"Odysseus is not a hero who ... Homer’s epic isn’t really about ... It's also a story about ... What the poem seems to be arguing ..."
What treasures, Homer's *Iliad* and *Odyssey*. So simple and straightforward that in the case of the *Odyssey*, at least, middle-school teachers regularly assign the poem. Also, complex and subtle enough to support the weight of countless "It's a story about" readings by everyone from professional homerists to account managers and bus drivers who happen to love literature.
How wonderful. How irresistible. The internet has been engaging in one of those late-night bull sessions that residential liberal arts colleges are supposed to have been making possible all these years. Participants may concede that having read the *Odyssey* in Greek, Wilson should be given a respectful hearing on "What the poem seems to be arguing," but only a hearing, mind you. If her ideas about the *Odyssey* are not adequately supported by the text, while the bus driver's interpretation uncovers a richer, more dedalian poem, so be it. That's just how it is: some readings are just better than others.
I will see Nolan's film on the 11th. I read enough of Wilson's translation when it came out to realize it's not my cup of tea. Nolan versus Wilson: I'll have to pass on that one. I sympathize with both sides: your indignation on behalf of filmmaking and your friends in the film world, and the regret voiced by people such as Mary Beard, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Emily Hauser that Nolan's Jason-Bourneing of Homer's Odysseus is a sadly missed opportunity.
In any case, enclosure: my mind goes immediately to Odysseus’s detailed description for Penelope of how he constructed their bedroom to enclose an olive tree, which he secretly made into one of four posts for their immovable marriage bed. Isn’t that passage consonant with your commentary on home, Hokkein, and your mother? “Home” for each of us is where we understand and are understood—perfectly. And insofar as perfection is impossible of attainment, it’s our condition as humans to live our entire lives as exiles, never not to some degree alienated even from those who share our inmost secrets.
I leave it to anyone happening upon this comment to ponder whether it’s important that Nolan, according to reports, omits that episode of the poem from his adaptation.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful reflection. The image of the olive-tree bed is interesting if not the perfect anchor. If home is where we are perfectly understood, then the poem itself becomes that immovable post, a treasure of imaginative agency that holds space for all our individual exiles. One could even argue it was our first generative technology, fluid (the sea), adaptive (the gods), and completed only by the mind of the person engaging with it. God, that deserves it's own book, if it's not already a genre.
Thank you for this provocative reflection. And I look forward to your thoughts on the film. I screened it multiple times in different formats. I highly recommend IMAX 70mm if possible. The aspect ratio, without cropping, was a vastly better viewing experience.
On home and language, I have long thought that this bit from Book 23, Odysseus speaking to Penelope, hearkening back to his encounter with the shade of Teiresias in Book 11, is more important than has been generally realized. Before he dies, he must travel inland far enough that his signs don't signify to people. Where he is misunderstood. Why? Such a mysterious passage in this amazing work. (The translation is by Fagles.)
"The prophet said
that I must rove through towns on towns of men,
that I must carry a well-planed oar until
I come to a people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly. And here is my sign,
he told me, clear, so clear I cannot miss it,
and I will share it with you now …
When another traveler falls in with me and calls
that weight across my shoulder a fan to winnow grain,
then, he told me, I must plant my oar in the earth
and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,
Poseidon—a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar—
then journey home and render noble offerings up
to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,
to all the gods in order.
And at last my own death will steal upon me …
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take me down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all my people here in blessed peace around me.
Maybe the physical journey home does not cure the psychological exile. Maybe 20 years of marriage does not stop the wistful longing for someone you no longer recognize.
Of the same mind, Brooklyn. I've watched Nolan's "Dunkirk" several times through because of his story-telling ability; and,
it just strikes me now: That the film trailer for The Odyssey includes several recitations of 'going home'. In Nolan's "Dunkirk", the moment that the Royal Navy's beach master, standing on a pier of dis-spirited soldiers, asks for the Army commander's field glasses and looks out to sea, the soldier implores of him, "What do you see?", he lowers the glasses and half-turns and says, almost in disbelief, "Home". It still rends me to tears. Thanks for your contribution, here, to this conversation. It all provides more of the map to 'home'.
