Study Leave: Occasional Posts on Research, Writing and Other Academic Matters: Iliad

Showing posts with label Iliad. Show all posts

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Abstract for the CACW

English: intrpretation of the Shield of Achilles design described in the Iliad, by Angelo Monticelli (1778-1837) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent three months working on a grant proposal, but come to the conclusion that I'll be in a better position to successfully apply for a grant next year, so didn't submit it after all. So back to Oswald!

The CACW/ CAPN conference this year is on the subject of "decisions in antiquity". Legal scholars are organizing it, and no doubt that's what they had in mind. However, that's not what I work on. I thought about submitting an abstract on Iphigenia at Aulis, which after all is all about the decision to sacrifice Iphigenia, something no one wants to do, but somehow it happens after all. However, although it's an interesting subject, I haven't been working on it, and I'm not sure I have anything to contribute on the I.A. at this point.

So I thought, instead, about Memorial. And it immediately occurred to me that a very interesting thing about Memorial is that all of the decisions of the Iliad have been omitted from Memorial, along with the narrative. And that I would like to talk about. So here is the abstract I submitted: we'll see if it flies ...

The Decisions of Memorial

Alice Oswald's poem "Memorial", a re-translation of the death scenes in the Iliad, highlights the decision-making processes in the Iliad, by their absence in the modern poem.

Decision-making processes in the Iliad are given prominence. Important decisions governing the entire narrative are made by those high in the social hierarchy – gods, kings, and aristocrats – and the process by which they arrive at decisions is shown in detail. Achilles chooses glory over a long life, and then changes his mind; Zeus chooses whose death, Achilles or Hector's, weighs more in the balance at the critical moment; the Shield of Achilles displays an alternative decision-making process for the peaceful settling of disputes.

"Memorial", which removes the overarching narrative, the gods, and the major aristocrats, also removes all the points of decision of the Iliad, except for those small decisions individuals make which contribute to their own deaths. These omissions make each individual death seem inevitable, and the decision-making processes of the narrative illusory. For all the importance given to decision-making in the Iliad, argues "Memorial",the end was always known, and only the deaths were real.

***
I am not sure that the observation that when you skip the story, you also miss out on all the decision-making, which is (after all) part of the story, is a deep insight into the nature of narrative. But it will be fun to think about.

Monday, 4 February 2013

great feedback

English: Chick pea and Silene vulgaris stew. (Potaje de garbanzos y collejas) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I gave a paper on Memorial yesterday; excellent response comments and discussion later on. I may have to rethink Asius the chickpea. Well, I do have to rethink him. When I'm writing up the paper I think I may just leave him out and use one of the other 100+ examples where Oswald turns the subject of a simile, in the Iliad, into the object in Memorial, or vice versa; and discuss as well, of course, why this matters. (Because that's what she's doing in the entire poem: the objects become subjects, over and over, and that's the whole point.)

Spent an hour this evening cutting and pasting the paper into Scrivener. But I do need to go through my notes and consider what else needs to go into the final paper. That's this week's task. Well, after I do a few administrative things I was supposed to do last week, but I was writing this paper ...

Monday, 28 January 2013

stymied at the last, augh! (ETA: unstymied!)

Diomedes and Glaucus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have nailed down all of the Homeric references for every single thing in all of Oswald's "Memorial", except one. I cannot find one. It has rocks, water, a dam and a marsh. None of these terms in any form I can think of searching for are showing up in the appropriate combination. I think I will just leave it for now.

However, I am very pleased that I think I have figured out what the last dozen pages of "Memorial" are doing. Each page has a single simile, drawn from somewhere in the Iliad. Each one begins with "like". We are done with the death scenes now – all of them are over, ending with the death of Hector – so we only have this string of similes. Each of them is a simile involving an aggregate – a flock of wild waterfowl, or of bees, or of wasps, or of flies, or of sparks. But the first of the 12 is the famous simile of the leaves:

Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves

- but what is like leaves? Well, of course it's the race of men, from the famous simile when Glaucus is talking to Diomedes, desperately – and successfully – trying to save his own life; so when you read all the rest of the similes, all of which begin with "like", they are all also about the race of men, in the aggregate. Oswald has through the rest of the poem gone one man after another, name by name by name; but now, at the end, she talks about how in the aggregate all men die, In a series of similes, each one of them drawn from a passage in which the fighters at Troy are described as a group.

