One more pirate post

[malsperanza]

I watched O Brother Where Art Thou the other night, and once again enjoyed the clever way the movie blends The Odyssey with The Wizard of Oz--two tales about baseball Getting Home, because Home is where one finds one's heart's desire. Home, as Dr. Lizardo says, "is where you hanga your hat. I feel so breakup," he adds plaintively, "I wanna to go home."

Don't we all?

There are two main Hero's Journeys, one is the picaresque, The Further Adventures Of, in which the hero leaves his old life, ventures forth, and arrives after terrible trials in a new place. Luke Skywalker leaves Tatooine and never really looks back. Achilles leaves Greece and sallies forth to meet his fate, as does Galahad, who goes after the Grail (no, the real Grail, not that damn Da Vinci thing) and never returns. Harry Potter is probably this kind of story. If Harry finds a home, it won't be in his Uncle's suburban villa, nor (I think) even in the Headmaster's turret of Hogwarts, where he found a temporary haven, if not a real home. A job as Dark Arts instructor is a possibility, but a slim one, I think. No, Harry, if he survives, will make a new home for himself.

The other version of the Journey is the better one, most times. It's the one Bilbo calls "There and Back Again." The hero ventures forth, or is driven ("It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door," says Bilbo, who ought to know), lost, compelled, exiled, or merely curious, and travels out to the furthest reaches of strangeness, alienness, and possibility, before discovering that There's No Place Like Home. He returns, and either finds his true heart's desire, sitting by the fire weaving fine cloth and waiting for him, and Everything old is new again, and All's well that ends well, and They lived happily ever after til the end of their days. Or else...

Or else he returns and all is changed, changed utterly, and he is changed and the world is changed, and You can't go home again. As TS Eliot puts it,

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.

(from The Journey of the Magi, http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/magi.html)

And Tennyson's aged Ulysses (http://www.gober.net/victorian/ulysses.html) says:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees [...]

Sitting in Ithaka with his family around him and all settled, he says:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Whether the venturer stays home and is happy enough or eventually sets off again on new travels depends a bit on his temperament and his ability to weigh one good against another: whether love is more important or curiosity. For love loves a hearth and a roof, but curiosity has only one real object of desire: whatever is over the horizon, whatever is in the locked chest. Whatever I have in my pocket. Whatever, as the guy says in Buckaroo Banzai, is in the big pink box, behind Door Number Three, around the next corner.

For some heroes, "Returning home" means "leaving forever." This is true of Tennyson's Ulysses and also Dante's. It may be true for Jack Sparrow too. Here is Dante's Ulysses in Hell (Longfellow translation):

Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,

Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;

But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been. [...]

'O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand
Perils,' I said, 'have come unto the West,
To this so inconsiderable vigil

Which is remaining of your senses still
Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge,
Following the sun, of the unpeopled world.

Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang;
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,
But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.' [...]

And having turned our stern unto the morning,
We of the oars made wings for our mad flight,
Evermore gaining on the larboard side.

Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;
For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,
And smote upon the fore part of the ship.

Three times it made her whirl with all the waters,
At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,
And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,

Until the sea above us closed again." (Inferno, Canto XXVI)

Dante and Tennyson both remind us that Odysseus too was a pirate--perhaps the greatest pirate of them all.

* * * *

Swing low, tolls the bell of the great spiritual, sweet Chariot,
Comin for to carry me home.

Like so much great poetry, the song has a double meaning: since for slaves there was no possibility of ever returning really home, to Africa, "carry me home" was both a metaphor for the soul's journey "home" to the bosom of God and a code phrase meaning, "I am leaving this place and never coming back."

If you get there before I do,
Tell all my friends I’m coming, too.

"There" being both heaven and the northern free states. For slaves, who lived in an Underworld, a Looking-glass world where laws and justice served injustice and evil, what was good was bad and bad good, and black was white and white black. Naturally, in such a world "coming home" meant "leaving forever." For an escaping slave, as the song tells us, the Hero's Journey was both kinds at once: the kind where the hero departs forever from the place of his birth, leaves behind family, friends, hearth, and identity, and sojourns out into the wilderness, to conquer it or die; and the kind where the hero is driven from his own hearth by crisis of circumstance, fares out into the wilderness, meets monsters, and then returns home to safety, love, happiness, and his belonging-place.

I suspect that Jack Sparrow faces something like this duality. Jack's constant wandering about the world is not that of the exiled Wandering Jew, condemned to homelessness and therefore to lovelessness and loss of name and identity. Rather, his wandering is itself the purpose of his quest, if quest it is. Jack hates a cage, a room, a box, a coffin. He likes the open quarterdeck, he likes constant motion and change. His natural state is that of chaos. As Jack himself might say, better to be still a liar than a lier-still.

Somewhere in the 3rd movie I think Jack will be offered the opportunity to come in out of the weather, into the civilized world, sit close to the hearth, to love and be loved. (Is it possible, frex, that he is in love with not one but two Black Pearls?). But I think Jack will remain true to his first love: and will carry his home on his back like a turtle--or rather, under his feet, upon the restless waters. Perhaps he cannot get his compass to make up its mind because his heart's desire is the compass itself, with its eternal possibilities. In short, Jack is not afraid of the Isla de la Muerte, nor of the Leviathan, nor of the storm. Because Jack is larger than these; Jack is the Whirlwind.