Katabasis

By Jude Kirk

Epilogue

O’ Muse, tell me how, tell me why, the strange Fates must warp my life, time and time again.

It is the fault, not merely fate, that wounds me so. My own fault, being who I am now and knowing who I was, then. But before it all, I was someone.

I used to be known by many sharp names: The Thracian bard, the father of songs. I used to be somebody, with hopes and dreams and constant, moving ideas (people become something and then nothing so quick!). I used to play gracefully. Used to sing sweet, sombre poetry; a thousand tales of a thousand men and women, a thousand lives more. But what was once a power is now a flaw, and the only flaw I know.

Now, there is only one story within me. Only story one left to tell.

O’ Aphrodite, sea-born scheming mother, I doubt you. For I believe that there is no love greater than mine. There is no love more empty, more critical, more crucial. It is what Love did to me that I must lose – and there is nothing to my love but losing.

Muse, give me the courage to tell this story, a final story, for me.

I

Three days the ceremony lasted. Three days the sky remained empty.

Hymenaeus, that dark-eyed decisive God – God to all those happily wedded – denied our calls each time. He gave no lucky omens; He brought no gifts. And in the sky, the throne where He should have been seated those days, remained vacant all along.

These were quiet days, but happy days, to me. They marked the finest days of my life. I anticipated the future in each and every way, for I felt within me such warmth. There was so little time to notice the unsettling absence of things. And my heart was too full to realise the continuous dearth of that God, and what it must have meant.

Alas, the next few days were all done in vain.

—

The first day of our wedding, we and all those in attendance had sung up, up, up into the sky, calling Him to acknowledge our holy union:

“Hymen, O Hymenaeus, Hymen, be present!”

He had not heard.

But there was always tomorrow. 

For the days were young! So young, and I was younger, happier, and looking out into the shared future before me with nothing but hope. What a joy a wedding is: to love someone in this way, and to have found this person by some grand chance. I was overwhelmed by my own luck.

In the evening time, whilst Eurydice offered her ending childhood days to lovely Hera, to swift Artemis, to Aphrodite, I poured out the libations to Hymenaeus, of thick gold honey. The air was cool and calm, and I waited for Him to come. But He remained silent to this first offering; the honey was not lapped up, nor was the incense enjoyed. And so, pouring out the libations for a lucky life, it was all fruitless.

Late that night, I imagined Eurydice in preparation: water streaming down her back and through her hair from the fine loutrophoros that had been gifted us. There and then, she had been cleansed of everything. I could imagine her, shiny and new, returning to her bed chamber to sleep alone for the last time.

Eurydice, the girl, then the woman, now nothing at all.

I thought and yearned to the point that I felt nothing within me but ironic fortune, and when Hypnos slipped his fine fingers across my eyes, I let the happy dreams come.

—

Day two was our union as husband and wife.

“Hymen, O Hymenaeus, Hymen, be present!”

And again, He did not hear! No, he was not there for Eurydice’s final moments in her father’s house, nor was He there for the splendid sacrifices made to all the Gods of Olympus. And again, I saw no reason in thinking of it too much. How could I think too much? For when I saw Eurydice, my Eurydice, with her oak-coloured eyes, and that day – that fine, beautiful day – she had flowers in her hair like Persephone, I need not think. Oh, no music, no prose of praise could preach my love for her as I do now! No love, no vivacity, felt greater than mine. It stays true, still.

So, lifting the veil to reveal her smiling face, I knew. Knew that I would never need nor want no other woman in all my life. That there would be no doubt within any ounce of my being in marrying her. That my songs may recount an element of my own longing for her, one day. And that day would be the greatest day in all my years, for in them would reveal the truth of my love.

For a striking moment, looking at her then, a sting of fear struck me universally. The knowledge of being unwatched, unprotected, passed through. There felt to be no God shielding us, and it might as well have been so.

It was a moment, in between a moment, but it seemed to linger there.

—

That night, I had a strange dream: Hymeneaus, dark-eyed, decisive, holding a torch of smoke, that would not alight pure flame.

—

Day three was the unluckiest of all.

Eurydice’s move from her father’s house to my home, her home, ours. I thought we had escaped an unhappy fate, and we were alone together at last.

New pots and perfume, jewellery and fine furniture lay across the darkening room; it was a life unlived, new and strange and exciting.

Finally, the liveliness of those days swept off our weary bones and Nyx – source of sweet repose – drew the dark curtains forth. I would have been happy to lay with Eurydice all night long, hand in human hand. If it were not for that night’s greatest woe. For when I thought it was all over, and my eyes begun to tire, to my surprise she called:

“I would much like to go out again, tonight.” She said, in a thin voice. 

