Author: joegoodkin

Becoming Nobody: A Classics Nostos

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A reflection on almost 400 Odyssey shows across all 50 U.S. States and More

In book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus famously recounts the story of how he came across Polyphemus the cyclops, who trapped the trespassing Odysseus in his cave. The titular hero tells the cyclops that his name is οὔτις, or “Nobody.” When Odysseus stabs Polyphemus in the eye with an olive tree trunk, the other cyclopes hear Polyphemus’ distress and run to help him. Polyphemus proclaims that “οὔτις (Nobody) blinded him,” the cyclopes think Polyphemus is a delusional lunatic, and Odysseus is eventually able to escape the cave and be back on his way.

This isn’t the only time in the poem that Odysseus takes on an alternate identity: He routinely uses other names and backgrounds as he tries to find his way back to the island of Ithaka and reestablish himself as the ruler of his household, a journey that spans twenty years from the time he left to fight the war at Troy to when he becomes the final Greek warrior to make it home.

But of these alternate identities, it’s the Nobody trick that feels the most telling and significant. There’s a piece of being a traveling storyteller (as Odysseus is) that makes you aware of both who you are and who you aren’t, something in you that is devoid of identity, which comes untethered when you are away from home. It’s both a freedom and a burden.

I know this feeling. For over twenty years I’ve traveled the world performing an original 24 song one man folk opera of the Odyssey. And I think I’m the only person since, well, Homer’s time, who can say that. 

I’ve played in all 50 US states. I’ve played in Athens and Rome. I’ve played in lecture halls at formal educational institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I’ve played in a muddy field in Jackson, Mississippi. I’ve played for audiences of elite academic specialists and I’ve played for high school freshman English classes. I’ll let you decide which of those is scarier. 

In total I’ve played my Odyssey almost 400 times. I’m a guy who goes around telling stories about a guy who goes around telling stories.

In this essay, I’d like to share my journey to create my bardic folk opera and what I’ve learned in sharing my work with audiences around the world.

Like Odysseus’ nostos, it’s been anything but a straight line.

παλίντροπος άρμονίη: “ a harmony of opposites”

I remember staring at those words my senior year of high school in the book “Myth of the State” by Ernst Cassirer, drawn to them, frustrated I couldn’t sound them out, break them down, understand them. They were magical. My life had no antecedent for interest in Ancient Greek and I had no idea why, but the words called to me.

So I chased that feeling and took Ancient Greek my first semester at University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by classes in Classical Mythology and Greek Archaeology my second semester. Quite suddenly (and altogether accidentally) I was a Classics major, a major I previously had no idea existed.

I read Homeric Greek in my fourth semester language class. Like those Greek words my senior year of high school, I vividly remember my initial engagement with the Iliad though I still struggle to describe to my audiences what I felt as this text washed over me and I saw and experienced the poetry for both how it was organized and what it meant.

Sometimes I call it being surrounded by a living breathing organism. Sometimes as being inside the words and feeling a landscape around them. Sometimes as having my head and heart explode at the same time (in a good way I mean…). Sometimes as having my brain rewired. 

All these are good approximations of my first encounter with Homer in Greek but maybe the best way to describe what I felt was connection. Connection to humanity. Connection to the tens of thousands of voices that sang these stories as songs three thousand and more years ago before they were texts, voices which left their residue in and around the words that finally got written and passed down for two and half millennia, improbably landing in front of me, a twenty year old undergrad in an upper Midwest public university who took Ancient Greek because of two words he saw in a book in a public high school in west suburban Chicagoland. 

It was a connection unfacilitated by intellectual calculation.  Academic analysis came later and fleshed out my understanding of perhaps exactly what I was connecting to and how but that initial flash was a pure emotional reaction to a force embedded in the text that was above or below or beside cognition. The text was acting on me and the result was emotional and visceral connection.

For the rest of college, I chased that feeling. I read Homer in translation. I read more Homer in Greek both for class and on my own. I took as many Greek classes as my schedule allowed and loved them all, but none lit me up in quite the same way Homer did. I took the equivalent of two years of Latin in 8 weeks the summer between my sophomore and junior years and survived it (screw you, Wheelock!) but found it didn’t do the same thing for me that Greek did. 

