Dinner with Persephone (7 page)

Athens is a city that brims with people, but it can often seem like a city no one lives in; it has a haunted quality. All the unseen worlds of the past, classical, medieval, Ottoman (of which there are few reminders left, except in the language, because the Greeks so hate the evidence), surround you, above and beneath. The underworld is always present, the world of the dead. And the jumble of houses—the abandoned nineteenth-century mansions in odd corners, the tiny houses that were built at the turn of the century by villagers and look exactly like village houses, the whitewashed boxes built for refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, now overshadowed by large apartment buildings on either side like grown-ups holding the hands of a child about to cross the street—gives Athens the feeling that everyone here is both himself and his own ghost.

I walk through an unexpected piece of countryside, apartment buildings going up on land that clearly belongs to the modest empty farmhouse still standing. Emerging from this cool shady lane, I find myself caught up in a throng of people on a paved plaza. They are carrying banners and enormous wreaths of flowers on tripods. Some are throwing handfuls of bay leaves onto the pavement. They are shouting a word over and over again: “Immortal, immortal!” I think for a moment that my Greek must be failing me, but they repeat the word often and furiously: “
Athanati, athanati!
” Tears are streaming down the cheeks of some of the women. There is no way to go forward through the throng, it is so dense, and they seem to be waiting for something.

“Please, can you tell me what is happening?” I ask a couple next to me. The man holds a small Greek flag. “We are burying our Jenny Karezi,” he says. “We are burying our great actress. She will pass this way.” He turns a genuinely grief-stricken face away from me, and forcefully joins the cry of “Immortal! Immortal!”

I know stories about Aspasia and Hypatia. But I have never heard of this immortal dead woman.

I can’t find a passageway out of this crowd, which shifts and sways but doesn’t move until people at the front catch sight of the funeral procession, when the chanting of “Immortal” trebles in volume, driven and protesting, and the mass surges forward to follow the coffin. I am swept past glass-fronted shops with sample tomb carvings in the windows, many in the popular shape of open marble books with space for a photograph. The photographs used in the storefront tombstones are of famous figures—I see a picture of a much loved young mayor of Athens, who died suddenly of a heart attack not too long ago and is still talked about with regret. There is a picture of Maria Callas, so it is clear that these carvings are a kind of advertisement, since Callas, defying the Greek state, in which civil funerals are illegal, and the virulent Orthodox prohibition against cremation, supposed to interfere with the resurrection of the body, had arranged to have her body cremated and its ashes scattered over the sea. The crowd sweeps me past a cluster of these shops, and I catch a glimpse of a memorial featuring a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. In other windows, there are elaborately decorated cakes with sugar messages reading
Kalo Taxidi
, the wish for a good journey, and
Athanatos.
This is
kollyva
, the food of the dead, made of grains, seeds, and dried fruit, funeral food throughout the Balkans. The Turks, too, have a similar commemorative food, of wheat and pomegranate seeds, which they eat to mark the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandsons, and to celebrate Noah’s survival of the flood—the mixture, in their version, is based on the supplies remaining on the ark after the survivors’ forty days on board.

I am swept along inside the Protonekrotafio, Athens’s version of Père Lachaise, but I manage to disentangle myself from the crowd. The geography of the cemetery is complicated; I am utterly lost now as I often am here, but I have learned that bewilderment is often as effective a method of finding an entrance or an exit as certainty. I pass a life-size statue of a little girl wearing a 1930s smock and a Buster Brown haircut, baptismal cross prominently carved, and a gravestone that proudly identifies the deceased as an employee
of the Greek national telephone company. A man in a straw hat and shirtsleeves is weeding graves. Tending graves is obviously a difficult business here, since water is expensive and keeping greenery alive takes committed effort—I can see that many people opt for urns full of deathless plastic roses and wreaths.

Two women near a wall are trying to revive a dying kitten by giving it sips of water; the Greeks consider spaying animals cruel, and according to European animal welfare organizations, attempt to control the stray animal population through putting out poisoned food. A row over, a priest in a long gown, ponytail, and the black fez on which chef’s hats were supposedly modeled is singing a remembrance ceremony for a small group of five, before a stone tomb covered with flowers, stems wrapped in foil to keep them wet long enough to live through the ceremony. Two rows further up, toward what I hope is the exit, two women are gardening the graves of their dead, one wearing a halter top and gym shorts, the other flapping her skirt up to her thighs to make a breeze. I pick my way through the meshes of the graves, struck by the modern versions of the kind of classical grave monument that pictured the dead relative on one side clasping the hands of the living on the other. The kitschy realism of the modern carvings is absurdly fascinating—mustachioed men wearing business suits, women with permanent waves wearing pearls and stiletto heels are presented in classical poses.

