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?