More significantly, I took a Comparative Literature class in which we read the Odyssey and a number of what I would learn were called “receptions,” works inspired by or in response to the original, as well as works that shared some of the themes of the epic. 

The primary theme we considered in that class was the relationship between home and identity. We read (in translation) the Aeneid and the Argonautica. We read Ulysses the novel by James Joyce and Ulysses the poem by Lord Tenneson. We read Omeros by Derek Walcott. We watched movies about journeys to or the search for home: Planet of the Apes (Spoiler alert: they were home all along!), the Wizard of Oz (Spoiler alert: there’s no place like home!), and Waterworld (Spoiler alert: uh… jetski biker gangs are even worse than Scylla and Charybdis?).

It was, in retrospect, ahead of its time: in the year 2024 there are many classes that engage ancient sources alongside modern receptions, receptions in literature, film, music, and other media, but in 1997 this type of framing and syllabus was rare.

What the class did was open my mind and heart to the idea that epic was a tradition not a fixed artifact. And that tradition is open for all to participate in. The stories of the Odyssey and Iliad originated as ephemeral oral performances and for a very long time there were no definitive versions. The truth of the stories was (and is) the sum of all the performances and in particular how tellings inspire retellings.

And the connection that I felt, the connection in which I wanted to participate, was a connection to this chorus of voices that told and retold this story and the audiences that collaborated on the meanings of the tellings.

So after I graduated college in 1999 with a BA in Classics, I went wading in the wine dark sea of epic tradition and wrote my own original 24 song bardic retelling of the Odyssey. I performed it for the first time in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002, to a score of family and friends.  The journey from performance number one in March of 2002 to performance number 366 (yes, exactly a leap year’s worth of shows) on November 8, 2023, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the 50th and final US state, could fill 24 books and then some with stories and adventures that rival Odysseus’ in nature and variety but one of the questions I’ve been asked after almost every one of those performances is: 

Why the Odyssey? 

My initial experience with Homer was through the language in the Iliad.  But I chose the Odyssey as the source for my first folk opera (and waited until 2018 to create my Iliad song retelling, The Blues of Achilles). Why?

That same shock of human connection I got from feeling the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad wash over me, I got from thinking about the experiences of the characters in the Odyssey. Thinking about what they were going through and why. Thinking about why a culture found these characters and experiences important enough to preserve in songs and then texts that preserved songs.

Did I identify with Telemachus? Sure. In some ways. But even when I was Telemachus’ age, I felt a pull towards Odysseus. 

A lot of attention is paid to the word πολύτροπον, that untranslatable epithet that modifies ἄνδρα (“man”) in the first line of the poem. But what struck me as more intriguing than πολύτροπον was the whole third line of the epic:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

“He (Odysseus) saw the cities and knew the mind of many men”

From the very beginning, Odysseus is presented as a seeker, a collector of experience. Why? How does he use it and what does he get out of it? Why does he want to hear the Sirens’ song? The tension between his desire for experience and his wish to get home moved me even before I was a traveling bard and got to feel it firsthand as the itinerant bards who told Odysseus’ story surely did as well. 

Current cultural norms are not kind to Odysseus. And I should say that any scorn heaped on his behavior and performance as a leader is fair and apt. But I think that the power of the story and its timelessness lie not in the morality of the characters (certain aspects of morality presented in the poem are clearly culturally determined) but in the power of the text’s portrayal of human behavior with respect to identity, which is complicated (or one might say πολύτροπον) for all of us.

I suspect that some of our discomfort with Odysseus is that we understand there is a little bit of him in all of us. Hopefully not the killing or getting people killed but the tension between our stated beliefs and our behaviors, how that resonates or doesn’t resonate with our identities, how we fit or don’t fit into the homes and societies that formed and produced us.

And nothing will make one feel this tension like becoming Nobody out on the wine dark sea.

