Issue #1 Winter 2002
The Poet, After Greece
by Christopher Bakken
Thessaloniki, 1992
For an hour the Alps crumbled into snowless, overgrown hills. Then stones, whole seas of stones: my first glimpse of the country. From above, from the mountain's perspective, even where the stones were not, the land was forbidding, burnt-yellow, occasionally etched with green where some agriculture asserted itself miraculously against the desolation. My flight from Zurich was late. Not extremely late, but late enough that most of my questions would have to wait until the rest of Greece woke up from its afternoon nap.
The road to Anatolia College rose steadily through this background, through a brief vineyard and haphazard groves of fig trees, turning south a few times as the car climbed to offer a view of a mountain in the distance and the wide bay separating us from it. It was clearly more of a mountain than I had supposed from the air: commanding the territory around it, yes, but certainly no Mont Blanc. The driver told me (in perfect English) that the
clouds—evidently
both smog and cumulonimbus—had only cleared away yesterday, with the arrival of the harvest wind, the sirocco. So Olympus was actually visible from the college itself. The idea was unsettling: at least until the clouds returned and my jet lag subsided, an old sky god and his coterie would be threatening me with lightning bolts.
The poetic problem of Greece, then, was present in this daily embodiment. How could I avoid remembering for the landscape its Edith Hamilton myths and (what was called in the 6th grade) "the history of Western civilization"? Words and place-names suggested too much here: Sparta, Thebes, Athens, Corinth. The Muses, those daughters of Mnemosyne, had to be resisted; memory in this landscape was almost too accessible, lying open to the elements everywhere in various states of ruin. Joseph Brodsky tells us that "There are places where history is inescapable, like a highway accident-places where geography provokes history." This was one of those places. How could I approach the present without drawing too much from the accidents of the ancient past?
More recent histories were equally available, only half-forgotten on the hills surrounding the college. Nazis bunkered on the actual site of the campus during the occupation of Thessaloniki; the land is honeycombed with concrete-reinforced tunnels and haunted by bomb shelters, many of them still accessible. A half-burned house crumbles aggressively at the bottom of one slope, surrounded by cypresses and thorny shrubs; its chimney remains erect while the rest of the structure succumbs to vines and sunlight. Carved in ornate calligraphy, smatterings of German are still visible, blackened by some conflagration, on beams running lengthwise along the eaves.
While Greece was sleeping during the hot afternoons, I walked the hills and dug through the rubble, occasionally rescuing an inkwell or a shard of decorative tile from oblivion. But mostly I just wandered. The hills were loaded, I was certain, with archaic garbage, though I never found anything more than the tossed-off tires and household trash of modern Greece. But I met the inhabitants of that sparse forest. First I'd hear the bells, then they'd be
there—goats—eyeing me
with their profound, blank expressions. The goatherd would never be far behind, squatting at the top of the hill, resting in the shade, looking absurdly noble and hauntingly familiar. He never made any gesture to acknowledge my presence, a fact I attributed to some sacred code of goat-men, or just Mediterranean haughtiness. He would just go on gnawing at his chunk of bread, or fingering the string of glass beads that appeared inextricable from his fingers.
Every day in that landscape, it was impossible not to be dragged by the dizzying suggestions of light and birdsong and heat into the recesses of another world, an older world, which became daily more holy to me, however much I resisted my impulse to over-Hellenize Hellas, to give too much literary or spiritual significance to the quotidian facts of the countryside. But I was constantly struck by the living presence of the ancient in its latest
manifestation—the
modern Greek. In every perfectly orthodox face I saw the pagan past; in every superstition (I already wore an amulet to protect me from the evil eye) were remnants of ancient belief. Before long, every goat recalled for me the bacchic friskiness of the Dionysus cult which had once flavored the region. The goatherd was a potential god in disguise. And in that magpie wavering at the top of a cypress, a sign of impending deliverance, or doom.
Spurred on by these weird hillside theophanies, I had to wrestle daily with a sort of mythopoetic pantheism, of a touristic variety, which I kept projecting on to the land, which was so hard to slough off. I felt in the geography of Greece a palpable spiritual reality, layer after layer of it heaped for the archaeologist and the poet in me to discover. But the old myths got in the way. To humanize it all, to view it all through the lens of mythology, seemed artificial at best, sacrilegious at worst. That would imply too much understanding of what felt utterly mysterious. "A god who is understood is no god," as the theologian Tersteegen once put it.