(I still can't find the one about water, a dam, and a marsh though. I think I'll just ask the audience if anyone happens to know it...) - finally it occurred to me to ask a papyrologist, since papyrologists know everything. It's from the fight over the body of Patroclus: the 2 Aiantes holding off the flood of Trojans. So that is all the similes sorted.

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Sarpedon

Sarpedon’s body carried by Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death), while Hermes watches. Side A of the so-called “Euphronios krater”, Attic red-figured calyx-krater signed by Euxitheos (potter) and Euphronios (painter), ca. 515 BC. H. 45.7 cm (18 in.); D. 55.1 cm (21 11/16 in.). Formerly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (L.2006.10); Returned to Italy and exhibited in Rome as of January, 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Detail from image:Death Sarpedon MNA Policoro.jpg, q.v. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sarpedon gets 15 lines in Oswald. No mention of who might have killed him or why. Of course he gets lots more attention than that in Homer. Oswald's treatment of his death draws in all the major mentions of Sarpedon throughout the Iliad; the wheat fields and apple groves from his heroic code speech to Glaucus, just before they go into the battle which will result in his death. Sleep and Death take him back to Lykia as happens after the death scene in the Iliad. He's called "the son of Zeus" because it matters here, because Zeus is the one who mourns.

I'm not sure why Oswald calls Troy "ungreen ungrowing ground" when it's described as "fertile" (ἐριβώλακι, 16.461) in this passage in Homer. Perhaps there is an alternate reading and I should find out what it is. The description of the wind shaking him out like a linen cloth and giving him his breath back - but not quite, not quite even though he's the son of Zeus and frankly, it was touch and go whether Zeus was going to save him after all - is nice. I tried to find an association between linen and Sarpedon but didn't find one. Still a nice image.

The following simile comes originally from book 11, where Hector has his aristeia, and is described as falling on the Greeks as a hurricane falls on the "violet-flower" sea, dashing the clouds, roiling the waters, spraying foam up high. Here the simile follows on in the discussion of wind; is Sarpedon's breath, or his body, the blue flower of the sea? Bruised between two winds, broken apart, its structure broken the way Sarpedon's organization is now broken? And the battle over his body is the battle between the winds and the waves and foam and destruction caused by the hurricane; so the simile recuperates the battle, and I rather like that.

Also, usually the object becomes subject in Oswald, but here the subject has become object; the sea = Sarpedon is our focus, battered between the opposing forces of the wind, rather than Hector as the battering storm.

Wednesday, 3 October 2012

Pyraikhmes and Paeonian bison (?)

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prolonged absence during which I discovered I have arthritis in one hip and moped about it. However, I have bought an expensive chair that makes my hip hurt less, so, back to work.

So: death of Pyraikhmes. (I've worked through a few others since I last posted, but today was Pyraikhmes.) He's important, in the Iliad, because his is the first death after the Greeks are actually chased back to the ships - apparently with very little loss of life, since about a dozen Trojans die for every Greek. Antilochus gets another Trojan, just before the Greeks retreat with the Trojans in headlong pursuit. The Trojans actually manage to set fire to a ship. And at this point, Patroclus persuades Achilles to let him suit up in Achilles' armour and chase off the Trojans. Achilles sacrifices (in vain) to Zeus for Patroclus' safety. Pyraikhmes is the first of the many Trojans Patroclus kills in his subsequent aristeia, culminating, of course, in his own death.

None of this context matters to Oswald; we don't know which side Pyraikhmes is on or that his death is made significant, in Homer, by the fact that Patroclus is the one who kills him. Here's Homer:

"(Patroklos) hit Pyraikhmes who had led his Paeonian horsemen from the Amydon and the broad waters of the river Axios; the spear struck him on the right shoulder, and with a groan he fell backwards in the dust; on this his men were thrown into confusion, for by killing their leader, who was the finest warrior among them, Patroklos struck panic into them all." (Perseus translation.)

