THE SECOND JOURNEY

By Charles Packer

A Note about this work:

After reading the blog "Resourcefulness and how it relates to Entrepreneurial Resiliency" former OPG Darlington Site V.P. and President of Cherrystone Management Charles Packer, spoke with me, and later shared a piece of writing which relates to the shiftings that can come to us in the journey of life.

This is less of piece about Rosenbaum's learned resourcefulness, but rather insight into the factors and journey that one experiences on route to the realization that a change is needed. The message and imagery in this piece is deep, inspiring, thought provoking. It also challenges us to think about one's journey in a very different light. I hope that you enjoy this piece.

Ron

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What waters lapping the bow

And scent of pine, and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return O my daughter. 

T.S. Eliot, Marina

What I shall call the First Journey of our lives is made from our quests and our adventures, and its legacies are achievements, memories, possessions and status. But even as we live our first journey, there grows beside it a Second Journey. And whereas the First Journey is made from our seeking and adventures, so the Second Journey is made from our identity and our destiny. The first journey has fruits and memories; in a sense it is partly directed towards “being stored”, but the Second Journey is always alive, refusing to be put on the shelf, always within us. Our first journey may try to own us as the weight of our past accumulations starts to crush us into immobility, but the Second Journey calls to us like the woodthrush singing through the fog. 

The call of the bird can make us afraid, but the Second Journey is of great importance. It does not begin where the first journey leaves off; they are not sequential pathways. Rather it develops alongside, like the second track of a railway. At some point we become aware of it, paralleling the life we have chosen or fallen into. Sometimes it moves away, sometimes it crosses our path. 

We can seek to deny our Second Journey, for its presence within us is often frightening. We can try to go on preserving ourselves each year; standing, as it were, upon our assets and our memories. But its voice can grow in power and presence until one day we have to admit its existence and face the question of whether we can “jump the tracks”. 

Perhaps the most famous of all introductions to such a crisis of life is the opening to Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300’s.

‘When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

For I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah it is difficult to speak of what it was,

That savage forest deep and difficult

Which even in recall renews my fear.’

We may find ourselves as Dante did “in the shadowed forest”, waking to realise that the place we inhabit, the world we once thought held the necessary meanings of our quest and our adventure has become slowly foreign.  

I once saw a cartoon in which a business man is hurrying along a city street, his eyes fixed upon his feet, and he is saying inside “Help! I’m trapped inside an Executive Vice President”. This is the point of recognition of the Second Journey. The Quest has been successful, the trappings and achievements are real; yet they are insubstantial and unsatisfying. The great “I” of identity speaks with hesitation and with longing. 

We began with Dante, the great explorer of the medieval world. But Dante of course was preceded by that greatest of all wanderers, Odysseus. Odysseus had to journey home from the Trojan War, and The Odyssey of Homer tells the story of the ten-year ordeal of his voyage and adventure. At the exact halfway point in the story Odysseus has become beguiled by Circe, the enchantress, much learned in the use of herbs, charms and spells. 

He and his men have lain idle on her island for a year, but eventually Odysseus realizes that he must set out again. Circe agrees to release him, but instructs him first to descend to the underworld to meet Tiresias the blind seer, before he resumes his voyage.

“Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, old campaigner, Stay on no more in my house against your will.

But first another journey calls. You must travel down

To the House of Death and the awesome one, Persephone, There to consult the ghost of Tiresias, seer of Thebes.”

So here we have the link which Dante draws on as he travels Inferno– a journey to the House of Death. We must pay close attention to what happens to Odysseus at this point and later to what Dante learns from Odysseus’s shade when he meets it in Inferno.

Notice that in both Dante and Homer we are at the transition point of the First Journey. Dante finds himself in a dark and shadowed forest, lost. Odysseus has had his quest and his adventures but finds himself beguiled and stalled. They are both in the dark, and they both journey through the darkness of life to the darkness of the dead. Both Dante and Homer speak to us, therefore, of a time of dying that we might live. In a sense, to see our Second Journey with any clarity we must look inside ourselves, and we must be willing to be emptied and to be afraid. 

So what happens when Odysseus enters the world of the dead? Tiresias already knows what is sought. The great question stands between them “Will I get home? Will the quest of my first journey be successful; will the adventures have been worthwhile?” 

Tiresias therefore speaks. He reassures Odysseus that indeed he will get home: 

“And at last your own death will steal upon you…

A gentle painless death, far from the sea it comes

To take you down, borne with the years in ripe old age

With all your people there in blessed peace around you 

All that I have told you will come true.”

But before this portrait of a peaceful end, he has said something strange. “When you get home” he says to Odysseus,

“Take an oar, and go overland on foot until you meet A people who eat meat unsalted, who have never seen  The sea, nor ships with crimson bows. 

Here some passerby will say to you 

“What is that winnowing fan upon your shoulder?”

Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf

And make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:…”

Tiresias therefore tells Odysseus that when his quest and adventures of the sea have run their course, he must go to a place where it is all entirely unknown – to where the sea itself and the tools of the sea, which are his past, are unrecognised. And at this place he is to offer sacrifice, for it is here and only here that he will have found home. 

