4/25
I wanted for myself what Robert Penn Warren called, “a story of great distances, and starlight.” Poetry—namely The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Divine Comedy—has provided the paths and scaffolding. At first, spurred mainly by Dante and Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, I was curious about whether the devotional gestures of pilgrimage could generate faith in a non-believer; then, exhausted by the path, I wondered what set me on it in the first place. When I remembered, of course, that poems were my movers, I tried to understand and map the constellation of their influence on my own fate. Because of the nature of these stories and stories like them, which had contributed in profound ways to the creation of my own nature, I began to understand my life as an oscillation between momentum and inertia, departure and arrival. They all told those stories of great distances and starlight. Finally, wanting to accept my fate but also hoping it would allow me to determine how to live it properly, I am seeking out an ethics of journey and obligation. Is it possible to indulge a desire for knowledge of the world while doing right by those I love? What are the ethical implications of spending time in one place and not another? What might balance look like? Is it possible to leave ethically, or is it inherently a selfish act? How can I return in the right spirit, wholeheartedly and with devotion?
When I consider this all, I am reminded of a couple lines by Anne Carson: “My questions were not original. Nor did I answer them.”
My decision to bring in Homer and, most importantly, The Odyssey, arose from a number of things, but mainly my third reading of The Divine Comedy. I left my hometown in 2014 and returned in late 2024; during that period, I spent a lot of time on the road. The concept of home—an understanding of which often carries with it a clear sense of obligation to family, community, and country—has become difficult for me to grasp. Since my childhood, home has felt less like physical space and more like a typically fleeting environment people must work to create together. Sometimes, home is even a single night, a brief moment. I sought home in the external world, outside the roofs I ostensibly lived under. While I've found home in numerous different places, it has most often manifested out of romantic relationships, where I felt and feel the safety in contained intimacy, or being able to “touch the edges” of moments. That intimacy brought me back to where I was born, to a person that it feels increasingly difficult to depart from.
I believe this feeling of home creates a sense of duty to whatever is creating that feeling. In my case, that is people (and, most significantly, one person). To leave these people behind, even temporarily, can create a dreadful sense of shirking those duties, of “not being where I’m supposed to be.” The most important obligation of all may be simply witnessing my loved ones’ lives, and because of my other, nearly (or so I hope only nearly) equivalent desire—to see the world, know it, and touch it—I often feel torn between two poles, stuck between stations.
The story of Ulysses, as developed through the poems of Homer, Virgil, and Dante (leaving out Tennyson, for now, but his take is important!), provides a terrifying, and terrifyingly ambiguous finale to the life of history’s most revered adventurer. In Dante’s final judgement toward the end of Inferno, driven by the desire to go beyond the limits set upon man, Ulysses opts not to sail for Ithaca, for his wife Penelope and son Telemachus, but out past the Pillars of Hercules, toward Mount Purgatory. For this trespass, after five months of sailing, God buries Ulysses and his crew at the bottom of the sea. While Dante understands why, his rapt admiration for Ulysses endures. Dante, beset by the same desires, takes careful consideration to curb his own urges as he recalls surveying hell and Ulysses consumed by flame: “It grieved me then and now grieves me again when I direct my mind to what I saw;” he writes. “And more than usual, I curb my talent, that it not run where virtue does not guide; so that, if my kind star or something better has given me that gift, I not abuse it.”
My first working title for this project, when I still considered it to be focused on pilgrimage, was Elena Ferrante’s translation of Beatrice’s greeting to Virgil in canto II of Inferno: “Love moved me, which makes me speak.” Dante was an adherent to Aristotle’s idea that love is the force behind all human action. On this, I agree. Love sends me out into the world; love brings me back to those people I consider home.
But both thinkers also felt that love could create disordered action. As Mark Musa points out in his notes to Purgatorio, Dante labours under the impression that good works are an extension of love rightly directed, and sin is an extension of love disordered. Herein lies my fear: is my pull toward home and the people I care most deeply for a love rightly directed, while my desire to know and to touch the world, though it feels natural, a love disordered? Am I bound for the bottom of the sea?
One must set out in order to return. But what are the consequences of an eternal pendulum swing between arrival and departure? This is the central tension of the work.
Am I where I am supposed to be? Has love, rightly directed, brought me here?
