Homer for All Seasons

Yosemite photographed on a tripod, shutter speed low: clouds captured as if to suggest the gods aren’t hard and fast as physical objects are.

On My Own

I’m a Johnny, which is to say, I studied at St. John’s College, the Annapolis campus. And though some students I knew there could never forgive my cancelling enrollment after one semester, I’ve always felt associated with the school. Much more so than with Hampshire College, where I studied for two semesters. After all, St. John’s invites such loyalty. If you cancel enrollment, you don’t have to reapply to return to your studies, as you do have to reapply at Hamster Cage. At least, last I knew, that was the case.

St. John’s, “The Church of Reason,” is a place where students and tutors alike worship ideas. Classes I attended called “tutorials,” in my experience, they comprised a dozen students at most. No text books used, we read classics themselves, then discussed what we’d read in those tutorials. At semester’s end, each student underwent oral exams.

I had no protestations whatsoever against any of that, but I did have a problem maintaining attention when others spoke and I wasn’t directly involved, and I held a contempt for society. I’ve long outgrown my need to escape its institutions. Aldous Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception or Heaven and Hell that the visionary “somehow” escapes the institutions, as if it’s an uncanny feat. I knew, however, at age 21, that I could study classics on my own, and I relished the working up of the courage to break with conventional society, treading clams self-employed and reading for hours each day. It’s not an uncanny feat, but it is a difficult renunciation from which return, for me, proved to be an arduous challenge. Through all four seasons I worked in the bay, which assured me of breathing the open air year ‘round.

People I knew felt I dangerously pressed on and over the edge, as if I’d have no future, but basically, I’m like 93 million other Americans in the working class, not privileged as my professional friends and family are, but not hopeless. Not that I wanted no more than to hold wage jobs, far from it, but I have discovered by working among such people that they deserve better…which is part of the reason I abandoned society in the first place.

Reading Homer

It wouldn’t be surprising to anyone that I knew about Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey before I read both books for a tutorial at St. John’s. In those books, I encountered a strangeness I didn’t understand but now think of as a lack of modern reflection and inwardness: everything is lived outwardly in those books, though it is so with great passion and vivid imagination. It felt to me as if imagination bore metallic substance, the reality of it so compelled.

And compel deeply those two books certainly did. It would seem ironic that the school where I read them on assignment is dubbed the Church of Reason, when you consider what Homer influenced in me as you will read below, but no, it wasn’t without reason. On the contrary, I took reason further than conventional bounds.

That quality of outwardness I named became my rallying cry after I left school—to live out my life. Not to divide myself from the world. Not to only reflect but to realize.

The ancient Greeks did not only believe in the gods. Each individual Greek and their society held a relationship with them, Homer’s books about such relationships. I felt stymied about that at St. John’s. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how the gods might exist, but I felt compelled to wonder. My default attitude towards the issue was that the ancients believed in the gods, but the gods didn’t really exist.

But more exists than confined within modern social convention. Most people take comfort in the walls that hem them in. The ceilings over their heads.

An Existential Quality

But gods, God, angels, demons, the Devil—all of these and more I came to better understand. A barghast, for example, a dog-like goblin from North English folklore, is more than a literary symbol. It “appears” in North English folklore, surely because someone encountered one, not simply because it arose in the confines of the mind as an imagined figment. It exists deep in the psyche where things are weird especially because they don’t exist as we acknowledge a black Labrador exists, and yet their powerful influence on anyone who encounters any such spiritual being can’t be denied. That very angst most people would feel I think of as an existential quality, and it’s an emotional reaction to something having provoked it.

Speaking for myself, when I encountered a barghast, it didn’t freak me out. I watched it closely as it remained in place, not an hallucination flickering back out of sight, small and resembling a Schnauzer. So, I approached, walking right up to where it had stood, but by then it had vanished like mist.

Even as we try to dismiss such events, and hire psychiatrists to be sure we dismiss them successfully, they lead the questioning mind to wonder what else might exist beyond ordinary existence.

The barghast felt profoundly fascinating and present, and it greatly disappointed me as it disappeared. It almost seems as if it led me to doubt its reality. As if such things don’t want us getting too close to their realm. I wasn’t on LSD or some other drug; in addition to studying while living at the Jersey Shore, I worked daily at reaching deep within. A penetrating effort to break through. Most of us do dismiss any barghast or the like as hallucination, and yet the experience itself is of an inner being autonomously separate from the self.

A Wild and Crazy Guy

All this talk about inner or spiritual beings existing in some indefinite way strikes modern sensibility as wild and crazy. We prefer the wild and crazy Steve Martin, because that’s not really wild and crazy. But look at the clouds in the photo above. We know what they are, but we further understand that the blur is due to their motion. We recognize that clouds “normally” appear as definite entities. The same could be true of anything else that has real existence—all is in motion. Indefiniteness is merely due to high speed. We infer that the object has measurable finitude.

No one’s caught a barghast and measured it, and yet crazy people will insist they’re experiencing…something.

The struggle of modernity is to do more than keep the inner world at bay. It’s to deny the inner world’s existence, and something in me rebels against that injustice, that refusal to acknowledge truth runs deeper than measurable mass.