Mythology is easy. We have pursued those old stories so long, the sacred ways of the ancients now look like interstate autobahns. They are hard to release from memory, the myths, since they fit the incomprehensible into narrative form; they give us allegory and metaphor, ready-made poetry, with a whiff of ancient religion and ritual intact. But when they are removed from their original context, the violent and terrible reality of the ancient world, these stories lose something; it is too easy to make them emblematic of our most feeble psychodramas. What must one do in order to write successful poems about a place like Greece? The most obvious answer: the poet must overcome a tendency to adopt the easy conventions of mythological poetry, the inclination to hold Ovid by one hand and Dr. Freud by the other.
II. Some Muses
My own poetic tradition offered only a little assistance, though an Englishman before me had at least found that asking the right questions was itself a way to approach such mystery:
Where is power?
Whose hand, whose essence, what divinity
Makes this alarum in the elements,
While I here idle listen on the shores
In fearless yet aching ignorance?
Keats sought essence itself, of course, but he continued to name it what it had been named ad nauseam: Muse, Apollo, Delphic Oracle. Reading Keats in Greece was valuable for me, but I felt that so many of his answers, notwithstanding their immense beauty, were attempts to guess at the meaning of a place he imagined through mythology. Keats's submission to the conventions of Attic light was forgivable (and he managed to turn away from those reiterations in the Odes), but such submission would bring me no closer to the bone-breaking reality of Mt. Olympus and the divinity of those ugly goats.
There were other poets of my tradition who were not content merely to create Greece out of their imaginations. As Samuel Johnson once pronounced, "The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean." He meant Italy, of course, since Greece was for so long just an inhospitable elbow of the Ottoman Empire, visited only rarely by those with health, ambition and money enough for the adventure. Unlike Keats, who came to the Mediterranean to die, Lord Byron came, first at twenty-one, to live large. He boasts in 1807, "I shall travel not over France and Italy, the common Turnpike of coxcombs & virtuosos, but into Greece and Turkey." As if the poems were not enough, the adventure paid him back with fame; it is now almost impossible to find a town in Greece without a street named for Byron. What country wouldn't adopt a foreigner who claimed, "If I am a poet, the air of Greece has made me one"? As much as I agree with that statement, does our world or our poetry have a place for Byronic figures, even if our nostalgia for them persists? Thus, I felt some embarrassment (along with tremendous bravado), when I was featured a few years ago in the variety column of an Athenian newspaper; above my photo the headline read: AN AMERICAN BYRON. It's true, Byron made way for poets like me, but he left the road behind him paved with well-worn cobblestones, with the Romantic idea of Greece now propagated by tourist agencies.
Not only couldn't I write Byron's kind of poetry, it would fail to capture my own encounters with Greece; it would fail to provide a counterpoint to my more immediate situation as an outsider, as a traveler, representative of a toddler empire. Many Americans do not recognize any reality separate from America itself. This kind of insulated apathy, evident to me when I lived in the U.S., became even more obvious when I moved abroad. I was reminded of it every time I picked up a newspaper, every time I thought of Sarajevo, a few hours to the north. My country was entirely unprepared to enter a scuffle between Balkan grandfathers forever waiting to bleed old resentments of one another. American foreign policy is born out of a genuine friendliness and a megalomaniacal generosity toward the rest of the world, which America constantly confuses with itself. And my country takes no advice from poets. The Balkans are another story altogether. There, politics have as much to do with the presence of gods and poetry as with nationalism and territory. The Balkans are a truly Homeric reality. But the genocides of this decade are, unfortunately, not myths.
I observed how the modern Greeks in my new city retained in their rituals of daily life, in their language, but most of all in their religion and in their wars, a very ancient world-view. They constantly invoked Ancient Greece to make a point ("After all," they'd begin so many sentences, "Democracy was invented here"). Of course, the historical ancestor-cult is not the property of the Greeks alone, it is a pan-Balkan phenomenon. Ancient names and words retain their original power there.
