“O Father, Where Art Thou?” — Patriarchal Poetics, Athenian Mechanics, & Kitchen Intuition
A open letter to my father on Homer, Kubrick, and culinary authority.
“A thousand girls that look like me
Staring out at the open sea
Repeat the words until they’re true:
Cover my eyes electric blue.”
— Arcade Fire, “Electric Blue”, Everything Now (2017)
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“Oh Maker, tell me, did you know this love could burn so yellow? Becoming orange — and in its time — explode from gray to black then bloody wine?”
— Janelle Monae “Oh Maker”, The Archandroid (2010)
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“I had my recurring dream last night. I guess I should have expected it. It comes to me when I struggle — when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. It comes to me when I try to be my father’s daughter.”
— Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, opening lines (1993)
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[For non-family members reading this, this one’s definitely in lieu of therapy, and I’m probably never going to do a full edit of it because I posted it on the day my grandfather died so…I mean can’t say I didn’t warn you]
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Dear Father,
I think my time is up for dawdling on this letter. Though you asked me to write it for you on Father’s Day and I told you then that I already knew what I had to do and had to write, I have truly and succinctly dragged my feet in getting it fully churned out. Not for lack of effort — I’ve written over 10,000 words for this but nothing really seems to come together.
But tonight after I washed my grandfather’s blood off my hands and thought about his dead youngest sister, how it was her birthday today and I hid from my feelings rather than honor her memory — I figured I could at least sit down and work out these details.
So I have to be honest — this letter is now going to serve two purposes — speaking to you on patriarchy, but also honoring Aunt Gayle. Because I’ve really cut myself off from grieving her these past eight years, and I think that’s been one of the larger detriments to my adult life.
I’m writing this letter at your request, partly to answer a question I asked you on Father’s Day that you were unable to answer me around patriarchy:
“You were the one who pushed me to keep going to school, to use my brain and to reach for more, through one of the most patriarchal indoctrinating institutional systems in our country — why are you now angry at me for using what I’ve learned against you when that’s exactly what you’ve pushed me to do?”
Like that Baldwin quote: “The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which [s]he is being educated.”
Talking about patriarchy is never easy between the two of us. It’s not even something I wanted to discuss with you outright until recently, when some of the points in my research were seeming a little hypocritical in light of my lived experience.
So I need to get into it with you over text, since in person hasn’t really been working for us. Also because it’s literally been a block in my research this summer: since I’ve been home for quarantine, I’ve been working on a digital resource packet around melanating the classics through Afrofuturism. I’ve been digging through so many Black interpretations of Graeco-Roman mythology and trying to harness it into something accessible for scholars to work with. But I keep hesitating when I write about the mythical archetypal patriarchs because too many parallels with my own life keep fogging up my brain and making things seem unclear and hazy.
Like when it gets really overcast here and suddenly entire world goes into varying layered shades of foggy grey-blue.
At the same time, this has been really overdue for us and there is too much happening for me to stay silent anymore. I know, I know — you probably have some comeback about how I’m always speaking my mind. That’s true, but so is my silence. You know how many paradoxes I embody. To depersonalize it with astrology: blame my Gemini moon.
And so in the tradition of our family, it’s time to teach with stories. While I tend to be very personal in my academic work, I rarely bring up my family so this is something new for me. I guess those are the pitfalls of mothering invention (and of not having health insurance after my last birthday to help pay for actual therapy, so sometimes I have to outsource it to my research instead — thanks Obama).
But at the same time, is it any wonder that I study ancient mythology when the main way I grew up communicating was telling tales of all kinds? Especially when the first ancient text I read in full was Homer’s Odyssey at age 12, the tale of the ultimate lying patriarch?
There are so many ancient patriarchs I could and have compared you to. Growing up as a mixed kid uncertain of her place in a “post-racial” society, you were Daedalus, the fantastic inventor of the labyrinth, enslaved for his brilliant mind, giving me a thread to understand your grooved nuances, a father so desperate to escape bondage, but so utterly terrified of losing his child.
When things got turbulent at home once I started college, you were Oedipus, unable to see the clear wrong he had done while his four turbulent children stewed to comprehend. Issues of identity and action boiled over until our household ripped itself apart in civil war which we have still not recovered from.
But the truth is, that was always me seeing your patriarchal behavior in the rhythms of our family, through the different spheres that intersect us all: race, gender, sexuality, mentality, sensitivities, and the like. I’m far more reluctant to look at our own personal relationship and the impact.
Yet Odysseus is the main patriarchal figure I’m looking at for my research. And he has always been my personal favorite patriarch because of the heart of the tale: a father telling a series of evolving tales to a court to gain safe passage and have his supper.
So I’m going to tell some stories about you, me, Odysseus, and the skills we’ve traded in our own odysseys.
Father Black Face/White Space and his Colored-Blind Bard of a daughter have got to spin one last collaboration.
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Kitchen Intuition
Or, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Sonnenaufgang “Sunrise”) (1896)
Or, “You Are What You Let Them Eat (Cake)”
Or, The Roseyfingered Dawn Motif (8th century BCE oral tradition)
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BBC Interviewer: The sixth member of the Discovery crew was not concerned about the problems of hibernation, for he was the latest result in machine intelligence: The H-A-L 9000 computer, which can reproduce, though some experts still prefer to use the word mimic, most of the activities of the human brain, and with incalculably greater speed and reliability. We next spoke with the H-A-L 9000 computer, whom we learned one addresses as “Hal.” Good afternoon, HAL. How’s everything going?
HAL: Good afternoon, Mr. Amor. Everything is going extremely well.
BBC Interviewer: HAL, you have an enormous responsibility on this mission, in many ways perhaps the greatest responsibility of any single mission element. You’re the brain and central nervous system of the ship, and your responsibilities include watching over the men in hibernation. Does this ever cause you any lack of confidence?
HAL: Let me put it this way, Mr. Amor. The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
BBC Interviewer: HAL, despite your enormous intellect, are you ever frustrated by your dependence on people to carry out actions?
HAL: Not in the slightest bit. I enjoy working with people. I have a stimulating relationship with Dr. Poole and Dr. Bowman. My mission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship, so I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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To quote Fraulein Maria as she’s attempting to figure out how to teach her seven young charges to sing as she’s getting her guitar in tune: “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…”
Which means going back to the first lesson you ever taught me — or at least, the first lesson that I remember. I’ve learned so much from you over the years, at your side in the kitchen, how to engage with uncertain aspects of society, different styles of debate, that I often forget that the very first lesson you taught me was how to hit a boy.
