Sicilian Lemons

Ever heard of the expression being between Charybdis and Scylla? 

Both were fabled terrible ordeals sailors had to pass when they wanted to navigate in what is believed to be the Strait of Messina, a narrow pass between mainland Italy and Northeastern Sicily. The first, a whirlpool that sunk ships, leaving no possible survivors. The second, a six-headed monster with blades for arms and digits that reached out to pluck sailors from ships as they advanced through the Strait. The expression, therefore, is not one to describe a lovely stroll by the sea following a hearty Sicilian dinner and too many sips of the sweet nectar the island grapes produce.

In French, we say to fall from Charybdis to Scylla. Both more or less describe going from bad to worse. And so, when lemons are continuously bombarded, one after the other, rather skip the lemonade and head straight for the limoncello. Sicily is, after all, renowned for its sultry digestive. Yet when it seems that the release from it all will never come, that « it has to stop » but without really knowing what « it » is, well, maybe we can turn to those who have a rather relevant experience in the matter.

Thoughts about this piece have been drifting through my mind for months without me being able to translate them into words. Theseus, Perseus, Odysseus haunted me, our lives intimately matched to their timeless, never-ending struggles. How could I connect them to topics that so relevant today - conservation, well-being, and our relationship with nature? Until a job in Sicily awoke more stirrings and things finally started to click.

So as our European forests turn red, amber and gold, as summer fades to a spring of orange leaves, please join me as we revisit the warm shores of the Mediterranean, just one last time, in an ode to Beauty, faith and freedom. 

Man’s Fatal Flaw: Hubris

Odysseus received his fair share of lemons - they never stop, or perhaps they do so only when we cease to look at them as such. In that respect, Homer sings the eternity of human nature: The Iliad and The Odyssey depict cycles of growth and chaos, both found within man and society. ‘Myths do not disappear, they wait, dormant, for us to embody them’ wrote Camus in his wonderful Summer. Odysseus is the perfect example of heroes whose flawed portrayals are an open book for us to see within. Love, hate, war, power, arrogance, peace, identity, curiosity….Odysseus’ strife and continuous obstacles to return home, hopes squashed by winds taking him far off course, monsters eating his men and Poseidon sinking his ships stand to show that if anything, we are constant in our inconsistencies and the adversity we face.

« And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more » (V, 230-234)

― Homer, The Odyssey

But perhaps let us start with context, for those unfamiliar with the Odyssey. Upon leaving Troy, he raids an island, Ismarus. Perhaps it was punishment for the violence that ensued despite the end of the war, perhaps it was just bad luck, but a series of storms and other unpleasant encounters blow him off course to an island that for the purpose of this piece I’ll hope was Sicily (many classicists and archeologists also believe it to be such).

The hero’s run-in with the Cyclops Polyphemus is quite dramatic - the one-eyed giant instantly devours two of his men before locking them up in his cave, with his sheep. Let us not forget these blood-thirsty giants are gentle(ish) pastoralists on a good day. After introducing himself as « Nobody », Odysseus manages to blind the creature in his sleep, mauling his unique eye into a bloody mess, instructing his men to hold on to the sheep’s bellies as the Cyclops lets them out every morning. Take a moment and imagine Polyphemus running round the island howling in pain screaming ‘Nobody hurt my eye, nobody blinded me!’. Homer had a sense of humour. 

Free to go, the men run to their ship, but Odysseus can’t help it. He turns around, looks at Polyphemus and shouts his true identity, son of Laertus, King of Ithaca. And so Cyclopes howls in fury and implores his father Poseidon’s vengeance.

Odysseus just committed an act of hubris by arrogance. 

Hubris, or hybris.  A word that rolls delicately on the tongue; a concept hard to grasp. It has sailed through the ages, embossing different names - the temptation of fate, arrogance, pride, excess, deregulation, a feeling or act of violence, but these are only facets of it. Hubris by vengeance, hubris by vanity….or the cause of a lot of suffering. Perhaps it can be best illustrated by uncontrolled actions and addictions that pull us inexorably back towards inner pits of darkness. Hubris is the unmeasured desire of what we do not have, rather than what is already within reach.

