Report to Grego (73 page)

These are our native gods, the true ones, the immortals. Beneath such a sun, before such a sea, among such mountains, how could other gods—without bellies, without joy, without vine-leaves at their temples—have been born, how could they have thrived? And how could the sons and daughters of Greece have believed in a paradise different from this earthly paradise?

I had entered the vineyards. Young girls were vintaging, their faces tightly wrapped in white wimples to keep them from being burned by the sun. They raise their heads when a person passes, and you glimpse nothing but two large pitch-black eyes flickering in the sunlight and filled with visions of men.

I had allowed my body to take whatever path it wished. The fact that it was guiding me and not I it gave me great pleasure. I had confidence. The body is not blind unwrought material when bathed in Greek light; it is suffused with abundant soul which makes it phosphoresce, and if left free, it is able to arrive at its own decisions and find the correct road without the mind's intervention. Conversely, the soul is not an invisible airy phantom; it has taken on some of the body's sureness and warmth in its own right,
and it savors the world with what you might call carnal pleasure, as though it had a mouth and nostrils and hands with which to caress this world. Man very often lacks the persistence to maintain all of his humanity. He mutilates himself. Sometimes he wishes to be released from his soul, sometimes from his body. To enjoy both together seems a heavy sentence. But here in Greece these two graceful, deathless elements are able to commingle like hot water with cold, the soul to take something from the body, the body from the soul. They become friends, and thus man, here on Greece's divine threshing floor, is able to live and journey unmutilated, intact.

Finding a tap along the way, I halted. A bronze cup was hanging from a delicate chain. I was thirsty. The water refreshed me right down to my heels, and my bones rattled. I stood beneath an olive tree for a moment. Crickets had glued their bellies to its trunk and begun to sing; they suddenly fell silent, frightened at the sight of this colossal cricket. Two peasants came by, their little donkeys laden with grapes. “Long life to you!” they greeted me, placing their palms over their breasts. Grape stems hung from their beards; the entire road smelled of must. Opposite me I saw cypresses and black crosses jutting above a whitewashed enclosure; it was the calm cloister where the dead reposed, my father among them. Picking an olive leaf, I placed it between my teeth and bit into it. My mouth filled with bitterness.

I left the olive's shade and set out again, quickening my pace. It was then that I saw where my body was taking me—toward the age-old forebears with the large almond-shaped eyes, thick voluptuous lips, and tiny ringlike waists, the forebears who thousands of years before had played with that mightily powerful god the bull.

Man can feel no religious awe more genuine and profound, I believe, than the awe he feels when treading the ground where his ancestors—his roots—repose. Your own feet sprout roots which descend into the earth and search, seeking to mingle with the great, immortal roots of the dead. The tart fragrance of the soil and camomile fills your vitals with tranquility, and also with a desire for free submission to the eternal laws. Or if death's sweet fruit has still not ripened inside you, you grow incensed and rise up in revolt, refusing to be deprived of light, struggle, and life's great troubles at such an early juncture. In this case you stride with all
haste over this soil composed of ancestral bones and brains, before your feet put forth roots, and you fly outside again into the hallowed palaestra, into the light.

The emotion I felt in walking over the ancient grounds of Knossos was so superabundantly rich, so embroiled with life and death, that I find myself unable to analyze it clearly. Instead of sorrow and death, instead of tranquility, stern commandments rose from the decomposed mouths. I felt the dead hanging in long chaplets from my feet—not to lower me into their cool darkness, but rather to take hold of something and rise into the light with me in order to recommence the battle. Unquenchable joy and thirst, together with the living bulls bellowing in the pastures of the world above, the sea salt and the perfume of grass, had penetrated the earth's crust for thousands of years and prevented the dead from dying.