I have a novel out that asks (among other questions) what we mean by home. Does it choose us, or do we choose it? Is home a place or (and?) an idea of a place? What does home demand of us: might it insist, by its very nature and paradoxically, that we leave it? (I suppose this is something like the hero's journey.) One of my characters says of a different one that he "had the need to be everywhere at home." I love that seeming impossibility: everywhere at home. My final chapter is titled simply "Home."
Homer's *Odyssey* ends with events so anticlimactic that ancient commentators said that surely the true ending is the bedroom scene (in Book 23) I mentioned in my earlier post. But if we want to take "home" as our theme, it makes perfect sense that the Sturm und Drang dwindles finally into a spat between the royal family of Ithaca and the families of the slain suitors. It's like Tolkien's hobbits in the Shire after the fall of Mordor—all the grand adventures are mere preparation for putting their own house in order, so to speak.
I am deeply moved by the vulnerability and depth of the conversations happening here. It is incredibly rare to find spaces where men are willing to share their hearts so openly, laying down their armor to talk about loss, longing, and what it means to look for 'home.' It feels as though, through these texts, we’ve found each other to collectively work through the deep sadness and exiles we've all endured. Thank you for trusting this space with your stories.
And, I just ordered a copy of A Thing With Feathers and cannot wait to dive into your words.
Your words mean a great deal, coming from someone with so much integrity. Thank you, too, for your interest in A Thing with Feathers. If you are so inclined, please share your honest appraisal of the good and the bad. Any writer would be thrilled to have a reader with your taste and percipience.
“Home is the language your mother spoke to you with — the specific cadence, spoken by that specific mouth, that recognized you before you had a name for yourself.”
This, this morning’s quiet reading. It’s raining here. Projects are put off. There’s this, instead, for a quiet, reflective reading. And;
Glen Hansard’s motorcycle crashed into a wall near Dublin in early hours last week, and he died. I was already in a place from that when you arrived this morning with a thumbed-over copy of “The Odyssey” in hand to talk about, in a substackian fashion. Over a coffee, for my part.
As I shared with our Substack neighbor, the writer A House Grows in Brooklyn, I will attend Nolan’s film, just on the strength of what he did with actor Kenneth Branagh, standing, heartsick, but present, on a pier crowded with soldiers stranded at Dunkirk.
I’ve had some measure of the experience, with my own mother, that you share here: from her accepting congregate living until the day my youngest trumpeted ‘Taps’ as a local VFW honor guard gave her that last veteran’s salute. It’s all a weaving of the tapestry some of us are fortunate enough to have been given, and sometimes come to recognize. Your weaving here is remarkably deft, ma’am.
Hansard’s film, “Once” and its signature song that brought him and Marketa Irglova fame, weaves some of the same: the refrain to “Falling Slowly” contains this plea: “Take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time…” The story of the film points to ‘home’, too: in a fleeting moment of falling in love; and, in your asking, “What is home?” here, I was washed over with the sense that you were also writing to: “Home is the language your mother spoke to you…”
I have set out on pilgrimage since I was just a very small boy (which wandering-off very much frightened my mother, who didn’t tell me THAT until her last years); then, once, solo, cross-country on an over-loaded bicycle, and twice by motorcycle. I’m thinking that it was the ‘going away, into the world alone’, as ‘Brooklyn’ offers, that made it more clear what home was; what it is. And I think it is this, as came to me in a thought shared here earlier. It is your mother’s voice; it is the voice, whether of the moment or enduring over time, that tells you that you are loved. It is where love is. And, if we still have heart that can bear it, it remains with us. Thanks, as always, for what you bring.
Thank you for this beautiful, rain-slowed reflection. I have to confess that I did not know of Glen Hansard's tragic passing until your message arrived. It is deeply heartbreaking to lose a voice like his before his time, when the world seems to need that kind of raw humanity most. Because of your note, I am going to watch Once this evening to finally experience what I have missed.
That haunting line you shared—‘Take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time…’—feels entirely consonant with the heavy, wistful longing Jim shared from Book 23 of the Odyssey. Your definition of home—as the language and cadence your mother spoke to you, the voice that tells you that you are loved—strikes right at the heart of why the physical journey home can never entirely cure our psychological exile. We spend our lives wandering away into the world, on bicycles or motorcycles, perhaps just to understand the shape of what we left behind. We are all trying to navigate back to that original, perfect recognition, even when time and loss mean we are returning as partial strangers.
