On Odysseys

Originally Posted April 25, 2010


Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story 

of [...] the wanderer, harried for years on end, 

after he plundered the proud height of Troy [...] 

til he came ashore at last 

on his own land. 

Homer, The Odyssey 

Robert Fitzgerald, Translator

***

So begins the great journey, taproot of Western literature, to which all our modern tales of adventure owe some kernel of inspiration. This is the big one, the lode stone of Western stories. Despite constant opposition from adversaries divine and mortal, Odysseus manages to come home from exile. Allegory of human potential and entertainment par excellence -- this story has it all. While I am living overseas, I study it in order to better understand what stories ought to be. Perhaps this story can also shed some light on another story -- my own -- in which I am far away from home and trying, in some sense, to get back again.

***

I have been in Korea working as a high school English teacher for almost a month now. To be honest, I never particularly wanted to teach and I am not very good at it. I took this job because it meant I could leave Indiana, even though I love my home state. I came to Korea because I feel compelled to wander, but can't really say why. Unbidden-but-unignorable, like a stone inside my stomach, wanderlust drove me here. Ever since I came back from a year spent studying in the Dreiländereck of Germany, I knew I had to leave home again. My family has lived in Indiana for at least five generations, and I feel a deep kinship with the people and deeply at home in the state's landscapes. The way people stretch their vowels (wash to warsh, fish to feesh). The molten iron of the August sun slipping beneath the dancing ripples of cornfields. Something inside drove me to forsake these places and people I know and love. In a way, I suppose it is because I know and love them that I had to go. 

*** 

On the surface of things, Odysseus's journey home in the Odyssey and my journey out to Korea couldn't be more different. The essence of Odysseus's character is his desire to return home. 

Odysseus [...] 

sat apart, as a thousand times before 

and racked his own heart groaning, his eyes wet 

scanning the bare horizon of the sea [...] 

such desire [was] in him 

merely to see the hearthsmoke leaping upward 

from his own island, that he long[ed] to die 

The essence of my character at the moment is my desire to wander. Odysseus journeys back, even as I head out. Upon closer examination, however, perhaps our two journeys have more in common than what is immediately obvious. 

*** 

Because I love my home I had to leave it. By forsaking the familiar-beloved, I hope to find it afresh. By becoming familiar with people and places utterly alien to me "in glance and gesture" as Rilke puts it, I hope to discover new territory within myself. Who are they, and who am I really, and how are we different, and how are all people everywhere the same -- or are they even? What does it really mean to be American? How is this different than being Korean, or German, or any other nationality? Is it possible to really love your country without hating the others? I journey farther outwards in order to travel further inwards. I leave my place to become more myself. 

*** 

It is Odysseus's destiny, we are told, to go home. Destiny. Purpose. The achievement his character strives toward. It is not that his home is the absolute perfect place. Kalypso, the nymph who holds him prisoner, is more desirable than Penelope his wife. It is hard to imagine that life at home will be more comfortable than the life he is so desperate to escape in exile. In spite of this, Ithaka is the place to which Odysseus belongs. He fits into this place, and the place fits with him. To go home is to make himself whole. For better or worse, Odysseus becomes most fully himself when he is in Ithaka. 

*** 

Before the homecoming comes the journey, though. The obstacles and enemies that Odysseus overcomes prove his cunning, prove his character. Odysseus, Master of Strategies, always harried on every side -- but also always unconquered. The perils he faces force him to flex the muscles of his essence. Whether he is stopping his ears with candlewax to escape the Sirens' sweet voices or using a wooden horse to capture an unassailable fortress, Odysseus's cunning is his greatest asset and most defining trait. The ability to adapt, by contrast, is mine. Adapting to life as a stranger in what is often an utterly strange land forces me to search for the things which Koreans and Americans share. Erik, Indiana farmboy, raised on banjo music and wagons-west American myth, exiled to a world of rice paddies and hive culture and technicolor neon night. And yet I can – I will – adapt even to this. Opposition really is a forge for character. Journeys exercise the human spirit, and it is because of this that they are worth making. 

Thus, I voyage ever outward in order to really get inward. Further away from home, in order to come home finally. Odysseus voyages homeward and in the process moves inward. Closer to home, and in doing so, ever closer to becoming the person he is destined to be. And they are one and the same, these two journeys. 

Outward and homeward, inward and onward -- all these bleed together and become indistinguishable -- separate streams flowing together into the great ocean of travel we are both trying so hard to cross.