M.C. GARDNER
For the first essay of this series I opened with an abridgement of a short story by Borges. The story was an account of a poet’s descent into blindness. The poet was Homer. It was, for Borges, a metaphor of his own blindness. In a strange concatenation of reflections, I’m sure that the sightless Joyce was not far from his thoughts, not far from that night when the sky first lost its stars, far from Ilium’s distant shores.
For the 2nd essay in this series I’ve also selected a piece by Borges. It is from a volume of his poems. The volume is called In Praise of Darkness. The Poem is entitled, James Joyce.
In a man’s single day are all the days
of time from that unimaginable
first day, when a terrible God marked out
the days and agonies, to that other,
when the ubiquitous flow of earthly
time goes back to its source, Eternity,
and flickers out in the present, past,
and the future — what now belongs to me.
Between dawn and dark lies the history
of the world. From the vault of night I see
at my feet the wanderings of the Jew,
Carthage put to the sword, Heaven and Hell.
Grant me, O lord, the courage and the joy
to ascend to the summit of this day.
The day to which Borges refers (in the assumed voice of the expatriate Irishman) is Bloomsday. June 16, 1904. Between dawn and dark lies the history of the world. Bloomsday is any day. Leopold Bloom is every man. We are each Ulysses. The passage of one day to another — is an odyssey. For these metaphors we thank Homer and those indebted to him, whom down the millennia have followed in his lead.
The Iliad concerns itself with 47 days near the end of a decade of war. The Trojan Horse episode is not found within its pages. Homer’s great story begins with the wrath of Achilles for the slight he received from Agamennon. It ends when he takes his wrath out on Hector, symbolically slaying his nemesis and then symbolically forgiving him by granting King Priam access to his son’s body for a proper funeral.
Homer tells the story of the hollow horse in his second epic, the Odyssey. Here the poet sings of another decade of travail but as in the first epic, he concerns himself with 41 days in the 10th year of a hero’s wanderings. This shrinkage of a decade to just over a month, in both epics is not dissimilar to the compression of Joyce’s 260,000-word novel to a single day. The episode of the Trojan Horse in the Odyssey is worth noting because Homer makes an appearance thinly disguised as the blind poet Demodocus. This from Book VIII:
Someone go find the gittern harp in hall
And bring it quickly to Demodocus!
Now to his harp the blinded minstrel sang
The harp image is one of pathos. The blind poet sings to his harp and not to the nobility of the court of which he is only provisionally aware. One is reminded of another musician lost in music he could not hear. At the conclusion of the premiere performance of his 9th symphony, Beethoven did not realize the orchestra had finished before him. When the audience saw him conducting the final phrases in silence – they realized with a shock that he had heard nothing of the fabled performance to which history has long since thrilled: “Now to his harp the blinded minstrel sang.”
Upon conclusion of that song, Odysseus cuts the finest portion of his “chine of pork” and gives it to the poet with this praise and request:
All men owe to the poets — honor
and awe, for they are dearest to the Muse
who puts upon their lips the ways of life.
Now shift your theme and sing that wooden horse
Epeios inspired by Athena —
The ambuscade Odysseus filled with fighters
and sent to take the inner town of Troy.
Sing only this for me, sing me this well,
and I shall say at once before the world
The grace of heaven has given us a song.
The poet sings the tale. More interesting than the heroic tale itself is the reaction of Odysseus upon hearing it:
And Odysseus
Let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks,
Weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord
On the lost field where he has gone down fighting
The day of wrath that came upon his children
At the sight of the man panting and dying there;
She slips down to enfold him crying out;
Then feels the spears prodding her back and shoulders,
And goes into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks
But no more piteous than Odysseus’ tears,
Cloaked as they were, from the company
Only Alkinoos, at his elbow, knew —
Hearing the low sob in the man’s breathing …
To compare the great Odysseus with a weeping maiden bespeaks something of the Odyssey that Homer himself has made in his maturity. It is one of the earliest instances in Western Literature of the emotional commingling of the sexes. We see the same image in reverse when Othello welcomes Desdemona as his “fair warrior.”
