Unfated Home-comings

I am fond of aetiological myths because they are concerned with questions of essential nature (rerum natura) and ontology; I am writing on them because monotheistism believes in them, while polytheism tends to offer various, conflicting stories. So I should aetiologically introduce this entry, give it its proper genealogy. Incipt: my ex-boyfriend looks and sounds like Orlando Bloom, so I’ve been watching Orlando Bloom films and consequently I have done that which nothing else could make me do; watch Troy. This in turn begat my reading of the Iliad and that caused me to go looking through ancient literature for the missing pieces of the story. There is an inevitability in the way I’ve ended up here, reading Hyginus. There is no point getting your heart broken if you don’t learn anything, and the Buddha agrees with me.

Levi-Strauss nearly said that myths are good for thinking with, and I always find that they are. Orpheus and Eurydice, a story my Mother used to tell me and one that I found profoundly distressing and incomprehensible as a child, is the one that is most difficult and important for to think with, for me anyway; it’s the understanding that I have most difficulty believing. So, for now, the Iliad instead. So many aspects of this particular myth cycle have caught me: that the war begins for much the same reason that the First World War did, that Odysseus is both the most important character and a peripheral one, that while most heroes describe themselves as their father’s sons Odysseus describes himself as his son’s father, that he is to blame for everything and I wonder if its because he is the wrong sort of hero for this sort of narrative, that all the really blokey Greek heroes spend time in drag, and that when, later, the Athenian playwrights told the stories, they were so concerned to tell those of the Trojans and the women; the enemy and the Other. But, here at least, the one that holds me is the diversity of morality of the heroes. Each of the characters is quite specific and particular in how their sense of honour and justice expresses itself and there does not seem to be much in the way of proselytising one to another’s way of thinking, because there does not seem to be a sense that there ought to be consensus. They are deeply concerned with good and evil, just in a way that doesn't make sense to us. My mother thinks that this is because, for the Hellenes, there is no single, central religious text, so there can be no orthodoxy, and more importantly, no hetrodoxy. The Iliad shows an honour/shame society that is more pluralistic than us; that should be impossible.