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When Odysseus sailed away from his beloved Ithaca, leaving behind family and friends, he had a specific purpose in mind. To conquer and return home was his plan. Twenty years elapsed, years full of adventure agony, and intense nostalgia. He returned to Ithaca an older man, unrecognized. The departing Odysseus did not have the slightest premonition of what was in his unborn future – Cyclops, Circe, Sirens, Nausikaa and much more. His plans and expectations did not command his future. Odysseus wandering, longing for Ithaca, always hopeful, moved on to realize the desired homecoming. Odysseus was never a hopeless exile. Age and adventure, pain and fear, nostalgia and memory, rendered him unrecognizable, yet reminiscent of the other, earlier, younger Odysseus, the conqueror-to-be. An old scar of his was the tangible link between the departing and the returning man [1]. It was a scar and Ithaca. Odysseus derived his identity from Ithaca and disclosed it through visible signs from the past. A scar and memories detailing intimate moments were things which twenty momentous years did not manage to erase. Two decades veiled the past but did not erase it [2].

In Horkheimer and Adorno's treatment of the Homeric tale, Odysseus was cast in a distinctly different light. He became a palimpsest upon which the essence of bourgeois existence could be inscribed. He was the prototype of what the frenzy and deceptively luminous reason of the Enlightenment could fashion-hollow victories, self-denials, and renunciations. A vanquished conqueror, a transfigured, estranged Odysseus would return to Ithaca. It is a powerful reconstruction of the Homeric epic. Odysseus also appeared in another guise. James Joyce in his European exile unfolded structures, events, and moods of Dublin in excruciating detail, as if to erase the actual, foreign cities in which he lived. Dublin and Ulysses were a microcosm of life, of the world. This was a monumental activity of the mind, informed and sustained by the heart. Ithaca comes in many shapes and colours, in the myriad forms of homeland.

The many Odysseuses and Ithacas [3] are intriguing and fascinating. They constitute the enigmatic territory, the complex domain of homelessness and nostalgia. Ithaca as home; foreign lands, exciting, spell binding, and dangerous but foreign. Together they capture the dialectical tension between the familiar and the other, the alien. They are the kingdom and the exile. They disclose the vicissitudes of the self, the limits of identity and its profound expansiveness. They disclose the fragility and resilience of identity and the impulse of the human spirit to reach out as well as its desire for roots, its memory of the topography of the self, including childhood and more, much more. Ithaca is a prism displaying multiple visions, dreams, fears, many colours, voices, nuances, eloquent gestures, and silent postures. Ethnicity must be unfolded, like Joyce's Dublin, in the context of Ithaca, in the dialectical movement between Odysseus' old scar and his nostalgic memories of his island Ithaca; between choices made and their consequences and conditions which are not fashioned by conscious, free choices. Between hopeless departures and hopeful returns we must decipher agony and resignation, defeat and spirited endurance. We must recognize crucial distinctions between those who returned, those who did not return, and those who can never return. Ethnicity as relocated community, active and thriving, is a lie. That is the Odysseus of the dialectic of the Enlightenment – a cunning, resilient survivor who pays with self-deception and self-renunciation. Survival requires the denial of the self. It is this topography and dialectic that I wish to explore here. The motif is derived from, and the text is placed in, a context of moods and elusive moments. It is the journey away from Ithaca, with its mystery and power, its irrevocable impact on the self, and its invisible scars and secret wounds. Joyless it might not be, but estranging it is.

Ithaca is the metaphor for the topography of the formation of the self. It is the particularity of space experientially appropriated. Ithaca is space and time meaningfully integrated. It is first biography and then history. It is not any place or merely a place but rather the place, the window through which we render the world familiar to us. Ithaca is not the world, nor is it an Archimedean point. It is the umbilical cord which connects us to the world. A great deal of the world we tend to take for granted because of Ithaca. We thrive in its familiarity. It is a mixture of habit and security; blissful unawareness of danger and adversity. Faces, patterns, sounds, and colours constitute the canvas of our being. A common culture, a history, and a mother tongue integrate and render coherent the world of Ithaca. Yes, Ithaca is not the world, but the world without Ithaca is a heartless landscape.

I

Ithaca is not a paradise on earth, not the Garden of Eden. Life's anxieties, miseries, and tragedies afflict its inhabitants. Simply, Ithaca is the familiar, recognizable flesh of the world. Through it we experience life, self, and others.

Ithaca is simultaneously an idea, an image which possesses the mind, and a concrete reality of memories and actualities that stirs the heart. It is neither a fiction nor a mental, conceptual abstraction. Ithaca is the externalized mythopoesis of the ontological need of belonging; the desire and need for roots, continuity, and identity in the flux of time. Ithaca is the face of the world. Just as the faces of friends and lovers render anonymous, faceless humanity concrete, particular, familiar, and desirable, so it is concrete and tangible. Places, faces, and moments are the vivid flood of memory. However, Ithaca as retrospective and introspective reflection can never be fully exhausted, defined or crystallized. Concrete, yet with extreme plasticity, Ithaca adumbrates the boundaries of the self with its shifts, adventures, triumphs, defeats, glories, and despair. Like Ithaca, the self never receives its final, definitive form and meaning, yet it is never amorphous or nebulous. Ithaca is inherently an unfinished entity. It is the particularization of existence. The ocean of time, the currents of history, and the vastness of space are domesticated, humanized by the metaphor and reality of Ithaca. It is a home. a perspective from which to decipher the meaning and scope of the totality of our odyssey. It bestows meaning, significance, and unity to our otherwise endlessly meaningless, insignificant passage through time and place. Ithaca's truth cannot be proclaimed absolutely, axiomatically. !t is situational but not relativist.