A final thought: 

My odyssey is a story of chasing things that moved me even when I wasn’t sure why. It’s one of reintegrating text into its vestigial form of experience to explore how musical elements impact storytelling. It’s one of trying to create the very feeling of connection that inspired me: connection to my own identity and myriad connections between humans who attend my performances, listen to my songs about Nobody, and take the feelings from these performances forward in their own lives to create more connection. 

To participate in this far-reaching chain of human connection, to be even the tiniest part of it, is humbling and beautiful. Becoming Nobody allowed me to become Somebody.

Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects.  He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else. He has written about his work on SA before.

A Menis on the Screen: Playing a Bard During a Plague Part II

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Homer, Iliad 18.22

“So he spoke, and a dark cloud of grief covered Achilles.”

 ῝Ως φάτο, τὸν δ’ ἄχεος νεφέλη ἐκάλυψε μέλαινα·

I don’t know why I’m surprised that I find it hard to write about the Iliad. Or rather, why I find it so much harder to write about the Iliad than I do to write about the Odyssey.

Everything around the Iliad has always been harder and heavier for me as a classicist and a modern bard. And as a human being. 

From the first time I read it as an undergrad studying Classics at UW-Madison, I’ve felt that the Iliad punishes the reader in a way that the Odyssey (which to be sure, itself has plenty of punishment) doesn’t. 

So… I shouldn’t have been surprised when this piece, ostensibly a follow up to my post entitled “A Penis on the Screen: Playing a Bard During a Plague,” felt as heavy and unwieldy as Ajax’s towering shield. 

To be sure, the context in which I’m writing about performing my Homer-inspired musical works has changed. “A Penis on the Screen” was written at the beginning of the first full escalation of the pandemic, more than nine months and three hundred thousand US deaths ago.  

It was also written after only a single virtual performance of my one-man musical Odyssey, and before any virtual performances of my one-man musical Iliad, “The Blues of Achilles. Since that initial phallus-inscribed voyage I have completed fourteen virtual Odysseys and eleven virtual Blues of Achilles shows.

In a way these two blogs mirror how the creation of my two epic works unfolded. I wrote “Joe’s Odyssey” in the naive afterglow of my undergraduate studies when I didn’t know any better, when I was too young to understand how audacious it was to create a thirty-five minute non-narrative modern folk opera telling of the Odyssey, let alone to ask folks to sit still for it. That actually worked in my favor, as youthful ignorance sometimes does. I wrote a prompt in my songwriting book that read “create a one-man 24 song folk opera retelling of Homer’s Odyssey” and three months later I premiered it in my parents’ living room, with a full performance for a group of students less than two months after that.

Black-figure pottery - Wikipedia
Heracles and Geryon on an Attic black-figured amphora with a thick layer of transparent gloss, c. 540 BC, now in the Munich State Collection of Antiquities.

By contrast, sixteen years later when I decided to take on the Iliad, I spent almost a full year reading, researching, even interviewing veterans, before I wrote a single song. Once I composed the songs that comprise “The Blues of Achilles,” I played small samplings of them in modest workshop scenarios for another year before I finally debuted the full cycle in San Francisco in early March just as the pandemic took hold (a selection of songs from that performance can be viewed here on YouTube).

All of this is to say that these two pieces came from and were in two wildly different places in March as I started to consider how I would continue to perform them in a streaming environment: on the one hand, I had 300 plus Odyssey shows under my belt, on the other I had the Blues of Achilles with… one single show (and one in which I performed with an ensemble). 

In reading my initial impressions of performing virtually as detailed in the Penis on the Screen blog, I have to give myself a little credit: almost all of what I wrote there about the Zoom performance environment bore itself out as correct over the course of repeated performances of my Odyssey. 

(NB: I am so infrequently right about things I have to make a big deal of times when I am. For instance, as she will vouch for, I saw where the pandemic was going early on and told my wife to stock up on canned goods and alcohol for quarantine in early-February.  I also correctly predicted that Dwyane Wade would be an NBA Hall-of-Famer after watching the 2003 NCAA tournament. Take that, Calchas).

