Katherine Anne Porter (116 page)

He showed unexpected firmness and severity with Circe, defended as he was by the moly; he accused her of all the evil Hermes had spoken against her, and required of her the mighty oath, which she swore at once; and kept.

And then—but this is all pure magic, this poem, the most
enchanting thing ever dreamed of in the human imagination, how have I dared to touch it? And what is this passage that stops my heart with joy, as do so many others—the description of Calypso’s island; the scene of recognition between Odysseus and Penelope; Argive Helen in tears before Telemachus, remembering Troy and wondering at herself, so shameless, so blinded by Aphrodite; and all the rest? It is a description of women casting purple and white linen coverlets on silver-studded chairs, with golden baskets and golden wine goblets and silver wine bowls on silver tables; and “a great fire beneath a mighty cauldron” to warm the water; and of the goddess herself bathing away weariness of the loved mortal body under her hands; and it celebrates the smoothness of olive oil on the skin, and of fine linen next the flesh, and of good cheer and comfort and sweet smells and savors. . . a song of praise and delight in the pure senses, fresh as the pearl rosy morning of that morning world. . . .

But Odysseus still grieved, could not eat, could not be at rest until she had restored his dear companions. So she took her wand and went out and drove them back into the hall, a herd of great pigs shedding human tears. Circe, compelled by countermagic to give them back their belying human shapes, was still a goddess, and in this moment she showed an easy, godlike magnanimity. While she anointed the unhappy beasts, they went on weeping; ancient Greek heroes spent a good part of their time lamenting, howling in anguish, bewailing their fates. They wept alike for joy or grief, tears like spring rain; for they lived in a world of mystery and they were its children—what is the strength and the skill of even the bravest and wisest man when matched against the gods, their inscrutable wills, their incomprehensible purposes? As they wept, first in pain and then in happiness, Circe restored them not merely to what they had been but taller, younger, more beautiful than they were born to be—the act of a creatrix, the pure aesthetic genius at play; and we must not be tempted to think of it drearily in our sad terms as an act of divine mercy and reparation, full of profound moral and theological meanings, such as: that the regenerated soul, after punishment and purification, rises in a perfection it could never know except through suffering. No. In this sunny high comedy there are profound meanings, some
lovely truth almost lost to us but that still hovers glimmering at the farthest edge of consciousness, a nearly remembered dream of glory; and it is our fault and our utter loss if we tarnish the bright vision with our guilt-laden breath, our nightmare phantasies. . . .

The transformed warrior and the whole company, joined by still reluctant Eurylochus, stayed on cheerfully for a year as the guests of Circe. Odysseus shared her beautiful bed, in gentleness and candor, with that meeting in love and sleep and trust she had promised him. No one was in the least changed, no one learned anything by his experiences. They were not intent on building their characters or improving themselves; they were what they were and their concern was to fulfill their destinies.

Meantime they were in the earthly Elysian fields, feasting themselves on the abundant roast flesh and sweet red wine, lolling in perfumed baths and rolling in perfumed oil, sleeping soft and waking easy to another rosy-fingered dawn. The goddess sat among them taking her own nectar and ambrosia, or walked singing back and forth before her endless shining web. This life was suitable to her; but the men became bored, then satiated, then sickened with all this abundance and generosity, this light and grace, tenderness, freedom from care, godlike splendor—they could endure it no longer. They complained to Odysseus when she was not present, or so Odysseus told her, and it could very well be true, but the warriors spoke his secret thought too. Circe had borne him a son, the quarter-godling Telegonus; Odysseus remembered with longing Telemachus and Penelope and Ithaca his kingdom. He longed to be again in the hollow black ship breasting the wild sea; the time had come for him to go. So, by her fair bed at her knees, he wept and told her all his longing, and reminded her of her promise that she would send him and his companions safely on their way toward home. Search Homer as you may, it is clear that she made no such promise at any time—no hint of it in any of her flowing honeyed words.

Now one may ask, since she knew that the ambiguous Hermes had outcharmed her, why did she not, as some women or even some goddesses might have done, steal the herb and
destroy it or cast a counterspell to annul it? Why did she not, as Calypso did later, make a towering scene, remind Odysseus that she had promised him nothing and then, with a smart tap of her wand, turn him into a fox to run his life away with those other wild creatures outside her walls?