We are human and we are mortal. Hubris is a trait that is embedded within us forever  - it is time to move past pointing fingers, crying over man’s arrogance will get us nowhere. From the ashes of hubris, hope, determination, solutions grow, and we see this in Homer’s texts. The Iliad and The Odyssey complete each other in a cycle of devastation and rebirth. Like the savannah fires that rage across the Serengeti, their ashes spread the promise of new life, fertility and renewal. The first sings the chaos of war and passion as one, the pinnacle of hubris. The second, a quest for harmony and peace that is neither linear nor easy. Odysseus’ return home brings balance to a decade of brutality - it is the desire to finally live a good life. Life is nothing but a series of seasons that last as long as they need to for shifts to occur. Whilst war - actual or symbolic - is ineluctable and embedded within, so too, is restoring harmony. Restoring whilst creating, thus entering a new paradigm, is our only duty as we leave the devastated plains of Troy behind.

Finding Meaning and Purpose: What’s the point? 

Ever asked yourself that question? Chances are, we all have.

One of Odysseus’ first stops is amongst the Lotophagi islanders who drank brews made of lotuses that completely mulled the senses and pains alike. Time, struggles, life became painless, and meaningless. The Lotus, an ancient heroin of sorts, causes people to forget one of two things that should never be forgotten - purpose. And purpose, is intimately linked to responsibility. The delicate little flower is comfort, stability, ease, hypnotic and enticing, but yet another weapon of absurdity trying to lull us into passivity and sweet dull inactivity.

My last writings mention the sense of home, explore the feeling of « belonging »  - and for the Greeks, this was very much tied to living a meaningful life. Being where we’re supposed to be. Thus, The Odyssey sings the return to the oikos (oikos in Ancient Greek is ‘home’ - see Chapter 8), yes, but the return to the self as well. Far from the shores of Troy, devastated by hubris, the terrible obstacles the men face on the journey home across the Mediterranean are phases that leave them with nothing but themselves. The challenges are mirrors presented to the characters - and so to us - stripping down layers of superficiality, pride, excess until they are nothing but their bare selves. A lost hero of Troy, the man behind the Wooden Horse, he must become the man who once laboured the fields of Ithaca, a husband and a father, a wise and kind ruler who enjoyed living a good life. Life, wrote Homer three thousand years ago, is not a collection of easy pleasures we feel entitled to, but a continuous struggle to find inner peace, and one’s place. We are Odysseus; the journey home becomes journey to the self. 

« Son of Laërtês, versatile Odysseus, after these years with me, you still desire your old home? Even so, I wish you well. If you could see it all, before you go— all the adversity you face at sea— you would stay here, and guard this house, and be immortal—though you wanted her forever, that bride for whom you pine each day. Can I be less desirable than she is? Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals compare with goddesses in grace and form?” To this the strategist Odysseus answered: “My lady goddess, here is no cause for anger. My quiet Penélopê—how well I know— would seem a shade before your majesty, death and old age being unknown to you, while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day I long for home, long for the sight of home » (V, 212-229).

We can choose humanity, and our ôikos - our home - like we can choose to numb our senses into turning a delicious yet debilitating blind eye, a modern lotus perhaps. Between numbing flowers and seductive nymphs offering immortality, Odysseus’ determination to return may well have been challenged, and more than once. And yet, despite the nymph Calypso’s efforts, the memory of his wise and beautiful Queen Penelope - love - brings him back to the shores of humanity. When Odysseus is freed from the nymph, refusing her promise of immortality, he not only chooses life, but rediscovers, and accepts what it means to be human. 

He leaves Troy a King and arrives home, washes up on the sands of Ithaca as a man stripped bare from his journey. A journey that tossed our hero across the Mediterranean by the Fates, from the enticing Sirens, to man-hating Circe, Charybdis and Scylla, conflicting winds gifted by Aeolus himself, the wrath of the Sun as cupid men slaughter his bulls to the lingering temptation of immortality. His men become the cause of his downfall, disobeying his orders, giving in to temptation, greed and foolish weakness.

Love, joy, wisdom, happiness, peace of mind and tranquility, and most of all, Beauty - these are our guides. Athena’s love for Odysseus saved him more than once, but so did the appeal of a wholesome and meaningful life. It is up to us to decide - to choose - what ‘meaningful’ is. Accepting destiny, its pains and challenges does not mean passiveness. Freedom, in Homer, is to continue our mission. It is, in a sense, that which keeps our will to live intact. We cannot win the war - we are mortal - but we are free to live, and to fight the battles that make us feel alive. Welcome what is, because no mortal escapes destiny - no god either.

