Poor Joseph K

At one point in Kafka's The Trial, Joseph K tells the student, Bertold, "I don't really know about your judicial system yet. . ." (63). The more we glimpse of this system through Joseph K's confusing confrontations with officials and bureaucracy, the harder it is to comprehend any of it.  It becomes something like an unsolvable riddle that Joseph K. tries to solve.  In the fourth chapter, when Joseph K. seeks out the offices of the judicial system in a tenement-like apartment complex, several metaphors, several possibilities, emerge at once: The law and its servants have behaved criminally, and Joseph K is the hero, pursuing the law, much the way he tried without success to pursue Bertold, the washerwoman's "little monster" (63). The 'little monster,' Bertold the law student will one day be a big monster, a judge, in much the same way totalitarianism and fascism begins as a little monster and becomes a big one. To use an earlier statement K. recalls in the story, "the court was attracted by guilt" (39), so it's possible that K. is attracted to justice.  This makes him questionable. Is he guilty of something? Why are the authorities interested in him? And why is he so interested in the authorities?  The last metaphor is conveyed in the dizzy spell K. experiences when he takes a tour of the law offices. Does it reflect his uneasiness with himself and with the law? Is his obsession with getting an understanding of this elusive riddle unhealthy for him? So far, we have no reason to believe he is the worst of people, but because of his life-style, we have no reason to believe he is the best. He probably is like the majority of people in the world, (especially men-- I think this dude is a bit of a chauvinist) somewhere in between. I think he is an average and harmless, person, but I have a feeling that the trial that Joseph K. has been forced to undergo in the story will take many of his freedoms away, at the same time that it leaves him in the position to become the best of people, or the worst. It will be an interesting metamorphosis.

Part III

I'm not yet at the end of Part III in Madame Bovary, but it doesn't take a genius to predict she is on the decline. The way that Flaubert portrays Emma's development as a character reminds me of a binge-eater. Eventually she's going to make herself terribly sick-- or unappealing. Sometimes I wonder if her character would have been more or less tragic and unattractive if she ate or drank herself into ruin. Instead she is destroying herself on a diet of questionable love and dubious lies.

As their affair progresses, even Leon begins to feel a little unsettled by Emma's transformation. At one point he wonders: "Where could she have learnt this corruption so deep and well masked as to be almost unseizable?" (219.)  This question has several answers. One of them is Rodolphe. Before Rodolphe, the novels Emma devoured set the stage for the romantic disorder that her affair with Rodolphe cemented. Rodolphe's life reflects the link between consumption and corruption, indulgence and indifference. Flaubert gives us a glimpse of his history in the following passage: ". . for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing was left; whatever entered there, more heedless than children, did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall." (162).

After Emma recovers from Rodolphe, she emerges in Leon's eyes as "woman of the world" (209). She satiates herself with pleasures during her relationship with Leon, to the point where love no longer even factors into her feelings. Though in many ways she becomes, at the height of her powers, more physically attractive to Leon, her mentality approaches that of an ever-expanding glutton. Flaubert's genius lies in his ability to portray with daring irony and sensuality the point where the path of a distinctive personality crumbles into pathology.

Part II

An Ordinary Existence

What I really enjoy about the selected readings for this class, and great literature in general, is that the texts and the characters we encounter generate endless talking points.  I find this especially the case with Madame Bovary. I've reached the point in the book where the positively diabolical Rodolphe Boulanger succeeds in his seduction and conquest of Emma. Flaubert has been inspiring humorous snorts from us up to this point with every flailing conceit of his self-absorbed heroine and every ridiculous flourish of Roldolphe. I found the scene at the agricultural fair that preceded the consummation of the lovers' affair, biting. The way Flaubert intersperses quick portraits of yawn-worthy pompous town officials and stupid livestock between Monsieur Boulanger's obvious advances, makes for something almost absurd--and virtuosic. Flaubert is a bit of a ventriloquist. Then, far that matter, so is Roldolphe. He talks to Emma using phrases that seem to come directly from her romance novels.

