also obscurely pleased, as he tucked me in tightly, a super-duper-tucker-inner, like a mummy! which is the way I preferred it when I was four or five and he’d come into my bedroom, sitting carefully on the edge of the narrow bed he had built for me, would read me Winnie-the-Pooh.
That’s okay, you’ll read it for me, I heard him say, this sweet thing he said one autumn evening half a lifetime ago, and I thought, not for the first time, Who is this man?
And so my father and I started talking again, thanks to Virgil. I would call him throughout the term and recap the seminar discussions, and sometimes he would take out the pages I sent to him and we would make our laborious way through a passage over the phone, and every now and then there would be a pleased little swagger in his voice as he recognized some grammatical principle he had learned sixty-five years earlier and then forgotten, as for instance when we were reading some lines from Book 2, the book with the dreadful descriptions of the Fall of Troy, lines from a scene in which the aged king Priam feebly dons his old battle gear in hopes that he might defend his beloved city one last time. Oh, sure, I see, sumptis armis is an ablative absolute there, my father said, and I said, Yes, that’s right!; and we talked about how, in the line ipsum autem sumptis Priamum iuvenalibus armis, “Priam himself, having taken up the arms he bore in his youth,” the detail that the arms that the old king struggles to wield—because he yearned to protect his palace from the Greeks who had sprung from the belly of the wooden horse, the notorious ruse dreamed up by Odysseus—were the very ones he had borne when he was young and strong, added a special poignancy to the scene. And my father said yes, he could see that. We had many such conversations in the autumn of my first year at graduate school, which were not like any conversations we had had before.
It is for this reason that I can say that I didn’t really feel that I got to know my father until I began to study the Classics in earnest.
From some point or another.
Unlike the tightly focused proem of the Iliad, the proem of the Odyssey rambles, is filled with ambiguity. In the first line of the Iliad the poet calls on the Muse to sing his great theme, which is summed up in the first word of that first line: “rage.” Whose rage? The rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus. Compare with this the opening of the Odyssey, which begins by asking the Muse to follow the story of “a man” but doesn’t give his name: it could be anyone. As the line proceeds, of course, we get more information from the subordinate clauses that start piling up: the man who wandered widely, after he sacked Troy’s sacred citadel, who was a great sufferer, who tried and failed to save his men. But the proem’s attention proceeds to slither away from “the man” to those men, delving in curiously elaborate detail into a specific episode that apparently doomed them: the eating of the forbidden flesh of the Cattle of the Sun. By the time you reach the end of the proem, you’re acutely aware of the discrepancy between the wealth and specificity of certain information you’ve received about this man and the gaps that remain, not the least of which, of course, is his name: a glaring omission, to say the least, in a passage whose purpose is to introduce him. Of course we know that “the man” is Odysseus; so why doesn’t Homer just say so? One possible answer to that question is that, by drawing attention to the tension between what he allows himself to say (“the man”) and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a major element of the Odyssey’s plot. For its hero’s life will depend on his ability to conceal his identity from enemies—and to reveal it, when the proper time comes, to friends, to those by whom he wants to be recognized: first his son, then his wife, and finally his father.
The proem’s sly refusal to commit itself to a name is mirrored in another bizarre evasion. The Iliad begins with a precisely worded request to the Muse to start singing from a specific moment in the story—from the moment when first the two stood forth in strife, / Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and Achilles, a man like a god. The poet of the Odyssey, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care particularly about where his epic ought to begin. He asks the Muse to begin telling her story at “some point or another,” hamothen—anywhere in Odysseus’ journey that suits her. But hamothen also has a temporal overtone: “from some point in time or another,” “at any random moment in the narrative.” In the Odyssey’s opening lines, space and time are themselves suggestively vague, indistinct from each other.
This strangely tentative careering between concrete specifics and unhelpful generalities gives you a familiar feeling: the feeling of what it’s like to be lost. Sometimes it’s as if you’re on familiar territory; sometimes you feel at sea, adrift in a featureless liquid void with no landmarks in sight. In this way, the opening of this poem about being lost and finding a way home precisely replicates the surf-like oscillations between drifting and purposefulness that characterize its hero’s journey.
The proem’s re-creation of a feeling of movement, of travel, brings you back to the deepest roots of the word “proem” itself. The word literally means “before the song”: pro-, “before,” plus oimê, “song.” This makes sense: the proem is the part that comes before the song proper, the “song” being the epic itself. And yet oimê has a suggestive provenance. It comes from an older word, oimos, which means “path” or “way”—because, possibly, some ancient stock phrase like “the way of song” was eventually reduced, simply, to “the way” and in time came to mean just “song.” That “song” should come from “path” makes a kind of natural sense: any kind of song, from a ballad to an epic of fifteen thousand lines, leads you from the beginning to the end, winds its way through a story to a climax, a conclusion. It is a “way” toward something.
And yet if we travel even further into the heart of the history of these words, more is made clear. For oimos, “path,” is linked ultimately to oima, a word that suggests something like our “impetus”—a rush, a forward spring, a purposeful movement forward.
I’ve always found this etymology of the word “proem” interesting because it takes you down a road from introductions to songs to the elemental idea of movement itself: the idea of, quite simply, “going.” For the Greeks, poetry was motion.
In every sense, it is supposed to move you.
Tell us the tale.
On a Wednesday night in a January half a century after the tediously circling homecoming about which my father, Daddy Loopy, liked to tell his story, I was thinking about long journeys again, and about long silences.
Once again I found myself sitting next to my father without speaking. This time, we were not in an airplane. My father was lying, as imperturbable as a dead pharaoh in his bandages, in a complicated bed in the neurological intensive care unit of a hospital fifteen miles or so from the house that he had moved into fifty-two years earlier, the house he’d continued to live in as it filled with five children and then was emptied of them, leaving him and my mother alone to live their lives, which were, on the whole, quiet and circumspect, at least in part because she never liked to travel, really.
Expect the unexpected. My father had fallen, and it was clear there would be no more educational trips. But we had had our odyssey—had journeyed together, so to speak, through this text over the course of a semester, a text that to me, as I sat there looking at the motionless figure of my father, seemed more and more to be about the present than about the past. It is a story, after all, about strange and complicated families, indeed about two grandfathers—the maternal one eccentric, garrulous, a trickster without peer, the other, the father of the father, taciturn and stubborn; about a long marriage and short dalliances, about a husband who travels far and a wife who stays behind, as rooted to her house as