But while my routines around my virtual Odyssey shows were immediately informed by the hundreds of previous live shows and discussions, The Blues of Achilles was a blank slate. Would I perform all the songs without stopping? Would I work in spoken narrative passages as I did in the public debut in San Francisco? Would I talk about all the works that informed my songs ahead of the performance, or let the audience lead me to such considerations in a discussion? 

My Odyssey performance had years and years to develop organically along with my abilities, going from a living room to high school classrooms to university settings over the course of more than a decade. In contrast, The Blues of Achilles had immediate opportunities with very high level college audiences.

Luckily, I had the songs I wrote for the characters we know most intimately from Homer’s Iliad: a number of songs for Achilles of course, but also songs sung by Chryseis, Bryseis, Agamemnon, Hector, Hecuba, Priam, Helen, Andromache, Patroklus, and Thetis. Songs sung by the bard (me in this case) telling the story as well as other more impartial observers to the human suffering portrayed in the poem. 

I had these songs that I loved very deeply and I felt said something interesting, deep and most importantly true about the characters and story, something that modern audiences might have a harder time accessing when considering them in millenia old translated texts. 

And these songs I wrote about warriors and war were mostly love songs, a fact with which I was uncomfortable until, after I’d written them, I read Simone Weil’s influential 1940 essay The Iliad or The Poem of Force in which she writes “there is hardly any form of pure love known to humanity of which the Iliad does not treat…”  

(There should be a word for when you read a sentiment similar to one which you’ve arrived at entirely independently, especially when it is confirmed by a lauded source. Joel suggested “serendipity” which is true and good but doesn’t quite capture the validation and confidence boost such an occurrence can confer upon an artist or intellectual.)

If excavating love from the grief of the Iliad was good enough for Simone Weil, it was certainly good enough for me. I thought perhaps this relationship between love and grief was the heaviness that had created such apprehension in me about considering the Iliad. 

It was actually several months into these pandemic performances of The Blues of Achilles that I fully realized why adapting the Iliad scared me more and was so much harder for me than adapting the Odyssey. 

In April, the songwriter John Prine died of Covid complications. In a beautiful New York Times tribute to this amazing artist, Jason Isbell (a brilliant songwriter in his own right) wrote about the genius of Prine’s writing in general but in particular the song “Angel From Montgomery,” which opens with Prine singing “I am an old woman/named after my mother.” Isbell has this epiphany:  “songwriting allows you to be anybody you want to be, so long as you get the details right.” 

John Prine, One of America's Greatest Songwriters, Dead at 73 - Rolling Stone

When it came to the Iliad, my anxiety was (and is) rooted in the fear that I couldn’t get the details right. And I knew that for these characters deep inside the machine of war and their legacies, the details were a matter of life and death. This was why I spent a year reading any war literature I could get my hands on from All Quiet on the Western Front to Catch-22 to Slaughterhouse Five. I read Achilles in Vietnam and The Things They Carried and Letters Home from Vietnam and Dispatches.  I interviewed veterans who served in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Operation Enduring Freedom. I interviewed a Gold Star father who lost his son in Operation Iraqi Freedom. I found myself by chance in a hazy whiskey-fueled late night conversation with a veteran military journalist who turned me on to the album Soldier’s Heart, a set of songs by Jacob George, a veteran of OEF who wrote and recorded this album of the truest war stories I’ve ever heard before he died by suicide in 2014. 

And with these details and a new vocabulary, I went back to the text and as is the case over and over with Homeric epic I found truths hovering in the spaces around the words, waiting for me. I thought about some of the other Iliad adaptations I read: Memorial by Alice Oswald, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, the play An Iliad by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson. Casey Dué’s Achilles Unbound helped me recognize the multiplicity inherent in oral tradition and gave me even more confidence to find my own Achilles.

And out of me in less than 30 days in early 2019 came tumbling my 17 love songs. If Homer’s Iliad tells of the Anger of Achilles, my Blues of Achilles makes its focus the Grief that is prominent in the first syllable of Achilles’ name and the Love that is so inextricably connected to Grief (for more “serendipity,” see Emily Austin’s work in particular the forthcoming Grief and the Hero.)

