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The World Is Not Done Yet. Part Two.

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We are as our stories have made us. Change in their meanings changes us.

Can we refuselet go so much planted so early? Identitytender memory clings there.

How tempting to resist what we know, as acceptance impels us to change.Can we forsake the protections imagined to be had in those ancient ways of making and reading meaning?

But in recognition lies our chance for comprehension.And for women & Others, escape.

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A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY:

“Our modern sensibility might wrinkle its nose against the pleasure the warrior world took in violence, but Homer cannot be understood unless that pleasure is also understood. Homer has a specific word for that death thump: doupein, meaning ‘to sound like the heavy thud of a corpse as it falls.’ It is always set against its opposite, arabein, ‘to rattle and clash,’ the sound that armor makes when a man is felled…

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...The thud and rattle mark the falling apart of a man’s life, its coherence removed by death, the effect delivered by the gleaming bronze, the triumph of the new metal dominance, its penetrative masculinity and its cultivation of power. The sharpened blade transformed human relations."

Why Homer Matters.
Adam Nicolson
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There’s wonder in the OldStories. The heat of those fires.And it’s not so easy, walking out on all the OldFamiliar.

We feelnostalgia sadness forthat loss of fellowship the comforts no longer to be had there.For men, permission to gather radiance to themselves.Without thought of the cost. Among other things.

For all that once, for better or worse, defined us.

What would be a malehood decoupled from warring and violence?Unbound from the scant residue of meaning left in those yarns’ exhausted spin& pillaged to empty.

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“Achilles cannot escape from the idea that Agamemnon has been sleeping with Briseis. That vision, in the present tense, haunts him. Agamemnon has her. He has his way with her, still, now, ‘the bed partner of my heart.’ The overking’s cumulative greed has taken even her. He has made her an object too. Agamemnon does not know the meaning of love. All he can imagine is ownership, and all Achilles can think of is Agamemnon’s repeated, horrible owning of his girl.”

Why Homer Matters.
Adam Nicolson
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It Is Not All Loss .