Hope United Church of Christ
Sturgeon Bay, WI
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1 Kings 22:29-38
Job 7:7-15
He appeared as a spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam’s Pythonesque 1977 film Jabberwocky, the movie inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem of the same name, but the actor behind the spaghetti was a poet in his own right off screen. Christopher Logue, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, was many things actually, including screenwriter, ex-con, and pacifist. Joan Baez sang his words, set to music by Donovan, on her eponymous first album.
Logue is known as much though for what he did not accomplish as for what he did. When he died in 2011, he left behind an unfinished modernist retelling of Homer’s Iliad titled “War Music.” Some portions had already been published, the slow and painful delivery of what looked to be a masterpiece. The poet’s death before the work was complete was a bit like when one of those new puzzle television series is abruptly cancelled and we never get the answers, but for the literary set. At least we know how the Iliad actually ends!
What was complete at the time of his death, those previously published portions of “War Music,” and what could be reconstructed from Logue’s notebooks, was posthumously published in a single volume in 2015. Early in, we find Antenor counseling the Trojan king, advising the return of Helen, the woman central to the decade-long siege of Troy. Antenor asks.
‘My King,
The winners of a war usually get
Something out of it.
What will we get?
Their camp. Their ditch. And who wants those?
Only Lord Koprophag, the god of filth.’
He continues:
Impatient now:
‘Stand Helen on a transport floored with gold,
And as they rumble through the Skean Gate
Let trumpets from the terracing
Bray charivari to her back’s bad loveliness.”
Logue uses the unusual word charivari, which means a noisy and mocking serenade. Let’s just say Antenor is not a slave to Helen’s legendary beauty. He’d be happy to see her gone.
While Logue’s version may be new and modernist, he has not altered one bit the mood of the ancient poem, which begins in medias res, that is to say, in the middle of the action. The Iliad was written at about the same time the Assyrians were destroying the northern portion of the divided kingdom, the portion known as Israel or Samaria, or in today’s second reading, Shomron, where they take the body of the wicked King Ahab, immoral and corrupt. His character is made clear by the ancient author who has Ahab enter battle in disguise, abandoning his allies when he is wounded. Continue reading “War Music: November 10. 2019”