The Pitiful Tears of Odysseus
Revolving around the depiction of poetic
performances in Book VIII of Homer’s Odyssey, the
Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players, using Streams On Line
and Ten Penny Players’ visiting teaching artists will
guide the students’ exploration of the change in the
presentation of poetry from the performance with music and
dance in the tradition of the aoidoi and harpists to the oral
tradition of the rhapsodes and then to the use of the alphabet
and the emergence of written texts. Students will also be
introduced through poetry to the concepts of mimesis and catharsis.
Students will recite, musically accompany,
dance, and perform classic and contemporary poetry. Students
will create, edit, and upload sound files and original poetry
on SOL.
Students will create one of a kind books of
poetry.
Cuneiform was developed in Sumer and Akkad,
heiroglyphs in Egypt, while pictograms and ideographs were used
as script in China. The alphabet began among the
Phoenicians and Hebrews. Much of Homer’s epic
was formed before an alphabet reached Greece. Homer may
have dictated his poems to someone else because of his
legendary blindness.
It doesn’t matter which translation
of Homer is used in class. Students may want to compare
the translations of Pope, Butler, Fitzgerald, Lattimore, and
Fagles. (There is an interesting variance when Fitzgerald
and Butler translate the color of the Polybus’ globe used
in the dance as red, Fagles as blue, Fitzgerald as purple,
while Pope doesn’t refer to the color at all.
Fagles language might be the most accessible to the
students, but Pope’s meter and rhyme make the most
interesting musical statement when read aloud.)
Demodocus’ three performances (including the dance
of the Phaiacians) will be read aloud and students will examine
the following elements:
Week 1. MUSIC
Domodocus’ harp and Pythagoras.
“ . . . call in the
inspired bard
Demodocus. God has given the
man the gift of song,
to him beyond all others, the power
to please,
however the spirit stirs him to
sing.” (VIII, 50-3, Fagles, ‘96)
“From all who walk the earth
our bards deserve
esteem and awe, for the Muse herself
has taught them
paths of song. She loves the
breed of harpers.”
(VIII, 538-40,
Fagles, ‘96)
“Pythagoras had found
that the chords which sound pleasing to the ear — the
western ear — correspond to the exact divisions of the
string by whole numbers. . . Pythagoras or
his followers believed that we should be able to calculate the
orbits of the heavenly bodies (which the Greeks pictured
as carried round the earth on crystal spheres) by relating them
to the musical intervals. They felt that all the
regularities in nature are musical; the movements of the
heavens were, for them, the music of the spheres.”
pp. 156-7, J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man.
Students will be encouraged to explore the
relation of mathematics to music and sound as they begin to
create and edit their poetry audio files (to be uploaded on
SOL).
Week 2. MIMESIS
Domodocus’ “true to life”
depiction of the argument between Achilles and Odysseus.
“ . . . How true to
life,
all too true . . . you sing the
Achaeans’ fate.”
(VIII, 548-9, Fagles,
‘96)
“...the Greeks had begun by thinking
of history as extremely close to epic poetry. Indeed,
history owed its technique and its very existence to Homer and
other Greek epic poets. . . For one thing, it had habitually
been read aloud to audiences, from the time of Herodotus
onwards, and, even after silent or sotto
voce reading gradually became
more customary, the practice never ceased.” pp.
10-11, Michael Grant, translator’s introduction to
Tacitus: The Annals of Imperial Rome.
Students will write poetry that evokes the
emotions of an event from the news or their personal histories.
Week 3. CATHARSIS
Odysseus’ tearful response.
“That was the song the famous
harper sang
but great Odysseus melted into tears,
running down from his eyes to wet his
cheeks . . .”
(VIII, 984-6, Fagles,
‘96)
“...incidents arousing pity and fear,
wherewith to establish its catharsis of such emotions.”
Aristotle’s Poetics, VI.
“Aristotle, actually following
Socrates’ lead, suggests that the poet can be the doctor
of mortals who are so mad as to insist they should be immortal.
The poet, not the philosopher, can treat the passions
that are dangerous to philosophy, which Socrates had to his
great cost ignored. He can arouse these passions inorder
to flush them out of the soul, leaving the patients more
relaxed and calmer, more willing to listen to reason.”
pp. 80-1, Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.
Students will discuss why they would write
about tragic events. They will explore the catharsis
(purging passions). After his tearful reaction to
Demodocus song, Odysseus was able to reveal his true identity
to the Phaeacians.
Week 4. SUBLIMATION
Demodocus sings of Aphrodite, Mars and
Hephaestos.
His poem is presented with music and dance.
“ . . .
masters-at-arms who
leveled the dancing-floor to make a
fine broad ring.
The herald returned and placed the
vibrant lyre now
in Demodocus’ hands, and the
bard moved toward the center,
flanked by boys in the flush of
youth, skilled dancers
who stamped the ground with marvelous
pulsing steps
as Odysseus gazed at their flying,
flashing feet,
his heart aglow with wonder.”
(VIII, 293-8, Fagles, ‘96)
“now the bard struck up an
irresistible song:
The Love of Ares and Aphrodite
Crowned with Flowers . . . “
(VIII, 300-1, Fagles,
‘96)
The poet, Sappho, was a
devotee to the goddess, Aphrodite. She is quoted in
Longinus’ On the Sublime.
Students will write and read classical,
contemporary, and original love poems.
Week 5. TRANSCENDENCE
“...the change from the aoidoi with
their lyres to the rhapsodes with their rhapdoi (light stick,
perhaps to beat the meter) that took place in the eighth or
seventh centuries B.C. And behind these particulars is
the more profound psychological change from bicameral
composition to conscious recitation, and from oral to written
remembering.” p. 369, Julian Jaynes, The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton
University Press).
Students will explore the repetition of
beat or accent (meter) in poetry.
Students will learn of iambs, spondees,
etc.
Students will make comparisons between
rhapsodes and current rap artists.
As an alternative to Western poetry,
students may want to use this time to look at Asian poetry.
In China, Lao Tse
established the Tao (Stephen Mitchell’s translation):
Week 6. SYMBOLISM
The introduction of the alphabet in Ancient
Greece.
Visual representation and calligraphy.
Students will explore the symbolism of the
alphabet.
“The Greek alphabet, which
subsequently gave rise to the Latin alphabet, is directly
derived from the proto-Sinaitic alphabet via Phoenican and
Ancient Hebrew. The oldest trace of the Greek alphabet
dates from the eighth century bc . . .
“The names of the letters —
alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. — have no meaning Greek,
except as names of the lettes of the alphabet. They are
quite simply the phonetic equivalents of the Semitic letters
aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth, etc, each of which has its own
meaning . . .“
(p. 107, Marc-Alain Ouaknin,
Mysteries of the Alphabet)
Weeks 7-8. PUBLICATION
Students will upload poems and sound files
on SOL.
Students will create one of a kind poetry
books.
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