Facing the reality of this religiously political Greece, how could I subscribe to the common notion, put forth by modern skeptics, that the ancient Greeks thought of their gods as mere metaphors? How could I accept proposals that the gods are simply innovations of the psyche to withstand the pressures of reality? Even Jung's archetypes relegate the divine to the unconscious, to a collective mind. But when the gods become symbols, when they are no longer external realities but identifiable forces within us, then they become explicable, accessible, and are no longer gods. They then become the fodder for propaganda, political or psychological.
Fortunately, what the psychologist, the biologist, the anthropologist and the historian forget, the theologian and the poet might remember. Some things can only be approached through a vision of something larger than us: this is not a psychological fact but a rule of the sacred. Poets need a tremendum, a realm accessible only to the mind, but no less real because of that fact. And poets also need some force to push them towards that other world. Navigating the space between the reality of reality and the reality of the otherworldly is the poet's first duty. Naming that region, describing with equal pleasure the shabby and the sublime, becomes the poet's supreme occupation.
For this reason, exile-even if it is self-imposed or artificial-so often engenders poetry. Faced with new, unnamed things and an aching nostalgia for familiar names, poets are forced to re-identify not only themselves, but also the two places of their division. I was not exiled in Greece any more than I was vacationing there, at least to begin with. But my desire to remain away, to extend my teaching contracts and to bunker down, involved a need to separate myself from my country, its imperialism and its weary consumerism, yes, but also its language, my language. According to Mircea Eliade, the condition of exile need not be political; often it can simply involve "seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts." Camping in archeological sites and scaling Mycenean fortresses, I was in an elsewhere, far from home but not so far from the past. Then there was the other necessity of living in the present and understanding it.
So I asked my poems to do what I could not sustain: to exist in the ancient and the modern present at the same time, in two worlds separated by so many centuries. The pursuit of a poetry which occupies both spaces at one time gave me a kind of necessary distance from both worlds, encouraged me to struggle to see from both perspectives, and to sing of what endures. Living in a landscape that was not my original home, living in this kind of self-induced poetic exile, it was inevitable that I would attempt to locate myself according to a poetics that had always had to confront these bewildering collisions. The poets of Modern Greece were invaluable to my developing sense of a Greek timbre, even if that only meant reading in translation, or reading out loud poems in Greek that were nearly incomprehensible to me. The cadence of Greek, it is easy to argue, cannot be replicated in English, but it was possible, I found, to translate a certain tenor of sensibility over to my own language. Two poets, in particular, voiced possible solutions for me.
The first, Kavafy, was himself an exile, a man on the fringe of the Greek world, neither in it nor out of it, a man who spoke Greek with an Oxford accent, a man in that state of perpetual seeking, in that endless setting out for Ithaka embodied by his famous poem. The mystery of Kavafy's poetry is difficult to account for. He writes masterpieces of understatement that are often, nevertheless, sentimental and didactic. He writes personal poems that are historical dramatic monologues. There is very little classical mythology in Kavafy, though there is that grand mythology of the poet's own youth as well as an entire cast of his despairing post-Alexandrian figures. His vision is historical, but as Richard Howard once pointed out, Kavafy writes down "history as moments, not movements." As a result, the nostalgia which is palpable in Kavafy is almost always buried beneath self-dismissal and a particularly Greek kind of stoicism. His poetry was my model for giving distance and nostalgia a shape, which he does by isolating a single circumstance, a single voice, not in time but out of time, while maintaining an immediacy and casualness of tone (which comes across well in translation). This tone persists in Kavafy whether he is discussing forbidden sexual exploits or speaking across the centuries through an imaginary Byzantine nobleman. His is entirely a poetry of this world, of this body; there exists in Kavafy's "now" no boundary between the past and the present, though the distance between them is still registered in increments of defeat and human longing, of echo and recollection.
If Kavafy is something of a Greek anomaly, Yiorgos Seferis is the natural product of his cosmopolitan environment. He is both a creature of the modern world and of modern Greece. He was born in Smyrna (then lost that "Ithaka" after the Asia Minor disaster), spent the 1920's in Paris, and the rest of his life traveling throughout Europe and the Middle East as a Minister of Foreign Affairs. But his poems, those which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1963, are undoubtedly of the Greek archipelago, identified as they are by island names and populated by heroic figures, the most important of those being Odysseus. A migrant himself, he writes a literature of migration, of metaphysical drifting and physical suffering. "No matter where I travel," his most famous line goes, "Greece wounds me still", and his most famous traveler, in
Mythistorema, paddles the sea with broken oars. Seferis learned from T.S. Eliot to write a poetry of the world's decrepitude, but also a poetry absolved of that decrepitude by its ability to comprehend time's resolutions, the sense that (as he puts it in "Summer Solstice"): "Everything that has passed has fittingly passed./And even what has not yet passed/must burn/this noon when the sun is riveted/to the heart of the multipetalled rose."
