The works of loom and adze

In Ben's last post, he clarified the difference between 'arcadian' and 'utopian,' as defined by Dr. Jacobs in our Auden class last year. It reminded me of another dichotomy from that class, the idea that the Aeneid, as opposed to the Odyssey, is the true Christian epic. The pattern of the Odyssey is circular—the object is to return home, to restore things as they were. The Aeneid, on the other hand, is linear and nonrepetitive, we are going somewhere new. The idea is that as devastating as our losses may be, something immeasurably better can be gained: Troy was sacked that Rome might be founded. Ben is right, it's not "behold, I make all things just like they were," but "I make all things new." A classic Protestant euphemism for "died" is "called home" or some such phrase, but it should really be "called forth."

All true, but nonetheless I have for years held an affinity for the Odyssey that I still haven't really figured out. I think part of it is due to the fact that I'm a sucker for the idea of going home (e.g. I tear up every time I read "when you have to go there, they have to take you in" in Frost's "Death of the Hired Man"). I've been thinking a lot about the end of the Odyssey lately, specifically about the two works of art we encounter there.

The first is Penelope's infamous shroud, which she tells a disguised Odysseus about in Book XIX (from Robert Fagles' unparalleled translation):

I yearn for Odysseus, always, my heart pines away.
They rush the marriage on, and I spin out my wiles.
A god from the blue it was inspired me first
to set up a great loom in our royal halls
and I began to weave, and the weaving finespun,
the yarns endless, and I would lead them on: "Young men,
my suitors, now that King Odysseus is no more,
go slowly, keen as you are to marry me, until
I can finish off this web,
so my weaving won't all fray and come to nothing"....

So by day I'd weave at my great and growing web—
by night, by the light of the torches set beside me,
I would unravel all I'd done.

This is a cyclical, potentially endless enterprise, and one all too familiar to me, to all of us. We are constantly having to undo things we've done or redo what has come unraveled. It reminds me of Laura Miller's appreciation of DFW in Salon, where she speaks of "the discipline and of the abrading, daily labor" that true humility requires. Penelope's shroud mirrors the way we must continually fight back our own instincts toward self-aggrandizement, how we strive to actually be caring and sincere rather than merely appearing to be. But it might also be the cycle of sin and penance or any number of things. The point is that there is no end in sight to this work, it is as regular as doing the dishes.

Moreover, Penelope has no idea why she's doing this, to what end. She doesn't know whether her husband will be back, doesn't know if these suitors will ever leave. She's hoping they'll get bored, that she can wait them out, but who knows? She weaves, I think, to distract her mind and her hands, to give herself something to do. As good a reason as any, but one that seems kind of hollow and pointless, a constant suspension.

But then there's the other piece of handiwork. To set the scene: in Book XXIII, after Odysseus has mercilessly butchered the suitors and revealed his true identity to his wife, Penelope (grown understandably skeptical in twenty years) puts him to the test. She asks a servant to move their marriage bed out for them, at which point Odysseus gets pissed. By way of explanation, he tells this story:

There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,
grown to its full prime, the bole like a column, thickset.
Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls
with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly
and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.
Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,
clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up,
planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze—
I had the skill—I shaped into plumb to the line to make
my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.
Working from there I built my bed, start to finish...
That's our secret sign, I tell you, our life story!
Does the bed, my lady, still stand planted firm?"

This knowledge is the couple's shibboleth, the way in which Odysseus and Penelope know that the long strands of their respective stories have finally rejoined. The trunk of the olive tree runs through the center of their house, their marriage, and, by extension, the whole poem. It is the great immovable pole around which Odysseus revolved through all his wanderings. And its rootedness stands in contrast to Penelope's "great and growing web."

What the bedpost stands for, I don't know. But if the shroud is real, perhaps the bedpost is as well—a great unassailable Something that anchors what we do. I haven't yet wrapped my head around the enormous implications of this—though they are both thrilling and frightening—but, as they did for Penelope, they allow me to continue my daily weaving and unweaving with a renewed vigor and hope.