Ghosts and the Un-willingness to Live1
Jessica Denzer
Editorial Meditation
What is a ghost? I recently posed this question to a character in a manuscript I’m currently writing. Or rather, I had her pose it to herself. In contemplating the emergence of an apparition or vision that has begun to haunt her, Anna finds herself meditating on the notion of ghosts; are they not simply memories, she wonders, transparent mimicries of those both living and dead, who have taken up residency in the mind, lying dormant in the unconscious until the moment of their unexpected summoning? No, she concludes. Ghosts are not memories. Memories are memories, or rather, ghostly memories are guilt and desire, logged failures coming to pay you a visit. Ghosts, on the other hand, are something else altogether.
Fall is the season for the dead. A celebration of decay. Leaves rage before us red and yellow, breaking open like the most beautiful of diseases, their veins prominent, the bulging rivers of oldened skin, their flesh bleeding before browning. It seems fitting that we place all our morbid fantasies in its turning; Halloween and la Dia de Muertos rushing by as we imagine our bodies inside out, our mortality wrapped in costume as if to remind us of our own potential disappearance, or reappearance. Our own spectral possibility grinning at us sinisterly from the faces we’ve cut out of pumpkins. Such a strange habit we have – carving faces onto the inanimate, a picture much like our own, as if the mirror isn’t enough. But the pumpkin has its own mortality. We place the face on an already dying thing and then watch as it shrivels away, as the mask becomes the death mask, a reaper of sorts that draws us to it before we toss it in the garbage. One less pumpkin in the world. A little sacrifice to guarantee another year of our own life.
And perhaps this sacrificial reassurance is necessary. Beautiful decaying fall is the precursor to actual death, to a loss of life – a sucked bone dry cold dark world of winter, where life ceases for a moment and suspends us in the frozen stillness of the truth; that what is lost will not actually return; that spring and summer and fall are gone; that when rebirth happens, as it inevitably does, it will not be the same as the birth last spring; it will be different; it will be another. It will not know you. You will not know you when you die. Or rather, when you die, you will not be reborn into spring, because even spring is not reborn into spring. Time goes on. And our memories, or our ghosts, or our guilt is all that remains.
But what am I saying? What purpose does my saccharine mediation on the cycle of life and death serve? And who does it serve? What indulgence is the life of a writer in constant contemplation of death and at times a bit of life!
And perhaps ghosts are real.
Or perhaps they are guilt.
Or perhaps they are both. For what is real if not guilt?
I think perhaps what I really should have done is write a poem, a terrible unreadable poem. And then forced you, dear reader, to read it, which would then make you cry at the injustice of it all, the injustice of terrible poetry.
But what is justice?
Or crying?
Penelope cries. Poetic tears in poetic narrative of epic proportion. Justice in Homer is not simply about rules, it is most certainly about tears, and ghosts, and the dead, and no one knows more about ghosts than Penelope. Penelope, wife of lost Odysseus, has cried so many times, her face has become cratered by her own salty stream. Her cheeks are streaked with long ravines that turn into rivers, tributaries following the traces of her veins, capillaries broken and visible, their spidery fingers pointing the direction towards an ocean of sorrow; “like the snow that Zephyr/ scatters across the mountain peaks; then Eurus/ thaws it, and as it melts, the river swells/ and flows again. So were her lovely cheeks dissolved with tears” (19.206-209).2 Longing has changed the shape of her.
In “A Translator’s Reckoning with Women of the Odyssey,”3 Emily Wilson tells us that “Homer’s original text says that her chros—her “skin” or “flesh”—melted, and that her cheeks themselves dissolved (teketo kala pareia).” This dissolution, Wilson asserts, is presented to the reader as something disturbingly natural, like the snow melting in spring, filling the rivers that will ultimately give life. For Penelope, then, her loss and grief, her abandonment and loneliness, are natural to her position as wife and mother, just as natural as all other cycles of life, and this cycle, the feminine cycle of despair has, as Wilson argues, come with “the destruction of her self.” And that destruction, the swelling of life that is Penelope’s tears, is presented to us as both lovely and the erasure of lovely: her lovely cheeks dissolve. Her cheeks and her tears function as one, a land frozen and then melted, a world hard suddenly made liquid. Penelope is the fluid, a sea, like the water that holds her husband’s ship.