Seferis turns to mythology, but never allows his nostalgia for what is missing to overshadow his love for what exists; he always preserves the mysteries at the core of experience, never rationalizes or explains them. But what keeps his poems from becoming hermetic is the fact that they inhabit visible landscapes, the living geography of his country, more than psychological vicissitudes. He works through fragments, isolated moments, to represent the distance between now and then; he gives us emblems of loss which are themselves remedies for that loss. It seems possible, reading this poetry of the material sublime, to believe that much more connects us to the past than separates us from it: through dry cisterns, temples, ruins, dust. It is what artists share across time, or out of time, that Seferis names for me: the need to be constantly setting out, to remain in motion, or, as I put it in one of my own poems, that "the cure/ for departure is more departure."
There is at least one American poet I must mention here, a hellenized barbarian whose tone resembles Byron's more than any other poet of this century, a man that I must count among my precursors. While his
tone—a
combination of the effete and the satirical—does not substantially inform my own timbre, something of the sensibility of James Merrill's "Greek poems," I would like to think, has been transmitted to my own. I would say my connection to James Merrill is not overtly stylistic. Our approaches to Greece, like our backgrounds, could not be more different: I came to Greece alone to teach at a small American college, to escape the kind of poverty only graduate students in New York understand; Merrill arrived connected and confident, sped by the magic carpets of his trust fund. His syntactical wizardry, the fanciness of his bejewelled vision blares in eighteen-carat gold next to my pared-down "plain style" (or should I say "Plains" style?). Yet we both strive for whatever mastery one might seek through technique, a concern for well-wrought urns and tidiness, a rather old-fashioned belief in Art, in it as a cause of culture and an effect of self-preservation. And though we paint with different brushes, the canvas we
share—this
Greece—brings out in both of us an alchemical fascination with the elements. I learned from Merrill that even an American could approach Greece without writing a travel diary. Like Merrill, I saw not only idealized ruins and monuments, but the sense that "All through the/ Countryside were old ideas/ Found lying open to the elements" [my italics]. Ideas and things are interchangeable in Merrill's Greek poems, as they are in mine. Though he is a poet best known for the "Broken Home" of his privileged childhood, upon encountering this landscape he usually turned from a mythology of the self and its artifacts to a world of ordinary objects and personae, as if the place could only be encoded with such things. In "After Greece," which might be an adequate title to my own book of poems, Merrill suggests that we must find a way to comprehend the where before we understand the who, locating ourselves so we might understand how locale alters the ingredients of identity. Lit by the afterglow of our highest life experiences, shadowed by nostalgia, with Merrill I raise this toast:
The first glass
I down to the last time
I ate and drank in that old world. May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.
III. Blanking the Slate
Allow me to sketch a few moments from my Greece. June: a whole day in the water at Portokali Beach, diving naked off a breast-shaped stone for the hollowed-out shells of sea urchins. Three nights alone, camped in a dried out river-bed on the Pelion Peninsula. In the old Roman marble quarry on the coast of Thassos, now the home to a million sea-crabs. An olive-wood fire, peaches and a tin of sardines, my motorcycle without a tire, Paleochora, Crete.
"Every man passes personally through a Grecian period," Emerson tells us in "History." Some years ago, staring from one leg of the Halkidiki peninsulas across the water to another (though it really could have been any one of these other conjured places), I copied his idea into my journal. It smelled suspiciously like truth then, as much a fact as the salt drying on my skin, or the bottle of piney retsina at my feet. And I believe Emerson remembers for me in this sentence what, in my more ecstatic moods, I can still brag I know through experience. It is more than youth, this "seed time," this phase in the poet's education. And I regret if it is a phase at all. Emerson explains:
The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the
senses,-of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head.
