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?