But one could not argue that Odysseus’ return is a true homecoming, one that metaphorically brings the barren lonely woman out of the winter of her life and into a new spring. I mean, I suppose you could. I suppose you could try anything with this poem. My students certainly do. I see them work their magical gymnastics of the mind to weave a Homeric narrative more akin to our own moral binaries. One that pits good against evil and awards Odysseus a Marvel film, or at the very least, a serious role alongside Brad Pitt. It would be lovely if that were the case, if in these moments of brief union, a resolution was reached, a love reignited, and the hearth and home become whole again. It would be lovely if Penelope’s tear-worn face was suddenly set aglow by the sight of her victorious husband, suddenly her beauty defined by her fulfillment of life rather than by the death that has been required for its making. It would be lovely.
But that is impossible, and Homer knows it. How can anyone’s cheeks become lovely in a house of massacre? How can massacre define loveliness. Or happiness? Or fulfillment of life?
It can’t.
Loveliness, as we know, is dissolution. It cannot both define the lines and erase them. It can only turn into the salty sea.
And this is actually what I want to talk about. This is where I want to begin. In this season of celebrated decay, right now, in this moment, I want to discuss the salty sea. I want to discuss the massacre.
Homer demands a specific story from the Muse. He doesn’t simply request a rag-tag adventure story of a wandering hero. He asks for the tale of a “complicated man”, a man who fails.
In most recent translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson, the poet orders the muse to “find the beginning.” Homer wants to know where it starts. He wants to know the failure.
In an earlier translation by Robert Fitzgerald, the muse is told to “sing in me and all through me”3 a tale that begins “when all the rest who left behind them/ headlong death in battle or at sea/ had long returned,” and Robert Fagles’ translation has the muse starting “from where you will.”4
It is easy to say it starts with Troy, or rather the end of Troy, after the city has been sacked, leveled, destroyed; after all but Aeneas, destined for his own journey, have been murdered or enslaved, executed; after Priam begs Achilles for the return of mutilated Hector so that he might give his son funeral rites, after Helen stands face to face with Menelaus, his sword sworn to her death but her beauty staying his hand, after Paris kills Achilles, and Deiphobus kills Paris, after Ajax the Lesser defiles Cassandra in Athena’s temple; after Ajax the Great has killed twenty-eight people, and countless more are killed without calculation; after and after and after; after all the death, when nothing is left. Nothing. Then we can begin the story.
Perhaps we should begin in layers, like the bodies layered on the battlefields of Troy. For Homer, it is all about the personal. War is intimate, hot, wet, dusty. Love and death collied somewhere between Hector’s gleaming helmet and Achilles’ shield.
In his essay, “Scarred Narratives and Speaking Wounds: War Poetry and the Body”, Jeffery Sychterz argues that these intimate wounds are a way towards narrative unraveling.5 Using the Fagles’ translation, Sychterz looks at Pedaeus’ death in Book Five of the Iliad:
Meges killed Pedaeus, Antenor’s son, a bastard boy
but lovely Theano nursed him with close, loving care
like her own children, just to please her husband.
Closing, Meges gave him some close attention too –
the famous spearman struck behind his skull,
just at the neck-cord, the razor spear slicing
straight up through the jaws, cutting away the tongue –
he sank in the dust, teeth clenching the cold bronze.
