BOOK XV
They build the ideal city. On his return Odysseus finds that his followers have split into two antagonistic camps led by Granite and Kentaur. In disappointment and rage, feeling that man cannot ever attain those heights which their leaders envisage for them, he roams the forest for three days, and on the third day contemplates a wild pear tree that had split through a rock, twisted into growth, and finally burst in bloom. It seems to him a gnarled symbol of the spirit’s vitality, taking whatever fate has given of soil and stone, and flowering stubbornly in the sun. Nearby, he finds an immense cave, then calls Granite and Kentaur, makes his peace with them, and decides that, like the pear tree, he must accept given conditions and work with the recalcitrant herd of mankind.
Next dawn the foundations of the new city are laid. Six cocks and six hens are slain as symbols of the passing of the twelve Olympian gods. The people are separated into three groups of ascending rank: the craftsmen, the warriors, the intellectuals, and a socialist state is created (from various elements in Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s The City of God, and More’s Utopia). Marriage is outlawed, children are to be held in common and educated away from their parents, old and useless persons are to be allowed to die. But Odysseus could not find the foundational law of his thought until one day he saw a flock of termites mating in the air. He saw that as soon as the bridegrooms had performed their one function, they fell expiring to earth, gobbled up immediately by birds, beetles, scorpions and snakes. With fierce joy, Odysseus embraces this as a ruthless law of necessity and survival in nature: “Whatever blind wormmother Earth does with no brains/we should accept as just with our whole mind, wide-eyed./If you would rule the earth, model yourself on God!” Kentaur is appalled by what he considers his master’s heartlessness. Odysseus longs to tell his people of his new god, but he postpones doing so, fearing they are not prepared to accept so cruel, ruthless, and selective a god.
In the spring, after many months have passed, Odysseus declares a fiesta of three days for the mating of young men and women, and also sets his leopard cub free to find her own mate in the mountains. Again he sees a vision of God as Commander in Chief, of all men as co-workers in the great battle where man must learn both to obey and to command. Each must act as though the entire salvation of the world depended on himself alone, but as though it did not matter whether he won or lost, for all that mattered was the struggle itself. One day he sees with horror a troop of blind black ants devour a baby camel, and then a human infant, and forever after keeps this vision before his mind’s eye as the grinding destructive power behind all nature and human endeavor, the gaping gulp that awaits us all. He is overwhelmed by the tragic necessity of life. At last one day he tells his people of the dread law of survival and existence, and that the new God they are to worship is not a protective and almighty god, but no weaker and no stronger than they themselves.
Indeed, God needs their support, for not even he knows from whence he comes nor toward what he goes. All but Granite are dismayed by a god who cannot help them by supernatural means, who cannot be separated from themselves as struggling mortals. Kentaur exclaims in despair, “Our bodies are the threshing floor where God fights Death.”
Summer passes, and in autumn Odysseus declares the dying of a great chief as an occasion of joy, for this man had fulfilled his duty on earth; tragic would have been the passing of someone still young. (In Ithaca, his grandson dreams that his grandfather had given him a toy ship, and both Nausicaä and Telemachus are filled with fright.) When winter comes, all work at their various crafts in the huge cave. Odysseus carves the Ten Commandments of his god on stone, and each law revolves about the idea of God as a struggling evolutionary growth of the spirit throughout all phenomena. This tragic, necessary vision must be embraced with joy, for “The greatest virtue on earth is not to become free/but to seek freedom in a ruthless, sleepless strife.” The last commandment is a symbol of the ascending struggle: “an upright arrow/speeding toward the sun with pointed thirsty beak.” When the time comes to inaugurate the town, there are many foreboding incidents. The air is hot and stifling, termites disintegrate Odysseus’ hut and bow, rats flee down the mountain, screeching. As the people deck their houses and streets with palms, Odysseus looks with pride on his city where he believes the good life may finally be attained. An unnatural darkness falls, the moon becomes leprous, the earth shakes, and Odysseus, subconsciously aware of what is happening, rages against his betraying God. Rocky appears astride a white elephant, for he has sensed the danger from afar and has come to fight by his captain’s side.