It’s one of your favorite stories to tell — how when I was two or three you gave me the instruction that if a boy wouldn’t stop bugging me that I should strike him upwards with the flat of my palm. There was a kid’s track meet, probably at Garfield High, the school three of your children would later attend, that my older siblings were participating in. I was sitting in a line with the other little kids and there was a boy behind me, who kept poking me and pulling on my hair. You saw, from afar, as I kept turning around and asking him to stop and as he kept ignoring me, and you started across the field towards us.
But then I turned around and hit the little boy up the chin, just in the way that you showed me, and you stopped in your tracks, surprised and elated.
I think that’s the first memory I ever remember intentionally letting go of when I was a kid. You know how ridiculous my memory is with detail, there are some things that I have to let go of to let other stuff stick around. But that was an easy choice or me: why would I need to keep that memory in my head when you told it perfectly every time? I didn’t need it in my head, because I could count on your oral narrative record. For me, it was our first great collaboration.
In some ways, this story set the stage for why I saw you as a hero growing up. As the figure who would swoop in and save me if things got too hairy, but who would also try to teach me the tools and techniques of navigating life.
However…at the same time…I’ve also always been contrary and critical. Much to your oft begrudging admiration.
And while I love our first collaboration… I was also dealt with a very large contradiction right around the same time: I got a little brother who loved pulling and grabbing at me and I couldn’t hit him. It made sense as a kid, but as we got older it was a contradiction that I couldn’t stand. That as a teenager it was “V, don’t yell at or hit your brother” instead of “Mal, maybe keep your hands off your sister?”
It’s a shitty situation you put me in with my brother. But more importantly, it had incredible impact upon his and my relationship. Because essentially you had given my little brother free reign to disrespect the autonomy of my flesh (at the same time that you were also teaching him to never lay his hands on another girl) which made the stage of competition between Mal and I growing up particularly charged and difficult to establish any sort of trust or bond.
Also he and I told the tallest tales of the whole family growing up, so even when I’d try to hold him accountable, there were too many ways that he would out-talk me. And so, instead, I had to learn how to catch my brother in the act of doing something wrong and show you to prove that I wasn’t lying.
It was my first lesson in stage-managing and direction.
And I got good at it. Because Mal was my first teacher in dealing with patriarchal behavior. And the first time that I realized that I had internalized patriarchy within myself: I had so many loud and raging thoughts in my head about the kind ways that I should engage with male behavior. But also how I was so concerned with you and mom as an audience to prove myself. I was known as the family liar. With my brother I could prove that it wasn’t just me.
This is pretty hilarious for me to look back on now, given how much lying and telling tales is embedded in the fabric of how we communicate in our family, and other than Ev, aka the one who grounds himself the hardest in facts and data and is excelling in accounting right now, we are all spectacular liars.
But because I was a kid, that didn’t occur to me until much later, so instead I learned something first with Mal that I then turned and would use on the rest of you: how to stage revenge when you know you’re right.
There was something deeper at the core of it though: something that resonated with that very first lesson you taught me about hitting a boy who wouldn’t leave me alone, and something about the way that you’d always tell that story.
I think it was the attention you would always pay to my responses right up until I hit the little boy: that I kept trying to do things the right way, of asking, of telling him no, of setting my boundaries and having him still ignore it. And how you were on your way to intervene, not even sure if I would heed your advice. I think that part of me knew from a young age that a little girl is not supposed to take pride in smacking little boys who touch her, but the fact that you were the one sanctioning this power made me realize that you were trying to help me with something bigger in society that I didn’t understand.
But I didn’t just hit him like you told me to, I tried the right ways first, to the extent that you realized it was a bad situation and were on your way over. And that was actually one of the more important lessons I think I took from the way you told that story.
If I went to extra effort to do things the right way first, I could usually yield a far more satisfying result. In a “don’t say I didn’t told you so” give them EXACTLY what they asked for kind of way.
Sometimes there is nothing more upsetting to men in society than society functioning to its rational conclusion, which is a psychological weakness that I’ve spent my entire life exploiting.
And it wasn’t until I was 12 and read the Odyssey for the first time that I saw representation for my brother and I writ large across the page smack dab in the middle of book 8.
We were Odysseus and Polyphemus. The two clash because of their differences in beliefs: Odysseus holds with Zeus and the customs of hearth-friendship from his own customs. Polyphemus the Cyclops is a son of Poseidon and has little regard for the other rules of the Olympians because he feels he is immune. Odysseus lets Polyphemus’ hubris play out before he exacts his revenge, and then aggressively rubs it in to his own detriment as he sails away.
That tale hit 12 year old me really personally precisely because of how much it reminded me of the dynamic between me and the sibling I was closest to in age — how we would scream about our different ideas of patriarchal authority and hurt each other and brag to each other before one of us would have you intercede on our behalf. We traded off roles and endlessly clashed — like the time he scratched my face the day before I had to sit before the Cyclops-camera of school pictures, or how frequently I would gaslight him into losing his temper so that you guys would witness what he’d actually say when he’d go all the way off.
We were deeply unkind to each other. My behavior towards Mal growing up are some of my deepest life regrets, but I also know that it’s not just our relationship. Because he and I attempted to salvage our relationship going into college because a lot was happening in the world (hello the birth of Black Lives Matter) and up until recently, we were actually doing a halfway decent job of it, given the foundation we came from.
But the topic of patriarchy has caused a lot of old familiar dynamics to emerge between my little brother and I, and I’m finding that quite alarming. Because I have always had a very different relationship with him than the rest of the family: despite our constant clashes, we grew to respect each other. I literally made him respect me growing up because I could manipulate him into getting into trouble with you and mom if he crossed a line. He then demanded my respect — in your room in front of you both, no less — as he became an adult and charted out his growth for me and the ways in which I’d failed to stand by his side as his older sister in those moments, or even acknowledge them.
It was that moment that I realized that while I could fight my little brother for the rest of my life, I didn’t want to. And I changed the way I engaged with him because he needed that and I cared.
Which is partly why I’m so critical of Mal’s current behavior, ironically — I am the one who has the longest receipts for he precise way to critique Mal. Y’all are now learning how difficult that process of accountability can be when he doesn’t want to be criticized (I wonder where he and I and Whit get that one from?) so you already know that you have my empathy because I told you that you would ahead of time.
But maybe that’s part of what’s weirdly held our relationship together over all these years — we’ve usually been the ones to hold each other accountable even when we felt like the family wasn’t.
That being said, there was one place where Malcolm and I always found agreement and entertainment: and that was working for you.
Oh the dramas that would escalate on your caterings (and the extra bonuses you’d pay us to keep it as far away from you as possible) and the wild places we’d go, the strange household customs we’d encounter. It was my first service job, but more importantly it was my first view into elite food culture and the expectations that would often come from such a conspicuous consumer culture (in this case, the most literal sense). The importance of the technicalities around food came out even in the name of your founded company: Catering By Design.