Sychterz’s interest in the passages is a matter of storytelling. The wound, inflicted with “close attention […] just at the neck-cord”, he argues, is consistent with a Homeric pattern, an unraveling of narrative: “the poet tells a short story that humanizes the individual killed and tells us who he was before the war; then he describes the fatal injury, often in graphic detail, including the exact organ or organs destroyed; finally he affirms the death and fate of the individual” (139). This wounded narrator is at the center of Erich Auerbach’s idea of “complete externalization of all the elements of that story and of their interconnections” that meld place, time, and experience into a single moment. In “Odysseus’ Scar”, from Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Auerbach focuses on a scar on Odysseus’s thigh, an identifying marker that threatens his disguise as unsuspecting beggar.6 Auerbach, like Sychterz, is concerned with narrative control; but, perhaps more specifically, Sychterz is concerned with narrative control of the dead, whose story is unraveled for him by the silent wound that bleeds out the self. Little known Pedaeus, who had once been a bastard son loved by his stepmother is no longer the orator of his tale, instead, the poet narrator unthreads the story through violence. The close attention of Theano is converted to the close attention of Meges, who places the spear expertly in the back of his victim’s neck, opening up the vessel of identity and allowing it to spill out onto the battlefield. Once empty, the body is an object of war, an inanimate thing to layer upon the fields of Troy. In death, then, all of Homer’s soldiers are emptied objects, identified not by their names or their stories, which had placed them as sons and husbands, citizens and supplicants of city-states, loyal followers of gods and men, but casualties, numbers, things to remember in a before time, before the wound let out the story.
I’m thinking about this now, this idea of objectification as ways of erasing story. The story, once told, serves only as a reminder of the body before the slaughter. The identity, no longer tied to the body, is placed elsewhere, in a book, or a mind, a function of nostalgia, a trigger towards memory. But memory is imperfect. And it fades. The further we get from the event, the thinner the lines that delineate time, experience, place, being. Sound of a voice; a smile; a thing said that one time that was so hilarious; was it actually said that way? Was it actually said? We can’t hold onto everything forever. Eventually, we lose the dead, we replace them with memory, a memory of a memory, a story we tell ourselves that is just a stand in for the actual thing. And the bodies? Like layers among the dust covered fields of Troy, one on top of the other, emptied of story. Objects, inanimate, unthinking, heavy with the weight gravity demands on them.
Troy is a city layered. There are nine different archeological layers, defined by ruins built on top of ruins. This is a result of constant destruction over the 4000 years of its existence. I find this fascinating, the human tendency to destroy and rebuild. Like the close attention of a mother or murderer; through wounds we travel into this world and out. Either way there is blood; either way someone’s tongue becomes the cold bronze.
We know Troy is destroyed. The myth tells us this. Nothing survives within its walls. Anything that does survive, ANYTHING THAT MAKES IT does so because it makes it out. And even those who make it out do not always survive. Agamemnon is killed on the shores of his homeland by his half-brother, Aegisthus. Cassandra, taken as his slave, is slaughtered along with the rest of his plunder. All of Odysseus’ men die, killed by his own brokenness. Only he returns to Ithaca, his survival a metaphor for remembrance, for the ghosts we carry.
But who returns to Troy? Who yearns for their homeland the way Odysseus yearns for his? Who cries for the rubble? Whose tears mix the binding agent to lay the stones? And when those stones are laid, what of the stories underneath?
Shall we return to the fall? To the leaves and mulch, the rotting corpses of our trees’ lost loves? The things that get cut off to preserve the whole. When they fall to the ground and layer upon layer, when they build in a quiet understory, the story underneath, they too create their own ruins. We are a world of ruins. A cycle of destruction surprised by regrowth. No wonder we have no idea who we are.
And what of the ghost?