The only answer I can give is, this is Circe, and this is Odysseus; when he says to her, “Now is my spirit eager to be gone,” she replies at once, with gentle remoteness, “Odysseus of many devices, tarry ye now no longer in my house against your will,” and breaks to him the dreadful news that he must at once perform another journey, to Hades, to seek out Theban Teiresias, the blind soothsayer, who will give him directions how to reach home. This broke his heart and he went and groveled and implored her to tell him who would guide him on his way—“no man ever yet sailed to hell in a black ship.”

“Set up the mast and spread abroad the white sails and sit thee down,” she told him, and promised to send the North Wind to waft his ship on its way. And she told him the ceremonies proper to one entering the place of the dead, the sacrifice of the black ram and the black ewe and the guarding of the blood from the voracious ghosts until Teiresias had spoken. Then things moved very swiftly and with great beauty and dignity. In the dawn Odysseus went through the hall waking his men; Circe gave him a mantle and doublet and “clad herself in a great shining robe. . . and put a veil upon her head.” But the youngest lad, Elpenor, heavy with wine, was sleeping on the roof, and roused too suddenly, fell, and his neck was broken. The men, who had arrived mourning and in tears, now departed the same way, tearing their hair. The goddess made herself invisible and went ahead of them and fastened a black ram and a black ewe by the dark ship: “lightly passing us by,” said Odysseus in wonder, “who may behold a god against his will, whether going to or fro?”

When they returned to the island to give Elpenor burial and quiet his uneasy spirit, while they were mourning and performing the rites, Circe came with her handmaids bringing “flesh and bread in plenty and dark red wine.” She made them a noble speech of salutation: “Men overbold, who have gone alive into the house of Hades, to know death twice, while all
men else die once for all. Nay come, eat ye meat and drink wine here all day long; and with the breaking of the day ye shall set sail, and myself I will show you the path and declare each thing, that ye may not suffer pain or hurt through any grievous ill-contrivance by sea or on the land.”

As if she could! As if her divine amiability and fostering care could save these headstrong creatures from their ordained sufferings. But Odysseus was wise in his mortal wisdom: He knew that man cannot live as the gods do. His universal fate: birth, death, and the larger disasters, are from the gods; but within that circle he must work out his personal fate with or without their help. He saw his own inevitable end in the swarming, angry, uneasy, grieving shades of the dark underworld of death; but when later the lonely goddess Calypso offered him immortality he was not shaken. When she spoke jealously and contemptuously of Penelope’s beauty he answered her in a speech that is the key to all his history, a mortal bent on mortality: “Myself I know it well, how wise Penelope is meaner to look upon than thou, in comeliness and stature.
But she is mortal and thou knowest not age or death
. [Note: my italics.] Yet even so, I wish and long day by day to see the day of my returning. Yes, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure, with a heart within me patient of affliction. For already I have suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war; let this be added to the tales of these.”

And there it is. But earlier, on the island of Circe, at the very last moment there was a memorable scene. After the ship and the men were supplied and ready, “then she took me by the hand,” Odysseus remembered long afterward, “and led me apart from my dear company, and made me sit down and laid herself at my feet, and asked all my tale.” He told everything about the journey to Hades, and she warned him again against the dangers to come, trying one last time to guide her wayward lover safely home. . . .

After this long night of good counsel and loving kindness, “anon came the golden-throned Dawn. Then the fair goddess took her way up the island. . . .”

This should be the end. But someone is certain to ask:
“What about the unpleasant episode of Circe turning Scylla into a monster?” Ah, well—without troubling to deny, or even mention, that hideous rumor, Circe told Odysseus plainly that Scylla was born a monster. In view of what we know about Circe, I am entirely happy to believe her.

1954

A
DVENTURE
.
The word has become a little stale to me, because it has been applied too often to the dull physical exploits of professional “adventurers” who write books about it, if they know how to write; if not, they hire ghosts who quite often can’t write either.

