Homecoming’s Not a Dance

Abstract

A line like that is about as far away from present day narcissism as you may get. This isn’t the individual memoirs of the actions and activities of unimportant persons, written by the self-reflective self or worse, a ghost writer whose very job is to make the subject sound and seem. This is a storyteller who knows that all stories connect to the gods and knowing that, asks the inspirator of the gods, the muse of storytelling, to tell through him not a story but the story of the man skilled in all ways of contending. Against the backdrop of the known cosmos is set the story of Odysseus’s homecoming, related by the poet whose importance is as vehicle and not as personality. The vehicular poet is, as we know him who is called “Homer,” someone who lives over a span of eight hundred years. Either he is extremely healthy, exercising daily aerobically and eating lots of whole grains, vegetables, and oily fishes, sleeping soundly and well without apnea, or our vehicle is a combination of Greek singers who spend centuries inventing professorially red-inked clichés—the epithets and tag lines like “rosy-fingered dawn”—that allow the oral singer to keep to his meter and pattern.

“Sing in me gods, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending.”¹