BOOK XVI
Odysseus becomes a renowned ascetic. Although ominous omens appear, only Odysseus seems to heed them. All throng next dawn in the great cave to celebrate the inauguration, but as Odysseus dances, the earth shakes and roars. Odysseus rushes out and sees the mountain belching smoke and lava. He rages against a god who made the world so imperfect that man is forced into an attempt to perfect it, then assigns various tasks to his friends and himself rushes to save the young children in the town. As the nursery begins to buckle, Kentaur suddenly appears and props the doorway; Odysseus leaps free, but Kentaur is crushed in the ruins. Soon the entire city, all but the North Gate from which Rocky had directed the fleeing troops, is swallowed in a gaping chasm.
Granite had begun to lead a troop northward, but returns and finds Odysseus, his hair turned white, clawing at a column of earth that soon reveals Rocky’s cinderous body. It disintegrates, and in tragic fury Odysseus kicks the dust and bones into the chasm. Granite tries to comfort Odysseus, but “his mind marched beyond all sorrow, joy, or love,/desolate, lone, without a god and followed there/deep secret cries that passed beyond even hope or freedom.” Granite leaves Odysseus forever and leads his group toward another life. Odysseus now falls into the “terror of thought,” an inner contemplation which blazes with light, and identifies himself with all of nature, the snakes and the grass, the ruthless laws of death and destruction, the seeds struggling toward light. He enters into a mystic communion with insects, fruits, and all growing things, with streams and stones. His feet flow like rivers, grass grows on his chest, morning-glories twine about his beard: “Odysseus brimmed with waters, trees, fruit, beasts, and snakes,/and all trees, waters, beasts and fruit brimmed with Odysseus.” He comes to a tragic acceptance of life as it is, but transcends it with joy, and then blesses his five senses for their omnivorous and unslaked desire to know the entire universe, because only through them may a man apprehend nature directly.
For many months he remains in ascetic contemplation on the rim of the abyss, and as his fame spreads throughout Africa, pilgrims come to worship him and to seek his healing powers. Telemachus appears to him in a vision and tells him not to push beyond man’s possible attainments, but Odysseus calls to his first forefather, Tantalus, and cries: “Ah, grandsire, I’ve surpassed your pride; you thirst/because you’ve never drunken, hunger because you’ve never eaten,/but hunger itself has sated me and thirst unslaked me!” He identifies himself with all persons, with all human races in their brief lightning flash toward death. Pilgrims of every sort bring him gifts and hang them on the branches of the wild pear tree. A black chieftain gives him lumps of mud taken from his people’s graves and kneaded with their tears, sweat, and blood, that the great ascetic might mold them a god to bear their pain, but Odysseus looks with compassion on man’s futile efforts to escape suffering, and molds but maddening faces, monstrous forms of primitive terrors.
One day Temptation appears in the form of a snakelike Negro boy to mock Odysseus and to tell him that he has become decrepit, that his mind has disintegrated, that he is still filled with the pride and wrath of his ego. But Odysseus envisages a struggle of the mind that may push on even beyond man’s physical limitations. A third inner eye of the life-stream itself now rises within him, and Odysseus blesses all his life as he recalls his daring youth, the sweetening influence of women on his character, how he longed to embrace his native lan
d at first but then longed to travel further. He blesses his restless search, his soul which has been faithful to no one thing: “My soul, your voyages have been your native land. With tears and smiles you’ve climbed and followed faithfully/the world’s most fruitful virtue—holy false unfaithfulness!”
Odysseus now turns to the playful creation of the mind, first with the lumps of mud given him by the Negro chief, and then with his flute. He sees a brief vision of his death amid icebound seas. He creates various fantasies of his mind—nymphs, the twelve months, werewolves, creatures of myth and legend, and finally an image of God as a vain, bearded, swaggering dwarf. When Odysseus turns to destroy him, God changes many protean forms and begs for his life, but Odysseus declares that even God is a creation of the mind, that like Orpheus he had almost believed in his own artifact. He destroys the image and rejoices in his freedom. Up to this point in his quest, Odysseus has tried to purify his concept of God, but now he turns away from even a monistic and anthropomorphic conception to a humanistic and evolutionary concept of nature, to representative types of men on earth for pattern, and extols man’s mind as the Creator—for man himself, at least—of all phenomena. Death, not God, becomes his constant companion.