I think sometimes I haunt myself. I know that sounds self-indulgent, but I’m going to leave it here anyway. I’m going to let it sit fully and thoroughly in this space. This white space with black words, or black space with white words or a space with words, whatever the color against color, ink against the page, mark on the skin, the skin that holds the body, the skin that keeps things in, the skin that marks the difference between a ghost and a living being, between Dante and Virgil, Hamlet and his father, Catherine and Heathcliff. WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE SAYING?, you might be asking, dear reader. Yes, perhaps I am saying nothing at all. And I apologize; I didn’t mean to give you such an aggressive voice. I didn’t mean to speak for you. I didn’t mean to embody you, sit in your body, move your mouth, hold you too close.
That’s a ghost’s job.
Catherine’s ghost is a memory and a face, a scratching at the window. Heathcliff, our hateful hero is the only one that really sees her, ever. Even living Catherine is only ever truly known by Heathcliff. It is why she loves him, is it not? And why she so desperately wants to get away from him. Why the thought of marrying him is impossible.
“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him,” she tells her servant and confidant, Nelly.7 This word degrade is a wonderful word, a signature Brontë word. It would degrade me. So extreme. But that is what these Brontës are – extreme, sharp, brittle. Everything always exactly to the point, but not the point that everyone thinks to look. It’s always a stare fiercely fixed on a point we were not anticipating, a place we had forgotten to look, or rather, a place we had not seen, a transparent place, a place inhabited by sprits.
Degrade, in the context of Cathy, is too often interpreted as a decline in social class, income, and status. Cathy cannot marry Heathcliff because he has nothing. At least that’s what Heathcliff thinks. That’s why he runs, that’s why he goes out into the night, into the dark, and returns even more hateful, but rich. But that is not what Emily wants us to see. Like us, Heathcliff is looking at the wrong thing. Emily’s Cathy is not looking at the point of wealth and social class. She’s not here with us and our worldly possessions. Her eyes are pointed towards heaven; she is looking at the angels; she’s looking at the dead.
“Do you ever dream queer dreams?” she asks Nelly before she confesses her love for Heathcliff.
“We’re dismal enough without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us,” Nelly warns her, but Cathy can’t help herself. She’s in too deep now. She’s near the Divine, she’s near the edge. She tells Nelly a dream in which the angels kicked her out of heaven.
“They flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights.”
She dreams of no escape.
Degrade.
“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (86). It is in her head and in her heart.
“‘Here! and here!’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: ‘in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart […]” (85). And it is there – forehead and heart – that she feels Heathcliff; she feels him where she most feels herself. He is her. She is him, and so to love him, to give herself to him, would be to give herself to herself. Degrade: to fully love the self. How can a girl fully love herself without haunting herself? Without becoming a ghost?
“How could you leave me/When I needed to possess you?/I hated you, I loved you, too” Kate Bush sings in her own Wuthering Heights.8 In the first version of the 1978 music video, Kate Bush dances in a dark and smoky studio room lit by studio lights yellow, red, yellow, red, blue, yellow, red, blue – “Out on the wily, windy moors/We’d roll and fall in green/You had a temper like my jealousy/Too hot, too greedy” — and then two other Kate Bushes appear and dance ghostly in sync. A holy trinity of white clad Cathies cartwheeling and twirling into themselves. The heart. The head. The soul.
“Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy/I’ve come home, I’m so cold/Let me in your window.” Scratchy dead little Cathy at the window, thrown out of heaven, so cold on the moors, haunting her Heathcliff and so haunting herself.
Perhaps Odysseus and Penelope are the same too. Perhaps this is why he cannot stay. Perhaps this is why loving him happens at the expense of her loveliness, perhaps this is why Penelope’s face becomes the rivers that flow to the sea, becoming the sea. Penelope is the sea, the rocky water that kills Odysseus’ men, the waves that steer his ship, keeps him far from home. Penelope feeds his absence, and his return. She is him. He is her. It would degrade her to love too openly. To love so fully. In her heart and in her mind, his soul and hers are the same. And so, he must go. Do you think Penelope ever scratched at the window of Odysseus’ mind? While he was sleeping beside the warm body of Circe, do you think he ever saw cold crying Penelope out on the moors of Ithaca? Do you think he ever got kicked out of heaven?