I looked at her in a confused way, as if to say: How could you disturb this stillness? This final peace? 

She took my hand in between hers, hands of white and purple-veined marble.

“I want to remember this night.” she spoke. How could I deny her this?

“Shall I come with you?” I said, “A walk together, perhaps?”

She shook her head, that I could see. She did not explain why, and yet I knew: we had so much time to spend together yet. So much Time.

So, I let her go. Knowing that we were from henceforth never truly apart, or feeling it. I watched her go.

There were no stars that night.

—

I did not sleep. Could not sleep, for I finally felt a tickle of misfortune. I was right in feeling thus.

The Gods fell into their pleasing slumber, and Hymenaeus turned his back from Eurydice a final time.

To this day, I know not why, I know not how, cruel Fate twists and turns in that way it does: how it had to come then, so early in Time. For when Eurydice was walking, walking along the quiet, still plains of forest with the Naiads in her attendance, some kind of ruin slithered in.

I imagine it (with torment): for as she was speaking softly, suddenly all the flush spilled from her sweetened face, and her eyes lost their glimmer, and all the life around her begun to spin, and in doing so, gave way. In one fragile fleeting moment she fell, silenced in the dead of night by a serpent’s bite.

Muse, how am I to go on with this story?

The one that is only beginning. The one that is my end.

II

No words, no prose of praise can relate how I felt that night, how I have felt ever since. 

I mourned the days and nights away, mourned the outstretch of time altogether, until there was nothing to Life but Waking and Sleeping. Some days it felt that I had grieved her to completeness; I was so full of both love and loss for her. It was an emptiness that no life could fix, and everything at once became very silent. 

I was a coward, you know. Too sick with sorrow to attend her funeral, to see the truth before me. And yet I could think of nothing but Eurydice, my Eurydice, and the many years taken from her, the opportunities, the possibilities of a life full of uncertainties, joys and sorrows, for both of us.

Pots and perfume, jewellery and fine furniture, collecting dust. No lady at the loom. No one to play fine sweet music (for in losing her, I was lost too). I have lived my life, and here is the rest of it.

The night of her funeral, I went outside, where the ocean was completely still and cried:

“Hymen, O Hymenaeus, Hymen, why have you betrayed me so?”

I received no answer. That silence was the worst part. 

—

Another night, and again I had given up all hope. I felt – not just felt but knew, deep down – that I had mourned too long in that Upperworld without remedy. 

And there I found a thing to do.

Half-alive, half-thinking, then half-filled with hope, I considered a journey, lower. Would I dare? How could I dare? My stomach curdled at the thought! But with it came some strange comfort: to exchange this miserable life, the monotonous days, the come and go, the uncertainty of everything when alone. No, no, I would trade it instantly for some chance to see my wife. There was so little risk in doing so, I felt. For with my greatest fear come true, what more did I have to lose?

Rare it is for a soul to see the Underworld with living eyes. Rarer is it for a mortal to know the pure vastness of that realm. 

This is all I knew: First, to get to the Stygian world, you must enter through the gates of Taenarus, where son of Leto cannot reach you. To enter truly, escaping all six eyes of Cerberus is your only hope. Stop, anything deeper I could hardly fathom.

I knew that there was nothing else that I could do. I was nothing on my own, but with music I had a kind of power. My grief too made me ambitious, but also reckless (so, so reckless). I knew I was not a fighter. Not a hero like Hercules, nor a thinker like Theseus. All I truly had were my words, my music, so little left for me.

—

What was once a power is now a flaw, and the only flaw I know.

I found my way there.

The sky was like a smear of fire (it is the only clichéd way of describing it), and the tide was low and unending; it was unsurprising that Icarus yearned to indulge in one or the other. With me I had nothing but my love and my lyre, ready to play music again in search of half my soul.

Finding the entrance, abstracted just above the shimmering water, was the most beautiful thing I had seen in so long. For within I knew Eurydice was there, somewhere. 

Entering the cave, another kind of darkness seemed to seep in.

I walked through pure darkness, and whilst every nerve of what was both human and mortal within me begged to turn away, back to the place where the sun shined, I kept going. I don’t know how long I walked through that darkness, that silence. Through it all I felt an overwhelming melancholy, a familiarity. That space felt nostalgic to me strangely. 

Eventually, the terrain beneath felt unsubstantial, and waded back and forth, as if uncertain of itself. I found my footing.

Timeless, colourless, shapeless minutes and hours passed me by. Fatigue fell through me unhappily. But there was no time in thinking thus. For, soon enough, I heard the barking.