I don’t read them, but rumors of them echo, and re-echo. The book business at least is full of heroes who spend their time, money and energy worrying other animals, manifestly their betters such as lions and tigers, to death in trackless jungles and deserts only to be crossed by the stoutest motorcar; or another feeds hooks to an inedible fish like the tarpon; another crosses the ocean on a raft, living on plankton and seaweed, why ever, I wonder? And always always, somebody is out climbing mountains, and writing books about it, which are read by quite millions of persons who feel, apparently, that the next best thing to going there yourself is to hear from somebody who went. And I have heard more than one young woman remark that, though she did not want to get married, still, she would like to have a baby, for the adventure: not lately though. That was a pose of the 1920s and very early ’30s. Several of them did it, too, but I do not know of any who wrote a book about it—good for them.

W. B. Yeats remarked—I cannot find the passage now, so must say it in other words—that the unhappy man (unfortunate?) was one whose adventures outran his capacity for experience, capacity for experience being, I should say, roughly equal to the faculty for understanding what has happened to one. The difference then between mere adventure and a real experience might be this? That adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country; for the illusion of being more alive than ordinarily, the thing you will to occur; but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

Adventure is sometimes fun, but not too often. Not if you can remember what really happened; all of it. It passes, seems to lead nowhere much, is something to tell friends to amuse
them, maybe. “Once upon a time,” I can hear myself saying, for I once said it, “I scaled a cliff in Boulder, Colorado, with my bare hands, and in Indian moccasins, barelegged. And at nearly the top, after six hours of feeling for toe- and fingerholds, and the gayest feeling in the world that when I got to the top I should see something wonderful, something that sounded awfully like a bear growled out of a cave, and I scuttled down out of there in a hurry.” This is a fact. I had never climbed a mountain in my life, never had the least wish to climb one. But there I was, for perfectly good reasons, in a hut on a mountainside in heavenly sunny though sometimes stormy weather, so I went out one morning and scaled a very minor cliff; alone, unsuitably clad, in the season when rattlesnakes are casting their skins; and if it was not a bear in that cave, it was some kind of unfriendly animal who growls at people; and this ridiculous escapade, which was nearly six hours of the hardest work I ever did in my life, toeholds and fingerholds on a cliff, put me to bed for just nine days with a complaint the local people called “muscle poisoning.” I don’t know exactly what they meant, but I do remember clearly that I could not turn over in bed without help and in great agony. And did it teach me anything? I think not, for three years later I was climbing a volcano in Mexico, that celebrated unpronounceably named volcano, Popocatepetl, which everybody who comes near it climbs sooner or later; but was that any reason for me to climb it? No. And I was knocked out for weeks, and that finally did teach me: I am not supposed to go climbing things. Why did I not know in the first place? For me, this sort of thing must come under the head of Adventure.

I think it is pastime of rather an inferior sort; yet I have heard men tell yarns like this only a very little better: their mountains were higher, or their sea was wider, or their bear was bigger and noisier, or their cliff was steeper and taller, yet there was no point whatever to any of it except that it had happened. This is not enough. May it not be, perhaps, that experience, that is, the thing that happens to a person living from day to day, is anything at all that sinks in? is, without making any claims, a part of your growing and changing life? what it is that happens in your mind, your heart?

Adventure hardly ever seems to be that at the time it is
happening: not under that name, at least. Adventure may be an afterthought, something that happens in the memory with imaginative trimmings if not downright lying, so that one should suppress it entirely, or go the whole way and make honest fiction of it. My own habit of writing fiction has provided a wholesome exercise to my natural, incurable tendency to try to wangle the sprawling mess of our existence in this bloody world into some kind of shape: almost any shape will do, just so it is recognizably made with human hands, one small proof the more of the validity and reality of the human imagination. But even within the most limited frame what utter confusion shall prevail if you cannot take hold firmly, and draw the exact line between what really happened, and what you have since imagined about it. Perhaps my soul will be saved after all in spite of myself because now and then I take some unmanageable, indigestible fact and turn it into fiction; cause things to happen with some kind of logic—my own logic, of course—and everything ends as I think it should end and no back talk, or very little, from anybody about it. Otherwise, and except for this safety device, I should be the greatest liar unhung. (When was the last time anybody was hanged for lying?) What is Truth? I often ask myself. Who knows?