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Message in a Bottle

 

I’m writing this week from a much warmer latitude than usual, a desert (but not quite deserted) island in the West Indies that Christopher Columbus named “The Drowned Land.” Roughly ten miles long by two and half at its widest point, it’s surrounded by coral reefs that prevented Columbus from landing. Much of the coral is dead now, yet it still poses a threat to anyone approaching the island by boat unless they can locate the channel that was, before people knew any better, dynamited and dredged for access.

 

From the modest height of his poop deck, however, Columbus would have beheld the vast salt ponds that occupy much of the western half of the island, whose highest point, well east of them, is only 36 feet above sea level. “Drowned Land,” indeed.  Aside from these ponds, the island is little more than a big sand bar whose permanent human population of about 200 is probably surpassed by that of its feral cows, donkeys, and goats. How they manage to survive on the diet of burrs and thorns and bristly shrubs on offer is anybody’s guess.

 

Inhospitable as it is—I’m talking about the island, not its residents—The Drowned Land attracts few visitors unless, like my wife and me, they enjoy having little or nothing to do. Eat, read, write, walk, swim, sleep. That about sums it up. We’ve been coming for twenty-eight years, minus one: the year of the pandemic. We pack a hundred pounds of food and cook it on a corroded electric stove top with one defunct burner because the price of everything on the island is inflated by an unofficial “Remoteness Tariff.” Renting a car is beyond our means, so we walk everywhere, including the nearest convenience store a mile and half down the beach. There we buy whatever we need to supplement the food we bring.

 

You might get the idea that this place is untouched by the cares of the world, and until recently it was. What’s different this year is the extraordinary psychological impact of cares that leave us untouched, but far from unmoved. Until a few years ago, we had no WIFI or cell phone service. Since then we’ve found them to be a blessing and a curse, and this year especially, more a curse than a blessing. For almost three decades we’ve been DIY castaways whose most pressing concerns were sand fleas, power outages, and braying quadrupeds at 3 am. Now we wake every morning to find our worst nightmares surpassed by news of the reality.

 

All of which puts me in mind of Odysseus.

 

Well, to be honest, all of that plus the recent release of The Return, starring Ralph Fiennes, which recounts Odysseus’s homecoming, or nostos, after ten years of besieging Troy and ten more lost at sea.

 

Ok, and the news that Christopher Nolan’s next film, after Oppenheimer, will be The Odyssey.

 

And my recent discovery that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are Elon Musk’s two favorite books of all time. (Although he seems to have them confused.)

 

Our current vogue for Homer’s epic is nothing new. From Virgil’s Aeneid to Joyce’s Ulysses to Derek Walcott’s Homerus, the story of Odysseus, his wanderings, and his nostos has inspired writers of every race and nation. And not just among the Titans of Literature. Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) offered a post-Civil War version, Margaret Atwood reimagined the story from Penelope’s viewpoint in The Penelopiad (2005), and you’ll find Odyssean themes in dozens of crime novels written by the late, great Elmore Leonard.

 

It’s hard to ignore The Odyssey for long, even on a desert island.

 

Especially if the island has a very, very long beach.

 

That’s where The Odyssey begins, on a beach on Ogygia, the island ruled by the love-besotted goddess, Calypso, where Odysseus has been stranded for many years after losing his fleet, his ship, and his crew in a terrible storm.

 

Or rather, that’s where Homer tells us our hero is waiting as the story begins. Before we catch a glimpse of him, however, we’re taken on a detour to Olympus, where Zeus decides it’s high time Calypso let her glum boy-toy return to Ithaka, his fiefdom. There his wife Penelope is fending off importunate suitors for her hand in marriage, which brings with it all the lands and chattels belonging to her missing husband, now presumed dead. The suitors have overrun the palace, helping themselves to its stores of food and drink and turning the household staff against their absent master—not a bad portrait of our current administration, I think. By Homeric standards, the suitors are arrogant, bullying home-invaders who deserve death.

 

Images like these must have haunted the mind of Odysseus as he sat, day after day, on the beach of Ogygia, looking out to sea. If he’d had a bottle handy, perhaps he’d have tried to get a message to Penelope: “I’m alive! Don’t give in!”

 

Not until Book V, however, do we behold our hero, Calypso’s “unwilling guest,” who, sitting “on the shore,/ The vex’d sea viewed, and did his fate deplore.” (This is how the Elizabethan poet George Chapman puts it in his translation, the first in English. Florid and archaic as it is, John Keats preferred it to all others, which is a pretty good endorsement.) Commanded by Zeus, Calypso provides the materials for Odysseus to build a raft, and less than six weeks later we find him safe in Penelope’s arms, relating his adventures as their servants mop the blood of the suitors off the palace floors.

