Perhaps it be everywhere-known how the gods cursed the blue-eyed Cyclops for promising hospitality to tired wayfarers and then eating them, but I think it well to repeat of such histories once in a time. Let it be remembered how the Cyclops' betrayal of the journeyman's trust and fellowship so offended Olympus that unanimously the gods struck him with neverending lonesomeness. Their judging brows even deemed it meet to magnify his forever pang with a poignant hunger for companionship. And they banished him to the remotest isle. And they pronounced him forthwith deaf. The gods really wanted that the Cyclops be lonely.
But Olympus is not omnipotent. It cannot, the oracles reveal, deprive the Cyclops of his magic without simultaneously depriving him of his life. And since the gods hanker for a signal and prolonged punishment for this atrocity instead of a nigh-forgotten execution, they will not wrest from him his magic. The blue-eyed Cyclops remains a peril, as a result, a concernment. Still he lives somewhere and may by evil accident one day encounter straying travelers upon which to ply his cunning. For this reason I repeat these fell warnings. One needs must beware.
The magic of the Cyclops emanates from his blue eye, remember. Irresistibly blinks that eye, hypnotically, mastering all and every blue of earth to fuel its bewitching gaze, to enthrall. Turbulent blue of seascape the eye projects, and sheer of firmament; silken blue of violet the eye projects, and of wingèd jay. With coy mien the Cyclops swaddles these lovelies about his mark, like a promise, like a pleasure, like a comfort. But do not look! For a single incautious glance dooms one to the Cyclops' enchantment. Interlock your desires with his seductive blue eye, my dear ones, and at once you tumble to his sway.
For then he turns his magic.
Tranquilized, you cannot resist the crawling of his trickery across the threshold of your pupils and its nesting amongst the workings of your soul. And once entrenched within you, the Cyclops identifies your most laudable of talents, your highest offerings to Athens. He curries and woos these guilefully, understand; until, by their own volition, somehow conscious of their act but also powerless to behave otherwise, your uniquest gifts hiss from your being as a tepid blue steam. Your most god-like of attributes then slumber meekly aweigh, as a mist, about your shoulders.
The ancients hold, and many a bard hath limned since, how the blue eye thereupon converts to vortex. Its pupil contracts, know. It rotates, know. It spins and spins, know, capturing your anchorless mist of potential and potency. Envision, if you may, Athena's young spinsters twining their yarns from bales of formless cotton or wool. Similarly the Cyclops pulls and narrows your innate abilities with his pupil, thinning them from their amorphous mist to a fragile-fine thread, and then drawing that thread away from your heart and mind. With the costumes of Star Wars, he does this, with the laugh tracks of The Brady Bunch. By these he tugs your greatness from your being, know, spooling it into his own, and thieving a fugitive comradeship. The Cyclops abducts your inmost art, see. He communes with you profanely.
Be it declaimed here and uppermost that the Cyclops treats of these stolen soulstuffs disposably. Ravenously he mouths at one's aspirations to feel his companionship. Ruthlessly he gnaws at one's passions to relieve his loneliness. But in vain. For the Cyclops cannot be satisfied. All of a citizen's finest possibilities, he will ingest, multiplied by thousands, but still without achieving his repletion. This is the curse of Hera, of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Apollo. And herewith pulses the keenest of the tragedies I warn of--That a doughty soldier, unknowing; that an eloquent orator, being careless, might find himself one day sacrificed to nothing, to a pointless meal. The accursèd Cyclops consumes one uselessly, remember, and then shrugs. End not your glorious days so belittled!
To the wind's four quarters these dread truths have spread. By the tongues of sailors, they travel, and in the packs of traders; amongst the Persians, they pass, and southerly along the Nile, even beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Few, as a result, mistake nowatimes upon the Cyclops' faraway rock of isolation and woe. We all of us fear the immortal tractions of his resistless blue orb, and the ignoble forfeiture of our priceless human pith. Yet, from while to while, one ill-fated amongst us forgets. And occasionally come those from barbarian lands who know not of these evils. And in every age, it seems, a hero youth sallies forth to brandish his mettle, to slay the brute. And stormwinds, too, toss castaways upon his uncharted shore. Episode by episode, though, unfailingly, these nameless unfortunates meet demise. All of them perish. First the Cyclops rapes their souls. Then the Cyclops eats them.
My dear ones, I sit before you offering an elder's counsel, nay, a grandmother's simple prayer. Hearken now, if you will, heed. Please stay aloof. Please stay aware. This I beseech of thee earnestly, invoking all thy trust in me: Mark well this warning! Tempt not the blue eye of the Cyclops!