Certainly the answer to the last question is no. Penelope is the ghost, right? Or perhaps they both are. Spectral lovers. Penelope as poltergeist, unweaving the funeral cloth, Odysseus as memory, our hellish traveler walking the steps of the dead. Unlike Cathy, he isn’t kicked out of heaven; he descends into hell. Odysseus is our subterranean traveler. He is our underworld adventurer. Thousands of years before Dante, Odysseus travels into the depths of the dead to see the face of his mother and receive a prophecy. Aeneas also travels to the kingdom of Dis, he too sees a dead parent, though it is his father, and it is his father who bears the words of the future. Of course, both heroes are precursors to another traveling soul who shuttles down into Satan’s lair, taking our dirty little sin with him. But let’s stay with Odysseus for now, the father of going where he doesn’t belong, of dying just enough to see the dead.
Odysseus travels down into Hades to receive the prophecy from the specter of the famous prophet Tiresias who still foresees the events of humankind long after his own corporality has ceased to be. Following the directions given to him by Circe, Odysseus reaches the “spacious home of Hades” (10.513). But his task is not just to enter Hades’ house, but also to play host to a dinner party of the dead. He must make an offering of meat, of blood, and a delicious cocktail of honey, sweet wine, and water, all recipes given to him by the “goddess who can speak in the human tongues” (10.137). When Tiresias finally arrives, he tells Odysseus that he will reach Ithaca “if you control your urges and your men” (11.105).
I discuss this moment with my students every semester. I wish we could linger on it more than we do. For the purposes of this particular class, the main thing they must learn is that Odysseus has no self-control. We must discuss his urges, and so discuss his failures, so that we can discuss agency and power, justice and retribution. But sometimes I stand in the middle of the room and ask them to think about the dead. I ask them to imagine the transparent bodies hovering around Odysseus, faces full of longing. Perhaps this is not what Homer imagined, perhaps this is Dante’s fault for drawing up the virtuous pagans who live in Limbo, trapped in a hopeless utopia just before the entryway to hell. But why bring up Dante? I don’t know. He always seems fitting to discuss when traveling into the subterranean world.
If I were to rewrite the Inferno and set it in New York, Cantos IV might begin in Pleasantville or Terrytown, perhaps I’d place Virgil and Homer in a 1920’s mansion just outside Rockefeller State Park. Or better yet, perhaps I’d place them, along with all the Ancient Philosophers (capital P), in Bronxville, on the Sarah Lawrence campus. They could have the best of both worlds, sandwiched between the library and the river, looking over the edge at Yonkers, the vestibule of hell.
But I digress.
This is really not what I wanted to focus on.
The windy river of Acheron eludes the intention.
I want to tell you what I want my students to tell me. I want them to tell me that Odysseus’ mother cannot recognize him because, like his wife, his face has melted into something else. He wears the massacre like an animal skin, like a winter coat, a Halloween mask. A second skin. The layers of Troy line his face, coat his hair, run through his veins.
Earlier, before Odysseus tells the story of his journey to his kind host, King Alcinous, he finds himself in the position of listener. The order of this information seems important, the fact that first he must hear his story told before he is allowed to tell it himself. He first must hear someone else tell him what he has done. Demodocus, a great poet sings for the court the tale of the Trojan Horse, the infamous gift the Achaeans use to deceive the Trojans and infiltrate their city. It was clever Odysseus’ idea, this pretending. A clever little game of hiding in the horse and pretending a truce. If war crimes existed during the Bronze Age, this would certainly be a war crime. Odysseus, along with Menelaus and their men, hide inside the belly of a wooden horse, and then under the cloak of night, sneak out and slaughter the city in its sleep. “Doomed to ruin,” is how Demodocus describes the state of Troy. Demodocus, sings that the ambush brings death, every neighborhood obliterated. “Dreadful violence,” the bard tells us as he conjures up Odysseus’s ghosts, or his memories as ghosts, the buried narrative (8.519). As Odysseus listens, he is “melting.” Wilson translates this particular passage with a brutal simplicity:
Odysseus was melting into tears;
his cheeks were wet with the weeping, as a woman
weeps as she falls to wrap her arms around
her husband, fallen fighting for his home
and children. She is watching as he gasps
and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing
upon his corpse. The men are right behind.
