epic musings

Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wiser than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets, had (like the seers) their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future, remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner’s control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace.

Thus E. R. Dodds in his excellent 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, which I'm still reading.

This extract is from chapter 3, "The Blessings of Madness", in which Dodds discusses the different kinds of madness as understood by the ancient Greeks. Some types of madness were known to be ordinary and pathological--disease in the same sense that the body can be diseased. But others were regarded as divine, and conferred special superhuman powers on those visited by these states.

Two of these forms of divine madness were conferred by Apollo and Dionysus. But a third was regarded as bestowed by the Muses; this form of "madness" was poetic inspiration. In contact with a Muse, the poet received special knowledge not available to anyone else, and was able to express this in his verse.

As Dodds points out, the epic poets, when they supplicated the Muse for inspiration, were looking not for the technical ability to express themselves, but for hidden factual knowledge of the past. In an era without recorded media, the all-seeing, all-remembering Muse was the repository of the truth about the past, and it was this precious truth that the epic poet needed above all in order to fulfill his task.

I find this idea fascinating and, yes, inspiring. At this stage in my own epic work, I feel that I understand exactly what my great forebears were asking for, and why.

The past is a great unknown, as is the future. We have memories of our own lives, but as psychology has shown, memories change. What we remember, if we remember, and if that memory has any relationship with fact at all, is colored and shaped by our need to account for the present as we understand it. Our personal memories are mainly a kind of personal mythology that explains and supports our current attitudes and actions. Very broadly, we remember what we want to remember--the way we want to remember it.

And when we look back to times before our personal memories, we move even further onto mythological ground. Textbooks of national history are notorious for showing an edited, self-serving view of the past. Their aim is to create generations of patriots.

The epic poet, then, prays to the Muse for the truth about the past. What he gets is what he gets--whatever she decides to give him, if anything.

Now we have a long tradition of recorded history, as well as an actual science of the past in archaeology. Does this mean the Muse is obsolete, retired?

I think not. For the poet--and here I mean poet in its broad literal sense of "maker"--is still a limited being, who has only so much time and energy in his mortal frame. Confronted with a sea of recorded information, how is he to find what he needs?

You can call it chance, or method, or association--but I think that a research process that relies only on these things will come up empty. Speaking for myself, I have a certain feeling of being guided. Not all the time--in fact, not usually. But nonetheless. And after all, it takes me time to collect and read through the material to which I'm guided. I just need to be nudged and steered a little from time to time. I do get these nudges, and they must come from somewhere.

The "unconscious" would be the usual explanation. But what is the unconscious? By definition it is the great unknown, what is outside the field of consciousness. Because we claim not to believe in gods, we take it to refer to essentially mental processes happening below the threshold of awareness. But the entire notion of an unconscious mental process is quite mysterious, if you think about it. And to the extent that it exhibits purpose and knowledge, well, then, it's all the more mysterious.

I say: the Muse is as the Muse does. The gift of Calliope, the Muse of epic, is not poetic prowess but knowledge. The epic poet knows things that other people don't--and then he tells them.

O Muse, thanks for your help thus far. Please don't abandon me now.

epics, holograms, and hell

Writing, studying, thinking--these three converge for me. I keep a separate folder on the computer labeled Thinking, in which I have documents devoted to different topics that interest me. For example, one of these is "Literary Criticism", which I've set up to record any thoughts I might have on literature as an art form. Some of these Thinking documents I find myself copying and pasting into my Encyclopedia folder for The Mission. The compartments between my different creative and thinking activities are dissolving. Gradually it's all becoming one enterprise, involving my whole being.

This relates to the idea of the epic as a total form: an epic, in some sense, is a complete image of the world. The epic form places the maximum demand on the writer. It reflects the totality of his being, which in turn reflects the totality of the world he lives in. I think of a hologram. One of the properties of the hologram is that each piece of the whole contains all the information in the whole--just on a smaller scale. A hologram of, say, a car, can be cut up into little pieces, and each little piece will have the image of the whole car.

The epic is a hologram of the world as the writer understands it. Perhaps this could be said of every work, but the epic is specifically an effort to make this image as complete and deep as possible. The epic gives meaning to the existence of a nation--or of our whole species.

