Odysseus and His Odyssey

The new movie called The Return begins at the end of Odysseus’ twenty-year travail. Ralph Fiennes is washed ashore on Ithaca, haggard looking but ever resourceful and muscular, while Juliette Binoche is no less cunning as she ravels and unravels the fruit of her loom. The scenes of them together are well-worth the ordeal of watching the rest of the film with its gratuitous violence.

Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca calls into question, is it the  destination or the journey. The promised land may be illusory. We strive for some ultimate sense of returning home, which ain’t what it used to be. As Thomas Wolfe put it, You Can’t Go Home Again. Yet we all have our Ithaca.

The illusion has been paved over or seen now with new eyes. In baseball one travels around the diamond to reach home plate in a cloud of dust. Is he safe or out? Only the imp-ump-god knows. What’s a Homer for?

Was Odysseus safe? Not until he emptied his quiver of arrows into the eager hearts of Penelope’s suitors. On full display is our hero’s devious ways, hubris here, self-possession there, lust and fidelity in his many turnings. 

Why do we still read the Odyssey today? Maybe to see the soft clay we are made of. Odysseus is a model of Western man, blemished as he is, and his multitudes within; the entire aggregate of men in all their passions and follies. 

In the Odyssey he is alternately punished by Poseidon and saved by Athena. Yet he emerges as man, alone, without providential intervention. He is without a moral compass, a cork on the waves given to expediency without any ideology other than survival. There are no moral imperatives to guide him. No sense of the greater good nor any ethical standards other than looking out for number one.

He returns to Penelope because he needs the feminine principle to make himself whole. Warriors require the other to recover their humanity. Eros is the creative life force. Will the patriarchy ever learn?

Few of us reclaim the throne unless self-actualization can be seen as royalty. I would say it is. And that sense of a life well-lived comes from the journey itself. What greater adventure than this wild span of years full of stumbles, detours, overhead light bulbs, being fully met and with moments of reverence for the all of it.