4. Such a pattern might even be discovered in one’s own, unheroical life. In the stages of one’s professional career, for example, or the succession of one’s love affairs.
5. If one imagines an artist less enamored of the world than of the language we signify it with, yet less enamored of the language than of the signifying narration, and yet less enamored of the narration than of its formal arrangement, one need not necessarily imagine that artist therefore forsaking the world for language, language for the processes of narration, and those processes for the abstract possibilities of form.
6. Might he/she not as readily, at least as possibly, be imagined as thereby (if only thereby) enabled to love the narrative through the form, the language through the narrative, even the world through the language? Which, like narratives and their forms, is after all among the contents of the world.
7. And, thus imagined, might not such an artist, such an amateur of the world, aspire at least to expert amateurship? To an honorary degree of humanity?
G. And if — by a curriculum of dispensations, advisements, armings, trials, losses, and gains, isomorphic with a Perseus’s or a Bellerophon’s — this artist contrived somehow to attain that degree, might he not then find himself liberated to be (as he has after all always been, but is enabled now more truly, freely, efficaciously to be) in the world? Just as the Hero (at IF6) finally terminates his tasks by exterminating his taskmaster and (IIF6) discovers in what had been his chiefest adversary his truest ally, so such an “artist,” at the Axis Mundi or Navel of the World, might find himself liberated — Old self! Old Other! Yours Truly! — from such painful, essential correspondences as ours. Which I now end, and with it the career of “Arthur Morton King.” In order to begin
II. My life’s Second Cycle
* See Lord Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama, ch. 16 (N.Y., Vintage Books, 1956).
† In ch. 4, “The Keys,” of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (N.Y., Bollingen, 1949).
I: Ambrose Mensch to the Author. A left-handed letter following up a telephone call. Alphabetical instructions from one writer to another.
“Barataria”
Bloodsworth Island, Maryland
Monday A.M., 8/25/69
Imagine your writing hand put hors de combat by a blow from the palm of Fame! In my case, a 3-lb. bronze job — either a replica or the original snitched by the redcoats from the U.S. Navy Monument during the burning of Washington in 1814—wielded here last night during the Burning of Washington sequence by R. Prinz, who I’m happy to say got as good as he gave: I smithereened his eyeglasses, and very nearly his head, with the pen of History, ditto. More to come.
So I’m following up my Saturday night’s phone call with a left-handed letter typed in A. B. Cook’s caretaker’s cottage, kindly lent Milady A. and me till noon today. Cook and caretaker, together with the navy aforementioned, are searching the Prohibited Area of Bloodsworth Island for Jerome Bonaparte Bray, possibly blown last night to Kingdom Come by a combination of lightning and thitherto unexploded naval ordnance. Choppers, air sleds, marsh buggies, patrol boats! Round about us the filmists film themselves cleaning up the ruins of Washington. Their Director has abandoned his messed-up mistress, one Merope Bernstein, and withdrawn alone to NYC, where no doubt he’ll respectacle himself for next month’s Battle of Baltimore. Germaine and I shall withdraw likewise, after lunch today, to Cambridge, to check out my dexter carpals (presently Ace-Bandaged) and my oncophiliac ménage.
My friend History (formerly Britannia, a.k.a. Literature) will pen you the details some Saturday.
Now: re your letter of August 3, and my call. Enclosed is my ground plan for that Perseus-Medusa story I told you of, together with more notes on golden ratio, Fibonacci series, and logarithmic spirals than any sane writer will be interested in. My compliments. All that remains is for you to work out a metaphorical physics to turn stones into stars, as heat + pressure + time turn dead leaves into diamonds. I have in mind Medusa’s petrifying gaze, reflected and re-reflected at the climax, not from Athena’s mirror-shield, but from her lover Perseus’s eyes: the transcension of paralyzing self-consciousness to productive self-awareness. And (it goes without saying) I have in mind too the transformation of dead notes into living fiction — for it also remains for you to write the story!
