by Nils Peterson
The Greek poet Cavafy begins his fine poem “Ithaka”:
When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon–do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.
Here I am, cast up on the shores of 92 years. I have things to weep over, yes, and things to rejoice over, yes. Most of my companions have gone. I find myself wanting to tell my story, and so I do in poems that remember and in bits of memoir. My court is the internet where friends sometime listen and sometimes, sometimes I say, catch the attention of an unknown who’s wandered in looking for wine and a little food and some entertainment.
Well, my “thought” was not always “lofty” so I’ve met Cyclops, “angry” Poseidon, many sirens, maybe even a tribe of Laestrygonians.
And the story is always with me, a continual source of imagery, a way of understanding myself and a help in explaining my self to others. (See the little gift you get from the difference between myself and my self? a readerly gift.) I’ll come back to this.
I was a reading a poem by Derek Walcott whose opening obliquely refers to Homer’s story and I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer mentioned in those lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general downgrading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, forgotten. But the Odyssey? I need it.
Once I was talking with a storyteller and explaining to her about a poem I’d written about how another storyteller, at the moment of telling, chose the story she’d tell.
Footnote
Dusk. Just before one turns on the light.
I’m telling a storyteller about my poem
about a storyteller, in which I’d imagined her
traveling like Odysseus into the underworld,
an underworld of stories, where a hundred
tales jostled each other longing to be told.
There, in my mind, I saw her stand, holding
“the sharp sword of her attention” until
she knew which story was needed.
“How masculine a thought,” says my
companion, peering over a glass of wine
the color of twilight. “For me it’s like
walking in a garden and picking what’s
ripest.” And yes, I feel a little masculine
chagrin as I peer down into my own glass.
Of course I’m referring to Odysseus having to go into the underworld to talk to the sage Tiresias to find out how to get home. It’s an extraordinary moment when he must even hold off for awhile the shade of his mother to get to the needed understanding. Let that resonate a bit.
Here is another poem of mine that uses the story in quite different way.
Thinking About Painting as an Odyssey
A line is a point
setting off on a journey
a location that wants to go
elsewhere.
Paint is a storyteller.
Color, a voice.
Shape, a history.
An artist’s brush
is a bow
no one else can pull.
Canvas
is the court
where he must tell
his story.
Of course one of the things that Odysseus does to prove his identity when he’s gotten back to Ithaka is to string the bow that no suitor of Penelope could. And isn’t it true that an artist’s brush is uniquely his or her own? So our story gives us a way of talking, a way of of understanding, a way of seeing riches. The way of words.
You can say “Well, Odysseus won’t be lost. Look at Matt Damon.” Yes look. Looking is not listening. Looking is not language. They inhabit, I think, different parts of the brain. Consider the emoji. An emoji is a way of avoiding language. What you want to “say” is communicated by picture. You don’t have to think about how to say a thing (I mistyped thing to think, but I find I want that here too), you push a button. It’s almost as if the you of you is missing, the world as cliché, comfortable and easy. Centerless. Think of Matt Damon on the screen as sort of a colorful emoji. (Actually, I like Matt Damon, The Bourne Identity so much fun.)
Will the Odyssey be forgotten or remembered vaguely in general and not its specifics. I think there’ll always be stories about a return home, a space odyssey maybe from a trip to Alpha Centaurus. But who will think Odysseus’s bow, artist’s brush Aha! – if the story exists only in the library, or a PhD thesis? or on a screen. This year we’ll be seeing it, but seeing it is different from reading it and we’ll be different if we give up one for the other.
We’ll be even more eye-centered and less ear-centered than we are. We’ll miss the joys, the musics of language. I’ve always feared the eye-reader as opposed to the ear-reader (though I think I was one when I was young). The one wants facts, the other wants music. It’s the difference between AI and spirit. ( I may have changed when I first read Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “Oh wild West Wind thou breath of Autumn’s being” “Oh wild West Wind.” What a joy to pay attention to the dancing doubleyous of your mouth, though the eye is helpful here too in picking up the capitals of personification.)
A last thought from another poem of mine:
The Bed
After he’d lain again with Penelope,
Odysseus, awake, listened to her gentle
snore and smiled. He’d forgotten it, or maybe
it had come while he was away. Restless,
he found himself restless and wondering,
at home, in a bed he’d made, yet restless, restless.
How many nights had he longed to be just here
when sea-wracked or caught in the arms
of a goddess. He rose and padded out
to the palace garden, moon shining so bright
the trees cast shadows. The saplings planted
when Telemachus was born, towered over the walls.
The sons he had not planted would never be.
Young, he’d thought a life could have many voyages
but now he saw there was only one.
Yes, when you get to the Ithaka of old age, you realize there was only one voyage and it’s the one you took.
Except – Odysseus is not yet done with his travels when the tale is over. He has another trip. Tiresias told him that to finally appease Poseidon he must walk away inland with an oar over his shoulder until he comes to a place so far from the sea that people mistake it for a winnowing fan (an instrument that helps with the harvest) and there he must make a sacrifice to the sea god.
What does that mean for me? Maybe my task has been to write this piece for someone who wonders what all that kerfuffle over the Odyssey is about. Maybe my hours at the computer are my sacrifice, a joyful one here in my ninety- second year.