Welcome to EpiBound

“I want to write the American epic.”

So began Epimetheus in his application to graduate school in 1977. He knew it was an absurd ambition, and tried to close with humor. He also knew he had to risk absurdity: A public declaration might be the only way to commit himself to the goal.

Someone had to attempt it: an attempt mandated by the Flights of Apollo and by our own Trojan War.

Epi (whose full name means Afterthought) began his first draft in 1986. In June, he fancied he was finished. In coming years, having endured countless defeats, he learned to laugh at the notion, sustained in part by hints from failed epigones. The epic is a rack that tortures overreachers. His first draft was but foundation to frame his evolving education; to stitch in parallels from works other builders can’t find time to read; to include weavings of routine busyness that give rise to timeless yarns and thrills.

Falcon Will Give Birth to the Rover is a work of imaginative nonfiction, an historical ’biography driven by headlines, a collection that began with the murder of JFK. Epi, a Nobody taking notes, swirls with the times: Wishywashy Epimetheus Kohoutek, who lived in his car because he wished to be a singer.

The car is a ’68 Ford Falcon, payments begun on return from the Winless War. Apollo 8 sounded the call, the Delphian summons affirmed by Snoopy in Apollo 10, and again two years later by a prophet who oracled the joy of Apollo 15: “A little later, Falcon will give birth to the Rover.”

Falcon is the Quest for the Higher Self, brought to surface dreams by the Flights of Apollo: “If they can get to the Moon, why can’t I fly to my own Moon?” It is the Quest for Homecoming—“re‑creation,” Zeus calls it—first awakened by physical return from Winless, when Epi knew he must read the Odyssey. Where else can he find clues for true return? Not least the mystery of the Ithacan’s ten-year struggle to find home shores: It can’t take that long, can it?

A little later. In the light of eternity.

A second guide is Dante’s Comedy, Epi’s quest a journey through our Earthly Paradise, though his mind often makes it a Hell (structured here in books of 33, 33, and 34 canticles). He is sustained too by a reading of the Aeneid, especially, as he recalls her words, by the Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas:

“Easy is the going down to Avernus; but winning your way back to the upper air, that is the labor, that the task.”