The Colossus of Maroussi (19 page)

“It’s been a wonderful evening,” I said, shaking hands all around, shaking hands with the maid too by mistake. “You must come and see me when I get back to New York I have a town house and a country house, you know. The weather is excellent in the Fall, when the smoke has cleared away. They’re building a new dynamo over near Spuyten Duyvil: it runs by ether waves. The rice was excellent tonight. And the cognac too….”

To-morrow I’ll go to Phaestos, I said to myself, picking my way through the fang-bitten streets like a laminated water-moccasin. I had to remind myself that I was in Crete, a quite different Crete than I had pictured to myself in my dreams. Again I had that feeling of the back pages of Dickens’ novels, of a quaint, one-legged world illumined by a jaded moon: a land that had survived every catastrophe and was now palpitating with a blood beat, a land of owls and herons and crazy relics such as sailors bring back from foreign shores. In the moonlight, navigating through the silent streets like a foundering ship, I felt that the earth was bearing me through a zone I had never been carried through before. I was a little nearer to the stars and the ether was charged with their nearness; it was not simply that they were more brilliant, or that the moon which had taken on the color of a yam had grown swollen and lopsided, but that the atmosphere had undergone a subtle, perfumed alteration. There was a residue, an elixir, I might almost say, which had clung to the aura which the earth gives off and which had increased in essence from repeated journeys through this particular corner of the zodiac. It was nostalgic; it awakened those ageless hordes of ancestral men who stand with eyes closed, like trees after the passing of a flood, in the ever-moving stream of the blood. The blood itself went through a change, thickening with the remembrance of man-made dynasties, of animals raised to divination, of instruments poised to thousand year niceties, of floods lapped up, divested of secrets, unburdened of treasures. The earth became again that strange one-legged creature which pegs and wobbles through diamond-pointed fields, passing faithfully through all the habitations of its solar creation; became that which it will be to the end and which in becoming transmogrifies the obscene goat into the stillness of that which always was, since there is no other, not even the possibility of a simulacrum.

Greece is what everybody knows, even
in absentia,
even as a child or as an idiot or as a not-yet-born. It is what you expect the earth to look like given a fair chance. It is the subliminal threshold of innocence. It stands, as it stood from birth, naked and fully revealed. It is not mysterious or impenetrable, not awesome, not defiant, not pretentious. It is made of earth, air, fire and water. It changes seasonally with harmonious undulating rhythms. It breathes, it beckons, it answers.

Crete is something else. Crete is a cradle, an instrument, a vibrating test tube in which a volcanic experiment has been performed. Crete can hush the mind, still the bubble of thought. I wanted so long and so ardently to see Crete, to touch the soil of Knossus, to look at a faded fresco, to walk where “they” had walked. I had let my mind dwell on Knossus without taking in the rest of the land. Beyond Knossus my mind pictured nothing but a great Australian waste. That Homer had sung of the hundred cities of Crete I didn’t know because I could never bring myself to read Homer; that relics of the Minoan period had been found in the tomb of Akhenaton I was ignorant of also. I knew, or believed rather, only that here at Knossus on an island which nowadays scarcely anybody ever thinks to visit there had been initiated some twenty-five or thirty centuries before the dawn of that blight called Christianity a way of life which makes everything that has happened since in this Western World seem pallid, sickly, ghost-ridden and doomed. The Western world, we say, never once thinking to include those other great social experiments which were made in South America and Central America, passing them over always in our rapid historical surveys as if they were accidents, jumping from the Middle Ages to the discovery of America, as if this bastard bloom on the North American continent marked the continuation of the line of true development of man’s evolution. Seated on King Minos’ throne I felt closer to Montezuma than to Homer or Praxiteles or Caesar or Dante. Looking at the Minoan scripts I thought of the Mayan legends which I had once glimpsed in the British Museum and which stand out in my memory as the most wonderful, the most natural, the most artistic specimens of calligraphy in the long history of letters. Knossus, or what happened there almost fifty centuries ago, is like the hub of a wheel on which many spokes have been fitted only to rot away. The
wheel
was the great discovery; men have since lost themselves in a maze of petty inventions which are merely accessory to the great pristine fact of revolution itself.

