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She begins again with writing, the joy & skill he willed her...
loosens her attachment to print & casts herself upon the cyberswirl.
I’d pick up the phone and he’d always be there ready to discuss any idea.
He could be counted on to know not just all things English grammar and use, but he'd have the facts of Western history at his fingertips as well.
He paces deep in thought but not lost at sea. In fact, found.
This thinking, his favorite shore.
Today’s question, “Is it the re-integration of the Hero that’s the important thing for the community?”
Which brings on a long conversation about the Iliad & how stability and un-changing-ness were held as high values in early clans.
X
"Glaucus may think of himself as one leaf in the centuries of leaves, a transient phenomenon, an irrelevant individuality, but that acceptance of transience is not what most of the poem (the Iliad) thinks or most of the heroes in it. For them, and for Homer, impermanence is life’s central sorrow and the source of its most lasting pain.
It is also what the poem itself is intended to cure.
X
In scene after scene, Homer quietly shows its listeners that it knows more and remembers more than men usually know or are able to bring to mind. The whole of the Iliad is a hymn to the scale of remembering of which epic is capable. The world forgets, but the poem remembers, and that knowledge is the source of Homer’s repeated sad-eyed, bloodhound irony on the nature of life. Only the gods can know as much as the poem knows."
Still he writes and thinks to bring into being.
Yesterday he calls at 7am, disoriented.
He's had bad dreams of hospitals, endless rooms where he was unable to find me, his trusted guide, his reminder of times and places.
Our faith in print's capture of meaning fades. The stories & that hanker, afterthoughts.
We are having coffee surrounded by young girls insisting it is summer with their short shorts. My father begins, “I’ve been thinking what you should write, Annie.”
He tells me I should write "small chapbooks" about various episodes in my life. The bookstore. My illness (the same one that will soon kill him.) My love of bicycling, which “we both know is more than just moving your legs.”