Gender, race, and ethnicity gain their full prominence not in isolation but in interaction, in cooperation, and in hostile, antagonistic circumstances. The female, the black, the ethnic are always that, but what precisely that is shifts and changes. Stereotypes, prejudices, and self-images emerge. To moderate and rectify this powerful mixture we must always re-open the question of history. We must re-interpret the past, redeem the future, and emancipate ourselves from the destructive, coerced self-images which protracted, chronic, external situations generate, sustain, and validate through introjection. Fanon's evocative narrative reconstitutes matters. It unveils the dynamics of racial colonial exploitation and dehumanization. Feminists are immersed in history as they should be. It is not simply a fierce battle over control of the past. It is not a struggle for the monopoly of the past, which is what Orwell's Big Brother desired in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is the need for historical roots, the indispensability of the historical dimension of human identity.

The quest for truth about origins is inescapable [4]. To articulate, to breathe life into the dead past, out of time, out of mind, is to reflect, to think, to seek Ithaca, to remember Ithaca, and to speak in the language of our Ithaca [5].

II

The human mind does not perceive the passage of time as an amorphous, indiscriminate sequence of events or as a process. The human journey through time is our history. Reflecting on time as history. demands, indeed forces, qualitative distinctions, differentiations, structures, and inevitably, meaningful interpretation. We are self-interpreting creatures. We bestow meaning on events. We demand a meaningful existence. When we reflect on the human predicament we set boundaries and demarcations to the natural, neutral flux of time.

From a specific, particular moment in time, a present moment, our present, we engage in a backward look, a retrospective look. We seek a view of and an understanding of the irreversible past. We seek the inner structure of our being where essence and existence meet. We also look forward toward a future horizon holding unknown possibilities and desired promises. It is as if we were permanently standing between past and future [6]. This existential in-between is neither an Archimedean point nor a vantage point for a panoramic spectacle of truth. It is at this point and juncture which is devoid, in and of itself, of topography [7] or geographic location that humans are tested, moulded, enlightened, and blinded.

The perspectives on and tensions between past and future are many and varied. Prototypical attitudes are a nostalgic vision of the past and a euphoric celebration of the future as a new era. These polarities bespeak two major human tendencies. The first is to seek refuge and solace in the past by regressing to what no longer exists and by exhibiting extreme and fierce hostility toward and contempt for the novel and current. The second tendency is to embrace the future as an emancipating dimension, as freedom from all the inadequacies of the past by seeing the future as the obliteration of all human weakness and by anticipating the future as the total, absolute transformation of human existence.

The immense polarization of the past-future juncture goes back as far as Aristotle and his castigation of idealist-Utopians such as Plato. It should be noted that this double look is backward toward the past and forward toward the future. Aristotle cautioned us that the truth of nature, a normative category in classical Greece crystallized in the truth of experienced historical practice, does not exhaust human potentiality. Aristotle wrote: “We are bound to pay some regard to the long past and the passage of the years, in which these things [advocated by Plato and other idealist-Utopians as new discoveries] would not have gone unnoticed if they had been really good. Almost everything has been discovered already; though some of the things discovered have not been co-ordinated, and some. though known, are not put into practice”. [8] The teaching of experience, the wisdom of the past generations as reflected in institutions and practices, must be heeded, Aristotle insisted. Reason censors, guides, and illuminates. It does not create ex nihilo. Reason must restrain experimental flights of the imagination toward horizons beyond the joys and sufferings of the earth.

Aristotle stressed the supremacy of the truth of the past, but this truthbound past must be understood in its essential dimensions. It is the product of the practical wisdom and experience of many anonymous individuals, our ancestors. No genius, no demigod produced it. Trial and error, human essence in its collective expression and manifestation fashioned it. Reason affirms its truth while the passage of time and institutional endurance confirm it, corroborate it. Reason illuminates and reveals the truth of our empirical reality.

This Aristotelian past as normative truth does not insist that we be chained to ancient traditions and modes of existence. It only argues the continuity of human wisdom which sets limits on the possibilities held by our unknown future Moderation as virtue is precisely the awareness of limits which should not be experienced or perceived as a crushing, humiliating defeat of human creativity. Proud we should be, but excessive pride, just like anything else to excess, is an imbalance in the natural order of things, in the natural cosmic order and harmony. Excess is a derangement. Aristotle did not view this excess as exclusively the intellectual vice of future eras. He believed it was a constant temptation. If contempt for the past is a vice rooted in ignorance, we should not assume that Aristotle endorsed the past in its totality. The past is not is sacrosanct universe, frozen in time, inflexible and rigid as a corpse waiting to be resurrected. It is truth and the normative principles of past experience that are stressed by Aristotle. The teaching of the past as lived wisdom rather than as formal, immutable doctrine is the heart of the matter. That is why reason, for Aristotle, was neither omnipotent nor impotent and superfluous.

