ABlog

I finished The Iliad.

As if it is two books, two tales: the one that is enthralled with Violence Variations, and the other that depicts life, emotion (other than battle-glee), domesticity beleaguered--whether next the "beaked ships" or within the walled town.

One can glimpse aspects of feeling that are, in theory, independent of armed conflict: parental love, romantic love, the sorrows of old age, the joys of male friendship--but all are seen through a prism, scrim of war.

Is it right to say that these relationships are "distorted" by organized violence? Or rather that the poem suggest that war IS the ground of life, love, domesticity? Akhilleus weighs the prospects of war versus peace in his own personal case: he can choose obscurity and long life, but opts for glory and early death.

On the one hand, the strangeness of the poem that is the stamp of its genius and source of its power lies in its contrasts. How is it that a poem so obsessively preoccupied with "grim war" in its ritual particulars can be so poignant in its depiction of a friend's mourning, a mother's or a father's grief?

Does not the very range of the work underscore its unstated thesis: that "there is no alternative" to war?

Not, anyway, unless you count that ambrosial romper room in the sky, where only ichor flows as consequence of strife.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

What did Briseis surmise,
she of the soft braids
when she lay unsleeping
beside her assigned hero?

What did she say to the
"woman versatile at crafts
whose value was four oxen,"
a prize for the losing wrestler
at Patroklos's funeral games?

(The winner received a
"fire-straddling tripod
valued at 12 oxen
by the Akhaians.") [Fitzgerald, 551]

At least her lovely name
occurs to us.
What does it mean, Briseis,
scribbled like a breath
in the margins of the mighty?


Alice Notley writes:

"Have I gone beyond the periphery?"

"How far gone
into my defect am I?" (From In the Pines)


The great poem moves me with its ending--its framing--in a minor key: the funeral, not the triumph; the beginning of the end and not the end itself. No closure for Homer, that's for sure. But such a brilliant move must not be mistaken for a critique of war. The "odd" cropping out of a portion of a larger "story arc" all the more powerfully affirms the "beauty and sadness" of human mortality, which is, in effect, equated with war. Yes, we have to admit: this is how it is. This is how it always has been. The poem both naturalizes and ennobles "what has always been." It prompts in us no real debate over Akhilleus's choice--long peaceful life/quick death and a hero's glory. THE DEFINITIONAL AUTHORIZATION OF GENRE ITSELF undermines any possibility of our experiencing this fork in the road as a choice to be pondered. The purpose of the epic poem is to sing of the glory of the man who fights for honor, for Helen, for loot, for revenge, and to pull down the walled towers. A life of peace is by definition an unsung--an unsingable--life. If Akhilleus had chosen to live, we would not know his name. If the most monumental form of literary art available to a society is one created specifically for the purpose of giving immortality to the short-lived hero, then our emotional and aesthetic response to that art is on some level an embrace of war as the permanent and inevitable centerpiece of human life.

Much of this may be implicit in Maxine Hong Kingston's critique of our attachment to a conflict-based notion of narrative or the novel. (One might also ask: why is our notion of "conflict" metaphorically based only on physical, violent, death-dealing conflict?)

From current Army Times discussion post on the question, "If you could improve the ACUs [combat uniform], what would you change? Would you improve the pixelated pattern? The fabric? Or maybe a pocket that's just not in the right spot?"

Answer: "The velcro looks horrid, and get crazy bumps on it. Plus I seem to have the constant problem of having the velcro on my left shoulder get caught on my left tape because that crappy velcro tag keeps curling up on the end. And not to sound too negative, but having a good looking beret is beneath the competence level of some soldiers. Yeah, I know the Army is so easy a caveman coud do it, but forming a beret and keeping it looking nice seems to be the achilles heel of many. Do away with it, or have soldiers where it less.

"Also, when I'd get blood on my BDU's you couldn't tell. Pretty nice, doesn't freak people out. If there is a good way to get blood out of the ACU's, I haven't found it yet. And it doesn't comfort my soldiers to see me walking around looking like I just butchered a hooker in a truck strop bathroom." [typos in the original]