Homeric Darkness
Week 10 of My Homeric Essays.
Homeric Darkness
Our favorite words are still waiting to be discovered, and the recovery of these words from the moment they are first spoken can never be done. Like the etchings of a heroic journey that discolor a life and take away time from it, so too does the plausible failure of a pattern of performance remove of us to insolubility of time in the manicured, happy instances of little remembrances of that core eviction of that perfect word. We will always remember the best time we say something, because it retains something of the strong passion that comes from that moment, and that moment can be so strongly indicative that it fails description in any other way than saying the word again, again, and again.
So the recollection begins for the Homeric world. Here the small structures of language details find their way into the minds of listeners at a young age. For these unmoving people, there is something about the life of the mind that is at its purest, because they cannot react to the things they hear and the sensations they gather. The respite from life that is the listening of poetry would have been the most important part of the life of a child in the Dark Ages, which this essay is about. Perhaps Hesiodically, it would have lasted their whole life, no matter how big they grew.
There is not enough detail given to the darkness that follows the 12th century B.C. when asking Homeric Questions. We are always impressed that Homer begins our Greek literature at a zenith, and also that he manages to be very historically accurate. We are interested in every small detail that serves as the tip of a spear for a substantiated argument on absolute terms, which seemingly always relies on his philosophy for natural inclination; always the dispositive demeaner of evidence or argument. A line of Homer, as they are heard, sung, or analyzed, is, for the ancients and us today at least, so perfect that it cannot help but be the truth.
Let us imagine then the singing of stories for five hundred years from 1200 B.C. to 700 B.C. What could happen in these years? What could they come up with? What little sounds could come into their view from other parts of the world, in the form of remembrances from other dialects and languages? It seems that the preservation of formulae are the choicest legacies of a good giver, because they give everything to time and reserve nothing for the present; their guest-friendship is unmatched, because they have infinite potential, and like a painting of someone that recalls their memory, they unveil that rigorous removal from the present into the recovery stasis of the mind at qualms with the brutal apostasy of the Homeric line, which is that these wonderful words are describing things that cannot not be.
As Agamemnon stands up in Iliad 9.14, we hear the growing up of the individual:
ἵστατο δάκρυ χέων ὥς τε κρήνη μελάνυδρος
ἥ τε κατ᾽ αἰγίλιπος πέτρης δνοφερὸν χέει ὕδωρ:
Iliad, 9.14.
“He stood up, shedding tears as a spring of black water
Which, as upon a rock with no goats, sheds its dark water.”
Like a child, which Agamemnon is always apt to be, he cries, and he cries dark water; the metaphor is wise, situating the goat’s rock too, which is an impossibility for a blind person to see, first of all, and logically interesting given the climbing of goats onto walls to get lick them for salt, the steady stream leaving behind dark water, not the rushing torrent of a waterfall or babbling brook (cf. Tsagalis 2017, “ΑΠ’/ΚΑΤ’ ΑΙΓΙΛΙΠΟΣ ΠΕΤΡΗΣ: Homeric iconyms and Hittite answers” for more interpretations). Perhaps this models epic as a medium. But most startlingly for me, the notion of the darkness of this water is in rejection of the reality of tears, which are not dark; tears, and the resolution of the young to cry, are dark because of another less literal reason, and the grasping at this foundation means more than the coming address to his beloved leaders, but a highest, most enveloping and exciting incision on the human spirit of maturity, which is the coming of words which follow tears.
We see regression in the dark ages. There is no more money, no more travel, and no more words; the traffic is merely that of big men between islands, as if for a moment, for just one half of a millennium, for the catharsis of Troy, the Greeks decided to retreat into that sanctuary of an island people that exists without their disparities and Platonic desire for betterment and captivation of others, but rather in the simplicity of rehearsing the ability to exist over and over again, and perhaps by this monotony they discovered that to be childlike. They now could have that hyperspecific entertainment of the incredible always at hand, and this evolved to be the only satisfying part of life. So, they spoke, and the color of this water is perhaps the echoes of the Dark Age Greek from which the stories of the Trojan war had to have passed through, and we can never know about.
But we can imagine an island without contact from war or maturity for five hundred years by reading the perfection of Homeric forms, because they cannot be built any other way, and they are our text. Their lives are saved in the story of Agamemnon standing up. In performance of them then, we are possessing the gold of fine generation in a permanence of something like heaven. This is when the greatest of the soldiers and aristocrats and wise-working women came across from the tumult of arbitration over the Sins of Paris and into the happy world of recollection and dissimulation, the discordant acquiescence to broken paths and seizure of fallow livelihoods from the external, a life of the mind and permanent fixture of philanthropy now found in every attempt to go beyond the tears of being young, in speaking, and one day saying, and one final recording thousands of years later, in our hands, singing.
The responsibility of the Homerist is therefore greatest and most dominating since every one of our texts is a child of it. We continue this wandering. Perhaps the resolution is then that, since Homer is so great at fighting, and so great at crying, we should consider ourselves permanently trapped in the Phaeacian phase of our lives until we grow up ourselves, and experience something; but to claim experience is to not be a singer, since, again, to offer singing is the ultimate philanthropy, to finally see and be disqualified from musical inspiration on par with the Homeric singer, and no ultimatum ever made room for extraneities. To break the Homeric spell is then to somehow forget Homer altogether, but by doing so, we lose the most beloved version of ourselves, given the effort and care that has been put into the poetry and its irreplaceability. In other words, it is simply enough to call Homer, by this dichotomous approach to the recreation of the dark ages as a compilation of one word that we would love to say over and over again. The poems are a beautiful word, even a favorite word, which altogether reflexively begets meaning to itself whether we understand it or not.
To brace against these dark waters of tears and the fascinations of the foothills of memory means to accrue something greater than Homer’s story of any individual character. For me, it means that we must accept the unity of the text with ourself, and trust it, as if we are reading our own consciousness, or as if we are feeling for the first time for our first language. This is why we must attempt to speak about Homer, and must pay attention to the time which Homer was written, and which we know nothing about. The Dark Age is then our age.