“That’s what’s the matter with Odysseus”; and at the thought of the man who had won this golden armour from the sinews and bones that here lay dead, only to lose it all again to this graven tree-trunk that would never be able to know anything of these human rivalries, Zeuks lifted up his head from between those withered but still mighty thighs. “It is,” he told himself, “as if I were embracing this corpse beneath that famous tree outside the great wall of Ilium; and as if I had been given by the gods the power to suck and draw and drain from the lapsing semen of this dead body such magnetic force into the peristaltic channel of my spirit that a fresh and a new insight into the whole of life radiates through me.”
Zeuks was not exaggerating what he felt; and indeed if the young daughter of Teiresias had been present at this moment she would have learnt as much, and perhaps more, from the motions of the man’s arms and legs just then, as she had ever learnt from his discarded clue-word “prokleesis”, or was ever likely to learn from his new clue-words, “lanthanomai” and “Terpomai”. But then Pontopereia, being, for all her prophetic gift, a natural girl, she would instinctively put less confidence in the creative impulse of a clue-word than in the simplest bodily movement.
But it was with more than his out-flung arms that this queer son of Arcadian soil proceeded now to encircle in one and the same embrace both the dead man’s neck and the base of that ash-tree out of which Hector’s shin-bones had been so exquisitely carved. It was not indeed until the moment when he saw Ajax fall at the feet of that graven image wearing the armour of Achilles, that something in him such as had never before come to the surface of the “laughing man” rose up, and dominated his whole nature. And it was on the strength of this “something” that he now pressed against his ribs in the same desperate embrace both the dead man and the carved tree.
“Why should I laugh at life rather than challenge it or defy it when all I’ve really got to do is just to enjoy it?” This was. what he was telling himself as he hugged the tree and the gold and the flesh and the bone together. And the very form of his. countenance became changed as he did so. The physiognomy of Zeuks has been, as we have seen, designed and dedicated, devoted and destined for the ribald reduction of everything in. existence to a monstrous jest.
But something had risen just then out of the depths of his being that was neither solemn nor comical; something that found its account in quite a different direction from that of either defiance or mockery. And the advantage of this direction was its freedom from the necessity of any effort except the effort of will. It needed absolutely no mental effort at all; not even the mental effort of realizing just exactly what it was he was defying, or towards what particular thing he was directing his mockery. “To will,” Zeuks told himself, “is simply to do a little more vigorously what we are already doing spontaneously. These efforts naturally occur when we grow consciously aware of some exercise in ourselves of the life-energy which moves in every offspring of the ancient earth. All we have to do is to use our will to intensify this.”
Nor was the expression upon the face of Zeuks that accompanied this revelation lost on the air. It was on the contrary inwardly digested. It was one of the luckiest moments in the philosophical life of the creature that always so proudly called itself “the Worm of Arima” that just when the adventurous consciousness of the son of Arcadian Pan had dived deep enough among the mysteries of the multiverse to discover a clue-word, or rather a clue-act, that was more intimate and more effective than “defy” or “mock”, the protruding, perspiring, and palpitating proboscis of the Worm of Arima happened to be above-board rather than in any of its convoluted labyrinths below. For since the illumination upon the countenance of Zeuks at this second of time communicated itself by the usual aerial vibration to everything within reach, it was natural enough that the Worm of Arima, being so near to it, carried away into its underground world when it returned there, though the form of its own visage was so much simpler, a celestial exultation worthy of the noblest zodiacal sign.
“These motions of the will,” said Zeuks to himself, “are motions of the life-energy within us, sometimes enduring and patient, sometimes violent and desperate. But, whatever these motions of the life-energy are, if they’re to give us that thrill of enjoyment we need, we’ve got to acquire the trick of forcing ourselves to forget the particular afflictions that spoil such enjoyment.”
And it was at this point in what might have been called his pearl-diving in the ensorcerized earth-mould of Arima that Zeuks felt himself to be, at one and the same time, a god, a man, a beast, a bird, a fish, a worm and an insect. And in his heart he cried out: “O gods, O men, O beasts, O birds, O fish, O frogs, O ferns and funguses, I, Zeuks, have you all in me, and I, Zeuks, am within you all! But, O Maia, mother of Hermes and grandmother of Pan, teach me to forget! Teach me, O youthful Maia, the heavenly tracks and heavenlier side-tracks of the sacred art of forgetting! Don’t let me ever, O Maia most holy, O Maia most blessed, O Maia eternally youthful, don’t let me forget how to forget!
“Yes, to forget the disgusts! Yes! to forget the horrors! yes! to forget the loathings! Mother of Hermes, hear the prayer of thy great-grand-son Zeuks, and grant unto him, and that not too late, the power of forgetting the madness, the loathsomeness, and the horror! I should require,” thus did the thoughts of Zeuks run on, “I who am a god, a man, a beast; a bird, a fish, a frog, a worm, an insect, I who have suffered such horrors from the sky, my begetter, from the earth, my mother, from the elements, my aunts, from Space my grandmother, from Time my grandfather, I should require a draught of forgetfulness so obliterating that it could turn every hell that all my separate natures necessitate into every paradise that all my separate natures crave! Mother of Hermes”—thus did the heart of Zeuks still jerk forth its desperate prayer to the multiverse around it—“cannot you see that for a manifold creature such as I am, a creature who is a god, a man, an insect, a frog, a newt, an ass, a camel, a bear, a monkey, an elephant, if I am really to drink a draught of pure Lethe, if I am really to obtain the power of forcing myself to forget the horrors, it can only be done by my own will to forget!
“O thou ‘still youthful Maia’, cannot you see that what I need is to strengthen my will to forget till it is ten thousand times more powerful than any god as yet discovered by us whether in earth or in air or in fire or in water? If I had this power, O thou ‘still youthful’ great-grandmother of mine, I could enjoy sight, sound, touch, taste and smell, each one of them separately or all together, and in the pleasure of satisfying hunger and thirst, and in the pleasure of satisfying lust and desire, and in the pleasure of diving into earth and air and water and fire, and through them and out the other side, if there is another side, I beseech thee, O Maia, thou Nymph forever young, let me learn the greatest of all the arts, the art of forgetting!”
By one of those pure caprices and casual happenings that occur under the dispensation of Tyche the great goddess of chance such as we mortals call “a stroke of luck” when they suit us and “the cruel irony of things” when they don’t, it happened that when Zeuks began heaving up the body of Ajax, with a view to carrying it to the Corridor of the Pillars, there occurred a faint but unmistakable flicker at the outer corner of the dead man’s left eyelid.