"pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge."

From Ms. E.:

This week, we read the last book of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus is reunited with Penelope after revealing his identity in an archery contest and a notably "bloody" revenge scene. After a few questions about what it meant to "behead a suitor" and some "eww" responses, all agreed that the ending was "good" because Ithaca returned to peace and Odysseus was happy. 

 The children then tested out their own archery skills by trying to shoot through a hoop with a bow and arrow on the front lawn. As Penelope (i.e., MG) watched, R, E, & N took turns with the bow, and each agreed that Odysseus was an impressive hero because shooting an arrow straight is harder than it looks!

After, we went inside and began the first read-through of the Cyclops scene. With some coaching, everyone began to get comfortable using loud voices, interacting with one another as characters, and using body language to enhance the lines. The group then finished drafting the remainder of the scene's script and retired for snack. We all discussed ideas for additional ways to present the material in the final performance such as representing some scenes with music, art, and puppetry. Mr. S. shared some from his trip to Chicago and got everyone excited about perhaps creating a Trojan horse of our own.

The second half of the morning was spent discussing and creating props and costumes for the Cyclops scene. Everyone made sheep masks and boulders for the cave. By noon, there was a lot of excitement about creating the armor for the scene and imagining how to make the cyclops look "hideous." Miss E. also shared a bit about the mosaic project planned for next week. Lastly, R showed with everyone how she makes "pocket-sized bows/arrows" with rubber bands and parts of tinker toys. Each archer seemed intent on refining his/her skills before next week!

[A lovely poem by Cavafy on the return to Ithaca.]

Man of constant sorrow

BBC Radio 4 program: "The Road Home: Remaking Homer's Odyssey"

"Tom Holland explores the continuing appeal of Homer's Odyssey. From the Coen Brothers' film 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' to feminist rewritings of the story of Penelope's long-suffering wait for her husband to return we remain as fascinated as ever by one of the poetic cornerstones of western life. Why should that be? Homer has been quarried and mined and remade ever since the Iliad and the Odyssey were first sung. But today poets, dramatists, songwriters, novelists and filmmakers are working on the poems like never before it seems. Dante, Tennyson and James Joyce all had goes at rewriting the story of Odysseus (also called Ulysses) and his struggle to get home after the Trojan War, but what do today's reworkers have to say about the story and its meaning to us? Simon Armitage, Michael Longley, Zachary Mason, Alice Oswald, Edith Hall, and the late Peter Reading and Christopher Logue join the words of Margaret Atwood and the music of Tim Buckley and the Soggy Bottom Boys to help us all find our way home. Producer: Tim Dee."

They include a version of Buckley's "Song to the Siren" sung hauntingly by This Mortal Coil:

On the floating, shapeless oceans
I did all my best to smile
til your singing eyes and fingers
drew me loving into your eyes.

And you sang "Sail to me, sail to me;
Let me enfold you."

Here I am, here I am waiting to hold you.
Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?

Now my foolish boat is leaning, broken love lost on your rocks.
For you sang, "Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow."
Oh my heart, oh my heart shies from the sorrow.
I'm as puzzled as a newborn child.
I'm as riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Or shall I lie with death my bride?

Hear me sing: "Swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you."
"Here I am. Here I am, waiting to hold you."

Well suited

Last week, with spring break approaching for the Odyssean crew, we took stock of our episodes thus far, as we anticipate crafting them into an adequate vessel for performance.

Reviewing Odyssey's return to Ithaca

Since last week was also the closing of the "Armed and Dangerous" exhibit at the Brooks Museum, and since the weather was unseasonably splendid, we took a field trip to learn more about Greek armor and weaponry. 

Human chain crossing a street without a crosswalk

We got to see a Greek helmet and sword, a vase decorated with Heracles (whom we could identify because he was wearing a lionskin), and (in the permanent collection) Luca Giordano's rather placid The Slaying of the Medusa. A favorite part of the exhibit was the interactive corner, where everyone tried on helmets as well as made decorative impressions with a stylus on strips of metal. 

Stylin'

V & MG

E

N

Some Homeric tidbits in the news over the break: Greek characters (via Shakespeare) were used for market commentary;  a quixotic millionaire (redundant?) and author of Odysseus Unbound (available in our crew's library!) is convinced that he has discovered the authentic Ithaca; meanwhile, scholars continue to debate who (singular or plural) even composed the Homeric epics. And in Chicago, a new National Hellenic Museum opened with an exhibit on "Gods, Myths and Mortals": "climb into a 12 foot tall Trojan Horse, journey through rocky caves, over open seas, into a Cyclops Cave and then a karaoke cave to sing like a Siren." Another field trip?

