I wasn’t Hector.
Nor was Homer, of whom such stories abound that he seems to both exist and not at the same time, as if he is one man of many voices and is also nobody at all. I like to return to the stories of his death. Pseudo-Plutarch writes: “Not long afterwards, when he was sailing to Thebes for the Kronia, which is a musical contest they hold there, he arrived at Ios. There, while sitting on a rock, he observed some fishers sailing up, and he asked them if they got anything. They (having caught nothing but for lack of a catch de-loused themselves) answered, ‘All we caught we left behind, all that we missed we carry.’ The riddle meant that the lice they had caught they had killed and left behind, but the ones they had not caught they were carrying in their clothing. Unable to work this out, Homer became depressed and died.”
Subtle variations abound. Homer, hearing the fisherboys, calls out: “O huntsmen from Arcadia, have we caught anything?” One answers with the same riddle, and in this account by Proclus, Homer, who best understood the mysteries of human hubris set against the myriad realities of the heart, could not find the answer. He became depressed, wandering around preoccupied by the riddle, “and in this condition he slipped and fell on a stone, and died two days later.”
Of his blindness, there’s much to think but little to say, other than to mention that some authors suggest we make Homer blind to excuse our own blindness, for he saw more clearly than any man to ever live. He is blind because we cannot see.
Even such a man a riddle baffles.
More simply, from someone known only as Anonymous, “They say he died on the island of Ios after finding himself helpless because he was unable to solve a riddle of the fisherboys.”
Part of the riddle of Homer’s life is that all the biographical material is spurious past factual belief. He is in his way wholly anonymous, just as we are anonymous, or quietly on the way to becoming so. To wander through our days preoccupied by what makes to us no sense means we keep good company. It eases some the sorrow every riddle burdens us with, a weight I call sight-with-obscurity-included.
The Muses sang in my ear the rage of Achilles and the rites of Hector, tamer of horses. But a question a child asked has destroyed me.
Sing me the songs you do not know.
One is a song about lice.
But aren’t there other ways to think?
Riddle that doesn’t lead to death. Riddle that doesn’t seduce us into all those facts, damaged by desire, we call knowledge.
But, as Emily Dickinson says of eloquence, that it is when “the heart has not a voice to spare,” perhaps there is another kind of riddle one asks and answers oneself, not a work of words so much as a kind of deed doing and undoing itself forever, as night undoes day, and breath undoes breath.
At odd moments in life, waking up in the middle of the night and trying to find some trick to put my mind back to ease and sleep, I find myself thinking about Penelope weaving her shroud each day to keep her suitors at bay, and each night undoing the work.
She makes an image to cover up the face of death, and each night, undoes the image. The suitors must sense it. Death’s face all uncovered. It looks like nothing.
I like to think Penelope became so skilled in her art she could weave threads together with one hand while the other hand simultaneously took those threads apart. Her shroud might look like a thin black fragment briefly hovering in the air, thrilled occasionally by the gold thread of a star or the silver thread of water from a spring. But the whole could never be seen. It would be something like the trick of the famous philosopher who reportedly could write a question with one hand and with the other write the answer at the same time. But Penelope’s art would be finer, for she’d know the question and the answer are the same thing—one is just the disappearance of the other.
Unlike the Sphinx, this riddle kept men at bay, kept them silent, kept them apart from the “valor of action.” Not eliciting desire, her work put desire on delay, and by delaying desire, paused for many years the deaths of those she wanted to stop wanting her.
Such a riddle creates a rift in time. Beginnings and ends cease to oppose but become one. To do is to be undone. But there’s a strain of music. It’s just the hands working by themselves, sound of thread against thread, like the work of the Fates—if you can call that sound a sound, it’s the only sound.
There must be a way to begin that doesn’t include paradise.
But maybe not.
Ezra Pound’s “Notes for Canto CXX”:
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
I’ve gone over this poem in my mind many times. I think about the made-thing that is a poem and the making-thing that is a poet. Sometimes I’ve thought a line of verse is only a placing of words on wind, but then the wind dies down and in my mind I see the wild thrashing of the storm-tossed tree grow horribly still. Other times I’ve thought the lines of verse that make a poem are nothing more than telegraph wires carrying voices inside them; but those voices matter little, if at all, for their importance isn’t in what they say but that they say. There is no other way to write but to string them like wires taut across some distance so that the wind can blow across and sing its own song. Sometimes I think it can be heard in no other way, that song—the one you cannot sing. And then I think, you can put your ear against anything, any made-thing, and hear that supernal vibration that is paradise, I mean the wind speaking, I mean the actual poem, the un-making one, the un-made one we can only glimpse by the making of our own.
Such thoughts lead to other considerations. Place your ear gently against the page. It’s a poem about the ocean, maybe. Maybe I think I hear waves. Obscure waves.
I’m writing these words sitting inside the Houghton Library. The ocean is somewhere not far away. Next to me, propped open, Emerson’s journal from July 1847 in which he is thinking about Thoreau. Next to it, in a manila folder not yet opened, Wallace Stevens’s typescript for “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”
I hope to open it before my time is up.
“HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.”
“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”
Emerson quotes from Thoreau: “So it remained in a degree of obscurity for me.” He’s referring to the name of a nameless place.
Emerson writes:
Henry pitched his tone very low in his love of nature,—[handwriting illegible for a few words] tortoises (?), crickets, muskrats, [illegible],
