You As Odysseus
Sunday comes with the promise of sunshine in the afternoon. Day after day for three days showers have come, when August is typically a dry month. I am thankful for the rain though I am compelled to mow the lawn 2x per week for a while. How happy I feel to see the creek full, and the garden robustly green; the tomatoes are ripening, and I am looking for thumb-sized baby pumpkins to follow the glowing yellow blossoms.
A night at the movie theater afforded us the opportunity to view The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan. I am not sure that Matt Daimon satisfies my image of a Greek chieftain military commander. Daimon impresses me as inordinately decent for a human being. As I watched the story unfold I found myself sorting through other male actors having impressed me as borderline hard-assed. Seems that a surplus of those types were available to choose from!
The movie was Ok. It was too long for my taste, perhaps cut by half Odysseus’ slaughter of the layabout suitors at the very end of the tale. Were so many louts necessary to the tale?
The movie did highlight a critically important theme, perhaps the most important. I mean the link between bronze age peoples and the pantheon of gods/goddesses shared by the Mediterranean civilizations. Homer’s Achaean Greeks and Trojans offered to the same gods. Apollo, Aphrodite, and Artemis to name a few.
A rule of hospitality regulated the treatment of a passing stranger. Consideration was “the right thing to do”. Also, you never knew whether the stranger might be a god.
To transgress the law of Zeus courted a divine response, which often came in the form of a life threatening upheaval of nature. Humans still live by the cycle of the seasons, by the products of nature. Were not the bronze age peoples more astute, insightful than are we, – Americans living in the glow of our screens, situated in artificial environments, the old gods displaced by our steely (predatory) ethos of “success”?
Earlier today this scene caught my eye. Just outside the Starbucks window, a table standing water captures light and reflects a gray sky. Reminders of beauty and power are all around.
