Voyagers

We are at the beach once again but it’s a different beach today. Perhaps it’s because the months have turned to December and the seasons have taken up their final movement of this annual cycle. Perhaps it’s because the end of this most peculiar year is appearing on the horizon, but the air is sharper, the sun is colder and our feet shiver as they tread upon the sand at the water’s edge. Whenever there is a chill upon the ocean, I hear the last verse of Bob Dylan’s song Sara:

‘Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp

And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.

You always responded when I needed your help,

You gimme a map and a key to your door.’

The two images in this verse call forth the desolation of this particular beach and give the lie so painfully to the opening verse where, we now realise, the singer sees merely memories;

‘I laid on a dune, I looked at the sky,

When the children were babies and played on the beach.

You came up behind me, I saw you go by,

You were always so close and still within reach’

Today the beach is far from empty. Yet the cold snap allowed me to sit briefly on that deserted shore and feel the singer’s loss.

As I fix my eyes upon the silver grey waves, I almost float away in a light bottomed vessel. Over our years in Southern California, I have always been able to sit beside the ocean and feel at peace. In the early days I was caught in the vicious grip of a Manhattan fever. The longing for the ice and cold of the snowy winter and the glittering nights would be so immediate that I could barely breathe. The endless monotony of blue skies, sunshine and very little else threatened to obliterate every feeling but despair. Yet minutes spent gazing out into the endless waters would soothe a burning heart and free space for deeper, gentler reflections.

Today as I spend precious moments on the sand,  I think of one who wandered upon a different stretch of water in a different time for a decade. Homer’s hero Odysseus sailed upon the wine dark sea of the Mediterranean rather than the silver blues of the Pacific; today he feels not so far away. My mind’s preoccupation with Book 9 of the Odyssey in recent months; in particular the story which Odysseus, the man of many tales, tells to the Phaeacians of the Lotus Eaters may be responsible for this sudden awareness.

‘Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,

lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,

their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,

grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home

dissolved forever.’

Can the forgetfulness of pleasure really be the best that modern culture has to offer? Such an endgame is anathema to anyone who desires true happiness and its causes. It provides nothing more than the source of our next fix. A fix whose expiration date leaves us weaker and hungrier than ever. The longer we persist on such a path, the less we will have the ability to fight our way out to anything approaching fulfilment of our potential. Odysseus’ men were fortunate enough to have a leader who rescued them from such a fate. In a world such as ours can we naively assume that anyone will save us if we blindly take such a road?

So perhaps Book 9 summoned the man of many ways. However there’s another avenue or boulevard he might have slunk down, silent in his beggar’s guise, while I was nose deep in Hemingway’s, A Moveable Feast. In deference to Hemingway’s genius, I will refrain from searching for an appropriate adjective to convey the love I now have for this book. If you haven’t yet read it you are missing out. It is Hemingway’s description of Ezra Pound and their friendship which has finally given me the courage to return to the Cantos. I’m reading them aloud before studying each one in more detail. I feel a little like the great John Keats must have done when he travelled in those realms of gold revealed in George Chapman’s Homer.  The last time I attempted to voyage into Pound’s world the gates were firmly locked, barred and bolted. Now, of a sudden, the way lies open and the terrain within is accepting guests.

To return to Odysseus. Canto I begins with the Nekuia* of the Odyssey Book 11, via the sixteenth century Latin translation of Andreas Divus. I recite and hear Pound, placing himself firmly in the Homeric tradition at the start of his endeavour. The winds roar and the men weep as they embark upon on their terrifying and undesired journey to Teiresias and the land of the dead.

‘And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.’

Is it any wonder then, that I sense the presence of the man of many sorrows as I idle by the shores of the Pacific Ocean on a happy Sunday afternoon?

* In Ancient Greek cult practice and literature a nekuia was a ritual by which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future.