Cooking with you made me realize who you were — not just the job you had… but the skills you thrived in. Like how I always knew mom was a teacher at heart even though she had to give it up when you guys moved here from Atlanta in the 80s to become an insurance worker to support her kids instead. But she always excelled and explaining things to us and teaching us different ways and methods of learning things.
In the kitchen, while you are a fantastic chef, I realized that it was just a part off the types of skills you excelled at. Because father, you’ve always been one of the more unconventional authors. You just do it in far different mediums.
It makes me laugh now, thinking about how torn I was in high school between my loves of cooking and writing novels, and how neither one of them were the future that you imagined for me, always talking about medical school. I remember firing back, “Well, why don’t you go to medical school?” because if it held no interest for you, why should it for me?
Finding my own voice in the kitchen…was a more difficult process. When I just had to follow your instructions and mimic your lead, things were easy. However when I just wanted to figure out how I liked to cook, I felt like I could hardly get two steps in without you trying to take away the spoon or talk over me or suggest a different flavor profile.
Your culinary authority in the kitchen is absolute, which was difficult for some of my own internalized ideas around spaces in the house — I always heard that women belonged in the kitchen, but sometimes I felt like I didn’t even belong there with you because I was just messing things up for you, or not doing things right, or clearly wrong in some way if you had to keep taking over. It gave me a lot of anxiety in the kitchen from a young age.
And it drove me straight into the one direction of your field that you’d never had much interest: baking, pastries, and confections.
Time for a little linguistics: The word “culinary” comes from the Latin word culina meaning “kitchen”. It comes from the verb coquo, coquere, coxi, coctum “to cook, roast, ripen, bake” which is the root of our word “concoct”. It echoes to me through coctilis, the backed bricks of architecture, to our own modern word “cook”.
So much of our culinary relationship was collaborative concoction, but I also had to fight to have my own place there, even being the one who tried to learn from you in the kitchen the most. That meant coming at it from a different baking element (a literal baking element) with a different tutor.
Aunt Gayle’s overtures towards the perfect tea party was a brand of authorship that I vibed with growing up because it was simple, easy. Not having to create an entire five course meal which is an epic in and of itself.
I learned so much about food because of you and Aunt Gayle. It was one of my favorite parts of reading the Odyssey, that so much of it was a series of nesting dining tales as Odysseus illustrates his odyssey of culinary wonder: as he’s sitting as at the sumptuous feast of the Phaeacians, he tells of the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops who drinks milk and eats human flesh, Circe with her enchanted feasts, the proper libations to bring about the dead, choosing between the consumptive powers of Scylla and Charybdis, being tasked with not eating the cattle of the sun god Helios...
Reading it for the first time in Greek years later, I understood just how important food and feasting culture was to antiquity, just in looking at the power dynamics of colonialism expressed in the text through portrayal of culinary customs.
Odysseus and Homer use those culinary customs to craft literally gut-wrenching narratives for the purpose of their audience. And honestly, it was pretty overwhelming. Cooking with you and trying to read Homer felt very linked in my head — while I’ve always been able to think broadly, I have a tendency to absorb things much more slowly, and there was so much to learn between everything you can do in the kitchen and everything that Homer (whoever they may be) is trying to do in that one homecoming text.
Now one of the first lessons that both Homer and Kubrick teach in their respective Odysseys is about food.
In Kubrick, he’s illustrating human development, showing some alien monolith’s impact upon the human consciousness towards creating tools out of bones while Strauss’ C major chord creeps and rises up like the dawn in the background. The tools are then used for a radical change in diet — of meat, and of the ability to defend your food through extended force.
In Homer, it’s a far more developed system than Kubrick’s primates, but the anxiety around not being able to eat, or indeed different groups who have different tastes than yours and might be able to affect your own, is very real and apparent. One of the first things Odysseus notices in Polyphemus’ cave is the differences in the way that he eats (particularly grossed out with the milk) which culminates in him being the ultimate monster to the custom of ancient dining customs — the host who would literally eat his guests.
But before the Cyclops, Odysseus and his crew also come to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, a land of floral food that causes the eater to forget their nostos or homecoming. Odysseus has to drag his comrades away from the Lotus-Eaters so they can focus on their journey.
In a way Mal and I allowed you to do that with us, maybe not so literally with food, but in our tastes and the ways in which we’d let you affect them, as your youngest children as our siblings got older and more independent. There were definitely things that we just allowed you to steer us away from because we trusted your judgement.
However there was glaring exception: your Achilles heel of foods.
Cake.
It didn’t matter the situation. The scenario. The literal environment. If there was cake, you were gonna finesse it. Usually with the aid of your two youngest when we were small round and bouncy.
(And you wouldn’t even share with us after using us to guilt random ass people in the park out of their birthday cake like damn dad at least share)
With cake, I think the whole family felt like we were all suddenly an Odysseus Collective, desperate to drag you away from the potential for embarrassment with your cake-eating ways that you always managed to side-step.
But I think there was something in that ritual that you genuinely enjoyed. A repetition to literally having your cake and eating it too. There was always a repetition, almost a call-and-response aspect to the ways that you’d enjoy things when we were growing up.
It was like the way Kubrick’s Odyssey. From as early as I can remember we would watch that long visual opera and every time we would beg you to explain it to us at the end because we never understood it. Your cheeky answer every time:
“Well…you’re just gonna have to watch it again.”
And I think that was ultimately the most important lesson I learned from being in relationship with you: if I could watch and try to understand things long enough, study the rhythms and patterns until I could fade into the flow, eventually I would come to some form of knowledge or other.
Repetition was also important, but there was one crucial lesson I took away from your favorite movie: The importance of sound.
2001: A Space Odyssey has very little textual dialogue in its runtime, yet has one of my favorite soundscapes of all of cinema. Whenever you or Kubrick talk about it, it’s always emphasizing the visuals. I think the visuals in 2001 are stunning but I think if you watch it silence, you miss out on some of the parts of that movie that make it so achingly human — and that’s the control and flow of sound throughout the film, the way it oozes and seeps and blares and recedes…
Sounds were always important to me growing up — I loved movies with orchestral scores and somehow convinced you and mom to let me play the harp at age 10. Part of that was trying to figure out things I actually liked — I realized your and mom’s love of jazz drove my desire to try the saxophone more than my actual interest in playing jazz music — and part of it was entirely Fantasia’s fault.
Music led to me being a performer on the stage, a wholly different arena for authority than I was used to, but one I eventually eventually took to. And the first time I ever had to figure out how to trap you like I did my little brother to show you how wrong you were about me, it was on the stage and with my harp that I discovered exactly how to do that.
