076: Leave the Raft Behind

On volcanoes, Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, life-rafts, and the vast gap between dreams and reality

I made the first booking on December 19th, the day after a volcanic eruption broke through the fissure at the Sundhnúkur crater chain north of Grindavík, Iceland.

I’ve wanted to go back to Iceland ever since last year’s magical trip. Then, on December 18th, the images of lava boiling out of the earth into the unlimited Icelandic night started popping up on X.

I sent a few links to a friend, pretty much knowing what he would say.

with love and respect you have to stop being
tentative and just get on planes

I don’t have that kind of bank account

how about a bank account of memories of the
earth exploding with lava

I booked the flights.

I booked two AirBnB experiences, as well: a northern lights tour in a “super jeep” and a volcanic hike with a geologist near the 2021 eruption at the Fagradalsfjall site. The confirmation for the volcanic hike came with an opening sentence in all caps: THIS HIKE IS NOT AT THE SITE OF THE CURRENT ERUPTION.

Then, stuff came up at work—a meeting in Boston, another meeting in another city. I could have said that I already had travel plans, but I didn’t. I cancelled the bookings.

*

Last year, when we both quit our jobs, my friend R and I started having an 8am stand up on weekday mornings. We answer three questions by phone or text: what is one thing I have to get done today? What is one thing that could be a blocker? What would make today great?

I first learned about the power of a regular stand up from my friend, S, who is, amongst other things, an Agile coach. Back when we worked together we disagreed often, debating each other on Slack back and forth for whole afternoons. But even when I thought S was wrong on substance, I could see he was right in his approach. He knows what is important and what is not and how to direct his attention, partly because of his nature and partly because of his Agile training. It’s why I trust him.

Stand ups are the best. They help you make a commitment to yourself in front of others, give you insights into the lives and concerns of other people, and create a setting wherein it’s easy to ask for help. All this for just 15 minutes of goodness.

R and I almost always have the same blocker, which is boredom.

We both procrastinate on doing work that is dull, but the root cause of the boredom is different, I think. R doesn’t have any time to waste: she has two teen-age kids, a husband, multiple pets, and she manages a team in a high stakes, executive environment—from an office, not from home. She’s a gifted problem solver anyway, and the skill’s been honed by a decade and a half of working motherhood. She’s smart, fast, and fearless, and if she’s bored with a work task, I guarantee you the work isn’t necessary: the correct way to supervise R would be to tell her what you need and then leave her alone to do it.

My boredom is more about being impatient as a state of mind. I can see how great things can be and prefer to take the shortest possible path between the starting point and the glorious destination—in communications strategy and in life. I like glittery tesseracts and time travel, not a roadmaps and implementation plans.

This is not a realistic approach unless you’re a founder or an artist, preferably with a trust fund, and it’s definitely not in demand in corporate America. Too many of my days are just wave after wave of tasks, half of which I’m just going to have to do again next week. I’m drowning in a sea of next actions.

Stand up with R is keeping me going, but barely.

*

I know this is controversial, but I don’t think that X (FKA Twitter) is a smoldering ash heap of garbage. It’s not as clever, fresh, or funny, as it was 2011, not even close, but that’s true for all social media. I don’t see people actively wringing hands about the commodification of Instagram or the pornification of Tumblr. Yes, Musk is kind of a douchey asshat, but if you make me choose a billionaire villain, I’m going to choose Bezos, the guy who really did turn every main street brick and mortar shopping district into a smoldering ash heap.

As a struggling writer, I don’t really mind the democratization of the blue check—I feel like maybe Elizabeth Gilbert has enough followers, you know? And I never depended on the Twitter home feed for reliable news sources, nor on establishment media profiles, which might be why I am suffering less now. My X lists, which I organize by topic, are still good. I know this because I regularly see tweets that present the same news, but with different sources, and opposing takes, next to each other.

As for Elon Musk’s fanboys, I greatly enjoy the sense of superiority I get from reading their impoverished takes on literature and culture. I am amused by the guy who rage-posts about the sticker price of abstract expressionist paintings whilst betraying he knows nothing about fine arts. Equally, I’m amused by the dudes who share reading lists that include Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Machiavelli, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ayn Rand, because lols.

For the last few months, the trad culture reply guys have been foaming at the mouth about Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Iliad, which somebody decided is disrespectful to the glory of ancient Greece or something. Wilson is the first woman to translate Homer into contemporary English blank verse, so that’s part of it, I’m sure. It probably didn’t help that the New Yorker described her as “radically plainspoken,” which is such New Yorker horseshit. Verse that is metrically formal but doesn’t rhyme is not really what I would call plainspoken, and Wilson’s translations are line after line of delightful, elegant, butter-in-your mouth, perfected English. Yes, it is more comprehensible than ancient Greek or 19th century British English, but it’s not “plain” as in common, so why call it that and trigger a bunch of people who think it’s disrespectful to speak in the vernacular unless it’s about cryptocurrency.