There are endless talks of the journey versus the goal, but man’s most anxiety-triggering thought - lack of purpose or meaning in a mortal life - supersedes both. The hero’s determination to return is as much a fight against hubris - the more the poem progresses, the less he gives in to it - as it is a quest for identity, belonging and a reconciliation with humanity. So what is the point ? Only you can answer that, but remember, with dusk comes the promise of dawn.

Beauty: reconnecting with what makes us human

Perhaps Beauty should be understood here in the cultural, human sense. For nothing is beautiful unless looked at by man. It is powerful only because it exists if we do, and because again, its existence is constant. My definition of Beauty, capitalised adoringly and platonically, places it on a pedestal. Not just a pretty thing that sparks desire or admiration, but a much higher overarching and universal concept that sits above all. It can be life, it can be light, it can be realisation and transcending, innocence or purity for they all bear it - always sublime and sacred, for it is what makes us human.

« To escape poetry and rediscover the peacefulness of stones, we need other deserts, and other places, with neither souls nor resting places. »

— Albert Camus, Summer

A month ago, I stepped into the glinting turquoise waters of the Sicilian coast, lapping onto shores of golden sand. Glistening shoals of fish adorned a little creek, a small refuge I enjoyed after long swims in the search for fleeting silver scales that darted by in a brilliant dazzle. The Mare Nostrum’s shores are a place of wondrous light. Sounds are very different to the roaring Atlantic; the Mediterranean and her seas are tranquil lovers most of the time, tirelessly caressing the sand in a salty embrace. The Sicilian sun has a strong glare, yet the gentle shallows melt around me like a welcoming cradle. With Okeanos we dance and play, with Thalassa it’s a tale of warmth and compassion, her finiteness a reassuring yet intense embrace. Her currents are charged with antique and modern tales, her grip stretching from the hot sands of North Africa to the ardent Hispanic shores, the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic and Ionian peninsulas, expanding to the Levant, gateway to the East. Along the way, the Mediterranean honours as much the Balkans and their plight against the Ottoman Empire as she does King Aegeus as he jumped into her depths believing his son Theseus to have died at the hands of the Minotaur. Yet ruthlessly claiming the lives of thousands of humans attempting to find the promise of something elsewhere. Light, warmth, wonder, all are present here, and they are the glinting bronze shields that give us strength to accept the world and its absurdity. Such is Beauty.

I sat there, for hours and days, reading or contemplating the histories that unfold(ed) in the Mediterranean’s flow. Nature has a way of grounding us like a mother, stirring emotions and triggering thoughts. The sun, the sea, the forests, the bush, the mountains - their memory compels us to return to them. Soothing, recharging…rebuilding*.

Helios gifts us every day with his golden rays of life, who are we to ignore them? Across the ages and civilisations, light is a guide, a trigger for awakening, venerated by artists, writers and dreamers, turning light into a source of inspiration and creation. Man exists through creation, and thus we loop the loop: in the darker phases of life - the « lows » -  Beauty is what prevents us from straying too far away and getting lost.

* (There’s also science behind it for those interested)

The new Troy 

« Do you believe in God? Me? I believe in Zeus » (Paul Veyne). The gods are everywhere. The product of man’s understanding of the world, they may be different today, but their roles still stand. Athena’s wisdom and guidance persist elsewhere, her disguises adapted to our world - like in this beautiful conservation project in Cyprus with Owls, archaeological ruins and organic produce. More than ever though, it can feel as if monsters and threats have new identities. Like Camus’s metaphorical plague, a symbol for ideologies that infected the 20th-century civilisations, the Trojan battlefield, a place of burning rage and passion, a place of excess, of hubris, is never far beneath us. 

« For the gods do not reveal themselves to all eyes » (XVI, 161).  

- The Odyssey

I’ve begun to read The Plague - and now The Iliad and its Trojan War - under a different prism. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges our century faces is that of drastic environmental changes and their adverse effects on livelihoods across ecosystems of all kinds. As per my last piece of writing, we might often find ourselves overwhelmed, and at a loss, as we contemplate the enormity of the fight to protect nature. But as we’ve just seen, History can never end in tragedy: Odysseus returns home. Like Sisyphus who climbs his mountain eternally, it is a cycle of highs and lows. Of growth and recession. Personal and emotional life, society, economic phenomenons - and history. Good and bad are arbitrary values - but this isn’t the place for me to delve into our dichotomous ways to make sense of the world. 