Aristotle held firmly to the essential character of past experience and argued for a sustained, continuous presence of that essence in the face of new developments and changes. He did nut celebrate the past nor did he deny the future. He did object to fundamental, radical changes which were, in his mind, cataclysmic discontinuities, assaults on the very flesh and spirit of human practical wisdom. Aristotle wished to conserve what is valid in our past. ft is the truth of the past that must serve as the fountainhead of our socio-political world. The past is neither a place to return to nor a specific, structured, ritualized tradition. It is a moral and theoretical self-understanding and orientation toward the fulfilment of our future potentialities. Life is past and future in a reasoned, natural, developmental rhythm. We do not live in the past when we honour its truth in future time. To deny the future is to pretend that time can be arrested. To deny the past is an immoderate, ignorant, self-inflicted amnesia. Either past or future as choice is a mutilation of our historical reality, of the dynamism of time and human creativity.

It was Edmund Burke who sanctified the past as tradition, though the genesis of tradition and a healthy attitude toward it were Roman virtues. Burke, unlike Aristotle, dwarfed reason and in a mystical, providential tone fused the truth of past experience to past practices and prejudices. The Aristotelian clarity is obscured under the burden of ideological rhetoric. Burke was confronted by the deluge of the French Revolution while Aristotle was confronted only by the turmoil, strife, and anxiety of a shifting socio-economic structure in his Athens.

If Aristotle and Burke insisted on the virtues of the past from their distinct perspectives, it was Marx who spoke of the total emancipation of humanity from its past. The future held promise and prophecy. The past was a dead burden weighing heavily on present generations. So radically opposed are the two dimensions, past and future, in Marx, that he declared all pastime as pre-history. Truly human history is posited at a future time. It is a secular millennium, according to some.

Polarized and antagonistic, past and future are pitted against each other. It is so polarized into a horrendous either/or that the past denies novelty. It tames future time by rejecting its individuality. It renders it predictable, acceptable, and capable of incorporation into the precious past. The future obliterates the burden of the past and its wisdom while it transvaluates and de-historicizes. Future time so monistic and intoxicated refuses to be contaminated with the deadly passivity of the past, the used, the worn out, the obsolete. Vulgar Marxists, not Marx, hold views close to this. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four captured fully the climax of such attitudes, with a twist toward totalitarianism. The past must be re-written, forgotten, extinguished. No trace of it must be left. Total control demands the reversibility of the past. Unobstructed entry of the new must be secured. Clearly a simple compromise between these two extremes, past over future, future over past, cannot be struck. Standing between past and future, between their claims and counter claims, between an old, if not ancient, world and an unborn one, is to stand between the past and modern times. That is a time, a present, distinct in texture both from past and future, a crossroads. It is backward and forward looking.

Since the present, our era, is located on the extremity of time, we do ponder and reflect on the origins of our circumstance. We speculate and seek demarcations, precursors, crucial turning points which would aid us in understanding and defining our predicament. Modern times are a mixture of the old and the new, Though perhaps all ages might have perceived themselves as modern, none appears as modern as ours.

Perhaps the genesis and origin of things modern reach back into ancient times, to time immemorial. Perhaps all things, events, and consequences blend or are woven into a grand web and therefore any determination of origins, of cause and effect, of necessary and sufficient reasons and conditions, of intended and unintended consequences, is an intellectually necessary but artificial demarcation. Yet reason and intuition point to certain factual configurations. If all major turning points have their origin in some totally imperceptible process, still, beyond a certain point in time, specific conditions and structures become more visible than others. They manifest themselves as more crucial and dominant, even if they are perceived so only retrospectively.

“Modern times” is used here to designate the segment of modernity in which we live. modernity is a specific socio-historical, cultural term designating a qualitative, normative difference between the ancient and modern way of life and mode of thought. It is interesting to recall that historically, prior to the use of the term modernity, the term moderns was employed. It was meant to designate that modern faith, Christianity. The moderns were Christians while the others, the pagans, were the traditionalists. Modernity deals with the emergence of modern society represented by urbanization, science, technology, commerce, capitalism, new modes of thought and being, new self-images, and new dreams and fears. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution are its demarcations. I speak of modem times because the term is more applicable to the sense of novelty in the present historical epoch and also because it fits into the larger historical unit of modernity. Finally, it echoes that masterful movie, Modern Times, in which a delicate, comic, sensitive Charlie Chaplin is aware of the peril and attempts to break out of the iron cage of industrial society, relying on nothing but his Inner resources. He had the desire for gentleness, meaning, and beauty which are endangered qualities in our world.