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Mark Musa's translation of Dante's Inferno. Excellent stuff. Quirky and weird, like all the greatest literature--but bold and brilliant. The Divine Comedy was Dante's effort at producing a total work, a complete image of the cosmos in all its significant features. All the levels are there, from the microcosm of the Pilgrim's soul to the mesocosm of his society to the macrocosm of the created universe. They are integrated and related. As Virgil leads him ever deeper down the trenches of the vast crater called Hell, centered under Jerusalem, Dante describes what he sees and feels with an awestruck but sober eye.

And 700 years later, he's still in print. Next up: Purgatory.

the Muse and I

All right. If this blog is supposed to be about the process of writing this work, then what can I say about where I'm at right now?

I'm going through the process that has evolved, seemingly of itself, in the long course of working on this project. I'm in the midst of trying to work out the chapter that, for now, I'm numbering 32. (My chapter numbers--and the number of chapters--will change in the next draft; this is one of the few things I'm sure of.) The notes document now runs to 32 pages as well.

The first and best metaphor that springs to mind is that of digging. I ask myself questions and try to come up with answers. Whether the questions are really useful or germane--never mind the answers--is not clear. They are just what come to mind in my effort to discover where I'm going.

I have a rough idea of where I'm supposed to go--that's laid out in my outline, the blueprint I developed in the earlier, happier days of 2002-03. But sometimes that outline is vague (such a huge job), and often it's hard to engineer the events that will bring about the steps required in the outline. Then again, sometimes the outline itself needs to be changed: I come up with actual new ideas for how to turn my story. In a way, that's the most exciting part of this first-draft process, even as it creates anxiety that my whole story might shift out of its current form and turn into something else--something that will take yet more years of my life to write.

Ah, anxiety, my old friend. Many fears attend working on a project like this (all right, on this project--there are no others "like" this). The greatest fear is of not finishing it, which might happen for any of a number of reasons, the most pleasant of which would be my own death. Other reasons would be physical or mental incapacity of one kind or another, including the "incapacity" of losing inspiration.

And now it dawns on me that this is the real reason that epic writers of the past have invoked the Muse at the beginning of their works. Not for quality of inspiration, even though that is how they couch their terms: "Help me, O Muse, find adequate words..." But for quantity: "Help me, O Muse, find the creative stamina to reach the end of this work..." I can't speak for other epic writers, but that's what this one needs. And for this I really do pray. And I believe that the Muse so far is helping me. Through the umbilicus that attaches us she sends the inspiration that nourishes me through these long seasons of effort.

For this I thank her. Oh yes indeed. Thank you, O Muse. Please don't let me down. I will keep at it and offer the result, good bad or indifferent, to you. It is yours before it is anyone else's.

continuing ed

Up again in the cold and dark of predawn: I could feel the colder air here in the house when I set about the morning routine of turning on heat and lights and putting on the kettle for coffee. Kimmie advised me that it was –4° C outside when I took her coffee and crackers up to her.

We were both tired after a restless night. In my case, I found that some of my concerns about life were weighing on my mind. But eventually I started drifting into dream, back awake, into dream, and back awake.

Over the weekend I underwent a spasm of book-buying: five online and two at a bookstore.

The bookstore buys were translations of the Iliad and the Aeneid by Robert Fagles, intended as part of my ongoing education in the epic genre.

I first read the Iliad back in 1975, when I was in English 10. It was among a small collection of alternative books that the teacher, Mr. Ryan, offered me in lieu of reading what the rest of the class was reading, since (as I recall) I had already read that book. I chose the Iliad because I was aware that it was supposed to be a great classic, and I wanted to have read it.

Even though the translation by W. H. D. Rouse was in prose, not verse, I found the book heavy going: lists of difficult Greek names and places, and a, for me, hard-to-follow story. I don't think I finished it. Indeed, I never returned the old, peeling paperback--I may even still have it: one of two thefts-by-carelessness that I can recall perpetrating in my school career. (The other theft was at the end of grade 7, when I hung on to a social-studies text, The Ancient and Medieval World. Come to think of it, that theft may not have been carelessness, but a more willful desire to keep the book, again, I think, so I could finish reading it--although I don't believe I ever did.)

Now that I'm studying the epic genre, the Iliad and the Odyssey are indispensable. I recently read that Tolstoy read the Iliad through five times consecutively before embarking on War and Peace. If Tolstoy could do it five times, Vitols can do it once.

I bought my copy new at the Chapters-Indigo store at Park Royal. I wasn't going to buy any books there, since I am one of the many Canadians who resents the fact that bookstores here are still charging "Canadian" prices for new books: prices much higher than the "American" prices printed on the cover, even though the Canadian dollar is now at par with the U.S. dollar. This copy of the Iliad is a good example: $24.00 Canadian vs. $15.95 U.S. That's a premium of 50%.