You do not need to go to Greece to believe this, though an hour in the museum at Delphi would convince you soon enough. You don't need Homeric heroes, nor even a head; as Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" proves, the body's gaze sees farthest: "We cannot know his legendary head/ with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso/ is still suffused with brilliance from inside,/ like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,// gleams in all its power."
Every poet needs a sensual education first. Yet, for a poet to enter his Greek phase in Greece, however appropriate and fortuitous that sounds, is as dangerous as it is lucky. The poet who enters the same phase in Wisconsin, say, attuning his spiritual barometer among the cornfields, in an unwritten landscape, in a place "artless, unstoried, unenhanced" as Frost would have it, might be inclined to take less for granted, might not have the tutelary divinities, nay, the very Muses, breathing down his young red neck. He would be writing the first poems of his landscape, in some sense, inventing a poetic vocabulary for it. This would not make him an Adam, but it would imply for him a kind of originality and a skill which I, for one, did not yet possess. The poems of Greece, by contrast, have already been written. The templates are everywhere, left to erode with the rest of the landscape like those famous Roman law codices etched in stone at Gortyns, crumbling in the Cretan wind.
The humanist tradition and the literary conventions that accompany it begin in Greece, a place we return to again and again throughout the centuries, via avenues Sidney, Byron, Keats, Merrill, et.al. As a result, the names of Greek places and heroes refract associations, scattering so much light. The things of Greece inhabit our poetry easily and frequently, even today. So much that when I pronounce Afrodite in a poem, my reader will not think, as I do, of Afrodite Kyriakides, who is not some civic deity, but the freckled girl I taught in the fifth-form who loved the poetry of T. S. Eliot and had difficulties with subject/verb agreement. Surely, a poet in my situation is blessed with the extra matter that emanates from every utterance, but how do I keep myself from drowning in so much connotation, from spilling on the page yet another honeyed cup of Romantic Hellenism? The notations of another traveler, especially one in our century, what will they add to the stockpile of our Mediterranean poems? And who would want to read them? The catalog of places and activities with which I began this section, are they not the common stuff of tourists and the typical matter of tourist books? Compose some dusty rocks, a suspiciously wine-dark waterscape, a god-sized outcropping on the distant hillside, and you put yourself in the all-too-familiar territory of the "Greek poem," of a tourist's photo album, complete with all the requisite snapshots.
Just as I do not want to repeat the easy mythology, to revamp old stories by filtering them through myself and the practical virtues of form, I do not want to write a travel book, a journal of events and sensations, of places visited and objects seen, as if in passing. Surely I do not want to complain about over-inspiration, or about the beloved landscape itself, since the Greece I comprehend comes to me through its objects, which I must render in their setting to be true to them. But I lived Greece and did not visit it. I did not dream that the place absorbed me, allowed me to become its citizen. I might even say Greece moved me beyond myself. My experience of it was more often than not otherworldly, though it always began with an experience of actual geography: the sea, the stones. The object of my quest for connection (indeed, then, a Holy
Land)—Greece
was the setting for a reunion of aspects of myself too long separated by grief, youth, confusion. With Emerson I declare this a book of the body, one that recounts the loss of a face's confused blur, the clarification of a gaze, an awakening in the loins and torso.
The consciousness of my poems is attracted to the emptiest places in the landscape (peninsulas of blank stone and watery expanses), places at once over-inhabited by the past and yet entirely open to further erosion, landscapes of white paper awaiting inscription. Here is the central paradox: nowhere can you step without trampling the dead, yet the openness of the landscape, its seeming lack of a "local habitation and a name," allows you to feel like one of the world's original inhabitants, perceiving paradigms for the first time. The emptiness becomes a kind of fullness of its own. Greece is a place where the patterns of life clearly discover their animation, so one worships where one breathes, or as often, where one cannot, underwater in those palaces of octopus and marl. This is not merely a literary reverence, something all pilgrims feel in the land of Homer; nor can it be explained away as a Kodak moment, a living out of the promises of brochures. No country has a monopoly on the sublime, but the sensation even the dullest of us feels standing on the edge of Santorini's caldera is unmistakable. The way back to Arcadia is closed; we cannot hope for the appearances of gods. Nevertheless, these poems want to believe apotheosis is possible if you locate yourself, if you hold fast to the matter and the beings of your sacred place.