A Recipe for Stinky Cheese

Report from Ondine:

On Feb 29, the kids voted to stay outside that morning, so they huddled together on a blanket that we spread on the porch, and Elizabeth recapped the previous week's story, which gave her the opportunity to reuse Scott's joke:  
"Who helped Odysseus by giving him a magic scarf?"
"Ino!"
"Great!  What her name was?"
"Ino!"
"I know you know!  What's her name?"
Lots and lots of giggles and feigned exasperation.  Because truly nothing is funnier to a kid than a confused grown-up.

Elizabeth then began the story of Odysseus' return, while the kids listened, asked questions and acted out what they heard in big and small ways. 

Athena disperses the fog.  Twelve tiny arms swipe at the air.

Odysseus, realizing where he is, falls to his knees and kisses the ground.  They immediately drop their faces to the blanket! 

Athena turns Odysseus into an old beggar.  Imagined magic wands descend on neighboring heads, and suddenly, the kids are old people.  They wrinkle their brows, tightened eyes and lips, and hunch shoulders.

Odysseus goes to the hut of the swineherd.  N asks, "What's a swine?"  MG and R answer in unison, "Pigs."

Athena instructs Telemechus to return home.  "Wait," the kids protest. "Where had Telemechus been?!"(In case you were wondering whether they have been paying attention and following all this from week to week, they have.  In the interest of time, Elizabeth had glossed over that part of the story; the kids noticed.  So she quickly brought them up to speed on Telemechus' activities and got back to the story at hand.)

Athena reveals Odysseus, and father and son are reunited.  The kids fall over hugging each other!
(E didn't care for the enthusiastic hugging and said very politely and sensitively to R as she went in for the big embrace, "Oh, no thank you.  I don't like that very much." And then he said, "Don't stab me in the eye."  Elizabeth said, "Oh, R was just going to hug you," to which he explained, "No, I was talking to my this eye.  My this eye was telling my other eye not to stab it."  With that resolved, all eyes playing nice once again, we were back to the story.)

Odysseus and Telemechus make a plan to rid the palace of the suitors.  And we will find out this week whether or not it will work!

We went inside. ("Shhhh!  Don't wake the cyclops!"  In this way, the kids know that A is napping and so tiptoe quietly down to the basement.) 

First the kids tested the raft.  "It floats!"  Success!

Then the kids made lists of props that might be needed for The Trojan Horse.  "But we can't do that story!  We don't have a horse!"  MG pipes up.  "I know!  We could use scenery!"

The kids have some free time to work on an art project of their choosing that relates in some way to any of the stories.  V made cyclops eyes for everyone.  C made a beautiful model of Clypsos' island on a tiny paper plate using markers and tissue paper.  MG drew at the easel, and R helped her mom with a paper trojan horse.  The coffee filters were big sources of inspiration.  N made a drawing of Odysseus' raft on one and a helmet for A on another (which he wore.  He's a good sport.)  And E used one to make some stinky cheese for the cyclops. 

Here is E's recipe for stinky cheese:
1. Take a coffee filter. 
2. Paint on it. 
3. Draw on the wet paint with markers. 
4. Dip it in water and squish it into a ball. 
5. Wrap it in string. 
6. Dap it with glue. 
7. Go back for more string. 
8. Hang it in the bathroom for a week.  Because it needs to rot.  And mold! 

Viola!  E's stinky cheese. 

Whatever you do, don't

So many myths and fables have at their core some clearly stated prohibition, an injunction that is almost immediately disregarded:

• God: Whatever you do, Adam and Eve, don't eat the fruit of this tree.
• Rama: Whatever you do, Sita, don't leave the hut.
• Mother: Whatever you do, Little Red Riding Hood, don't stray from the path(/talk to strangers).

The predictable, deeply human fall has become a comic refrain in our readings, as R. sympathetically smirks at the characters who proceed to do what they are explicitly told not to do. She's suggested two alternatives: either the rule-giver should explain in great detail the consequences of rule-breaking, or better yet deploy some reverse psychology and tell her charges to do the opposite of what they are supposed to do, so they'll end up doing the right thing.

Cultural anthropologists have a lot to say about this, mainly pointing out that prohibition itself initiates desire. Wallace Stevens put it more lyrically: "not to have is the beginning of desire." We are driven by want, and made all the more aware of our lack when we are told we can't have something.

