Why Homerism?

Humours of the Homerist 2

What is an Homerist anyway? The infirmities that interrupted me recording Homer’s Odyssey have made me wonder what it is that leads a man to want to sing from Homer every day—each and every day—like a priest of some denomination, blessing his daily bread? It does seem a religious devotion, though saying so hardly clarifies its nature or motive. But it does all the same feel an honest assessment, if I were to say that at a certain point in the course of this project it began to make sense to call myself ‘Homerist’, in the same sense that that man there in robes is called ‘Buddhist’, or that widow lady, ‘Roman Catholic’. In the loss of it there is now the religious, the sacramental breath around my practice, in addition to the sense of following a discipline in philosophy or a diet—a sense heightened by the break—and engaging the daily aesthetic reverie that is the sounding in rhythm of a snippet of Homer.

I think of the call of the Muezzins: how when I visited the Ionian coast, five times a day the call would pierce all commercial and tourist consciousness, and remind resident and visitor alike that there was more to life than this, this business. Homer’s voice comes from another world. It also does not care or mind what you are up to, or why. It helps the effect that you cannot sing him quiet: his cadences bounce, rock, and land.

And Homer does come from another world. I mean really: in the images on Achilles’ shield, and in the night sky of Calypso’s navigational instructions to Odysseus on the raft, the Pole is in the constellation of the Bear. That’s not our world. The North Pole is not in the Bear. Nor was it in the Great Bear in the past, to judge by the regular, slow motions we observe today in the cosmos. The retro-calculating astronomers will cheerfully tell you that the North Pole was never in the Bear. We are therefore separated from the world described in Homer’s narrative by a catastrophe that shifted the Pole. About 15 degrees. And no doubt a lot else too! A tilting earth moves coastlines and ports and maybe whole sloshing oceans. Good luck finding Troy in the Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean in Homer! You’d sooner find Middle Earth.

The sky was copper-brazen and there was no word for blue. An Homerist is a catastrophist. (Perhaps one should add, ‘among other things.’) But not all catastrophists respond to poetry, let alone turn Homerist. There is a call that reaches us from that other side, it speaks to a persistent humanity that survives in blonde-headed Menelaus and Penelope passing-wise, irrelevant of catastrophe and stupid presumptions about technology and climate. Though their giant heroes killed nine men at a run and a swipe, there were plenty of Joes and the odd Josephine among them who could sing for a pint and wink back. It helps to contrast the Judeo-Christianists who align themselves with the survivors of a cataclysm, of the sort who consider themselves ‘chosen’ in the aftermath of a general human massacre. We Homerists take no part in that sibling illness. We know the fragility of all this present construction, whether physical or academic, because we feel it in our bones—and latterly, our frail organs as well.

The peculiar pathology of ‘chosenness’ really does define a vast class of people who are not Homerists. Believers and atheists alike succumb to the childish myth of being chosen. It is all the wished and more or less deeply felt significance of the self that defines this modern democratic type. René DesCartes identified the autonomous doubting self as the ultimate arbiter of being and non-being. It is the belief in this ultimate authority that justifies the jury system, the power of consent, and so many other essential formative principles of modern social and political life.

Neither atheism nor belief enter into this troubled delusion, of being important and entitled to an opinion—at least not in an essential way. The sense of being chosen, as an individual or as a people, is entirely wishful self-aggrandisement. To be sure, the Homerist is a polytheist, but he is no sort of believer: polytheism is rather the recognition of a fact, that the powers which operate in the world, so as to shape the course of human affairs, do not show evidence of being part of some coherent awareness acting with a will, or from love, or even interest; but instead seem to be more like the distant effects of the enactments of an unelected Congress, who can be earnestly petitioned personally for promises about next year, but any alterations to the dispensations in this year’s budget are ‘almost completely’ out of the question. This goes even for the frustrations of its Speaker and its Chief Executive in getting their way—each of them self-styled by the way. The debated and passed Congressional budget, and in Greek its ‘portions’—already distributed—are what we call ‘fate’.

It will surprise and perhaps offend that Christians get lumped in with atheists, not to mention agnostics, Jews and Muslims, but the Homerist really does observe the same thing in all alike—including the atheist who believes she is an ‘individual’ (literally an atom) with a sovereign opinion: there is the same unshaken feeling for an integrated, unitary consciousness which can meaningfully be held accountable for its thoughts and actions, and crimes. This is the delusional premise of singular agency that societies double down on, to the point of actually incarcerating people, as though human beings are literal individuals who can get what they deserve. (There is a vengeful satisfaction in believing this.) It is not only the one who says ‘I didn’t do it’ who is lying.

‘I was not myself.’ Who were you then?

It is thought that individuals can be predicated upon—that is, ‘accused’ of certain qualities and histories, such that these attributions are made to stick to their subjects, with consequences. The Homerist seems a grown up by contrast, who is far more diffident about the act of predication. What he attends to is naming, expanding the process evocatively, rhythmically into epithets rather than affixing predicates. He is in no hurry to proceed to definitions: the Homerist lingers on the name, as though to experience the referent simply and directly, previous to judgement, so that any epithets do not so much describe as flesh out.

We learn in school about subjects and predicates and submit our minds to the metaphysical law that there must be a predicate attached to a subject if meaningful speech is to be possible. But the law is ex post facto, not a priori. Speech happens regardless. We presume that names are arbitrary, things you can alphabetise. But what if there are true names? Oughtn’t we try to name things well, like the chemists?

