another, in that new world you’re dropping in on, you’ll be Old Man of the Marsh for keeps. And unless your son forgives the tricks you’ve played on him, you’ll always be some version or other of his story. God knows why. Heh. ‘Bye.”
Spread-eagled, Bellerophon sailed over and called: “When he said I was your son, you sonofabitch, which twin did he take me for?”
I was too busy dying and plotting to answer directly: dying forever to the form of Polyeidus; plotting to my best interest this dénouement—how I might begin by becoming the terminal interview which follows; grow thence into all of Part Three and ultimately permeate (at least when the moon was on my side) the whole Bellerophoniad; grow narratively on in death like hair and fingernails until I comprehended the entire Bellerophonic corpus and related literature; con my son the imitation hero, as Admetus conned his wife Alcestis, into taking my place, or part of it, in death’s company by becoming his own life story, the myth of Bellerophon. One way or another, if I was obliged to be Old Man of the Marsh, I would make the world my oyster. With an expiratory grunt I changed, for openers, into these fluttering final pages, written (so help me Muse) in “American”:
Polyeidus: Ah so. As you see, our stars are falling fast. In the manner of the Perseid, mutatis mutandis, would you care to end this tale by answering freely as we fall five questions for posterity?
Bellerophon: Perseid may be your model; I have none any longer. That’s one for you. My first is the last I asked before you changed format: when Zeus called me your son, whom did he take me for?
P.: Bellerophon, of course. Who else? N.Q. When you swatted me with the Pattern, you fulfilled the prophecy first laid on me as I humped your mother in the surf: that I would die by my son’s hand unless he agreed to take my place, et cetera. The usual. And I scarcely expect you to do that, even though you’ll die anyway when you make your hard landing a few questions from now, whereas a paginated form like mine can expect a certain low-impact afterlife. So what’ve you been up to since you left Themiscyra at the end of Part Two? Please speak directly into the page.
B.: A funny thing happened on the way to Mount Chimera. Melanippe’s hip sent me higher than I’ve ever been, and I saw the ends of all the supporting characters in my story. I saw my mother in Corinth, bitter and senile, dying at the graves of Glaucus and Bellerus, cursing Poseidon for not taking better care of his by-blows and Bellerophon for not taking better care of her. There was your daughter, out of her head altogether, wrecked by the goddess who should’ve honored her: in a mantic stupor in the grove she was crying “Bellerus! Bellerus!” while her lover sold her frowsy favors to frightened fourteen-year-olds at a drachma per. Worse yet, that lover, Sibyl’s last, was Melanippe, the first Melanippe: not a suicide after all, but a gross and bitter bull-dyke who had taken Hippolyta’s name and place to raise her daughter, Melanippe Two. Whether I was that daughter’s father, my second sight was kindly blind to: once I’d deflowered Melanippe mere and nipped the bud of her career, she’d turned promiscuous as Sibyl, but out of self-spite: a predator with heart of flint. Over in Tiryns I saw her bitter bullish like, Anteia, forcing docile girls into tribadism while Megapenthes plotted coup d’état and double-theta’d sodomocracy. I saw Philonoë: heartbroken but gentle still after brief romances with other men and suicide, she had withdrawn to a lonely Lycian retreat-house to live out her days in bookish solitude and infrequent masturbation. Of the high-altitude kisses I showered on her head, she was as mercifully unaware as of the wreckage of our children and our state. Those former were grown not into semidemideities (an impossibility) but into commonplace adults, grasping, doomed. The boys, per program, had taken the ring-bait, quarreled over whose child should be shot through it to determine my successor, and been finessed by their clever sister, who volunteered her own child Sarpedon; this was her son by a high-school dropout who’d seduced her in the guise of Zeus-disguised-as-a-high-school-dropout, oldest trick in the book: it duped her brothers into relinquishing their claims in her favor as easily as it had her into relinquishing her favors to the dropout’s claims. Zeus himself, unduped and unamused, then commissioned Artemis to cut my dear daughter down for this imposture, and Ares (count on Z for overkill) to dispatch my sons in the ten-millionth bloody skirmish of our endless war with the Carians and Solymians. Dead, dead, dead. The kingdom, then, was ruled by greedy viceroys, my former students, in the infancy of Sarpedon, who will himself grow up to die on the losing side in the Trojan War.
This latter vision was my first clear evidence that I was flying now above mere panorama, into prescience: fearfully therefore I turned my eyes to the banks of the Thermodon, and beheld the final horror: straightforward as always, my dauntless darling had put me through the ordeal of Part Two by way of testing her conviction that it was not her mortal self I loved, so much as some dream of immortality of which I fancied her the cute incorporation; not one to toy with either life or death, upon my flight she’d washed face and hands, brushed teeth, combed hair, made up our bed, lain down upon it, and passed the time by singing to herself as many Amazon campfire songs as she could remember from her girlhood until, as she’d expected, her first Full-Moon menstrual flow commenced, about midafternoon; at that evidence that she was after all not pregnant by me, without expression or hesitation she drove her knife hilt-deep into her perfect little left brown breast. Whatever blinders I still steered with thereupon fell from me, and I saw the chimera of my life. By imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, I’d become, not a mythic hero, but a perfect Reset I was no Perseus, my tale no Perseid—even had we been, I and it, so what? Not mortal me, but immortality, was the myth.