But let’s let you decide:

Here is the first line of Robert Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

Here is Emily Wilson’s

Tell me about a complicated man,
muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy

Maybe it’s because I’m not a scholar of Greek, but I think they’re both cool. Fagles’ is lyrical, and Wilson’s is, in the contemporary parlance, based. That’s the thing about really great literature, it’s rugged and multi-layered and withstands scrutiny, sometimes for multiple millennia.

All of which is to say that I’m not sorry I’m still on X, because it introduced me to Emily Wilson and now I’m reading her translation of the Odyssey, which is one of the only things that doesn’t make me angry right now.

*

During the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I was angry in the middle of the night because of all the reasons I’m angry right now, so I got on my phone, and rebooked, more or less, the same trip to Iceland. It was some kind of way to make myself feel better about doing all the things that I think I have to do, but feel resentful about. It was a story I told myself that was right out of a bucket of self-help/self-care nonsense, and I knew it just as soon as I said a version of it to my daughter, which made me sad on hindsight, as well as wishful, as I so often am, for a delete button for stupid things I say out loud.

Still, I walked around with this plan for a week or so, trying to make it stick. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go with someone, but not just anyone. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to have to shove it in between work meetings. I wanted to go and never come back. I wanted to go, but thought maybe I should be saving money for retirement, or inflation. I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to have to deal with parking, and getting to the airport, and finding someone to clear my driveway if it snows while I’m gone, because if I don’t, my 80 year old neighbor will do it and what if he has a heart attack, while clearing my driveway, while I’m chilling out in Iceland.

I pushed the booking to November. There’s a new moon right at the time of my birthday, good for chasing the aurora borealis.

I like this decision, in terms of Iceland, but I still have an anger in the middle of the night problem.

*

Back in the day, I taught the Fagles Odyssey, and had a great time with it because once you disabuse high school freshmen of the idea that poetry has to be dull, they realize the entire book is about feasting, drinking, sex, going around in disguises, crying whenever you feel like it, shooting bad people with your bow and arrow, and lying naked on beaches.

marginalia for the win

Book 5 has always been my favorite, because it leaves no doubt about both Odysseus’s strengths and his weaknesses. In just one chapter, we see him weeping helplessly on the beach, cutting down trees with basically his bare hands to make a boat, making love to Calypso whilst explaining to her why his wife, Penelope, is the only woman he can ever love, and surviving yet another shipwreck. The whole thing about learning that he is going to be allowed to leave Calypso’s island is really hard for him. He’s been trapped in paradise with a love goddess for years, spending his days “sobbing in grief and pain,” staring out at the “fruitless sea,” and he’s obviously gotten used to the routine. He doesn’t believe it when Calypso gives him the news that he’s allowed to leave, and even after he’s set sail and is once again at sea, navigating by the stars, he feels weighed down by the clothes and supplies that Calypso supplied for the journey.

But there are other goddesses, ready to help. Ino, “once human, human-voiced, now honored with the gods in salty depths,” rises up from the deeps and dispenses some very high quality wisdom.

You seem intelligent. Do as I say.
Strip off your clothes and leave the raft behind
for winds to take away. With just your arms
swim to Phaeacia. Fate decrees that there you will survive.

What I love about the Greeks is how they metaphorize the workings of our minds. I think we’ve probably all had a voice (or a Bible verse, or a Tarot reader, or an Instagram quote) that tells us it’s time to leave the baggage of the past behind, but the Greeks knew how to personify this voice as a goddess who is part human, part immortal, wise as the ocean, and able to sit with you on your life-raft for a quick little chat.

It’s poetry that fuels inspiration, you know. It’s all of those millennia of stories told by firelight, shaped by generations of souls imprinting on bright, heroic images spun out of the darkness by blind bards, effusions of courage and resilience, erupting from the ash heap of history.

*

On New Year’s Eve, I went over to my friends’ house to play games and watch the ball drop. J always throws a fun party: good food, excellent cocktails, tolerant teenagers milling around, a roaring wood stove, and the game where you peel apart a very large ball of prizes, rolled up in plastic wrap, while wearing gloves, while the person next to you rolls for doubles.

Later, we played a game of thoughtful questions, the kind of game I usually love because if you can’t get real with people, then what is the point. One of the questions was, what is an ordinary day in your perfect life? It’s a good question, right? It’s not “what is your perfect life?” it’s “what is an ordinary day in your perfect life.” You have to think a little bit. Both of the people who answered the question described a perfected version of their actual life—more money, better weather, no wars, no illness, more goodness, etc., but more or less the same cast of characters and location. It was unexpectedly moving to hear these answers—they were so full of love, that it stood out to me. We get so used to acting jaded.

