The Opposite of Chaos

It began with a student's observation as we discussed The Odyssey: "If Calypso has granted Odysseus immortality, then is Penelope getting older than him all those years he's on Calypso's island?"

It's moments like that when I wish I weren't standing in front of them, but rather sitting amongst them, silently pondering the idea that was just introduced. My brain immediately began to hurt as the logic of that student's question revealed itself. I was just looking through some notes on a poetry lecture given by William Seaton last year, in which he said "The opposite of chaos is complexity." The complexity of The Odyssey, hinted at in that question about time, wowed me this semester as I taught it to this avid group.

Odysseus is his own bard as he tells his story (with no living witnesses, no one to dispute his memory or his version of events—convenient, yes?). Disguise after disguise (with help from Athena); he goes from being no man to being many. Ageless for a spell, yet twenty years older. A visit with the dead provides him with knowledge of things that happened in his absence and because of his absence—not quite prophecy, but a prediction of a constantly-shifting present.

A journey, so much of which was standing still, going backward, changing almost every mortal place in which he set foot. Nothing is simple.

*
now
the
calendar

gaunt
yet
sated