IV. To Delphi, 1996
On Mt. Helicon Roula's father keeps his bees. They point it out to me as we pass on the highway. But we are climbing a different mountain, curve after curve toward the famous Parting of Ways, where poor Oedipus made a wrong turn, collided with Fate; we're taking his route backwards, out of Thebes, and we'll leave it soon to head straight through the pass. Roula tells me this is her parents' first excursion in years (though her father retired some time ago) and they are taking us all, in my honor, to Delphi. By six we are awake, speeding off in their little car in order to beat the heat and the tourists. Vagelis sings
rembetiko while he drives and Pelagia, beaming, sings every other verse (they've memorized all the songs on their cassettes). I recognize only a few things-eyes, moon, train-and so Roula tries to translate a bit, though she says it's quite difficult. Rembetiko is the music of sufferers, exiles. It is made by men in flannel shirts who smoke and drink too much, and by women who have borne too many hard knocks. What keeps me from the words is not a lack of these prerequisites exactly, it's something more fundamental. Rembetiko was born in Seferis's Asia Minor, so the Greek is flecked with Turkish words in addition to taverna lingo; it is a Levantine blues that veers toward the ecstatic. There are times, indeed, when the singing can be mistaken for moaning, or, in another country, the prayer-call of a
muezzin. Hearing it, you remember that in Greece you are in the East, not the West, in the Balkans, where borders and the identities that blur around them often shift beyond recognition, where tyrants are as popular as rock stars. In a car with a Greek family, listening to words I cannot fully grasp, my life in this country takes on its strange character: suspended between inclusion and confusion, honorary citizenship and tourism. I am too much barbarian to be Greek and, though not by blood, too Greek to be barbarian.
We stop for pastries in a tiny village on the verge of Parnassus, giddy from the altitude and coffee. I arrived just yesterday in Athens, on a direct flight out of Houston, and it's quite a stroke of luck to go from the airport directly to a home, a family, their intimate language. But the transition back to my Greek has me reeling. To make things more difficult, the Greek of Thessaloniki and my Greek teacher's Athenian dialect are just cousins to this one, to Vagelis' village slang, delivered at the speed of a heated debate. But the Konsolakis are generous, stopping often to rephrase their stories into what must be, for them, a kind of kindergarten simplicity. They are amused to have me and are endlessly entertained by my descriptions of home, of Texas, the
polee megalo, para polee megalo (very big, very VERY big) with which I begin almost every sentence. Pelagia, who keeps the joke going, requests for me
ena polee megalo cafe from the waiter, who doesn't get the joke, brings me a tiny steaming cup like everyone else.
There is a dusty, caved-in hole in the hillside behind their house where Vagelis stores his hive-building lumber and rusting feta crates. Roula tells me it's not a hole, but a tunnel leading to the tomb of Antigone which had to be caved in to prevent looting and injury. When she was a child, votive figurines would sometimes turn up in the yard after a vigorous weeding around the tomato plants. The little archeological museum of Thebes, like all Greek museums, is overflowing with such objects: clay chickens, goddesses, phalluses and rams. No one bothers to catalog this refuse of the ancient cults. This is not, as a result, a family impressed by ruins.
So I am not surprised when Roula's parents tell us to go on ahead, that they'll meet us at the museum later. There are already a number of gaudy tour buses parked along the road leading up the Sacred Way to the archeological site. And, though we've both been to Delphi several times before (Roula on her yearly field trips in grade school), it's hard to resist another climb past the treasuries, the Rock of the Sybil, the little amphitheatre, up to the stadium. For a long time the locals called the stadium
Marmaria—the marbles—but many of the stones have been hauled away, some for house-building, some for lime. There remains, however, seating enough for about seven thousand around the familiar elongated oval of the track (one of the best preserved in Greece). It's much too hot for running, though a noisy group of Scandanavians have just finished the climb and already their children are tearing off around the track, shrieking. We take this as a sign, leave the athletes to their exercise and climb down the mountain to the air-conditioned museum, since Roula has an appointment to keep.
