Self Enduring All
Published 2017-06-11 on MindsA mythic paragon, in an example not to lead, but to show the essence of man.
There is an ancient story, with more ancient morals, of a man who lived through pain. Not pains meagre or intermittent, short and final, but perpetual and unceasing, which darkened his joys and killed his pleasures with their shadow, so that even the short intervals of respite were lost against the fundamental reality of pain. In all our fables, there are only two sorts of men to experience this to such a degree: the homeless, and the homesick. Each is an unassailable ailment, with a distant and tenuous fulfillment, which all the world acts to intervene, and the number who have completed their quest are outnumbered in hundreds by those who have died alone, adrift and in agony, placeless and cleft in spirit even before it fell from their bones, bodies unburied and unmourned, lost in the world and to the world, lost in the void and to the void.
Joyfully to the breeze, royal Odysseus turned his rudder. And when he had no rudder, he swam.
For days, hours, clinging to flotsam for respite, unshielded and immersed in the turgid brine, where it soaked him to his bones and coated his skin ever, a permanent coat of stinging salt and choking water. To be struck with waves, again and again, thrust under, given to drowning, to claw for the surface, again and again, for interminable hours of terrible tempest, only to endure more of the same. Only for his limbs to grow heavier, his lungs more wracked, his hands battered and raw against what splinters would float. On and on, until only at laziness would the storm depart, and he would be left adrift, with all his mounted agonies undiminished, to wait in quieter agony under clearer skies, the gentler swell of the waves, none of which could soothe a body or mind so abused. His skin still never dry, but the sun now beating upon his head, his shoulders, burning what could not be shielded, which the salt would only inflame further, scalding if he faltered and sank for a moment. For he for all this could not stand, could not brace nor simply endure in stillness, for he had to swim. To swim and swim perpetually to keep himself afloat, surrounded by leagues he could not measure, which would yield no respite once his plank was lost to the storm, or the drift of the sea. No man is more forsaken than he who the ground and all touch flees, to leave him at the mercy of the sea and the wind; so was he forsaken. For spans beyond counting, for spans not worth counting. With no prospect of salvation, no point to endurance, no hope of reprieve. A curse lay heavily about him, a curse for which he could not atone, and so doomed was he that no aid may come to him lasting. Condemned to die, in the worst of ways, struggling always with lagging strength, pulling more and more at every muscle, to simply stay afloat, to remain in the same place, and with the effort of every stroke diminishing the next, exhausting a finite supply that was always insufficient but yet seemed able to draw ever onwards. Long enough, strong enough, to survive, for indifferent fortune to yield to him land.
And even this, far kinder, was so fleeting. No man could give him a ship, or stores that would last more than a fortnight, before being smashed and lost by the wrathful sea, casting him again into his torment. No man could accompany him, that would not be drowned or ripped to pieces, torn away in all respects. To remain ashore was only to him a weak smile, a chance to replenish the flesh, and pay custom to the ways of living men, before his inevitable return to the brine, to unbridgeable agony. And if he lingered, if he tried to aver that doom which waiting for him, the trial and likely death, it was no joy to him ever. Scarcely could he leave the sea than he spoke of it, scarcely could he be fed and clothed than he could recall his lost ships and men, his blessings shattered and his fortune ruined. Yet for all this, he did never shun to return to the sea, but would depart as soon as his host would permit him, unto the very maw of the void, and his inevitable drift therein. Even where a ship would hold, it never failed to carry him to a place with pains equal or greater, dangers equal or greater, taxing more sharply and more violently than the churning sea, but as inescapable. Yet, yet always onward, royal Odysseus sailed, when he could sail, and swam, when he had nothing else.
This was his resolve above and beyond pain. A decision, a dedication to forward motion and an arbitrary end from which many had tried to dissuade him, and many to prevent him, and to which by divine edict he was barred. To bend against this was to bend into certain torment, likely death; but never defeat by surrender. For it was his will. His will undiminished by, unfettered and unaffected by, the pain which lay behind him and with certain foreknowledge ahead of him, that which lay all about him and defined him, as a man cursed is. Condemned by an inescapable god, hard-hearted and brutal as any, indeed more aptly a titan in relation to man, against whom none dared to directly intercede, and in whose domain he languished; none can claim reasonably to be more cursed than he. Against a divine edict itself, directly against the lord whose domain surrounded him without intermediary on every side, he swam. And in swimming, set his very being in opposition to that which would kill him at a stroke, not for pride, not for spite, nor for vengeance or defiance, not any of these things, but because he had resolved himself without question, without indecision in any moment of fleeting calm, to return to his native shores.
A man by no measure numb, insensitive, lacking in mind, but indeed a man whose cleverness turned wars beneath the eyes of heaven, and whose struggle turned the hearts of any mortal or lesser god to cross his path, whose tales made of him widely famed, while his quest yet continued, every drop as miserable, with mounting grief. Few men could rival his trials, or the cost at which he endured them, in the stories of heroes, and fewer still could rival his pain, his loss in the many tragedies. How many men had broken utterly, at a fraction of the gods' ire? How many had suffered so much for so small a crime? No contenders exist, in all the wide record. Yet for all this strain, he through sheer persistance endured without a loss in his will, any fracturing of that elemental resolve, or deterioration within his vaunted mind, clouded by the stains deeper than salt across his skin and far more biting. Still in every faculty, with every strength which he could bring to bear, he persisted across the great ocean, never faltering.
He could never have made home, for all this. There was in none of his actions, no total of his pains, any guarantee of success. Often did he despair, indeed, that the unshifting judgment of the deep god would wholly prevent him. Yet never did this halt him, in stepping again into the sheerest brink of pain, the prospect of death. Not with any assurance or conviction did he act, with some anticipated result, but by only a single and unerring drive. And he could, at a different turn of the tale, have swum onwards to his death, of age or infirmity, likely sucked beneath the surface against which he had fought for so many years, or still unto eternity, never to be satisfied. But in this world without mercy, his resolve eventually broached success, and fulfillment upon his native turf. His triumph there, over all the long and impossible years, can only be fittingly described in view of his travails, but not they by his success. The trial, the odyssey, stands by itself, a monolith beyond any circumstance or context, a tale into immortality, whatever became of fateful Odysseus upon the earth. His journey would become legend, then myth, until at last in our own time it would be handed down, so far departed from his home country. To strange and alien hands, and foreign minds. But across this, the vast dark gulf of space and time, one thing has carried, something which he bore in every stroke of that journey. One thing, from the mind of talented and multifaceted Odysseus, whose power would outlive even all the rest, from the savage tides to the gentler times after, which killed the man. His resolve, some bottomless and unshakeable thing, deeper than any ocean which would set upon him, and drag him under. It was what buoyed all else, ruled over them and drew them foreward, where without that power he surely would have died, adrift in the measureless sea, with no word of him but his vanishing ever to survive, and nothing to remark of him. But that innermost faculty assured elsewise, and would last on a scale beyond flesh, beyond even that ocean which dwarfed him, and the time and sum of his suffering. This has survived to us, as an example, as a paragon to every man, of what it is to live beyond any condition of life. What it is to exist as a man, and to will something.
Only one other, very brief, tale exists of similar magnitude, in all the myths. One other figure, who in endurance and dedication can mirror the stature of Odysseus. One other, worthy of mention, as an example for true strength. One name. Atlas.
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