III

In political thought many tend to attribute the origins of modernity in general and our times in particular to Machiavelli and Hobbes. Our century, itself so volcanic and monstrously catastrophic, can be traced in two events – the fire and smoke of Auschwitz and the luminous mushroom Hiroshima. These horrendous events mark the century, disclosing its brutality and cynical decadence, but they did not give it birth. The prophet of the age is that mad genius, Nietzsche, who dared pronounce the murder of god and the unbearable freedom and loneliness of the murderers [9]. Without strength or a moral compass, we navigate in our world. Nihilism levels all criteria, all norms. It unhinges the human universe. We have a cosmos without courage, without axis, and without purpose. It is a bottomless abyss.

Well before Nietzsche uttered his fateful and frightening words [10], Machiavelli sought to harness divine authority to political power in order to render it expedient but subservient. Machiavelli argued the truth of the past, the glorious historical past. He urged his demoralized contemporaries to recapture the glory of ancient Rome. Human achievements and greatness could be initiated and repeated. Machiavelli fixed his eyes on the political horizon, on this world. Humans need a homeland before they can achieve anything. The passion for politics, the political necessity for violence and fraud, the potential triumph, are the transformational, creative forces in the world. That is why Machiavelli could say in utter seriousness that he loved his homeland more than his soul. For him, soul without a terrestrial base, a habitat, was nothing. His soul became his true soul through loving his homeland, his Ithaca [11].

Restoration and reinvigoration of a whole society is the grand task of a prophet, a political prophet. This prophet, armed with national armies and a nationalistic populace, is also armed with great political visions. Machiavelli's armed prophet, his great, talented, skilful prince, transforms, creates, and moulds. Dexterity and virtuosity are his. Omnipotence is not. Machiavelli, by calling his prince a prophet, captures the need to transcend the merely human. He evokes primordial images of divine mission and commission. The prince stands before the people in alliance with divine authority. He arouses a deep-seated fear, the fear of power, of omnipotence, of divine wrath. Machiavelli's prince, however, is not a prophet of an other-worldly order. He does not represent god nor does he believe in god.

The prince does not mediate between his people and god. He is not god's instrument Instead, he brings the idea of an omnipotent god to earth in order to strengthen his military and political position, and to facilitate effective control of the people. He brings the fear of god to earth. He manipulates the divine in the human mind. The prince himself is fearless. He is not god's agent. He makes god his ally, his agent, his servant. God is an immensely effective tool. Machiavelli's prince is a godless prophet who utilizes and sustains his people's belief in the divine as a kind of psychological superstition. Unlike Marx who saw religion as ideology and in direct opposition to his historical goal, Machiavelli read in religion not a necessary evil, but a useful political tool, an extraordinary opportunity.

Machiavelli's political and ethical stance is a complex one. It fused nobility of spirit and action with sinister, perverse methods. Whatever the truth about his views end his significance, the crucial issue here is that Machiavelli effectively dethroned god but refused to permit the total levelling of human values. Something of extreme significance, something collective and national, not only remains erect and monumental but it is advocated, demanded, expected, and promised. Rome in her glory dazzles the human eye. Lest we forget, Machiavelli reminded us by unveiling before us the necessary horror, the bitter truth. All Romes have their origin in a murderous Romulus. There can be no exceptions.

That an extraordinary creature, who was a founder of a nation, a leader, a redeemer, solid, beyond corruption, would wield power, absolute power, with skill and knowledge, with wisdom and passion, might be the most romantic dimension in the thought of this otherwise realistic thinker. Nevertheless, Machiavelli's theoretical landscape is not one of total desolation, sterility, and futility. Fortune and human action, the prince, have political, existential, and sexual encounters. Neither omnipotence nor impotence constitutes the human predicament. The glory of politics is the possibility of ephemeral human success, the creation of a nation-state, The self does not disappear in the collective. The self blossoms in it. Power is indispensable but it is not an end in itself. It is a creative force.

It was Hobbes who stripped power of all creative dimensions. Politics was reduced to the function of the policeman – law and order. Glory, excitement, and positive passion were dethroned. Security was the ultimate value. Machiavelli's armed prophet was transformed into an absolute sovereign, a mortal god overseeing a congregation of atomistic creatures. These possessive individuals inhabited the ordered battlefield of the market place without a sense of belonging. Motion would be their characteristic, possession their essence.

Such are the precursors to Nietrsche's will to power and murder of god. If Machiavelli wanted to utilize divine authority, if Hobbes wanted to incorporate it into his sovereign, his mortal god, and if Nietzsche declared god's violent death, it was our contemporary writer, Albert Camus, who wished to reinstate gods to their supreme power only in order to challenge humans to a momentous rebellion against them. He wished to invite humans to a momentous awakening against nihilistic nothingness.

Nihilism distorts the natural tension between past and future, between existence and meaning. It devalues the past and yet it does not celebrate the future. Nihilism is transfiguration and a fragmentation. Nietzsche believed that nihilism should be seen as the occasion of its transcendence. It was the transvaluation of all values, the song and dance of the new man (or is he a new god?) whom Zarathustra proclaimed and announced.

Nietzsche spoke of the death of god and the ensuing crisis, which we do not seem able to overcome with the facility and ease some had promised us. Camus, however, seized on nihilism and insisted on pointing out its logico-psychologicai and philosophical consequences. He argued against the intoxicating euphoria of an illusory blissful future and against the glorification of a sterile past. Vitality, moderation, joy, suffering, a tragic sense of life, consciousness, and conscience were propounded and demanded.