They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her
to slavery, hard labor, a life
of pain. Her face is marked with her despair.
In that same desperate way, Odysseus
was crying
The Odyssey, 8.521-536.
I shouldn’t have given you that entire quote. It’s not important for the point. What is important here is that “Odysseus was melting into tears.” I tell my students to stick the point and here I am not sticking to the point. Or rather, I gave you the point and some extra. I gave you an overabundance of Homer, an “o’er growth,” as Hamlet calls what I’ve done, an excessive indulgence, an “o’erleaven” of quotation. I did it. Perhaps, like Hamlet, I will lose my mind and kill us all. Or rather, I will kill this essay, I will kill our faith in ghosts. Or perhaps I will kill the ghosts. But how can you kill a thing already dead? Perhaps we will all become ghosts, and the ghosts will remain, and so we will remain, a haunting of words, translucent line breaks, whispered poetics. What is poetry but ghosts?
But back to the point within the point; my pouring of Homeric rhyme.
I want this Trojan woman’s story to be told as much as possible. I want to etch it out on every page. I want us to see her body fall, melt, cry, hit, dragged away. I want my students to ask me about the ghosts, to ask me about the melting. I want them to ask: why does the body destroy itself after it has destroyed others, why does the body let itself be destroyed, why do the sins linger in the cracks of our faces? I want them to ask: How might our mothers cease to recognize us? I want them to ask me: what do you love about this passage? I want them to ask me: do you love this passage? I want them to ask me: do you love!?
I want, I want, I want. To tell you. What I love about this passage.
What I love in this passage is the parallel narrative’s power. Demodocus’ narrative, which is Homer’s narrative, which is Odysseus’ narrative, which is the narrative of the Achaeans, the narrative of the Trojans, the narrative of history, our history, our history taken from this ancient story, this story that has molded our identity, our understanding of bodies, of power, of war, of annihilation. THE STORY IS ANNIHILATION. The story that is Odysseus’ story through King Alcinous’ poet, through Homer, through the Muse, becomes our story, and Odysseus becomes a ghost.
And as a ghost, Odysseus is a melted woman.
Like Penelope, he becomes a tributary, a river, an ocean. He is the sea that carries him home. And once home, the slaughtering ghost, the beggar, the NoMan, the hero, is a harbinger of death. A reaper. Home again and blood all over his naked body.
I’m thinking about the cycles. How one person is killed, and then another is killed, and how we continually kill, kill, kill, until killing stops being killing, stops being murder, and simply becomes a matter of life. That to live is not just to die, but to be slaughtered. So far, the combined deaths of non-active-military Israelis and the Palestinians since October 7th is approximately16,400 people, 15,200 of those being Palestinians, and 6,150 of those being Palestinian children. Between Palestinian and Israeli deaths, approximately 6,185 children have been killed by either Hamas or IDF. By the time you’re reading this the numbers will be higher. In Ukraine, over 10,000 civilians have died since the Russian invasion, more than 536 of those have been children. Over 32,945 children were killed or maimed between 2005 and 2021 in Afghanistan due to U.S. military action in Afghanistan. I could go on. Approximately 84,000 children were killed during the Vietnam War. How many were killed during WWII? WWI? The First Crimean War? Napoleonic Wars? Should we discuss the massacres in India under British Colonial Rule? France in North Africa? Should we talk about the Crusades? How far do we go back?
