Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver

Achilles

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The exam is at 8 AM and it’s now 2 AM. My pen hand is twitching just thinking about it. English 440: The Foundations of Western Literature. The course was taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one. The Foundations of Western Literature. It’s one of those topics that sounds manageable at first. Solid, with pillars like the Parthenon or Solomon’s Temple. But is there enough ink in my pen to cover such a topic? Where does it even start, and where on earth does it end? You find a container to fit it in, and it spills over the brim.

Old Rex started the course with “the epic journeys of Western Culture,” by which he meant the journey of Moses in The Bible and the journeys of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad & Odyssey. To me, it seemed a bit odd to start a literature course with The Bible, given that it’s mostly about religion. Yet Old Rex said he was a trailblazer. He refused to be boxed in by convention. He even said, “There is no star to my wandering bark. It wanders everywhere!”

He looked out the classroom window as he said this, as if he was on the deck of a Greek trireme heading into a storm Poseidon had whipped up just for him. From the top floor of the Buchanon Building, he could make out a stretch of the Georgia Strait in the distance. It was the Strait of Ithaka leading to the Ionian Sea. He was Odysseus, riding the waves to new lands.

He could face any temptation, overcome any foe. The sirens were nothing. A bit of a song. Some sharp and nagging words. Nothing could stop him from sailing between the rocks.

Or he was Achilles, leaving his home and his mother behind him, riding the Aegean waves to the city of Troy. On the deck of the ship his mighty loins glistened like the loins of Brad Pitt. His curly locks danced in the salty air. He looked over at his dear cousin Patroclus, his blood eager for adventure.

Old Rex often acted out dramatic Greek scenes in which he was the protagonist. Or he would have a Socratic dialogue, playing the parts of both Plato and his student Heraclides.

On this first day of class, after several adventures on the high seas of the Aegean, he ended with the following words: “I have arrived at the peroration, the closing remarks. En syntomía, in brief, the Greeks and the Hebrews invented everything. This is why we start our journey with the Greeks, from the Trojan War at the dawn of Greek time to the Peloponnesian War at dusk. Yet we also start with the epic struggles of the Jewish patriarchs, from Exile to Exodus to Promised Land. Together these two cultures gave us everything — politics and war, poetry and drama, love and loyalty, temptation and adventure, sin and suffering, paganism and monotheism, reconciliation and redemption. Everything begins with the fusion of these two great traditions. May they lead us safely across the jagged seas!”

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Old Rex was pleased with his performance, although when he turned from the window and saw the benumbed look on the faces of his students, he shuffled his feet and didn’t quite know what to add. He felt naked. He regretted not keeping his jacket on, with its collar mounting firmly to the chin, perfectly fitted over his fine white cotton shirt with its necktie, rich and modest, held in place by a simple pin. Now he felt the cotton shirt, with its fine fabric, was too thin, even transparent. Could the students see right through it, with their surly X-Ray vision, to his skinny arms?

Old Rex felt like Achilles when he was on the island of Skyros, waiting for his mother to cast a magic robe over his bare shoulders. He looked again out the window, and saw birds swooping this way and that through the trees that mostly blocked his view of the Georgia Strait. He recalled an episode from The Achilleid, written by the Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius. In this episode, the goddess Thetis (the mother of Achilles) hides her son among the princesses of Skyros. Wisely, Thetis helps him with the finer points of acting like a lady:

[Achilles] blushes for joy, and with sly and sidelong glance repels the [maiden] robes less certainly. His mother sees him in doubt and willing to be compelled, and casts the raiment o’er him; then she softens his stalwart neck and bows his strong shoulders, and relaxes the muscles of his arms, and tames and orders duly his uncombed tresses, and sets her own necklace about the neck she loves; then keeping his step within the embroidered skirt she teaches him gait and motion and modesty of speech. […] Nor did she struggle long; for plenteous charm remains to him though his manhood brook it not, and he baffles beholders by the puzzle of his sex that by a narrow margin hides its secret.

The [king of Skyros] receives the disguised Achilles by his mother’s ruse – who can resist when gods deceive? Nay more, he venerates her with a suppliant’s hand, and gives thanks that he was chosen; nor is the band of duteous Skyrian maidens slow to dart keen glances at the face of their new comrade, how she o’ertops them by head and neck, how broad her expanse of breast and shoulders; then they invite her to join the dance and approach the holy rites, and make room for her in their ranks and rejoice to be near her. Just as Idalian birds, cleaving the soft clouds and long since gathered in the sky or in their homes, if a strange bird from some distant region has joined them wing to wing, are at first all filled with amaze and fear; then nearer and nearer they fly, and while yet in the air have made him one of them and hover joyfully around with favouring beat of pinions and lead him to their lofty resting-places. (Achilleid Book I)

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Within the rank and file of student resistance, green-eyed Juniper had cleared her throat several times to get Old Rex’s attention. This was her tracheal warning signal, the first few notes of a siren song that Odysseus was determined not to hear. Besides, Old Rex was sailing through the air with the Idalian birds, and never paid attention to the feminine sex. He often said to himself, What were they on about? Whining and bleeding, what was their point?

And so the classroom behind him seemed deathly silent. On the horizon he saw the clouds tossed by winds. The Idalian birds sought shelter in the trees. He launched his trireme once more into the choppy water. And yet behind him, breaking the eery hush of the dark sky, he heard the voice of his star pupil, the green-eyed Juniper. Her voice broke the silence, and cracked like thunder the white and incandescent room.

“So, are you saying that the matriarchy of the Minoans, the goddess Ishtar who later became Aphrodite, the Sumerians with their numbers and letters, and the Hittites with their iron ore — that all of these had nothing to do with it?”

Old Rex turned from the window to face the class. The land was scattered with trees and grass, and a herd of Triceratops was grubbing for bulbs. He just stood there, his jaw clamped tightly to his head.

This wasn’t how his first lecture was supposed to end. In his mind he had accomplished a cross-dressing triumph, his manhood intact, and sailed from the effeminate chambers of the Skyrian maidens to the battle field of Troy. Having slaughtered several dozen Trojans, he was now attending to his dear cousin Patroclus, who had been wounded in the arm. He bent down to bandage it, and to slather a balm of honey and resin over his sweet limbs and organs.

He applied the translucent balm to Patroclus’ loins, and worked it into his flowery curls and up and down the stem. On the Elysian Fields, the bulbs were sprouting from the grass, laden with the stamens of blossoming joy and with the fragrance of the cloved and clovered earth. In the fingers of the rosy dawn, Old Rex saw the veins of the long purples, the sweet sap rising from the shafts and bursting into — and then came Juniper’s voice. He thought to himself, Had she even asked a question? Or was it an accusation?

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Next:✏️ Rivers of Time

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