The image of your youngest trumpeting 'Taps' for your mother is a powerfully heartbreaking addition to this shared tapestry. Thank you for bringing your own pilgrimages, and for the profound vulnerability of your words. It is rare and beautiful to share a conversation of this depth, and it feels like a quiet sanctuary where we can collectively honor and work through the losses we carry.
While I always carry a particularly folded big, blue paisley handkerchief for the purpose of 'getting bit of dust from my eyes', I would've suggested a tissue for the watching of the film portrayal of what I gather was the heartbreak beneath the surface of that portrayal. Maybe a box of them.
"Once" was rightly named a critical and personal favorite by the professionals at film festivals. The film is a favorite of mine. If there's one thing Ireland has mastery of, it's the richness of tragedy.
On revisiting the trailer, it just now struck me, hard, why, when I went looking for my (probably) last motorcycle for basic and pilgrimage transport, I sought a vintage Triumph Bonneville, which was the machine filmed rolling, joyfully two-up, on an Irish coastal road. My hunch is that it was Hansard's own machine then. The moment of 'finding' and the loss portrayed in the film (and I think in actuality), and the immeasurable joy shown through the story, brought me more fully into the richness of a place, chronologically long past, that's never really left me. And fortunately for me, that knowing enriched my small existence on the ground I'm still graced to walk.
Your writing, and conversations around, are the same. I've a story to put down for the benefit of the now two young men for whom I was lucky to change diapers and teach to ride bicycles. Not to mention the delight who's shared coffee and raisin toast and time and stories with me the past nearly ten years.
Your own walk, so well and fully expressed, have brought a particularly warm breeze across my library table here again. It's a gift you have, You, and our neighbor Jim have nudged me, by the way, to drop in at the used bookstores looking for a copy of The Odyssey. And probably Jim's recent book, too.
I've put the moka pot on for elevensies, and have again parked in your doorway too long, so it's time to thank you, and pick up the next small pleasure in my morning.
"Odysseus is not a hero who ... Homer’s epic isn’t really about ... It's also a story about ... What the poem seems to be arguing ..."
What treasures, Homer's *Iliad* and *Odyssey*. So simple and straightforward that in the case of the *Odyssey*, at least, middle-school teachers regularly assign the poem. Also, complex and subtle enough to support the weight of countless "It's a story about" readings by everyone from professional homerists to account managers and bus drivers who happen to love literature.
How wonderful. How irresistible. The internet has been engaging in one of those late-night bull sessions that residential liberal arts colleges are supposed to have been making possible all these years. Participants may concede that having read the *Odyssey* in Greek, Wilson should be given a respectful hearing on "What the poem seems to be arguing," but only a hearing, mind you. If her ideas about the *Odyssey* are not adequately supported by the text, while the bus driver's interpretation uncovers a richer, more dedalian poem, so be it. That's just how it is: some readings are just better than others.
I will see Nolan's film on the 11th. I read enough of Wilson's translation when it came out to realize it's not my cup of tea. Nolan versus Wilson: I'll have to pass on that one. I sympathize with both sides: your indignation on behalf of filmmaking and your friends in the film world, and the regret voiced by people such as Mary Beard, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Emily Hauser that Nolan's Jason-Bourneing of Homer's Odysseus is a sadly missed opportunity.
In any case, enclosure: my mind goes immediately to Odysseus’s detailed description for Penelope of how he constructed their bedroom to enclose an olive tree, which he secretly made into one of four posts for their immovable marriage bed. Isn’t that passage consonant with your commentary on home, Hokkein, and your mother? “Home” for each of us is where we understand and are understood—perfectly. And insofar as perfection is impossible of attainment, it’s our condition as humans to live our entire lives as exiles, never not to some degree alienated even from those who share our inmost secrets.
I leave it to anyone happening upon this comment to ponder whether it’s important that Nolan, according to reports, omits that episode of the poem from his adaptation.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful reflection. The image of the olive-tree bed is interesting if not the perfect anchor. If home is where we are perfectly understood, then the poem itself becomes that immovable post, a treasure of imaginative agency that holds space for all our individual exiles. One could even argue it was our first generative technology, fluid (the sea), adaptive (the gods), and completed only by the mind of the person engaging with it. God, that deserves it's own book, if it's not already a genre.