Now here's Oswald:

The River Axius has the silverest sweetest water
It flows through Paeonia
Where there are bison in the hills
And men make curved bows from their horns
To get there you have to go miles over mountains
Some of his men might make it
But not Puraichmes

Some of this she got from the Catalog, where Pyraikhmes and the Paionians are again described, with the addition of the 'crooked bows" (ἀγκυλότοξος) they use and the beauty of the water in the Axios river. I was distracted however by the bison. Homer does not, as far as I can find, mention any bison or mountains anywhere. However, an increasingly obsessed search eventually brought me to Aristotle's History of Animals, which tells me

Aristotle, History of Animals,630a20

Ὁ δὲ βόνασοϛ γίνεται μὲν ἐν τῇ Παοιονία ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ Μεσσαπίῳ, δ'ὁρίζει τὴν Παοιονικὴν και τὴν Μαιδικὴν χώραν, καλοῦι δ'αὐτὸν οἱ Παίονεσ μόναπον.". "The 'βόνασος' (bison) lives in Paionia on Mt. Messapion, which borders the lands of Paionia and Media, and the Paionians call it a "monapos".

So as far as I can tell, Oswald takes the 'crooked bows" from the Catalog, adds them to the bison mentioned in Aristotle, and throws in the mountain as well, in a casual display of naked erudition. Pyraikhmes' men get a mention (actually not many of them are going to make it).

A puzzling thing: she then uses the most famous simile in the Iliad, the one where Achilles is chasing Hector around the walls of Troy:

Like a man running in a dream
Can never approach a man escaping
Who can never escape a man approaching (Oswald p. 58)

But here, it's about how Puraichmes is never going to make it home. But why use it here? It leaves Puraichmes, and all the other warriors, and us, trapped in the limbo of constant combat, in which no one, including Puraichmes, will ever make it home. Perhaps that's the point. And also, of course, to increase the significance and magnitude of Puraichmes' death by attaching such a famous simile to it.

In breaking things down into such small bits I am missing such overarching patterns as Oswald's poem has. But I'll continue doing this for now; I don't have that much farther to go with it; and then go back, and see if I notice larger patterns.

Related articles

Poets and Profs ~ Homer as Slam Poetry

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Myth on the Map

Fresco on canvas mounted on board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent my productive time today looking over Myth on the Map. I see that two months ago I was wildly optimistic about getting onto a new author: Homer, perhaps, or Pausanias, this summer. But it is now the end of the summer, and I have spent all the grant money, and we still aren't finished Apollodorus. I don't believe we will ever finish Apollodorus, so there's no point even beginning to wonder what author we should do next. This depresses me.

On the other hand mapping Apollodorus is not such a bad project. I am unlikely to get any more money from the university for this project, but at least Apollodorus on the Map will be a useful website.

Saturday, 25 August 2012

three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map. Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding. I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins. Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point). She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar."

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive. In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard. In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk. Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths. Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death. Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out. "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance. First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos. They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter. Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries. I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

Monday, 11 June 2012

Myth on the Map

English: Map of Homeric Greece with English labels Česky: Mapa homérského Řecka s anglickými popisky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Organizational day for the website project, "Myth on the Map". I have enough money to get a functioning website up with 2 works mapped, Apollodorus and the Catalog of Ships. Question: should I then map the rest of the Iliad, or map a test book of Pausanias? If so, which book? Not sure yet. Would link to the project but it doesn't appear to be working yet. The plan is, at any rate, to finish Apollodorus and the Catalog by the end of the summer, and have a map which, when one searches for stuff, finds it and displays it.

Tweaked the outline for the "sacrificial virgins" conference paper, and resolved another Oswald simile: a list of five (dead) Greeks, followed by the simile of the eagle attacking the geese by the river. In Homer, it's about Hector, who's the eagle. In Oswald, the geese are named but the eagle is not; the attacker is impersonal; the war.