For this reason I've been resisting buying in bookstores, and choosing to buy online instead, paying in U.S. dollars. But I made an exception, and was also encouraged by Kimmie, who wanted to make these books part of my package of birthday presents, since we had just returned one of the presents she had given me--a fleece that was not quite the right color. She was happy to get a substitute that I genuinely wanted.

And yes, I was happy too. I decided on getting this version simply by opening the book up and reading some of Fagles's verse translation. The opener:

Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

I found it vivid and vigorous--very readable. Right away I felt myself drawn to Fagles's direct, simple way of expressing the thoughts. I glanced at one or two other verses, but had already made up my mind that I was happy to try this translation. It was a bonus that Virgil's Aeneid was also available in his translation, also as a Penguin Classic.

So more books wing their way toward me. I feel anxious about it: I know I won't be able to finish the ones I've got going; I'll put some or all of them aside to start the new ones as they arrive. I've already started the Iliad--that is, I'm reading Bernard Knox's 64-page introduction. I'm thrilled to think that a book written 2,700 years ago is still being printed and read today--that I can acquaint myself with people from that remote time.

I enjoy reading with purpose. And the more definite and important the purpose, the more I enjoy the reading. As a writer in the epic tradition, I continue my education. It seemed to work for Tolstoy.

epic as world-view

Back at my post--blogwise, anyway.

Two days ago a big box arrived in the mail: an order of books from Amazon.com. It contained three picture-books on Victorian fashions for Kimmie, and two books for me: the Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (translated by Robin Buss), and The Epic Cosmos, edited by Larry Allums, a text on the epic genre. The first I got as part of an investigation of "escape" stories, since this is what Mom and I think her memoir-in-progress might be (and also because of the unanimous acclaim of reader-reviewers on Amazon). The second I discovered while looking on Amazon for another book on Greek epics, under the heading "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". The readers' reviews for this one were also glowing.

As far as I can tell, genre is not a well-studied aspect of literature. After Aristotle's original categorization of poems into four kinds--comedy, tragedy, epic, and "dithyrambic" or what we would call lyric--it seems that much of what is known about genre is a matter of received assumptions and checklists of structural features. My Webster's gives this definition:

epic n (1706) 1 : a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero

There: an epic is long, a poem, in "elevated style", and recounts the deeds of a legendary/historical hero.

The view taken by the authors of The Epic Cosmos (it is a collection of essays) is different. Their thinking is based on the ideas of Louise Cowan, who in fact was the teacher of all the authors at something called the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, connected with the University of Dallas. Cowan herself provides the introductory essay, "Epic as Cosmopoesis". My compressed notes from paragraph 1 of the introduction are as follows:

Epic is both more frequent and more diverse than the recognized canon tends to indicate. Characteristics intrinsic to its nature include its sense of totality and its consciousness of mission.

Yes! I thought. Fantastic! A sense of totality and consciousness of mission!

Cowan goes on to state that the epic genre is characterized by four main features:

• penetration of the veil separating material and immaterial existence, allowing an intimate relation between gods and men


• an eschatological expansion of time


• restoration of equilibrium between masculine and feminine forces


• a sense of motion, linking human action to a divine destiny, toward which epic senses history moves

Any work, however humble, that has these aims as part of its agenda, qualifies as epic from this point of view. Any one of those four features would be a major undertaking, and alone would make for a work of serious purpose. Taking them all on at once, of course, is a gigantic and ambitious task--one so large that all true epic authors have invoked divine help for their work, either explicitly in the text (calling on the muse for aid) or "offline". The epic author requires help to gain access to the realm of the gods and channel divine energy. There is an element of theurgy here--or maybe sorcery.

The introduction, which I've not yet finished reading, has already given me a huge amount to think about, and a great boost of inspiration. Looking through Ms. Cowan's magic mirror into the dark inner world of the epic, I have felt an elevation and renewed appreciation for my chosen task. And my various life problems, my worries and kvetches about career, money, relationships, and so on, seem puny and pusillanimous in the presence of such concerns.

Ms. Cowan, and her students and coauthors, are saying that epic is, first of all, a point of view. It is a way of seeing and artistically representing the world as a whole. As I dip into this book, I feel strongly that this is my own point of view, and that I'm reading--and doing--the right thing.