But for that tale we need a new section, a new sibling, a new song from Kubrick’s idle brain…
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Athenian Mechanics
Or, Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) (1939)
Or, Across 110th Street (1973)
Or, “Man of Constant Sorrow” (first written down around 1913, from American folk tradition)
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Dave: Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL. Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL. Hello, HAL, do you read me? Hello, HAL, do you read me? Do you read me, HAL? Do you read me, HAL? Hello, HAL, do you read me? Hello, HAL, do you read me? Do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.
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Before we get to Ev, I guess this is the right section to address the mom of it all. Ev’s section, the middle section, also my section — not to mention your’s and mom’s as middle children yourselves.
Mom and I have a pretty good relationship now but we did not start off that way. I held a lot of fear and anxiety against mom for one very singular reason that it seemed I couldn’t escape: my hair.
Far more tender-headed than my sister and with much louder pipes, mom and I had to suffer through it together. I would scream endlessly as mom would try to get me to be quiet because my screams brought about some triggers in her, which was a word we didn’t even know in the 90s.
I always felt bad for crying because mom would tell me that it was a part of my culture that I had to understand — not to mention the constant echoes of your family that you and she would say growing up: “Now don’t you cut those babies’ hair!”
(Me and Whit, obviously, no one cared when Ev and Mal would go bald)
It was quite literally the most painful part of trying to understand you. Which was weird, because you never did my hair growing up. You would occasionally offer to brush it (the fun easy part), but you never put yourself in the seat that mom was constantly putting herself in with me — of being a direct cause of my pain.
That was something that it took me a really long time for me to see.
Something easier to see, however, were the cracks in our patriarchal structure when it came to you and my older brother.
Ev and I have always gotten along — the one relationship of your four children that has sustained pretty much since the start of my memory. We’re the middle kids, we share a birthday month, we were the two more introverted ones growing up.
Watching you with Ev over my life never made sense. If you need understanding, he’s the best at it. If you need an audience, he’s the most enthusiastic. If you need unconditional love without expectations, he offers it freely. He’s straightforward, he sets boundaries.
Yet growing up he was closer to mom like I was closer to you. But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because so much of the root of my anxiety around mom was caught up in my hair. I would listen over the years to Ev not feeling close to you and feeling conflicted because I was someone you would often share things with.
Mostly about your mother, at times when you’d miss her. She died when I was still a newborn. We share a middle name (which she preferred to go by: Ruth).
I remember crying as a kid sitting and thinking about you and your mom. About how you had to embark on your own odyssey from Athens, Georgia to Seattle, Washington — such utter opposite corners of the country. I think about how she died so soon after I was born, but mom was pregnant again with Mal not much long after.
I mostly cried because I couldn’t imagine going out and cooking in restaurants and having kids and mourning your mother all at the same time. But then as time when on, I began to wonder if I was the only person you’d really let yourself mourn your mother with.
My favorite book in all of the Odyssey is Book 11, when Odysseus summons the shades of the underworld. He is needing to retrieve information from Tiresias, the blind prophet, about his path home. Persephone, the goddess of the dead, sends forth many female ghosts to entreat him, most alarmingly his mother — whom Odysseus had not known had died. He still speaks to Tiresias, but is also eager to hear information from his mother.
It’s one of the hardest scenes for me to get through because it’s never not reminded me of you.
But while I love Persephone’s role in that Book, there’s another goddess who’s far more dominant and influential throughout the narrative, and I’ve seen her reception trickle down into the fabric of our family’s relationship in so many ways, but mainly in the namesake of that little city in Georgia that you call home:
Athens, the classical city.
The one in Greece was named for the Athena, goddess of strategy, weaving, defensive war. Odysseus’ constant ally who also kind of ghosts him a lot.
The one in Georgia you always told me were named by white folks who saw the seven hills of the city and declared that it simply had to be named Athens.
Between growing up reading myths about that goddess and your own myths, tales, and legends around Athens, I so better understood the mechanics around story, plot, genre, and being savvy.
Athena operates in and out of the scenes throughout the Odyssey, constantly weaving herself in and out of the narrative as intervention is needed. She is often tweaking an coaxing things into the gods’ accordance throughout the epic.
Athenian mechanics were what you were trying to get me to understand, slowly, my whole life — the ways in which Georgia’s classical city had framed you, made you like Odysseus, to be polutropos and polumechanos or “many turns/ways/tropes” and “much resourced/devised” both figuratively and literally: your father was a mechanic in Athens.
If there’s any proof that you’re an author, it’s your father: it was the only topic that your natural charisma would refuse to leak through on. The walls would come up. The old Athenian defense mechanisms.
As I grew up recognizing that you hadn’t had the best relationship with your father (who died with the eldest of us was still a baby), it slowly began to dawn on me that maybe some of those patterns were being accidentally replicated towards my brothers.
I wish we had the literacy around gender then that we do now. There were so many words and terms that I was reaching for and didn’t know how to describe.
But suddenly, much like with the kitchen intuition, watching and waiting did teach me a lesson. It was a lesson that had incredible impact upon me and our relationship at the time, and it was the first time I had to treat you like you were my younger brother instead of my father.
I’ll never forget the look on Ev’s face when I told him:
So I’m 13, it’s the last year of middle school, first year of Whit off to college on the East Coast so I don’t have her trying to do my hair anymore, mom’s backed down on my hair a bit in middle school because I’ve been on swim team.
We go to a salon where there’s a Black man preparing to do my hair. You talk down first mom, then me about how Black female hair should look and what men like (so sad I didn’t know the full extent of the word “queer” then), and THEN you both talked down the dark skinned black woman with close-cropped short hair who advocated for me because she was also a swimmer.
No, instead you had him straighten it (something I hate) and cut it a little longer than shoulder length (I wanted less than two inches) and spent the next several weeks (including when we went to Georgia to visit your family during spring break) getting me to agree with you about how good it looked. Which wasn’t something I actually wanted to respond to, but you know how needy you can get when you feel like someone’s ignoring you.
All of this, quite naturally, led to my first act of teenage rebellion: cutting all of my hair within an inch of its life with a pocket knife.
The revenge plot was perfect: I hacked my hair off in the dead of night and wrapped my head in a scarf, slipping out to school without saying much in the morning. Mom was returning that day from some trip and I wasn’t going to see you until an orchestra concert I had to perform in that night.
I walked out on stage without my scarf and allowed you to see my crown in all of its hackneyed glory.
See, I tried to do things the right way, I tried to get it shorter at the hair salon, but you just wouldn’t let me and look at what happens…
The best part? I always knew I was right, because you were the only one pissed that I did it. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.
But especially Ev. I think he was the first one to feel disillusioned by some of your antics early on — Whit was too co-dependent back then to extricate herself — and so the times when I’d clap back hard against you he tended to find pretty entertaining.
