A Witness Walking to these Shores: Embodied Memory and the Dispersed Spatiality of Networked Presence
- Michael Joyce
- Jun 22, 2021
- 16 min read
Updated: Jun 27
A witness walking to these shores in our time would not spy a single war-worn and sea-tossed Ithacan sailor returning to his homeland but rather thousands of woeful, current- day avatars of Odysseus, refugees who in the words of Homer find themselves ‘τῆλε φίλων καὶ πατρίδος αἴης’, ‘far from friends and home’.
The linkage of space, politics, and the humanities in the theme of this conference is something more than a matter of mere historical timeliness—and certainly not opportunism—but instead an expression of the deepest roots shared by Greek and American notions of language, literature, history, philosophy, and the arts, that for better or worse we have come to call by the increasingly awkward term ‘the humanities’.
‘The humanities’ has become an awkward term not only because of a broadening definition of human beings’ reciprocal relationship with both the animal world and the inorganic quantum universe, but also on account of the convergence of techne and episteme in the networked world, factors that increasingly challenge the centrality of the human. But our humanity is also challenged on its face as the internal politics of nation upon nation across the globe turn misanthropic and the immigrant experience of an increasingly exiled global population of refugees becomes brutalized, hopeless, and dehumanized. We are all of us ‘estranged from that which is most familiar’, as the twentieth-century American poet Charles Olson frequently paraphrased and evoked Heraclitus.
If we gathered here have been both careful and caring during these days, perhaps we can leave here having renewed our familiarity in the root sense of not just our shared humanity but also what we mean by both politics and space. I hope by these remarks to make some suggestions toward that renewal.
‘Politics’, of course, is a fine and ancient Greek word, at first meaning the affairs of the city, the polis, but where the meaning of polis in time came to be understood not just as the concentrated and fortified high place—the citadel—but the surround which the city state encompassed and whose extent the polis gave a view to. ‘Polis is eyes’, Olson—himself a one-time politician—declared in his four-volume epic The Maximus Poems, whose prototypic hero is modeled upon not Odysseus but the second-century Greek rhetorician and philosopher, Maximus of Tyre (M I 26).[1]
By ‘Polis is eyes’ Olson meant a quality of attention—a caring attention to the what, the whom, and the when of the world—possessed by those women and men who had eyes to see their relation to both others and otherness. For Olson politics was a poetics, what he called ‘the attention, and the care’ with which ‘each of us/chooses our own/ kin and/ concentration’. He attributed this quality of attention not just to poets—but perhaps unsurprisingly to a Greek audience—to fishermen, those whose eyes we might say could discern the kinship between the ship of the returning hero on the horizon and a raft teeming with Eritrean refugees nearing Kos.