 

I’m ashamed to admit how much this conclusion appeals to me as the most satisfying resolution to our present crisis. Perhaps its appeal arises from the fact that, at a distance of more than 1600 miles, I feel helpless to prevent or even forestall what’s shaping up to be the end of the world, except by throwing money at it. And how well has that worked so far?

 

Meanwhile, friends and colleagues and coreligionists are organizing protests and boycotts, jamming the phone lines of their congressional delegations, and providing church sanctuary for beleaguered immigrants, all under the very real threat of arrest and prosecution by a federal government unhindered by any respect for the rule of law or even the necessity of paying it lip service.

 

I know it’s presumptuous to compare a white-haired, First World Boomer like me to the hero of Troy and Ithaka. A fitter counterpart would be the superannuated has-been of Tennyson’s dramatic monologue “Ulysses” (Odysseus’s Latin name), who near the end of his life decides he’s fed up with the day-to-day administrative tasks of governing Ithaka and sets sail again with a hand-picked crew of intrepid mates. “I cannot rest from travel,” he tells us:

 

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

. . .

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

 

Renowned for his cunning and his golden tongue—and his persuasive lies—Odysseus was also, like Homer himself, admired in antiquity for his extensive knowledge of men and nations, making him, arguably, our very first tourist. Tennyson’s restless monarch would have resonated with Victorian readers whose wanderlust was already fueling a nascent but fast-growing trade in foreign travel.

 

Tennyson takes his cue from Homer’s opening lines:

 

The man, O Muse, inform, . . .
That wander’d wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack’d and shiver’d down;
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
He saw and knew.

 

There’s a long tradition in Homeric scholarship of looking for self-portraits of Homer in The Odyssey, including Odysseus himself. The most promising candidates, however, are three pre-Homeric bards: Phemius, the court singer of Ithaka; a nameless poet at the court of Menelaos, whose wife, Helen, was the proximate cause of the Trojan Wars; and Demodokus, attached to the palace of Alkinous, ruler of Phaiakos, where Odysseus is (again!) washed ashore after a storm on his journey from Ogygia to Ithaka.

 

All three bards accompany themselves by plucking a harp, the indispensable emblem of their craft, but Demodokus, in Book VIII, gets the most attention and seems closest to a deliberate self-portrait, for he is blind, as Homer was said to be, and his subject is the wondrous feats, already the stuff of legend, performed by Odysseus at Troy just twenty years before. The song of Demodokus brings tears to the castaway’s eyes as he listens, an anonymous guest at the king’s table, prompting our hero to reveal his identity and tell his amazed listeners what happened to him after the city’s fall.

 

If ever Homer came close to dabbling in metafiction, it’s here. For Demodokus is singing the story of the Trojan horse, Odysseus’s most famous act of cunning, which is missing from the account of the city’s siege in The Iliad. And Odysseus himself replies with what Homer would have us believe to be the earliest, and for many of his readers the most memorable, verses of The Odyssey itself, the Wanderings.

 

“Memorable” because it’s in Books X-XII that Odysseus relates the eye-popping events that took place during his journey from Troy to Ogygia, events featuring grotesque and terrifying monsters like the Cyclops, Scylla and Charibdis, and the man-eating Lastrygonians and Anthropophagi, not to mention temptresses like Circe, Calypso, and the Sirens, and dreamy distractions like the Lotus-Eaters. There’s even a journey to Hell and back. Nowhere else in the poem do such fantastic creatures and events make an appearance. Odysseus’s reputation as a cunning liar was well-earned!

 

But wouldn’t it be more accurate to say he sings his lies rather than tells them? After all, he speaks throughout these three books in flawless Homeric hexameter. And how could he not? His voice was, originally and in fact, the voice of Homer or his acolytes, the homeridae, who in that preliterate era sang, from memory, the entirety of both The Iliad and The Odyssey for the entertainment and enlightenment of their rapt auditors, ventriloquizing in their own voices the voices of their creations.

 

It should be clear by now that, like Demodokus, Odysseus is still another version of Homer (1), but in case we missed the signs in Books IX-XII, the poet makes them unmistakable in Book XXI. Here Odysseus, who has returned to Ithaka in the disguise of a beggar, reveals himself to the suitors at a drunken feast where it is proposed that the hand of Penelope should go to the first man who can string her husband’s mighty bow and shoot an arrow through a row of twelve battle axes. Needless to say, the suitors are astonished when the beggar asks to compete, and even more astonished when he manages to bend and string the bow of Odysseus with ease, which not a single one of them could even flex.