This is very real and powerful message. When we turn to our Second Journey and spend part of our time there (a time which will grow), we must take no self-significance with us. Yes, we take our skills and we use them, but we do not need to stand where our first journey has placed us. Odysseus has been told that he must become ordinary, anonymous even. He must allow himself to be “re-written”, exactly as Dante in his journey as pilgrim will find that he must face his fears and allow his self-narrative to be re-written when he found himself within the Shadowed Forest at the beginning of Inferno. 

And now we are ready to listen to the meeting of Odysseus and Dante the Pilgrim in Inferno, which takes place in Canto XXVI, the Eighth Circle of Hell. This Circle is where the Fraudulent Counsellors are condemned – those who, in their lives, and for selfish benefit, took others down false paths. It is here that Dante meets and talks with the shade of Odysseus, and as we overhear the conversation we will pay attention to Odysseus’s story and to his motivations. 

In The Odyssey Tiresias had foretold that Odysseus would get home and that he would die at home, but Homer’s poem ends before we know whether in fact Odysseus lived out this prophecy. Now, when Dante meets Odysseus in Inferno, Odysseus tells him that this was not to be his destiny. Here is the extract from Inferno Canto XXVI (Odysseus speaking):

“Neither my fondness for my son nor pity 

For my old father nor the love I owed 

Penelope, which would have gladdened her

Was able to defeat in me the longing

I had to gain experience of the world

Therefore I set out again…”

But Odysseus cannot travel alone – he needs his sailors, his companions, to sail his ship.

And so he must draw them too into his personal adventure: 

 ‘Brothers,’ I said. ‘o you who having crossed  a hundred thousand dangers, reach the West,  to this brief waking-time that is still left  unto your senses, you must not deny  experience of that which lies beyond  the sun, and of the world which is unpeopled. 

Consider well the seed that gave you birth: 

You were not made to live your lives as brutes, 

But to be followers of worth and knowledge.’ 

In these short passages Odysseus declares himself. He will leave behind his family and humanity itself in order to follow after “worth and knowledge” within “the world which is unpeopled”.  Indeed he says that NOT to seek these things would make him and his companions to “live our lives as brutes”. These are strong words indeed. 

Dante uses this encounter to say to us that a life of disconnection from humanity in order to gain self-worth and knowledge is a deep and fatal flaw. Instead, humanity, relationships,  - perhaps indeed the whole past of humanity - is the essential soil of a Second Journey. And while pride is a separation of the self from others, humanity has to be found in humility.

Whoever does not grow upward from the soil of life will not find home. 

And so, between these two great poems, we are drawn to a Crossing-Place of our lives. The Second Journey calls us from within the truth of ourselves. And it calls us not entirely to new adventures, but to our humanity, our ordinariness, to life itself. It is a call to humility and to the shifting of our self-narrative.  

But why does the Second Journey want to consume the person we tell ourselves we are? Because we are alive. This is a great and wonderful paradox: what lives must always die, and therefore we can recognise what is most alive within us by its power to consume us. We are born mortal, will always be mortal. And mortality is the consuming fire of experience. 

And now we are arrived at something rich and strange - we hear echoes in the fog. For have we not been here before? Have we not lived a time when life found us every day; a time when we did not seek to accumulate or to preserve; a time where our status and our past held no meaning; and a time when we had no guile? 

Perhaps this is what T.S. Eliot felt, standing, as it were, here with us, at the river’s edge at nightfall in October:

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands

What waters lapping the bow And scent of pine, and the woodthrush singing through the fog

What images return O my daughter. 

The first journey is ended (as Eliot says later in the poem  “become unsubstantial”), and the Second Journey has taken hold. For yes, the images return. We have been here before, and when last we walked this path we called it Childhood.

                                                                                      .. let me

Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,

The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships

This recognition of childhood in the Second Journey, which yet is not a return to childhood, is a great and wonderful mystery. And we should not let our first journeys prevent us from laying hold of this mystery, for it cannot be turned into assets or preserved in memories. It can only be experienced. 

So, there is a vital and necessary first journey to our lives, in which we have powerful, great and sometimes painful and tragic adventures, and through which we build our memories and our images. But all the while a Second Journey walks beside us, at times a shadow, at times a turning, and then at a time of dusk, perhaps in fear, perhaps in confusion, when a slow moon climbs, or when the woodthrush calls in fog, it claims us. 

The Second Journey has no need of status. It waits for us, and it hopes for us, and it is alive within us. It is no preserver - it wants the fistful of sand in our hourglasses, and it has no guile. The Second Journey is a journey back as well as before us, and when we walk its path it brings to us something of the child within; a great and wonderful mystery.  

SOURCES

1. Poem Marina by T.S. Eliot, 1930.

2. Quotations from Dante’s Inferno Cantos I and XXVI: Translation by Allen Mandelbaum, 1982. (In The Divine Comedy Dante refers to Odysseus as Ulysses – the Latin name.)

3. Quotations from Homer’s Odyssey Book XI: Translation by Robert Fitzgerald, 1961.