michael-dean-k/

Check out "the odyssey" tag (at the bottom) for more posts on my idea to rewrite an alternate version of epic.

The story opens with a modified tale of the cyclops—probably the most memory-scaring monster experience of the whole Odyssey. This typically doesn't come until book 9, which means the framing of the 8 prior chapters changes the significance of this event; the traditional opening sets a frame of a disordered home that can only be restored by Odysseus's return; this opening highlights the protagonist's Faustian curiosity. Venturing onto the cyclops island is his original act of wanderlust; throughout the whole epic, he ventures into forbidden lands, but this is the inciting event that gets him cursed.

But how did he arrive in the land of cyclopses in the first place? The Gods were aggravated with the Greeks—because of how they looted the city, disrespected temples, and pillaged nearby villages—so Poseidon scattered all home-bound fleets in arbitrary directions (while Agamemnon stayed on shore to apologize and make sacrifices). So Poseidon is already pissed, but the cyclops ordeal is what brings the personal vendetta against Odysseus, who is riding the high from victory. He personally conceived the trick to win, the Trojan Horse, and there is nothing his cunningness can't overcome.

The opening line of the original describes Odysseus as being a "polytropic man," but we don't fully see this in action until the cyclops scene... Polytropic is traditionally understood as "many turned," making him a trickster, but he is also multi-desired. He loves the stability of being a king at home, and earnestly wants to return to Penelope and Telemachus, but also harbors an unsatiable thirst for all kinds of knowledge. He thinks he's cunning enough to have both, to venture into forbidden lands, to learn and see what no human has ever experienced, but without sacrificing his normal life. (This is a relatable, timeless tension—the desire to be both ordinary and extraordinary). IMO, the only proper conclusion of the story is to show him failing this juggle. As in the Bible, one cannot eat from the tree of knowledge without consequence.

The whole odyssey stems from his curiosity of the uncanny. He was not forced onto the island. He chose this side quest. Odysseus has never seen a cyclops, only heard of them in lore. How big are they? Are they as rude as they say? He could have easily returned home if he had allowed these questions to remain unanswered. Instead, he thinks he can use his cunningness to form a pact with them, to receive gifts. The larger crew is scared to explore, but a small group wanders out and into the cave of Polyphemus, not knowing it is Poseidon's only surviving son at this point—his other died at Troy. It is not just a normal cyclops (10 feet tall), but being the God of Poseidon and a sea nymph, he’s a 30-footer. They quickly find out that the cyclops is a savage; he ignores Odysseus's request for xenia around guest treatment, and casually eats two members of their crews (to be fair thought, the cyclops did walk in to them raiding his food supply). They get trapped in the cave, blocked in by a massive boulder they can't lift.

As Polyphemus wanders the fields on day 2, they try to plot their escape. The pressure mounts, and some of the crew startw mocking Odysseus, the man who got them in this pickle, the man who conceived of the great Trojan Horse, now fumbling for an escape scheme. Another man notes that no one will believe the fantastical story of Trojan Horse, nor will they believe their story of the 30' cyclops, if they survive. How could they? One jokes to capture the cyclops, hang him from the mast, and return home with the mythic beast (King Kong-style). Another jokes that he's too big to carry, but his penis is only the size of a man. Carryable/draggable. Odysseus insults them and their ideas, suggesting they're drunk, suggesting they might as well take the loose rope around the cave and hang themselves—which hatches his new plan: to get the cyclops drunk, tie him with rope, and castrate him.

This is the founding deviation from the original, and way more extreme, but the mechanics work on many levels. First, the logistical level: After Polyphemus comes back and eats two more men, Odysseus offers him Apollo's wine, 20x the strength, fit to get a cyclops wasted. Polyphemus thanks him, and promises to eat him last (his idea of a gift). He is out cold, vomiting in his sleep, and so the crew takes the opportunity to gather the rope (Polyphemus is a builder/shepherd). They tie down each limb, and most importantly, tie his dominant hand to a rope that is connected to the boulder. One man grabs a rope attached to the cyclops's phallus to hold it in tension, odysseus grabs his sickle, and the others wait by the boulder. In one blow, the cyclops gets dismembered, which shocks him awake. The natural reaction for the cyclops is to cover his groin to stop the bleeding, and this thrust of his arm shimmies the boulder just enough so the men can escape. In the scramble, Odysseus, sees the phallus on a rope, and decides to drags it out, wanting a souvenir to prove their ordeal, a tangible symbol for his cunningness.