A voice now cries out thrice within him, and Odysseus recognizes Heracles, his great forefather who had struggled through twelve labors to purify his spirit through flame into light, who taught him to pass beyond all small passions, to aim at the great, and to strive still further, all in terms of actual deeds performed. Now, in death, Heracles sees that man may reach even further than the twelfth ax. He looks upon Odysseus as his heir, begs him to purify his mind of gods, demons, virtues, sorrows, joys, and the final and greatest foe, Hope, until there remains only the essence of flame, scornful and superhuman, a fire no thorns can feed. Odysseus realizes that he has now unbound himself from the final chain, that of Hope in an anthropomorphic God no matter how purified, and in complete freedom realizes that all phenomena, as an individual sees them, are the creations of each particular mind. The sun rises at his right temple and sets at his left, and “when/the mind snuffs out like a thieves’ lantern, all things vanish.” With the aid of his senses, man weaves the fabric of his life over a bottomless abyss, over Nothing, over Death. Odysseus now exclaims: “No master-god exists, no virtue, no just law,/no punishment in Hades and no reward in Heaven.” He has ascended the seven tiers of heads which he had bought from the peddler in Crete.
Frightened by his ecstasy and the blazing light of his freedom from God, the pilgrims had fled in terror. Now on the rim of the abyss, Odysseus dances ecstatically in affirmation of life with all its antinomies. He bites his heel and drinks his blood in a symbol of complete communion and acceptance. He has passed beyond arrogance and pride, the drunken rage of plundering and possession and guilt, until he who had striven to be the savior of the world finds that he is saved even from the need of salvation. Stooping with humility and homage, he kisses Mother Earth and accepts the universe in all its aspects, both evil and good.
BOOK XVII
Divertissement: The drama of life. Odysseus remains in an ecstatic contemplation where past and future seem enveloped in an everlasting present. Life seemed, at times, the pursuit of women, beauty and pleasure; at times, the pursuit of virtue and justice; at times, the necessity of assisting an endangered God and embodying him in an ideal city. But now all these seem shadows, and Odysseus turns to embrace the nude body of life, stripped of all illusions; he bids her rise on the crags of strength and despair, on the peaks of both drunkenness and laughter, and there, according to the mind’s playful desires, create whatever it wishes—a wedding pomp, a war, the normal life of a city. Odysseus smiles, and three maids are born. He calls, and an old man falls to the ground. He sighs, and a slim dancing girl springs up. He scowls, and battalions besiege a city. He contemplates gold, and a bazaar seethes with merchants and commerce. Odysseus is seized by an inexpressible love and compassion for these creations of his brain who rush through their roles as if they were real.
Slowly, as he comes out of his trance, his creations vanish until there remain only an old king, his son the prince, his faithful slave, a fierce warrior-king, and a maiden. Taking up a flute made of a dead man’s bone, Odysseus plays till the characters come to life and live their roles; when he stops playing, they freeze in arrested postures. A drama unfolds among them, depicting the eternal passions of life: love, lust, jealousy, war, betrayal, the survival of the strongest. The maiden, daughter of a famous ascetic, lies in a forest beneath a tree where her father has just died. The king, in a gold chariot driven by his slave, searches throughout the forest for his son. The prince has found the maiden, declared his love for her, yet fears that she is not flesh, but spirit purely. Hearing the king approaching, and fearing that his father will part them, the prince urges the maiden to cast herself on the king’s mercy, then hides himself in a cave. When the old king sees the maiden, he is terrified by her nakedness, senses evil and wants to withdraw, but because he has esteemed her father, he bids his slave clothe her and place her in the chariot. As the slave lifts the maiden, she admires his animal strength and wishes they were alone. Odysseus stops playing his flute and laughs to see life spinning its old rounds: the king cracking with desire; the temptress, which is woman, burning towns and castles in the offing. When a storm threatens, the old king stops by a roadside altar to pray, the maiden and the slave take shelter in a stable and fall to lust on a bed of manure and dung.