We have lapsed in our regular accounts of the Odyssey Odyssey, but in the last three sessions we've repeatedly encountered a series of "whatever you do, don'ts"—

* "Whatever you do, tired voyagers, don't open the bag of wind" (E. had the crew blow up and decorate balloons)

* "Whatever you do, Pandora, don't open that box" [technically, a vase -- we owe that "box" to Erasmus] (E. brought some lovely patterns for cardboard boxes with details from William Morris)

* "Whatever you do, men, don't drink Circe's potion" (ingredients for which were discovered in our own front yard)

* "Whatever you do, famished sailors, don't eat the cattle of the sun gold Helios"

Odysseus, that self-controlled "prototype of the bourgeois individual," manages to withhold himself from the Siren call of desire, or give in to it only temporarily (if you can call cavorting for seven years with Calypso temporary!) before returning to his destination.








Last week the crew crafted many prototypes of rafts in preparation for the final (and now solitary, given that everyone else has been knocked off for succumbing to prohibitions) journey to Ithaca. E. first had them design  different drafts on paper, and reminded them that they could revise their plans based on elements they found appealing in their peers' work. Then, for a snack they built vessels made of celery and toothpicks. All of this was in preparation for the final weaving of sticks together for a sturdy platform.









Psychologists have been confirming something that American parents of our generation seem to have forgotten: self-control is far more important for a child's developing autonomy than vacuous praise ("Good job!"). The stories that have been handed down to us recognize that we keep falling for the same stuff, over and over, and keep reminding us: "Whatever you do, don't!" We are only human, we clearly need to keep being reminded.

Binding into form

Last night I tried, and failed, to read Edith Hall’s The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s one sprawling, associative list of every conceivable adaptation ever made of The Odyssey, thinly disguised as a book. There’s no argument whatsoever, except for the multiplicity and malleability of the narrative—but who wasn’t aware of that already? I find it a characteristically 21^st century volume in this regard: we all now have instant access to oceans of information (there’s even a subgenre of books about this overload, with titles like Too Big to Know and Too Much to Know), so there’s nothing particularly novel anymore about accumulating endless variations on a theme. The trick—really, the laborious, necessary task of judgment and evaluation—is to select and shape a mass of information into a coherent, persuasive argument. 

Hall does attempt to cluster her library of Babel into thematic islands:

Turning Phrases

Shape-Shifting

Telling Tales

Singing Songs

Frontiers

Colonial Conflict

Rites of Man

Women's Work

Class Consciousness

Brain Power

Exile from Ithaca

Blood Bath

Sex and Sexuality

Dialogue with Death

Yet within each cluster is a ceaseless litany of versions, with Hall rarely devoting more than a few sentences to each iteration. In the space of a few paragraphs, the reader is frogmarched through a 17th century Italian opera, which recalls for her a late Roman poem, which reminds her of a recent film, which in turn resembles a stage adaptation she once saw, whose plot surprisingly echoes an earlier French translation, which happens to have been published the same year that a German painting was produced . . . I don’t quite get the point of this frenetic cataloging. As noted previously, it should be encouraging for our children to be reminded that versions of this narrative have always been retold across three millennia. But it's genuinely wearying for a reader to try to wade through such a magpie hodgepodge of cultural flotsam. 

Giulio Bonasone, 1555, "Menelaus Binding Proteus"

Moreover, the book seems to abdicate a crucial, even Homeric task, namely, the shaping that any intellectual endeavor demands. All of these hundreds of artists who crafted their own versions of The Odyssey undoubtedly wrestled with their predecessors, yet they each ultimately produced something that they found most true for their respective moments. It's not unlike Menelaus wrestling Proteus into a single form, in order to get that elusive god to reveal something at last. Hall, to the contrary, seems reluctant to make her book binding.

The following poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay identifies Chaos rather than Proteus as the artist's antagonist. But I think the point about creative struggle still holds, in perhaps the best sonnet written about sonnets:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon—his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple yet not understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.

Creators of Cyclopses!

Greetings all!

I hope everyone is enjoying this adventure as much as I am! We are only into the second week, and we are already starting to take on the ways of the ancient Greeks. Who knew that a peplos could be so fashionable? (See photos in the previous posts) Feta and olives also seem to be quite popular with the group.

I wanted to share some dialogue between the kids and me this past Wednesday. When asked "tell me about your cyclops you are working on", they had some great responses:

"It's a big foot cyclops. All of those holes inside the foot are the eyes and they can see from the inside to the outside" -E

"It's a snowman cyclops with a baby cyclops." -N

"It's all gooey and dirty. It's going to have tiny arms. Now I'm trying to make the hair. Now I'm smoothing it out with the knife." -V

"These are the overalls and arms. I'm making the neck. It will look very fun. It will have big overalls and a small body." -MG

"I think it's going to be Polyphemus. I might make a baby Polyphemus. He has a very giant eye." -C

"This bowl is for the wine that Odysseus gives to the cyclops." -R

Curious to see what all of these cyclopses look like? They'll be ready for their journey home once we put on the final touches!

