ultimate truths: an essay via whatsapp

 [07:16, 09/06/2020] Mum: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef917ec

[07:17, 09/06/2020] Mum: I have been thinking ... the loom is stationary but the shuttle is in constant motion xx

[07:20, 09/06/2020] Mum: Does the poem suggest that both travel and where we come from makes us what we are? If so, do Penelope and Odysseus together represent the whole human experience- male and female combined to make something whole?

[07:20, 09/06/2020] Mum: Tiresias

[07:21, 09/06/2020] Mum: 360 degrees human experience

[07:25, 09/06/2020] Mum: Also P undoing her work is a creation -destruction cycle. Reflecting the earth’s constant cyclical nature. So Ithaca is constant despite the passage of time xx

[07:56, 09/06/2020] Daisy: I’m a big fan of this!

[07:56, 09/06/2020] Daisy: What a beautiful thought!

[07:57, 09/06/2020] Daisy: I actually read in a paper yesterday that working at the loom was usually done by younger women as it involved a lot of walking to and fro

[07:57, 09/06/2020] Daisy: And that’s why older women are usually depicted spinning not weaving

[07:58, 09/06/2020] Mum: That's interesting. So in another way she is holding her place in time with the walking, undoing and redoing a single day?

[08:00, 09/06/2020] Daisy: Yes, never moving forwards

[08:01, 09/06/2020] Daisy: But also how odysseus’ journey is always marked by the 10 years

[08:01, 09/06/2020] Daisy: There are always reference of how much time has passed

[08:03, 09/06/2020] Mum: I guess also that decade would have been her childbearing years- incredibly significant in those days

[08:04, 09/06/2020] Daisy: Yes that too

[08:07, 09/06/2020] Mum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_P._Cavafy#Excerpt_from_Ithaca  You might be interested in the themes of his poetry

[08:13, 09/06/2020] Daisy: I’ll have a read today - thanks xxxx

[08:14, 09/06/2020] Mum: The ten years might be a poetic convention, signalling the passing of a long time. Like falling asleep for a hundred years, or the seven times seven thing.

[08:15, 09/06/2020] Mum: But in a decimal system, of course, it does have significance as a complete unit

[11:35, 09/06/2020] Mum: Also, I have been thinking...Ithaca is the point you start off from and the place you return to. Like birth and death. And at the centre, a woman, making and unmaking. So an analogy of the Earth goddess? And the poem could reflect birth, life, and returning to the earth when you have completed your life? Xx

[11:38, 09/06/2020] Daisy: seasonal like demeter

[11:38, 09/06/2020] Mum: yup

[11:38, 09/06/2020] Mum: But also all there is of life

[11:39, 09/06/2020] Mum: Also, I keep thinking of this:

[11:39, 09/06/2020] Mum: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

[11:39, 09/06/2020] Daisy: ts eliot

[11:40, 09/06/2020] Mum: Four Quartets, Burnt Norton

[11:40, 09/06/2020] Daisy: I like the idea that there's this epicentre of the world

[11:40, 09/06/2020] Daisy: and it's always just the world turning, everything else is periphery

[11:41, 09/06/2020] Mum: Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

[11:43, 09/06/2020] Mum: And this: We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

[11:43, 09/06/2020] Mum: From Little Gidding

[11:44, 09/06/2020] Daisy: kinda modernist in a smallest thing sense

[11:45, 09/06/2020] Daisy: looking at the world in its minute detail whilst trying to understand the largest of questions

[11:46, 09/06/2020] Mum: Which must have been how the earliest people looked at existence. So 'at the end of our exploring/will be to arrive where we started'?

[11:47, 09/06/2020] Daisy: vessels of experience

[11:47, 09/06/2020] Mum: So does modernism end up bringing us to back to our beginnings

[11:48, 09/06/2020] Mum: ?

[11:49, 09/06/2020] Daisy: well i take it as just as the world is only created when we see it

[11:49, 09/06/2020] Mum: Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

[11:52, 09/06/2020] Daisy: maybe that's why gods fling stars into the sky in bouts of love (like bacchus & ariadne)

[11:53, 09/06/2020] Daisy: there's always this idea of being eternal, but maybe only if you break your circle - like extremes? like pecking out insides on a rock, or falling in a deep crazed love

[11:54, 09/06/2020] Mum: An entirely human centric view? We do our best to shape it (even Eden is described as a garden) and yet it will continue in some form and absorb us entirely

[11:55, 09/06/2020] Mum: To humans, the gods they create to explain life must be extreme in action and experience in order to explain ultimate truths

[11:58, 09/06/2020] Daisy: and what is life without trying to understand an ultimate truth?