I traveled through Greece, and gradually I began to see with my eyes and touch with my hands something that abstract thought cannot touch or see: the means by which strength and grace combine. I doubt that these two ingredients of perfection, Ares and Aphrodite, have ever joined together so organically in any other part of the world, have ever joined together so organically as in the austere, ever-smiling land of Greece. Some of her regions are severe and haughty, others full of feminine tenderness, still others serious and at the same time cheerful and gracious. But the spirit passed over all of them and by means of a temple, myth, or hero bequeathed the proper, suitable soul to each. That is why whoever journeys in Greece and has eyes to see with and a mind to think with, journeys in an unbroken magical unity from one spiritual victory to another. In Greece a person confirms the fact that spirit is the continuation and flower of matter, and myth the simple, composite expression of the most positive reality. The spirit has trodden upon the stones of Greece for many, many years; no matter where you go, you discover its divine traces.
Various regions in Greece are dual in nature, and the emotion which springs from them is also dual in nature. Harshness and tenderness stand side by side, complementing each other and coupling like a man with a woman. Sparta is one such source of tenderness and harshness. In front of you stands Taygetus, a hard, disdainful legislator full of cliffs and precipices, while below, stretched out at your feet like a woman in love, is the fruited, seductive plain. On the one hand Taygetus, the Mount Sinai of Greece, where the pitiless god of the Race dictates the most rigid of commandments: life is war, the world is a battlefield, your sole duty is to win; do not sleep, do not adorn yourselves, laugh, or talk; fighting is your sole purpose in life, therefore fight! And on the other hand, at Taygetus’s foot—Helen. Just as you begin to grow savage and to disdain the earth’s sweetness, suddenly Helen’s breath, like a flowering lemon tree, makes your mind reel.
Is this Spartan plain really so tender and voluptuous? I wonder. Is the fragrance of its oleanders really so intoxicating—or does all this fascination perhaps spring from Helen’s oft-kissed far-roving body? Certainly Eurotas would not possess its present-day seductive grace had it not flowed as a tributary into Helen’s immortal myth. For lands, seas, and rivers, as we well know, join with great beloved names and, evermore inseparable from them, flow into our hearts. Walk along the humble banks of the Eurotas and you feel your hands, hair, and thoughts become entangled in the perfume of an imaginary woman far more real, far more tangible, than the woman you love and touch. The world today is drowning in blood, passions rage in our present-day anarchistic hell, yet Helen, immortal and untouched, stands unmovable in the air of her extraordinary verses while time flows by in front of her.
The soil was fragrant; the dewdrops hanging from the lemon flowers capered in the sunlight. Suddenly a gentle breeze blew and a flower struck my forehead, sprinkling me with dew. A quiver ran through me, as though I had been touched by an invisible hand. The whole earth seemed a freshly bathed, laughing-weeping Helen. She was lifting her veils with their embroidered lemon flowers and, her palm to her mouth, her virginity constantly renewed, following a man, the strongest that could be found. And as she raised her legs with their snow-white, ankles, the round soles of her feet gleamed with blood.
What would this Helen have been if Homer’s breath had not passed over her? A beautiful woman like countless others who made their passage across this earth and perished. She would have been abducted, just as pretty girls are still frequently abducted in our mountain villages. And even if this abduction had ignited a war, everything—the war, the woman, the slaughter—would have perished if the Poet had not reached out his hand to save them. It is to the Poet that Helen owes her salvation; it is to Homer that this tiny riverbed, Eurotas, owes its immortality. Helen’s smile suffuses all the Spartan air. But even beyond this, she has entered our very blood streams. Every man has partaken of her in communion; to this day every woman reflects her splendor. Helen has become a love cry. She traverses the centuries, awakens in every man the yearning for kisses and perpetuation. She transforms every woman we clasp to our breast, even the most commonplace, into a Helen.
