Dionysos and the Pirates

My translation of the Hymn is posted on the blog: Poetry on the Loose: The Homeric Hymn to Dionysos (williamseaton.blogspot.com).

    This story [1] is, in the most general terms, an epiphany. The god appears numinous, both frightening and fascinating [2] to the mortal. The frisson of a listener (for the hymn was surely oral whether or not it was in some way liturgical) experiencing a vicarious glimpse of the divine may have had something of the appeal of a science fiction or horror film today. The hymn has a handsome leading man, fast action, and impressive special effects, what with the cascading vines and materializing beasts, topped off with the sailors’ metamorphosis into dolphins.
     Moros is sometimes translated fate, but, considering that Hesiod deemed moros “hateful,” perhaps doom is a better translation. As the parthenogenetic son of Night, Moros carries dark associations, but then the Moirai (Fates) themselves, though euphemistically called the Parcae (“Sparers”) in Latin, are described as ugly hags, closely associated with mortality and with death. Their worship arose in Mycenaean cult practice and, even in later times, they generally seem to operate independently of the Olympians. A dying and reborn god imported from barbarian realms, Dionysos is an appropriate partner for these archaic powers.
     Further, the incident presents an illustration of the imponderable and sudden turns of the wheel of fortune. The captain is particularly brought low, the helmsman, who had been treated with disrespect is elevated, and the crew, anticipating a routine voyage, are suddenly cast into disaster.
     In this hymn’s first line, the god’s semi-mortal origins are highlighted. He is the son of Semele (also semi-divine) who is herself undone by her encounter with the fully divine, though Dionysos later rescued her from the underworld just as he himself was reborn after being torn to pieces by Titans. The affinities to figures like Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Tammuz, Asclepius, and Orpheus are clear. Surely, these cults as well as the Mysteries and Christianity were imported by ancient Romans seeking personal salvation. Dionysos invites believers to identify with him, even to become him in rites of enthusiasm and ecstatic possession.
     In this poem, though, his divine omnipotence is stressed. Though taken for mortal, the theophany is a markedly extraordinary human. Dionysos is youthful, well-dressed, strong and sexy, consistent with his role as a fertility deity. He is long-haired and probably beardless, the sort of representation that might be associated with his epithet Androgynous. He smiles (line 14) with profound confidence and works his will with cunning means.
     The incident may be considered, like the story of Pentheus, as a cautionary simple tale of retributive justice. With Dionysos pulling the strings, a moral reading is certainly present. The greedy pirates are punished, their ringleader first of all, and the virtuous helmsman is blessed. The sailors had been interested in a ransom, preceded, perhaps, by a bit of fun, but they found their egos chopped for grabbiness. Even after the miracle of the bonds falling away, their selfishness blinds them to the god’s power. Though warned, the captain will not listen. Those who in the end suffer dire consequences for their actions are offered opportunities to reconsider, but they persist in error. Like the moral reading of tragedy this is true but reductive. [3]
     When wine swamps the decks and an ambrosial scent arises, the men are paralyzed in awe. Foliage leaps forth from grapes and ivy, bursting with fruit and flowers in a wild excess of generative power, recalling other epithets of Dionysos: Phleon (luxuriant, said of foliage) and Auxites (giver of increase ). Then, however, the fierce beasts, the lion and bear, materialize, reminding the reader of the Dionysian predilection for homophagia, the eating of raw meat after sacrifice. [4] The vicious captain falls victim to the lion, while the crewmen become dolphins, animals regularly considered beneficent by the Greeks. [5] Their animal form then becomes a kind of purgatory where, by doing good services, they may expiate their guilt. Surely, these ordinary sailors bear a limited guilt, neither vicious like the captain nor as insightful and scrupulous as the helmsman. The latter appears as a sort of saving remnant, offering a better fate to the more pious individual.
     Violent though it be, the tale lacks the macabre horror of Pentheus’ end, but the interlacing of death with life is tight and consistent in myth. Even the Ikarios story of the introduction of Dionysos’ gift of wine includes murder, suicide, merciless revenge and the founding of a propitiatory festival to placate the angry deity. Dionysos Lysios means the Undoer, recalling Dionysos’ literal “undoing” in his being eaten and the tragic hero’s cry “I am undone!” as well as implying the Liberator, the one who frees humankind. [6]
     The poem concludes by noting that Dionysos’ aid is essential to the poet. Of course, the origins of the dithyramb, from which, according to Aristotle, tragedy developed were Dionysian, and all theater was offered to the god whose image was seated up front. For moderns, Dionysos corresponds to the unconscious from which arise metaphor and image. The worshipper’s loss of ego in the god is similar to the reader’s participation in the poet’s vision. And in modern times Dionysos has been the popular favorite in his contention with Apollo for the lyre. It is he to whom Nietzsche appeals for the punishment of his critics in his first dithyramb. [7]