But Flaubert is in this for more than the laughs (if perhaps the same can't be said of Roldolphe). Moments of stirring beauty are his other forte. As Emma luxuriates in her passion for Boulanger in a country meadow, Flaubert's attention to Emma's perceptions, like everything he writes, gleams with exquisite, flawless, detail: "Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds flying about had scattered their feathers." (130). Later he writes, "A blue space surrounded her and ordinary existence appeared only intermittently between these heights, dark and far away beneath her." (131). By despising her ordinary existence, Emma makes what I fear might be a tragic mistake-- a rejection of a life that for all purposes is a good life, a life that many would consider a blessing.  All of the unassuming, harmless, honest mundanities of life-- of which Charles numbers the sorriest-- strike Emma, in her illness, as things she can not enjoy and can not endure. As she basks for the first time in the fulfillment of her romantic dreams, we feel a small ache for the plain, true gifts that are being overlooked, at the exact moment that a world that is sensationally gorgeous and dazzlingly false is being discovered.

Part I

Now that I'm reading our next selection, Madame Bovary, I feel a little sad that we're leaving ancient literature behind, and rapidly approaching modernity. The Sorrows of Young Werther departed from the older classics and offered a semi-modern voice, but Madame Bovary kind of leaves it in its dust, even as Flaubert takes inspiration from Goethe. Both stories strike me as cautionary tales. I'm seeing a theme that we discussed at the beginning of Dante's Inferno appear again: how literature can be a bad influence on characters.

Werther, before his downward spiral, boasts that he has abandoned his favorite songs from Homer and replaced them with Ossian-- unaware that the rhapsodic literary sensation of the latter was that of a poetic charlatan. Madame Bovary makes the same mistake of worshiping false idols you could say, falling sway to the powerful glamors and attractions of fiction and life. Already full of beautiful worthless nonsense from girlhood, she becomes chronically discontented after she glimpses wealthy Parisian life at a ball.

It is incredible how Flaubert doesn't make a moral judgment on the characters-- a feature, we learned in class-- that got him in trouble. Instead he offers an overwhelming array of data and details in prose that dances with elegant ironies and truths. I'm hooked, though I'm disappointed by Charles Bovary, and care even less for Emma. But I love how Flaubert writes about her, as when he reveals how the early development of her character surrounded a sensitivity to things that a devout person might not find devout. We are told that her temperament was the kind that “loved the church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the songs, and literature for the passions it excites,” and “rebelled against the mysteries of faith ...” (34).

I think a writer has a different kind of disorder, but in a way it's equivalent. Writers love words for the music in them, and grapple at times with 'the mysteries of faith,' as I'm sure Flaubert did. Writing literature is a task that demands a considerable amount of passion, and a considerable amount of faith (even if it's not religious faith)-- as well another thing that Flaubert says Madame Bovary lacks: Discipline. It takes discipline to write this blog, I realize. So that's a start.    

The Silhouette Artist

It's easy to see why this week's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, struck its first readers as real. Goethe created a portrait of a tragic young man through the fictional character of Werther's letters that I feel is one of the most complete portraits of an afflicted, sensitive person I've ever observed. Burton Pike's introduction in The Modern Library's edition of the book suggests that Werther's character may have had an autobiographical element to it. As I read the novel I debated whether the author's hand was rendering a scathing self-portrait of himself at times, or providing a precise, internal study of the emotional world of someone he understood very well. Is this impossible, impractical, unfortunate, dazzlingly true and deluded creature, someone who the writer once knew? Or someone who the writer once was? Either way, the picture he to presents us, strikes our senses as vibrantly--and painfully-- authentic. Like great art, it is has the potential to cut and cure.

I'm fascinated by Goethe's surgical precision when it comes to capturing the intricate hopes and despairs of a classic goner. The way Goethe constructs this slim book by cutting and pasting things out of the fabric of remembered experience, for instance: What Goethe pastes together is just as interesting and important as what he cuts out. As Pike mentions in the intro, we get only Werther's letters, not his friend's responses, not Lotte's journals. Information is limited and truncated when it comes to the world beyond Werther's impractical senses, so that we often only receive the first letters of names of places and people. We are given a complete portrait of Werther, but only belated, conjectured glimpses into the minds of the other characters (at the novel's conclusion by the so-called 'editor'). Of Werther, we are privileged—or burdened-- with a cascade of his inner-most thoughts and perceptions-- through his eyes, we get only people's exteriors. Though this is common in first-person narratives, I feel like it illustrates the very nature of Werther's, and mankind's dilemma. How much do we ever really know each other?

