After my post on dragons, I ended up talking with one of my awesome coworkers about Odin.  The thing I like the most about the Odin myth is that he gave up an eye for wisdom.  For reasons that I never fully understood, this always resonated with me and I’ve thought about it often.

As I went down that path, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems (In the Darkest of All Forests), in one of my favorite books (Armorica), from my favorite trilogy (Riverrun) by my favorite author: S. P. Somtow.  I’m not going to analyze this a lot, except to say that poem doesn’t stand alone – it sits within a context (the series of poems, Tales of the Wandering Hero; the story, Armorica; the trilogy, Riverrun; and my life at each juncture I’ve read it) and acts as an anchor to that context for me.  It is bookmarked so that I can unfold that context in a few short verses and remember my own personal search for wisdom.

Philip Etchison: Tales of the Wandering Hero

4: In the Darkest of All Forests

The time of reckoning had come; I stood
Before the gates of hell; I had come far,
Braved men and monsters, answered riddles, slain
The sphinxes that afflict men’s souls, unchained
The princess from the rock, sung songs to move
The rocks to tears, to change the River’s course.
Behind those gates lay the forbidden fruit
Moly, the herb of immortality,
The quince of sexual awakening.
A fearsome voice cried out to me: “The Password!
Utter the password, or be doomed forever
To wander among the lifeless shades of Hades.”

I knew no password, so I temporized:
Plucked from its socket my one remaining eye,
And cast it, bleeding, past the iron bars.
I saw no more.  With blindness came true vision:
I saw that I could gain the golden apple
Only by vanquishing my longing for it,
And conquer death but by embracing it,
And reach the quest’s end only by acknowledging
I needed the quest no longer.

          There I stood:
Racked by the final quandary, out-paradoxed;
Unable to advance without retreating
Sightless yet gifted with a godly foresight,
My loaf, my condom, and my kiss long since
Consumed in the arduous wandering.  I wept,
And from my tears there flowed a mighty River
Encircling the dark forest.
Eternity long, eternity and a day
I wept.  The water rose.  The universe
Itself sank in my sorrow, and was drowned;
The stars fell from the sky; and I myself
Fell like a droplet into my own grief,
Infinity, infinity plus one.

In time, the flood subsided.  I myself
Became Deucalion to some brave new world,
And ruled over a prosperous domain
Until an age had passed.  Then, on my deathbed,
An angel led me to the gates of hell,
Beyond which lay the fruit, the herb, the pomegranate,
The pearl, the grail, the jewel, the orb, the crown.
I knew then that the kingdom I had ruled,
The cosmos flooded by my sightless eyes,
The long eternities that had transpired,
Had been as substanceless as dream, and I
Still stood before the gate, not knowing the password
That the portal’s guardian still demanded of me.

I knew no password, so I temporized;
I reached up to my eye, to pluck it out.
But this time was different.  I was blind.

–S. P. Somtow, Armorica