 

It’s at this point that Homer ratchets up the tension almost to the breaking point. Like a poet tuning the strings of his harp before a grand performance, Odysseus plucks his bow:

 

But when the wise Ulysses once had laid
His fingers on it, and . . . as one of skill
In song, and of the harp, doth at his will,
In tuning of his instrument, . . . touch all, and lend
To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound

. . . [so] twang’d he up the string,
That as a swallow in the air doth sing

. . .

So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch.  

 

Needless to say, the beggar’s first arrow pierces all twelve axes. His second pierces the throat of the braggart Antinous, ringleader of the suitors. No more singing for him.

 

So, granted, Odysseus is a stand-in for Homer and a plucked bow is like a plucked harp. What does it all mean? Close readers of the Homeric epics have offered different interpretations. One of the most persuasive appears on the website, “Stuff Jeff Reads,” where the eponymous “Jeff” (I’ve been unable to determine his surname) writes, “Just as the tension of the bow increases before the arrow is launched, so the tension of the overall story increases before the moment when Odysseus launches into his attack on the suitors.” (https://stuffjeffreads.wordpress.com/tag/harp/)

 

This makes sense, and Jeff has a lot to say, equally sensible, about many other great works of literature, all of it worth reading. But his interpretation relies on an assumption that exhausts only one of two sets of possibilities. It tells us how a warrior is like a poet, but not how a poet is like a warrior. These sound like the same thing, but they’re not, any more than “Achilles fought like a lion” is the same as “the lion fought like an Achilles.”

 

It’s a matter of what’s called “tenor” and “vehicle.” The tenor of a simile or metaphor is the thing being described, the vehicle is what’s used to describe it. The vehicle singles out a particular feature of the tenor and foregrounds it. The words “Just as . . .” tell us Jeff is thinking of Odysseus’s bow “as” as a vehicle to describe the work of Homer, the poet: like Odysseus flexing his bow, Homer uses his words to increase tension.

 

But what if we reverse the positions of tenor and vehicle?  How is the poet like a warrior? “Increasing tension” isn’t the first thing that comes to my mind. What battles do poets fight? And how are their words like arrows? We’ve all heard the adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Could this scene illustrate its preliterate version? Something like, “The harp is mightier than the bow?”

 

I ask because no one knew better than Homer that without a poet to sing of his exploits, there would be no Odysseus for us to admire.

 

What do poets fight?  

 

Oblivion, first and foremost.

 

Erasure. Redaction. Distortion.

 

“Truthiness.” Fudge.

 

Lies.

 

And this is where Odysseus, the smooth-talking liar, and Homer part ways.

 

In Homer’s day, the poets were our only historians, custodians of a people’s self-understanding. They reminded listeners of their origins, their ancestors, and all the events—births, deaths, marriages, natural disasters, wars, duels, treaties—that made them who they are and pointed their way forward, into the future.

 

Homer is the kind of poet Percy Shelley has in mind when he writes, in his Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their weapons are words, which can transform the world just by changing the way we see it, and without shedding a drop of blood.

 

William Blake conceived the poet’s task in much the same way. In “Jerusalem,” his prophetic indictment of England’s “Satanic Mills” at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, he uses language that seems lifted straight from The Odyssey to make his point:

 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green & pleasant Land.

 

This is all terribly inspiring. But bows, arrows, spears, and swords don’t care who wields them, and in the wrong hands they can do more harm than good. Homer, the poet, wants to remind you of things you are in danger of forgetting. Odysseus, the liar, wants to give you a Trojan Horse.

 

We as a nation are witnessing just how much harm words can do. We are losing the Mental Fight. A rising tide of lies and innuendo and rumor is erasing the memory of our origins, our ancestors, and the events that have made us who we are.

 

For the record:

 

We came from all over.

 

We are descended from lovers of freedom, fairness, and justice.

 

A catastrophic Depression, a World War, and a Cold War tested our commitment to these ideals. We survived the test and forged alliances with like-minded nations. These events have made us who we are.

 

Or were.

 

Drowned Land?

 

Until the tide turns, and it will, let’s keep speaking the truth, each of us adding our grain of sand to the pile. We’ll need a place to stand if we want to outlast the storm.

 

Consider this my message in a bottle.

 

 

NOTES

 

1. Most scholars now assume that The Iliad and The Odyssey as we know them are the result of a long process of composition, revision, and augmentation by successive generations of homeridae, all working with a common body of source material: the songs, stories, rumors, and legends of Troy’s siege and collapse, and the nostos of its Greek victors. Arguably, Demodokus could be a self-portrait of one of these contributors to The Odyssey, inserted by him as a way to add material missing from The Iliad.