I gazed at the bullfights painted on the walls: the woman's agility and grace, the man's unerring strength, how they played with the frenzied bull, confronting him with intrepid glances. They did not kill him out of love in order to unite with him, as in oriental religions, or because they were overcome with fear and dared not look at him. Instead, they played with him, obstinately, respectfully, without hate. Perhaps even with gratitude. For this sacred battle with the bull whetted the Cretan's strength, cultivated his bodily agility and grace, the fiery yet coolheaded precision of movement, the discipline of will, the valor—so difficult to acquire—to measure his strength against the beast's fearful power without being overcome by panic. Thus the Cretans transubstantiated horror, turning it into an exalted game in which man's virtue, in direct contact with mindless omnipotence, received stimulation and conquered—conquered without annihilating the bull, because it considered him not an enemy but a fellow worker. Without him, the body would not have become so flexible and strong, the soul so valiant.

Surely a person needs great training of both body and soul if he is to have the endurance to view the beast and play such a dangerous game. But once he is trained and acquires the feel of the game, every one of his movements becomes simple, certain, and leisurely; he looks upon fear with intrepidity.

As I regarded the battle depicted on the walls, the age-old battle between man and bull (whom today we term God), I said to myself, Such was the Cretan Glance.

And suddenly the answer invaded my mind, and not only my mind but also my heart and loins. This was what I had been seeking, what I wanted. I had to fill the eyes of my own Odysseus with this Cretan Glance. Our age was a ferocious one. The Bull—the dark subterranean powers—had been let loose; the earth's crust was cracking. Courtesy, harmony, balance, happiness, life's sweetness—all these were virtues and joys which we had to be brave enough to bid adieu; they belonged to other ages, past or future. Every age has its own countenance. The countenance of our age was ferocious, and delicate souls dared not look it straight in the eye.

Odysseus, he who sailed upon the octameters I was writing, had to be made to view the abyss with such a Cretan Glanee—without hope and fear but also without insolence—as he stood proudly erect at the very brink of the precipice.

My life changed from that day onward, the Day of the Cretan Glance, as I named it. My soul discovered where to stand and how to cast its gaze. The terrible problems tormenting me grew calm; they smiled, as though springtime had come and the wild perplexities, like vernal thorns, had been covered with flowers. It was a tardy, unforeseen juvenescence. Like the ancient Chinese sage, I seemed to have been born a hoary, decrepit old man with snow-white beard. As the years went by, the beard turned gray, then gradually blackened, then fell off, and in my old age a tender adolescent fuzz spread across my cheeks.

My youth had been nothing but anxieties, nightmares, and questionings; my maturity nothing but lame answers. I looked toward the stars, toward men, toward ideas—what chaos! And what agony to hunt out God, the blue bird with the red talons, in their midst! I took one road, reached its end—an abyss. Frightened, I turned back and took another road; at its end the abyss once more. Retreat again, a new journey, and suddenly the same abyss yawned before me anew. All the routes of the mind led to the abyss. My youth and maturity had revolved in the air around the two poles of panic and hope, but now in my old age I stood before the abyss tranquilly, fearlessly. I no longer fled, no longer humiliated myself—no, not I, but the Odysseus I was fashioning. I created him to face the abyss calmly, and in creating him, I strove to resemble him. I myself was being created. I entrusted all my own yearnings to this Odysseus; he was the mold I was carving out
so that the man of the future might flow in. Whatever I yearned for and was unable to attain, he would attain. He was the charm that would lure the tenebrous and luminous forces that create the future. Faith moves mountains; believe in him and he would come. Who would come? The Odysseus I had created. He was the Archetype.

The creator's responsibility is a great one; he opens a road that may entice the future and force it to make up its mind.

I looked at the Cretan sea, at the waves that towered proudly, flashed for a moment in the sun, and sped to give up the ghost with a chuckle upon the pebbles of the beach. I felt my blood following their rhythm as it left my heart and spread to my fingertips and the very roots of my hair. I was becoming a sea, an endless voyage full of distant adventures, a proud despairing poem sailing with black and red sails over the abyss. And at the poem's summit was a seaman's cap, beneath the cap a rough sunburned forehead, two black eyes and a mouth frosted with salt spray, and lower down two huge, callused paws that gripped the helm.

