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The Homework Blues

August 17, 2018

8:23 AM

Dr. Rexroth is staring down at me with his usual intensity. He says drily, “Don’t mess it up this time, Matthew,” and drops the exam instructions, front facing downward, on my desk. The piece of paper is violet, unlike the white sheets dropped onto the desks by the professors of Sociology and History.

8:29 AM

Exam instructions are now on every desk of the Osbourne Gymnasium, which is the proud home of the UBC Thunderbird teams, whose banners deck the walls and float from the rafters. According to their website, on October 30, 1948 the Kwicksutaineuk people “officially grant[ed] permission to UBC to use the Thunderbird name and emblem.”

The clock is about to strike the hour. Thunderbird pennants flutter in the wind of the air-conditioner above. The ghosts of the Thunderbird elders are watching, with eagle eyes. They’ve seen what the old White people have done to the forests, the rivers, and the fish in the sea. It’s late in the summer, and they’re anxious to hear what the young White people have to say about it.

The Doctors of Philosophy exchange wry glances from their makeshift tables at the front of the gym. Meanwhile, the students recite The Lord’s Prayer in every language from Tagalog to Greek: Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death…

The clock strikes the hour, and the students turn the page.

8:30 AM

The exam paper lies before me, like a siren mocking Odysseus. Old Rex even went to the trouble of printing the exam on coloured paper. Hellish shades of violet. A warning about the journey ahead.

The Inquisitors are making their rounds of the gymnasium, like priests in Blake’s Garden of Love … And I saw it was filled with graves, / And tomb-stones where flowers should be: / And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds.

I must remember everything. Otherwise the Grand Inquisitor, who knows everything, will assume that I know nothing. 

2:00 Am the night before

Six hours to go until the exam. I consult the prep sheet. Six possible topics to write on: Tragedy, The Epic, Beauty, The Journey, Love, and War. Old Rex added the following instructions: “You will write your essay on one of the six topics. The day before your exam, I will roll a die and Fate will determine the precise manner in which your number is up. The die will decide; there’s no point trying to second-guess my intentions.” To underscore his point about Fate, he included a colour print by Walter Crane:

Six hours to go. Six topics to choose from. Six paths into the dark woods. 6 X 6 X 6. If that isn't ominous, what is?

I spent most of the last two weeks guessing which topic Fate would choose. This isn't as crazy as it sounds: by doing that, I recalled what Old Rex said about each topic, and I made connections between them.

Beauty starts everything, from Creation to the Trojan War. And of course we’re not talking the beauty of the sunset, but the beauty that leads to love and fornication. The type of beauty that spins the head of even the most lustful satyr:

The beauty that teased poor old Alberich out of his mind, and made the giants dream of a soft-skinned bride:

The beauty that made a jealous Greek husband launch a thousand ships, and caused Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit.

Ten days ago, I went on a quest for a book I could use for all six topics. I finally found it: Germanic Myth: From Snorri to Wagner. Old Rex said something about it months ago. I found it, unopened, at the bottom of five or six books we were supposed to read over the term.

Germanic Myth worked for all six topics: it had fate and tragedy, impossible loves, a journey of hell-bent demons in a boat, epic battles, beautiful flying maidens, and powerful misguided men. When I cracked it open, the first thing I saw was The Battle of the Doomed Gods (1882) by Friedrich Heine: 

The End of the World. While reading the first story, The Völuspá or The Prophecy of the Völva, I listened to Wagner's Twilight of the Gods, hoping that the spirits of Odin and Thor would descend upon me like a storm of warrior poets ready for battle.

8:31 AM

The gymnasium is almost silent. The only sound is that of students turning pages and clicking their pens. My eyes are weary yet caffeinated to the point of hallucination. The topic lies before me: The Epic, from Odysseus to J. Alfred Prufrock.

Did Old Rex really roll a die the day before to arrive at that topic? I doubt it. I suspect that the game is rigged. Why? Because Old Rex is a Classical Greek scholar and he’s in love with Lord Byron. Which explains why he looks alot like J. Alfred Prufrock — haunted by all the epic journeys he never took.

2:01 A.M.

I pour a bath to settle my nerves, and set up a makeshift work station around the furious tumbling water. The spine of Germanic Myth is resting on the faucet, and the open pages are held in place by the hot and cold water taps. I turn the pages, slightly moistened by the turmoil below the falls. On the toilet seat is my trusty Mac Air: thirteen inches of screen and rubber keys connecting me to the chaos and harmony of the world.

I'm mesmerized by the apocalyptic language of the Völuspá. The rebel Loki, the wolf Fenris, and the giant snake Jörmungandr are making their assault on the Aesir gods. Together with the fire-giant Sutr, they’re about to tear down heaven, light it on fire, and sink into the sea.

But how to work this Norse myth into a coherent line of argument about the epic? I remember Old Rex stressing the difference between the northern sagas and the southern epics: he said the Norse and German stories were crude and inferior, and they could never compete with the Greek and Roman epics. Yet whether it was in Valhalla or on Olympus, it was all about in-fighting, lust, conniving, and war.

Old Rex is obsessed with the Greeks, their Golden Age, their law and order, their famed democracy, and, above all, their Iliad and Odyssey. And yet the Classical Greeks also fell into chaos and darkness: war with the Persians, the execution of Socrates, and then a fratricidal war with the Spartans.

Several nights ago I was worried Old Rex might pick the topic of war, so I watched Troy. I was moved by how sad Achilles and Priam are at the end, when they see the futility of it all. After all the lame reasons for battle and butchery, Peter O’Toole sneaks into the Greek tent and sits with Brad Pitt, the two lamenting as only enemies can. Achilles and Priam, having lost everything, for nothing.

If the Trojan War was the start of Western Civilization, it was a bad start. And it never really ends, does it? There’s no such thing as The war to end all wars. There’s no such thing as Mission Accomplished. Maybe these Vikings, the ones we conveniently distance ourselves from and treat as violent figments of the Dark Ages, aren't so different after all. Maybe the battle of the gods — the dark vision of the völva, with its destruction of the world — is what we keep doing, despite our vaunted Classical Age, our Renaissance, and our Enlightenment. And maybe the women, the wild rheinmaidens and the fateful valkyries, are our only hope.

Tragedy goes down, beauty goes up. Yet tragedy enters into everything. The epic and the journey intervene, with all their combinations of love and war.

I look down into the swirling water and see beauty and love slide into tragedy and war. I see the crowds swirling toward the beach. Promenade des Anglais. Nice. The beauty of the goddess Isis turned into a monster, mowing down infidels on the fourteenth of July. The Bataclan. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vietnam and Iraq. Syria and the Congo. All those special military operations. Global Warming. Water shortages. Eight billion people and counting.

Why do we fixate on Greek versions of tragedy when we've got so many versions of our own? Instead of repeating Aristotle’s fall of a noble man, why don’t we look at civilization itself, as it seems so willing to fall, again and again? As Bob Dylan said in "Subterranean Homesick Blues," Look out kid / It's somethin' you did / God knows when / But you're doing it again. 

The battle of the gods rises from confused currents and trembling stretches of calm.

This is going to be total collapse.

I look up from the swirling water. My laptop is firmly on the toilet seat. My notebook is trembling on my knees. 

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