On the way out, he reveals his name, "Odysseus," to be known in the land of cyclopes (all soldiers, like Achilles, care most for the immortality of their name). This hubristic act gives away his cover and lets Polyphemus connect the dots: he was warned about this in a prophecy, and so now he pleads to Poseidon to curse him (to either kill him, to kill his crew, or to have him return to unfixable chaos).

The castration is a not a random or lewd replacement for blindness; it deepens the escape on several levels: (1) they are both "one-eyed" (he took the one-eyed monster from the one-eyed monster); (2) this is more painful for Poseidon, since it neuters his only son alive and threatens his bloodline; (3) it is more embarrassing, since cyclopses are uncivilized and unclothed, the others will notice; (4) it is less threatening; Polyphemus would be unable to hunt or survive from blindness, and so castration is actually more humane; and (5) a castration is the foundational act of Greek cosmology; it has an uncanny similarity, fusing Homeric lore with Hesiod's universe.

The myth goes something like this: Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (sky) fuse together and have monstrous/mythical children, which include three cyclopses. But Uranus was so disgusted by them, he banished them to live in caves inside the Earth. This upset Gaia, so she arranged to have the cyclops's father castrated by one of the kids (Saturn, the Titan). Out of the blood of that castration poured many more monsters, nymphs, and goddesses, and the previously caved beings were free to roam. So the castration is symbolic in two ways: (1) it lets the trapped children (Odysseus and his crew) leave the cave, but really (2) it unleashes the wave of monsters, the same ones Odysseus is about to encounter; the origin myth includes nymphs, giants, multi-headed sea monsters, and Aphrodite (a sex goddess who spawns from the blood and foam of the severed penis in the ocean... to jump ahead briefly, after his ship sinks, the cyclops penis sinks with it, and his next encounter is Calypso, strikingly similar to Aphrodite, a sex goddess of the ocean who deceives with desire).

The chapter ends with the six-foot cyclops phallus skewered onto the bowsprit of a ship (the already phallic spike at the front). It sets the whole sexual/subconscious angle of the story: they are following their genitals, which isn't limited to sex, but the Faustian impulse to go beyond convention to know what should remain unknown.

I finished reading The Odyssey on Sunday, and can’t quite get it off my mind. The read itself was more enjoyable than expected (I read the Lombardo Essentials—with intention to return to Lattimore, and finally the Fagles version read by McKellen at 0.6x speed). It was hard to put down; something mythical, strange, aesthetic felt accessible, modern, timeless. I never read it, but it felt like I knew it.

I’ve since been in the sensemaking/reflection phase; there are so many ways to interpret the different themes and put them in a hierarchy. I hear Nolan’s film focuses on guilt, while some focus on order in the household, or cleverness, or revenge, or glory, and some have a Nietzchean reading. I can’t help but see this primarily as a Faustian tale.

If “punishment for accessing forbidden knowledge” becomes central, it becomes fun to imagine an alternate version of the Odyssey, the same characters, the same narrative, but with slightly different decisions, and slightly different consequences, which unfold into a radically different ending. I have been unable to resist re-architecting the story…

Faust is a German tale that’s been retold through centuries, culminating in Goethe’s Faust, though probably originating in ancient Greece in theme (Theophilus). The tale is usually known by its frame, a deal with the devil—Mephistopheles—but more so, it’s about the insatiable appetite for non-ordinary knowledge; a curiosity that seeks the extremes, whether for intelligence, sex, strangeness, love, power, fame. Oswald Spengler defines it as infinite striving, restlessness, and a transcendence of Apollonian limits. In Faust, the devil grants you the ability to access these states, but if you get so consumed in one of them that you then decide to freeze time to experience the bliss of it eternally without cessation, you go to hell.

Zeus hints at faustian themes—punishment from recklessness appetite—in the opening chapter of The Odyssey:

Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share."

But the non-linearity of the book makes this less apparent—it opens with Telemachus and Penelope facing the chaos from the suitors at home, in absence of their patriarchal leader; it closes with Athena and Odysseus restoring order to Ithaca. It’s been argued that these bookends were added after the fact, in around 400 BC, to promote civic order in classical antiquity. Was it a civilizational neutering to help a culture digest a story that was too strange to integrate?

