What Is It About Myths?

"Rage—Goddess, sing the rage..." - Homer, 'The Iliad'

Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!

Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with “Flesh and Blood” by Manaly Talukdar dragging our literary Nostromo to the underworld.

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Rage doesn’t actually play much into why I like myths. How completely metal that opening line is—the opening line of one of the OG Epic Poems, something you imagine sweater-vested private schoolers hemming and hawing over, virginally—it’s unnecessarily Black Sabbath-esque, and that’s something I like about myths.

This blog is reading The Iliad and The Odyssey for National Poetry Month. Obviously, I read Beowulf and the updated-hybrid myth Autobiography Of Red last week. This is, like everything I do for this blog, both something my weirdo brain thought would fun and in service of a writing project. What is it about these ancient epics that gets me so excited? It’s a little hard to explain, neatly anyway.

Up front: Homer’s epics, Beowulf, Paradise Lost—I read these the way some people read Jrrrrrr Tolkien or Grrrrrr Martin. These are both serious and unserious texts for me. Emblematic of my inability to take life completely seriously? Possibly. But there’s a remove from these texts—temporal, continental, cultural—that makes the war and death and heaviness unreal to me. These texts enter a sort of super-metaphor state, where it’s less “wow Achilles is being a whiny bitch about Agamemnon taking his sex slave away” and more “what is the right way to treat a man who has fought in a war for you?” or even “can there be anything redeemable about a society where women can be wrenched from their homes (where they are enslaved) and thrown into another one (where they are enslaved) and they technically haven’t even switched sides in the war?”

This means I’m doing incredibly NON-authoritative Reader Response criticism here. I’m not trying to teach these books, I’m not trying to go around thumping my Smart Boy chest because I’m a reader of the Homeric tomes. Whether or not these were real people, “Guy Thinking About The Roman Empire”-style political interpretations for contemporary society, and pedantic thoughts about the intricacies of the pantheon? You’re not going to catch me doing much of that. What I enjoy about these vaunted, well-studied Muse-revelations of old is selfish extraction: what can these poems show me about my own writing, and do I get hype reading them?

The Language

sing to me, O Muse (credit: Wikimedia Commons, Raph_PH)

The first time¹ I read The Odyssey was I think junior year of college, in a class called “Literature From The Writer’s Perspective.” It was a class required for creative writing concentrations, the fiction prof and poetry prof traded off years, and the only syllabus guideline was the course name. Joshua Marie Wilkinson taught the class I took, and you know a poet’s gonna design a whole class around what language is doing. We spent some time with The Odyssey—the Robert Fagles translation—and I was never made to feel lesser than for not remembering that Ares was the Greek one not the Roman one or not knowing how to pronounce Hesesuesocles. We read Autobiography Of Red in that class, too, and Emily Dickinson (this class gave me my Billy Collins hatred), Paul Celan, Lolita, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and probably something else cool that I’m spacing on. Yes: all books that foreground the fact that stories are made of language. “Words bounce,” Anne Carson says in the introduction to Autobiography Of Red. “Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” No “invisible prose” or whatever the hell the sci-fi children are always going on about.

No, my 300-course-level Homeric reading was all about the visceral, blood-soaked intensity of (Fagles’s translation of) the OG novel-in-verse. Every line of these epics reminds you that you are reading a poem, yet it tells a pretty seamless narrative. There’s a richness here, and an unpretentious richness at that—or at least, the highfalutin courtliness you might expect if you only know Homeric epics as “those things old people in private schools read.” Don’t even get me started on the adjectives! I’m going to get to the adjectives at the end.

Reaching Back In Time

all the water they talk about in Beowulf is so cold like imagine Beowulf happening around Lake Michigan (credit: Wikimedia Commons, Ian Alexander)

Every line of these epics reminds you that you are reading a poem, yet you are constantly thinking about how these are stories told around campfires, when you’re certain the lions are asleep. There’s something powerful about these being stories that have survived across centuries and empires—and yes, I realize a lot of that power is white supremacy and imperialism, but still. In order for the neo-Nazi dorks to piss and moan about fallen Western Civilization, there had to be art that was 1) surviving and 2) very good in the first place.