As a reader, I feel like I'm not sure if I really know or understand Lotte, the object of Werther's all-consuming love, and even Werther admits himself that he can't draw an accurate picture of her face. Instead, the only image he can make of her on paper is by cutting “out her silhouette instead.” (p45). The New Oxford American dictionary offers a definition of the word silhouette that corresponds with a theme that I feel encompasses Werther's experience-- “the dark shape and outline of someone or something visible against a lighter background. . .”

Nothing perhaps reflects this definition and illuminates Werther's—and mankind's-- predicament than his own words, “. . we are so made that we compare everything with ourselves and ourselves with everything. . .everything outside ourselves seems more glorious, every other person more perfect” (p.71).

At the end of his life, when Werther plans his suicide and settles his affairs, he requests that the silhouette he created of Lotte be returned to her so she can be pleased with his work. But in the end, the silhouette he has left behind is the one created by his own self-negating actions, his own absence. In this sense, the motif of the silhouette provides an apt metaphor for loss. Werther has chosen to cut himself out of the fabric of life. And no one is pleased with his work.  

Gray Area

The Inferno is sensational. And I mean sensational in an unsavory, skin-crawling way. From the moment we embark on Dante’s journey through hell, our senses are assailed by unpleasant smells, sights, and sounds, brought to us by one incredibly uncanny, unflinching mind, and the Hollanders’ vivid and lyrical translation.

On a purely poetic level, the work is a beauty. But I’m still strongly unsettled by much of the imagery, by the ghastly souls, regions, and assorted torments that clawed at my perceptions and left disturbing impressions. At the present, I’m trying to shake off the almost physical discomfort of a description in the final canto, when Dante and his guide Virgil must endure close contact with Satan. We are confronted with the massive and hairy body of Lucifer, and given a description of how Virgil and Dante are escorted to their final destination:

Climbing aboard the colossal Devil, Virgil “clung to the hair” (xxxiv, 80) of the monster, and instructs Dante to do the same: “Hold on tight, for by such rungs as these. . .must we depart from so much evil.” (xxxiv 82-84).

It’s not the first time the characters of Dante and Virgil have received assistance from a demon or monster during their voyage through Hell. And it’s not the first time that one of Hell’s disgruntled creatures has bent itself to their service. (Their ride on the Devil is preceded by aid from the Centaurs in Canto 12, the monster Geryon in Canto 18, the gang of Malebranche in Canto 21, and the giant Antaeus in Canto 31.)

It’s difficult to accept the idea of Good, even for a moment, joining forces with Evil. Even if you just call it an indirect embrace of cruelty, or an expedient alignment, or alliance, with immorality, I think it’s problematic.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just one of those gray areas, like politics, religion, and social psychology, that I have to accept.

Another Beast

If I thought the classics we have been reading so far were unusual, Dante's Inferno is a whole different animal. I really found writer Thomas Cahill's summation of Robert Fagle's translation of The Aeneid accurate: a "miraculous beast of a text."

I agree the most with the beast part of his assessment, since I'm still wrestling with Virgil's work while I'm getting a feel for Dante's tricky swift-footed creation. This again being my first introduction to the text, it's not without trepidation. What strikes me most is how timid the character of Dante is. He worships Virgil, and is uncertain about his own courage and resolve in the first chapter, though the man who is writing the verses is anything but. I love the images that he threads together-- Hollanders' translation is so immediate to me.

Right now I have my own theories about the significance of the three beasts that Dante encounters in the beginning of the story that block his 'ascent'.  "Your spirit is assailed by cowardice," Virgil tells him, after Dante says, "But why should I go there? Who allows it? I am not Aeneas, nor am I Paul. Neither I nor any think me fit for this."  Self-doubt and a sense of shame have a hold of him, and I feel that the beauty of the leopard, enforces that self-doubt, making him step back, while the lion and the she-wolf, hold him in the grips of fear.

Airborne

Aeneas, the solid hero of Virgil’s famous epic, The Aeneid, gets my sympathy because the Trojan war has cost him and lost him so much.  His wife is not destined to make it out of Troy alive.  His father dies early in their voyage to find a safe harbor: 

He is left literally clinging to the air. 