Thank you for this provocative reflection. And I look forward to your thoughts on the film. I screened it multiple times in different formats. I highly recommend IMAX 70mm if possible. The aspect ratio, without cropping, was a vastly better viewing experience.
On home and language, I have long thought that this bit from Book 23, Odysseus speaking to Penelope, hearkening back to his encounter with the shade of Teiresias in Book 11, is more important than has been generally realized. Before he dies, he must travel inland far enough that his signs don't signify to people. Where he is misunderstood. Why? Such a mysterious passage in this amazing work. (The translation is by Fagles.)
"The prophet said
that I must rove through towns on towns of men,
that I must carry a well-planed oar until
I come to a people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly. And here is my sign,
he told me, clear, so clear I cannot miss it,
and I will share it with you now …
When another traveler falls in with me and calls
that weight across my shoulder a fan to winnow grain,
then, he told me, I must plant my oar in the earth
and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,
Poseidon—a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar—
then journey home and render noble offerings up
to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,
to all the gods in order.
And at last my own death will steal upon me …
a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes
to take me down, borne down with the years in ripe old age
with all my people here in blessed peace around me.
All this, the prophet said, will come to pass.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-148929936
Maybe the physical journey home does not cure the psychological exile. Maybe 20 years of marriage does not stop the wistful longing for someone you no longer recognize.
Of the same mind, Brooklyn. I've watched Nolan's "Dunkirk" several times through because of his story-telling ability; and,
it just strikes me now: That the film trailer for The Odyssey includes several recitations of 'going home'. In Nolan's "Dunkirk", the moment that the Royal Navy's beach master, standing on a pier of dis-spirited soldiers, asks for the Army commander's field glasses and looks out to sea, the soldier implores of him, "What do you see?", he lowers the glasses and half-turns and says, almost in disbelief, "Home". It still rends me to tears. Thanks for your contribution, here, to this conversation. It all provides more of the map to 'home'.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15
Thank you, Tim. That's a poignant scene.
I have a novel out that asks (among other questions) what we mean by home. Does it choose us, or do we choose it? Is home a place or (and?) an idea of a place? What does home demand of us: might it insist, by its very nature and paradoxically, that we leave it? (I suppose this is something like the hero's journey.) One of my characters says of a different one that he "had the need to be everywhere at home." I love that seeming impossibility: everywhere at home. My final chapter is titled simply "Home."
Homer's *Odyssey* ends with events so anticlimactic that ancient commentators said that surely the true ending is the bedroom scene (in Book 23) I mentioned in my earlier post. But if we want to take "home" as our theme, it makes perfect sense that the Sturm und Drang dwindles finally into a spat between the royal family of Ithaca and the families of the slain suitors. It's like Tolkien's hobbits in the Shire after the fall of Mordor—all the grand adventures are mere preparation for putting their own house in order, so to speak.
I am deeply moved by the vulnerability and depth of the conversations happening here. It is incredibly rare to find spaces where men are willing to share their hearts so openly, laying down their armor to talk about loss, longing, and what it means to look for 'home.' It feels as though, through these texts, we’ve found each other to collectively work through the deep sadness and exiles we've all endured. Thank you for trusting this space with your stories.
And, I just ordered a copy of A Thing With Feathers and cannot wait to dive into your words.
Your words mean a great deal, coming from someone with so much integrity. Thank you, too, for your interest in A Thing with Feathers. If you are so inclined, please share your honest appraisal of the good and the bad. Any writer would be thrilled to have a reader with your taste and percipience.
“Home is the language your mother spoke to you with — the specific cadence, spoken by that specific mouth, that recognized you before you had a name for yourself.”
This, this morning’s quiet reading. It’s raining here. Projects are put off. There’s this, instead, for a quiet, reflective reading. And;
Glen Hansard’s motorcycle crashed into a wall near Dublin in early hours last week, and he died. I was already in a place from that when you arrived this morning with a thumbed-over copy of “The Odyssey” in hand to talk about, in a substackian fashion. Over a coffee, for my part.