1. References to the story also appear in Eur. (Cycl.11), Ovid (Met. iii. 582-691), Nonnus (Dion. xlv. 105-168). Briefer mentions in Apollodorus (iii. 5. 3), Hyginus (fab.134), poet. astron. ii. 17 (after the Naxica of Aglaosthenes), Seneca (Oed.449-466), and Nonnus (Dion. xliv. 240-249) Servius (on Verg. Aen.i. 67), Oppian (Hal. i. 650)]

2. The terms are Otto’s: mysterium tremendum, inspiring fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.

3. See my “Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy” (July 2011).

4. Dionysos is also called Aigobolos (goat-killer), Taurophagos (bull-eater), Bouphagos (cow-eater), Moschophagos (calf-eater), as well as Anthroporraistos (man-killer).

5. Apart from having rescued Arion, they were considered to guide ships. The very name of Delphi derives from Apollo’s arrival in dolphin form.

6. Still another of the god’s names is Eleuthereus (of freedom).

7. In “Dionysos Dithyrambs 1” Nietzsche describes being ridiculed as a foolish poet and imagines the “hot-hungry” god descending to avenge him by “tearing to pieces the god in man/ as well as the sheep in man,/ and laughing while tearing.”

The Homeric Hymn to Dionysos

Of Dionysos, Sem’le’s son, I sing, 

who came once, looking like a youth, atop 

a headland over fruitless sea, so fine! 

His lovely hair all down his neck, so dark! 

A purple cloak about his muscled frame! 

A well-benched fleet Tyrrhenian pirates’ ship 

came fast upon the wine-dark sea. Their fate 

was dark. On seeing him each nodded to the next, 

then they jumped out and right away they seized 

him, thrilled to force him up into their ship. 

 A son he seemed of god-groomed kings. They sought 

to tie him up with painful ropes – the bonds 

broke free, the withes fell altogether off 

his hands and feet. And still he smiling sat 

with deep dark eyes. At once the helmsman knew, 

cried out to all his comrade crew, and said, 

“Possessed! You’ve grabbed and bound some god who’s strong. 

No well-made ship can hold this one for long! 

For Zeus it is, Apollo with his silver-bow, 

or else Poseidon. He’s not like a man, 

not mortal but divine, Olympian. 

Come now, let’s put him out on this dark shore 

right now. Don’t touch him, or, irate, he’ll bring 

us grievous winds, and he’ll incite great storms.” 

That’s what he said. The captain then spoke back,

“You’re mad! Look to the breeze and hoist the sail! 

Haul on the ropes! And we’ll take care of him! 

He must be bound for Cyprus, Egypt, or 

the ends of earth or further yet. He’s sure to name 

his friends, admit his wealth, his kin. Some god 

has surely given him to us.” He spoke, 

then ordered mast and sail raised; wind filled 

the canvas; sailors pulled lines taut; but soon 

unfolded marvels on that ship, for first 

sweet fragrant wine swamped all the deck of that 

black ship. Ambrosial fragrance rose.  The crew

was seized with awe with what they saw.

Then sudden grapevines grew from highest sail, 

in clusters grapes hung down on every side. 

And then dark ivy twined about the mast, 

with blossoms bursting, lovely berries, too.

Each thole was wreathed about. On seeing this 

the crew called, “Helmsman, bring our ship to shore!” 

No god was high on deck; a lion fierce 

now loudly roared; he made also a bear 

with shaggy neck midship that glowered huge. 

Sure signs enough. The lion on the deck 

in fury glared. They fled back to the stern 

about the helmsman where they stood amazed 

in thought. The lion sprang, the captain fell.

The crewmen thought to flee dark fate and leapt

into the holy sea – what things they’d seen! – 

and dolphins they became. The helmsman, though, 

got mercy and was held and blessed with words: 

“Take heart, my man, for you are dear to me. 

Loud-shouting Dionysos is your friend 

whom Cadmus’ Sem’le bore in love with Zeus.” 

 I hail the fair-faced Sem’le’s son! Without 

your aid no one can weave sweet words in song.