Though Aeneas has the opportunity to see each of his loved-ones again, both moments echo with his inconsolable attempt to hold on to things that have tragically slipped from his grasp in life, and have in death, like Troy itself, and the virtual world of his past, lost all substance and solidity. 

Sometimes it’s good to read words that give you a twinge of sadness, a streak of pain through the chest at a character’s marathon of hardships.  As I’m reading the text for class this week, I find myself wondering at the intangible resonance of words, brought to life once again by Fagle’s beautiful translation. 

The third in a series of ancient classics I’m ashamed to say I’ve never read before, The Aeneid can be an exhausting and overwhelming marathon at times-- and I doubt if I’ll reach the finish-line in time.  But a theme that really resonates with me revolves around the power of “false dreams” (6.323).  It’s often difficult to tell whether things in Aeneas’ world, and the underworld-- to say nothing of this world-- are more vision than substance, more air than matter, more illusion than truth.  This theme winds through many of the characters and trials I’ve observed so far in the book.

Aeneas’ mother, Venus, is one such illusionist, a goddess who flits around constantly to meddle in human affairs. Aeneas can hardly share more than a word with her before she soars back to the realm of the Gods. On top of this all, he is chasing a dream: A majestic ambition, an epic conquest, ordained by Jove himself. He must conquer Italy.

His fidelity to this ambitious vision shatters the terribly human heart of Dido.  Her time with him becomes a doomed, short-lived dream that turns ugly and tragic.  Even more than I hated seeing her fooled by a God-induced illusion, I hated seeing her transformed by bitterness into a phantom that Aeneas could not possibly help or console.

I’ve just finished Book Six, where Virgil describes Aeneas’ visit to the underworld.  Virgil populates the place with a variety of undesirable specters that I would never want to encounter or be among, including monsters that are “are mere disembodied creatures, flimsy/ will-o’-the-wisps that flit like living forms. ..  (6.332-33). These phantoms reside in the shadows of a tree of “false dreams,” and have their parallel in the living world: Perhaps the strangest and hardest to pin-down of all monstrosities of the earth, a female goddess, named Rumor, “swiftest of all the evils in the world” (4.220) who relies on manipulating falsehoods, facts, and appearances. 

I found it powerfully symbolic that these airborne monsters could not be fought or destroyed with Aeneas’ sword.  In much the same way, the apparitions that Aeneas wishes to comfort or embrace, can not be held in his arms. I can’t think of anything more difficult.

A memorable moment occurs in Book 2, when Aeneas tries to embrace the ghost of his wife Creusa.  This moment replays itself almost exactly in Book 6, when Aeanas encounters his father in the underworld: “. ..three times he embraced--Nothing. . .the phantom/ sifting through his fingers,/ light as wind, quick as a dream in flight” (6.809).

Creusa and Anchises, like Dido, are each casualties of war and fate and a steely leader’s forward-drive, Aeneas’ resolve to reach his goals. Aeneas weeps openly for all three of figures, as he weeps for his lost comrades. But he recognizes that he can’t turn back time or go backwards more than once. He can’t rescue any of them from the clutches of fate or hold them in his grasp or make them more substantial.

And I believe this is what makes the character of Aeneas convincing.

This is what gives him substance and weight.

Final Destination

I was really surprised by the up-tempo ending and emotional change of direction of this week's book, Aeschylus' ancient Greek trilogy, The Oresteia.  The play thickens into a rhythmic song of violence and vengeance, and spirals into an exultation of "prosperity and peace" (The Eumenides, line 545). Or I guess I could reverse it and say that it spirals into an exultation of violence and vengeance, and thickens into a rhythmic song of "prosperity and peace."

Strange. Because I didn't see this shift in feeling and outlook as even a remote possibility in the first two plays. Tragic plays usually rule out positive destinations for any of the characters. But the ingenuity of Aeschylus--and Athena--somehow manages to avert the bleak ending and end the conflict, and I'm still trying to understand how they both accomplish this, when other minds throughout literature--and history--have failed.

Towards the end of the play, The Furies, a pack of otherworldly hags, who feel defeated and displaced by God-and-human negotiations and skewed concepts of justice, ask Athena what she has in store for them.

"Where is the home you say is mine to hold?"(901), the leader of the Furies asks.

Athena's answer is brief, but generous, gentle yet forceful. "Where all the pain and anguish end. Accept it. " (901-2).