As I said, though, I am not the most serious Classics scholar. What Anne Carson or Maria Dahvana Headley did is much more interesting to me. So while I honor and respect ancient texts, I absolutely recognize this is my time, and my work won’t be ostrich-facing to the world around it. I also have no am I worthy hang-ups, because…

The Thrill Of Learning These Don’t Have To Be Stuffy

The highfalutin courtliness you might expect if you only know Homeric epics as “those things old people in private schools read” is just not there. Beowulf (not a Homeric epic) seriously earns Maria Dahvana Headley’s bro-tastic translation. The characters in The IliadOdyssey are constantly covered in the blood and entrails of sacrificed animals, let alone that of their opposing grunts. Formally, there’s nothing staid or overly restrictive. Carson’s text maintains a loose long line/short line structure, Maria tries to stay true to the alliterative nature of Old English, but nothing that makes you feel like you’re reading someone boring, like Alexander Pope. There are gods and monsters and trips to the underworld. Feasts, fights, and fucking. And honestly, these lines move so quickly that you have to stop and re-read lines so you don’t sail past some casual beauty, like the guy on the whale watching cruise who gets trapped seasick in the head at the exact moment the humpbacks show up.

Adjectives Adjectives Adjectives

“What color would you say that sea is?” “Wine-dark.” “Yeah wine-dark sounds about right.” (Wikimedia Commons, Yellow.Cat)

Don’t even get me started on the adjectives! I will not shut up about how much I love the adjectives. “What a sweet genius in the use of adjectives!” Hermogenes said of Stesichoros, and so Anne Carson said of Stesichoros: “This one was making adjectives.” And we all know what adjectives do, we definitely don’t need to be told, we’ll all smart enough to remember 7th grade grammar, but just for a refresher from Carson that no one, especially not me, needs: “Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else…meaning ‘placed on top’…Adjectives seem like fairly innocent additions but look again…[they] are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity.” We don’t want writing unmoored from its place in particularity, do we? Nah, no one wants writing like that.

Use too many of these, and maybe you start to sound a little overwrought. But Fagles translates Homer as always going on about rose-fingered dawn or even the wine-dark sea. Carson collects more from Homer: “When women appear, woman are neat-ankled or glancing…The sea in unwearying. Death is bad. Cowards’ livers are white.” Stesichoros? Well, he lives up to his reputation: “Stesichoros released being. All the substances in the world went floating up. Suddenly there was nothing to interfere with horses being hollow hooved…Or a child bruiseless…Or an insomniac outside the joy.” Personally, I noticed Hector often is called man-killing, which, hell yeah. This kind of writing can be really exciting, and being turned on the thrill of adjectives is a bit of writing appreciation you can take with you anywhere. “Rose-fingered dawn stretched over wheat fields while man-killing Hector stared into the wine-dark eyebrows of Poseidon” isn’t a real quote, it’s just me off top and it’s bad, but even writing that as a joke makes me feel like my writing has the Chris Evans-strong arms to reach back through time. It’s like how that Calvin & Hobbes line about Tracer Bullet is supposed to be parody, but honestly just rips and makes you wanna go read Raymond Chandler.

Bill Watterson should’ve written noir after quitting the funny papers (Credit: Andrews McMeel Publishing)

Did we solve it? What makes these maximalist-yet-compact, smooth-yet-dense, historic-but-not-worth-getting-too-nose-up about stories so compelling? Who knows. Probably I just want more novels in verse.

Now if you’ll excuse me, dry-skinned and sleep-deprived Chris is gonna go watch white-clad Dallas Mavericks go to battle against championship-possessing Golden State Warriors. Hwaet, my dudes.

Sorry you got an email,

Chris

1. the real first time, not freshman year of high school, where I skimmed a few excerpts and then got stoked about the proto-Bride-vs.-O’ren-Ishii-and-The-Crazy-88s slaying of the suitors as depicted in the 1997 miniseries