—

Cerberus, who was so large, so looming that I mistook it for some great cloud of shadow, I saw in front of the gates. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. I dared not go close, too scared of the beast. How surreal it was to see the creature I had only heard of. Fear took my breath away. But Survival does what it needs.

So, to soothe the barking down I began to play my lyre, just like I had once done in life, to men and fine ladies, to children. To Eurydice, to send my darling to sleep. I played to a monster. And to my surprise it worked: those strings quieted the creature; soon enough all three heads were thudding to the floor, six inflamed eyes weighing closed unwillingly.

This victory infected me with Ego, and I was foolish enough to think it easy – for going further down, there seemed not one thing I could not dismiss with my song. 

I passed the paws of Cerberus and entered through those gates with nothing but Hope.

Time passes. Eventually, what once silence become something solid again, and I begun to hear water being poured into a cold windy cave. It sounded almost living: finally, something real, something solid against something else. It was the closest thing to certainty I had experienced.

Then I heard another sound, rising upwards and through me. Hundreds of sounds, sharp and piercing, echoing like half-formed memories. I knew not what they were until I saw: the ideas of people once before! Some wailed, some raged, some were completely silent. I saw them, barely, those insubstantial spirits of the dead.

Sifting through the absent crowd, I found the source of that fluid sound.

The Styx was a long narrow lake, looking like a plane of marble, black and unsettlingly calm, nothing like those wine-dark oceans back in Thrace. From a distance, it almost looked like peace. Before it, stood the man, the judge, who had only been a myth to me prior.

But Charon was not what I expected, for getting closer, he looked like the saddest man I had ever seen: what a thousand lifetimes of solitude and nonexistence does to you, I wonder.

“These are the souls who have not received burial.” he spoke, “feel pity on them, but do not help them. You cannot help.”

Then he looked down on me and must have realised my living soul.
  “You are still living” he said, “you don’t belong here, yet.”

His voice was slow and warbling. Here I knew not what to say, for his message was clear and simple. I tried to offer him an obol, shiny in that watery darkness, but he denied me this.

“You are still living.” the unhappy thing he repeated.

So, I had no choice but to give my lyre a second try. I played a very sad song, bringing tears to both my eyes and his. And to my pride it worked a second time; Charon offered me a seat in his tired little boat and slowly sailed me away, and did not speak nor question me.

I watched the thousand souls behind me then, crawling on the dead shore, wailing still, as they drifted from my view and into darkness again.

III

Looking up, I could no longer see that shining entrance which I had once entered

through. Everything above me became pure nothingness.

I landed onto solid ground, paid my obol, and with it my respects as Charon sailed away.

Here was a place I could have never quite imagined. Whilst the oceans of the earth seemed endless – but had an end – the landscape before me showed no sign. The lands went on and on, in layers before me. Each of them was filled with shades, but only a low humming sound could be heard all around, tuneless and formless.

My living body reminded me of its mortality by this time; I had been walking so long by now that I had begun to exhaust all of myself. This is how I came face-to-face with the rulers of those unlovely realms. In pure exhaustion, in pure desperation. 

Muse, how frozen I became, how powerless. For as I was wading along, I wasn’t yet aware of their presence. It was only until I looked up again and saw two exquisite thrones looming high. Soon enough shapes became recognisable, and I found myself looking into the deep, distant eyes of Hades, the gate fastener, and his wife Persephone. A God who could not yet see such a small insignificant life. No, I could hardly see their cold, still faces so high up there in the dark canopy of sky. They were eerily still. Nothing is ever how I imagine it to be.

Persephone was the first to see me; wasting her time best she could whilst stuck there. She was indeed a beautiful sight, from what I could see. It struck me so. How, oh how, could Eurydice be here, too? And how, oh how, do beautiful things leave so fast?

Eventually I caught the attention of Hades, who, in moving his head to see me, silenced every spirit with fright.

“How did a mortal make it to the land of lost souls?” 

So he spoke. And all the absence and uncertainty in that world became very clear, substantial in his voice.

There, then, I did the only thing I could do. Standing there, I began to play a final time.

“I am no hero. I have not come to see Tartarus, nor to bind the three heads of Medusa’s offspring. I cannot be who I ought to be since fate took my Eurydice away.

I have come on this journey in search of half my soul. For whilst we were together in life, a serpent snatched away her budding years, and left me here, alone. I am at my wit’s end!

Blessed king, blessed queen, believe me, I will not deny that I have tried to bear this grief. But Love has overcome me! If only you could see this grief poor mortals suffer when their lovers are turned away from them. Magnanimous Hades, may you please unravel the fates of my wife, too quickly run? All souls must return here inevitably, so why not rejoice in the death of two, after living our one good life? 

