Projections

In the days leading up to the release of The Odyssey, I became obsessed with Greek mythology. Above all, I became fixated on the notion of hubris, and I read anything I could get my hands on that explored the topic.

Hubris, I learned, was not simply excessive pride, but rather it was pride that violated the proper limits between gods and mortals. When Bellerophon believed he was equal to the gods, he attempted to ride Pegasus all the way up to Mount Olympus. As punishment, Zeus sent a gadfly to bite Pegasus, and Bellerophon fell from the sky.

One night, during this mythology binge, I dreamt I was in the theatre, watching The Odyssey, when the projector broke. The screen went black. At the same time, it also became translucent, almost like a veil, and I could see that behind the screen there was a large mechanical projector, puffing with smoke.

The next day, I was reading The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R Dodds, a book which challenges the idea that Greeks were purely rational and logical. Instead, Dodds argues, the Greeks wrestled deeply with irrational forces like possession, prophecy, fate, and magic. Eventually, I made it to the chapter on dreams, where I read about how the Homeric poets often treated what happens in dreams as if they were objective facts, things which existed “independent of the dreamer” – a good example, I suppose, of the kind of so-called irrationality Dodds had in mind.

At that point, I took a break and began scrolling aimlessly through the headlines, when a particular article jumped out at me:

It was supposed to be an epic movie-going experience of The Odyssey. Then, the projector broke.

I couldn’t believe it. I poured through the article as quickly as I could. The IMAX projector in a movie theatre only blocks away from my house broke – on the same night I had that dream. Plus, I stumbled on to that article randomly, only seconds after reading about the Ancient Greek experience of dreams – pointing to events in the real world.

But there was more.

Earlier that week, I gave a lecture in which I happened to refer to John Gardner’s theory of fiction, according to which the purpose of creative writing is to “create a vivid and continuous dream” in the mind of the reader. It’s a familiar idea, which you sometimes hear described in terms of “playing a movie in the reader’s head,” or “projecting images into the reader’s imagination.” For Gardner, anything that interrupts this dream should be removed.

In my own vivid and continuous dream - a movie was interrupted. This was no mere projection of my psyche. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had a prophetic dream.

But to believe I had the power of prophecy – was this not a form of hubris?

The next day, with that in mind, I found a copy of Aeschylus’ Oresteia on my shelf, a Penguin Classics edition I forgot I owned. Thrilled that I didn’t have to track down a copy, I read a huge chunk of it with my morning coffee before heading to work, but it didn’t shed any more light on the question.

That would come later that night, when Marianne and I were scanning the titles on Amazon Prime, looking for a movie, and we came across the 1981 version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

“Let’s watch it,” she said.

“This?” I replied.

I needed something Greek – I wanted to watch Troy.

She pressed play: decision made.

We made it to a scene where Connie, overcome with lust, pleasures herself while gazing at her reflection in the mirror. Standing there, examining the contours of her naked body, her desire growing more intense, she places a veil over her head. At that point, I paused the movie and sat upright.

“What is it?” Marianne asked.

“Take a look at this,” I said. “I started reading it this morning.”

I reached for the copy of The Oresteia, which was resting on the side-table next to the couch, and held it up. On the cover, above the title, there was a lone face against a black background, covered with a translucent veil. It was if they were running away from something, but the veil was holding them back. Their mouth hung open in a way that you couldn’t tell if they were in a state of agony or ecstasy. It looked eerily similar to the image of Connie from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the verge of climax, frozen on the screen.

Now I had to ask myself a different version of the same question I asked before.

To believe I had the power of prophecy – was this hubris? Or was it a strange form of self-pleasuring?