Myth is the story told of what cannot be told, as a mystery is the scene revealed of what cannot be revealed, and the mystic gnosis the thing known that cannot be known. The myth-teller beside himself with the excitement of the dancers sucks in the inspiring breath and moans, muttering against his willful lips; for this is not a story of what he thinks or wishes life to be, it is the story that comes to him and forces his telling.
Robert Duncan
In 1968, when Duncan’s study on the correlations existing between what we may consider to be of mythological proportions and what we may take as real, factual, life-deeming, The Truth &Life Of Myth, came out in print , the United States of America were living out a reality of war, home and abroad. This gruesome and yet by some necessary playing-out of life brought the once unified Promised Land many changes. The casualties, human and social, were numerous; some painful, other desired, needed, ground-breaking. While American youth was denied its casual post-teen existence by being shipped off in the jungles of Vietnam, Americans at home, young and older, were standing up for what they believed in, by either organizing peace-marches, burning their draft cards, challenging the segregation policies in the South, or by accepting the given, fiercely protecting what once was considered as just, rightful, in its place, no matter how hurtful or damaging it may be to the self. Duncan, who had spent most of his adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, was not exempt from the immediate reality of the sixties. Along with the above mentioned study, he published a collection of poems under the title Bending the Bow in 1968.
The collection, that is to say, the poems in it, revolve around two main, opposing centers; on the one hand, there is the presence of the Vietnam War and the strife it created at home, and, on the other hand, there is the notion that poetry may be a passage through which one (the person/individual and the nation) may transcend this (or any other similar) disassembling pain. At the same time, neither the poet nor the poem are free of the plight of war; therefore, Duncan attempts to avoid the path of the self-righteous that many around him chose. However, following the publication of Bending the Bow is a long period of silence, or better abstinence from the resonance of publishing, until 1984, when
Ground Work:
Before the War was published. In this mediating period of sixteen years, a few poems did appear in print (for example, in 1970, the group of five “Passages” in a volume titled
Tribunals) , but they were not meant for a broader circulation. This conscious choice on the behalf of the poet was not a solitary one, since many others around him, as well as before him, have also decided to withdraw their work from the public’s eye. With this absence he has allowed for his subsequently published poetry to speak freely of the times it rendered while still in a manuscript version. One such reverie of man and myth is “Achilles’ Song”.
The myth surrounding the champion for the Greek polises (city-states) in the Trojan War, Akhilleus (most commonly known as Achilles in the English tradition), is one of the outlining threads in the tapestry structure of Homer’ Iliad. As the greatest hero of the Iliad , Achilles is faced with the greatest of human challenges, our transience, our mortality. This burning sensation within the hero’s mythical presence, as we learn from Homer’s epic, has largely influenced the hero’s life; he is a monolithic, fiercely uncompromising individual who actively chooses violent death over life, so that he may win the glory of being remembered for posterity. As a man of unbending principles, uncompromising values (not even when his dear friends beg him to yield a bit, to save his people), he becomes a man of constant sorrow, never being able to forgive himself for having unwittingly allowed his nearest and dearest friend, Patroklos, to take his place in battle and be killed in his stead, being slaughtered like a sacrificial animal. His human sadness grows into unspeakable anger, fury so intense that Homer words it the same way he words the wrath of the gods, even of the chief god Zeus.
Duncan’s Achilles is a quiet voice seeking return, to the “crumbling shores” of what once was. He tells us that his mother, the sea goddess, had promised him, once, long ago, “the mirage of a boat, a vehicle/ of water within the water,/ and [his] soul would return from/the trials of its human state,/ from the long siege, from the/struggling companions upon the plain,/ from the burning towers and deeds/ of honor and dishonor,/ the deeper unsatisfied war beneath/ and behind the declared war,” a vessel that would be his “lover, an up-lifter of [his] spirit/ into the rage of [his] first element”. Duncan’s hero is a fallen man seeking solace, seeking a continuation in life, not a renewal of innocence, but a possibility even for an allusive return to one’s beginnings, one’s home. This new phase of Achilles is a departure from Homer’s representation of the hero’s consummation in a paroxysm of self-destructiveness. Duncan’s Achilles does not exert his brutality in a physical sense; this man does not want to eat Hektor’s flesh. The mythical hero had already done that, his rage has taken him to the depths of pain; now that the enemy is no longer the ultimate Other, he is his own worst nightmare.
The ending of the Iliad allows for the culmination of Achilles’ anger, and yet it also leaves enough room for the fallen hero to redeem his humanism. As the savage brute begins to realize the pain of his mortal enemy, the Other, he also begins to achieve a true recognition of the Self. Since the anger is at an end, so the story can end as well. However, Duncan’s “Achilles’ Song” is not a song about anger, the doomed and ruinous anger, of its hero Achilles; it a song about the possibility of life after anger, after the victorious defeat of a country’s pride, after the peace-talk agreements, after the political accords and the insignia on war documents, after the nightmares of the disillusioned self. As “Achilles in Leuke has come home” , the process of myth-re-telling is immanent, since there has come a time in a civilization’s existence when “we at once seek a meaningful life and dread psychosis, ‘the principle of life’”.
In Ancient Greek (Hellenic) epic tradition, the singer (since Ancient Greek epics are relics of a vibrant oral tradition) summons the Muse to help him tell his story. In the Iliad, the singer calls upon the Goddess to tell the story of Anger, of the ruinous and doomed anger, of the hero Achilles, which caused countless losses and woes for both the Greeks and the Trojans in the war that later culminated with the destruction of Troy. Duncan’s spiritus movens in telling Achilles’ song, in the 1960s, is a composite force, consisting of his life experience, his imagination as a poet, his words, and his actual body. He is a poet present in the words of his poem. This is not to say that “Achilles’ Song” is a poem that necessarily fulfills a personal desire, an ego-fest; rather its language draws its strength from Duncan’s sensibilities, emotions, his imagination, his experiences as a poet.
Few readers today have empathy for the Ancient Greek’s hero (as he is presented in Homer’s epic) and for his sorrow, which Achilles himself describes as an everlasting one. The present-day reader finds it easier to empathize with the hero Hektor, the champion of the Trojan side in the conflict, whose farewell to his wife Andromaha and his son (soon to become his widow and his orphaned child) is heart-breaking at every instance; however, at a closer look, the pathos of Hektor resembles the pathos of Achilles, i.e., Duncan’s Achilles. They are both in pain, one a hero forced to face his mortality and the subsequent destruction of his people, the other a man tired of facing death for all the wrong reasons, ready to surrender to his “princedom/ in the unreal, a share in Death.” However, Duncan’s Achilles moves one step further in learning to live with his shattered existence. In the beautiful incantation of this ancient hero’s present, Duncan leaves no room for utopian thinking, common for the other voices of the sixties’ counterculture. As he tries, through/in his poem, to redeem the shattered (hi)story of Achilles, by allowing it to speak, through him as a medium, he delivers us from our solitude, from our sheltered ego-focused existences, he enables us to rise to the occasion, the occasion of life merging with myth to reclaim the truthfulness of our reality as violent and as fallen it might be. The poem’s hero is us, looking for a way to appease our interrupted lives; searching for renewal. A difficult and yet life-restoring activity, of the selves and by the selves through the poetic dictum of a voice like Duncan’s Achilles.
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