Earlier in the play, Athena asks the Furies a similar question about the destination of Oreste's troubled "flight" from Argos where he murdered his mother: "Where does it all end?" (434). The Furies' answer is less than comforting. "Where there is no joy, the word is never used." (435)

I thought that these words surely spelled out doom for Orestes-- particularly since all of the lives of the play's characters, Cassandra, Agamemnon, and Clytaemnestra, were doomed, full of betrayals, terrors, and turmoil.  And yet, the characters who play out the drama's last conflict in The Euminides-- The Furies, Orestes, Athena, and the citizens of her city, all manage to avoid disaster and end the cycle of outrage and anger.

While I found it sometimes too strange and ancient a work to enjoy, the chorus of the Furies gave it a mysteriously ghoulish quality.

I can't remember the exact quote but I think D.H Lawrence once said that there are only two forces in the world: 'life' and 'anti-life.' Though death and destructiveness dominate the world of The Oresteia, life is the ultimate victor, the resilient survivor. And that made it worth the read.

Eat, Eat, Eat

I wonder what vegans think of The Odyssey. . .

Last week I wrote about the human heart and its relation to the mind in Homer’s epic.  This week I’ll explore another dominant element of the body that receives frequent attention in the story: 

The stomach. 

As Odysseus says at one point, “. .  .there’s no way to hide the belly’s hungers--/ what a curse, what mischief it brews in all our lives!/ Just for hunger we rig and ride our long benched ships/ on the barren salt sea, speeding death to enemies.” (17.312 ...)

Considering that there is so much roasting of meat and eating in this book-- among other indulgences-- I found it accurate when Odysseus compared his “belly” to “a shameless dog” (7.250).  He is right to be so disparaging. The demands of his crews’ stomachs in Thrinacia lead them to eat the cattle of Helios the sun-god, destroying themselves, and jeopardizing Odysseus’s chances of returning home. But hunger also keeps the characters in the story tied to life. 

“. . .despite my misery, let me finish dinner./The belly’s a shameless dog, there’s nothing worse./ Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget--/destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness. . ./still it keeps demanding./ ‘Eat, drink!’ It blots out all the memory/ of my pain, commanding, ‘Fill me up” (7.250. . .). Odysseus exclaims these words to Alcinous during one of the epic’s many feasts.

Later in the story we learn how Odysseus’s father Laerte’s has sunk deeper into depression, refusing to eat, lost in despair. Odysseus eventually finds him and revives him: As tempting as death or oblivion seems at certain points of the story to certain characters, life is equally compelling.

The quote from last class’s discussion comes back to me: the dead Achilles’ surprising estimation of the value of life--- even a humble life-- over the prizes of death:

“By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man-- some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive--/ than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (11.556. . ). 

I’m reminded by a moment in the middle of Odysseus’s journey when he’s “overjoyed at the sight,” of a simple pile of foliage to hide under and rest.  The narrator compares him to a man “on a lonely farmstead” working against the darkness, “. .  to keep a spark alive.” Savoring a moment of shelter and insignificance, “. . .great Odysseus buried himself in the leaves. . .” (5.540).

Later, in the book, he seems to enjoy being reduced to an anonymous vagabond for a time.  He relishes meals of roasted pork with his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, who lives “cut off from the world, with all my pigs,“(14. 422)-- a man who Achilles, and all the others from the underworld, would gladly trade lives with.

Between the calamities, misfortunes, and brutalities of the story, Homer makes every simple beauty of life, every insignificant detail, seducing.  Sleep is a “gift.” And “Dawn with her rose-red fingers,” has as much a pull on Odysseus and the other laborers of the story as the temptresses who entice him with death or immortality.  The cycles of night and day that Homer describes, and all of its attendant meals and rituals-- keep the characters in motion, held in the orbit of life.

Homer is repetitive. Sometimes I can’t read another word. Other times I get lost in the pile of leaves.  It’s very dream-like.  An extravagant and violent fairy-tale.  I get the feeling as I read the repeated descriptions of meat-carving, sacrifice, and consumption in the narrative, that Homer’s Greece had an unapologetically carnivorous culture. Of the number of monstrous appetites in the story-- the Cyclops, the Laestrygoninans, the deadly Charybdis and Scylla-- the greed and slaughter of the suitors seem to comment most on the dangers of such a culture. 