When viewed more chronologically, the faustian theme becomes the main frame of the story. The whole chain of supernatural ordeals is kicked off by Odysseus’ reckless curiosity. He ventures into the land of cyclopes, to observe and converse with beasts, thinking that he can outsmart them and bring back a gift—ironically, the cyclops Polyphemus walks in on Odysseus and his crew raiding his cheese supply, which is extremely rude, poor xenia, acting like the suitors he would later slay. This blunder costs him four crew members, but he was able to fool the cyclopes, blind him, and escape—he almost gets away… but as the ship left the harbor, he yells, “Cyclops, if anyone, any mortal man, asks you how you got your eye put out, tell him that Odysseus the marauder did it, Son of Laertes, whose home is on Ithaca!” This act of pride—the yearning for immortality in his name—is what gets him in trouble: Polyphemus was told a prophecy that a man named Odysseus would blind him, and so he calls to his father, Poseidon, to kill him, to kill his crew, and to bring chaos to his homeland.

Prior to Polyphemus, the crew is riding the high of their Trojan victory. Their wanderlust gets them in trouble twice—they escape a foiled ransack and lose 72 men at Ismarus, and then escape the island of the Lotus Flower, an opiate/psychedelic substance—but they can’t escape a third time. They’re cursed by a Faustian curiosity about non-human entities. Without this curse, none of the book's events would have occurred; he would’ve gotten home simply and safely.

The cyclops is often mentioned as just another foul monster in a chain of monsters, but really it’s the inciting event. If the cyclops were the opening chapter, then faustian curiosity would color everything else, but the preceding 8 chapters dilute that framing. Beyond the cyclops (book 9), he is continuously succumbing to faustian temptation in books 10-12: the sirens, nymph sex, lingering in Hades to learn from the spirits.

Throughout the story there is a somewhat consistent cause-and-effect logic: the crew is told, no matter what, to not eat the cattle of the Sun God, and when they do they all get killed; the suitors face their consequences for terrible manners; etc. I appreciate how the story acknowledges that by killing 100+ noblemen from Ithaca, it would incite a mob; but the way Athena intervenes to force a peace treaty felt very unsatisfying, breaking the consequence logic. I would have been more satisfied if Odysseus was imprisoned/blinded/killed and Telemachus became king.

I have been in a fugue state mapping an alternate universe, a faustian retelling.

I originally thought that this might be received as a blasphemous act. Why tamper a classic that’s three thousand years old? A story at this scale is never stable; it’s a series of elements that get continuously reimagined. The canonic original from Homer is likely just one frozen variant across dozens or hundreds of variants that preceded it for centuries, mutated through the oral tradition, and never remembered. Separate from the Iliad and the Odyssey, there were six other books on the Trojan war, including Telegonny, where we learn Odysseus had a son with Circe, who comes to Ithaca and unknowingly kills his father, most presciently, with a mantid spear, which satisfyingly concludes Poseidon’s “death by sea” prophecy. (This is effectively the real ending of the Odyssey that was never absorbed into culture.) The western canon itself includes known names imagining alternate endings, like how Dante puts Odysseus in Christian Hell. And now there are of course many modern Homeric retellings of various quality, from versions of Penelope’s perspective, to gay Achilles. TLDR: Odyssey fan fiction is not new or original, and so my hesitation to tamper is minimal. Castrate the cyclops.

You could make the case that both the Iliad & Odyssey are faustian: Helen is the ultimate faustian object, the peak of unattainability; not just “the most beautiful woman in the world,” but the wife of the king of Sparta, the sister-in-law of the ruler of the Mycenae coalition. Seducing and abducting her is a faustian temptation, whose consequence is launching the mythical war. In Goethe’s story, Faust actually possesses Helen and gets her pregnant. Odysseus has no lust for Helen (they interact in a book 4 flashback), but falls to more cerebral faustian yearnings.

I find myself unable to think about anything else in the last few days. I was up till 4AM some nights. This is causing more sleep deprivation than my newborn. Weird details have emerged in the process. I’m sensing that this might be a good exercise to get into fiction. The structure and characters are “locked,” and so the imagination can run wild with connections and consequences around the existing parts, which already have enormous mythic charge. It feels like I'm surfing between fractals, letting associations and fantasies emerge, before logically integrating them into coherence.

