The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

  BOOK XXII

  Odysseus sails toward the South Pole. The poet invokes Virtue, most joyful when most persecuted, that struggles for the sake of the battle alone. As Odysseus sails and landmarks disappear, he recalls three tensions in his life: when he first held a woman’s body, when he first grasped his son, when he had slain his first enemy. But now he faces the greatest of all: Death. He sees a shoal of sharks where the males contend bloodily for the female. A tumultuous rush of fish reminds him of the ecstatic flow of life, which he now blesses with all its wars, its cunning gods, its stupid men, its tears and its laughter. When he passes by coral islands with huge wooden statues of primitive gods, with sunken cities in their shallow waters, he exclaims, “Dark demons, we have suffered much at your vast hands!” He now approaches the last antithetical limits of the world, the huge clashing mountains of Yes and No, but on coming close finds them to be serene peaks inhabited by flocks of birds. Climbing one of the peaks, he sees before him an endless sterile sea from which cold winds blow. After eating, he cuts into that virgin and cold sea.

  The sun has been turning more and more pallid, hovering closer and closer to the horizon. He sees a whale swallowing a fleeing shoal of fish, recalls the black ants that ate the infant camel and the human child, and exclaims that there was a time when he named the lavish longing and fierce assault of life “God,” but concludes that “God is a labyrinthine quest deep in our heads;/weak slaves think he’s the isle of freedom and moor close,/all the incompetent cross their oars, then cross their hands, /laugh wearily and say, “The Quest does not exist!’/But I know better in my heart and rig my sails: / God is wide waterways that branch throughout man’s heart” The first ice floes drift by.

  One day after sunset he sees the aurora australis like a lustrous crown of death above his head, and that same night he crashes into an iceberg, is flung into the sea, and at sunrise climbs, exhausted, on a crag. As he plods over the snowfields and ice, he finds a hot geyser surrounded with shrubs and birds, eats and sleeps, then next day discerns on a boulder the fossilized marks of a primordial hot climate. After many days of plodding he spies a human settlement of igloos, and is welcomed by the inhabitants as the Great Ancestor, the Great Spirit. He lives in the igloo of the witch doctor, shares their life, and discovers that here man asks not even for comfort or joy, but only not to be slain, for Fear and Hunger are the only gods. The pallid sun disappears, and through the long Antarctic night Odysseus watches many die of starvation as all wait for spring to come and the ice to thaw; yet even here he blesses life.

  When spring finally comes, all prepare joyously for their journey to their summer sites, and as they speed in their sleds, singing, Odysseus bids them farewell and once more embarks, alone, in his new seal-skin kyak. But suddenly the earth roars, the ground shakes, the ice gapes, and all—men, dogs, and sleighs—are plunged into an abyss of roaring, freezing waters. Once more the poet reminds us, and for the last time, of the yawning darkness which surrounds the universe and man’s puny endeavors. As Odysseus watches in horror, he restrains his blasphemies, nor does he curse as when his city had also been swallowed by the abyss, but simply says: “O Sun, who gaze and shine on all this teeming world,/who without preference cast your rays on Life and Death/nor pity man’s misfortunes nor his rectitude,/would that I had your eyes to cast their light on earth, /on sea, on sky, on wretched fate indifferently.” He speaks to man’s soul that sails on the dark waters of despair with Death at the helm, knowing there is no safe haven home, only the black cataract of death that whirls its ships onward. Odysseus worships the soul most when, knowing there is no salvation, it crosses its hands on the cliffs of despair, without hope or fear, and welcomes Death, singing.

  BOOK XXIII

  Odysseus blesses life and bids it farewell. The poet invokes the Sun, the source of heat and life. As the worm of Death arms itself to devour the archer, the sun laments that now it, too, will disappear, for it has existed only in the archer’s mind. When the worm crawls on Odysseus’ forehead, he shudders, and then sees a shadowy form on the prow of his boat which, after turning into many shapes, distills into the form of his old companion, Death, whose features are identical in every way with his own, for we each carry Death in our decaying bodies and nourish him as we grow. Odysseus welcomes Death as a long-expected guest. He recalls his past, tracing his life backward from old age even to the embryo and the rhythms of the universe. As he feels the five elements of his body disjoining, he summons Tantalus to tell him that he, too, has given up one security after another and now meets his end completely disburdened, until Death will find in him nothing to plunder but dregs. Vividly he recalls three images of his life: a rose on a cliff’s edge shedding its petals into the abyss, the canaries that sang in the holocaust of Crete, a butterfly scorched in the sack of Knossos. He invokes and praises woman in his life, for only with love are the barriers of flesh demolished and the source of life penetrated.

  He falls asleep and dreams of his ancestral dead and of his father, Laertes. All phenomena pour into his head to say farewell: the birds with sheathed claws, the tamed beasts, the stars and moon, great thoughts that strove to free men from fear and darkness, good and evil powers now reconciled. He awakes and rejoices to see his old friend still at the prow, but as Death suddenly vanishes, Odysseus knows that his end is drawing near, and he grasps his bow, his flints, and his ax that he may die armed. He recalls even his conception, and then his birth on a seashore when far-off visions of burning Troy and Knossos also rose concomitantly with his birth, and the twelve Olympian gods scattered in fear. Odysseus then blesses the five fundamental elements of his body: Earth, the ballast that keeps the ship on an even keel; Water, the restless, ever-flowing flux, the unsated voyager; Fire, that consumes all flesh and phenomena and turns them into spirit; Air, the final fruit of flame, the light, the drone that fructifies the queen bee, earth; Mind, the regulator and creator of all things, the charioteer of the other four elements which it drives headlong down the abyss with fearless joy. He dreams of God creating man to the terror of birds and beasts who sense that their master is being born, of man growing in pride and power until finally, in revolt and freedom, he chases God out of earth and into the sky.

  As Odysseus sinks deep in the earth’s roots, into Mother Silence, surrendering to the tide of non-existence, he hears an iceberg approaching, and as it looms before him, a mountain of ice, and crashes into his boat, he jumps up, flings himself on the slippery wall of ice, clings to it with bloody fingers, and tries to call to his old comrades for help, but the cry chokes in his throat. The ax slips from his waist, the bow falls from his shoulders, the flints drop from round his throat, the North Wind strips him bare, and all of nature bursts into lamentation. The seven lean crows who have followed him since his birth now huddle round his feet, and his seven souls come rowing on a cloud. His mind’s final flame flickers on the wick of his backbone, and the worm takes its first bite as the five elements of his body snap and disjoin and the sun prepares to drown. Only Love and Memory remain as they cast up their dead in a last effort. Odysseus’ spirit, his consciousness, leaps like a flame from its wick, and for an eternal moment glows disembodied in the air before it vanishes forever: “As a low lantern’s flame flicks in its final blaze/then leaps above its shriveled wick and mounts aloft,/brimming with light, and soars toward death with dazzling joy,/so did his fierce soul leap before it vanished in air.” It is in this eternal moment that the entire action of the twenty-fourth and final book takes place. The fire of memory blazes, clasps all souls it has loved on earth, and calls them to its assistance: “O faithful and beloved, O dead and living comrades, come!”

  BOOK XXIV

  The death of Odysseus. The four winds smash open the four gates of Odysseus’ head. Through the north gate all plants rush into his head to strike deep roots; through the south gate animals, birds, and insects rush in to save their souls; through the east gate thoughts, dreams, and creations of the imagination rush pellmell; and
through the west gate troop men of every race and kind. All mass in the streets and courtyards of the archer’s spacious brain to live on in his memory.

  But Odysseus cries out that he will not give up his soul before his dead companions come. Kentaur hears his master call and leaps out of his grave, gathering his moldering bellies, and joins Orpheus, who has been weeping because he had betrayed his master. Together they rush through the air to join their dying friend. Captain Sole is lying on his deathbed when he hears the cry, and as he rushes along the beach to come to his friend’s aid, he meets Hardihood, his head cloven in two. Captain Sole runs up to offer his assistance and put Hardihood’s enemies to rout, but Hardihood only wonders with contempt where Odysseus had picked up such an evident fool. Dame Goody, her hands filled with pomegranates, hurries with Margaro who laments the passing of love and lust, but Dame Goody, to console her friend, recounts the seven types of men to whom her body had given some consolation. She declares that she would take the same road in life again, but Margaro wants to tell the great ascetic that she has learned her lesson well, that though all in her arms had merged into One, that One was but empty air. Rocky hurries by on his white elephant, accompanied by the two Egyptian girls at whose home he had eaten, but when he meets Granite at the head of a great caravan laden with fruit and spices, he joins his friend with joy and leaves the two girls behind. Helen, her hair white with age, lies dying by a riverbank in Knossos, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, but when she hears Odysseus’ call, she longs again to wreck her home, to take to sea, driven by fate. As she dies, she turns into a twelve-year-old girl on the banks of the Eurotas in Sparta, and as she rides a reed over the hermit’s grave, he leaps out, rides his oaken staff with her, and longs for a home and hearth with just such a girl for wife. Diktena and Krino come riding the black bull which had killed the mountain maiden. Krino sighs and says that, could she only live her life once more, she would, like Diktena, enjoy the bodies of young men; but Diktena, in turn, longs to experience the pure joys of virginity. Captain Clam hurries by with Phida. He is anxious to join his captain on their last deathbound voyage, and Phida laments that she can never wash her father’s blood from her hands, that decadent Knossos had been destroyed in vain, for the slaves had once more turned abjectly to their slavery. Argus leaps out of his grave in Ithaca, joyous and proud because of all in his native island Odysseus has chosen neither his wife, nor his son, nor his father, nor his mother, but his dog only.

  Under a tree in the Orient, Prince Motherth lies dying surrounded by his yellow-robed disciples, and when they ask for his final word, offers them only a faint smile. When they insist, he says that the roads toward salvation are five: through love, despair, beauty, play, and truth, but that beyond all these, beyond the Word, lies only a wordless smile. As he prepares again to die, two men arrive from Greece, for they have heard of the great Oriental sage and have come to reap his wisdom. They debate with his disciples on the relative merits of the East and the West, the Orientals insisting that all is illusion and dream, the Greeks upholding the anthropomorphic conception of gods, denying the abyss, and placing emphasis on virtuous deeds, on the Apollonian view of harmony and balance. The older man addresses Motherth directly and speaks of philosophy, of how order must rule anarchic rage, of how the Word and not the Smile must reign supreme, but when Motherth simply smiles in answer, the younger man rushes to embrace what now seems to him more lustrous than the mind, and proclaims Motherth to be a greater Dionysus. But as Motherth is sinking into death, Odysseus’ cry for help tears the sky, and an eagle swoops down and carries off the great sage in its claws.

  Rala hurries to fall into the arms of the man she loves, regretting that she had ever espoused an abstract cause or denied herself husband and children, scornful that she is now worshiped on earth as a virgin martyr. She is joined by the Negro fisher-lad who had preached of love and peace, but Rala rages against him in contempt, finding his philosophy pallid, cowardly, chaste, and of a cloying sweetness. When the leopard cub leaps out of some bushes, Rala welcomes her as a twin sister.

  Thus, all those whom Odysseus has kept alive with love in his memory rush to help their master in his last moment. Rala and Phida embrace as friends, Krino falls into Helen’s arms, Margaro and Diktena join hands. Odysseus spies them from afar, welcomes them to his white ship of death, and begs them to hang the masts with the figs and grapes he has loved so much. He sees Captain Elia’s blood-soaked lyre and longs to “pluck its chords/and play Life’s great refrains to keep Death entertained.” All rush and crowd the icy ship of death, Rocky on his elephant, Krino with her black bull, while Argus licks his master’s feet. Now the three great forefathers come, the three Fates—-Tantalus, Heracles, Prometheus—and plant themselves on the deck like three towering masts from which the women hang pomegranates, figs, and grapes, until the death-ship glows like a garden. The cricket that had once perched on Odysseus’ shoulder comes again, hides in his beard, and bursts into rasping song. Then finally Temptation, that small Negro boy, crouches at Odysseus’ feet, and as the two look laughingly into each other’s eyes, they play with all of life until the universe merges into a forked flame and the mind soars like fire and longs to burn all away into nothingness once more. As the Negro boy falls asleep, Odysseus fondles him, and when the boy awakes and looks up again, he shudders to see the whole world swirling in dance within the world-destroyer’s eyes. When the boy falls asleep again, Odysseus hangs him like a scarecrow on one of the masts. Now that the time has come for final farewell, Odysseus laughs, thrusts his hands into the pomegranates, figs, and grapes, and all suddenly vanish. Then his mind leaps, soars, and frees itself from its last cage, that of its freedom.

  EPILOGUE

  The poet invokes the sun who in great sorrow has sunk beneath the horizon but refuses the food and drink prepared him by his mother. He upsets the tables, pours the wine into the sea, and laments that his beloved one has vanished like a dwindling thought. Thus the poem begins and ends with the sun, itself a long metaphor of the transmutation of all matter into flame, into light, into spirit.

  AN ADDITIONAL NOTE ON PROSODY

  Ancient Greek meter was based, as in Homer, on a quantitative measure; that is, syllables were counted long or short according to the length of time each took to pronounce. This distinction has long since disappeared from the Greek language, and syllables are now considered long or short according to whether or not they are stressed in pronunciation, exactly as in English: a long syllable is a stressed one, a short syllable is an unstressed one. There is, however, one basic and most important difference between all inflected languages, such as the Greek, and an analytical language, such as English. An inflected language, because nouns, verbs, and adjectives must show case and tense by the addition of extra syllables to the root stems, has almost no monosyllables of any importance. The metrical accents, therefore (keeping the beat with secondary as well as with primary accents), almost always coincide with the rhetorical stress. Take, for example, the opening line of Book I of the Odyssey: . The marks below the line indicate the metrical accents. The marks above the line indicate how the lines would be stressed by most persons in declamation. It will be noticed that there is coincidence of metrical accent and rhetorical stress in every syllable except the last syllable of and the monosyllable or*?. This is the only variety possible, in so far as beat is concerned, in an inflected language; that is, it is possible not to stress in recitation a syllable which receives a strong or long metrical accent, but to give it an emphasis sufficient only to keep the underlying beat. This is what I would call a light syncopation or counterpoint (the word preferred by Hopkins), and I use these terms to indicate a variance, a disagreement, a cross-ruff between metrical accent and rhetorical stress. But it is almost never possible to stress emphatically in recitation a syllable which receives a weak or short accent in the meter. This is because in Greek (other than the weak monosyllables found in articles and pronouns), monosyllables of any importance can
almost be counted on the fingers of one hand. In every line the metrical count will be eight, but the rhetorical stresses may vary from a hypothetical one (in actual practice, four) to a possible eight when there is exact coincidence between every metrically accented and every rhetorically stressed syllable.

  Now take the sixth line of the same opening: . Again, it will be noticed that there is exact coincidence between metrical accent and rhetorical stress in every syllable except the last syllable of ποθερισε and the last syllable of στις. I have translated this line thus: . It will be noted that though every metrically accented syllable has a corresponding rhetorical stress, the unaccented syllables “black” and “dripped” also receive a strong syncopation or counterpoint, for here the meter is wrenched from its position and an opposing crosscurrent is set up. There is more than enough coincidence between metrical accent and rhetorical stress on “thick,” “blood,” “down,” “both,” “murderous,” and “palms” to keep the prevailing beat which the strong rhetorical stresses on “black” and “dripped” attempt to vary or destroy. Such a strong syncopation is possible only with monosyllables, in which the English language is extremely rich, and in this variation, I am convinced, lies the true beauty, music, and variety of traditional English verse. A good reader of traditional English poetry must keep these two counterpointing measures in balanced harmony, keeping the steady underlying beat, as a pianist keeps his, but varying it with the full-flowing cadences of the rhetorical or interpretative stress. It is my belief that a comparable counterpointing occurred in ancient Greek verse between the quantitative accental beat of long and short syllables and the rhetorical stress of the words as they were pronounced regardless of quantity.