Neither despair nor resignation were recommended. We were to create in the midst of our existential desert. We were to come to terms with the fact of our mortality. We were to struggle against meaninglessness and death, injustice, and indifference. To humanize the world was to grasp the contradictions, paradoxes, and riddles of life. Confronting death, Camus believed, was the royal road to a meaningful life. He interpreted modern history from the French Revolution to the horrors of the concentration camps, as an obsessive drive toward power, a deification of man by man, and the grand denial of mortality. The murder of god had solved nothing. We had to start once again with caution and lucidity, with imagination and reason.

Camus' sober and eloquent voice must be understood as a call for limits. The loss of limits and meaning, the despiritualization of life, which is not identical with secularism, has been articulated by the great twentieth-century social thinker Max Weber. Weber spoke of disenchantment, the loss of enchantment, which is the magical mystery, the source of wonderment in the human heart. He also spoke of actual, protracted historical changes. These were external, structural changes A host of circumstances and factors joined forces to generate the modern predicament, our modern times.

Such factors included science and technology with their primary emphasis on utility, functionalism, efficiency, the conviction that the mystery of life and nature can be comprehended rationally, and the idea that the world is an object of mastery. Bureaucracy is another major factor. Bureaucracy asphyxiates creativity, spontaneity, and passion. Routine, rules, organization, and systems prevail. Capitalism is another factor. Systematization or rationalization of all aspects of life, religious belief included, is another. Urbanization and the massive scale of modern social existence cv contribute their negativism. Finally, human beings tend to become indifferent, passive, and unwilling to or incapable of struggling with the central and fundamental issues of life – freedom, justice, human suffering. Human beings lose their autonomy and recoil from the glorious and humanizing responsibility of making choices, ethical choices. They subscribe to formulas and doctrines while they enslave themselves to simple, non-agonizing solutions. This Weber saw as an ultimate abnegation of humanity and the height of irresponsibility.

To re-enchant an already disenchanted world might be impossible as long as negative external, structural factors militate against it, but Weber was convinced that a partial re-spiritualization and re-enchantment of the world was possible [12]. He did not believe in the magic of Machiavelli's prince nor in divine prophets. Nor did he have any tolerance for secular prophecies of a future paradise on earth. He called them a fool's paradise. He believed that difficult, crucial choices had to be made in order to escape a future nightmare. His images of it are haunting: iron cage, petrified forest, polar night. Courage, heroism, and personal integrity were indispensable, in his view.

A philosophy of history, an understanding of past events and future possibilities, is most desperately needed. The past is neither burdensome inert matter nor a self-evident directive. The voices of the past are many and silent [13]. They are to be found in the ruins of the past and in ourselves. History, memory, and recollection do constitute the indispensable starting point of self-identity. Only if we are equipped with the voices of the past, and not the past itself, can we proceed toward our modern times and future.

Camus wrote that he used to return to a site of ruins by the coast, Tipasa. There he would, in utter silence and solitude, hear ancient voices which taught him what he knew, what was dormant in him. They would leave him fortified, aware, human. We must all find that secret place and time so that the voices of the past silently can awaken us [14]. Then and there we will fully understand that time past and time future are one [15] only in this mysteriously paradoxical way. It is a primordial human activity to journey toward the unknown future with the courage and the wisdom of past navigators. We realize as well that no one can make the journey on our behalf and that each ocean we sail is a new and an old ocean.

The fusion and diffusion of time and place, of past and future, and the vantage point and vicissitudes of all modern times, perhaps amount to nothing more than one statement. It is that the human journey in time is a journey toward the inner world, the vast landscape of the human spirit. Though the journey is primordial, its specifics vary. This is why the voices of the past are needed. This is why standing between past and future, we stand between possibilities, lost opportunities, temptations, and dangers. There are no guarantees. Such is the nature of the ocean of time. That is why we must accept, indeed welcome, the challenge of change. We must go forth not only toward potential victories and triumphs but also toward potential defeats and betrayals. With sorrow and pity, but without bitterness and resignation, we must proceed.

Max Weber was correct when he said that those who ate from the tree of knowledge must create their existential meaning. This does not mean that meaning is a private, subjective issue, far from it. It is Weber who said that politics, as the act of the possible, must realize that the possible is never so declared ab initio. The possible is born out of the pursuit of the impossible, which is distinct from the illusory and unrealizable. We must have the strength to dream.

Such is the fate and destiny of those who wish to be alive and not simply pretend to be so. It is the fate of those who care about the world, and the gift of life and of those who dare without recklessness but with danger. Go forth and become the salt of the earth. Fly toward the luminous sun, but be faithful to your inner strength. Be loyal to those who have been condemned to a life of silence and darkness. Speak on their behalf. Aristotle said it best. There is nothing more horrible than humans when they fail their humanity and there is nothing more beautiful than humans when human. Such are the most vital and most crucial choices that confronted and still confront our race. Such choices stand beyond time but assume the guise of each historical era. They manifest themselves in modern modes and visions before they are admitted once again into the eternity of the past, the possibility of the future, and the very flesh of the human spirit.