However. 

Current environmental shifts - and degradation compared to the quality we once knew existed - are the new plagues and Trojan battlefields. Yet, like Odysseus, who escapes the collective fury of Troy after a victory embedded in hubris, and later angry gods and sirens alike, like him we have a choice - he persevered. The gods strung him around, but eventually broke free, to at long last live a good life of peace and love - balance and harmony restored as The Odyssey ends. Everything must be rebuilt, and his process of retribution begins with the long journey home. 

Beauty isn’t enough. It’s a trigger perhaps, but John Muir’s main problem was that soothing healing nature doesn’t feed people and their families - it’s more or less where we’re at today as the overarching discourse is still about why protecting nature is for the ‘privileged’, or those who can afford to consider nature. In fact, it has become an easy argument to avoid too much change within our habits - because we hate change. And yet, it would make much more sense to invest in Natural Capital, rather than to continuously try and repair damage (See The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review). We owe everything to the natural world. The lotuses are easy, fast and comfortable pleasures and have lulled us into forgetting this. Like the gods who gave Odysseus the antidote to the challenges they sent him, we attempt to fix the pressures we impose on ecosystems, often in a state of urgency.

One of the founding principles of conservation today relies on reconnecting people and nature. Interdependencies between both have of course always existed - they still do, obviously - but by people here, I mean socio-economic entities - civilisations. In time hopefully, relationships with nature can grow to become intrinsic rather than solely instrumental. Though the disconnect with our environment is perhaps one of the main guiding principles to its degradation, socio-ecology helps to restore nature within a structure that enables livelihoods of all sorts to increase their well-being. Spending time in nature, associations to concepts like Beauty, observing and understanding the cyclical nature of life will hopefully not only trigger action but shift an entirely different value system as we find lost lenses to look at the Earth differently.

It’s not so much about the symbols and spirituality, more so about analysing past and current rapports with nature and human nature to fill the void between society and ecology that has very much expanded in modern civilisations. As always, we should, I believe, strive toward learning and adopting perspective. 

Conclusion

« Everything is beautiful in what unveils » (Illiad, XXII, 73). Transcending is unveiling.

Homer’s writings are of pure beauty. Celestial skies, glorious expanses of nature radiating with light, trees heavy with olives and glinting seas….they transport us back to the Mediterranean as we’ve never felt it before, calling upon synesthesia as a gentle reminder to how non-linear we are, reconciling past and present as Mnêmosynê -Memory- meets experience. The art of portraying Beauty is a final gift from the gods for those who cannot see it, or as Baudelaire and Rimbaud wrote, deciphering nature’s symbols to increase us mortals’ sensitivity to the world. 

In the 21st century, we have images, stills or moving, to convey Beauty. Thousands of years ago, the Muses, daughters of Mnêmosynê, spoke through poetry. Poets were masters of immortality, spreading their words like nectar and ambrosia, singing heroes, gods and history in one. Eternity becomes attainable with the verb. Words awaken new worlds, explored with imagination. 

Now we have photos that replicate copies, and at times this frustrates me - it takes the viewer places, maybe, but it’s too easy, too obvious. Subtlety is an art in itself. Suggestion and wandering versus instant rendition and gratification - what do you chose between a naked whole and a suggestive silhouette? Words are powerful. They are often forgotten in the name of action, but without them thoughts remain obscure and strange feelings, indecipherable and confused.

Yet, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Words and images are both compelling means to convey and venerate Beauty, inspiring even the smallest of sparks. Anything to wake us up from the Lotus’ slur. The gods do not reveal themselves to everyone, perhaps not immediately, but they do so in these sparks of feelings and emotion. A beginning to a slow reconnection with our own humanity, slowly seeping to our environment, to once again revel in the original meaning of an ecosystem. A home. 

Bibliography

Homer The Iliad

Homer The Odyssey (used a range of translations depending on how much I preferred the verses).

Sylvain Tesson A Summer With Homer

Albert Camus The Plague

Albert Camus Summer