The island then was once studded with citadels, the gleaming hub of a wheel whose splendor cast its shadow over the whole known world. In China there was another great revolution going on, in India another, in Egypt another, in Persia another; there were reflections from one to another which intensified the piercing gleams; there were echoes and reverberations. The vertical life of man was constantly churned by the revolutions of these great gleaming wheels of light. Now it is dark. Nowhere throughout the greatly enlarged world is there the least sign or evidence of the turning of a wheel. The last wheel has fallen apart, the vertical life is done with; man is spreading over the face of the earth in every direction like a fungus growth, blotting out the last gleams of light, the last hopes.

I went back to my room determined to plunge into that great unknown tract which we call Crete, anciently the kingdom of Minos, son of Zeus, whose birthplace it was. Since the wheel fell apart, before that too no doubt, every foot of the land has been fought over, conquered and reconquered, sold, bartered, pawned, auctioned off, levelled with fire and sword, sacked, plundered, administered over by tyrants and demons, converted by fanatics and zealots, betrayed, ransomed, traduced by the great powers of our day, desolated by civilized and savage hordes alike, desecrated by all and sundry, hounded to death like a wounded animal, reduced to terror and idiocy, left gasping with rage and impotence, shunned by all like a leper and left to expire in its own dung and ashes. Such is the cradle of our civilization as it was when finally relinquished and bequeathed to its miserable, destitute inhabitants. What had been the birthplace of the greatest of the gods, what had been the cradle and the mother and the inspiration of the Hellenic world, was finally annexed and not so long ago made part of Greece. What a cruel travesty! What a malefic destiny! Here the traveller has to hang his head in shame. This is the Ark left high and dry by the receding waters of civilization. This is the necropolis of culture marking the great crossroads. This is the stone that was finally given Greece to swallow. To be followed up a few years later by another even more terrible gift, the return of a great mutilated member which had been flung with fire and blood into the sea.

I fell into a nightmare. I was being gently and endlessly rocked by the omnipotent Zeus in a burning cradle. I was toasted to a crisp and then gently dumped into a sea of blood. I swam ceaselessly amidst dismembered bodies marked with the cross and the crescent. I came at last to a rock-ribbed shore. It was bare and absolutely deserted of man. I wandered to a cave in the side of a mountain. In the shivery depths I saw a great heart bright as a ruby suspended from the vault by a huge web. It was beating and with each beat there fell to the ground a huge gout of blood. It was too large to be the heart of any living creature. It was larger even than the heart of a god. It is like the heart of agony, I said aloud, and as I spoke it vanished and a great darkness fell over me. Whereupon I sank down, exhausted, and fell into a sob that reverberated from every part of the cave and finally suffocated me.

I awoke and without consulting the sky I ordered a car for the day. Now there were two things I remembered as I set forth in the sumptuous limousine—one, to remember to ask for Kyrios Alexandros at Phaestos and two, to observe whether, as Monsieur Herriot is reported to have said when he climbed to the precincts of the palace, the sky is really closer to the earth than anywhere else on this globe.

We swung through the dilapidated gate in a cloud of dust, scattering chickens, cats, dogs, turkeys, naked children and hoary vendors of sweets to right and left; we burst at full speed into the drab and dun terrain of gutta percha which closes in on the city like mortar filling a huge crack. There were no wolves, buzzards or poisonous reptiles in sight. There was a sun flooded with lemon and orange which hung ominously over the sultry land in that splashing, dripping radiance which intoxicated Van Gogh. We passed imperceptibly from the quick badlands to a fertile rolling region studded with fields of bright-colored crops; it reminded me of that serene steady smile which our own South gives as you roll through the State of Virginia. It set me dreaming, dreaming of the gentleness and docility of the earth when man caresses it with loving hands. I began to dream more and more in the American idiom. I was crossing the continent again. There were patches of Oklahoma, of the Carolinas, of Tennessee, of Texas and New Mexico. Never a great river, never a railroad, however. But the illusion of vast distances, the reality of great vistas, the sublimity of silence, the revelation of light. On the top of a dizzying crag a tiny shrine in blue and white; in the ravine a cemetery of terrifying boulders. We begin to climb, curving around the edges of precipitous drops; across the gulch the earth bulges up like the knees of a giant covered with corduroy. Here and there a man, a woman, the sower, the reaper, silhouetted against billowy clouds of suds. We climb up beyond the cultivated lands, twisting back and forth like a snake, rising to the heights of contemplation, to the abode of the sage, the eagle, the storm cloud. Huge, frenzied pillars of stone, scarred by wind and lightning, grayed to the color of fright, trembling, top-heavy, balanced like macrocosmic fiends, abut the road. The earth grows wan and weird, defertilized, dehumanized, neither brown nor gray nor beige nor taupe nor ecru, the no color of death reflecting light, sponging up light with its hard, parched shag and shooting it back at us in blinding, rock-flaked splinters that bore into the tenderest tissues of the brain and set it whimpering like a maniac.