IV

Ithaca, Ethnicity, and Modern Times

If a conceptual moment, a juncture that had no solidity, no exterior, was standing between past and future, the voices of the past could not be rendered audible, meaningful. That juncture would have no authenticity, no stature, it could be an illusion, but standing between past and future is crucial not simply as a metaphor for the meaningful passage of time, of time as history, but also because the external reality, the world, is part of it, is incorporated into it. The past-future juncture is rooted in the interior of the self, in its biographical vicissitudes and history. As historical time, the flux of time has demarcations. Events. occurrences, the very process of the aging self and the social transformations of the world are there. The very natural, progressive, evolutionary changes of human existence suggest that time past and lime future cannot be absolutely identical [16].

The inner domain of the self pondering the past-future nexus is itself concretely immersed, rooted, and embedded in the tercitonality of Ithaca. The self has a home, a base. Had we lived the whole of our life span in Ithaca, we would not have been immune to the negative aspects of life and modern times. The life experience would have been mediated by the positivity of Ithaca – the familiar, exteriorized, acculturated territory of the self. Thus, even with serious discontinuities, an infrastructure of meaningful continuity exists. Ithaca is not, then, a shell, a prison of extreme parochialism. Ithaca is not the arrest of time, a dream world unchangeable or untouched by history and reality. Ithaca as a home is a point of departure and a point of arrival. All journeys, all roads, lead back to Ithaca. All journeying gains its meaning and loses its horror precisely because it is an adventure, an exciting exploration of the world's other places, cultures, colours, and faces. It is so only because it harbours in its very being the idea and desire of homecoming.

Ithaca knows no ethnicity. Ethnicity does not exist because in Ithaca you belong to a homogeneous totality, to your people [17]. Precisely because Ithaca is a belonging, exile is such a fierce punishment, a form of death since time immemorial. Exile meant and means the sudden total uprooting of the individual . It is sudden severance from all that sustains the self. The exile, uprooted, transplanted, and abandoned is tossed in an alien ocean. Forced to sail the seas. the exile is not allowed to return to Ithaca. The horror of exile is captured in the repeated desire of exiles to be buried in their homeland. It is not ashes to ashes, nor earth to earth, but a belated homecoming to the soil of Ithaca. It is a return to the soil where flesh and spirit were nurtured, a home after homelessness, rest. tranquillity in the bosom of the familiar and beloved. Since exile is a form of death it calls for a proper burial at home in Ithaca.

To understand ethnicity we must understand this. Departures from Ithaca, permanent or lengthy, are alienating forms of existence. No one leaves Ithaca voluntarily. We say farewell to beautiful Nausikaa and we escape the Sirens but we do not give up Ithaca. To get a last glimpse of Ithaca and die is Odysseus' final, ultimate compromise. Ithaca calls us back because Ithaca is in us. Without her we are incomplete, mutilated, disoriented. Without her we have the trophies of ethnicity – self-denials, insults and humiliations, false triumphs, hollow victories, amnesiac existence, dehistoricized life, a high standard of living. To live through memory, in memory, is exhausting, distorting. Life without memories, without dreams, is not worth living, but a life of only memory and dream is a wasted life.

Milan Kundera says, with accuracy and without compromise, that a person who longs to leave Ithaca is an unhappy person [18]. It is unnatural to leave, hence exile is punishment. The exiles, the political immigrants, the refugees, whatever ill fate awaits them, whatever their sorrow and tragedy, love Ithaca. She is never renounced or betrayed. Coerced departures do not kill love. There would be sorrow and tears, perhaps suicide and insanity, but never renunciation of the beloved land. Exiles are like orphaned children who never turn against the dead mother or father. Normally immigrants leave home for economic reasons-work, a better living, a better opportunity for themselves and their families. There is a great deal of truth in the reality of a superior standard of living, of improved material conditions. The Sirens of the market society, the dream of possessions, vie with Ithaca, but there are yet more temptations, more difficulties.

Technology, capitalism, consumerism, the world of domination and one-dimensionality, opulence and narcissism, Hollywood, the mirage of earthly paradise, and the necessities of industrialization combine to erode the prevailing pattern of existence [19]. By attrition Ithaca changes and so do we, away from Ithaca. Technology, more precisely the constellation of technological, political, and cultural forces, is the great leveller. The global village is the result. Ithaca and the self are under siege, under attack.

Ethnic communities away from Ithaca, whatever their material success and euphoria, begin to experience the problems of their existence in their children. It is not a merely natural generational conflict. The children are the first casualties, the first tangible agents, of assimilation. Customs, manners and, above all, language begin to crumble. The battlefield of ethnicity is now the family. The foreign culture has penetrated the domestic scene. It has infiltrated the sanctuary of character formation The impulse of the immigrant ethnic community is to freeze time. Culture and customs become museum pieces, refilled, worshipped. Ithaca is no longer a living, vibrant reality, an actual realistic memory. It is immortalized in an alien context. The immigrant wants both the material world of his new country and the human texture of his past. Parochialism, traditionalism, ossified ritualism versus cosmopolitanism, individualism, mass culture are all at war. Back in the homeland, armies of tourists celebrate sun, sea, and gastronomic delights and pretend to have grasped the spirit of the place. The natives become court jesters without either irony or wisdom.

