All about me

11 October, 2001

Grief

I wrote a first version of this for a class two days after the attacks last month; it begins we the grief we all felt then. Our class was reading the Odyssey, which explains in part my choice of texts.

In book 8 of Homer's Odyssey Odysseus, the Greek warrior who played such an central role in the Greeks' defeat of the city of Troy, asks a poet to sing of the fall of Troy. Homer describes how he responded to that song.

Odysseus, sacker of cities, cries like a woman cries when her city is sacked. Homer sometimes turns around his similes like this, allowing us to see another side of things. We would expect a defeated Trojan to cry like this, but even the victors cry. Odysseus is crying for the comrades he lost in the grim fighting it took to take the city; he cries, too, perhaps, for his own wife, still at home, who faces her own sufferings as he wanders for so far and so long, against his will, trying to return. Those left at home have their grief too.

Odysseus may not grieve for the Trojans here; but Homer certainly does. Homer is himself a Greek, and he shows us how the Trojans are in the wrong; but he also shows compassion for their suffering. One way he does this is through the brief obituaries he appends to many of the deaths he describes in the Iliad. In a few lines, we are told who the father and mother of the dead man were, who his brothers were, where he was born, what qualities distinguished him in life. He was rich and generous. His father, though a prophet of the gods, could not foresee his death; his dear parents will receive no care from him in their old age. I thought of these brief obituaries as I read and heard brief accounts of those killed a month ago. Our stories also feature family. As we all have heard, in one of the many things our wonderful and terrible technology has now made possible, many of our victims spoke with their families in their last minutes from their cell phones, from offices filling with smoke or planes veering off course. Others plastered New York with xeroxed missing posters featuring wedding pictures or the like.

Reporters have told us about such scenes. Homer does what a good reporter does, then: makes victims come alive. He also, famously, uses long similes to describe battle. Reporters do not do this. This is what Homer says of the second Trojan to die in the Iliad

Such similes do more than report. A man falls like a tree falls. But the simile tries to say more than that. It illustrates war by peace. Here man is in control: the tree is cut by a chariotmaker, who will make good use of it. There is some purpose in it all. There is another world, a peaceful world, in which we cut down only to build up. It will take a very great poet indeed, I am afraid, to present us with the similes that will do this for the scenes we saw on September 11.

Homer almost always names his victims and his heroes by their father's names. The first line of the Iliad tells us not only that his poem is to be about Achilles, but that it is about Peleus' son. Achilles, son of Peleus, may not cry for the Trojans, but he cried with one, with Priam, king of Troy, who had come to Achilles to beg him to return the body of his son, the greatest Trojan warrior, Hector, whom Achilles had killed. Achilles returns the body because he thinks of his father as he pities Hector's father. He and Priam are both fathers and sons; as Priam mourns for his dead son, Achilles mourns for his father, who will die without his son to comfort him. Homer teaches, and Achilles learns, that suffering is a large part of what makes us human. The gods who so often intervene in Homer's poems cannot die, and therefore cannot truly suffer: but this also means they cannot truly live or truly love.

So compassion is one side of grief, if only, following Homer, we can look not only to our own sufferings but turn our feelings toward others. Grief can unite us.

One other side of grief before we turn to revenge. It has the virtue of taking us to another simile, and another father and son. (Homer, as Greek literature as a whole, has far too little to say about mothers and daughters.) When Odysseus and his son were reunited, the two embraced.

This simile, too, takes us where we did not expect to go. Father and son, joyfully reunited, cry as birds of prey who have lost their young, who will have no such reunion. They are the same tears, the tears of grief and the tears of joy: this is why we have a deep desire for both. I thought of the Odyssey's joyful scenes of reunion, too, when hearing the happier tales of those whose desperate searches for their loved ones ended in such happiness. Homer's gods cannot shed these tears of joy and grief.

So joy is another face of human grief.

Revenge

But grief, as we all know, can also turn us toward anger and revenge. Penelope and Telemachus suffered when Odysseus was gone not only because he was absent, but because they were besieged by lesser men eager to take his place, 108 of them in all, the suitors who sought Penelope's hand in marriage when her husband was not yet dead. They devoured Odysseus' livelihood, hounded his wife, abused his slaves, tried even to kill his son. Odysseus' revenge is bloody and complete: all the suitors must die. Antinous, the leader of the suitors, is the first to die: Odysseus' arrow slashes through his neck as he is drinking Odysseus' wine; the wine and blood are spilled together. One can well see Hollywood doing a version of this scene in years to come, in a feel-good, high-tech, low-thought film about some Rambo in Afghanistan.

Antinous gets no obituary, and we have here none of the beautiful compassion of the Iliad. Homer's Iliad is often thought to be the greater work, more profound, more humane, more compassionate. The Odyssey is too black and white: good and evil are defined too superficially and the villains, the suitors, while vile, do not seem fully worthy of a great hero's hate. Its ending was attacked even in antiquity.

But I have found it hard to think of the core of our opponents in this struggle with the compassion that Homer gives to the doomed Trojans, who were the Greeks' enemies, true enough, but noble and worthy enemies at that. These terrorists deserve the revenge we hope to inflict upon them, I find myself thinking, in a way that the noble Trojans did not. In some ways they are like the suitors, who did not attack Odysseus bravely on the field of battle, but attacked his wife and child when he was away. Like the suitors, the terrorists lived among us, and for years, enjoying our hospitality. I find myself, then, in the moral universe of the Odyssey.

The Odyssey, however, does not end with Odysseus' vengeance or his reunion with his family, but with an interrupted battle. For the suitors also have their fathers and brothers. When they learn of the slaughter Odysseus has inflicted on their kin, they too grieve and seek revenge. Their grief, and their anger, are as human as Odysseus' anger and grief. So another battle is joined. It takes two divine interventions to stop it. First Athena must cry out, telling all the fighters to hold back and make peace; but as the suitors' avengers turn and run Odysseus swoops after them, still eager to fight. Zeus himself must send down a thunderbolt to stop Odysseus.

This is troubling. It takes not one but two divine interventions to prevent the hero Odysseus from slaughtering all of the suitors' kinsmen. It takes the gods to impose peace: this is a deus ex machina ending in the worst way. The human beings of the Odyssey cannot, it would seem, solve their problems themselves. Homer's gods often intervene to save heroes, and sometimes intervene to stop them, but usually they intervene on the side of the heroes who would have been victorious anyway--the gods help those who could and would have helped themselves--or to stop a hero who would have had enough sense to stop himself anyway. Here we have little evidence that our hero Odysseus had that sense.

I have long thought that this is a bad way to end an epic. But perhaps it is bad for a reason, perhaps one of the lessons of the Odyssey is that the only ending of the black and white revenge plot is a bad ending. Revenge is another side of grief. It is as natural, as human, and as justified as grief's other sides. It is the face our grief wears today as we strike back against those who struck us. I do not wish to simply speak against revenge. In a world in which not all peoples recognize the rule of law there will be a place for revenge, for war as well as justice. But we can be sure, I think, that neither Zeus nor Athena will intervene to tidy up our ending. If we are to see ourselves through the trials we face, to reunite a world which seems torn apart, we must look to all sides of grief. We need both the Iliad and the Odyssey.