Myth Notebooks: Odyssey

On a day when I am catching up with notebooks, a poem by Simon Armitage
appears in my in-box, reminding me of another ongoing musing...

Myth Notebooks: Homer’s Odyssey

Ulysses weeping the stones white on Ogygia -
His “one last night” with Calypso (fit for a Strauss opera – a Letzteliebesnacht!)

The Odyssey as a poem on hospitality, old-school style –
epic sea-faring adventure with gods, mortals & monsters AND a morality play...

Ulysses: prototypical wanderer & exile -
dependent on the kindness of strangers (Knox)

Kurosawa on Tarkovsky, vis a vis Solaris:
In this world there are (and should still be) many things unknown to mankind.

Ulysses is the first mortal to face so many unknowns & survive.
Enigma personified. The resilient human spirit embodied.

“This is not madness. It has something to do with conscience.” (from Solaris)

Ulysses as Boddhisatva warrior,
tossed to & fro upon the wine-dark seas:
Rest in natural great peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma & neurotic thought,
Like the restless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara (Nyoshal Khenpo)

Ulysses trials & natural disaster, version 2011
(Hurricane Irene, August 27)
The tree lay down
on the garage roof
and stretched, You
have your heaven,
it said, go to it. (The Hurricane, William Carlos Williams)

From Simon Armitage’s hipster update,
The Odyssey: A Dramatic Retelling of Homer’s Epic

Zeus to Athena on our thickness:
When we send eagles / to signal our thoughts in the sky,
what do they do – stand and point and stare, / like…birdwatchers!


On reading Lombardo’s millennium translation
(Hackett, 2000) of the Odyssey (XI.11)

Homer’s compound adjectives, his colorfully imaginative metaphors
and his wonderful mixture of true-to-life realism and supernatural fantasy –
Shakespearean invention millennia before the Bard, distilled like purified water
by the spare, bone-dry language and the “swift narrative pace” of Lombardo...

the early-born, rose-fingered dawn
spreading its hands across the horizon
like a long-pining lover upon the skin
of his much-missed beloved…
(my Lombardo-inspired quatrain after / to Homer…)

The Odyssey and weeping, or “Real men cry – often!”
Odysseus: shedding salt tears
honing his heart’s sorrow…with hollow, salt-rimmed eyes

His eyes, his cheeks, his face perpetually wet with tears -
what kind of warrior have we here?

He was ashamed / To let the Phaeacians see his tears falling down
Tears / Welled up in his eyes and flowed down his cheeks

Odysseus weeping was contagious and spread to his crew,
group-therapy style:
with twenty-two men / All in tears…

Weeping as a symbol of despair:
This broke my spirit. I sat on the bed / And wept.

Grief in action -
the spontaneous emotional response to seeing the ghosts of loved ones:
I wept when I saw her…[his mother, Anticleia]
I wept when I saw him [his friend, Agamemnon]

The heightened emotion surrounding the reunion of Odysseus & Penelope -
one of the most stirring examples of true love in any genre from any period -

And as she listened, her face melted with tears…

So her lovely cheeks coursed with tears as she wept
For her husband who was sitting before her [however unbeknownst to her]
…she wept until sweet sleep settled upon her eyelids…

The Odyssey and creatures – A Bestiary…
The touching scene of reunion with Odysseus & his dog Argus –

(again, after Lombardo)

a pitiful sight, the old & neglected,
lice-infested dog by the dung heap,
enough to make his master weep…

The aviary of the Odyssey – from the eagles of Zeus and Athena –
high-flying...of the hooked beak...mountain bred
Owl-eyed Athena
Apollo’s swift arrow Hawk
Ino’s flashing gull
Odysseus himself appearing like a soaring raptor

*Circe and her "manly beasts" of stags, pigs, bears
*The Sun-god Helios / Hyperion and his sacred cattle
*The Giants – from the Laestrygonians to the Cyclopes,
and Polyphemus’ flock of XXL sheep
*Dangerous beauties from the Sirens to Calypso
*Deadly sea creatures like Scylla & Charybdis

Multi-disciplinary mash-up of adventure & epic, history & myth, tragedy & romance, fantasy, extraterrestrial and oh-so-wonderfully human…