Let us briefly note the structure of the poem. It begins in the 10th year of his odyssey, the 7th year of his imprisonment with the Goddess Calypso. We learn this from a council of the Gods who discuss his fate and employ his son Telemachus to their directed ends. Odysseus doesn’t appear until Book V. His adventures during the first three years of his journey are told in flashback in Books 9 through 12. Each of these adventures are respectively parodied in Joyce’s Ulysses and described in detail in Stuart Gilbert’s Guide to Ulysses. Nabokov received Mr.Gilbert’s efforts of elucidation only with the greatest exception.
There is nothing more tedious than a protracted and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth … One bore, a man called Stuart Gilbert, misled by a tongue-in-cheek list compiled by Joyce himself, found in every chapter the domination of one particular organ — the ear, the eye, the stomach, etc. — but we say “stop, thief: to the critic who deliberately transforms an artist’s subtle symbol into a pedant’s stale allegory — a thousand and one nights into a convention of shriners.
I will resist the temptation of comparing the adventures of an Irish Jew with those of a waylaid Greek. In Homer, as noted, the tales are told in flashback at the same dinner party at which the blind poet sings of the Fall of Troy. Here Homer, in the guise of the hero Odysseus, tells the fantastical story of the Odyssey’s wanderings. In Book Nine Homer can’t resist another self-compliment as Odysseus begins the woeful tale of his storied peregrination
How beautiful this is, to hear a minstrel
gifted as yours: a god he might be singing!
There is no boon in life more sweet, I say,
Than when a summer joy holds all the realm,
And banqueters sit listening to a harper
In a great hall, by rows of tables heaped
With bread and roast meat, while a steward goes
To dip up wine and brim your cups again.
Here is the flower of life, it seems to me!
But now you want to know my cause of sorrow —
And thereby give me cause for more.
What shall I
say first? What shall I keep until the end?
The gods have tried me in a thousand ways.
But first my name: let that be known to you,
and if I pull away from pitiless death,
friendship will bind us, though my land lies far
I am Laertes’ son, Odysseus.
Thus chronologically begins an epic that had famously commenced “In Media Res,” eight books earlier. Disguised as the blind poet Demodocus he had told the untold story of the Trojan Horse. Now as Odysseus he tells of the voyages of his Odyssey six years after his shipmates perished in his wine dark sea. Odysseus knows the gods must have their due. In both epics care is taken to propitiate them with suitable sacrifice. This “order” of the Homeric world is sidestepped only at the greatest peril. Shakespeare depicts his Ulysses as more cunning than courageous; nonetheless, on this point of order he gives the Greek one of the most apocalyptic speeches in the cannon:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make asop of all this solid globe.
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead,
Force should be right; or rather right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justices resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wold,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up itself.
His shipmates bring about their own demise as they butcher “The Golden Cattle of the Sun.” Their boat is shattered by a thunderbolt and they are swallowed by the sea. Odysseus alone survives but seems destined to forever spin within a Charybdisian whirlpool. Mere days from home he is flung back into the sea by Poseidon’s unforgiving trident. Odysseus, like Sisyphus, seems condemned to a living death upon the mountains of the sea. The Odyssey is a metaphor for life. It is also a metaphor of madness. The banquet at which he tells his story contains within it the possibility of a literature’s first eternal regress. The tale includes the fact of its telling and hence could be eternally be retold. Of the thousand and one stories with which Scheherazade nightly distracts her husband from chopping of her lovely head, one of them contains the story of Scheherazade and so would eventually arrive at the tale being told.and hence, as well, proceed eternally. Homer senses this would be bad form and severely try the patience of his audience. As he approaches that juncture he says:
But why tell
The same tale I told last night in hall
To you and your lady? Those adventures
Made a long evening and I do not hold
With tiresome repetition of a story.
Only four of the Odyssey’s 24 books deal with the heroic and fantastical tales of his adventures. The poet seems more interested in setting the stage for his homecoming and his battle with the suitors of Penelope. He must have identified more with an old man’s longing than with youthful adventure modeled to some degree on story of Jason and the Argonauts, to which he alludes early in Book Twelve.
Two weeks ago I noted many classics that can directly trace their lineage to Homer. I will close today by reading a passage of a book that is still fresh in manuscript but is, as well, full of longing and longitude, owing much to the work we have been considering. The book is called Marathonas. Its author is William Winokur. It might find its way through the Another American Press if the current publishing world is indifferent to the power of its telling.. Sufficeth to say that the book is an epic. It is a tale of loss and redemption worthy of Wagner’s Dutchman, to which there is some small hint and resemblance. It is a dual story. Its ancient subtext is the story of Pheidippides and his heroic runs both preceding and following the battle of Marathon. Marathon is at the fabled crossroads of Western Civilization. Had the outcome been different, the Orient would have overwhelmed the West. What we glory as 5th century Greece would not have existed. The ancient story is serialized at the beginning of each chapter and is eagerly anticipated as each chapter concludes.
