How does one connect Homer’s Odyssey with StoryPathing?  Remarkably, Homer introduces his in a state of abject defeat, after four preceding chapters in which Odysseus was physically absent, but much talked about.  The machinery of the plot starts to turn here, in chapter 5, as Odysseus’ situation is about to change. Later, prompted by an audience, he delivers a personal narrative summarizing his adventures up to that point; in other words, his past.  This narrative in turn sets the stage for the second half of the story, Odysseus’ arrival home; that is, his immediate future.

Odysseus appears to be at a ‘dead end’ when we meet him, but really it’s an axis, an alignment between the past and a future he has the potential to claim. This connection wasn’t clear to me until I ran across the following quote from Charles S. Pierce in Logic of Events, published in 1898:

“We start, then, with nothing, pure zero.  But this is not the nothing of negation . . . It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed.  As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility—boundless possibility.”

StoryPathing is all about possibility.  In Odysseus’ case, as in our own, it is possibility that is about to unfold in the telling of the story.