He could not—we could not—fit any longer within the constricting homeland. Choosing the island's most unsubmissive souls, we seized what we could from our homes, boarded a ship, and departed. Where to? The wind would blow and show us our route. Southward! To Helen, who was pining away on the banks of the Eurotas, constricted just like ourselves by security, virtue, and the comfortable life. To the great archisland of Crete, which was withering because potency had departed the loins of its rulers; raising her arms in the middle of the sea, she was calling the barbarians so that she might have children by them. To Africa, to the ends of the earth, to the everlasting snows, to death!

At first the blue bird with the red talons went in the lead, but it quickly tired and we left it behind us, remaining free in the empty air, without a guide bird. From time to time great immortal souls dug their claws into our ship's rigging and warbled in an effort to entice us, but we burst into laughter, and they became frightened and left. Sometimes we heard a terrible cry spurt up from the sea's bottom: “Stop! Where are you going? Enough!” and we leaned over the gunwale and shouted back at it, “No, not enough, not enough! Keep still!” And one evening Death came and curled up on the prow. He was dressed like us, in fox pelts, with a pointed
blue cap crowned by a red pompon; he had a snow-white beard, and his face, chest, arms, and thighs were furrowed with cicatrized wounds. He smiled at us tenderly. We understood. We were finally approaching the end of our voyage.

Stretching out supine on the boat's deck, we closed our eyes and saw: above the continents and seas we had traversed, above the men we had encountered, the women we had kissed, above earth, water, fire, and flesh was another voyage where the boat was made of clouds, and the continents, seas, and people of silken threads which had emanated from our entrails. And still higher, on the highest level of all, our cloud boat scattered, our silken threads dissolved. The world's apparitions vanished, and nothing remained on this highest level but a mute, blind, stationary sun, blacker than blackness. It's probably God, we said to ourselves, who knows, it is probably God. . . . We tried to raise our hands in order to greet Him, but we could not.

W
hile I was writing this
Odyssey
on my Cretan shore line, the infernal powers were preparing the second great war. A wind of insanity blew over the human race, the earth's foundations creaked, and I, bending over my paper and listening to the clamor made by waves, people, and infernal powers, held on to my soul for dear life in order to keep panic from overcoming me. I strove to divine—and to entice with well-ordered, harmonious words—the man who lay beyond the massacres and tears, beyond today's ape man. Though he remained a specter hanging in mid-air, I felt as I leaned over and wrote, that I was transfusing my own blood into him. I was being emptied, he being filled, and his body began to solidify little by little, to move, and come.

I had entered a deep dream. Truth's lower level had vanished, the solid one whose entire area rests against the earth; and tonguing upward high in the air, like a fire blown by a strong wind, was the most elevated level of truth, the soul of man.

I worked all day, slept all night. Never in my life have I been able to work at night; I am like a solar clock. Sine sole sileo—without the sun I am silent. The night, with its dreams, its silence, with the dark doors it opens in me, prepares my work for the following day.

The supreme benefit for me at this point is time. When I see
people going for strolls or lolling about aimlessly or squandering time in vain discussions, I feel like going to the street corner and extending my hand like a beggar in order to entreat, “Alms, good Christians, grant me a little of the time you are losing—one hour, two hours, whatever you prefer.”

T
he day was finally declining. I crossed my arms, leaned my head back against the wall, and watched the setting sun. I felt neither joy, sorrow, nor fatigue. Just a sense of relief, as though my entrails had been emptied, as though I had shed all my blood, as though I was the hard transparent garment left by the cricket on the olive trunk when it hatches. A tiny skiff with a red sail was returning from fishing; I could discern the glittering fish on its deck. A tiny island opposite me had filled with violets. The diminutive, desolate chapel of the Crucified gleamed whitely at the mountain's summit, like an egg; the light clung to its whitewashed walls and did not wish to leave.

I heard the grating of pebbles on my right; someone was striding hastily over the shingle and approaching. I turned. A pointed cap flashed in the purple dusk and the acid smell of human sweat suffused the air. Moving to one side on the stone bench where I was seated, I made room for him to sit down near me.