Hades, think of those cold months away from your wife, the thing you feel: though the time is mere seconds to your immortal eyes, you must feel her absence, still.

Persephone, do you miss your divine mother and her living seasons down here? Every half year the whole world knows she grieves for you. Please, give me this one hope.”

As I sang thus, playing my song in so great a melancholy, all the spirits of the Underworld cried out. The sounds blared into life in an echo. 

I saw Tantalus – yes, that most selfish fool – stop reaching for his uncertain desires, and Ixion’s turning wheel halted, wonder-struck. It is true, that Prometheus’ liver escaped the vulture in that moment, and all fifty daughters of Danaus halted from their futile labour. Sisyphus, for all eternity, forgot about the endless pushing of his boulder. Even the Erinyes stopped taking vengeance and wept, for the first time.

And for a moment – so brief a moment – I thought I saw a change in Hades, too.

He spoke nothing, for a long time. Only waited for those sounds of universal suffering to shuffle down, down into whispers again, until all was achingly still. I waited, so frozen with both love and fear, to see what they would do.

Persephone looked at her husband, her partner, a friend or a stranger. Her eyes seemed to glisten, and tears fell from her cheeks, like pearls. It was liked it begun to rain. 

Hades gave no sign of censure. Only began to kneel lower, so that his hand lay fisted before me. He opened each finger one by one, and there, in the palm of his lifeless hand I saw her.

Eurydice, my Eurydice! She who walked in steps halting, still affected by that pain which ended her.

But it was strange, for she was not fully herself: she seemed not to walk upon the ground. Her face I could hardly see, her hair drawn across it, as if caught in the wind, though there was none. She was an idea, still new, still clearer than the many shades I had witnessed.

A Eurydice half-formed. I thought: what can I do?

Before I could answer this question of mine, the divine king spoke:

“Do not look back.” Hades started, “Go forth from the valley of Avernus. You may not speak; you may not play your song. And do not turn back, for if you do before you have returned into the Upperworld, the gift before you shall all be in vain. In doing so, she will die a second time.”

The condition was clear. And so, I did the easiest thing I could do. I walked. Walked out through the darkness and the stillness, from whence I had come.

How was I to know this would be the hardest challenge yet? For whilst my other trials had one certainty in them (I knew I could play music with psychagogic charm), this was simple and vague and uncertain. How was I to know this was not some cruel trick, used to cast me out of the Underworld?

This is my worst flaw of all: Doubt. 

—

We walked. We both did, I know now. We marched up, up up that sloping path, through places of utter silence. Steep, indistinct, and dark. I imagined our wedding bells, and echo, then. Our house built for two living souls. I imagined a lady at the loom again, my darling there to sleep beside and to wake up beside. I remembered that none of it was yet real, and grieved her for the thousandth time. My eyes begun to well.

Each step away from that place felt like I was walking a lifetime away from her. The thought bit into me incessantly. Her form behind me, forced forward like a string pulled too tight. I was more scared then than I had ever been entering.

I heard no footsteps, no crunch in the rubble, no breath nor echo. I denied my temptation for clarity.

With no music to play, no quest but this, it took many hours or days until I saw that square of light again, though it felt like years. And then that light became something living. I heard sounds that I had almost forgotten. That monotonous ocean in its high tide, almost feeling the day’s warmth across my face, as if nothing had changed. I could smell the salt of my home, her home, our home. Could feel the fullness of the air lift up into my lungs and carry me away. And I knew that I could bear it no longer.

I, so afraid that she may fail me, eager for sight of her, touch of her, smell of her, turned back my longing eyes for only a moment. And in doing so, failed her. 

Oh, how beautiful she was! No longer was she a memory of herself, but a real living thing again: all the colour in her sweetened face renewed, and the glimmer of her eyes had soul behind them. I thought I heard a breath from her, a laugh from her. Felt her touch. I imagined that it would start again, our life: there was a pause, yes, but it had all returned now. We could keep on going. I, for one so foolish, was giddy with glee.

But then, I saw her face, fading how I must have that woeful night. Again, the colour faded, and the soul disconnect from her heart, and she slipped away, away from me and backwards, like a strange dream. I watched it happen this time. And I tried – Gods know I tried – to catch her, but my arms only held still air, unbreathed.

It is a sadness that wraps around you. It is a cruelty brought unto me. I have nothing to blame now for her early end, no snake to strike. It is me to blame, and me only.

Standing there, the living world behind me, I watched her go.

If you have read this far, I cannot help but thank you. No one has ever listened so long, and I have never had such a truthful song to sing.

———

THE END

Featured Image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.