As I shared with our Substack neighbor, the writer A House Grows in Brooklyn, I will attend Nolan’s film, just on the strength of what he did with actor Kenneth Branagh, standing, heartsick, but present, on a pier crowded with soldiers stranded at Dunkirk.
I’ve had some measure of the experience, with my own mother, that you share here: from her accepting congregate living until the day my youngest trumpeted ‘Taps’ as a local VFW honor guard gave her that last veteran’s salute. It’s all a weaving of the tapestry some of us are fortunate enough to have been given, and sometimes come to recognize. Your weaving here is remarkably deft, ma’am.
Hansard’s film, “Once” and its signature song that brought him and Marketa Irglova fame, weaves some of the same: the refrain to “Falling Slowly” contains this plea: “Take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time…” The story of the film points to ‘home’, too: in a fleeting moment of falling in love; and, in your asking, “What is home?” here, I was washed over with the sense that you were also writing to: “Home is the language your mother spoke to you…”
I have set out on pilgrimage since I was just a very small boy (which wandering-off very much frightened my mother, who didn’t tell me THAT until her last years); then, once, solo, cross-country on an over-loaded bicycle, and twice by motorcycle. I’m thinking that it was the ‘going away, into the world alone’, as ‘Brooklyn’ offers, that made it more clear what home was; what it is. And I think it is this, as came to me in a thought shared here earlier. It is your mother’s voice; it is the voice, whether of the moment or enduring over time, that tells you that you are loved. It is where love is. And, if we still have heart that can bear it, it remains with us. Thanks, as always, for what you bring.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15
Thank you for this beautiful, rain-slowed reflection. I have to confess that I did not know of Glen Hansard's tragic passing until your message arrived. It is deeply heartbreaking to lose a voice like his before his time, when the world seems to need that kind of raw humanity most. Because of your note, I am going to watch Once this evening to finally experience what I have missed.
That haunting line you shared—‘Take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time…’—feels entirely consonant with the heavy, wistful longing Jim shared from Book 23 of the Odyssey. Your definition of home—as the language and cadence your mother spoke to you, the voice that tells you that you are loved—strikes right at the heart of why the physical journey home can never entirely cure our psychological exile. We spend our lives wandering away into the world, on bicycles or motorcycles, perhaps just to understand the shape of what we left behind. We are all trying to navigate back to that original, perfect recognition, even when time and loss mean we are returning as partial strangers.
The image of your youngest trumpeting 'Taps' for your mother is a powerfully heartbreaking addition to this shared tapestry. Thank you for bringing your own pilgrimages, and for the profound vulnerability of your words. It is rare and beautiful to share a conversation of this depth, and it feels like a quiet sanctuary where we can collectively honor and work through the losses we carry.
While I always carry a particularly folded big, blue paisley handkerchief for the purpose of 'getting bit of dust from my eyes', I would've suggested a tissue for the watching of the film portrayal of what I gather was the heartbreak beneath the surface of that portrayal. Maybe a box of them.
"Once" was rightly named a critical and personal favorite by the professionals at film festivals. The film is a favorite of mine. If there's one thing Ireland has mastery of, it's the richness of tragedy.
On revisiting the trailer, it just now struck me, hard, why, when I went looking for my (probably) last motorcycle for basic and pilgrimage transport, I sought a vintage Triumph Bonneville, which was the machine filmed rolling, joyfully two-up, on an Irish coastal road. My hunch is that it was Hansard's own machine then. The moment of 'finding' and the loss portrayed in the film (and I think in actuality), and the immeasurable joy shown through the story, brought me more fully into the richness of a place, chronologically long past, that's never really left me. And fortunately for me, that knowing enriched my small existence on the ground I'm still graced to walk.
Your writing, and conversations around, are the same. I've a story to put down for the benefit of the now two young men for whom I was lucky to change diapers and teach to ride bicycles. Not to mention the delight who's shared coffee and raisin toast and time and stories with me the past nearly ten years.
Your own walk, so well and fully expressed, have brought a particularly warm breeze across my library table here again. It's a gift you have, You, and our neighbor Jim have nudged me, by the way, to drop in at the used bookstores looking for a copy of The Odyssey. And probably Jim's recent book, too.
I've put the moka pot on for elevensies, and have again parked in your doorway too long, so it's time to thank you, and pick up the next small pleasure in my morning.
Grazi, Tim