The Lost Books of The Odyssey

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

I began reading Homer last November, prompted by a nagging sense of obligation, and encouraged by the delusion that I would actually finish at least the Iliad before our trip to Turkey last December. It’s now April, and I have just turned the final page.

I hesitate however to say that I have actually read the books. Easily bored and possessing the attention span of a humming bird, I found that large sections were simply beyond my reach. So each time my nodding head banged against the table, I’d simply move on to the next chapter.

But I soon came to realize that this is a very different book from the one that I didn’t actually read 40 years ago. The words are the same but everything else about it has changed. I soon found myself reading and re-reading chapter after chapter, verse after verse, even going back to those sections that I’d skipped. It took almost six months, the entire living room and half the dining area to accomplish this. Flurries of pink and yellow sticky notes covered cabinets and furniture and the dog-eared and book-marked pages of Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Bullfinch’s Mythology in an attempt to sort out and understand the extraordinary perceptions on human existence that Homer uncannily elucidates as well as what Homer’s audience knew and took for granted everyday about the forces that shaped their lives and the world in which they lived.

I think we’re missing something - this intimate familiarity with gods and heroes. Their place in the lives of mortals provides structure and guidance, perspective and strength to our daily existence. We no longer walk with gods, nor they with us (with the exception of a few Republicans of course), nor do we engage in public discourse with them.  But we ignore them at our own peril.

As children of Abraham we’ve turned our backs, discarded and collectively scoffed at this pantheon of gods, fashioning instead the notion of monotheism. But once these multiple divinities are discarded along with their rivalries, their jealousies, fears, and petty schemes we separate ourselves from the divine and we fail to recognize the divine within our daily lives and the divine within ourselves. We are reduced to just Heaven and Earth - eternally separate. I think sometimes we are simply inadequate to the task of understanding the divine. By our nature we can barely understand ourselves.

Now that I’ve read this stuff of course, my view of the world is forever tainted. Has the Washington Press Corp misreported the facts or has Eris (Discord) once again appeared uninvited at a State Dinner at the White House? Are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi actually running out of meaningless gestures to parade endlessly across the Capitol and in serious danger of actually having to accomplish something, or are Apollo and Athena once again squabbling and using the pair as playthings in yet another Olympian version of ‘As the World Turns’? Might we be less rancorous in our public discourse if the antics of Sarah Palin and Glen Beck were accepted more as immutable destiny (fate) and the convoluted alliances of the gods rather than purely as ill intent?  Or on a more intimate note; Have I personally done something to fall from the good graces of Mnemosyne? Would I remember if I had?

Homer’s stories are of course extraordinary. More so the older I get. But if I expected these pages to somehow provide a key to my understanding of my father, a classics scholar who would quote Homer at breakfast, Cicero at dinner, and Dante Alighieri each evening, what I found was something else. I did seem to stumble occasionally upon dusty bits and pieces of the road on which he must have traveled; I seemed to recognize a few signposts, places that he’d been, places that he’d talked about, the literary equivalent perhaps of his wonderful yet grainy, discolored, and faded 16mm movies of the Appian Way. It’s interesting that his words, spoken so many years ago have in the end guided me to extraordinary places that I would never have found on my own. What I found, as I should have expected, was a clearer picture of myself, rather than of him.

Go Outside and Play!

Postcard From Paradise

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Go Outside and Play!

Well apparently it’s true. As I’ve been told repeatedly throughout most of my life by many people beginning with my father, but have steadfastly refused to believe; I am not in fact the center of the universe. I was informed of this fact once again last night.

A serendipitous encounter in the high desert just outside Cle Elum, during a brief period of clearing on an otherwise rain soaked weekend in early August; the Perseid Meteor Showers is one of the most astonishing spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. Shooting stars streaking across the sky and disappearing so fast you’re not really sure that you saw them, and other stars falling in long, graceful arcs as if something imagined or remembered from a childhood dream. So many stars falling from the heavens that after an hour you’d think the skies should be empty, completely void. And as the clouds rolled in again, and the rains again began to fall, the sky did appear dark and the earth appeared to sparkle and glisten as if covered with, well... stars.

There are a few simple and unexpected encounters in life that stand out from the rest and seem to illuminate what an extraordinary and wondrous world we live in; night-blooming jasmine, fire flies, banyan trees... this is one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars came out only once every thousand years.

         “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how

         would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations

         the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown! But

         every night come out these envoys of beauty and light the universe

         with their admonishing smile...”

And we watch television. Should we instead be building cathedrals, writing poetry, symphonies, hymns and prayers to the greater glory of God? Perhaps. We do seem to have lost our collective sense of wonderment, or perhaps the world just moves too fast now. Or perhaps we don’t even bother to look anymore, after all it is kind of an awful distraction from Tweeting and Twittering.

I remember Mom’s admonition clearly: “Get out of the house! Go outside and play!” I guess she was right after all.