Odyssey (1997)

April 03, 2021

I’ll be alive like this tree around which we’ve built this world.
Is there a way to avoid this war?
Troy will not fall so gently.
Turn Troy to dust. Return with the spoils of enemies you’ve slain and my heart will rejoice.
The gods of sea and sky carried me towards Troy.
The walls of Troy reach to the clouds.
I did not want you to escape this journey. Because I want you to go. I want you, my brave Odysseus to defeat the Trojans.
Your destiny is to do battle, to become immortal. To have your name on the lips of endless generations.
Giant Polites. He’s stubborn beyond words.
Eyrolochus lies more than you. O: He’s the best blacksmith in all Greece.
Achilles hear me, it is I Hector, defender of Troy, who challenge you.
In the 7th year of blood, Achilles the god amongst man, was slain. Our hope was lost. Troy had taken the best of us and still remained locked.
Mighty Priam, give me life and I’ll be your slave.
You see, you gods of sea and sky. I conquered Troy. Me, Odysseus! A mortal man of flesh and blood and bone and mind. I do not need you now. I can anything.
It was my serpent who silenced Lacoon, or your horse was doomed. Yet you refuse to give thanks. You will suffer for this offence. You suffer for this offence. For your arrogance, you will drift on my sea for eternity. Never again you’ll reach the shores of Ithaca. You will suffer.
No one will stop me from seeing Ithaca.
He’s just a boy. He’s not ready for man’s work. A: Because you will not let him grow. P: It is my son, not yours. A: My son was ready for all things. P: Yes, your son had his father.
You must live for your son. You must raise a king.
The wine. We’ll trade it for water.
I’m the youngest, Polyphemes. What did you bring?
Take me next. Of course, if you do, you’ll eat all your magic inside my head.
My name is nobody.
Your hear Poseidon? Odysseus is alive and you cannot stop me.
O: Why are you helping me? A: because you’re the first mortal ever to use his mind. And you understand that there is always something to learn!
Polites: I don’t care. I want my share.
You betrayed me. You fools.
She offered food and wine in her honeyed voice. The witch waved her hands and each one of our brothers was turned into an animal before our eyes.
Careful, you’re about to lose your sword and you need it.
Please cake care of my sword. H: I’m not allowed to touch.
You cannot refuse a goddess. Only then she will surrender your men.
The only way I will turn your soldier into man is if you take me into bed. Brave Odysseus. Are you still a man?
But it is mine. If I’m old enough to keep my father’s flocks and kill his game, then I am old enough to use his bow. P: If you can string it. If you cannot, you’ll place it into your father’s treasury until I give it to you.
P->A: You’re my mother. You’re my father. You’re my strength.
You’ve given me much Circe, but no bare enough flesh could make me forget Penelope.
O: No! You, open your eyes and you see who I am!
If you still wish to go home, you must first enter the underworld. Only there you will find the answers you seek.
You must cross a river of fire and sacrifice a ram. And you must enter the fire.
And what of my son? He’d be 15 by now and still without his father.
Mother, men are in the hall. They say they’re here for you. Men who say my father is dead.
I will receive these men and that is all. They will have nothing that belongs to Odysseus. Not his fortunes, and not his wife.
The river of fire. Let me come with you. O: No. I must cross it myself.
P: Your soul will burn away.
It is I, am lost.
Stay back, this ram is not for you.
T (blind prophet): You’re a clever man, Odysseus of Ithaca, but not a very wise one. You keep your eyes only on your home. Blinded, you do not see that it is the journey itself that makes up your life. Only when you understand this you will understand the meaning of wisdom. O: No, the wisdom, I will find alone. Help me find my way! T: The answer has been before your eyes, every night at sea.
A (in the underworld): You must hurry. Men are trying to steal your world.
Men would stop at nothing to steal my kingdom.
I hope my father died a hero. If he’s alive, he’s forgotten me.
The day the gods gave you to us, they took your father from me. But he promised me, with you lying here in my arms, that he would return alive, as this tree around which we built our world, is alive. T: If he’s alive, why hasn’t he come? P: I know your father. He’s alive.
Guests leave when asked.
Alone, my men lost before my eyes. I float endlessly in Poseidon’s sea. Wondering when he’ll take my life.
C: It is only a dream. O: No, it is real. My men, my brothers, they’re all lost.