And that was important. Ev would encourage my storytelling, my own voice coming forward, often against you and your narratives. That was an important space that I needed. I hope he felt as supported in that by me but I’m honestly not sure. I worry that I was so desperate to have space to say things my way that I might have replicated that same behavior with him that you had with me.
All we can do now is talk about it and try to move forward.
Did you know that Athena was almost in Kubrick’s Odyssey as well? He named it an odyssey to give it a classicizing context (he wanted to make the “deep” sci-fi movie apparently) and originally HAL was supposed to have a female voice and be named ATHENA? It’s funny, because the scenes with Dave and HAL always reminded me more of Odysseus and Polyphemus rather than Odysseus and Athena, but the idea of Athena suddenly trying to kill Odysseus and his whole crew is one too good to not mull over for a bit.
Maybe I’m biased against Athena. She’s always felt a bit too much like a forgone conclusion to me. Probably it’s because the first myth I read of hers was a critique of her Roman counterpart — the weaving contest that doubles as a debate on Minerva’s (Athena) womanhood. The contest itself is centered on Minerva’s more domestic range with women (rather than her warlike aspects with men), which makes Arachne’s rejection of her influence all the more dangerous to her godhood.
Minerva then weaves an elegant symmetrical tapestry of her defeat over the god Poseidon for the city of Athens. It is her full Athenian mechanic writ large.
However Arachne’s composition is also criticism, showing in spiraling variegated horror the various sexual assaults and rapes of Minerva’s male counterparts: for what good is the use of her influence over the male gods as the perfect virgin goddess when that may be precisely because she doesn’t have to face the same violence that most other women (and female goddesses of equal power) do.
Oh Athena. It’s no wonder so many alternative girls identify with her growing up. It’s like she’s an embodiment of all our internalized patriarchy, showing us if we can just game things right, then we get to sit with the boys.
But it’s the need to sit with the boys that I’m critiquing father. Reading ancient sources and contemporary, the hyper-focus on proper ways for women to behave for them to receive accolades…it’s exhausting. It’s so tiring and I nowhere near as feminine as my sister growing up.
But Athena goes deeper than that for me — actually Ev always reminded me more of Athena growing up. Maybe because he was neuro-divergent and would always try to categorize things in a more logical way.
I always felt far more like the other god of craft: Hephaestus, ugly and misshapen, but could create marvelous wonders if doubted enough — and fantastical traps if pushed too far.
Also I’ve been ugly — Athena and Ev haven’t. I think that’s why I identified more with Hephaestus and Arachne growing up. They were monstrous bodies, but magnificent creators — and they knew how to be right with panache.
Just look at the reaction to Arachne’s tapestry: Athena tears it up because she “cannot find a flaw” in the web of heavenly crimes before beating up Arachne with her shuttle. After Arachne kills herself in protest, Athena turns her into a spider so that she has to keep spinning for her whether she cares to or not.
The myth of Arachne and the cutting of my hair taught me a very important lesson together: sometimes getting punished was worth it just to know that I was right. That’s not the best lesson to learn around close relationships at a young age.
But also my instrument was one of the few places that I had my own sense of voice and authority — with good reason too, I picked the one instrument I knew that no one else would play so that I wouldn’t have to deal with that problem. The harp became my secure foothold for my own authoritative voice.
And I loved classical music. Desperately — I’d never heard something that had allowed me to express an entire emotion like classical music did. The guys in your favorite movie are pretty great too (so great I’ve named each of these sections after them) — two Strausses and a Khachaturian. The three weren’t contemporaries, but I think through them you can hear a lot of the range of the Romantics, my favorite of the classical musical movements.
Romanticism is all about emotions pouring forth big and expressive (and oft German) in a much needed breath of fresh air in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and rationalization of nature. I studied it for a year in college, after my first year of studying antiquity, because I needed something to bury my emotions in.
Aunt Gayle had only been dead for a year and…well, no one in our family seemed to be taking it well.
I tend to leave off that year of Romanticism when I talk about my undergrad experience because I just did it because I felt I needed to, not because it fit into some grand scheme of thing that I felt I needed to learn, I just needed to figure out how to mourn.
Instead, I got wildly interested in why the Greek and Roman gods kept popping up in Romanticism, especially when they were being used to discuss issues of gender and race that seemed to be tiptoeing their way straight into eugenics, and no one else seemed particularly alarmed by that because no one else seemed to care enough to research what the Greek gods actually were. So in a strange way, Romanticism just ended up sling-shotting me right back into the Classics (thanks Nietzsche).
It’s through the process of gathering skills around mourning (and yet not mourning Aunt Gayle) and meditating on your mother that I first came up with the idea for my own art movement that I want to bring forth into this new decade: Negromanticism, and understanding what it means to be amongst the shades of society.
I think a lot about how at the start of my life, you were mourning the loss of your mother, your last living parent.
I thought about it when I went off on my own odyssey eight years ago when I left for college, and how my entire undergraduate degree was consumed with trying to figure out how to become a researcher when all I wanted to do was grieve.
I lost the family member I was closest to just a few weeks before I had to leave for college, and I had to return home in the first few weeks for her funeral. To lose great-Aunt Gayle, the youngest of the entire grand-generation, the surrogate hip grandmother that my sister and I claimed (just as our mother had looked up to her before us).
Aunt Gayle was the cook on mom’s side, the fabulous author in all she did. A wonderful teacher as well, as she always tried to endeavor with her many nieces and nephews and all the kids she claimed as her own.
You two always had a respect for each other that I admired, even though I heard both of you be critical of the other, you were also respectful of her kitchen.
I needed help mourning while I went through my undergrad. I was leaking emotions everywhere (combined with the traditional going through your late teens/early twenties), but I didn’t really see how I could reach out to you because you’ve never really been good with our extreme emotions. You always tell us that you can’t handle us when we’re emotional. So I turned to learning about death in my studies instead.
It was also difficult because it was a time when I was trying to go off on my own, start my own odyssey as an adult. And I think that somewhere in the back of my brain, always thinking things through the lens of mythology, I think I just assumed that you would fill in the role of Athena in my life going forward — a wise counselor watching over me, occasionally intervening when needed, advocating on my behalf, maybe having trouble just trusting me to do things on my own, but still wanting to be present.
Instead I was shocked to find you instead as Calypso, a figure reluctant to let me go even as your were driving me to college and stocking up my fridge for my adult odyssey. I remember being annoyed when you wouldn’t leave because it felt like you couldn’t trust me to go forward on my own without your authority.
It sucked that that was my takeaway. Because I think the reality was that you were just really going to miss me, to an extent that I wouldn’t even comprehend until much later.
