Friday November 19, 2004 - A Journey of Struggle

Friday November 19, 2004 - A Journey of Struggle

Yesterday I was in conversation with a workmate over the phone when he mentioned Zorba The Greek and its author Nikos Kazantzakis. “L” said, “did you know he wrote a sequel to Homer’s Odyssey also called Odyssey.” My curiosity was aroused as I have been returning to my college readings including Homer and I had just listened to an audio lecture on Homer’s Odyssey. The Greeks knew a thing or two about good story telling.

I’ve become fixated on Homer’s second work because my advancing years have taught me that we’re all on a journey traveling through time and space. And though we might occupy the same space over time that space is continually changing, as are we. Furthermore, everything that we experience immediately becomes part of the past.

Poor Odysseus spends the first part of Homer’s work journeying home in the process overcoming one hardship after another. Finally, he manages to return to his home in Ithaca only to spend the rest of the Epic defeating the many suitors who have been camped out waiting for Odysseus wife Penelope to choose one of them to replace her long lost husband. She has skillfully managed to keep them at bay all the years of her husband’s absence through feminine guile.

Odysseus does overcome the suitors and reclaims his land and household and that’s where the story ends. Kazantzakis in his epic work—33,333 17-syllable verses—follows Odysseus after he now has to settle down and once again run his farm and manage all the small day-to-day crises that confront any landowner. Talk about a great let down, this has to rank right up there with the Boston Red Sox, post World Series depression bought on by the realization that they no longer have anything to strive for. Only the long suffering Chicago Cubs can claim that distinction, but at least they still have the struggle to endure, which ultimately is what Kazantzakis's modern work revolves around, the need for man to struggle. Strip that away and you are left with nothing, Kazantzakis declares.

My life has been a series of journeys not unlike the Red Sox, though of much shorter duration. The two most recent journeys are the more memorable. In 1990, I had the good fortune of taking over the editorship of a once venerable technical publication, originally owned by a major New York based publishing company. By the time, I took the helm, however, a rust-belt publishing company based in Cleveland owned it. The reality has all the elements of a good joke but I can’t conjure it up.

When I took over, the magazine had been mortally wounded. Its lifeblood, advertising revenues, had been halved by a series of misguided moves intended to “reposition” the publication. To be fair most of these decisions had been made before the Cleveland publisher acquired the magazine, which in reality was thrown into a purchase deal that originally excluded it. This gives you some idea of what an orphan this once great publication had become. When I took over, the wound had been bandaged and the bleeding had stopped but healing the wound and returning the patient to health was a constant struggle. I worked harder than I’d ever worked before: on planes every month extolling the editorial direction to every media buyer in every agency our sales people could put me in front of.

Three years into the venture, it was becoming obvious that the wound was reopening and the bleeding was beginning again. We downsized the publication, moved it to Cleveland and began surviving off the large number of paid subscribers the magazine still had. Instead of a monthly magazine, we began producing a 16-page color newsletter every other week, with a staff of stringers all over the world. This staved off the inevitable for another two years, but in the end the poor beast finally gave out and died. I wrote the obituary in its final editorial and I went on to find another editor position.

The aftermath left me with a great sense of loss and depression. This once great journal began publication in the 1930s at the height of the depression to describe the embryonic world of “electronics”. Now that journey and my nearly ten years of association with it had also come to an end. During those last five years, I wrote two obituaries besides the one I wrote for the publication. One was for an editor who had succumbed to AIDS another was for one who had succumbed to the ravages of age. Every struggle has its casualties.

I had stopped being the editor of that publication which no longer existed. And all the effort and struggle that had been invested in keeping it alive was as so much water flowing beneath a bridge receding into the past with every advancing moment. I was now, “baggage” in hand, standing outside the door of another publication waiting to take the position of editor, which had been vacated shortly before I was to come on board. If I had to wait any length of time before taking up my new position, I would have been completely at a loss. So much adrenalin and nothing to apply it toward.

I’ve learned that without struggle in your life, existing can become tedium with no end in sight. I'm going to have to read Kazantzakis' book.