THE WAR! RAHR! (Source)

(Okay, so I am foolishly reminded of Loki, leaping from the upper level upon Thor. "There is only - THE WAR! RAHR!" The only truly awful line in the Avengers...)

Wednesday, 6 June 2012

a death scene today: Ilioneus

Ilioneus Statue (1850s copy after ancient greec original) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For a look at her translation practice here's Oswald 52-53, on the death of Ilioneus:

Ilioneus an only child ran out of luck

He always wore that well-off look

His parents had a sheep farm

They didn't think he would die

But a spear stuck through his eye

He sat down backwards

Trying to snatch back the light

With stretched out hands

I've bolded the parts that appear in the Greek. Here's the Greek, with a literal translation - the bolded parts, in Greek, are translated by Oswald:

ὃ δ’ οὔτασεν Ἰλιονῆα

υἱὸν Φόρβαντος πολυμήλου, τόν ῥα μάλιστα

Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε·

τῷ δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπὸ μήτηρ μοῦνον τέκεν Ἰλιονῆα.

τὸν τόθ’ ὑπ’ ὀφρύος οὖτα κατ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο θέμεθλα,

ἐκ δ’ ὦσε γλήνην· δόρυ δ’ ὀφθαλμοῖο διὰ πρὸ

καὶ διὰ ἰνίου ἦλθεν, ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας

ἄμφω·

"And he (Peneleos, a Greek) wounded Ilioneus, the son of Phorbas of the plentiful flocks, whom especially among the Trojans Hermes loved and granted possessions; to him his mother bore the single (child) Ilioneus. Him then he wounded under the eyebrow down through the base of the eye, and drove out his eyeball; and the spear went first through the eye and through the nape of the neck, and he sat down, stretching out both his hands."

Cool things:

switching object to subject (Ilioneus is the object of the Greek, in the accusative until the last phrase, but is the subject in Oswald).
switching personal to impersonal: in the Iliad the important thing is who killed him (Peneleos); in Oswald that's elided, and the spear killed him by itself. A move Oswald frequently makes, because "who killed him" is not important to Memorial as it is to the Iliad.
"μοῦνον" = "an only child".
"μάλιστα Ἑρμείας Τρώων ἐφίλει καὶ κτῆσιν ὄπασσε" (Hermes loved him and gave him stuff, the most of all the Trojans) = "he always wore that well-off look", but also.
"ran out of luck" - also a reference to Hermes, because a ἑρμαῖον is a "lucky find", a "thing sent by Hermes". So Hermes loved his father, but eventually, he, or his father, ran out of Hermes.
ὃ δ’ ἕζετο χεῖρε πετάσσας ἄμφω gets amplified with "trying to snatch back the light", which then leads to the simile, which actually is fascinating, but this is enough for today.

Monday, 4 June 2012

Archelochus and the changing will of Zeus

English: Picture 47 of the Ambrosian Iliad, Achilles sacrificing to Zeus. Français : Image 47 de lIliade ambrosienne, Achille dédiant un sacrifice à Zeus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Homer, the gods decide to kill Archelochus, so a spear flung at someone else hits him. In Memorial, the spear decides of its own free will to miss the other guy and hit Archelochus.

But then Oswald continues (p. 52),

Like the changing mind
That moves a cloud off a mountain
And makes rocks and cliffs appear
Pushing the landscape's sharp edges up
Through more and more air

This simile comes from Bk 16, where Patroclus has just suited up in Achilles' armour and is leading the Greeks to fight back the Trojans, who have just set fire to Protesilaus' ship. The Greeks take heart and beat back the Trojans and put out the flames, the way (says the Iliad) Zeus lightning-gatherer moves a cloud etc etc., but (says the Iliad) not forever; this gives them a breather, but the war doesn't stop. ("Changing mind" I take as a translation of στεροπηγερέτα Ζεύς, since nothing changes more quickly than lightning.)