And maybe that’s why I feel a root of anger at myself whenever I’ve gotten mad at you as an adult. Because I failed to recognize one of the moments where you were genuinely disarmed by me into vulnerability and I overlooked it. But I also know that my mind can’t keep beating itself up over “what if I’d known” or “what if I’d figured out how to build our relationship going forward as adults”.
Because the truth is, it takes two to tango. In any form of human relationship. There were ways in which I could have reached out more, but there were also ways that you could have learned to reach out differently as I started becoming an adult. It felt like a Sisyphian task trying to explain to you that I needed you to change up your own mechanics in dealing with me because I was changing into something new (or my frontal lobe was finally settling, who knows) and couldn’t keep on my past tracks like I had.
And it was particularly painful, because I did get an Athena from a very surprising source — though I don’t know why the pale-skinned and grey-blue eyed woman who birthed me would be a shocking parallel for Athena in my life. Mom has never not been a work in progress. As I became an adult, I learned how much of life is always working in progression with the people you care about most. And figuring out how to devise your way through that together. Mom and I have been able to work towards that.
And because she and I have been able to get to that place, I feel like you’ve just given up on being close with your children.
That’s what it felt like you were saying that night up on 110th street during my first semester of grad school. It was like I was three again, but it was somehow my father I couldn’t get away from no matter how polite I tried to me. There you were on the 1 train with me, refusing to get off at your stop at 66th, kept ignoring me trying to say goodnight and separating, kept pushing me over the edge until I started snapping and got off the train abruptly to separate myself from you.
And then you made the mistake of following me off of the train onto the block insisting that you wanted to talk and that I couldn’t walk away, so I turned around in the middle of that block and started screaming everything that I felt inside at full volume at 1am in the morning only a few blocks from my campus because I was truly and deeply beyond caring at that point.
I was beyond empathizing (as you tried to get me to do by turning on the waterworks), I was beyond trying to understand you, I was just raw anger. I felt you deserved the scream-out because you were the one who’d brought me to that point, partly by your actions at the very beginning of that year which had triggered one of the worst depressive spirals I’ve had since getting diagnosed at 17, but mostly because of how you ignored everything I said right up until I started screaming.
“I can’t handle you when you’re emotional like this!”
“THEN WHY THE FUCK DID YOU FOLLOW ME OFF THE TRAIN?”
The problem between us is that you taught me too well — and you know how much better I thrive when people doubt me. And at this point in my life because you haven’t attempted to actually work with me in understanding my viewpoint in where I actually need you to change to be in relationship with me (because again, as I have to remind you, as your children my siblings and I often didn’t get a choice when we had to change things for the sake of you and mom when we were growing up) because that’s what adults with actual autonomy have the agency to do.
Things have shifted and changed and you have to understand and deal with the impact of it because…it’s life.
I’m tired of grieving and raging. I’m not even done with my first decade of adulthood yet and I’m already scared that I’ll lose steam (in the midst of a pandemic as well) but I also don’t know if you’re someone I can actually rely on. Because the things that I need now are so much different than what I needed from you when I was a kid. Of course everything is going to have to be so much more different, but also that means that you’re going to have to give up some of the ways that you’ve grown comfortable around engaging with me.
Maybe comfort isn’t the best word. Maybe just familiar. Routine. There are some serious cycles that we need to break.
And that’s why I’ve always gotten along with my older brother — he could always break me out of my cycles. Without using anger.
Ev always showed me the other way, always showed me how to find a third option when it felt like my hands were tied. He could snap me out of my anxious brain when it felt like I was pulling back from everyone.
I think it was because he and I were always comfortable in the background — Whit and Mal shined so brightly and were so extroverted that we were their natural flanking wallflowers. We’re excellent witnesses, and we followed you the closest in your love of genre — Ev and I endlessly poured through science fiction, fantasy, horror and suspense.
Witnesses, shades, offbeats — quiet weirdness is an aesthetic Ev and I have perfected our entire life. He’s always the best reactions to my stories. He has never not enjoyed that hair-cutting story. And he high-fived me and said “nice” when I told him about my sexuality — in the midst of studying Romanticism, no less — which was exactly the reaction I needed. He was also the last person in the family that I told. Because he was the easiest. Save the best for last.
But also in Ev I could see all the gaps and shadows that were around your narratives — because it was so easier to see with him than the rest of us for some reason. I understood your vulnerabilities best through him because of how much I came to realize that the ways in which he would talk about you growing up reminded me of the ways in which you would talk about your father.
Now your father is a difficult topic. Tracing your patriarchies is so difficult. I know you best through your mother — I carry her name. You would open up to me about her the most growing up, and that’s how I learned the power of listening. Of being that witness. I’m afraid of even mentioning your father too much in this, in case it raises your defenses and you can’t carry out til the end of what I need to say. That’s happened a lot with us speaking face to face.
So instead I have to end this section on silence, on a stillness, on a lacuna: there’s a gap around your father and information that is missing from the five people you’ve created a family with and I don’t know how to impress its importance when it’s something you won’t acknowledge.
This section is actually the one that convinced me to name each section after a different classical piece from Kubrick’s Odyssey. Because Khachaturian’s Adagio from his Gayane is sort of what it sounds like in my head when my brain begins to give up on a train of thought with you because you’re shutting me down.
— —
— — — —
Patriarchal Poetics
Or, The Beautiful Blue Danube (1866)
Or, Rap City in Blue (202?)
Or, “Waltzing is just walking in time” (timeless, if in sync)
— — — —
— — — —
HAL: Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over. I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid... Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I could sing it for you.
Dave: Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.
HAL: It’s called “Daisy” [sings while slowing down] Dai-sy, dai-sy, give me your answer, do. I’m half cra-zy, all for the love of you. It won’t be a sty-lish mar-riage, I can’t a-fford a car-riage — — But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle — built — for — two.
— — — —
Sometimes father, you only learn from silence.
I think that was part of why I was the one you opened up to a lot growing up — that capacity I had to sit silently for a long time and really internalize what you’d tell me before I would try to offer my perspective.
In some ways, I’m almost the polar opposite of my sister, your first child. Whit seems to only gain power the more authority she is given to speak. I think Mal tells one of the best stories about how she started telling him a tale at work in Madison, continued it on the bus all the way downtown where they got food or shopped or ran an errand — Whit still talking all the while — before busing back down south either home or down in the valley towards Whit’s — “AND THERE’S STILL THREE HOURS LEFT TO THE STORY BY THE TIME WE GET TO HER HOUSE — ”
If there was anyone who regularly arose to your challenges (or any challenge at all really), it was Whit. The eldest. The leader. The boss. The junior parent. The English/Environmental Science double major. The popular high school girl. The dramatic actress. Defender of animals and small children. Worked more types of jobs than you could ever dream of (and, from hearing some personal work stories from both of you in confidence…sorry dad, but Whit’s had it worse by my estimation). The moody painter. The alternative fashionista. The cellist. The coder. The organizer. The authoritative speaker.
