Lotus Eaters

   

  I think frequently here about the lotus eaters. We have been living for the past four weeks in lotus land—Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica. We stayed here last year for seven weeks and the year prior for seven weeks in Guanacaste Province. We traveled a bit about the country, at least on the country’s Pacific coast: walked the rain forest in Monteverde and the coffee and chocolate plantations there; there we hiked a mountainous trail at El Tigre where we suffered serious fatigue and where one of us almost collapsed. She was transported to a safe place via zip line bicycle! The other one was left to complete the walk alone and walking the last 350 meters sludging through the mud and brambles feared suffering a heart attack and hoped that in that event he might be found. To celebrate our survival we dined that evening in a restaurant in the trees and enjoyed a very lovely meal. We have visited Manuel Antonio National Park, spent a few days in the city of La Fortuna and stayed there in a hotel whose window overlooked the Arenal Volcano. In the late 1960s the Arenal erupted and destroyed the town of La Fortuna, but the volcano has been quiescent in the years since and the city has been reconstructed; we spent a day on the beach at Tortuga Island; we hiked the park surrounding Rincon de la Viejo and in the area experienced a volcanic mud bath and natural hot springs. We drove All Terrain Vehicles all three years, and we have stayed in the capital city of San Jose and toured the Pos Volcano.

We have not been completely sedentary; indeed, it almost could appear that we have been very active, but actually for the majority of the time during our weeks-long stays, we lie about amid the lotus blossoms. Twice a day we walk to the beach carrying our beach chairs and water bottles and sit comfortably in the sun and sand for 90-120 minutes. I have slobbered my face and body with SPF-50 sun screen, though I never am not worried about skin cancer, a result of a careless and vain youth on the beaches of Long Island and some bad genes: my legs are splotched with what the dermatologist refers to as ‘wisdom spots’ but which know as blemishes. Sometimes we head into the ocean, she for play and me for a cooling, and then we return to the chairs where we sit until we gather the energy to retread our steps and return to the casa where we will we shower and have a(nother) lie down. We read and write, enjoy a quiet cocktail hour, dine in or out and retire early for the evening. And then on the next day we push repeat. And regardless of our forays out, we remain for the most part sedentary, and it seems to me that with every new day our lethargies increase. 

                I have been thinking about the lotus eaters. In Homer’s The Odyssey Ulysses and his men go ashore on the island and having eaten of the lotus plants they become languid and lose their desire to raise themselves from their lethargic comfort and continue their voyage home. Homer writes that Ulysses’s men went ashore “and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them.” They would go no more to roaming. 

Alfred Lloyd Tennyson addresses the same topic in his poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” In Tennyson’s work Ulysses’s crew having arrived at the island of the lotus blossoms the sailors want to abandon their world-weariness and live forever eating of the blossoms. They say, 

Death is the end of life; ah, why 

Should life all labour be? 

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 

And in a little while our lips are dumb. 

Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

All things are taken from us, and become 

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 

To war with evil? Is there any peace 

In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 

In silence; ripen, fall and cease: 

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

Weary of war and strife, with the constant effort that a life of responsibility demands, of inevitable pain and loss only to be doomed to die, the sailors beg to be left alone. Three times in the stanza they make this demand: they would go no more to roaming. In these times I appreciate their wish to withdraw from the difficulties life means.

The presence of the lotus eaters appears continuously in literature. Chapter 5 of James Joyce’s Ulysses addresses Homer’s episode of the Lotus Eaters as Leopold Bloom wanders seemingly aimlessly about Dublin before attending to Digby’s funeral. Bloom is to keep away from his home where his wife Molly will be meeting for a sexual tryst with her manager, Boylan. Joyce refers to this episode as “The Lotus Eaters." In the chapter Bloom's daylong journey through Dublin begins with thoughts concerning drugs and other strategies for avoiding reality. 

            In another literary reference, in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain an implicit reference is made to the lotus eaters by Ludovico Settembrini, the Italian humanist intellectual, a patient/client of the sanitorium being treated along with other sufferers for tuberculosis. Settembrini says, “Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.” He argues that music, too, lulls the listener and leads to torpidity. Settembrini is arguing that analysis can act as the flower of the lotus plant: a narcotic that depletes one of the desire to act. There are critics of postmodernism who might agree with Settembrini. And it was Bertoldt Brecht who argued that catharsis as the result of experiencing theatrical tragedy also serves as a lotus flower draining the desire to act as the emotionally drained audience exits the play. Brecht believed that theater should inspire committed action.

            However, in his poem “Ulysses” Tennyson has offered an alternative to the lethargy of the sailors who eat of the lotus blossoms. Ulysses exhorts his comrades, 

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This is the opposite of quietism, of torpidity, of lotus eating. Ulysses’ invitation is to action, to risk, to discovery, and to exploration. There would be no time for indolence, says Ulysses. We must go a-roaming. 

I think the urge to eat of the lotus blossom and forget all cares and responsibility is ever-present. Life is hard here out of the garden. In Costa Rica it is so simple to lay about, to do little, to eat of the lotus blossom. To amble to the beach and then amble home, not to rest from a weariness of doing but to continue to do nothing. Like Ulysses, I have not the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, if ever I had that strength and the inclination to lie-about is strong and alluring. But I have much sympathy with Ulysses’ call to action, an acceptance that we are what we are, creatures with will and longings to move out and explore and even to suffer. Yes, life might be hard and death our end, but though weakened with toil and age we still possess the strengths to struggle, to explore and discover new worlds. Lying amongst the lotus blossoms there is no energy to set sail still, and it takes a great exercise of will to put away the lotus blossoms and to set sail again. 

But sometimes I just don't have the will.