'Men as They Are Now'

Of Ichor and War 2: Considering the Metaphysics of Homer's Iliad

Food for thought. Last night, my friend Mike, the homeless tweaker, came by. He told me of his friend who died of a tree falling on him at Powell Park. I remember the newspaper story about it. Anyway, two days before his friend died, he told Mike that he had dreamed of a tree falling on him. I hear these things in passing and ponder them.

-Yeti Waters, Monday June 21, by text

Last night, and again this morning, after receiving that text, I lay down and listened twice to Books 9-13 of The Iliad. Zeus has acquired two additional names in the poem, Olympian and Deathlord. While the lesser gods communicate to and even fight with, command, trick and scold mortals much as angels in the Old Testament and like Satan in Job, Zeus Almighty, Lord of Heaven, father of gods and men, communicates with man in three different ways:

-through natural forces, such as clouds, thunder, lightning, tempests and the permission of discordant forces such as war to rage,

-through signs, involving usually the animal world,

-through dreams.

Homer often describes the great events involving mortals and immortals in terms of natural observations, such as the roiling of the sea, the building of thunderheads, the view of a watcher from a high point, the behavior of animals while being hunted by men. This marks these poetic traditions as pre-agricultural and vested in the Stone Age culture of the hunt.