It also freaked me out, because an ordinary day in my perfect life would look absolutely nothing like my current life. Not even close.

There was another question. It was getting later by then, so I don’t remember it exactly, but is was something along the lines of if you could solve the thing that worries you the most, what would it be? Here again the answers were quite moving—one of them even made me tear up. Even when we ruled out things we worry about with regard to our children, because of course that would be our first choice, my friends were still altruistic. One friend talked about strengthening his community. Another mentioned our broken political system.

Meanwhile, I was in a completely different head space. Mostly I worry about how to get to having an ordinary day in my perfect life—a day that would be conducted from a multi-bedroom ski chalet in Alta. Or from my converted loft in London where I paint abstract expressionist paintings and write best selling memoirs. Or from the desk of my very small, very elite, creative solutions company, where my team and I solve marketing problems like they do on “Scandal,” with implausible technology and inappropriate risk-taking.

*

On New Year’s Day, I woke up angry, and it was a whole different kind of monster than the middle of the night kind of anger.

I did all the things: Sit ups. Warm cashmere sweater. Coffee. I wrote in my journal about being stuck and what would it take to get unstuck. I self-validated all of the things that are legitimately challenging. I took a really long walk under gray skies in the mudscape of no-snow Vermont. I did a couple of primal screams. At the end of the day I was still very angry.

It felt terrible to realize that not everyone has a vast gulf between their real life and the life that they imagine. I hated realizing that I wasn’t part of some fellowship of sojourners, all of whom want a hell of a lot more than they currently have, while still being basically good people.

It was one thing to realize I am more like Odysseus, 20 years into a cursed exile, on the verge of yet another shipwreck.

It was quite another to realize that unlike in the Odyssey, there’s no goddess Ino on her way to climb up on my raft, whisper good advice, tie a sash around my waist, and promise me I’ll survive. No one like that is coming.

*

It is really hard to leave the baggage of our life behind, especially when it’s the good, comforting kind—the kind that pays the bills and greases the wheels of social discourse. When the goddess says Strip off your clothes and leave the raft behind for winds to take away, most of us have a pretty reasonable voice that replies, nah I’m good.

Which is why Odysseus is such a relatable hero. Upon hearing Ino’s wise words, the world’s wiliest hero says to himself that probably it’s better to just stay on the raft.

I will do this:
as long as these wood timbers hold together,
I will hang on, however hard it is.

Odysseus isn’t a young kid, new to adventure. He’s a battle-scarred, middle-aged warrior whose been surviving on his wits for a long time—sometimes to his own detriment, but not always. Some of his biggest wins are on his own terms (lashing himself to the mast to hear the Sirens) and due to his own cleverness (outfoxing Polyphemus with his “my name is NoName” bit). He’s been rationalizing, for years, the life of pleasure and immortality that he didn’t ask for, and doesn’t satisfy him, but that is objectively a very sweet deal. He’s got a bevy of goddesses willing to help, but also a sea-god who wants to drown him. He puts his trust in his capacity to endure for good reason.

He knows he’s at his limit though. The second part of this stanza is pretty striking.

But when they have smashed my raft to pieces,
then I will have no choice, and I will swim.

It’s almost as though he’s looking forward to the moment when there really isn’t a choice, as though his capacity for endurance is at odds with his clarity of purpose.

If you can endure anything, how do you know when it’s time to leave the raft? Do you pack your stuff and leave before the earth spits lava out of its core? Or after? Do you stick around to watch the sparks fly upward?

*

Snow came really late this year in Vermont—the first real snowfall was January 6th, AKA the twelfth day of Christmas. There was another big snowfall last week, too, thank goodness. I was watching it fall from my window while working on my middle managerial “to do” list, when I looked up and realized there was enough powder to ski on.

I almost didn’t go.

It was only barely enough to ski on, I had less than an hour before it got dark, and my nordic ski boots have a wonky toe clip. I didn’t know what the conditions on the nearby trails were, and I don’t trust the locals to know because they grew up in New England where they are confused about the difference between ice and snow. I didn’t want to drive anywhere because driving is annoying and makes me angry, like everything else. My rage and my tasks were so very soothingly familiar.

I went anyway. I booted up, went outside, and broke a path around my life-raft sized back yard. Then, I skied it, round and round, until the last light sank into the rosy-tipped horizon, remembering the old arts of balance and pacing. I wasn’t angry about going around in ridiculous circles, but I wasn’t not angry either. Mostly, I was thinking about a complicated woman who wanders and is sometimes lost, wondering when I’ll have no choice but to swim .

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