Sea Grapes

Sea Grapes

by Derek Walcott

That sail which leans on light,
tired of islands,
a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,
home-bound on the Aegean;
that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like
the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in
every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war
between obsession and responsibility will
never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now
wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since
Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from
whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the
conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Those last lines.  They pull me up short today with Mercury retrograde exactly half-way, Saturn turning direct in Scorpio, a Grand Water Trine activated for the next week, emotions spilling everywhere, mine and everyone else's.  How many times have I turned to the Odyssey to soothe me, to help me navigate some rough water?  And always it has consoled, but the rub is, not enough.  In the end, I have to find a way to live with uncertainty, insecurity, and failure.  At least that's the hypothesis of Oliver Burkeman and his recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.  And looking back over the last few years, that's exactly been the lesson for me, at least one of them.  You can't be certain; you can't always work with a net.  And Lord knows, it may not always look like success, although 'failure' may be a much more relative term than we often think it is.  

The classics can console but in the end, it's not enough, they're not enough.  They can provide wise counsel, those classics, but ultimately it's our lives and we are the ones that must do the living - good, bad, indifferent.