We are all in love with the Charioteer of Delphi. But Roula has been carrying on a veritable affair with the handsome youth, though he is almost two thousand years her elder. She walks straight past the glass-cased amphoras and golden shields, the stiff
kouros and korai, does not even stop for the omphalos (the very navel of the earth!), into a room lit only by two rather dirty windows and the Charioteer himself, with his beard of barnacles, his brown eyes carved from glass and stone. One can hardly bear to look him in the face. Yet we find our downcast eyes rewarded with the best surprise of the museum: his feet, a bare bronze pair entirely anomalous to the god-like proportions of their owner. If it is not the utter, gut-wrenching beauty of this form isolated in space that impresses us, then it is this collision of the divine and the human: the towering head and sublime face, the plebian feet, ankles showing, planted firmly on the earth. Tourist after tourist photographs him from the shins down. And this is the proper way of viewing him, since he would have been seen from below. The sculptor has corrected our vision, which shrinks objects above us, by making his body tall and unusually slender, gowned in a pleated tunic that inscribes straight lines down the torso, like the fluting on a column, down to that great revelation of perfectly ordinary feet.
But we see something that ancient maker could not; we see a man in ruins, an incomplete man, whose squared shoulders and placid expression conceal something tragic. The Charioteer is nearly perfect, but he has no team, is going nowhere fast. His horses have fled. He holds nothing now but a tangle of broken reins, like a forlorn handful of limp tagliatelle. Doesn't he hear, like us, the echo of those invisible stallions? Doesn't he think to ask, as James Merrill imagines in his poem, "Where are the horses of the sun?" What we see is the void he clings to. The look in his eyes is the weary glance of his, and of our own, oblivion. And in this, the Charioteer of Delphi best embodies ancient man, who galloped forward once with his domesticated creatures, but now remains forever stranded, cut off from his transport. The future has left him, a greening relic, in its dust.
V. Terra Incognita
We forget, too often, the Archaic in favor of the Classical. Who wouldn't? Put side by side a stiffly Egyptianized, mis-proportioned archaic
kouros and one of the figures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, perhaps that enormous, graceful Apollo with his perfectly shaped, outstretched arm (the very same arm God reaches out to Adam in Michelangelo's chapel). Why take the real when you can have the dream? For this Apollo is the sculptor's dream of himself, his own Platonic image. It is the body made Form, isolated, perfected. But let's skip these great figures, spend our museum hours with goofy Geometric craters, the bewildered faces of janiform heads from Crete, the stick-figures on stone-seals we must peer at through a magnifying glass.
It is true, you would have to be dead not to love the art of the Classical period, to admire its Apollonian bravado and immortality: the government of Pericles, the monumental marbles of Athens, the canons of Polykleitos. But these contain, for me, an aura of the official. They correspond to an ethics of perfectibility, to a species of arrogance, what the Greeks themselves called hubris. Here the gods are made subjects, are forced to appear, to kill us or woo us, as we would have them.
It is to the archaic, like Rilke, we should let ourselves return: to the Minoan, the Mycenean, the Etruscan. Let us have Linear A, the Phaestos Disc, everything indecipherable, the half-broken bodies of awkward stone men, the homely kore's lumpy figure beneath its panoply of marble garments. Give us unsettling terra cotta dwarfs in lewd poses. The glowing marble dildos of Cycladic figurines. A Protoattic vase with its cartoon sphinx. Missing spears, and arms, and feet, those fragments of song on a burial stele:
I am a portrait in stone put here by Seikilos I remain forever in remembrance as long as you live do not grieve for time collects its
tribute.
The poet in Greece becomes obsessed with time: there one encounters the past and it snorts like an animal at your back. Yet, that past is inaccessible, unknown, there are empty graves everywhere. One must suffice with looking through artifacts, resting awhile in the ruined places that house those
Artifacts—Knossos,
Delphi, Mycenae, Thebes—but also in the forgotten places one steps without knowing it. The table of contents for my own book, therefore, reads to me as much like an archeologist's checklist as a hedonist's. This is not accidental or touristic: one way poems can secure themselves in time is by naming where they are, where the germ of the poem's thought begins, so the voice that sings it has a harbor-mouth to leave from and return to.