To come from one culture and five in another is to progressively become a stranger in both. The crisis of ethnicity is that objectively no tangible Ithaca is possible. The community centres are artificial units, illusory islands of continuity. We must understand that ethnicity outside Ithaca cannot be a slice of Ithaca, for Ithaca and the ethnic community abroad develop, breathe, suffer, betray, and thrive in distinct climates. Their landscapes are no longer homogeneous.

Immigrant life is a form of exile which can be modified, but it cannot be transformed because to do so we must totally forget Ithaca. We must forget what we were and renounce history and authenticity, reflection and consciousness. We must empty ourselves totally. Living away from Ithaca undermines and enriches. Ithaca is never the same again, nor are we. Yet the memories of Ithaca are there in us and they silently beckon us to return, to come.

V

Memories of Ithaca

Perhaps the estrangement of immigrant life cannot know true solace. What I have presented here is a preliminary attempt to decipher the complexities of time and place as past and future, as history, and as homeland and foreign lands. I sought to point out how, in defining and redefining, in revising and articulating the landscape of the self, we must have a notion of identity and past as inviolable. This enables us to receive the future as an open-ended possibility. Past and future must be balanced. Ethnicity without Ithaca is decentred and the delicate balance of the old and new, of the familiar and the unfamiliar, is distorted, accentuated, aggravated.

Those of us who are still in the midst of their odyssey, those of us who lost their Ithaca because of circumstances beyond our control, should know that the mystic and the real, memory and actuality, will always haunt reason and mortify the heart and soul. There is silence and poetry.

Ithaca as a metaphor veils reality but is rooted in memory, a real memory: “and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness... memory of friends, of incidents long past.” [20]

With Ithaca on our mind and in our heart, with old scars and new, we move on. As Weber tells us in the concluding paragraph of “Science as a Vocation”, “nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone... we shall set to work and meet the demands of the day”. [The reference is to the Hebrews]. Perhaps ethnic communities survive by doing just that.

Memories of Ithaca is only a beginning. It is better to leave the rest for the silent landscape is the capital of memory and the heart of exric.

For Nicos Pouiantzas, in memoriam.
Desperate moves far away from Ithaca;
public triumphs close to Ithaca.

NOTES

1. Odysseus resembles, is reminiscent of the real Odysseus In physical appearance and age, but he denies he is Odysseus He is recognized by his dog and then by his trusted servant who sees the old scar. On Odysseus' scar, see Erich Auerbach's masterpiece. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Wesiern Literature (Princeton, (953).

2. It is Homer's insistence which permits Odysseus' reintegration. He returns and he resumes his old life. Obviously his identity has not been shattered, undermined or transformed. What his odyssey had done to him costs deep inside him. It is totally in tematized. This is The case with all survivors. Their story is locked in silence.

3. Nikos Kazantzakis in his Odyssey: A Sequel refuses to domesticate Odysseus who. restless that he is, seeks adventure beyond Ithaca. Though Kazantzakis celebrates the heroic inadvertency he points out the fact that prolonged absence might render impossible the resumption of a normal life. Odysseus would be a stranger even at home The metaphor of Ithaca abounds in literature. Alexandria for Lawrence Durrell; Tipasa for Albert Camus; Florence for Machiavelli; see C.Cavafy's poem “Ithaca”. Also the work of Czeslaw Milosz and V.Nabokov is relevant here. Perhaps we should recall the movie Citizen Kane where in mythic opulence, in a castle utterly alone the old billionaire holds only one memory, happier days. his Ithaca “Rosebud”. In this essay emphasis is placed on Ithaca rather than Odysseus. I do not view Odysseus as the archetype of the immigrant life. He was king; he left intending to return: he was with his comrades. He returned, it is the odyssey as a metaphor-reality of the loss of Ithaca that t wish to stress. Odysseus struggles with nature, not alien socio-political forces. I treat Ithaca as the metaphor of the familiar, desirable. For the ethnic it can be concrete; an actual lost homeland or imagined ancestral land and heritage; second-generation immigrants have no original memory of homeland like their parents nave. Of the Ithacas mentioned here, though all relevant existentially, only a peopled homeland is the immigrant's Ithaca, the native land. The imagined and the actual are fused in a powerful emotional and mental mood that defies a permanent crystallization. Ithaca is the eloquent and grand metaphor of the human desire for a homeland, a cry against exile. It is only in this sense that the immigrant and the true exile can be compared; immigrant life in extremis is exile, life away from Ithaca. Odysseus' nostalgia must be understood etymologically: nostos, return. homecoming; algos, pain. grief. Nostalgia is the grief and pain of the desire to return home, the haunting, painful memories of homeland away from home. Homesickness is a pitiful translation. On Penelope and female destiny in the Hompric epic Horkheimer and Adorno write: “Prostitute and wife are the complements of female self-alienation in the patriarchal world: the wife denotes pleasure in the fixed order of life and property, whereas the prostitute takes what the wife's right of possession leaves free, and – as the wife's secret collaborator – subjects it again to the order of possession: she sells pleasure”. The Diatectic of Enlightenment, 73-4. It should be clear that Ithaca is neither a paradisiac locale nor a name for self-delusion. It is memory, desire, and imagination allied against an alien, hostile world; it is the heart of human identity.

