A Fantastic Cave Landscape, with Odysseus and Calypso (1568-1625), by Jan Brueghel the Elder
Dear Stacey,
I've been slack in my letter writing because of work, which is, at the moment, attending to the sentences of others. I'm sweeping clean the muddiness of poor word choices and useless repetition, employing the foot soldiers of concise writing: grammar and punctuation. It's tedious, but I also kind of dig it. It's a lot easier to fix someone else's mistakes.
But when the work seems insurmountable, I think about what else I'd rather be doing, or, to put it another way, what might be my own kind of Ithaka, "...the island of them all" - something that I greatly desire and whose attainment is continually delayed. The promise of it keeps me going.
One of my Ithakas is riding my bicycle, a pearly white Raleigh that my husband gave me before we were married. I love it so much that I instantly named it Pegasus, and soon after bought a bike bell, which I mostly ring just to hear its thick trill. It is searing hot in South Florida at the moment, the norm in late July, but when I'm on my bicycle the temperatures seem less oppressive, as does everything else, and I get to fly around town smelling the ocean and checking out the poincianas and palms and the little green parrots that like to nest and screech in both. I feel like the me that was once a 10 year old, skinny-legged girl explorer. And I suppose she too is another kind of Ithaka.
What I'm getting at is that even though I haven't been writing you, I have still been reading and thinking. Books IV-VI are my favorites so far. I like how the mundane tasks of servants are described in painterly fashion:
Here a maid tipped out water for their hands
from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,
and set a polished table near at hand;
the larder mnistress with her tray of loaves
and savories came, dispensing all her best...
And also here:
"...but Helen called the maids
and sent them to make beds, with purple rugs
piled up, and sheets outspread, and fleecy
coverlets, in the porch inside the gate.
The girls went out with torches in their hands..."
Whether cooking, doing laundry, or making beds, no chore seems too mundane for Homer to depict with color and physical touch. Even scent is not overlooked, as when Eidothea, daughter of the god Proteus (and a nereid), dabs ambrosia beneath three lads' noses to drown out the "bestial odor" of the seal skins in which they hide. The ambrosia is likened to perfume, and, to me, the moment hints at how man aligns himself with both the beautiful and the monstrous, how often the two can be experienced within breaths of one another.
I also admire the simple, fairytale connotations of these books' titles, such as "Sweet Nymph and Open Sea," although I don't recall Kalypso being so accomodating in other prose versions I've read of this same story. Perhaps I'm mixing it up with The Iliad? Somehow I remember Kalypso as a dangerous and seductive foil, and when I came across these lines describing her lair, I could see how Odysseus might be lulled into contentment, if even for a short while.
Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing
scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke
and smoke of thyme, and singing high and low
in her sweet voice, before her loom a-weaving,
she passed her golden shuttle to and fro.
A deep wood grew outside, with summer leaves
of alder and black poplar, pungent cypress.
Ornate birds here rested their stretched wings --
horned owls falcons, cormorants -- long tongued
beach combing birds, and followers of the sea.
Around the smoothwalled cave a crooking vine
held purple clusters under ply of green;
and four springs, bubbling up near one another
shallow and clear, took channels here and there
through beds of violets and tender parsley.
When I think about escaping my keyboard, it's usually to a green place like this, which I imagine as lit by candles and mirrors and old lamps. Once when I was in New Orleans, I spent quite some time in a store that devoted itself to that kind of light. We had run in from the rain, and the contrast between the pale gray of the French Quarter and the jeweled glow of the shop was as precise as if invisible hands had placed each setting in its own frame, the former ensconced in a rectangle of simple pine and the latter in a baroque gold square.
Now I'm sitting here looking out the window, writing you, thinking about New Orleans and ignoring The Odyssey, and that poem by Donald Justice comes to mind, the one about how art casts its own light and how it can comfort us in our mortal, and thus temporary, sorrows.
I've always been easily distracted, finishing projects or cleaning the house in no particular order. Look, there is a cup on the balcony that needs washing.... let me clean the grime from this leaf.... this shelf of rags needs folding.... No one thing is started and finished in a continual surge. And now I realize that I read that way too -- following a story, then drifting off into my own.
Yours, Emma
