OUT ON A LIMB

 

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

                                                                                  

The owl stared the wide-awake Paris dead in the eye—not a blink—not a flutter of feather. The bird sat statue-like on a limb of a tree at the edge of the campsite the young herder shared with his fellows. Stretched out on the ground, boulders pillowing their heads, the other boys slept soundly, their comic snores and lip-smacks bouncing trunk to trunk among the small copse of ancient olive trees, their bent and twisted heads scoured by seawind. Although a night stifling with heat, the presence of the owl blossomed gooseflesh on Paris’ arms.  He had seen the owl before, too often before, so often that he was watchful of its appearance and wary of its portent. “Great Athena,” Paris uttered under his breath to the chaste goddess of War and Wisdom and Women’s Work, the goddess demolisher of giants, whose owl companion she had let loose on himself, apparently. While he could not lay claim to chastity, he felt certain he was respectful of the contributions of women. He was dismayed by Athena’s evident wrath toward himself. His face upraised to the sky, he appealed to the goddess, “Have I wronged you in some way? Or, is the owl’s attendance a foreshadowing of my death?” Even though at times the boy was weighty with a fatalistic foreknowledge of his early demise, still he felt a strange sense of destiny, irrational as it was considering his lowly circumstances. It was as if a grand adventure awaited him in the ethers. A prologue of it was acted out in peculiar dreams, in snippets of vague memories, in puzzling clips of intuition, in a sense that he must stand the ready for it at all times and against all odds.

            The soft plashing of the sea called Paris to it. His way floodlit by deep starlight, he walked to the soggy beach. Kicking off his sandals, he waded ankle-deep into the licking surf. Far in the distance, a roar like rolling thunder grew nearer and nearer, moment by moment ever nearer. “Horses!” It was horses on the hoof—heavy on the hoof. “That means riders.” A thrill surged through his body, for by some odd, perhaps even a supernatural calculation, he recognized that the horses and riders spelled out the clarion call to his fate. He planted himself firmly and waited for them…

Few of us mere mortals can boast of a destiny the equal of the mythological Paris/Alexander, who was the lost and then found prince of ancient Troy, the adulterer abductor of Helen of Sparta, and the pivotal object of the Trojan War. Later, we find idealized variations of him in Moses and David and Jesus, in the fallible Gandhi and Churchill and Mandela and King. In popular culture he is the enigmatic James Bond, the unlikely Luke Skywalker, and the underestimated Indiana Jones—and yes he appears again in extreme perversions (the shadow-side) in imposter-heroes such as Hitler and Mussolini.

Swedish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung famously labeled this type of character as the “hero archetype.” This symbol of man’s unconscious self, this the hero’s main goal is to overcome certain obstacles and achieve exclusive goals, of beating back the monster of darkness, to rescue the princess, to find the treasure, the golden egg—all of which are metaphors for the character’s true feelings and unique potential. The authentic hero, initially a lonely figure usually unsupported by anyone else, goes out on a limb, however shaky it is, and achieves his superhuman tasks and is not overwhelmed by them.    

Jung explains it as, “In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only the one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the ‘treasure hard to attain.’ He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself…He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means.”

In the large scheme, such destinies are consequential in the extreme. They start wars; they launch religious movements; they force civil rights reforms. And this year of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, I submit that the citizens of the world, and especially of the United States, are witnesses to an archetypal hero’s journey unfolding within the race for the presidency of the United States in the person of Joe Biden—this person whose decades of public service have earned him a peaceful existence as an honored American statesman—this person whose best life is in his Delaware home with his loving wife and adoring children and grandchildren—but no—this man chooses to take up the seat behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House, to take on the hardest job in the world at this, possibly the most difficult time in history, for you, for me, for us…not for himself. I doubt it is a stretch too far to imagine that there are wannabe presidents, Democratic, Republican, Green Party, no matter, all across the nation who are breathing a secret and deep sigh of relief that he or she is not a designated candidate for the office at this tragic era of history. But not Joe Biden! He is locked and loaded and ready to make any necessary personal and professional sacrifice in the mission to save democracy for his country, the loss of which is a real and present danger. Win or lose the election, I see Joe Biden as the hero of our time!

Clearly, the direction the election will go is ultimately in the hands of the gods, or, more likely, it rests with the goddesses among us. And at their lead, I envision Athena, that goddess-embodiment of awesome warrior womanhood, that slayer of imposter-heroes.©

 

The introduction of the above essay relative to Paris/Alexander, and Athena and her owl, is this writer’s fictional rendition of Classical Greek and Roman mythology stories.

 

#Ancient-Troy; #Paris; #Carl-Jung; #hero’s-journey; #hero-archetype; #Joe-Biden; #POTUS; #Linda-Lee-Greene; #A-CHANCE-AT-THE-MOON.

                                                                             

A CHANCE AT THE MOON, award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s latest novel, finds Hawaiian Koa Kalua’i and Navajo Sam Whitehorse embarked on a classic hero’s journey to stop environmental terrorists in their tracks, strategies the two friends concoct at Sam’s ranch in northwest Nevada. A novel of love, betrayal, murder, and captivating psychological suspense, it is available for purchase at:

https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder-ebook/dp/B07Z44YN9X/.