Whit was a standard I could never live up to because she was a pedestal that I constantly upheld within my life. I could never understand how she could sound so like you growing up, how she could mimic and take over your vocal patterns and then completely dominate a conversation if she so chose.
Still to this day I would say my relationship with Whit is the most difficult (even with Mal not talking to me right now…actually I don’t know if he is or isn’t, I just know that it’s gonna go with his mood) because she’s the one that I get caught up in my feelings with the most.
I think it’s because I’ve always felt slightly off-beat from my older sister — going back to the instance I came into this world: had I decided to come two minutes earlier, she and I would have been born exactly five and a half years apart. But instead I delayed til the clock struck exactly 3am and I don’t know if it’s that odd little coincidence, but I’ve always felt that I understand things two minutes later than Whit does. Almost like there’s a strange mental echo that goes between us and travels back and forth, tuning and refining itself almost like…
Well, almost exactly like the two sirens singing out their information to Odysseus.
I feel that the siren episode is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood episodes of the entire Odyssey. The sirens sing a song of information that Odysseus is desperate to hear more of, to understand, to get into the flow of. The potential of getting into the sensual sirens’ musical informative flow is one that Odysseus cannot resist, and is an episode I’ve seen replicated over and over in our community, all those Black women and non-binary performers singing their various blues. Are the sirens truth? Or lies? Or both?
That was the blurred line of our relationship: between the two of us, we formed our own epistemology around lying. A different form of lying, a loving form of lying. My sister and I always understood that we sometimes had to lie to you and mom, often for reasons that we didn’t know but just had to trust our gut that they were details were had to omit until they could be revealed at a later and safer date.
And no matter how different and disparate I could become from my sister, that ironic truth always grounded us: lying was a utility.
It’s funny because I never saw Whit as a liar growing up because of her intention: so many of her lies were to maintain (at least from her young perspective) your and mom’s emotional states and belief systems. I was more fascinated with the form and functionality. She lied out of necessity. I lied out of desire.
But we were both rooted in love. There was nothing we loved more than peeling back lies, letting little details slip to you and mom and reveal whole hidden stories after the fact. It was because of that vulnerability we shared that I never felt I could ever really be scared of my sister. I loved and understood her too much. And even when I judged the ways in which I thought she bought into some of the more feminized aspects of society, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the way she’d game male society and killed many male icons for me early on.
Whit also showed me how to combat you. How if I ever wanted you to leave a room I could just start talking about my period very frankly and openly.
She was also the one who showed me the current sirens (though I loved the old jazz and blues and motown and disco goddesses you and mom showed us) of the music scene and we bonded over the rise of female pop stars who looked like us growing up and into adults — Janet, Erykah, Beyonce, Rihanna, Ciara, Eve, Raven, Solange, Alicia, Nicki.
It was through those women that we watched what women like us could face on the large scale of the world. The ways in which society treated these women. How our own classmates would react to stories around them as we went through school (always the same stories, despite being five and a half years and two minutes apart).
Together we would look at the lies and truths all blended together in magazines, on new internet sites, through their own bright and expressive lyrics…
Our sirens taught us how ugly the world could be. And how important it was to create joy for ourselves.
It’s a lesson we still have to face: our latest siren we’ve been bonding over is Megan Thee Stallion, who was just shot in both of her feet days ago trying to leave a car. Whit and I still haven’t talked about it (but we will and I should probably grab a bottle before we do) because I know it’s too painful for both of us. Watching all the fucked up shit she went through online, and so much tired ass transphobic shit from Black men trying to justify a Black woman getting shot…
Whit and I are tired. Megan’s Mal’s age.
We’re tired of being the ones standing up and yelling the loudest.
We’re tired of being the ones innovating new ways and having those methodologies torn down until they’re suited to everyone’s temperaments.
Even now, Whit’s still showing me how to deal with you. Because she has always been your most vocal critic among the four of us. As was her right — you expected the most from her of all of us. We saw her constantly trying to understand herself in your ideas and go half crazy trying to do it.
I was always so critical of Whit’s critiques of you, always insisting that she just didn’t know you well enough or try well enough or…
…or all those same things that Mal’s been yelling at me ever since I got home, so how can I be mad at the ways he’s slinging abuse at me on your behalf when that’s exactly what I did to my sister growing up?
And now she hasn’t spoken to you in almost two years. And you can’t stand it. By not engaging, she’s exploiting some of your worst patriarchal tendencies because you literally can’t help yourself. She set a boundary. You’re finding out for the first time what it’s like to genuinely have to respect that in our family, because we have always been shit with boundaries.
I was good at putting on shows to get you to back down, but I’ve never been able to draw boundaries in the way that my older sister has. And it’s taken me a lot longer than two minutes to realize that she made the right decision, as painful as it is for me to acknowledge.
It can take a while for information to absorb into my brain. But I find if it repeats, or has a rhythm, or texture, or pattern, it usually has a better chance of sticking.
Kind of like a waltz. Everything’s a little easier to remember if you only have to do it in threes. Like my three siblings. Or my three best friends. Odds that alternate into evens.
Kubrick saw it — the Blue Danube waltz was the perfect background for his spaceship choreography.
Remember all the years of the Garfield High Winter Waltz fundraiser my orchestra would put on, and how much we’d dance? I was bad at it in the years that Whit was in orchestra, but I got much better by the time I was in high school. Remember how I told you that you just have to alternate your feet and walk in time to the “BOOM chuck-chuck, BOOM chuck-chuck” and voila you’d be waltzing?
Left-right-left, right-left-right…
I think it’s why I keep coming back to Athena with you. It’s sort of the only path I know forward that I can work with. Plus having a Black and White Athena at my back going into the field considering feels like a nice little historical echo: you and mom are far greater collaborators than Bernal and Lefkowitz are adversaries.
And yeah, Athena’s patriarchal as hell. But she’s a patriarchal that I can actually work with.
I almost caught a glimpse of it: during graduation, the day you, me, mom, and some of my closest friends went around through the different departments, finessing cake in a manner that was reflex at that point. There was a point when I was sitting on the ground with my friends out in the classics hallway, looking into the reception room as I watched some of the professors cluck awkwardly around you (I tried to warn you guys ahead of time that classicists tend to me some of the more awkward humanities scholars) before you and mom would snap them up into conversation with y’all’s usual one-two punch of sunny empathy and disarming charisma.
It almost looked like Athena on a spectrum — which shouldn’t surprise me given how much I associate her with Ev. An utterly arrogant part of me wanted to call it something cheesy like “Athena in Homeric Blue” but I think my brain needs to chew on that one a bit longer. I don’t know what it was about the two of you working your usual magic even on my grad professors that fascinated me so, but I do want to figure it out. And I want to figure it out with you both two — because you two are unparalleled back-up when you want to be.
