This is the way the blind man comes, lock-step, two heads lit by the eyes of one. Blind as a bat, yet more cunning than Bruce Wayne, more omniscient than the hundred-eyed giant, Argus.
You’ve seen it all — from Amphion’s tortoise shell guitar, gifted by the swift-footed Hermes, charming the stones into the seven-gated walls of Thebes; you too have been know to make stones move, trees to speak, cedars and firs to march to the Song of Solomon.
You Augur, with your understood relations, have by maggot-pies, and choughs and rooks brought forth the secret’st man of blood.
Who can withstand Zeus’ indignation? Who can endure his fierce anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered like fire. Yet that same fire bestowed upon you, Tiresias, in an act of illuminating sympathy by the hand of god after his spiteful wife plucked out your eyes long before Oedipus Rex took his own.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this gift clean from your mind? No, this your mind will rather the multitudinous deeds divine making the unknown known.
Not only do you see a wide swath like Helios’ arc ‘cross the sky sitting in your chair of augury in a whirlwind of wings clashing, you Birdman, but you don’t forget either. Even in death the implacable muse held your head above water wading through The River of Forget on your way to see the secret, black and midnight brother of the one who bestowed your seeing.
While every other soul in Sheol is a pale shade of near nothingness, you retain your cognizance, your memory, your ability. When wily Ulysses and his Ithicans fight their way through Hell to find you and divine your secret to click their heels home; offering blood, fending off the surrounding zombies; when you speak, do they listen Mr. Wizard?
History is the great teacher — the farther you look back the farther you see forward, but it also has the least apt pupils. The Trojan Horse men made mince-meat of Helios’ sacred cows against your better judgment. Those sailors supp’d full of horrors; direness, familiar to their slaughtering of the cattle on a thousand hills cannot once start them.
Did they pay the price? Did Oedipus before being beamed up in apotheosis like fire in the sky in a hidden grove of Sophocles’ home-village as his two daughters witnessed no martyr’d bones for Cain and Able to pick over?
Did Creon, more draconian and hardened by pride-of-state than the sown dragon fangs of Cadmus? As he desperately tried to understand pummeling the labyrinth walls like a raging bull. Clawing the jewels from his crown for pawn diminishing Thebes’ to that of synthetic gold from Sardis. Kings have always loved brass, just as prophets have always loved gold. He tried to understand, never seeing eyes so blue. Mamma Mia Jocasta says she’s worried, Antigone’s growin’ up in a hurry. Creon, try to understand, try to understand, try, try, try to understand — which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not — he’s a magic man...(cue Greek chorus).