Telemachus! What are you doing here in the dark (trying to string Odysseus’ bow)?
I’m mentor. Keeper of the staff.
Give me a ship. I will sail from Ithaca and find my father.
From a wild boar. I was 15. And my mother cried tears of happiness.
Don’t you see? No one leaves my island. And all that lives here exist to serve me… Forget Ithaca. You’re home now.
Do not worry. The gods are watching you with favour.
Remember. The gods will not do for man, what man must do for himself. You must make this journey.
For two more years, Calypso’s island was my prison. Forgotten by the outside world, abandoned by Athena. My hopes of reaching the Penelope began to fade.
I saw you on the day you were born. It was the proudest and most painful day of your father’s life.
You Telemachus must return and fight for what is his, and yours.
My goal is not to kill you. You must understand. That without gods, man is nothing.
I was alive. Broken by Poseidon’s waves. But I was alive. I was led to the palace of their ruler, the powerful king, Alcinous.
I understood that I was only one man in the world. Nothing more and nothing less.
Pontonous. Blend a sleeping potion.
My cheese. My wine. My bread.
I am alive.
Please, look at me. Do you see yourself In my face.
I know what your head asks your heart. You’re afraid your Penelope has been untrue to you.
He went for his father and found a filthy beggar.
I did not find him. But I know my father is alive.
He’s alive. He’s alive Odysseus. He knows your sorrow. Your pain. And he longs to touch your hand, hold you in his eyes, kiss your lips. He’ll come to defend you. He’ll come to defend you. You’ll see.
Tomorrow, I’ll take my world back.
If I cannot do it, no man alive can. O: And what about a man who was dead?
Your crime is that you tried to steal my world. The world I built with my hands and my sweat. The world I shared with a woman who bore me my son and no one will ever that that from me! Now you’ll die to a man in a river of blood.
I will never leave you.
It’s 20 years since you held me in your eyes. O: That was only one day. P: And in one day you’ve seen all the world? O: Yes. So much that is sacred and beautiful, but nothing as beautiful as a man’s own world. That he can take in his hands and always be his. You are my world.

Please allow me to Introduce Myself, I am a man of Mnaemae and Phrenae, Mnaemo is my name, and Peirasis is my Game. [29]

Pe(i)rasis means: the going through, the going beyond, the transcending; mnaemae: memory; phrenae: mind/brain/ Intelligence/ Inter-Legerence. The word mnaemo- connects us to Maemosynae, the ancient Greek “Mother of the Muses”, the numinous personification of memory, and of poetic inspiration of the Aoidoi, the bards, epic singers, and prophets, of antiquity. It also reminds us of the captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s novel. Nemo in Greek means: outis, maedeis, oudeis, and this is the name that Odysseus called himself in the land of the Kyklops. (Od. 9,366). From the word sounds, we can get an interesting “pattern that connects” oudeis and Odysseus. As the captain, and seafarer, he is a gubernator or kybernaetaes. In his fragment B 64, Heraklitos alludes to this: ta de panta oiakizei Keraunos: The Kόsmos is steered by the Keraunos: the thunderbolt, or the Vajra.[30] Odysseus had to endure seven years of captivity, on the island of Ogygia, the Omphalos of the Thalassaean sea (Od. 1,50; v. Dechend 1993: 183-185, 193, 269, 324).[31] There is a deep cave, the hiding place of the God of Time: Kronos, in Plutarch’s account (v. Dechend 1993: 121). Kronos is the original owner of the Keraunos, before his son Zeus, or Jupiter, had wrenched it from his fist, to govern the universe himself as usurpator. This island is guarded by the nymph Kalypso, whose name means “the Veiled One” (kalyptron, Od. 5.232), she is the personified numinous power of veiling, obscuring, and occulting, in the ancient Greek Homeric Mythology. Her name also connects to the flower- kalyx, and the seed husk, thus symbolizing the encapsulation of future potential. She shares her occulting power with Laethae, the numinous force of death-forgetting. (Illich (1988: 13); Hesiodos (1978: verse 211 ff.)). When Odysseus was finally allowed to leave his place of banishment, Kalypso gave him two special tools to cut the trees and fashion his raft: two double axes,[32] the pelekys megas, and the skeparnon, both being variants of the original Keraunos. (Od. 5.234-237; Dechend 1977). Now, as v. Dechend tells us, the Keraunos is the tool of the time, belonging to the god of the time: Kronos. One could say: nomen est