THROUGH ME TELL THE STORY

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story." The author has only one name but two epics. Uncertainty exists about his birthplace, thought to be Ionia, an ancient Greek colony on Asia Minor. Homer is believed to have been blind. One name, one fact (his blindness, perhaps), another fact (his birthplace, in dispute), two epics (arguments abound here about whether the same mind could have created both.)

Arguments abound. There are those who prefer his Iliad, a concentrated masterpiece covering several weeks of the Trojan War, a defining event for the ancient Achaeans who crossed a sea, stormed a citadel, destroyed a royal family, and took back the Greek woman named Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, stolen from his host by the Trojan prince Paris in a gross violation of the cultural conventions of hospitality.

But the hero of this epic is not Helen's husband or her lover. The hero of this epic is Achilles, its theme the destruction that wrath can cause, its imagery of fire. In the Iliad, we get the first portrayal in western literature of the bureaucrat gone mad with power lust, of the obsessive-compulsive who regrets too late his rashness, of the capriciousness of an unkind fate.

Although more temperamentally akin to Achilles, a warrior with limited survival skills, and although a believer in the tragic view of life, I prefer that lying vagabond, that cheater and deceiver, that contender, Odysseus, the one who survives the dangerous comedy of life. One motif in the Odyssey is the imagery of food, not fire. Perhaps it is for the contrast that I prefer Homer's "lesser" epic.

All of western literature begins with Homer. He is the wellspring. His works were used as educational tools for Greek youths. His works were copied--by Virgil in the Aeneid and through him to Dante's The Divine Comedy. Joyce copied him in Ulysses as did Tennyson in his poem of that name. Even "O Brother, Where Art Thou" copied Homer recently. One wonders whose, if anyone's, shoulders Homer stood upon. Virgil, Dante, Ovid, Milton, even that comedian Pope and that failed epic poet Williams stood on Homer's.

I have certainly wanted to stand there. I began a story that progressed episodically and included large dollops of the fantastic and a quest for home. A member of my writer's group, a musician, asked me, "What kind of book is this anyway?" Without thinking through my reply, I responded, "An epic." Gotcha, Homer snickers.

So what are the facts of Homer's life? His facts are his works. I believe that the same mind created both works because I am capable of low humor and occasional poignancy myself, of contradictions in my view of life. I believe he might have lived in Ionia because he had that objective view of the Greek culture's heroes, a view achieved only by a relative outsider.

I believe he was blind because of the way he treats Demodokus, the blind minstrel in the Odyssey. Homer has Odysseus say that all men owe honor to the poets. Odysseus gives Demodokus the finest cut of meat at a banquet after listening to Demodokus sing his tale of Troy. And when another minstrel thinks Odysseus is about to slay him, as he has slain over a hundred suitors for his wife's hand and has slain their unfaithful servants who abetted this outrage on his household, his wife, his son, and his honor, the minstrel first places his instrument (the lute) carefully on a table. If he is to be slain, he doesn't want his instrument damaged. That is a lesson only a poet would teach. That and the smell of blood, which stinks.

Homer's greatest contribution to my life is his relevance--the relevance of a man who orally composed in 800 B.C. (a date that is disputed) the stories of what happened in 1200 B. C. (if, as some argue, those events ever occurred at all). Did Troy exist? Heinrich Schliemann claims to have found Troy, with only a copy of Homer in his hand to guide him. But Schliemann lied about other things as well, such as his young Greek wife's wearing of Helen's recovered jewels. The photograph of Schliemann's Greek wife is lovely, as lies so often are.

Where is the relevance? one might ask. He was Greek; I am American. He wrote of warriors; I am a woman. He wrote of epic deeds affecting civilizations; I write of my husband, my children, and my doppelgangers.

But Homer gave us monsters, which certainly exist in today's headlines, like the flesh-eating Cyclops and Laistrygonians, killers; he gave us drug addicts in the Lotus Eaters, showed us the dangers of complacency, of failure to strive; he gave us Odysseus' grief at his inability to embrace his dead mother, impalpable, sifting through his grasping fingers like mist; he gave us Circe, that witch, that woman, whose magic could not dominate Odysseus but whose "flawless bed of love" held him captive for a year, his only failure in his quest; he gave us the disasters we bring willfully upon ourselves such as when Odysseus' crew eats the sacred cows of Helios, whose flesh moos and crawls and brings their deserved destruction; he gives us a patron goddess, Athena, who slows the night to prolong the love between Odysseus, returned home after twenty years of struggles, to his wife, Penelope, whom he compares to a sun-warmed beach, to my mind the most beautiful metaphor for marriage in all of literature. No, it's not fair that Odysseus slept with both Circe and Calypso, but yes, he returned to his wife and found her faithful. He did return. And there are other failures of this hero, this anti-hero, Odysseus. He was the one who chose to remain in the Cyclops' cave, where six men were eaten, squirming like puppies, their brains bashed out. In fact, all his crew members die; only Odysseus survives to return home. And Penelope does not recognize him when he returns; she does not welcome him into their marriage bed, their secret sign, until he has proved himself Odysseus.

I used to bring matches to class to have my students smell the sulphur of Zeus's lightning bolt when he destroys Odysseus' ship and crew. Homer smells and sees and hears.

I am not given to admiration. But I wish to stand upon Homer's shoulders, if I can get there, just to see his view of the human comedy.


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Carolyn Holdsworth has taught at six colleges and universities, and World Literature I and II were among her favorite classes to teach.

Cornell University Press published her scholarly edition on W. B. Yeats's manuscripts for The Wind Among the Reeds. She's also published essays on Yeats, Hopkins, and others. The essay above won first place in the Geneva I. Crook Memorial Award contest at the Arkansas Writer's Conference in June 2002.

She can be reached at Choldswo8@cs.com .

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