Skip to main content

Be careful what you wish for: The Return from Troy



Ends never justify means.

The Trojans fell not only for the deception of the Wooden Horse but Odysseus' promise to the collaborator, Antenor, that anyone who surrendered would be spared. But both Agamemnon's duplicity and the barbaric logic of pillage swept such a promise aside leaving behind carnage and a burned, destroyed city.

During the course of which Athena's temple is desecrated. Athena, until then a dedicated supporter of the Greek cause, turns and out of the jaws of victory falls defeat. Many of the winning kings return to find themselves deposed from their kingdoms and Agamemnon is murdered by his wife consumed by the suffering he has inflicted on her. Many of the men are lost on their way home in the storms that Poseidon, a stalwart of Troy, sends in retribution at its destruction.

Odysseus is cast adrift by his own guilt - and wanders forth on a circuitous journey that will only slowly return him to home after great trials.

All of which is deeply re-imagined in Lindsay Clarke's 'The Return from Troy', the companion volume to 'The War at Troy' http://ncolloff.blogspot.ch/2018/02/the-war-at-troy.html. Once again using the conceit of the story as related by Odysseus' bard, freeing him from the parameters of Homer, he can wage further and with poetic license and a modernising eye.

For Clarke, Odysseus' journey becomes a process of interior discovery and healing, aided, rather than hindered, by practitioners of the religion of the Goddess - the earlier religion that was, in fact, historically being replaced by the newer minted, arriviste Olympian gods/goddesses. Thus does Circe and Calypso (and the journey to Hades) fall into a pattern of encounter with this older, deeper pattern of being rather than simply be occasion for female enchantment and entrapment. There is a deeper reality to the feminine that Odysseus must taste if he is to be redeemed. It is as if Odysseus were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and must go on an archetypal journey of transformation before he can return to Penelope, Telemachus and a life of renewed, deepened domesticity.

It is skilfully woven - sufficiently mythical to resonate with its abiding context from Homer, significantly modern to allow a deeper identification. It is a class balancing act from an author that imagines that the gods live but not precisely after the manner that the original story tellers imagined.

Behind each and every particular individual journey is the abiding question of war.

The Iliad has been called the first great 'anti-war' poem. Simone Weil in her penetrating essay on it calls it a 'poem of might' that unsparingly explores the impact of the practice of power on the soul's disfigurement - both of the victim and the victor and how often are they rapidly juxtaposed?

Clarke's contribution - apart from simply laying bear in gifted prose the war's abiding costliness - is to notice that the seed of the conflict is sown when Eris, the sister of Ares, is not invited to Peleus and Thetis' wedding. All the gods are present except her. Eris is discord, friction: why would you want her at your wedding? Yet it is she who brings the 'gift' of the apple - bearing the legend for the fairest - that sets Hera, Athena and Aphrodite at odds and sets up the 'solution' that is the judgement of Paris (and the rest is history). But, as Blake noted, in opposition is true friendship. There can be no ultimate harmony that is not a continuous balancing and in that balancing the shadow of strife must always be allowed its place and say for to repress is to invite its return greatly amplified in horrors that may be un-navigable.

Odysseus begins to learn through the ordeal and gift of his journey home that there can be no true healing that does not embrace this shadow and that does not learn to bear the reality of division where it truly exists in each and every human heart rather than betwixt me and an other. The guile you need is not simply in directing the outward arrangement of men (and women) but in the inward arrangements of your own self-knowledge.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev