Tales and Imaginings (18 page)

Then, action! B and I waded out and dived as deep as we could after the fish. I had goggles on, and I saw hundreds of tiny fish hanging motionless in the water like the crystals of a chandelier, and a few big fish on the bottom. But it was too deep for us. We
almost burst ourselves trying again and again to get down to them. Benny came up spouting with laughter and crying ‘We’re not
Tritons
!’ D was disgusted; any of those muscular local foreshore loafers could have done it. But we were too excited by the spectacle to fret over a few fish. And by then we were ravenous, we wanted to get back for breakfast.

There was a strange end to the escapade. I think you and M had gone on ahead and were out of sight by the time we had collected some reasonable-sized fish that washed ashore. As we came home along the coast B touched my arm silently to make me look back, and there was Dimitri standing up on a rock at the top of the beach and staring at the sea. He was too far away for us to read his face but he was as rigid as a statue. Then, as we watched, he lit the fuse on the last of his dynamite, and ran down the shore and flung it into the water, and without even waiting for the explosion turned his back on it and went off inland by himself. And somehow we knew he’d never go dynamiting again.

Well, I don’t know why I’ve written all that out, or if
I should post it. A memory, and perhaps you remember it all differently. But you can say, surely, in gratitude to the past, that you too have holidayed in Arcadia, whatever happened later.

Will you write and tell us about your life since?

We are both well and keep busy.

M joins with me in sending you our love and best wishes for the future.

Headless, but still maintaining the poses of life. Having no heads, with our imaginary heads we imagine that we have heads.

DEMETER, GODDESS OF GROWING CORN, WAS
SHOWN RESTING HER CHIN (NOW MISSING)
UPON HER HAND. IN GREEK ART THIS WAS
A CONVENTIONAL GESTURE OF MOURNING.
HER GRIEF IS

one might think, not

FOR HER DAUGHTER, PERSEPHONE, WHO WAS
ABDUCTED BY THE GOD OF THE UNDERWORLD

but for her own lost features and those of the other Immortals seated by her: Zeus, and his consort Hera who

LOOKS TOWARDS HIM DRAWING BACK HER VEIL
IN THE TRADITIONAL GESTURE OF THE BRIDE

revealing that her face is a broken stone.

Heads were particularly targeted by the fifth-century iconoclasts who broke the spirit of paganism to make the temple into a Christian church. On the panels representing

THE BATTLE OF LAPITHS AND CENTAURS

the combatants have lopped each other until they lack brains to direct their blows and limbs to grasp their weapons, but still fight on.

THE HEAD IS MISSING BUT ONCE LOOKED TOWARDS
THE CENTRE OF THE PEDIMENT. SHE IS PERHAPS
HESTIA, GODDESS OF THE HEARTH.

The figures of other members of the Greek pantheon she would have recognized on this eastern pediment were torn down to make room for the porch of the church, and no longer exist.

Under Turkish rule the church became a magazine for troops
garrisoning
the Acropolis. During the Venetian siege of 1687 it was shelled, and the gunpowder stored in it exploded. Walls burst
outwards
, flinging down the frieze of the Panathenaic procession above them. This solemn and joyous celebration of the Goddess of
Wisdom
by the people of her city is
now reduced to a parade of amputees. Among these veterans

FOUR GIRLS WALK IN PROCESSION CARRYING JUGS.

Two of them, victims of napalm, are seared meat from hips to shoulders. Some youths are shown driving cattle; the realistic
attitude
of one of these sacrificial beasts

IS THOUGHT TO HAVE INSPIRED KEATS TO
WRITE IN HIS ‘ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’ OF
‘THAT HEIFER LOWING TO THE SKIES’.

But if the animal’s head is twisted upwards in a spasm it is because her rump has been beaten into a mass of scabs. One of the chariot teams in the procession

HAS SUFFERED PARTICULARLY. ONLY THE MIDDLE
AND REAR QUARTERS OF THE HORSES ARE VISIBLE.

Of another,

THE CHARIOTEER AND FOOT SOLDIER ARE

LOST ALL BUT FOR THEIR HANDS

which stretch into existence as if reaching through the bars of a prison window to grasp at air.

The Venetians dragged down as booty what statues still survived on the western pediment, and wrecked them in doing so. These figures are reduced to frightful gobbets.

A FRAGMENT OF POSEIDON’S
POWERFUL TORSO IS IN ATHENS

and what we see here is a chest cavity full of stone.

IRIS WAS A MESSENGER GOD – SHE WAS WINGED

but the roots of her wings are empty sockets now. Some of these personages have lost their identities, and more. A drawing
predating
the explosion shows one of them, perhaps Oreithyia, lover of Boreas, the god of the north wind, holding her twin children.

THE TORSO OF ONE SON IS DISPLAYED
IN AN ADJOINING ROOM.

Throughout the eighteenth century the heaps of masonry were quarried by lime-burners and pedlars of souvenirs. Gentlemen
making
the Grand Tour carried home choice pieces.

RIGHT BREAST OF A DRAPED FIGURE.

The curiosity cabinets of Europe were laden with exiled body-parts.

RIGHT FOOT OF A LAPITH WOMAN.

In 1801 Lord Elgin’s men began to remove whatever seemed worth taking.

FRAGMENT OF A LOWER LEG.

Hundreds of tons of carved stone were crated up, shipped to England, stored here and there for years, sold to the government, sorted, labelled and exposed in the British Museum.

THE FEET OF HERMES ARE DISPLAYED SEPARATELY.

These scraps ache with separation.

ONE OF AMPHITRITE’S ARMS IS IN A SHOWCASE
IN AN ADJOINING ROOM.

Fossilized sighs lie under glass.

VARIOUS GROUPS OF PEDESTRIANS WALKED AHEAD
OF THE CHARIOTS. THE SURVIVING FRAGMENTS
ARE MAINLY IN ATHENS.

What life they have is in abeyance, encisted, sustained only by the remote chances of reintegration.

THE TORSO WAS IN THE ELGIN COLLECTION WHILE
THE HEAD WAS FORMERLY AT CHATSWORTH HOUSE.
A SUBSTANTIAL FRAGMENT OF SCULPTURE IN ATHENS
HAS ALSO BEEN SHOWN TO JOIN WITH THIS

agonized limbless

TORSO

which now wears its head on a neck ringed with a dark groove as if a cord has been tightened round it.

To see these lumps of rock as they are, disregarding their seductive portraiture of mortal and immortal beings as they should be, is counterintuitive. It feels unnatural, even perverse, to withdraw one’s attention from the lovely representation of flesh and fabric, and concentrate on the areas of crude stone. Vision is
repelled by these patches like water by grease. Their texture baffles the eye and is
difficult
to characterize. On a scale of tenths of an inch it looks like blunt, opaque, half-crushed crystals; on a scale of a hands width it shows irregular scallopings, so shallow in places they are scarcely traceable, as if this damage itself had suffered damage. A
sedimentary
geology, little metamorphosed from its origins in seabed muds. Raw material. Bedrock. Matrix. The underworld of matter, in which, to grow, the cornseed must pass half the year. The random outcroppings of this enigmatic substrate interact strangely with
surfaces
worked and polished to reflect public meanings. In one panel the grain of the rock is horizontal; it replaces the lower parts and legs of a rank of horses with a speed-blur so that they seem to pour off the edge into a sink-hole formed by a missing corner of the next slab. Elsewhere two badly eroded horsemen are seen as if through heavy rain slanting across them from behind; they lean back into it with mute endurance. Another rider’s features have been obliterated apart from an earhole and one eye, which together provide a widely spaced pair of eyes to a streaky oriental dragon-mask. A horse’s muzzle has been truncated obliquely; the remains of the deep slit of the mouth appear in the cross-section, which looks like a torn slice of bread. It is natural to think of the complement of this sad circus of mutilated creatures as the sum total of all that has been detached from it since its creation: labelled and boxed ankles, noses and
earlobes
in museum store-rooms, unidentifiable nuggets shovelled aside and carted off to be thrown into the foundations of walls, abraded particles blowing in dust around the world – all retrievable in thought, down to the half-dozen molecules I saw a visitor wipe off a horse’s mane with a touch of the finger a moment ago as I sat, still as a statue, ruminating in a corner of the Parthenon Rooms. The Greek ideal — virility harmonized by grace, femininity
energized
by virtue, the animal suffused with nobility — is so familiar an inheritance that our mental restoration of these carvings is a reflex of thought. Unhesitatingly we make good the blemishes, round out lost substance, match notional left with extant right hands. But let us suspend the assumption that it is
our task to restore all this stone to its former state. Why put a head on this hacked neck, rather than an arm bearing a shield, or a horse’s leg? The attachment need not
come from the repertoire of ancient Athens. It could be an
elephant’s
trunk or the tentacles of a squid. It could be vegetable, architectural, mechanical, of any age or provenance. All the scars of all these marbles could be the rooting-places of one vast jungle of incoherent forms, investing the British Museum, overgrowing
London
, packing the whole of space. There is no need to explore this fantasy further; we live in its entrails. Or we can let these scars tell us that, of two conjoined twins, one, the less viable, has been ablated, to save the other. On which side of the knifeblade was our universe? Were we the sacrificial victims, the not-unblemished beasts, left with a ruined body in a history dying of its birth? If so, then elsewhere, in that radically disjoint alternative future, the promise of the Panathenaea is
fulfilled. Millennia of millennia have already passed in that dawn-lit realm, of which the Greek vision was a faint prefiguration. If we wandered into it in a dream we would find we lacked the evolved senses and mentality to comprehend anything of it. A half-formed phrase, almost meaningless, might remain with us on our wakening: something about the world as the grey eye of wisdom; something about