Riding the wave

Who knew that we were launching an avant-garde project here in Memphis? This just in: England's "Paper Cinema" is producing an "instant silent movie" version of the epic tale, live animation where


cinematic projection and cunning tricks transform a suitcase full of cut-out paper puppets into an array of living characters and striking landscapes. A silent film is created before your eyes, set to a captivating live score from exceptional musicians.


One-minute preview here.

One eye in the middle of his forehead

Day two: a nice sojourn in a cave. And say, what are these giant rolls of cheese doing here? And barrels of milk? Let's hang out here for a while and snack on these deliciou----WHOOOOAAAAHH!

Elizabeth read the Polyphemus story to the crew (augmented to a Scylla-worthy six by a new arrival) before they worked with clay to craft bowls, jugs, and giant cyclopses.

 

For a snack, pita was rolled out from scratch, consumed with Greek hummus and feta.

Then, back to drawing.

Finally, peploses!

Some of the crew expressed sympathy for blinded Polyphemus -- after all, Odysseus and his crew had intruded upon his cave and eaten his food. And don't forget the touching tale, recounted in Ovid and elsewhere, of Polyphemus falling for the sea nymph Galatea, inviting her to "come live with me and be my love."

She spurns his entreaty, and in rage he kills her lover Acis, the stuff of opera.

The uncommon lyre

Laertes and Odysseus, Theodor van Thulden (1606-1669)

R. and I just finished the Padraic Colum adaptation of Homer, which we had been reading intermittently over the last few months. He insets a great deal of The Iliad into Helen's account to Telemachus, giving us one epic enfolded within the other. R. wept at the reunion of Laertes and Odysseus, an event most illustrated children's versions omit—they tend to conclude rather with Penelope's recognition of Odysseus. Yet there's a good deal more ground to cover after that (not the least of which involves placating the families of the slain suitors! thanks, Athena, for one last intervention).


I found compelling a detail I had forgotten since I first read The Odyssey in full some twenty years (!) ago. Penelope has declared that she will marry the suitor who can string the bow of her supposedly absent husband. Of course everyone tries, everyone fails, and Odysseus prevails. But in the midst of the prevailing, we are given an extraordinarily lovely detail, a prolonged hesitation between the stringing of the bow and the vengeful launching of the arrows. Colum's version reads: "For long Odysseus stood with the bow in his hands, handling it as a minstrel handles a lyre when he stretches a cord or tightens a peg. Then he bent the great bow; he bent it without an effort, and at his touch the bow-string made a sound that was like the cry of a swallow." 


Here's how George Chapman's translation (c. 1615) lingers further with this same pause:


But when the wise Ulysses once had laid

His fingers on it, and to proof survey’d

The still sound plight [pliability] it held—as one of skill

In song and of the harp, doth at his will,

In tuning of his instrument, extend

A string out with his pin, touch all, and lend

To ev’ry well-wreath’d string his perfect sound,

Struck all together—with such ease drew round

The king the bow. Then twang’d he up the string,

That—as a swallow in the air doth sing

With no continu’d tune, but, pausing still,

Twinks out her scatter’d voice in accents shrill—

So sharp the string sung when he gave it touch,

Once having bent and drawn it.

Listen to how Chapman stretches these lines beyond their endings—"extend / A string out with his pin," "drew round / The king the bow." Those two extended similes likewise draw out the tension before the conclusive outburst of violence.

Apollo with lyre and arrows

The great philologist Erich Auerbach famously opens his study Mimesis with a comparison between Homeric style and the Genesis account of the sacrifice of Isaac. Auerbach insists upon the "externalization" of phenomena in Homer, characterizing the narrative as concentrating on "foreground" instead of being "fraught with background": "the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer breathless." Perhaps true on the whole, but I'm not so certain that's the case here in this felicitous conflation of warrior and artist. The poem itself was likely sung to the accompaniment of a lyre—savvily, Elizabeth brought an autoharp to our first session, so that our crew could strum along while she recited. The epic is lyrical. What a wonderfully self-conscious moment, then, to say that Odysseus re-familiarizing himself with his bow is somehow akin to a singer tuning a harp (and to say this via lyrics themselves performed with a lyre). As Shakespeare's Ulysses puts it, when discussing "degree" (order and hierarchy), "Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows." Odysseus' kingdom is a mess; it's out of tune. It's time to re-pair it. And the power compressed in the singular stringing of that bow chimes with the power compressed within the poet's lyre. Pluck it, and the string sings. 

(p.s. an enigmatic line from the later Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who thought Homer should be flogged) also fixes upon this productive tautness: "that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" and elsewhere: "the name of the bow is life, but its work is death.")