On a rise overlooking what seems like a reception hall, I see a gate onto the street. Descending, I see clustered boxes and a pile of shovels outside it. It is a mausoleum for reburial; grave space is at a premium in Greece, and practical necessity has made a religious ceremony of the recycling of the remains roughly three years after the burial. The remains are removed from the grave to be ritually washed and reburied in mausoleum walls. It looks as if the workmen are taking a break. Soft-drink cans and beer bottles are propped up against open chests overflowing with white, yellow, and gray bones.

A
  glowing lemon, like a star magically transformed into a fruit, falls directly onto our table from the tree overhead. Aura, an actress whom I recently met, has spent a morning with me wandering the Archaeological Museum, probably the most visited museum in Greece, with its collection of treasures from Schliemann’s digs, and sculpture familiar from postcards and art history textbooks. We finished with a visit to her namesake, a headless fifth-century statue called
Aura
, a personification of a breeze in the form of a woman whose maker battled against his own material, doing all he could to transform a block of stone that would crush bones if it fell, into the illusion of a transparent current of air, the pleats of her dress eddying unevenly around her, following the topography of her body, her bodice molded in the gust to her breasts, a nipple showing through the cloth. It is a marvelous piece of work, evoking a nakedness that will never be revealed as an underlying metaphor for air that can never be carved, stone that can never feel a breeze, much less achieve the condition of air. Aura looks nothing like it. She is not an image, but a maker of images, with round malleable features which can mimic nearly any expression, from a newborn’s to a secret
policeman’s, and a sturdy, even rather thick, hourglass figure like a nineteenth-century actress’s. When the waiter brings our iced coffees, the pattern of his expression, the narrowed eyes and rather pursed mouth, momentarily clings to her face as she looks at him. A lizard startlingly falls onto her head, and before she shoos it off the table, it is unnerving to watch her absorb its gaze, matching its impervious stare with a cousinly eye.

“And?” she says. “How did it all strike you, what you saw?” I have visited this museum enough to know the rooms where my personal landmarks are, and to have ritual pilgrimages to make, even to pieces that I know would be trivial to many other people, like a sauté pan with a handle in the shape of Aphrodite, found among grave treasure, which I yearn to have a copy of, as the ideal vessel for scrambled eggs with white truffles, along with champagne, for Valentine’s Day breakfast. But for the most part, as I have to confess to Aura, I always emerge from this museum with new reactions, always aware that in looking at these statues, we partly see them and partly guess at what we are seeing. The museum inevitably disguises as well as exhibits them. The last time I visited here, I came away with a pervasive sense of the connection between these sculptures and tragedy. I was looking at the famous statue called
Poseidon
, poised to cast a spear, and motionless, and I thought how absolutely failure was worked into every keenly modeled muscle, tendon, the perfect hips of this perfect body, that it had been brought to this physical pitch, but could never breathe, never cross the boundary into life. This wouldn’t matter in many kinds of art, but here it does, here it seems that the failure of perfect sculpted bodies to live is a meditation on the failure of human beings not to die.