The Western Wagon

The Western Wagon

For the purposes of the English class I’m taking--where this blog is a requirement-- I’ll just jump in.  I won’t concern myself too much with details like my spelling (or my word-count). I’m reading The Odyssey for the first time. It’s translated in all its wind-tossed, hypnotic beauty, by Robert Fagle.  I’ve reached Book 7 now, and I don’t know where to begin tracing this enormous tapestry for Homer’s patterns, methods and motives, not to mention those of his characters.           

            I’m finding the females of the drama especially snarky: Helen, who shocked me by calling herself a whore, Calypso, who surprised me, by acting like a saint, and Penelope, who I will now be cautious not to underestimate.

            As someone who has tended to shrink away from the Western Canon, I’m seeing for myself now why this book is such a part of literary tradition and the imagination. I’m just taking it all in right now. The sensory details, the symphonics of it, the pangs of pain and love.           

            I was really surprised by the centrality of the heart, both as a theme and as a word, in this book. In Book 4, Menelaus mentions his travels in Egypt-- which made me wonder about the extent of Homer’s knowledge of the physical, and natural, world. I remember watching a fascinating TV segment once about how the ancient Egyptians thought the heart was actually the mind. They believed the brain was useless mush (that needed to be drained out with a straw--after one’s death-- and discarded.)

            I assume that the ancient Greeks had a more sophisticated understanding of anatomy and organ-function. For the most part, the heart is something distinct from the mind throughout the book. But at certain moments in the narrative, the two elements blur together in a possibly misguided Egyptian way, as in the statement, “Zeus contrived in his heart a fatal homeward run. . .” (3.147). 

            This makes me ask: How does someone contrive something in one’s heart, instead of one’s mind?           

            Regardless of science, or what was known of it at the time, it’s clear as I read, that the mind is equally central in Homer’s work-- it’s the chamber of knowledge, calculation, and memory that characters are always trying to “probe”(3.128), or access in each other. The mind is the source of Odysseus’s craftiness, the place where he consults himself and ‘contrives’ his plans-- just as the heart is the source of his courage and endurance.

            At moments the Gods also provide or amplify his physical and mental gifts. I can see how Homer’s vision reflects a worldview where divine beings were considered agents of human fortune, misfortune, knowledge, courage, passion, and even abandon. Anything from love-affairs to wars could be blamed on the Gods. The Odyssey reflects human constructs of the world that were just as irrational and intricate as the Egyptians’. Then again, who’s to argue that we modern humans are any more rational or logical?  But I’m also seeing that Odysseus doesn’t depend merely on the deities throughout his voyage, and I wonder if he’s unique among the characters in this respect. Certainly, he offers his prayers and reverence to the Gods as much as any God-fearing character. But in the scene where he desperately tries not to be swept away in a violent storm before he reaches Phaecia, he consults himself, ignoring a Goddess’s counsel at first.  As he struggles to stay afloat and alive, he ‘addresses’ his own consciousness several times:

            “He spoke to his fighting spirit (5.450). . . “ . . .numb with fear he spoke to his own great heart” (5.328). . .i.e. At one point, he even sighs to himself, “Man of misery, what next?. . .” (5.515).

            Spirit, mind, heart. Maybe at times, Homer regarded them all as the same entity: In a nutshell, the location of someone’s soul and identity. I found Bernard Knox’s observations about identity and disguise in the introduction fascinating. Right now I’m taking a math class, and as I keep reading The Odyssey I like thinking geometrically about the concept of identity that I’ve recently learned: The position an object returns to after a series of rotations, flips or translations: Or the position it never leaves. 

            All said these classes are going to boil my flabby, reluctant brain until the ancient Egyptians would think even less of what’s in my cranium. But I’m taking care not to burn out. I’ve found that learning, in moderation, does wonders.

            Before I call it a day, I’ll conclude with a lulling moment from Homer’s epic. It’s in Book 5, when the hero has just escaped from Calypso’s island. Odysseus floats on his raft, resisting sleep. Trying to get his bearings through the constellations in the night sky, he sees, “ . . .the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon:/ she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter,/ and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean’s baths.” (5.300).

            Woman of misery, what next?