After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time

by Charlotte Du Cann

A pile of seeds, a tuft of wool, a vessel of water, a closed box
What happens when the heroes disappear, when the battle for the city is over, when you return to the island and find a box in your hands? There was an instruction once that told us why the box should never be opened. But you don't believe those stories anymore. You always open the box.
After Ithaca is a non-fiction work - part memoir, part essay, part travelogue - that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis . It is set in the Peruvian rainforest, in the backrooms of Suffolk towns, in Japan, in France, Australia, in the desert borderlands, in borrowed houses and Occupy tents, in kitchens and burial chambers, underneath a lemon tree on an abandoned terrace...
The book revolves around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, set by Venus, the goddess of love and four territories that map this search for meaning and coherence in a time of fall. Each chapter starts with a memory of place as a clue to the the recovery of a relationship with wild nature, with being human, a kind of archaeology for the pieces of self that lie missing beneath a broken storyline, like the sherds of a pot. It is a personal story and also a social story, about the relinquishment of a certain world, that looks at writing as an existential showing how myth can be a techne for finding our lost voice, our medicine of how to put a crooked thing straight.
How to pull ourselves out of the wreckage, and start again.

256 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2022

Reviews

[Hannah Persyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book so much. I think because overall, the message the author is trying to convey resonates so deeply with me. But god it was hard to read, the actual voice of the author grated on my nerves. She seems to have reverence for the mythic world/existence outside of centering humans above all else which -again- I love but yikes. How she communicates it feels demeaning? Or I’m not sure that’s even the best word? Seems like she feels these truths are big ah-ha’s but they actually aren’t anything new… guess I can’t quite put my finger on it. Couldn’t finish the book.

[Rose Paris]

This is a hard book to rate so I am not even going to try until after a re-read in a few months. There were aspects that I found striking and have continued to think about for weeks after reading. The author, I think deliberately (which did not become apparent until 3/4 of the way through) does not give a neat or linear progression to either the narrative or the central arguments of the book. A story of a life and a world full of contradictions and complexities and despair, but with moments of beauty.

[Chenoa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lord save us from formerly-wealthy intellectuals who think they need to enlighten the rest of us. What a horrible, sanctimonious, sexist person the author must be!