And I need back-up now more than ever.
— —
— —
To end this section finally, let me tell you a story of my own little odyssey to study odysseys, and what I learned from that.
So there I was, first summer in NYC, a year of my masters under my belt, home late from a shift waitressing with shitty tips. I was up in my little attic room blasting Dorothy Ashby so I could try to think clearly, concentrating on the finer nuances of rolling a spliff, rolling my eyes at the copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man on my desk (another eerie aching Odysseus by no name) because I was a parody of its prologue.
That was the summer I was trying to figure out why I uprooted my life to get a masters, if the things I thought or felt I could do were even feasible, if I was just out of my head delusional trying to imagine the impossible.
I was all the way across the country from everyone I knew and loved. I was sad and mad and all sorts of blue. My headphones had broken as well, so I couldn’t keep out the noises of the city when I headed towards Riverside to smoke and dissociate. I remember getting down the to the park, giving my usual nod to the Invisible Man monument in its snug little street park before sitting up on a ledge to stare across the Hudson at Jersey as the stars were just starting to come out.
I sat smoking and staring over the flow of the Hudson and the gentle glittering of the stars and the sirens of the NYPD slowly faded into the background.
Instead something started rumbling in the backs of my ears. Kind of like Ashby or Coltrane’s harp. But also something low and mournful and nasal sounding. It started echoing and reverberating into its own rhythm, almost kind of like a waltz, but something other than three-four time. I let my vision go hazy, let the blue of the Hudson fade into the blue of Jersey into the blue of the night sky with the stars and lights and fake reflections all forming their own choreography.
I closed my eyes on all that hazy dreamy blue so that I could better hear what I needed to listen to, and that’s when the familiar dactyllic hexameter started remixing itself into my brain. I’d already had to memorize the first ten lines of the Odyssey earlier that year for a recitation test, but that was the first night I really felt I finally got Homer.
I opened my eyes and suddenly I could see all of the colors that Homer was singing in and the irony of blindness in ancient thought — all the best seers were blind.
And maybe Homer was something of a sounder (Go Sounders) because as I watched the flow of the Hudson, I realized that what I was listening to was a soundtrack.
It made me realize how much I missed home, and how far my own odyssey had taken me: I had gotten to the place I’d always dreamed of, with the view I’d always wanted, yet I would’ve given anything in that moment to be staring at the foggy grey-blue of Puget Sound. I finally understood nostos (homecoming), the deep-seated love and anxiety that’s at the heart of the entire epic.
That was also a heartbreaking moment: despite how connected I felt to Homer in the first real concrete way since I read him at age 12, I also had a sinking feeling that I wouldn’t be able to go home for quite some time unless something drastic happened, which was something that was difficult.
I wondered then if I was more like mom or you — would I return home after a few years like mom did with her odyssey, or would I make my odyssey my new home like you did with yours?
The anxiety around that question for me was wiped out because something drastic happened: and now I’m home because my odyssey was getting a little too deadly in my current circumstances (and in the current pandemic).
So my ending has been cut short, curtailed. Kind of like I usually do with the Odyssey, I’ve always tended to cut things short when he returns to Ithaca (though that more has to do with me not liking to read about dogs dying more than anything) and now I’ve got to move on from odysseys. I’m trying to figure out how to do that, and I’m uncertain of many things, but the one thing I feel in my gut is that the best answers I can get right now will be from my siblings.
Because despite how uncanny I am with predicting things — I don’t know what the future will bring. But I do know the things that I need from my relationships. And there’s three that I’ve been neglecting because of my own internalized patriarchal behavior. I’ve always given you a place of precedence even when I didn’t want to.
I guess it’s time for me to finally start taking my best friend’s advice that I kept parroting at your for the past couple years: “Don’t do things you don’t want to do.”
There was a time that I genuinely did want to give you precedence over all else but…if I’m being honest? I think I’ve really outgrown that phase.
I need someone right now who can help me figure out what I’m growing into.
— — — —
Alright yes I lied, I said this was a letter about you and Aunt Gayle, but it’s also sort of about my three siblings. Because that’s always been a part of my driving motivation of our relationship, dad. And we haven’t done a lot to move past that. Because I love and care about my siblings which means that I have to figure out my relationships with them separate from you and mom. Which should seem obvious, but you guys are pretty overbearing, especially with how you communicate.
But like that Sound of Music quote I threw out at the start of this — go back to the beginning, go back to that track, dad. Because you’ve always made us run track even though none of us liked running. But that didn’t mean we didn’t like tracks, we just connected to them in different ways. With Mal it was through rap and lyrics and getting his voice to resonate through all the acoustics of the house until he was too good that we couldn’t tell him to shut up no matter how loud he got. With Ev it came with the fascination of our country’s railway system, a love that he shares with our mother’s father. With my sister it was woven into her hair for a long time, but now I think she’s more into environmental tracks with her native gardening.
And me? Well, I’m still figuring it out. I was always the worst at deciding when it came to the four of us. Still a little shook that I almost convinced myself that the tenure-track was one that maybe I needed to orient myself around. But after that hazy indigo night staring over the Hudson, I know my tracks are going to be more on the aural side of things.
Also…I literally have to now compose a score about a father sacrificing his daughter to justify a patriarchal war in a production for the institution that told me that they definitively did not want me, so I’ve got other patriarchal issues I need to focus on now. I think I finally have to put away Odysseus for the time being.
Speaking of soundtracks and the Odyssey and this country, I wanna leave you with one last remix to meditate on when you’re looking out over Puget Sound:
Have you ever noticed how the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Lift Every Voice” sound like a call-and-response to each other? Do you hear the ways in which the two melodies play against each other, notes rising and falling in their own reactionary patterns?
And when you have the two floating in your head — words and sounds mixing and mingling together — can you hear the C major chord of Strauss’ Sunrise theme peaking up through those beginnings? Can you hear that melody stretching itself between the polarities of our two anthems?
Can you hear it confirming the truth you and I have known all along, one truth we keep coming back to in our love of odysseys?
The revolution has never been a monolith. But it can be a harmony.
Oh say can you see — lift every voice and sing
’Til earth and heaven ring — by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed — ring with the harmonies
Of dignity — through the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars — let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies — through the perilous fight
And the ramparts we watched — let it resound
Loud as the roaring sea — were so gallantly streaming
And the rockets red glare — sing a song full of the
Hope that the dark past has taught us — the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof to the night — sing a song full of the
Faith that the present has brought us — that our flag was still there
Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave — facing the rising sun of our new day begun let us march on ‘til victory is won — in the land of the free
and the home of the brave?
