The Poetry After Chaos
From Homer’s wanderer to Ted Lasso, the strange work of finding a way forward
There is an archetype that lives on one side of my family tree as real as the weather. We might even call it a caricature, almost funny if it wasn’t so real, of exaggerated masculinity. I sense around me a growing weariness of this archetype and its obscene distortions. We are fed up with these shock jocks who have twisted Christianity into something barbaric. The election of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope reminded us what virtues had been perverted. By image and presence alone, the Pope is proof that a real perversion spread through the culture for too long.
Finding a possible way forward, the Democratic Party has fixed on James Talarico. While in the first Trump presidency, Resistance often acted through visible difference, this time, the party appears to be trying something else. Gavin Newsom tried to become Trump’s mirror image, meeting fire with fire and insult with insult. But the Democrats seem to have chosen not the opposite face of the same coin, but something more interesting: a familiar form inhabited by different values.
What that something else is Ezra Klein talks about in his podcast (or if you prefer, article) dated August 2nd. (Gift link.) He talks about The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2026) and “Nolan’s trick.” That trick, he says, its own Trojan Horse, but the trick is not merely to show that gentleness can inhabit a muscular body. The deeper question is what the disruption was for in the first place.
Maybe Nolan’s “trick,” as Klein calls it, is to show us all the things that Trumpism loves, like war and violence and muscle, only to give us poetry and meditation, compassion, wisdom, a love of beauty, and life skills to do the right thing. Things in short that Trumpism derides as cliché, that it associates with weakness.
Klein cites Lewis Hyde (Trickster Makes This World) in forming a kind of thesis about the trickster as vital to a society because we need disruption. Trump performs the first half of the trickster’s function—breaking boundaries, mocking authority, exposing weakness—but abandons the creative obligation that makes disruption meaningful.
Klein writes:
I’ll always remember 2016 as the year of the split screen when every narrative on the public stage became irreconcilable with its parallel: debates, town halls, Senate Judiciary hearings, and eventually the COVID-19 pandemic became tales of two uncompromising realities, one asking people to trust experts and be safe, the other calling for rebellion and recklessness. I think of the Attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as the day the dam finally broke. America broke. The trickster got elected in 2016, but the fortress largely held. Maybe he was kept happy enough not to start breaking his toys yet. But then he lost the next round—the election in 2020. What succeeded denial was an absolute temper tantrum and then calling for blood and even throwing his own vice-president to the wolves.
What followed next—retreat, and a new presidency that promised to build back better, but tragically underestimated the enemy. It allowed the trickster to reform when no one was paying attention. Napoleon came back from exile.
Civilization brings order and security, but the trickster brings entertainment and chaos when ennui becomes unbearable. Perhaps we had become too comfortable: working remotely, ordering food to our doors, watching new releases from the couch, arguing on social media without ever having to face our opponents. Some people answer that restlessness by going on cruises. I see Facebook friends taking them every year. It may be fun for a short while, but indulgence isn’t meant to be a routine or habitual. Something fun becomes a vice.
ABC even built a drama around it—Doctor Odyssey, in which Joshua Jackson plays a physician aboard a luxury cruise ship. Every playground needs a medical team because when people have been relieved of occupation, they begin inventing new ways to hurt themselves.
Homer’s characters crossed the sea because they had somewhere to go, or because fate had driven them from where they belonged. The modern cruise passenger goes nowhere in particular. The voyage itself has become the destination: transportation emptied of necessity and experienced in a haze. And yet struggle returns. Deprived of real hardship, people create foolish risks and then find themselves battling once again for survival.
Nolan has revived the older voyage—the sea not as an amusement park, but as distance, danger, homesickness, temptation, and the long ordeal of returning.
How does a civilization remember these older, hard-won truths when the culture has become overwhelmingly noisy?
There is a man who lives in Grenoble who never sought and never achieved fame. He founded a publishing house, eponymously, not to see his name in print but to give what he prints a passage out of obscurity. The Éditions Jérôme Millon has published somewhere around 400-500 texts. Ancient, medieval, real lives, mythologies, Christianity, Mysticism, witchcraft, sorcery, Catholic scholarship, Jansenism. These are the texts that come from the publisher who toils from passion alone, assembling collections that attract only philomaths. People who want knowledge for its own sake, who are driven by curiosity without compensation. That kind of scholarship might seem as purposeless as a cruise, but in a time when society has burned too much (and keeps burning) it may be, like Nolan’s Trick, the only way out. This little publishing house caught my eye with a new compilation called, in translation, Second Odyssey: From Ulysses of Tennyson to Borges. It is a compilation of poets, prose, and essays—Tennyson and Borges, Homer and Dante are all translated into French by Evanghélia Stead. But you don’t need to know French to dive into these treasures. Of course, we don’t even have to reach back quite so far into antiquity to find the same story in different guises. The epic themes flow through the works of Tolkien.
We find the universal journey and return in Ted Lasso as well. In the cryptic first episode of the fourth season, we find the hero (Jason Sudeikis) returned to a settled life in Kansas City. Ted tells himself he is happy to be at home, to be a dad; he moves and speaks as though it’s enough to be on the sidelines of the game. And maybe it is—sometimes. Maybe there is fleeting satisfaction in moments of translating game tactics into life skills for the people he works with, for his son, and maybe even his mother. Ted is better at that than anyone I’ve ever met, real or unreal, but the brilliance of the show is its reveal that even heroic figures feels the emptiness of staying home when new adventures beckon. When I saw Ted working in a grocery store, I thought, huh. It’s just a different field for helping strangers who become friends. But no. I mean, yes, Ted is always Ted. He has a gift for mentoring people without condescending methods. The problem is not a lack of opportunities to exercise his talents. The problem is that he’s choosing to stay in a level he mastered long ago. His talents are needed for bigger challenges.
Home is not always the end of the voyage. The character Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) reminds Ted near the end of the episode, “Home is a state of mind.” Sometimes the journey teaches us capacities that cannot be put away or subdued.
We’re used to thinking of home as a fixed place, something boredom wants to escape that becomes a longed-for point of destination and rest for the traveler. But maybe home is something transient, something that shifts according to what we need, or what needs us. Maybe home comes with us wherever we go.
The episode gives Higgins (Jeremy Swift) a smaller journey of his own, one whose destination changes before he reaches it. The jazz aficionado sets out excitedly for the American Jazz Museum, only to find it closed for a private event. Redirected to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, he is given the chance to learn about something he knows nothing about. The writing in this scene is hilarious, but it also produces the invaluable message that encapsulates the meaning of the episode. The tour guide, portrayed by actor Milan Carter, delivers the thesis in the form of a quote from baseball legend Satchel Paige:
Ain’t no man can avoid being born average—
but there ain’t no man that got to be common.
Like Ted, Satchel was good at what he did. Very good. Exceptional. He wasn’t the man to break the Major Leagues color barrier, but he was one of the team who made that feat possible. He kept playing. Even at 42, long after baseball players typically retire. The tour guide said: “They didn’t do it for fame or fortune. They did it because to not play would have been unacceptable.”
Perhaps this is what must follow the trickster. Not a return to innocence, and not an endless appetite for chaos, but the recovery of attention. A publisher preserving forgotten texts in Grenoble. A ballplayer continuing long after people expect him to retire because there’s still a game to play and not playing is unacceptable.
The game must go on. It will remember those who played.