Here are some of the psychosexual, geopolitical, and moral alterations that are scattered across my 32,000 words of notes: the escape from the drunk cyclops's cave by tying his limbs to the boulder and castrating him (relating to Hesiod's origin of Greek mythology); specifics on the sexual mechanics of Circe and Calypso (Circe can swallow Odysseus’s semen and shape shift into Penelope, which is why he stays for a year; Odysseus only has sex with Calypso once, but it's a time-dilated extended orgasm that lasts 7 years, which lets him experience a hive mind of all orgasms across Greece—a kind of "remote viewing through lust”—, which is how he learns of the suitors banging his servants, and of Penelope's chastity—he only agrees to sex with Calypso for the intel/recon, not knowing a single moment would last so long, which is why he weeps); his overstay in Hades lets him discover the judgment of souls, which, along with Achilles's blood-mouthed confession, triggers his own internal crises of morality; his multi-week extraction of knowledge from the Sirens ("Zeus's plan" for world peace, the omega state (the entire future), and yet also, news of Telemachus’s assassination plot); the spontaneous and bloody rampage of Telemachus after his father’s return (against his father’s wish), which explains the hanging of the maids; Calypso's curse, causing Odysseus to see any mortal woman he penetrates as a skeleton; his appeasement of the mob at Ithaca with his ultimate knowledge from the Sirens, him taking credit for Telemachus’s rampage, and for his own imprisonment as an oracle; Telemachus's rise into a tyrant from having total knowledge via his father (but the knowledge becomes more useless the more they act on it; the arrest of bards, oracles, and soothsayers to regain knowledge of the future (and blinding them to heighten their divine vision, including Odysseus); Penelope's calm and principled suicide, walking into the sea with iron boots, knowing she will receive a favorable judgment in Hades (Odyssey only tells her that secret); the arrival of Telegonny, the son of Odysseus and Circes—an exact clone of Telemachus, but ~15 years younger, with identical voice—, with the goal of restoring order in the universe (the Gods are threatening to retreat into the cosmos and leave the humans behind), by killing his father and step-brother; a scene where blind Odysseus hears two versions of his son talking and thinks he's going mad; Telegonny shapeshifting his father into a pair of floating hands, then stabbing and killing him with a mantid spear (his inevitable "death by sea"); a final scene in Hades, where Persephone sentences Odysseus to write about his journey (an anachronistic ability he stole from Sirens to capture the knowledge of the Sirens), which is a meta-fictional move explaining why the whole version is written in a 1st-person Montaignean style; and once his essays are written, Persephone sends the book on a ship back to mainland Greece to warn humans of Faustian appetites, and then releases the Gorgon (Medusa) on Odysseus, freezing him into stone, the ultimate consequence and destiny of a restless wanderer.

I imagine this all sounds quite bizarre to an average person, but to someone who gets the themes the Odyssey, half of it might click. These are all latent possibilities in the existing material, triangulations that connect a character to a theme or consequence, but a new way. In the end, I am sympathetic to Odysseus, and think he represents a modern condition: the desire to have both an ordinary and extraordinary life, and believing you can use your cunningness to have them both. He loves his wife and son and remains faithful (his sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso are rapes, illusions, and tricks), yet he can’t turn down his infinite appetite for knowledge. The ultimate lesson is not to be reckless in the spheres of the Gods. This theme feels more urgent than ever, as our technology becomes more faustian by the decade, bringing us hyper-porn, superintelligence, robots, life extension, etc.

Of course, Odysseus is not a Faustian story, but Faust is an Odyssean story. Part of my interest here is to take themes from the great canonical centers (The Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Montaigne) and feed them back into the narrative structure and universe of the Odyssey. I see the Sirens as a tool for Odysseus to see into the future, which lends to all sorts of interesting anachronisms: ie: he foresees “the forms,” a Christos (“the savior”), modern society, advanced technology described in the vernacular of Hephaestean machines. Ultimately though, him stealing this knowledge ends up corrupting that timeline, and so what he sees is not our timeline, but a theoretical one in which Hellenism never collapses, one without the Dark Ages, where they get to the moon by the year 1200—this is the gods' plan, stolen. At a meta-level, the most actionable thing he steals from the future is the invention of writing, which he uses to capture and act on these revelations, and which he eventually uses to recount his odyssey from the first person.

I suppose my underlying intention in this project is to write essays about the Odyssey. Instead of doing that in a detached, 3rd-person sort of way, I can blend genres, explore my own questions through the persona of Odysseus, and replace mundane experience with mythic experience. There are several retellings of the Homeric epic in prose, but none of them are from the first-person point of view, through the medium of Montaignean essays (who himself is a kind of trickster).

Essays from Hades.

• On uncanny curiosity (Polyphemus)
• On hallucinations (Circe)
• On learning death's secret (Hades)
• On forbidden knowledge (Sirens)
• On eternal orgasm (Calypso)
• On lying to friends (Phaeacians)
• On revenge (Telemachus)
• On consequences (Penelope)
• On blindness (Telegonny)
• On legacy (Persephone)