Not much to it–the disruption caused by the Trojan War, but the main theme of the sequence is introduced: Odysseus’s longing for home. (The word, “home,” is inside the O of Odysseus’s largest name–and thus inside him; inside it is the subject of the next frame). The rest of the sequence elaborates what “home” was for him–and what it can mean for those lucky enough to have the kind he had. There’s more to the poem than that. It may be my most complex poem.
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Note: the (excellent) translation of the passage from The Iliad is by Robert Fagles.
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Marpril
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This will be the new sub-dividend product of the first frame of my “Odysseus Suite.” Dawn of civilization, dawn of Mycenae, dawn of the Trojan War, dawn of literature . . . whatever.
I feel I ought to have done better but that it’s simple but adequate. The final two frames are where the poem makes it, if it makes it. It’s not in color, by the way, because the suite was originally designed monochromatically. I think it may work best that way–as a visit to a simpler world than ours.
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Februar–
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This map should prove that no one can sink lower than I to post a blog entry; I stole the map from a reference book for use as part of my “Odysseus Suite.” I did make a few changes, removing labels and things that I didn’t want, and I will add something ever-so-slightly clever to it which I worked on earlier today but got too tired to finish. I really wanted to finish the entire frame of the suite that it will be part of, but I’s so tired. Anyway, the portion shown in orange on the map is the extent of the Mycenean empire around 1300 B.C. when the Trojan War is believed to have taken place. Hurrah for history!
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I had a bad back and then hip for two years or so; now both are fine, but I still dawdle through life like a cripple. Yesterday, however, I managed pretty much to finish the graphic for “Mathemaku in Homage to the Piano”:
It’s just half-size above. I did very little to it–just made the boats more sharply outlined. (Note to posterity, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet: this image, in its entirety, connects to one in my “The Best Investigations,” which in turn alludes to one or more others of my works.)
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Apologies but I’m so blah today that all I have is this (full-sized) detail from my “Mathemaku in Homage to the Piano,” that I’m now working on:
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When I read that Peyton Manning would be signed by the Bronchos, I was not surprised to hear the Bronchos would then trade Tebow. No owners or coaches in the NFL are capable of leaving their equivalent of Wilshberia. But, boy, I’d love to figure out plays for a backfield with Tebow and Manning both in it–and maybe Michael Vick, too!
Meanwhile, the latest news from my poetry workshop is that I’ve decided to revise the first two frames of my “The Odysseus Suite.” Here’s the present version of the first:
A few people seem to have liked this, and I liked it. Andrew topel recently published the sequence it’s part of it, and I have had it published elsewhere, including Germany. And I’ve only touched it up slightly in the ten years or more since I composed it. Why am I now unhappy with it? Basically because I could never make what I consider proper sense of it.
The quotient–consisting of the word, “ocean,” and variations thereof repeated over and over, although that’s hard to make out in this poor reproduction–represents the indomitable, everliving ocean; the divisor light, its silence and fragility emphasized, and enclosed by great blocks of darkness. My original thought was that the product of these two yielded the ruins that Mycenea has become. But just how? Ocean as time wearing away the light that was? Maybe, but I didn’t like it. And the use of “ocean” for Homer, the bard of the Mediterranean Sea, made no sense. That I had to change. Even the remainder bothered me: why would the moon have to be added to the ruins of Mycenea when light had already been used to produce it?
When I began the preceding paragraph, I thought I knew when needed to be done, but now I’m confused again.
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Nothing but an arithmepoetic problem for you today: what does distant thunder times sentient moonlight equal? The two images occurred to me one after the other, the thunder first. I thought I was on the way to a long division poem but nothing further developed.
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I had high hopes for this one, which I composed yesterday. I even thought I might work a sequence out of it, using the Klee ship “musical theme” as the first step of a visual symphony. But I wasn’t satisfied with what I did with the ships. As I worked with them, though, I came up with a lot of minor ideas I liked. The main one was a suddenly conscious attempt to provide a metaphor for the coming of spring. But I also liked breaking up what was originally as single framed image, and changing the sizes of each unit. Grey-scaling the first two tiny ones seemed a nice touch, too. And the escape of the final ship! I didn’t like my dividend too well, either–after my initial enthusiasm for it (being a sucker for anything having to do with spring). For some reason it doesn’t seem quite there, for me. Maybe I’ll simplify it to, “a brook’s revived consideration of an April countryside.” Yes, I think I was trying for too much. . . .
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Yesterday a glimmer of a mathemaku crossed my mind just when I was about convinced I was finally permanently non-creative. I’d read an essay in praise of the piano, and I’ve always loved the piano although self-teaching myself to play Fur Elise, or whatever that standard for beginners of Beethoven’s is, was as far as I ever got. In fact, I sometimes consider its invention the most important invention ever. Certainly it’s in the top ten. Competitors would be the invention of writing, the phonograph, the mathemaku . . . I don’t include the invention of language since that was no more an invention, it seems to me, than the human voice, or upright walking.
Anyway, yesterday (and maybe a little of the previous day), I wondered how to make a mathemaku in praise of the piano. “The piano” would be either the poem’s dividend or sub-dividend product. I was able to add only one of the other four elements the poem would need. After thinking my way through three or four versions of it, I wrote, “the way an April countryside celebrates a brook’s twisting, revived consideration of it.” I almost at once added “enthusiastic” to the adjectives modifying “consideration.” Just now, though, I revised it to “the pleasure a countryside takes in a brook’s joyful, revived consideration of it as March turns into April.” Then I deleted “joyful” and changed “of” to “through.” I see a problem with this: it suggests the effect of a piano, not the piano itself. In fact, I’m not sure what exactly it may be a metaphor for. Stay tuned.
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