VIDEO: The ILIAD of HOMER: Book One in Performance (Lattimore translation)

Enjoy this performance of Book One of Homer's Iliad, most of it produced in quarantine as an effort to keep the crisis creative. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the clinical value of this story lies in its viscerally felt linkage between rage and misery; competition and bitterness; loss, and the revelation that there are things far more important than being right, or vindication, or even victory. For this wisdom, the tragic drama of ancient Athens is among the best sources in the world (though King Lear, for example, teaches some of the same lessons about shame). 

Homer's epic poem, or "made thing," is among the deepest works of our species. It represents the collective labors of over four centuries of bards, who span the gap between the Trojan War itself (c.1185-1175 BCE), and the emergence of a vast epic tradition that has kept its human images alive. Those labors were woven together, and presumably linked by improvised poetic transitions, by the mind of an individual blind genius, touched by poetry's Divine origin. 

Iliad I (traditionally, the "books" or chapters of the Iliad are noted in capital Roman numerals; those of the Odyssey, lowercase) includes a Divinely sent opportunity to put aside anger. Though Achilles' reprieve from his own rage proves all too brief, each of us may be more free than we suspect; free, for example, to let go of old resentments, of old yearnings for retributive justice, or for a great day of reckoning. 

The non-tragic outcome is surely still possible for you and me, in part because the tragic consciousness is already is still available to us---only (or as I prefer to think, especially) if, as Nietzsche said, we still have some connection to the past and the ancient world.

I made the first portion (lines 1-92) in 2013; the rest in the Spring of 2020. It was a great experience----a real reward for playing hooky from the daily regime of anxiety about wasting time; or about being too expressive; or about failing to monetize every minute of each day, or meet other American expectations that are levied daily at the expense of each human spirit who buys into them for lack of support. The latter includes love (rather than isolation), as well as connection--not only to a partner and the community, but to the to the past and the cosmos.

Art exists to help us live our lives---as everybody says, in a chorus that includes Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer; Shelley and Nietzsche ("hey, those are my guys"). Living with the help of art does not make you Don Quixote. It can put you in touch with much more of reality, and not (usually) less.

Sure a Poet is a sage, a humanist, physician to all mankind.--John Keats.

Enjoy some Homer, today.