So in the Iliad, Greeks pushing back the Trojans and putting out the flames = Zeus (temporarily) moving a cloud off a mountain. In Oswald, a spear decides to kill one man rather than another, the way a "changing mind" moves a cloud off a mountain and reveals the (sharp, clear) landscape. Oswald highlights the changeability of the spear and of the mind; one man could have been killed just as easily as another. And where the Iliad's simile focuses on those who are benefitting by the divine choice (of the moment) - the Greeks are forcing the Trojans back and putting out the flames - Oswald's simile, as always, focusses on the one that did not benefit; Archelochus, who died because of the will of the gods, rather than Poulydamas who lived.

A further point of context: Zeus' favour is not going to rest with Patroclos forever, either; this simile, in the Iliad, also foreshadows his eventual death. Its use here in Oswald grants the all but unknown Trojan Archelochus' death the importance of Patroclus's eventual death. Finally: I have yet to find anywhere in Oswald that the gods get a mention. But should re-check that.

I need to start collecting these points, and decide what matters most, and what article to write. I'd like to just write an article on the similes, and how they work in Oswald. I would need to talk about how they work in Homer, for comparison.

Thursday, 31 May 2012

Antilochus, the Iliad's Mary Sue

Antilochus. Side A from an Attic red-figure neck-amphora, ca. 470 BC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists seven deaths that, in Homer, are given in 120 lines of hard fighting: Oinomaos, Askalaphos, Aphareus, Thoon, Antilochus, Deipuros, and Peisander. Except one of these things is not like the others: Antilochus doesn't actually die here. This is the second time she's killed Antilochus, quietly embedding him in a list of dead warriors, when in fact Antilochus killed someone else in this passage (who isn't listed among the dead). And here she's done it again: Adamas, son of Asios (who has just died), attacks Antilochus, but Poseidon likes Antilochus and saves him. Adamas ducks in behind his friends but Meriones follows him and kills him particularly painfully (spear in the gut, midway between the navel and the privates, and he writhes around painfully until Meriones pulls out the spear and he dies). Oswald skips all this and lists Antilochus among the dead.

The first time Oswald did this I thought it was a mistake, but this isn't a mistake. Why does she keep killing off Antilochus? He doesn't even die in the Iliad. (He's killed later, by Memnon, or possibly by Paris at the same time as Achilles, or according to Hyginus Hector kills him, which would be a surprise to Homer, because Antilochus is still alive in the next book of the Iliad to put in a mediocre performance in the funeral games for Patroclus). And everyone likes him, and he's Achilles' good buddy, and everyone likes his dad, and he's always up to fight some Trojans, bouncy and courageous and gay, he is, in fact, the Mary Sue of the Iliad, the one that has puzzlingly been made way, way too likeable, as if Homer (or the entirety of the oral tradition really really liked him and thought the rest of us should too for no obvious reason.

But she keeps killing him off. As if we should get in our mourning for Antilochus now, because he keeps being mentioned, but he doesn't get a proper death scene in the Iliad, but the fact is he is going to die before he makes it home, so let's mourn him in advance, as the only Greek warrior that everybody really likes, and she wants to remind us that he doesn't make it either?

Or, I don't know. I wonder if Antilochus' inclusion in Memorial might be my way into writing about the poem. It's odd in so many ways. I could talk about the ways.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Asius the chickpea

I have forty deaths and a dozen similes after that to work through; at the rate of one a day, I'm - not going to be done by the end of May. But what Oswald does is always interesting. With Asius for example, she combines the four places he's mentioned in the Iliad, briefly in the Catalog and at some length in book 12 and 13, into 11 stripped-down lines that tell us everything we need. Asius had great horses; they brought him all the way from Arisbe; but he couldn't leave them behind when he should have, and that's what killed him.

But it's the simile, once again, that really nails it. It's the simile about beans and chickpeas getting blown away in all directions by the impact and the wind of the winnowing-shovel, and Homer uses it to describe how an arrow bounces off Menelaus' breastplate. What's it doing here, though? Once again, subject and object interchange. In Homer, chickpea = object = arrow, driven by the winnower/Helenos, and bouncing off Menelaus (the subject's) breastplate. Here, the chickpea = object = Asius, driven by his horses/the winds of fate/ his own foolish error, and bouncing off - well, in some direction, but not under his own control, and to his death.