omen, because Kronos, Chronos and Keraunos are deeply related through their sound. He is also the Saeturnus, the God of The Golden Age. And by its use, Time, the present, the past, and the future, is initially created, en archae, as is related in the mythic account of Hesiodos (1978). Its most common symbol in many cultures world wide is the double axe, the Pelekys, Thor’s Hammer, or the Labrys, as it was called in Minoan Crete. (Marija Gimbutas sees a butterfly image in its symbolism, which has its own reasoning, via the temporal stages of Metamorphosis, and their initiatic associations: caterpillar / chrysalis / butterfly (Gimbutas 1974: 185-190)). The Keraunos cuts both ways: into the past, and into the future. Its axis / axle / hub is the Kairos, the present, the decisive moment, the instant of creation, the Now. In the grand gory finale of the Odyssey, Homer describes down to the minutest detail the feat how Odysseus shoots his arrow through the hubs of twelve aligned double axes, the abovementioned pelekon. (Od. 21.75-21.421). Since these are twelve, they cannot be anything else but the hubs of the Precession of the Equinoxes. Let is be said that the Omphalos is a navel as well as a hub (gomphos, Parmenides 1974: B1,17-20), and how else could the Keraunos steer the Universe than through the hub? (German: Nabe -> Nabel). In Roman mythology, the threshold of the past and the future is guarded by the god Janus, the Double-Faced One, who looks into the past, as well as into the future. He ist the guardian of the Limen, the Threshold, called peras, in Greek. (See also, the liminal, in Gennep 1960). His name re-appears in the month January. A lesser known aspect of the mythological chronology of January was that after the winter solstice on Dec. 21 (and the official end of the year), the following week was considered “outside of the time”, that is, in the liminal, or limbo, and also in the hub of the time, until the new year began. This was the time for the Great Roman Festivity of the Saturnalia.[33] Not without good reason, the celebration of the birth of the Christ was placed right in the middle of this period, to Dec. 24. The captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Novel makes his journeys in the Nautilus, or nao-telos, the naos, a submerged, or sub-liminal, ship. According to Vedic Mythology, the Vajra was hidden on the ground of the Oceanos. (Dechend 1977: 99). But naos also evokes our association to noos, and nous, the thoughts, the stuff out of which our memories, imaginations, and anticipations, are fashioned. The connection of nous and telos (aim, goal, finish, completion, success, death, limit -> peras) leads us into the association field of anticipation, and planning, in the ancient mythologies personified by Pro-metheus, the before-thinker.[34] This was also a characteristic of Odysseus the poly-maechanaes, the crafty, cunning, ruseful. Our mental imagery consists of things perceived as phai-nomena, as impressions derived from sensory inputs, and as nou-mena, the impressions derived from mental, noetic, or noietic, sources. The Mnaemo-synae is the ancient numinous personification of those forces, patterns, and processes which do their work under the surface of the visible and intelligible, in the mae-phainon, the realm below, and before they turn into the phai-nomena, and the nou-mena. These are, in scientific terminology, the workings of neuronal activation patterns, of oscillation fields and logical relation structures of neuronal assemblies, of the coupled dynamic systems of neuronal attractors, of our brains: the phrenae. The mnaemo-synae reminds us of this still quite mysterious working of the neuronal sym-plexis, and syn-apsis, by which our sym-ballein, the concept formation is effected. When the subliminal workings of the neuronal webworks of our phrenae then weave (histon, historia) together into the appearances of the intellegible and discernible, they become ho phainon, that which finds its appearance through phos, the light, and phonae, the sound, as appearance, and apparition, phaino-menon (in German: Auf-Scheinendes), with form: mor-phae, and Gestalt. This, Ho Phainon, the Brilliant, the Shining One (in German: Er-scheinung), is also the name of the god Hae-phaistos, he who works the brilliant and shining metals, while they are red and glowing: phoibos, and phoinos, phos-phoros (lucifer). With his hammer and anvil, and with his mighty blows, he forges them into their forms, the mor-phae. And with his hammering, the metallic sounds of phonae and phthongos ring out to make themselves heard awide and afar. …