This is where I begin to exult. This is something to put beside the devastation of man, something to overmatch his bloodiest depredations. This is nature in a state of dementia, nature having lost its grip, having become the hopeless prey of its own elements. This is the earth beaten, brutalized and humiliated by its own violent treachery. This is one of the spots wherein God abdicated, where He surrendered to the cosmic law of inertia. This is a piece of the Absolute, bald as an eagle’s knob, hideous as the leer of a hyena, impotent as a granite hybrid. Here nature staggered to a halt in a frozen vomit of hate.

We roll down a crisp, crackling mountainside into an immense plain. The uplands are covered with a sheath of stiff shrub like blue and lavender porcupine quills. Here and there bald patches of red clay, streaks of shale, sand dunes, a field of pea green, a lake of waving champagne. We roll through a village which belongs to no time and no place, an accident, a sudden sprout of human activity because someone sometime or other had returned to the scene of the massacre to look for an old photograph amidst the tumbled ruins and had stayed there from force of inertia and staying there had attracted flies and other forms of animate and inanimate life.

Farther on…A lone rectangular habitation sunk deep into the ground. A lone pueblo in the midst of a vacuum. It has a door and two windows. It is built like a box. The shelter of some human being. What kind of being? Who lives there? Why? The American scene is behind. We are now traversing the Mesopotamian hinterland. We are riding over dead cities, over elephant bones, over grass-covered sea bottoms. It is beginning to rain a sudden, quick shower that makes the earth steam. I get out and walk through a lake of mud to examine the ruins of Gortyna. I follow the writing on the wall. It tells of laws which nobody obeys any longer. The only laws which last are the unwritten ones. Man is a lawbreaking animal. A timid one, however.

It is high noon. I want to have my lunch in Phaestos. We push on. The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads out like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar. In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap and vault into the blue. You want to float in the air like an angel or lie in the grass rigid and enjoy the cataleptic trance. Stone and sky, they marry here. It is the perpetual dawn of man’s awakening.

We glide through a deer run and the car stops at the edge of a wild park. “Up there,” says the man, pointing to a steep bluff—“Phaestos.” He had said the word. It was like magic. I hesitated. I wanted to prepare myself. “Better take your lunch with you,” said the man. “They may not have any food up there.” I put the shoe box under my arm and slowly, meditatively, reverently began the pilgrimage.

It was one of the few times in my life that I was fully aware of being on the brink of a great experience. And not only aware but grateful, grateful for being alive, grateful for having eyes, for being sound in wind and limb, for having rolled in the gutter, for having gone hungry, for having been humiliated, for having done everything that I did do since at last it had culminated in this moment of bliss.

I crossed a wooden bridge or two in the depth of the glen and paused again in the rich mud which was over my shoe tops to survey the little stretch I had traversed. At the turn of the road I would begin the laborious ascent. I had the feeling of being surrounded by deer. I had another strong insistent intuition: that Phaestos was the female stronghold of the Minos family. The historian will smile; he knows better. But in that instant and forever afterwards, regardless of proofs, regardless of logic, Phaestos became the abode of the queens. Every step I climbed corroborated the feeling.