The rhythm of Homer overwhelms. The performance takes over its space, it commands attention. The hexameter is like a drumbeat, it is not a musical trick of speech but an external pounding, insistent and unending. The accompaniment insinuates itself into the rhythm, interweaving syncopated syllables with reinforcing downbeats. There is staccato, lilt, and sonorous plod. There is no mystery that this rhythm lends itself to counting. The descending rhythm, counter to the ascending cadences of speech, resolves into sixes that repeat and repeat.

The Shakespearean also is transported, the rhythm seems to take over and anticipate his words. But here the speech comes first: the metre arises from within, ordering and distending time, shaping prose into ascending verse. The Homerist is not like this: he is transported from without.  The falling rhythm of dancing feet pounds a drumbeat that possesses him, before he thinks to utter a syncopating and harmonising sound.

There is no mystery that chanting to such a back beat, swinging the time, becomes endlessly stimulating; there is no mystery that the chanting of lists, catalogues, well suits this beat-mesmerised momentum. Counting becomes recounting, and catalogues fill out into stories.

The Homerist is not an actor. Hers is a one-man show. The modern actor becomes the part. In the unhomeric Cartesian modernity, he turns into the other self. That is why this becoming and inhabiting the character is particularly fetishised in the modern award ceremony. In the temple of the integrated chosen self, the actor is a prodigy, a magician. Nothing more magical can be conceived by these self-styled individuals: the best actor can fool you, that he has become a different self. But Homer always announces when he is exchanging his persona: like the actor for Socrates in Plato’s Republic, he plays all the parts. And the play is play, it is pretend, there is no fourth wall because the scenes conjured by her art do not play out in a box. The audience (and the staff as prop) are ever-present, especially when he voices in the second person.

But that does not mean she does not submerge in the process. The Homerist does not like the word ‘simile’. It gives too short a shrift to the process generating the poetic reality, its poetic prowess. The Greek word ἀναλογία is often translated ‘proportion’, but it takes a certain distance from the objects of a comparison to start registering the portions among them, what between them may be measured or even numerable. Homer is indeed the parent of Euclid: there is no study of ratio or proportion as such, that is not born in the meditation of a simile. But this meditation involves an immersion not germane to the ritual of the Euclidean demonstration.

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ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἐν οὐρανῷ ἄστρα φαεινὴν ἀμφὶ σελήνην

φαίνετ᾽ ἀριπρεπέα, ὅτε τ᾽ ἔπλετο νήνεμος αἰθήρ:

ἔκ τ᾽ ἔφανεν πᾶσαι σκοπιαὶ καὶ πρώονες ἄκροι

καὶ νάπαι: οὐρανόθεν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπερράγη ἄσπετος αἰθήρ,

πάντα δὲ ϝεἴδεται ἄστρα, γέγηθε δέ τε φρένα ποιμήν:

τόσσα μεσηγὺ νεϝῶν ἠδὲ Ξάνθοιο ῥοάων

Τρώων καιόντων πυρὰ φαίνετο Ἰλιόθι πρό.

χίλι᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐν πεδίῳ πυρὰ καίετο, πὰρ δὲ ἑκάστῳ

εἴατο πεντήκοντα σέλᾳ πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο.

ἵπποι δὲ κρῖ λευκὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι καὶ ὀλύρας

ἑσταότες παρ᾽ ὄχεσφιν ἐΰθρονον Ἠϝῶ μίμνον. (Iliad VIII.555-65)

As when the stars in heaven around a splendid moon

Will shine out conspicuously upon the coming of a windless sky,

And all the lookouts are completely disclosed, the headlands and peaks,

As well as the woodland vales; out of heaven there bursts the unspeakable sky

And all the stars are seen—and in his mind’s vessels the shepherd rejoices!

So many there were between the ships and the currents of river Xanthus,

The fires of the Trojans as they burned and shone out before Ilium.

A thousand there were—fires burning in the plain—and by each one

There sat fifty Trojans in the gleam of the blazing flame.

The horses kept chewing on white barley and spelt grains

As they stood by their chariots for Fair-Throne, Eos the dawn—waiting.

The key to the process of the meditation is immersion; this can get forgotten as one attends to comparison, and finally to proportion. One is immediately in the moment when the stars break through, when the wind dies down (evidenced not by a change in the local weather but by the disappearance of scudding clouds in the upper air) and the landscape suddenly stands conspicuous under the moon; the hills have always been there but they turn etched and struck with moon-shadow. One immerses in the particulars. It seems as if a veil has been suddenly torn and the vast depth of the sky revealed, with all the stars. The point of comparison is ostensibly that there are as many fires on the plain as these stars; this number is immediately multiplied, however: for every fire (and so every visible star) there are fifty soldiers. Mathematical proportions can often serve to define a common unit. If there is any corresponding element here, it is surely not in this case, as in mathematics, in the numbered objects, stars and fires, but in the unity of perspective that the poet must share with his listener. This sharing is objectified in a little half line which frames the vision of stars bursting through, and the headlands under moonlight: ‘and the shepherd rejoices in his mind.’ This lonely shepherd effectively haunts the tenor in the shape of the men in their cohorts huddled round the fires in the plain, awaiting the dawn to transform the landscape and bring death in battle—each in the crowd alone as the shepherd (with or without sheep) in his mortal contemplation. Their armed gathering is so silent that you can hear the horses chewing.

There is a false cadence in the final line: ἐΰθρονον Ἠῶ. ‘Fair-Throne Eos’ lands in sung rhythm like the end of an hexameter line. But there is another word to come, the actual last word: μίμνον, ‘they kept waiting’. It is the waiting that is emphasised in this way. The moonlit tableau will yield for these men, both crowded and alone, to mortality in the sunlight. The shepherd, for his part, is no soldier; he has this to advantage.

The Homerist is not a lonely shepherd, but he sees him feelingly. They agree that the North Pole was in the Bear.