Read Online Odysseus in America by Jonathan Shay - Free Book Online

return.”
    (4:181ff, Fitzgerald)
    A twinging ache of grief rose up in everyone,
and … Telemakhos and Menelaos wept …
    There’s no hint that Menelaus wants to forget Odysseus, nor that he finds the pain unmanageable, nor that he finds his own tears humiliating. But Menelaus’ wife, Helen, the famous beauty, Helen of Troy, over whom the whole war was fought, apparently thinks “it’ll be good for him” to forget:
    But now it entered Helen’s mind
to drop into the wine that they were drinking
an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.
    (4:235ff, Fitzgerald; emphasis added)
    Whoever drank this mixture in the wine bowl
would be incapable of tears that day—
though he should lose mother and father both,
or see, with his own eyes, a son or brother
mauled by weapons of bronze at his own gate.
    The opiate of Zeus’s daughter bore
this canny power….
    She drugged the wine, then, had it served …
    While some veterans will say that they want to forget what they’ve seen, what they’ve been through, what they’ve done, they never say they want to forget the comrades they’ve lost. Veterans are more often distraught that they cannot remember the name of a friend who died or cannot envision his face, much as it’s common for bereaved widows and widowers to go through agonizing periods when the pain is there but voluntary recall ofthe beloved’s face is impossible. The veterans I have worked with regard forgetting dead comrades as dishonorable as forgetting dead parents.
    A third time, when Odysseus’ men fall into the clutches of the witch Circe, Homer connects drugs with forgetfulness:
    â€œ[Circe] ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine—
but into the brew
she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thoughts of home.”
    (10:256ff, Fagles; emphasis added)
    The drug turns the veterans from Odysseus’ crew into pigs—a ripe metaphor for moralizing on what drug and alcohol addiction can do. But the core of what Homer shows us is that drugs cause veterans to lose their homecoming. The Lotus and Circe’s drug both make them “forget” their home. The drunk may literally be unable to recall how to get home, and the crack cocaine addict may be unable to remember anything worth going home to at all. In the subtler sense, the drug- or alcohol-addicted veteran may be physically at home, but his cognitive and emotional resources are entirely consumed by the next drink or fix.
    Sometimes a veteran’s desire to “stop the screaming” or “stop the nightmares” gets framed as forgetting, “If only I could forget …” But the inability to remember things that the veteran longs to recover and the inability to feel safe from ambush by flashbacks and nightmares are two sides of the same coin. The veteran has lost
authority
over his own process of memory. Restoring that authority is one dimension of recovery from combat trauma. A veteran who is actively drinking or actively using drugs can never regain authority over the processes of memory. Sobriety is one of the three essential
starting points
for recovery from complex PTSD after combat, the other two being safety and self-care. 4
    Using drugs and alcohol for forgetting, to suppress nightmares, to get to sleep in the face of unbearable agitation, are examples of what has come to be called “self-medication.” Legally and illegally, the civilian world offers a range of psychoactive substances, which street lingo divides broadly into “uppers” (stimulants such as amphetamines and cocaine) and “downers” (sedatives such as alcohol and barbiturates, anxiolytics such as Valium and other benzodiazepines, and opiate analgesics such as heroin).
    With the story of the Lotus Eaters, echoing Helen’s “anodyne, mildmagic of