Not So Speechless

Yesterday I subjected you to a rather maudlin, self-pitying piece about having lost a soul-mate, but I’m ashamed of it, kinda, since I have had and am still having the most wonderful, enviable life anyone could have. (So far. 😬🤞)

Bereavements, such as everybody has to endure unless you die yourself at age 7 or so, remind me of the Monty Python sketch with the limbless Knight, it is like having an arm or leg cut off, and you just hafta cauterize the gaping hole and GO ON.
We all have to endure it, and allow me to express my sympathy for your losses, Readers. “Parting is all we know of Heaven, and all we need of Hell” as Emily Dickinson put it.

There was a famous episode in the original Star Trek series, where the crew at first found it impossible to communicate with the inhabitants of the planet who spoke only in what appeared to be incomprehensible riddles. But Kirk, with the help of his on-board computer ( the great-aunt of Chat GPT, I reckon) figured out that they expressed all thoughts and emotions by reference to their own cultural sources: mythology, literature, proverbs, all kindsa scripture. As an example, if we Earthlings wanted to say “I have fallen in love with you!” we might say: “Romeo, when he sees Juliet at the ball!”

This is the Summer of Nolan’s much-heralded movie of The Odyssey. If you haven’t seen it, GO, if you want a stunning, thrilling 2+ hours. (But DONT go if you’re extremely attached to Homer).
Anyway—here’s what I want to tell you: there was a guy named Eugammon who write fan fiction for Homer. He couldn’t STAND for the adventures of Odysseus (aka Ulysses) , to end with his resumption if the throne in Ithaca. BO-ring! So, he wrote a sequel in which Ulysses takes off again in his old age for new adventures ( sadly, doesn’t end well since it turns out O/U had conceived a son by Circe who ends up killing dad, but never mind that now..)

I was most familiar with Ulysses through Tennyson’s poem about his later journey. Like the inhabitants of Planet Allusion from the Star Trek episode I described above, I can’t help seeing every experience through a lens of literature or poetry.

I shouldnt have given in to impotent melancholy yesterday! Here is Ulysses, rallying his senior-citizen comrades-at-arms for yet another quest, in the famous last lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses:

“ Though much is taken, much abides, and though

We are not now the strength which in old days

Moved Earth and Heaven, that which we are, we are:

One equal temper of heroic hearts

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”