Dead Reckoning

I had meant to use this as the opening essay for a chapbook of poems. It was not until after I had put the collection together that I idly searched the phrase only to find not one but two poetry collections published during 2010 were titled Dead Reckoning. Am I swimming with the Zeitgeist? is it simply a commonplace idea? or the instant appeal of a more richly suggestive phrase than most?




In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds.

 
                 from Walden



     Dead reckoning improves with experience, since the navigator must rely not on the revelation of instruments, but on a few precise calculations, based on an uncertain starting point, extrapolated with the rapid subconscious computation we call intuition. Without certainty but with dispatch, the sailor takes all the available data into account and moves on, always unsure whether the morrow will bring a new found Eden or a school of sea monsters or, more likely, something far more complicated between.
     The territory between heaven and hell, between void and plenum is where the action is. History begins after Eden, when the plot thickens. With Hopkins I am greedy for that play of unpredictable patterns, glad for the pied beauty of dappled things, the irregularity of the calico cat’s colors, the chiaroscuro of the bright day forest floor. My heart, I confess, is an English garden far from M. Le Nôtre’s French style and always, for better or worse, neglected in spots, intensely cultivated in others, and overgrown in little-planned ways.
     The reader or writer moves through a book as the traveler moves over the face of the globe, facing always the unknown. When I first arrived in Europe I had no itinerary at all, but simply set out, and in this I had the precedent of Byron’s Childe Harold who addressed his vessel at embarkation, saying he cared not “what land thou bear’st me to,/ So not again to mine.” But then one never returns to quite the same place after a journey, whether reader or writer or tourist.
      I was once called a bricoleur, and I suppose I might plead guilty. My last book was divided into categories, but at bottom it, too, like the present collection is this and that, here and there, moving with the moment from one focus to another without architectural connections, rather as the eye does over the field of view. I admit that what results is a rag-bag, as Pound called his Cantos, a variety show in which a juggler or dog act may succeed a singer, as, indeed, once a hurdy-gurdy player preceded my poetry in what struck me as a most effective opening, and, if this collection is a hodge-podge, it is so only to the extent that the day just passing could be similarly described. I like to think my method has something in common with the young child whose arrangements of objects, using whatever is at hand, are quite often entirely arcane to some, but pregnant with intimate significance for the maker and for others who know how to play.
     The fact is that, apart from the word’s adoption by Levi-Strauss and Derrida, the most common meaning of bricoler is “to fiddle or tinker” and thus “to make do with what is available.” Does this not parallel the catch-as-catch-can character of consciousness as one combines every new impression with the myriad that have come before to create an ever-changing model of the real? Everyone who has not received stone tablets from on high is, after all, fiddling and tinkering with the little that is known, making do.
     My home’s kitchen runs at what I fancy to be a high standard, though with a methodless method. We buy utterly without plan and always privilege the cheap. This leads to fresh products, whatever is plentiful and in season, good in both quality and price. So what-it-may-be becomes the basis of the week’s menus. For cooks with catholic tastes and a bit of knowledge, this method cannot fail. For poetry, the reader may judge.
     Just as every fruit has a particular grace in form and flavor, so has every place. I have lived in cities and countryside, in the West, the Midwest, the East, and abroad, moving not due to some grand career plan or life design, but because of slight or chance circumstances, and the appeal of a new scene, a series of “pavannes and divigations,” to use Pound’s lovely title. But who can do other than wander? Our very existence is dependent on countless unlikely conditions back through generations to the dawn of life, itself all but impossible – indeed, every fact is as improbable as a lightning strike or lottery win.
     Not my writing alone, but my reading as well has always been altogether desultory, more dependent on what turns up in the Salvation Army or what catches my eye in a chance glance at a review than any scheme. I read works from every land and every age and admit that immense breadth cannot fail to compromise depth, but I doubt I shall reform.
     Billiard players also use the verb bricoler, meaning in this context to play off the cushion, that is, to pursue one’s goal by indirection, just as literary texts use irony and metaphor rather than “straight” talk. These poems, then, may be seen as a sort of scrapbook, a collage, reminiscent of motley, tossed together in the backyard of the brain, art’s own atelier.
     Starbuck, anxious about Ahab’s leadership, muses "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?" But which of us has access to one with fewer flaws?

Dead reckoning is good for to sail for the Deadman;
And Tom Deadlight he thinks it may reckon near right
Melville, from “Tom Deadlight”