Let’s go back to Odysseus, who “ripped off his rags,” his glorious body before all the men who have taken over his house, all the men he means to kill. “Dogs!” he calls out. Animals, sick little dying lambs! “…you thought no man would ever come to take revenge. / Now you are trapped inside the snares of death” (22.1,35-41). You beasts stuck in the net, you will die and die and die and I will kill and kill and kill, you and I in the cycle, dying and killing and dying and killing, we will all rip off our rags. We will all stand naked and covered in blood. Who is to blame?
Paris?
I think about my students asking about Helen.
“Wasn’t it an abduction?” they ask. “Wasn’t it rape?”
Yes and no, I say. We don’t know. There are conflicting narratives. Aphrodite made her, she claims. The Goddess of Love entranced her, made her want someone who wasn’t her husband. It is a convenient narrative for a woman who otherwise has so little power. For a woman whose only power to stop her husband from murdering her is her beauty. Either way, we must believe the victim.
Lesson: beauty makes people care.
Lesson: beauty keeps you from being murdered.
Lesson: If you are murdered and also beautiful than other people will be upset and murder your murderer. Or your abductor. Or your lover who turns into abductor if that means you get to live.
Lesson: be beautiful if you want to be cared about, dead or alive.
Lesson: we will all die, so be beautiful so people will care about your death and also maybe not necessarily murder you, as was the case with Helen. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.
But let’s say she was abducted. Let’s say it was rape. Let’s say that Paris is evil and selfish and deserved to be punished.
Does that matter? Of course. Of course it matters. Should Hector’s tiny child, the same tiny baby that cried at the frightening sight of the sun gleaming on his father’s helmet, the same tiny child whose name was Scamander but who was nicknamed Astyanax, should he be thrown from the city walls? Did he deserve this death?
There is a child across from me at the café I am currently sitting at. She is maybe almost one? Not even? I have no idea. Tiny. Another, curly haired and walking, her big toddler belly leading the way, runs past me. These babies are adorable. Their little runs are hilarious and cute. Human life at its most innocent, its most pure. How amazing. Do these children deserve to be thrown from the city walls? If an American soldier commits a war crime somewhere out there in the many possibilities the U.S. has created for itself to commit war crimes, do these tiny babies get to be punished? Is this how we want to think of ourselves? Is this how we want to think? What do we really mean when we talk about atrocities. Are we discussing theirs or ours? Yours or mine?
It’s Odysseus who sets the stage. He opens the door. He thinks of a horse and then sits in its belly, and when he leaves the belly of the beast, he kills and kills and kills. He gives us the blueprint for action and reaction, for denial, for trauma, for brokenness. He tells us what it is to be destroyed by your own ability to destroy, to commit “dreadful violence.”
And then he melts. Years later he melts into a river of Trojan women. He becomes a ghost.
It’s interesting that we think of Odysseus as a living character. That Penelope and Telemachus are waiting for a living man. Perhaps we should rework this. I don’t mean to get all “I see dead people” on you dear reader, but let’s. Let’s get all Haley Joel Osment circa 1999 for a moment.9 Let’s imagine; let’s allow the Muse to enter us so that we might retell the story.
What does it mean to go into the underworld? What does it mean to talk to the dead? Who is there to tell us that everyone is not already dead? I am sorry for all the questions. I’m breaking all the rules. I’ve become a body of questions. I just want to know about the ghosts. I want you to tell me. I am asking so that we might find an answer together.
Odysseus is our one survivor. But is he? Might the dinner he sets at Hades and Persephone’s dining table not have been a summoning, but something else? An entering? A request? A sleep “devoutly to be wished”? Is there no “bare bodkin” for Odysseus? Muse knows he wishes for it enough. He and everyone else. “I wish I had died the same day the mass of Trojans hurled their bronze-tipped spears at me […]!” he cries while in the throes of Poseidon’s rage (5.308-310). If I could choose how to die! If I had a choice! If my unwillingness to live could also be my one and single power. If only my power was to unlive this life and live another! “By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man/ some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive/ than rule down here over all the breathless dead,” Achilles’ spirit tells Odysseus (11.489-492). To be someone other than who I am. To be a person without the burden of violence. To be removed from the conversation. To be to be to be to be to be to be or not to be.
