While living in Nashville I wrote a series of songs… 15 or so… about the Odyssey (by Homer) & this was the third one. I guess it relates to Telemachus coming into his own power & realizing how awesome he is.
On a personal level, hi! How are you doing? I am fine I suppose. Recently I have been trying to become more yellow again by sitting in front of a yellow light for an hour or so a day. It has me feeling a little out of sorts, but we will see if I can stick with it and reach the other side.
What will be on the other side? I am not quite sure, I just feel that yellow is a color I lack. While I am intelligent, I don’t feel yellow intelligent- the sort of down to earth intelligence that knows how to get from point A to point B on this space-time continuum. If you are yellow enough, the world is your oyster. And least I hope that is what I will find when I finally reach the Yellow World.
Here is a better picture of Patton, the new dog. The last one I posted was from when we had just found him, so he looked like a wild animal. But here you can see he is settling in well to family life.
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus travels to Hades to seek guidance for his journey. Hell is a place we all visit at some point. Perhaps by visiting Hell while still alive we don’t have to go there when we die.
What is Hell? Hell is a place so black we can only look backwards.
A place where the light of the future has been extinguished by the shadows of the past. Suddenly we are engulfed by everything we had forgotten- lost opportunities, suppressed humiliations, mistakes we can never erase. We realize that what we thought was behind us- our past- was actually closer to us than our present- standing between us and the present like an atmosphere, a cover of clouds, and in Hell these clouds thicken and swallow us up. We are confronted with the ways we have hurt others and the ways we have hurt ourselves. We come face to face with the dark sides of those we loved, the ways they betrayed us, the love that existed only in words but not deeds. We see the ways we were overpowered by life and shaped by forces beyond our control. We realize we cannot change the past- not because it is behind us (it is not behind us at all!)-but because we never could have changed it. We did our best, but it was not enough. Our will was just a tiny candle in the big wide world, barely illuminating our own hand and bound for extinction.
Some dreams were fulfilled, but still they were hollow. Some goals were achieved, but still they led nowhere. Best friends slipped away, one by one, like sunsets. Ideals that seemed so tangible turned out to only be concepts. Right and wrong, success and failure, struggles and surrenders… in the end it all led to the same place… nowhere.
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island where he could have lived forever as an immortal sex slave in order to face probable death on the ocean, hoping that he can make it back to his wife and son on a pathetic homemade raft.
Another song from the Odyssey, featuring the two elements that weighed most heavily on my mind at the time- fire and water. Water was, in my mind, the root of all evil, so it seemed fitting that Odysseus’ exile was spent wandering and lost in a watery hell. And fire was, to me, the most wonderful element, so it seemed fitting that the offerings the Greeks made to their gods were offerings of fire.
Living in Nashville, I saw the big black bat building that towered over the downtown as being emblematic of the element water, splashing its black liquid over everyone to extinguish the light of their individuality, and turning us all into slaves and clones.
Another song from the Odyssey… Odysseus washes up naked on a foreign shore after barely escaping Calypso’s island where he has spent seven years crying for his wife (while working nights as a sex slave). Poor Odysseus! Why did life have to be so challenging for such a nice and clever guy?
One thing I like about the Odyssey is Odysseus’ constant fluctuation from king and hero to helpless beggar. Even his appearance fluctuates from that of an oily muscle-bound god to a shriveled, smelly weakling. In a world where people are treated so differently based on wealth and status, it reminds us to be careful, because you never know who may be a god in disguise or a king in distress.
