Le Quatrième Pentamètre

Father

One of the most extraordinary mythic stories from our own collective past, a story as sacred as any in religious literature, is about a man trying to reclaim his fatherhood, a wife longing for her husband, and a son out in search of his lost father. 

At the beginning of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is sitting on the seashore in the midst of his unplanned travels following a long, difficult war, wishing to be home with his son, his father, and the mother of his children. In his longing and melancholy he asks a famous question: "Does any person know who his father is?" 

It's a question many men and women ask in various forms. If my father is dead, or if he was absent and cold, or if he was a tyrant, or if he abused me, or if he was wonderful but is not there for me now, then who is my father now?

 Where do I get those feelings of protection, authority, confidence, know-how, and wisdom that I need in order to live my life? 

How can I evoke a fatherly myth in a way that will give my life the governance it needs?

The story of Odysseus gives us many clues toward finding that elusive father. However, it does not begin, as one might expect, with the father in the throes of his adventures, but with the son, Telemachus, distraught at the havoc created in his house by suitors vying for his mother's affections.

 The story gives us first an image of "absent-father neurosis." Without the father there is chaos, conflict, and sadness. On the other hand, by starting with the unhappiness of Telemachus, the story teaches us that the experience of father includes his absence and the longing for his return. For at the very moment Telemachus is bewailing his situation, Odysseus is on another beach on the same sea, pining for the same conclusion. 

If we understand The Odyssey as one of the stories of the soul's fatherhood, then at that very moment when we feel the confusion of a fatherless life and wonder where he could be, the father has been evoked. As we wonder where he is, he is finding his way back. 

During this time of separation, Homer tells us, Odysseus' wife, Penelope, is at home weaving a shroud for Odysseus' father, and every night she unravels what she has woven. This is the great mystery of the soul: whenever something is being accomplished, it is also in some way being undone.

 A thirty-year-old man I worked with, who had a conflict-ridden relationship with his father and who found it difficult to father his own life, told me a dream in which his father was hugging him and asking him to remain with him; the son said he had too much to do and had to go away. Later in the dream, his brother came and took all the dreamer's belongings. In this dream, I felt there was a relationship between signs of reconciliation with the father and the loss of belongings, a motif not far from the themes of The Odyssey. 

Sometimes we may have to feel absence and emptiness in order to evoke the father. In a similar way, there is something frustrating about the very idea of The Odyssey. Why don't the gods look compassionately on this broken family and allow Odysseus to make a beeline home? What possible value is there in this father taking ten years on the sea, telling his stories and surviving his risky adventures, before he can finally return home and restore peace? 

The only answer I can think of is that this long, dangerous, adventure-filled journey is the making of the father. 

Odysseus' return to his family is analogous to the Gnostic stories of the soul descending through the planets to earth, picking up along the way the qualities it will need for human life. 

Who is my father? I won't know until the soul has been on its odyssey and returns with its stories of love, sex, death, risk, and afterlife. If I am feeling the absence of fatherhood in my life, I may have to give up the project of forcing fatherhood into my character and instead open myself to my own unplanned and uncontrolled odyssey.