Frank Zappa purportedly said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” and whether or not he actually did, the sentiment is correct. I write songs to capture something that other types of writing cannot convey so I won’t try to describe what my online Blues of Achilles shows are like in detail other than to say they are heavy, connected, and beautiful. I break the songs up to allow for audiences to ask questions and contribute to the meaning as we go rather than waiting until the end for them to participate and engage. Pandemic audiences seem particularly attuned to the less central characters to whom I try to give voice, to the characters who have been pulled into the grievous orbit of the principle tragic figures of the story. 

I’ll be doing these shows (both Odyssey and Blues of Achilles) online for at least the first half of 2021: while I’m hoping that later in the year conditions might allow for safe travel and gatherings, it might be even into 2022 before that’s possible. But I know that eventually I’ll be able to bring The Blues of Achilles (and my Odyssey) to audiences in-person.

Joe's Odyssey

Whereas my online Odyssey shows were informed by live in-person performances, my live in-person Blues of Achilles shows (when they happen) will be informed by my online performances and I’m interested to see how this inversion impacts the futures of both pieces.

I return to one of my first impressions of performing online which is that these stories are so durable and rich and full of possibility that they can thrive in any sort of performance environment. Maybe better put: making the change from in-person to virtual is no big deal when a story has survived the transition from oral performance to written text and the thousands of years since. 

Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects.  He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else.

A Penis on the Screen: Playing a Bard During a Plague

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Homer, Odyssey 11.333-334

“So he spoke and they were all completely silent:
they were in the grip of a spell in their shadowy rooms”

ὣς ἔφαθ’, οἱ δ’ ἄρα πάντες ἀκὴν ἐγένοντο σιωπῇ,
κηληθμῷ δ’ ἔσχοντο κατὰ μέγαρα σκιόεντα.

Aristophanes, Peace 870

“Everything else is complete—but we need a penis.”

καὶ τἄλλ᾿ ἁπαξάπαντα· τοῦ πέους δὲ δεῖ.

 

Halfway through my 306th performance of my one-man folk opera retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in song, something happened that had never happened in the previous 305 performances. 

An audience member drew a penis on the screen.

That’s right. An audience member drew a penis on the screen and that penis was visible to the 75 other people who had logged in to Zoom to watch my very first ever virtual Odyssey performance.

Perhaps I should backtrack a bit and contextualize this particular penis because there is a clear hazard in leaving an uncontextualized penis out there.

A (not so) quick summary of how we got here: I graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 90’s with a Bachelor’s Degree in Classics. Not long after I graduated I composed a 35 minute continuous one-man musical folk opera retelling of Homer’s Odyssey consisting of 24 first-person songs inspired by the characters and events of the epic poem.  

After years of development and long periods of hiatus, I built the program up to where by the mid-2010’s I was performing it at high schools and universities across the country.  In 2016, I wrote about my experiences as a “modern bard” for Eidolon.

Since writing that article, my reputation and calendar have grown and earlier this year I celebrated my 300th performance (which occurred in Arlington, Texas, at UTA) and performances in my 40th (Hawaii) and 41st (Wyoming) states. 

Some places to read and hear about my Odyssey performances are here, here, here, and here, and you can find a studio recording of the entire piece on YouTube.

2020 was supposed to be a banner year for me and my Classics-related music. By working really hard on booking, I started the year within shouting distance of getting shows scheduled in the remaining 9 states I needed to complete my goal of performing in all 50 states.  A month-long Odyssey tour of Europe in October and November was confirmed with dates in the UK, Ireland, Sweden, The Netherlands, Italy, and Greece.

And there was also new Classics-related music to start sharing in addition to my Odyssey.

The first week of March, just before the full-on coronavirus crisis began manifesting, I premiered a new cycle of songs called “The Blues of Achilles”, a reframing of Homer’s Iliad, as part of a wonderful program called Conversations with Homer at San Francisco State University.  Samples of this performance can be viewed here, here, and here.

