The Disenchantment of Ulysses
 |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|
Ulysses fnds himself on the isle of Ogygia, the island of Calypso, immortal sea nymph, where he spent a full eight out of the twenty years of his heroic wars and wanderings, fguring out whether he wanted to become immortal on an island paradise in the company of a beautiful goddess, or if he was to return and face his human destiny...home, love and death. While he accepts her advances, sleeping at her side by night, by day he longs for the shores of Ithaca, for Penelope, for home. He lives in a state of idleness, of longing, he is a prisoner of eternal desire satisfed; he has no materials with which to fashion a boat, he has no help from the gods to send him on his way.
Ulysses is nonetheless a survivor...his state of mind is one of contemplation.....Not a passive contemplation, nor a sinking into the greater consciousness, but an active meditation; He is constantly embarking and dis-embarking in his mind on seas and lands often visited but hardly ever chartered.... the ocean of the inner world, the world of his and our imagination. He has re-instated his voyage of discovery. He knows better now the dangers and perils that he will come to face, he recognizes them in drawings and paintings, in comic-strips and in fairy-tales. He traverses, however, a dream-scape in which he meets too with many unknown beings, objects, forms and places of his interior world... this state of non-action goes contrary to his nature, but it is not a fearful state of reticence or prudence. On the contrary, it is a state of action on the inner sphere.
He is an artist exploring and connecting the various layers of his conscious and sub-conscious imagination. Art is perhaps the only medium in which Enchantment can still be discovered, given form and disseminated in public spaces.