The modern story concerns a pair of odysseys — one by the female narrator and the other by an old man of the author’s actual acquaintance. Each of these odysseys will end upon the plain of Marathonas, twenty-five hundred years from the earlier enactment of the drama. After the death of her father the narrator seeks out a remembered friend of the family. He is a retired Classics professor who had once known fame in the Olympics. As a little girl she had known the professor as “Uncle” Ion Theodore. She tracks her unrelated “uncle” to a rest home – old, neglected and staring lost in the labyrinthine dementia of ill heath and old age.
The vision that I had imagined of an instantaneously touching reunion was quickly dispelled. He sat almost catatonically, staring out his window as I gazed upon him for the first time in over thirty years.
I felt the suffocation from imagining so expansive a life reduced to occupying half of a 14′ X 18′ room. His only connection with that former world was through two small windows. It was a depressing view, made worse by the wire mesh and the gray drizzle, which blanketed the cityscape beyond.
I momentarily saw what he saw — or at least looked at: rooftops; an urban collage of AC condensers, rusting water tanks and cluttered antennae. Eyes that had once seen so much of the world now looked north over a little corner of Queens. And the look to the north was undoubtedly the loneliest of views — with neither sunrises nor sunsets — and the least amount of daytime sun.
He sat motionless across from me like a relic buried in a dusty basement of a museum. For an instant he turned his head as if to see where the sound of my voice was coming from, but then dropped back into his vacant reverie.
A gray and threatening afternoon had precipitated a premature darkness, which exacerbated the already drab atmosphere of the room. Low flying clouds unleashed their torrent of freezing rain and buffeting wind. It blew with such force, hurling sheets of water that splattered against the window, and rattling them in their sashes.
A book on Ion’s shelf caused my mind to drift back to one of the stories that he had once told me. It was the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope after their twenty-year separation. The passage had always been my favorite part of the story. I seized the volume.
It was a very old edition bound in leather, obviously by hand, in what by now had turned a faded light brown color. Oils from human hands had permanently left their mark. The title on the cover and the spine were embossed in gold leaf. Its pages had frayed and yellowed. There was the following handwritten inscription to
My fellow Marathoner,
As you carry our Olympic torch, do not forget the valiant ancestors who have preceded you — and the heroes yet come, to whom you will pass the eternal flame.
Your teacher and friend ..
Spyridon L. 1st August 1936
Suddenly the meaning of the old athletic photo on the wall came into focus.
August, 1936. Berlin. The torch of Olympia.
I can recall the details of what followed with acute precision, thus my temporal recounting of the sequence of the events is easy. However, I was so overwhelmed by emotions that conveying the gravity of what I experienced is virtually impossible.
He was still looking out the window as I sat on the edge of his bed. I felt like a shadow in the room. Searching near the end of the book, I swiftly, but carefully turned the pages until I found what I was looking for. I looked over the spaciously and elegantly typeset lines, waiting for the words to leap off the flat page and become the colorful images that Ion had painted decades ago. I silently read this scene and, then, quite unexpectedly, began a soft utterance of the one that followed.
“Then Odysseus in turn melted, and wept as he clasped his dear and faithful wife to his bosom. As the sight of land is welcome to men who are swimming towards the shore, when Poseidon has wrecked their ship with the fury of winds and waves — a few alone reach the land, and these, covered with brine, are thankful when they find themselves on firm ground and out of danger — even so was her husband welcome to her as she looked upon him, and she could not tear her two fair arms from about his neck.”
I had stopped and bit my lip and was startled to hear the passage continue but through another voice.
“Indeed they would have gone on indulging their sorrow till rosy-fingered morn appeared, had not Athena determined otherwise…”At first I though my memory and imagination had projected Ion’s voice, but there he sat, focused on me with his life ablaze in eyes that had also begun to well. A wide, inviting smile spread across his face, almost masking the tear that was rolling down his cheek. Swift-footed Ion Theodore had returned from Ilium’s distant shores.