The rest of the spring was to include three weeks of shows in Ohio, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Michigan, Maryland, and Illinois, some Odyssey shows, some Blues of Achilles shows, an artist-in-residence opportunity, and a chance to perform Blues of Achilles songs as part of a program that brings classics to the incarcerated population. 

But of course by the second week of March I could see none of these shows were going to happen.  Campuses began to shut down and move online, travel became unwise, and by the third week of March my entire spring schedule, some 20 gigs, was gone, and the rest of my year’s touring (including Europe) was in doubt. 

I should interject here that I feel extremely lucky that I do not rely entirely upon performing music for my living.  These cancellations have resulted in a sizable loss of income, but I also have a guitar teaching practice (not to mention a partner with a job) to fall back on, so while these losses hurt (many of which I do hope to reschedule and all of which were done with compassion and understanding by understandably freaked and stressed out teachers and administrators), the pain was more from a standpoint of planning and momentum than the dire financial situation that many performing musicians have suddenly found themselves in.

Then last week something interesting happened: I got a DM on Twitter from a high school Latin teacher in Pennsylvania who wondered if I might try performing my Odyssey online through Zoom for some of her students. The sudden shift to online learning had left teachers scrambling to find activities and material with which to engage students. This teacher had seen me perform at the PAJCL convention in 2017 and thought my program would make for a good online event.  

I initially recoiled: so much of what I love about my Odyssey performances is wrapped up in the magic of the interaction between me and an in-person audience.  How would this online thing work? How could I truly encounter my audience if they were hundreds of miles away watching not me but 1s and 0s that represent me, listening not to my actual voice but to my voice as compressed through their computer speakers or earbuds, taking it in not as a group in the same room but in separate isolated spaces? 

But as I gave it more thought, I saw reasons to give it a shot. 

Some were practical, as in “this is the way the world is working now so you might as well try to adapt if you want gigs” and “if this format does work what kind of additional markets and opportunities might it open up for you.”

Some were artistic and intellectual as in “can I make these songs work in a new medium?” and “what might it illuminate for me as a classicist/Homerist about oral performance?” 

So I decided to go forward with it.  My contact and I had a conference call with a very patient and generous tech support guru from her district and we settled on using Zoom as the best platform to both accommodate both my performance needs and also comply with some of the privacy issues associated with educational institutions. 

We gave Zoom a trial run with a couple of students and teachers and it seemed to work well. We could mute all the cameras and microphones of the attendees and I could share my screen which would contain a powerpoint of the lyrics of my songs so the audience could follow along as I sang (I do this in every in-person show as well). 

I was nervous as I sat in my office with my wife sitting just out of the webcam shot to advance the powerpoint. I could see the online audience grow to 75 and after an introduction from the teacher, I was off and singing.  

It began well enough. My voice felt good and the teacher was texting my wife some feedback on the sound which seemed to be coming through fine.  I was just starting to settle in when suddenly some lines started popping up on my screen. Scribbled lines as if someone was able to draw on his or her iPad. 

Clearly we hadn’t quite gotten the settings right and the audience members had the capability to write things on the shared screen for all to see.

It was a little distracting to me and (I assumed) the audience but I pushed on.  I was on song 6 of my 24 when the scribbling became written words. I stopped singing and announced that if the scribbling continued, I’d have to stop the performance.  

This seemed to work for another 6 songs but just as I finished singing the song in which Odysseus finally lands on Ithaka in book 13, there is was:

That hastily drawn penis on the screen right next to my lyrics.

Image result for ancient greek phallus

Some quick observations: First, though in the moment I was not particularly thrilled with the phantom penis, it should be noted that the Greeks and Romans loved penises and were happy to have them in their art and theatre. One need look no further than the #phallusthursday hashtag on Twitter for ample evidence of this.

Second, I feel fairly confident that this penis was drawn by an adolescent male and the reason I feel fairly confident in this conclusion is that I myself was once (and sometimes still am) an adolescent male in whose life and psyche penis-related jokes and pranks figured prominently. To wit (and I believe the statute of limitations on this crime has expired), my senior year of high school the entire bass and tenor sections of our choir conspired to, in our performance of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, replace the word “truth” with the word “penis.” 

