D. His reencounter with the Graeae, who want their eye back. But P. has dropped it accidentally into Lake Triton in the 1st Cycle (ID). He promises to retrieve it.

E. His deep dive into that lake for that eye; his near drowning and rescue by Medusa, disguised as a Styx-Nymph.

F. 1. His lakeshore idyll with this veiled and odorless nymph, who reveals herself to be Medusa, but won’t lift her veil. For Athena has told her that if her true lover unveils her, they will be immortalized together like Keats’s lovers on the Grecian Urn; but if anyone else does, she will be re-Gorgonized and he a fortiori petrified. She’s willing to risk it, but is he?

2. His decision that he is not, yet. He slips off, attempts to fly over the desert as in his youth, loses his way, crash-lands, loses his consciousness, awakes in a spiral temple muraled with all the foregoing scenes and ministered over, as is he, by a pretty young priestess, who becomes his lover. He believes himself dead and in heaven, learns that he’s alive and in Egypt (where he’d paused for refreshment in the 1st Cycle) and that his new hero-worshiping lover, a student of mythology, is the artist responsible for the story of his life thus far, complete to IIF2.

3. His gratefully kissing her… good-bye. He departs from the temple, returns down the Nile, and secretly enters Joppa, where he learns that Andromeda is established in the palace with her new lover.

4. His confrontation with her there, among the petrified host from IF4, their original wedding guests. Danaus’s live warriors step armed from behind the “statues”; it is a trap.

5. The second Banquet-Hall Battle, a reenactment of the first, but without Medusa’s aid. Perseus’s slaying of young Danaus, arduous general victory, and sparing of Andromeda. Their final rejection of each other.

6. His unveiling and open-eyed embrace of ambiguous Medusa, let come what may.

7. Their transfiguration (along with Andromeda, her mother Cassiopeia, her father Cepheus, the monster Cetus, the horse Pegasus, and the remarkable artist-priestess of IIF2, who will by now have added these scenes to the unwinding mural) into constellations.

G. Their “posthumous” dialogue in the sky, in which, as every night, certain questions are raised (e.g., Has Medusa been truly restored, and is Perseus her true lover? Or was his kiss a mere desperate hope, and she thus a Gorgon after all?) and at least equivocally answered; the stars set until the next nightly reenactment of their story.

3. If my story were so partitioned, and further arranged in its telling so that the First Cycle is rehearsed retrospectively in course of the Second — which itself begins in medias res, in the Egyptian temple of IIF2—then the “panel” IIF6, Perseus’s open-eyed embrace of his new Medusa, would be the climax of the climax, intimated in IE (not IE) above.

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!

Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are my thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts — my good Dame History — has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions: