M.C. GARDNER
“He had never lingered among the pleasures of memory. Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him: a potters vermilion glaze; the sky-vault filled with stars that were also gods; the moon from which a lion had fallen; the smoothness of marble under his sensitive, slow fingertips, the taste of wild boar meat, which he liked to tear at with brusque, white bites; a Phoenician word; the black shadow cast by a spear on the yellow sand; the nearness of the sea or a woman; heavy wine, its harsh edge tempered by honey — these things could flood the entire circuit of his soul.
Gradually, the splendid universe began drawing away from him; a stubborn fog blurred the lines of his hand; the night lost its peopling stars, the earth became uncertain under his feet. Everything grew distant, and indistinct. When he learned he was going blind, he cried out… Days and nights passed over this despair of his flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain — perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.
With grave wonder, he understood. In this night of his mortal eyes into which he was descending, love and adventure were also awaiting him. Ares and Aphrodite — because now he began to sense (because now he began to be surrounded by) a rumor of glory and hexameters, a rumor of men who defend a temple that the gods will not save, a rumor of black ships that set sail in search of a beloved isle, the rumor of the Odysseys and Illiads that it was his fate to sing and to leave echoing in the cupped hands of human memory.”
The poet of whom Borges mused was, of course, Homer. Within a pair of centuries that, further to the east, the scribe, J was recording the court history of David and Solomon – the Greek poet was shaping the remembered songs and stories of Greek heroes who fought and died on the plains of Ilium, during the century that Moses walked on the bottom of a sea and climbed a fabled mountain. The writer or writers of the Torah transformed their history into religion – binding Jews, Christians and Muslims to their respective faiths. Homer transformed the collective memory of his people and Western Civilization was bound to the startling visions of a blind man who had forged his epics into art. The literature of the Occident begins at this juncture. Near three thousand years have come and gone — during which traversal his work has been approached but not surpassed. His children are many. A short list would include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Lucretius, Seneca Boetius, Dante, Chaucer, Cellini, Raphael, Michaelangelo, Titian, El Greco, Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, David, Shelly, Bryon, Keats, Joyce, Becket, Pound, Eliot and Kazanzachis.
He has equally influenced Classic and Romantic sentiments. He was the unifying structure in which the 5th century Greece came to flower. At the height of the Augustan Empire we find him resolutely in Virgil’s Aenied and perhaps Dante and Virgil found him in the outer rings of the Inferno because they had borrowed so much from him. Chaucer and Shakespeare recast his characters and plots in their respective Trollius and Cressidas. Milton follows his lead and his loss of sight while composing Paradise Lost. Painters of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Romantic eras have never tired of peopling their canvases with his characters and tableaus. Berlioz, was of course, named for the hero Hector. He culminated his career by composing an opera so gigantic that Les Troyens’ first performance had to await the passage of a hundred years before it was heard and proclaimed among the three or four operatic masterpieces of the 19th century.
And finally, the seminal novel of the 20th Century finds within the 24 books of Homer’s Odyssey the inspiration for the 24 hours of a June day in Dublin. Homer’s ubiquity is as certain as his art.
He, along with perhaps Shakepeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt, has peered most deeply into the human heart and the gods who are its richest projection. The dichotomy between the human and the divine is one of his great themes. In the Iliad we find gods who are wholly human and we find, as well, humans who aspire to the stature of their immortal counterparts. When Hector or Achilles take the field of battle it is as if the Titans once again shake the earth as they walk upon it. Achilles bears a spear that few could heft and none other could throw. Hector’s mighty sword cuts a frenzied swathe through any Greek garrison that opposes him – and yet at times, he chooses not to slay. From Shakespeare’s play the Greek Nestor comments on a humanity exceeding that of the gods:
I have, thou gallant Trojan, seen thee oft ..
When thou hast hung thy advanced sword in the air,
Not letting it decline on the declin’d,
That I have said to some my standers by
“Lo, Jupiter is yonder, dealing — life.”
Few battle sequences, up to and including those that have visited the monster multi-plexes, come close to rivaling those that inhabit the dactylic hexameters of Homer’s verse. Hear him as he describes the Trojan throngs encamped by firelight outside the walls of Troy:
As in dark forests, measureless along / the crests of hills, a conflagration soars, / and the bright bed of fire glows for miles, / now fiery lights from this great host in bronze / played on the earth and flashed high into heaven.
And hear, as well, Homer’s first description of the mighty clash of arms:
This great army, Ares urged on; the other, grey-eyed Athena, / Terror and Rout and Hate, insatiable sister-in-arms of man destroying Ares / Athena frail at first, but growing till she reared head through heaven as she walks the earth. / Once more she sowed ferocity, traversing the ranks of men, redoubling groans and cries. / When the long lines met at the point of contact, / there was a shock of bull’s hide, battering pikes, / and weight of men in bronze. / A great din rose, / in one same air elation and agony / of men destroying and destroyed and earth astream with blood.
The Iliad and the Odyssey are glorious national epics and taken together two of the most subversive anti-war tracts ever written. As Greeks and Trojans fall under “the black waves of war” there is a melee over the armour of the dead. Homer imagines “wolves whirling on each other, man to man.” On the death of Trojan soldier he suggests:
“To his dear parents he never made return for all their care, but had his life cut short when Ajax’s shaft unmanned him.”
The Greeks spend ten years trying to burn the citadel of Troy to redeem a woman who believes herself a harlot. “In low tones enticing Helen murmured to Hector:
Brother dear — / dear to a whore, a nightmare of a woman! / That day my mother gave me to the world / I wish a hurricane blast had torn me away to wild mountains and tumbling sea. / to be washed under by a breaking wave, / before these evil days could come. / You are the one afflicted most by harlotry in me and by his madness.
And again in an reverie worthy of Prospero, she muses
Agamemnon is brother to the husband of a wanton or was that life a dream.
Odysseus spends ten years trying to return to his island home of Ithaca to a wife who remains faithful through two decades of a nightmare separation. Only in Shakespeare are such ironic symmetries achieved. In the Iliad thousands are slaughtered so that the victors will gain the fame and immortality known only by the gods. In the Odyssey the goddess Calypso offers to make Ulysses a god — he prefers instead the freedom to return home simply as a man of whom only a dying dog might takes notice.
Some might remember a fanciful film called The Highlander. The story concerned a group of immortals that would seek each other out to battle for what was cryptically called “The Prize.” Only the last surviving immortal could qualify to claim its glory. By story’s end The Prize is discovered to be simple mortality. Odysseus returns home so he can love his wife and child and grow old and die.
In the Iliad, Andromache pleads with Hector to forgo a coming battle:
Andromache rested against him and shook away a tear. No pity for our child, poor little one, or me in my sad lot — soon to be derived of you! Soon, soon Akhaians as one man will set upon you and cut you down! Better for me, without you, to take cold earth for mantle. No more comfort, no other warmth, after you meet your doom, but heartbreak only.
Berlioz perfectly captures that heartbreak after the death that the wife foresaw. Achilles has slain Hector. And in an outrage to honor, drags the mangled corpse behind his chariot before the walls of Troy. The following day at a Temple in Troy, the widow, in silent bereavement has her child place flowers at a sacred altar. The people make way while whispering sentiments of sympathy. Andromache is overcome. Cassandra reflects that she should save her tears for disasters yet to be. Andromache takes her child’s hand and leads him slowly from the stage. A Trojan chorus mummers a collective sigh.