How disruptive could this be? you ask. Well, at one point in the arrangement the basses and tenors sing the phrase “truth is marching” over and over, something like 12 times in a row.  Perhaps now you can imagine our confused choir director searching around the room for why things didn’t sound quite right (sorry Mr. Hayes) as a group of 15 adolescent males melodically chanted the phrase “penis is marching” over and over.

So as I promised I would, I stopped the performance.  The teacher had determined the only way to fix the problem was by ending the Zoom session, creating a new one with the correct (non-screen writing) settings, and letting everyone log back in.

So that’s what we did: for the first time in 306 performances, I took an intermission.  Almost everyone came back online to the new session and I finished the performance without further incident, singing the remaining 12 songs that chronicle Odysseus’ reintegration into his home on Ithaka. 

Afterwards, I read and responded to audience questions from a Google docs as well as questions texted to me by the teacher. And then it was over.

Very suddenly, it was over.

In a regular performance, I’m used to a much more gradual ending.  Members of the audience often make their way to the stage to chat with me while I pack up my guitar. Faculty introduce themselves. There’s almost always a meal or a drink with a host or a group to get feedback and continue discussion.

But with my virtual performance, none of that.

Until I looked at my phone and saw social media messages and emails from some of the audience members.  Videos and pictures showing students glued to their computer screens watching me perform. Notes from teachers thanking me for giving them and their students something to break up the days stuck at home. 

https://twitter.com/magistradee/status/1240740810255224835

Suddenly the penis didn’t matter so much and I saw a number of truths about this unique moment both in history and for me as a modern bard. 

First, everyone is trying really hard to do their best in a tough situation. Teachers are trying to teach, parents are trying to parent, students are trying to be students, all in a largely new environment. There are going to be bumps and difficult moments and it’s going to take some time to figure out what works and what doesn’t but in general folks are trying so hard and succeeding.

Second, this quick change to fully virtual learning is putting incredible forced stress on the people involved but from incredible forced stress sometimes comes innovation.  I would never have even attempted a virtual performance without these extenuating circumstances and outside pressures, but now because I have I am excited to develop it as a complement to what I do with in person performances and ultimately as a chance to reach more people with my music and the experience of hearing Odysseus’ story sung by a bard. I’m thinking in particular of places and schools that don’t have the budget to bring me in for an in-person performance but might be able to facilitate an online performance.  

Third, for all my preciousness about my in-person Odyssey performances and how they recreate the original oral environment, this virtual performance embodies all the same concepts I detailed in my Eidolon article with some unique and beautiful twists.  I’m always fascinated with how performance space impacts audience perception and therefore meaning, and in this case there were actually 75 different performance spaces, all acting upon the listeners and resulting in different experiences and meanings. The teacher who initially reached out to me said that while she enjoyed my performance at PAJCL (which was for an audience of 400), she liked the online performance even more because it felt like I was singing directly to her.  For all my misgivings about the technological distance, there was actually something more intimate about my online performance.

Fourth, my online performance is yet another example of how enduring, adaptable, and resilient myths and oral tradition are.  For as different as my performance looked from Phemios’ in book 1 or Demodokos’ in book 8, it was essentially the same as what bards have been doing for three millennia or more: singing stories to groups of people.  My guess is that if you offered a Homeric bard the chance to do a performance from the comfort of his home, he would have jumped at it before you finished telling him he might have to endure interruption by phantom penis drawing. 

As Joel added in the comments when he so graciously edited this piece: “Antinoos would totally have drawn a penis on his screen if he had a screen.”

In the end, perhaps it’s best to think that my virtual performance relates to my in-person performances in the way that the text we have today relates to a Homeric performance. They are related, connected at some point, but ultimately different ways to communicate and pass on stories.  It’s not a choice of either but rather an embrace of both, and this embrace ensures that the names and stories will continue to echo through history for new audiences in new times.

You might even say that “time is marching” but that is dangerously close to the phrase “truth is marching” and… well, you remember where that road leads.

Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects.  He can by seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.coom or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joe@joesodyssey.com about bookings or anything else.