“Yes! I will boldly utter it! — It is the word ‘Prokleesis’. And now I must struggle to make clear some of the beautiful, terrible, stirring, satisfying, comforting, restoring, consoling, redeeming, creating meanings that I have put into this natural and simple word, Prokleesis! For I do here and now, O great King! I do here and now, most lovely ladies! I do here and now, Moros my old friend, Nisos my young friend, and you three, heroic sons of the lady Nemertes, who is the friend of all of us, as indeed this banquet, which is the grandest banquet I have ever enjoyed, proves up to the hilt, I do here and now proclaim, to all living creatures in all the innumerable worlds, that for each and every one of us, whether human, super-human, or sub-human, whether male or female, whether old or young, that the word Prokleesis whose simplest meaning is a ‘defiance’ or ‘challenge’ is the best clue to life we can have!
“Yes, Prokleesis is the word. We must ‘challenge’ life from our childhood to our old age! We must ‘defy’ life to quench our spirit and to beat us down! We must ‘challenge’ it, whatever it may be, to a fight to the finish! Don’t you see, O great King, don’t you see, my sweet friends, how the crafty and wicked Enorches is really advocating an escape into death in place of a battle with life? His Eros and his Dionysos are both different names for the same plunge into the same Nothingness.
“One is a plunge into it by way of love, and the other by way of drink. Whatever else to be alive upon earth, or above earth, or under earth, may mean to those who are landed in it or sunk in it or confronted by it, it is clear that it means a challenge to a battle! O my friends, my friends, we have not got the secret of life, I mean the secret of our experience of life for ourselves, till we’ve defied it to make us cry, ‘Hold! Enough!’ This challenge, this ‘Prokleesis,’ is the secret of life for us.
“As to what the secret of life is for life itself, who can answer such a question? We can only answer for ourselves. The animals and birds and fishes can only answer for themselves. Whatever it is that calls itself the cause of life, or imagines itself to be the cause of life, or is supposed to be the cause of life by the tribal tradition of this race or that race, or by the geographical tradition of Northern or Southern life, or of Eastern or Western life, or Middle-Eastern life, or of life at the bottom of the ocean, or of life among the Gods in the sky, or of life among the Titans in Tartaros, or of life among the ghosts of Hades — if Ghosts have any life and if there are any ghosts left there now; for the story runs that they have all escaped, even as this wise lady here has come back to her own from the Latin cavern of the Nymph Egeria!
“No, we have not the faintest idea as to how this world of colour and form, and of solid and watery and airy and fiery substance ever appeared before us or ever inspired its favourite champions with the overpowering suggestion that we ourselves are nothing but transitory and dreamlike portions of its evanescent mirage!
“Let us suppose that at this very moment there suddenly crowded into this beautiful dining-hall twenty murderous pirates, from an unknown land beyond Ultima Thule, and carrying ropes woven of a breakable hemp! And let us imagine these pirates bind each of us, men and women alike, with their ropes, and deliberately begin chopping us to bits with their sharp knives! Call up such a scene, O great King, thou who hast known in thy vast travels worse scenes than this! Call up such a scene, sweet ladies! Call up such a scene, brave men!
“Now be absolutely honest with yourselves, every one of you here and tell yourselves, not aloud to the rest of us, but in silence, each heart to heart alone, exactly how you would feel as you watched what was going on and saw your own turn coming nearer and nearer, and heard the shrieks and groans of each particular victim.”
As Zeuks spoke in this way it was very clear what the feelings of Omphos and Kissos and Sykos would have been under the conditions he described as from behind the chair of Zenios they listened with awestruck attention. It was also clear that the three young men’s interest in what Zeuks was saying displeased their mistress Okyrhöe; for she promptly gave them a peremptory signal to go and help their mother in the kitchen; but as they discreetly followed one another out of the hall they received from Zeuks just as if they had been relatives of Zenios, and not servants at all, an extremely friendly and fraternal smile of recognizance.
Zenios himself, still absorbed in what remained on his large antique Babylonian plate, evidently considered that this drunken babbling horse-stealing bastard from a remote farm at the other end of the island whose future destiny even Atropos, unless the old lady had Anangke, or Necessity at one elbow, and Tyche, or Chance, at the other, would have been puzzled to predict, though he might propitiate a poverty-stricken king like Odysseus by his antics, was not the sort of person to interest a rich frequenter of the Bazaars and Markets of Thebes!
But Zeuks had not failed to notice that although the old King was too absorbed in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what was going on round him, there had come a moment, the same moment no doubt when the speaker had caught that response in the faces of the three sons of Nemertes, at which the old hero’s pointed beard had suddenly jerked itself up in an automatic call to battle.
It was as if the bones of his jaw had answered a physiological summons independently of his mind. And this automatic jerk of the well-trimmed beard of the blinder of Polyphemus in some profoundly subtle way so completely satisfied the kidnapper of Pegasos that he suddenly became, at least in the eyes of Nisos who was watching him carefully a completely different person.
That curious appearance of being unnaturally bloated, as if his outer skin, like a leather bottle whereof the contents had become, by reason of some sort of spiritual fermentation, too powerful to be contained in such a prison had been replaced by a singular toughening, at least that is what appeared to have occurred, of the actual flesh of his face; and the result of this was to make the expression of his face harder, firmer, and though no less humorous, much more formidable in the nature of its humour.
Nisos noticed, something else too, though if he’d tried to describe it to his brother or his parents or even to his friend Tis, he would probably have become tongue-tied and might even have retreated into that quite special silence which we associate with idiots; but what he would have wanted to explain about this more powerful humour in Zeuks’ expressive countenance was that in its inherent nature it was not proud or vain or conceited, nor did it, like almost all so-called “prophets” and “thinkers”, shut all doors but the one it came in by, and close all windows but the one it looked out of!
By this time all their eyes were fixed upon Zeuks. The large platter upon which Zenios had been concentrating was now as empty as if that insatiable collector of every possible species of plate that the artists among men have ever carved and moulded in precious metal had licked it clean that night of every stain it had acquired while the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Rising carried it beneath the earth to the blameless Ethiopians of the Sun’s Setting!
Odysseus himself had allowed his wandering mind to return to the immediate situation; and he was now watching Zeuks with the sort of steady, quiet, amused, contemplative interest that the master of a Circus of performing animals would display in the unexpected arrival of a caravan of freshly-caught creatures from the Mountains of the Moon.
As for Okyrhöe, she had very quickly decided that Zeuks was a person who had to be treated on completely different lines from any of the other original personalities she had hitherto succeeded in dominating.