“But I know you don’t think like this; and yours is the only opinion I really value. As I have often confessed to you, there have been occasions in my peaceful life when I have had pleasure with exactly twenty-seven female flies. This I have never concealed from you. But when it becomes—”
It was at this point that the Moth — who so many times had heard her friend quote the well-known lines from Beelzebelle, the Sappho of Flies, that begin:
“airy-fairy-flickit-with-Mary” and ends:
“wagatail-wispy-with-honeymoon-Jane”,
that there had been moments when she felt that if he didn’t stop before one, two, three more ticks of the clock she would rush straight into the nearest fire — beat a tattoo with her free wing upon the wall of their retreat of so decisive a character that the fly yielded in every sense.
He left the topic of female flies. He gave up his exploration of the neck of Odysseus for a drop of perspiration. And he replied to the unspoken question that was behind all the moth had been saying, by assuring her that even if there had been no drop of sweat under the king’s beard, and even if they all had to sleep where they were that night, they would without question be making their departure, if not by “Lykophos” or “Wolf’s-light”, certainly by the first streak of red in the sky….
By this time Zeuks had reached the climax of his singular outburst. He was still on his feet; but he was standing in a manner in which we can be absolutely certain no Grecian orator had ever stood before while addressing a crowd. One foot was on his chair and the other on the floor.
This sounds harmless and conventional enough; but it only does so because we have not yet realized that owing to Zeuks’ lack of height and his chair’s antique height, his upraised knee was on a level with his chin. Nor was this all; for Zeuks’ incurable indifference to the decencies of human dignity combined with his flagrant and absolutely unashamed fondness for his own physical person from head to foot, resulted in a very quaint issue: for seeing his knee so extremely near his mouth, much nearer than human knees generally are to human lips he clutched it with his two hands and digging his chin into it and pressing his clenched teeth against it he began muttering and murmuring through his teeth, for his teeth being tightly clenched he wasn’t biting his knee, a strange rhapsody of self-enjoyment.
To all but one of the company then present this curious chant of ecstatic self-possession was inarticulate; but to the club of Herakles it was not only wholly audible but wholly intelligible.
“At last,” said the Club to himself, “I hear the language uttered, which, if I were the ruler of the world, I would cause to be the language of the world!”
What the club heard as articulate speech could not be set down in the syllables of any tongue that was spoken then on the surface of the earth or has been spoken since; but it consisted of a groaningly murmured, thickly muttered, grindingly hoarse, creakingly wooden, scrapingly rocky, clangingly metallic, and also, naturally enough considering that our friend was rhapsodizing into the hardness of his own knee, a satisfyingly onomatopaeic paean.
The drift of what Zeuks was chanting had undoubtedly to do with that same “prokleesis” whose secret he had tried to interpret; only this was an attempt to turn his own body into a drum or trumpet or clarionet, or whatever it might be, that like some vocal sea-shell or land-shell transformed the heavy material sounds of rock against rock, root against root, earth-mass against earth-mass, sea-sand against sea-sand, through which the sixth Pillar from its fixed abode in that old corridor at home was able to communicate with the club of Herakles.
“Enorches”—Zeuks chanted at last, in a deep, rich, resonant voice, lifting his head from his knee and clasping that symbol of eternal supplication with the fingers of both his hands—“Enorches is the unhappiest man on earth! Anyone who understood to the full the real nature of the unhappiness of Enorches would die of pity. But this much, my friends, it is permitted to me to tell you; and tell it you I must since the knowledge of it is of the very essence of the supreme ‘prokleesis’ you are making with me, or if you prefer, I am making with you, here tonight.
“Enorches is deliberately lying when he says that Eros and Dionysos together redeem the world. He implies that they do this, one or the other of them, or both together, as the salvation of mankind, by means of mystical love or mystical intoxication. He implies they do it so utterly and completely that ordinary self-control, ordinary kindness, ordinary decency, ordinary honesty, ordinary courtesy, ordinary generosity, are rendered totally and wholly unimportant when these two mystical ecstasies are at work; and that it is in fact as an alternative to the good, the true, and the beautiful, that these celestial manias and heavenly drugs fill the entire stage and obsess the whole nature of man’s consciousness.
“Now the diabolical lie beneath all this is the implicit assumption that we love to the point of ecstasy and drink to the point of ecstasy in order that life shall go on in the universe indefinitely and without end. Now the real secret purpose and the real secret motive actuating Enorches is the extreme opposite of this.
“What he really hates with a hatred that is co-existent with his uttermost being and with the uttermost being of what he hates is nothing less than Life itself. His praise of Eros and Dionysos, that is to say his glorification of Love and Intoxication as Substitutes for all other forms of Worship, is really a grand and supreme indulgence in deliberate lying. The one secret aim and the one final intention of this crafty Priest of Orpheus is to destroy all Life utterly and forever!
“In the depths of his own being he is so scooped-out by despair, so bled white by abysmal unhappiness that he has only one desire left, the desire that Life once and for all and in every place under the sun and moon, and upon and within and below the earth, should be destroyed and brought to an end forever!
“Yes, what this Priest of the Mysteries aims at is that there shall no longer be any Mystery — in other words that there should no longer be any life. What he recognizes as the uttermost reality of his own destructive and negative nature is a fathomless, yawning void, an open mouth, a gulf, an abysmal hole; and this in-sucking shaft leads not to any kind of Being, but to that nameless opposite of all existence that can only be called Not-Being.
“Here, therefore, down in the depths of this priest’s nature, is something much deeper and much nearer an absolute than Death; for Death, after all, implies that something has lived or it could not have died; but in this man’s nature, when we go down to the very depths of it, we find that which can in reality have no ‘nature’ of any sort at all, for it is Nothingness Itself.
“Yes! What this self-styled Priest of Orpheus really feels, in his absolute and abysmal despair, is that it would have been infinitely better if there had never been any Life at all. But since life has appeared, what this Priest of the Mysteries would wish to see happen would be for the whole miserable mass of it to plunge headlong down and vanish in the Nothingness out of which it ought never to have emerged!”
While Zeuks let himself go in this sweeping diatribe they all watched him carefully in their different ways — Odysseus watched him as a steersman in dubious weather watches a distant horizon. Nisos watched him as an amorist might watch the eyes of one girl through the transparent body of another. The pregnant woman watched him as if he were a cock crowing on a dung-heap. Old Moros watched him as if he were a dog going too close to a trap that ought long ago to have been sprung. Zenios watched him as if he were an itinerant musician, spoiling an opportunity for a good stroke of business.