Hamlet decides it is too hard not to be. So does Achilles. It is too hard to die. And so we become ghosts in the face of the “undiscovered country.” We become cowards. Unfortunately, for Achilles, it’s too late. It will be too late for Hamlet very soon, too. And Odysseus? Well, he’s a ghost.
“The dog belonged to someone who has died,” Eumaeus says of Argos, an old faithful dog who has waited and waited for Odysseus’ return (17.312). He is the only one who knows the master right away. He is the only one to recognize the ghost. No one else sees what is right in front of them. No one else stares into the face of death but Argos. Perhaps Penelope, perhaps she looks into the face of death, but she recognizes her own ghost. She knows the demons that they keep. Looking at her beggar husband is like looking into a mirror, or a pumpkin; it’s like looking at her own corpse, her own river of tears, her melted body, her own sins. WE KNOW IT WELL, she says to the beggar, WE KNOW WHAT THIS LIFE IS NOT.
But Penelope is already dead. They’re all dead. Only Argos has held out. And Argos, the poor abused Argos, he too gives in at the sight of his skeleton king. The dog dies at the sight of death and then all the death. As if death was the reward, the goal, handed out after the task was complete. After he had fulfilled the waiting. He stops. We all stop.
This is where I will stop: at the end of waiting. Before the slaughter. Before. Before the lie begins, when fall and then winter and then spring, before we pretend to recognize a thing that is not the same, that is new and not what we were, before we pretend to see ourselves in the now and not in the past, in a life instead of a death, the death of others instead of ourselves. Or even before. Before we carve the pumpkin and let it rot. Before this essay. Before Gaza, before Ukraine, before Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, WWII, WWI, before Europe, before West and East, before before before. Before Argos, before Odysseus, before Achilles covered in ash, before Paris, and Hector, and Patroclus, before Cassandra is defiled in the temple, before Helen is taken from Sparta, before Lido, before Europa, before before before. Before the body is a thing that can die and so lives. There is no apple here, no garden, just Troy. The city layered. The city ruined. We must go before Troy. Before. Before the body does not seek a life that un-lives others so that it might feel the contrast, so that it might feel life beyond its own mortality, before the body sees, really sees, and sees and so does not kill. Before. I will stop before. Before we get kicked out of heaven. Before the haunting. Before winter. Before you, dear reader, become a ghost.
Endnotes
1 Unless otherwise stated, all quotes from The Odyssey are from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2 Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2018.
3 Wilson, Emily. “A Translator’s Reckoning with Women of The Odyssey.” The New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-translators-reckoning-with-the-women-of-the-odyssey. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
4 Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 1961.
5 Homer, The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking. 1996.
6 Sychterz, Jeffrey. “Scarred Narratives and Speaking Wounds: War Poetry and the Body.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 44, no. 2, 2009, pp. 137–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25699562. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.
7 Auerbach, Erich, et al. “ODYSSEUS’ SCAR.” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature – New and Expanded Edition, REV-Revised, Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 3–23. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt3fgz26.4. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.
8 Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights. Modern Library, 2021
9 Bush, Kate. “Wuthering Heights – Official Music Video – Version 1.” You Tube, uploaded by KateBushMusic, Dec 30, 2010, https://youtu.be/-1pMMIe4hb4?si=EIKZSAbYJXwYACNo
10 Night Shyamalan, M. The Sixth Sense. Buena Vista Pictures, 1999.
Jessica Denzer received her B.A. in English Literature from Fordham University and her M.F.A. in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a researcher in residence at the New York Public Library and writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, and she supplies a range of editorial contributions to Iron Oak Editions,, L’Esprit Literary Review, and Four Way Review. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of essays.
L'Esprit Literary Review 
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