A Return to Posting

Early this morning I was still a bit off from a brief but encapsulating little virus- not so off that I couldn't enjoy the silence of my attic and my desk, but just weakened enough to give into a habit I am trying to escape: The Internet In the Morning.

Every morning I awake with the same thought. No Internet. A tidal pull manifests itself, and a quick swirl of rationalizations lead me to wherever my computer might be. Usually, I put the kettle on. These days I gather the day's news in the time a full kettle comes to boil.

This time, rather than the usual gamut of lefty blogs, La Repubblica (which I struggle to read), and the baseball box scores, I was scrolling through a particularly rich index of New Scientist. Being sleepy, and having effectively fasted for 30 hours or so, I was inclined to seeing patterns across disparate fields.

"Secret sleep of birds revealed in brain scans" "Climate race seperates the weeds from the trees" "Even vegetarians may not be safe from 'mad cow' prions" "'Time reversal' allows wireless broadband under the sea" "How switching language can change your personality" "Smoking gene protects against cocaine addiction" "Girls are as competitive as boys- just more subtle"

Poking, prodding, observing, altering...these headlines are a geography of human activity. Some of it is everyday science (some birds seem to sleep), some seem to reflect frightening, human-driven changes (mad cow disease), some reflect very interior phenomena (language and personality), and some simply the strange but constant expansion of human horizon and integration (more broadband!). This was, after all, New Scientist. There was an experience of the headlines, however, that did not read like a catalogue of modern effort and folly. Later in the day, I likely would not have read them in quite this way:

"Martian soil could grow turnips"

"How river engineering is tied to US floods"

"Artificial brain predicts death-row executions"

Each can be seen as existing in a different moral universe. Yet each is the product of extraordinary human effort: space exploration, gigantic engineering projects, computers. Three images were evoked for me: a giant turnip pushing out of the rusty martian soil like a sunrise, a great swell of water pushing over s-shaped banks and being largely absorbed before it reaches across to the next turn of the river, and a brain-shaped phosphorescence dryly selecting the doomed from the not-doomed.

Equal parts anarchy, surrealism, karma, and dread.

Homer's Secret Odyssey?

About fifty years ago Kansas school teacher named Mrs. Doris Wood (?) took her lifelong interest in the Iliad to the skies. She began noticing very explicable patterns, for instance, that when one warrior fatally wounds another, it always reflects a clearly delineated order of power: Achilles kills Hector who killed Patroclus who killed Sarpedon. She also noted that the so-called "precession of the earth's access", which is well established as having shifted the apparent north star from Vega (in the constellation Lyra, 12000 bce) to Thuban (in Draco, 3000 bce) to Polaris in a great circle back again to Vega (about 12000 years from now).

Because of this the stars that dip below the horizon are also always subtly changing; for periods of many, many years a prominent star may vanish. Yet it would be predicted to appear again, a consequence of long observation and uninterrupted folk traditions.

According to this theory, the stars were crucial to navigation, and in a preliterate society such as Homer's, stories maintained a coherent body of vital, factual information, in this case, a map of the stars that was flexible enough to be useful over many centuries.

Achilles, the Iliad's greatest warrior, "returns to the battlefield", that is, the skies, to chase down and slay Hektor (the constellation Orion). Achilles is the bright star Sirius that is so often mistaken for an aircraft or UFO these days. Sirius had vanished from the skies sometime in the millennia prior to Homer's time.

The squads of warriors are associated with constellations, each with a superior, or brightest, star, who is part of calibrated system of stars, squadrons, and so one, each relatively more powerful or weak in regards to the next.

The book, Homer's Secret Iliad is a good read and very interesting. The schoolteacher's daughter and son-in-law put the book together from her mother's notes. Unfortunately, I had loaned the book out and cannot remember her name. The book is available at Amazon.

Now this: Is the Odyssey a star map as well? Or at the very least, is it grounded in observation and categories, and thus an early expression of those most Greek characteristics?