What do the Itacas mean

Palma“Tell me, Muse, of the deeds of that cunning man, who wandered for a long time, after having destroyed the sacred citadel of Troy.” Book I of the Odyssey begins like this. Tell me, Muse, a story, the account of a journey, a return? A penance? Perhaps, a whole life? Miquel Morey argues that more important than the facts is how we tell them, how we construct (or they construct for us) the story of what happens to us.

Odysseus has become a symbol of human adventure, which too often is written in the 'universal' masculine. A model that has so often excluded diverse sensibilities, but which can be interpreted and reappropriated in many ways. Odysseus, Penelope, cyclops, sirens, lotus-eaters, goddesses, even a dog, are beings who, at specific moments, can help us reflect on our shipwrecks.

Homer, as Plato acknowledged, was the poet who educated Hellas. Who knows if when he called for the expulsion of poets from the republic, he was merely making a desperate attempt to leave education in the hands of philosophers. Nevertheless, Plato confesses his admiration for Homer in various dialogues. As if the poet's story were a raft to launch ourselves into the waters of life. Dante referred to the song of the sirens, and described, in his own way, the encounter in Hell between Odysseus and Diomedes. Shakespeare composed a drama in which he introduced a fascinating Odysseus. Calderón de la Barca recreated an adventurous man, who "made Circe die" by abandoning her after a great infatuation.

In the 20th century, Joyce's Ulysses re-does the journey, invents a new one, which resonates like a parallel universe. He tells us the lives of Bloom and Stephen Dedalus over 20 hours, raising a monument to modern literature. And he gifts us the immortal final monologue of Molly, alter ego of Penelope. Joan Maragall imagined an impossible love between Nausica and Odysseus. And, to conclude, with no other criterion than the chance of a string of possible rereads, it seems poetic justice to remember Penelope's version, funny, irreverent, necessary, written by Margaret Atwood.

These weeks, in cinema, Nolan tells us again the Odyssey, not Homer's, which has been ours for centuries, his. Irene Vallejo explains to us that the heated debates and indignation over the reinterpretation of the Odyssey, are old. If it is not feminist enough or too inclusive, if it presents us with a protagonist who instead of being Greek mirrors us, if it overturns essential passages, if it erases, rewrites or tells in different ways.

Irene Vallejo points out that Seneca, in the 1st century, already took part in a similar discussion. He wrote in his Epistles that what was important was not the existence of the characters, the location of the places, the itineraries, the details... Seneca argued that all these questions were not essential. What is worth knowing, if we listen to the philosopher, is whether the Odyssey, after centuries, still tells us something about our own odysseys, about the storms that shake our souls, every day.

Perhaps art becomes a shelter when it helps us to write, or to unwrite, the stories we tell ourselves to survive, the tales that allow us to float after each shipwreck. It doesn't matter if we talk about a breakup or a forced exile. Each person will build, thanks to the stories of others, their own toolbox, because sensibilities are diverse, and we need to tell ourselves many stories to be able to live.

Now, when our collective odyssey is losing the place where we were born due to mass tourism and political blunders, we are fed up and need to tell ourselves that if we persevere, we will return to Ithaca. Cavafy, immortalized in Catalan by Carles Riba, promises us that even upon arrival we will know what the Ithacas mean.

Perhaps it makes sense to cling to cinema, to literature: “Tell me how to inhabit my own territory with dignity, how to navigate even after a shipwreck, so as not to falter,” to take to the streets with the strength of the muses, who have always been more powerful than batons.

“and the sirocco and the south wind clashed, and the ill-wind west and the mistral, which is born of the azure and the great rolling sea”.