LEAST TERN FLIGHT SEQUENCE - Composition Tuesday

Top ten narrative counterfactuals of all time!!!! It's such an incredible moment for manhood and generational relationships in Homer. A Homeric warrior has an aged father who can't fight and a baby son who also can't fight, no matter how little sense that might make in the narrative timeline. There's only room for one generation of men in a family. So accessing full adult masculinity in Homer means one of two things: either your father is dead (Agamemnon, Menelaus, Diomedes, Orestes) or you've displaced him and pushed him into old age and out of the picture by coming into manhood (Achilles, Hector, Ajax, Odysseus himself).

Telemachus spends the first four books of the Odyssey trying to reach adulthood by figuring out of the first thing is true. If Odysseus is dead, then he can hold a funeral for him, send his mother away, and take up authority over his father's household, a thing which he alone properly has the right to do. But Odysseus is not dead, and then you get this narrative feint at the second thing, at the possibility of Telemachus becoming a man and/by displacing his father, taking up authority in his father's house even while his father is still alive, as Odysseus evidently did to Laertes decades ago. But he doesn't do it! He doesn't do it!

pretty good. took this picture of my friend's cat, who uses to date my cat

FIRST THING I SEE:

Marabou stork sketch, in ballpoint