While the Gods Sleep Restfully, the World Is Free from Nightmares
I descend into a long basin of land, tapered like a spearhead, which ends in a narrow neck between two cliffs. The surface is scattered with boulders, as though the faces of rock on either side have been blasted apart. I can see long figures moving about on the clifftops above me, but the valley itself seems desolate and silent. Once, I pause to watch a landslide tumble down the sheer wall to the right of me, leaving yet another diagonal scar in the face of the rock.
I find, when I get there, that the pass is blocked. I cannot hope to get through that way. The barricade is made of loose boulders, and the crevices are filled with lubricant ash. I try, at first, to pick my way carefully up the rocky slope, but I sink and slip and slide, and I make no progress at all.
“There’s no way.”
I turn to find an old man standing behind me. It is he who speaks.
“Where did you come from?” I ask him. I was alone, I am sure of that.
“From the hills,” he replies.
I contemplate his answer briefly, and then I repeat the question. I have found that it pays to repeat questions. The answers are almost never the same.
“From beyond the slopes,” he replies this time.
“Then there is a path,” I conclude.
“No,” he says, “there is only the other way.”
“And which is that?” I ask.
The old man walks away, treading lightly upon the fluid surface. I watch him closely. But he is right. There is no way but the other. His feet do not touch the surface. He dissolves himself into the rock. His shape blurs in the clear air, and he passes into shadow beneath the bright sun. He fades into the barricade. He becomes invisible.
Lifting my eyes to the jagged ridge of the cliff which towers high above me, I discern a tiny silhouette.
It is waving.
Nevertheless, I think that I have come through the worst. It is not easy. It is never easy. But there is yet another way. I can go back. I can go around. I have all the time that I need. If I were Sisyphus, I would abandon the rock and go to the mountaintop without it. If I were Tantalus, I would go hungry. If I were Ixion, I would be patient, because I would know that someday the wheel would return, and that existence is only a matter of waiting for it to do so.
I think that you and I are at rest. Not that our troubles are over — merely that we have come to accept them. Neither you nor I can work miracles. I think you have accepted that at last. You are content to be a conjurer — you have abandoned your futile quest to be a real magician. We are most certainly on the way home. We have looped the star. We have come close to it, and we have passed it by. We are aimed for the sun.
I am not complacent. I look at the sunrise, and I do not call it dawn. There are more false dawns than real. But I remember, and I endure. The dreams flow by, taunting me with their petty frustrations and their giggling specters and their veiled meanings. I am not afraid of them. They try to make everything fearful with their coy hints and their baseless insistences of danger and significance. But dreams are froth. I know it, and so — I think — do you.
If this is the calm before the storm, all well and good. Let me taste your lightning. I will find it as bitter as I ever did, but I will drink it down. I remain unbroken. We are whole.
We are going home.
At the crossroads where the dead-ended highways meet, I find a featureless milestone, a weatherworn signpost, and a scarecrow in a tattered military uniform holding aloft a cross and speaking to a multitude which passes him silently by.
“It is coming in clouds of night,” he pronounces, in accusing, prophetic tones. “Shadowless in the black sky. The good crops will wither, and from the derelict land and the dust of city streets there will spring new wheat, in the cause of compensation.
“And those whose crops are blighted will cry out aloud for help, but there will be no one to turn to, save for those to whom they sold their bread in years past. And these, who now have plenty, will set the price at the very highest, and will spit on the erstwhile rich, in the name of compensation.”
I remember that in the long-gone days when I was given my first pair of wings, my father warned me:
“Do not fly as high as your dreams might take you.”
But I trusted my dreams. How was I to know that dreams can be faithless? How was I to know that I was set apart, by the mark of Tom O’Bedlam, that dreams were meant for other men, and that to me they could be only a curse?
How?
I, child of the winds, flexed and furled my giant wings with a feeling of great power, and I soared away into the black, brooding skies. I flew above the clouds, bathed in airborne fountains, and danced in the ballroom of the stars.
I flew to the distant moon and cooled my feet in her oceans of tidal dust.
I flew to the sun and glided in and out of her flowing tresses of fire, crying aloud to hear the echoes fleeing through her honeycombed caverns of light.
I tasted the sweet blood which oozed from the many spear wounds of heroic, immortal Mars.
I blinded my eyes in the poisonous vapors of Venus’s samite shroud, and washed them clean in cold starlight that fell from the clouds of the Milky Way.
I painted a portrait in the liquid, glowing face of inmost Mercury, and failed to recognize the man behind the face, although I knew him well and remembered his name.
I cast my clothes to the wilderness of wild rock, to giant death-worlds in the arctic solar sea. My fingers touched the rings of Saturn and were not bitten by the cold. I was naked, and I did not bleed.
And the gluttony of my gaze reached further yet, and out and out, expanding ever faster at the speed of light and beyond, shedding glare of its own into the paths of the treading stars.
And I returned to my father, full of the triumph which I could hurl against his ancient wisdom.
But he only replied, “Do not fly as high as your dreams might take you.”
My father advises me still. He is in the asylum. He remembers Icarus. I remember Titan. I am Titan.