After the three reach the palace, the old king, tormented by jealousy and guilt, imprisons the maiden to keep her from the prince. Soon the warrior-king besieges the palace, the prince refuses to lead the army unless his father will free the maiden, but the king refuses and casts him in prison also. Then the slave prevails on the king to send the maiden to the warrior in order that she may seduce him and then behead him in his sleep. The maiden agrees on condition that the king will give her his son on her successful return, and the king finally, in disgust and despair, agrees. Odysseus again stops his flute and urges the maiden to fulfill her role, one that scorns compassion, justice, goodness, truth, and has no care for virtues, ideas, men, or gods. Toward dawn, after the warrior and the maiden have passed a night of love together, he asks her why she had not beheaded him, as he suspected she would, and she replies that when he had laid his head, replete, against her bosom, she had felt a mother’s compassion for her child. Now she urges him to fill her pouch with another’s head that she may fool the old king and thus betray him into the warrior’s hands. The old king thinks his kingdom has been saved, but his slave treacherously beheads him and presents the head and the keys of the city to the warrior-king, announcing at the same time that the prince has perished in the burning prison. The warrior-king declares that God is not concerned with love or compassion or friendship, that he cares for the strong only and supports those most fitted to survive who rule without compassion. He commands that the maiden be burned on a scented pyre with the honors of a great warrior.
Odysseus now stops playing, and the five actors sleep on. He addresses the Mind as the creator of all that lies fallow and shouts to be born, and to which the Mind gives form on the shores of insanity, which is life. There the Mind sits and plays the game of life, creates and destroys. Some have called the Mind Spirit and declared that it begat the flesh; some have called it Flesh and declared that it begat the Spirit; but it is something beyond both, and it plays in the abyss of the Universe. Man, with the free play of his mind, locks and unlocks the chambers of life, though he hopes for nothing; he does not complain under life’s blows, but strides through the nonexistent palace of his desires as though it were real, holding the keys of Nothingness, for he knows that at bottom all is a dark abyss and an oblivion.
When day breaks, Odysseus continues his journey toward the southern tip of Africa. He sees that through his mind and senses now all the creative impulse flows and plunges, laughing, down the abyss: an image of a deathless flowing stream. Within
him War (the ceaseless strife of evolutionary creativity) and Mind (that which gives the stream direction, order, body, shape) embrace in a creative strife.
BOOK XVIII
The prince and the prostitute. Amid common scenes of daily life, Odysseus continues what he knows is his last journey and begins his last long farewell to the world, rejoicing in life as though he were looking on all things for the first time. At noon, as a cricket perches on his right shoulder and bursts into song, Odysseus recalls how at Knossos a crow had perched on his shoulder, its beak still splattered with the blood of kings, and a profound spiritual change in him is thus symbolized. At night in a forest a black chieftain, slain in war, is burned on a pyre. Odysseus meets a hungry wolf, but greets him like a brother. Himself weak with hunger, he welcomes death, and when he sees a peacock attack and devour a viper, another image of the grim struggle in life, of beauty fed by slaughter, he falls in a faint and dreams of pagan, bacchanalian Greece.
Next dawn as he continues his journey, he again falls fainting with hunger and is fed by a passing Negress bringing food to her husband in the fields. That night Temptation visits him again in the shape of a Negro boy and informs Odysseus that he now bears all the thirty-two signs of the perfect man, that he has therefore attained his salvation and should now scatter into non-existence, but Odysseus replies that the Tempter has not named the greatest sign of all: “I am the savior, and no salvation on earth exists.” When the Tempter disappears, Odysseus regrets that he had not named for him a still greater sign: that embracing ecstasy (as in Yeats’ Lapis Lazuli) which transcends all tragedy, for “Erect on freedom’s highest summit, Laughter leaps.”
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