Now that I am living here, I have a new way to imagine the statues, not as rare, but as ubiquitous, like the painted icons I encounter in workshops, shops, homes that shelter them as the polytheist homes housed their patron deities, churches, restaurants, streets. The ancient dreamers who told Artemidorus their dreams literally lived with these statues, dreaming of the meanings of seeing themselves
anointing and cleaning them, as they did in daily life, sweeping in front of them, sprinkling everything in the temple with water, defacing them in moments of distress, or angrily throwing the statues from a house outside. Their statues had social meanings as well as religious ones, which were reflected in their dreams: connotations of victory and public honor, because of the practice of honoring athletes with statues, and connotations of freedom—if a slave dreamed of his own statue in bronze, it portended freedom, because bronze statues were erected only for free men. No woman, then, could ever dream that she was free, since the statues representing women were nearly always of supernatural women, or of dead women and their domestic attendants on grave monuments. The ancient dreamers saw statues with specific associations; they liked the gods to be seated or immovable, in stable positions, and in their usual costumes, “in the form we have imagined him to be,” as Artemidorus says of Zeus. They might see the sun god, Helios (it was a better omen to see a representation of him in a dream than to see the god himself); Heracles, who was a good omen for men engaged in lawsuits; Tyche, the goddess of chance, whom it was always desirable to see seated or reclining, not shifting positions. For the modern dreamers, statues seem mostly symbolic of tendencies in their inner lives: if you see a statue, you can expect to meet a person who will become your ideal; a statue of a famous person predicts good news, or some reward for an effort; seeing yourself as a statue may mean something has gone wrong with you as a human being, in your emotional life. Under the headings of dreams about icons, though, are guides for the dreamer to specific personal patronage and protection, like the codes Artemidorus assigned to the dream statues. But that doesn’t imply a simple continuity, because while our wishes and needs may be similar, the selves we wish with have changed. A modern dreamer making a statue, according to several of my dream books, wishes to perfect some aspect of himself, and is preparing for an opportunity to do that. The second-century interpretation of this dream—a common
dream, since Artemidorus based his interpretations on many instances of dreams and their outcomes that he compiled on his travels—-is that it is good for adulterers, orators, forgers, and for all deceivers, since the art of making statues shows “what does not exist as though it actually does.” My modern dream books are splendid catalogues of the imagery of modern Greek life—if you riffled through a book of photographs of Greece, like the wonderful
Yeitonia
(Neighborhood) of Andreas Skhinas, you would see many of the dream images that come to life behind closed Greek eyes. But while the modern dream books document the dreams, they leave alone the question of who the dreamers might be.

And today, as I was looking, I tell Aura, I was struck not only by the beauty of the statues, but by the limitations of the conception of beauty they represent, not just in the way it creates a convention of perfection, and then is bound to its own convention, unable to respond to physical features outside it, but an actual limitation. Aura asks what I mean, and I struggle to find out myself. I mean that the beauty they embody is only at the threshold of what beauty is, a fragment. This is beauty only as it is idealized, not as it is experienced, beauty only as it is desired, and not beauty as it is loved. It misses the beloved ugliness that is also part of our sense of beauty, part of the specific beauty of a body and face that you love. It misses the shocking joy of the attainable. And it misses something else. Think of the human genitals, with their humility and magnificence, a beauty too complex to be idealized. The statues of the women have no genitals, and the statues of the men have dainty, symbolic genitals, made symmetrical so as not to spoil the line of the body.

“You are making me think about a phenomenon that occurs in our language, because it is so old,” Aura says, putting on her sunglasses. “What happens is that sometimes after moving through different eras, and grammars, and absorbing elements of other languages, a phrase or a word will pick up meanings that comment on each other. I am thinking just now of the verb ‘to idealize,’ which can also mean ‘to sublimate,’ although it is not a very common
usage. Think about how our ideal of the body changed with Christianity from the beautiful athlete’s body to the ruined emaciated saint’s body you see in icons. John the Baptist is always shown nearly naked, like the old gods and the boy athletes, but his arms and legs are sticklike, tortured-looking, as if he is diseased. And yet this body is a kind of ideal, the ideal Christian body, with its hollow throat, the sacralized misery of its limbs and sacred torment on its face, with which it bargains for the eternal life that beauty couldn’t win. In both worlds, though, it was the male body that expressed the ideal, physical, moral, social. If you look in the
Nichomachean Ethics
you will read how Aristotle, a thinker riddled with assumptions about class presented as biological observation, as you would expect a tutor dependent on the nouveau riche Macedonian royals to be, describes a man’s slow impressive gait as evidence of his great soul. Ideas about the body are so built into social imagery that the ancient word for beggar,
ptokhos
, very like the modern adjective for ‘poor,’ literally means someone who crouches. Women, of course, were supposed to crouch, and look down submissively. The type of woman who did not is represented by the many scenes of the Amazons fighting the Greeks, who of course defeated them—the name of one of the famous Amazon warriors, Antiope, means ‘the woman who looks straight into your face.’ As for the Christian male body, go to Nea Moni on Chios, and to Patmos—you will see the ambitions of the new bodies, the ones that belong to the emperor of heaven, no longer bodies at all, but instruments, so their loss cannot matter, as the loss or aging of the athlete’s beautiful body does.