In this essay I move from Odysseus to Ithaca and the metaphor of odyssey; I end with El Greco, a solitary, silent painter; in him I see the ultimate starting point, the founding of life away from Ithaca. He is the existential canvas. Others, community, language must follow. El Greco is, metaphorically, the silent nostalgia for Ithaca that screams in colours and forms to a world which would not understand him in Greek El Greco and sunset. The foundation.

4. R.D.Laing, F.Fanon, and Orwell argue the need for origins and history. Octavio Paz and, recently, Eduardo Galeano are brilliant in their poetized web of history and existence. G.Seferis is the master of this in Greek literature. Feminist literature is rich on history and identity.

5. Language as sound and meaning, as flesh and music of the spirit is the least studied aspect of exile and immigrant life. When the vital nerve of existence is severed, language, the mother tongue begins to be bastardized among the ethnics. Writers in exile know it best: language is a living thing, it needs human interaction to survive meaningfully.

6. See Arendt's Between Pasr and Future.

7. See below, section III where the past as Ithaca, life in Ithaca, achieves corporeality.

8. Politics Bk. II.

9. Nietzsche died on 25 August 1900. His mind entered the darkness of insanity several years earlier. In 1889 in Turin, the famous incident with the horse took place

10. Heidegger “The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead” in The Question Concerning Technology.

11. The famous lines are “I love Florence more than my soul”. There к а sophisticated tension in Machiavelli between Florence that he loves and Italy that must recapture the glories of the Roman empire.

12. He speaks explicitly of the re-enchantment in “Politics as a Vocation” and in “Science as a Vocation”.

13. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of the light of the past. Andre Malraux spoke of the voices of silence.

14. Tipasa is for Camus the equivalent of my metaphoric use of Ithaca. Tipasa is his Ithaca. Machiavelli has his Ithaca while Hobbes does not. This is the beginning of modernity.

15. Were I allude to T.S.Elliot's opening lines in his “Four Quartets”:

Note the crucial word perhaps and recall that the motto of the poem is from Heraditus.

16. Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber and so many others starting with Aristotle, point out the gradual transition, the shifts, and changes that beset social existence. Change takes place in the village, on the island, in the city, in the neighbourhoods of the metropolis. Lawrence Dunell captures it beautifully in his The Alexandria Ouartetwheri he narrates in his letter to Clea the changing life on the island in the concluding pages of the novel.

17. The national Greek poet, Solomos, has said that language, religion, and homeland constitute the world of the self. This is the extreme of homogeneity and the solidity of communal life.

18. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 27. Kundera understands the loss of Ithaca in its fullest bitter truth and pain. Lives interrupted by historical convulsions. There is pain, loss, the desire to forget the unforgettable past.

19. On domination, see Marcuse's One Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. Also Domination (Tomrito: University of Toronto Press 1975), Alkis Kontos, ed.; “The Dialectics of Domination: An Interpretation of Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Visit” in Powers. Possessions, and Freedom: Essays in Honour of C.B.Macpherson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1979), Alkis Kontos, ed.

20. Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. Durrell speaks of Alexandria as place and history thus:

21. Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons. George Seferis puts the mythic thus:

Who returns and who does not return to Ithaca and why should be registered. Odysseus upon his return sustains his pretence that he is not Odysseus except when he encounters his father who laments the loss of his son. There is a belated but happy reunion. In The Iliad two scenes involve less happy encounters between fathers and sons. Hector bids farewell to his wife and young son on his way to the battlefield where he will be killed. It is a tender family moment to the warrior. Hector's father pleads with Achilles for his son's body. Achilles knows he is next to die. He gives up the body as if he is giving his body to his father for funeral. Odysseus returns and embraces his father. Hector's son. Hector's father will not embrace Hector again. Neither would Achilles be embraced again. The spoils of battle and conquest. Wars, memorials, a tomb for the unknown-soldier. CA.Trypanis in his poems Pompeian Dog writes:

I think of El Greco – a solitary figure. He went from Crete to Venice, then to Toledo. Spain. The Greek – no name, no community no illusions of having a slice of Greece there; a labyrinth without Ariadne; Dante's odyssey without beloved Beatrice. Alone, he was without illusion or self-deception, without false hope, without bitterness and resignation. Solid, authentic, and free stands El Greco, the son of distant lands. Colours and visions, echoes of the past pour forth on the canvas. Monumental but most human he stands, and:

Standing high above Toledo, El Greco – Domenicos Theodocopoulos by name – at sunset, caresses with his eyes the town, the landscape. Is he thinking of Venice, of distant Crete? Are there perhaps melancholy regrets? Visiting his house, paying homage to him I salute a solitary human figure, a Greek in distant lands, and I believe I know. During those sunsets El Greco is immersed in memories of other sunsets, sunsets of his island as I remember the sunsets of my island – memories of Ithaca – and I recognize the truth of Homer's words:

Yearning and tarrying; we must meet the demands of the day. Yet you ask: What of ethnicity?