Letter #174: Poseidon and the Poets

A realism worth the name.

Dad,

It was great to see you this weekend—and it was fun going to the movies, even if it was The Return.

I liked that movie less and less the longer it went on, and even less the more I thought about it afterward. You put it perfectly: what we call “realism” is in fact a form of blindness to one half of reality. Once you’ve decided flesh is real and spirit is illusion, you can only conclude that the artists of old were imagining things when they described a world bursting with life and glory. It follows that understanding Homer means seeing “past” or “beyond” his fanciful embellishments to get at what he was “really” describing “underneath” all the mythology: a world of meat, gore, and death.

I suppose the materialists may be right that meat, gore, and death are what really lies beneath all our sparkling war poetry. But we could at least do Homer the courtesy of taking him at his word when he tells us he didn’t see it that way. And instead of deciding in advance in favor of our own bleak outlook, we might ask whether the Greeks, and every other culture before ours, saw something we didn’t.

What might that have been? As I said in my essay, I don’t think people in the past made contact with a different world, featuring a different cast of characters, than we do. The evangelists don’t describe the height or eye color of demons, and I assume that’s because they weren’t looking at spirits the same way you and I look at each other, as bodies located in space and time. Likewise I take it that the content of Homer’s experience when he gazed out at the ocean was the same as ours.

But his interpretation of what he saw was different: built into his perception of the sea was his sense of it as animated by a spirit he called “Poseidon.” The inner life of that spirit, its ultimate status as a living entity, must have been something of a mystery to him. It’s a mystery to us, too, as it was to Isaac Newton. Science tells us how nature moves. It tells us nothing about the inner powers that make it move.

The question we arrived at, which I hope we’ll pick up in the new year, is how to depict the real world as if it were really occupied by living souls—ours, and perhaps those of others. God came to earth at Christmas in nothing more or less than a normal human body: “He had no remarkable appearance, no majesty that would attract our gaze.” Great Christian art—a sculpture by Michelangelo, say—can show you divinity not just in a cloud of thunder but in the curve of a hand, the glance of an eye. If we could do that at the movies, on the timeline, in V.R., well, that would be a realism worth the name.

Love,
Spencer