For eight jugsworth of years thereafter, saving the spells of inclement weather aforementioned, I gloried in my isolation and seeded the waters with its get, what I came to call fiction. That is, I found that by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed who didn’t, I could achieve a lovely truth which actuality obscures — especially when I learned to abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events: Menelaus, Helen, the Trojan War. It was as if there were this minstrel and this milkmaid, et cetera; one could I believe draw a whole philosophy from that as if.
Two vessels I cargoed with rehearsals of traditional minstrelsy, bringing it to bear in this novel mode on my current circumstances. A third I freighted with imagined versions, some satiric, of “the first fact of our generation”: what was going on at Troy and in Mycenae. To the war and Clytemnestra’s treachery I worked out various dénouements: Trojan victories, Argive victories, easy and arduous homecomings, consequences tragical and comic. I wrote a version wherein Agamemnon kills his brother, marries Helen, and returns to Lacedemon instead of to Mycenae; another in which he himself is murdered by Clytemnestra, who arranges as well the assassination of the other expeditionary princes and thus becomes empress of both Hellas and Troy, with Paris as her consort and Helen as her cook — until all are slain by young Orestes, who then shares the throne with Merope, adored by him since childhood despite the difference in their birth. I was fonder of that one than of its less likely variants — such as that, in cuckold fury, Agamemnon butchers Clytemnestra’s whole ménage except Merope, who for then rejecting his advances is put ashore to die on the island where everyone supposes I’ve perished long since. We meet; she declares it was in hopes of saving me she indulged Aegisthus; I that it was the terror of her love and beauty drove me from her side. We embrace, sweetly as once in rosemaryland.… But I could only smile at such notions, for in my joy at having discovered the joy of writing, the world might’ve offered me Mycenae and got but a shrug from me. Indeed, one night I fancied I heard a Meropish voice across the water, calling the old name she called me by — and I ignored that call to finish a firelit chapter. Had Merope — aye, Trojan Helen herself — trespassed on my island in those days, I’d have flayed her as soon as I’d laid her, and on that preciousest of parchments scribed the little history of our love.
By the seventh jug, after effusions of religious narrative, ribald tale-cycles, verse-dramas, comedies of manners, and what-all, I had begun to run out of world and material — though not of ambition, for I could still delight in the thought of my amphorae floating to the wide world’s shores, being discovered by who knew whom, salvaged from the deep, their contents deciphered and broadcast to the ages. Even when, in black humors, I imagined my opera sinking undiscovered (for all I could tell, none might’ve got past the rocks of my island), or found but untranslated, or translated but ignored, I could yet console myself that Zeus at least, or Poseidon, read my heart’s record. Further, further: should the Olympians themselves prove but dreams of our minstrel souls (I’d changed my own conception of their nature several times), still I could soothe me with the thought that somewhere outside myself my enciphered spirit drifted, realer than the gods, its significance as objective and undecoded as the stars’.
Thus I found strength to fill two more amphorae: the seventh with long prose fictions of the realistical, the romantical, and the fantastical kind, the eighth with comic histories of my spirit, such of its little victories, defeats, insights, blindnesses, et cetera as I deemed might have impersonal resonation or pertinence to the world; I’m no Narcissus. But if I had lost track of time, it had not of me: I was older and slower, more careful but less concerned; as my craft improved, my interest waned, and my earlier zeal seemed hollow as the jugs it filled. Was there any new thing to say, new way to say the old? The memory of literature, my own included, gave me less and less delight; the “immortality” of even the noblest works I knew seemed a paltry thing. It appeared as fine a lot to me, and as poor, to wallow like Aegisthus in the stews as to indite the goldenest verses ever and wallow in the ages’ admiration. As I had used to burn with curiosity to know how it would be to be a Paris or Achilles, and later to know which of my imagined endings to the war would prove the case, but came not to care, so now I was no longer curious even about myself, what I might do next, whether anyone would find me or my scribbles. My last interest in that subject I exhausted with the dregs of Thalia, my eighth muse and mistress. It was in a fit of self-disgust I banged her to potsherds; her cargo then I had to add to Clio’s, and as I watched that stately dame go under beneath her double burden, my heart sank likewise into the dullest deep.
6
A solipsist had better get on well with himself, successfullier than I that ensuing season. Time was when I dreamed of returning to the world; time came when I scattered my beacons lest rescue interrupt me; now I merely sat on the beach, sundried, seasalted: a survival-expert with no will to live. My very name lost sense; anon I forgot it; had “Merope” called again I’d not have known whom she summoned. Once I saw a ship sail by, unless I dreamed it, awfully like Agamemnon’s and almost within hail; I neither hid nor hallooed. Had the King put ashore, I wouldn’t have turned my head. The one remaining amphora stood untapped. Was I thirty? Three thousand thirty? I couldn’t care enough to shrug.
Then one noon, perhaps years later, perhaps that same day, another object hove into my view. Pot-red, bobbing, it was an amphora, barnacled and sea-grown from long voyaging. I watched impassive while wind and tide fetched it shoreward, a revenant of time past; nor was I stirred to salvage when the surf broke it up almost at my feet. Out washed a parchment marked with ink, and came to rest on the foreshore — whence, finally bemused, I retrieved it. The script was run, in places blank; I couldn’t decipher it, or if I did, recognize it as my own, though it may have been.
No matter: a new notion came, as much from the lacunae as from the rest, that roused in me first an echo of my former interest in things, in the end a resolve which if bone-cool was ditto deep: I had thought myself the only stranded spirit, and had survived by sending messages to whom they might concern; now I began to imagine that the world contained another like myself. Indeed, it might be astrew with islèd souls, become minstrels perforce, and the sea a-clink with literature! Alternatively, one or several of my messages may have got through: the document I held might be no ciphered call for aid but a reply, whether from the world or some maroonèd fellow-inks-man: that rescue was on the way; that there was no rescue, for anyone, but my SOS’s had been judged to be not without artistic merit by some who’d happened on them; that I should forget about my plight, a mere scribblers’ hazard, and sing about the goats and flowers instead, the delights of island life, or the goings-on among the strandees of that larger isle the world.
I never ceased to allow the likelihood that the indecipherable ciphers were my own; that the sea had fertilized me as it were with my own seed. No matter, the principle was the same: that I could be thus messaged, even by that stranger my former self, whether or not the fact tied me to the world, inspired me to address it once again. That night I broke Calliope’s aging seal, and if I still forwent her nourishment, my abstinence was rather now prudential or strategic than indifferent.