A time-haunted consciousness is bound to inform a poem's shape. To depict a region so stratified, so punctuated by the pulse of time, the lyric must become an instrument of stasis, of what Holderlin called
Ruhe, a dynamic stillness that holds energy in place, like a spinning top, while it revolves. A kind of vertigo accompanies the poet's experience of time in Greece, and while this vertigo is something to embrace (one of the great pleasures of Greece is this bewilderment), for clarity's sake one must find a way to steer the spinning top back to a center, even if that point will be spiraled away from as immediately as it arrives. We would not call these "spots" of time as Wordsworth does, since we are not measuring things according to the progress of the poet's life as much as we are navigating the progress of a different history, that of the landscape itself, which is landscape-shaped. The lyric allows for anachronism in a way that narrative poetry does not; the lyric can be a fragment and a whole at the same time. It resembles an archaic sculpture, torso severed from head and limbs. A poem of this sort follows Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his understanding that a sonnet, the most epitaphic of all lyric forms, is a "moment's monument,-/Memorial from the Soul's eternity/ To one dead deathless hour." The lyric poem, even a very brief one like a sonnet, gives time a temporary form; it contains something briefly in the shape of its seconds.
VI. Distomo
The day is already approaching its heat when we step back outside the museum. Cicadas are screeching in the immense olive groves which blanket the valley from Delphi to the sea. Vagelis and Pelagia are eager to get back over the mountains to Livadia, home of yet another oracle, at the intersection of the rivers Lethe and Mnemosyne, a place now shaded by plane trees where we'll have our lunch. As we descend the pass, heading in the opposite direction, for mile after mile, are panting men and boys with plastic numbers pinned to their chests. They are running uphill-a marathon! But these are not athletes, or at least not very convincing ones. A few look dangerously near death in the morning heat and we even pass a group that has stopped running to smoke. It is only gradually, and with horror, that Pelagia remembers the date-June 10th-and first she bursts into tears, then Vagelis. There is no time to explain, for on a blind curve Vagelis has whipped the car around, accelerated in the opposite direction, with the runners, toward Distomo.
My students tell me it is impossible to understand Greece unless you understand a single untranslatable concept: Philotimo. It is a species of self-esteem, a flavor of pride. When Walt Whitman sings the divinity of himself, he is, in some sense, singing philotimo. Not arrogance, because inborn, it is an intrinsic part of a Greek's ethnic ingredients. It might even be mistaken for nationalism: Greeks are unabashedly loyal to the country they constantly complain is failing them. It's hard for me to tell how much of this fidelity, however bitter, can be explained by looking into the argumentative nature of their characters. As with most things in that country: it is not Greek without some large dose of conflict thrown into the mix. Really, both the anger and patriotism arise out of a sense of communal suffering, the shared pathos, the philotimo of an endlessly conquered people.
So there is no leap from song to tears for this couple, and to cry for the love of country is to cry for oneself. Pelagia is telling the story for Vagelis, who wipes his face on his sleeve and keeps his gaze forward. She lets Roula translate. In Karakolithos (a village we just passed), back at the end of the second war, Greek guerillas sabotaged a Nazi barracks, killing an important officer. I suspect Vagelis knew these men. German retaliation was decisive. They first obliterated Karakolithos, then Distomo, burned the village down, skewering pregnant women on bayonets and taking whatever other retribution they could improvise on the spot. Two hundred eighteen people died and every year a marathon is run (by all who can) to commemorate the grandfathers. So here we are, very late in the milennium, lighting candles in the dark little church and applauding, with the whole village, each runner's exhausted crossing of the finish line. Then we climb back in the car, radio on at a murmur, and drive to our lunch.
How to make contact with this language, the place that comes alive with it? From the moment I set foot in Greece, each time I return, my English begins to fade; I cannot identify things my language does not have a name for. Even more puzzling, English words I have known since childhood disappear. But my Greek remains superficial at best, expanding at a pitifully slow pace-a noun here, a verb there. I am obliged to find other words, gesticulations, expressions, to get by. My experience of writing these poems is that part of their essence, though written down in English, has been translated from a middle language, not a Creole, an Engreek, but a non-language where poetry exists, one found somewhere between the present and the past. I fear, like all poets, falling silent for awhile, but when my mind awakens with my body, I expect the arrival of my breath. Those moments of invocation mark the beginnings of poetry.
©2002 Christopher Bakken
Note: this essay was originally published in volume 5, issue 6 of Literal Latte.
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN lived in Thessaloniki, Greece from 1992-1994 while he was teaching at Aristotle University and Anatolia College. His poems have been collected in the book, After Greece, which won the 2001 T.S. Eliot prize, and they have appeared in The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and The Texas Review. He currently teaches at Allegheny College.