Thanks to this Spartan queen, sexual desire assumes exalted titles of nobility; the secret nostalgia for some lost embrace sweetens the brute within us. When we weep or cry out, Helen throws a magic herb into the bitter dram we are drinking, and we completely forget our pain. In her hand she holds a flower whose scent drives off serpents. At her touch ugly children become beautiful. She straddles the goat of the ancient Bacchic rites, shakes her foot with its untied sandal, and the entire world is transformed into a vineyard. One day when the ancient poet Stesichorus uttered an uncomplimentary word about her in one of his odes, he was immediately struck blind. Then, trembling and repentant, he took his lyre, stood up before the Greeks at a great festival, and sang the famous palinode:
What I said about you is not true, Helen;
you never boarded the swift ships,
nor did you ever reach the citadel of Troy.
He wept, holding his hands aloft; and all at once the light, submerged in tears, descended to the corners of his eyes.
Our ancestors held beauty contests in her honor, the “Heleneia.” Truly, the earth is a palaestra and Helen the unattainable achievement, the achievement beyond life, perhaps nonexistent, perhaps just a phantom. In one of the mystery cults the tradition confided to initiates was that the Achaeans did not fight at Troy for the true Helen, that only her image was discovered in Troy, that the real Helen had found refuge in Egypt, in a sacred temple where she remained untouched by human breath. Who knows—perhaps we too fight, weep, and kill each other here on earth only for Helen’s image. But on the other hand, who knows (the shades in Hades came to life when they drank the blood of a living man)—with all the blood that Helen’s shade has drunk over so many thousands of years, will it never be able to come to life again? I wonder. I wonder if the image will not eventually join its flesh, thus enabling us one day to embrace a real, warm body, a true Helen?
Taygetus the fierce warrior and Helen his wife. Inhaling Helen’s perfume amidst the oleanders of the Eurotas, I had forgotten myself. I felt ashamed. In order to breathe more virile air I set out one morning to climb Taygetus.
The mountain’s cheer, the pine tree’s balm, the fiery rocks, the hawks hovering above me, the impregnable solitude—all these fortified my heart. I climbed happily for many hours. Around noontime, however, black clouds gathered overhead. There were muffled thunderclaps. I started back down at a run, feeling the storm approaching behind me. I jumped from stone to stone, raced, competed with it so that it would not overtake me. But suddenly the pines quivered, the world grew dark, and I was belted by lightning flashes. The whirlwind had caught me. Plunging face-downward on the ground so that I would not fall, I closed my eyes and waited. The whole mountain shook; next to me two pines split in half and thundered down the slope. I smelled the sulphur in the air. All at once the torrent let loose. The wind subsided and huge necklaces of water poured out of the sky. The thyme, savory, sage, and mint, battered by the downpour, threw forth their scents; the entire mountain began to steam.
Getting up, I resumed the descent, rejoicing to have the water thrash my face, hair, and hands. Zeus the Descender was falling with all his might upon Earth, his suffocating wife, who split open with cackling laughter and received the male waters.
Soon the sky cleared. The storm had been a violent descent of the Holy Ghost; now, as the cuckoo began to proclaim, it was finished. At that very moment the sun went down. Far in the distance below me I spied the freshly bathed ruins of the Frankish citadel of the Villehardouins at the top of its hill, above Mistra. The entire sky had turned gold and green.
The next day, proceeding through orchards and cypress groves, I went as a pilgrim to Mistra, the Greek Pompeii. This sacred hill, the birthplace of modern Greece, possesses all the manifest and hidden charms needed to entice even th
e most difficult of souls: lemon and orange trees, narrow twisting lanes, half-naked children playing in the streets, women going for water, girls sitting beneath blossoming trees and embroidering. Life has begun to cling to this soil again; it is struggling to reclimb the whole of the ancestral hill. This is Mistra’s first zone, the green and inhabited one. Proceed farther and the dusty, treeless ascent begins. Striding through crumbled houses, you reach the charming sun-baked Byzantine churches—Perívleptos, Metrópoli, Aghioi Theodoroi, Aphendikó, Pandánassa. This is Mistra’s second zone, and it is studded with churches.
I was thirsty. I entered the Pandánassa convent to have the nuns offer me a glass of water. The courtyard was shining, the cells whitewashed and immaculate, the sofas covered with embroidered woolen blankets. The nuns ran to welcome me. Some were young, others stiff from rheumatism, all inordinately pale bacause they must work very hard in order to subsist. They keep vigils, they pray, and they never have enough food to calm their hunger. When they have a free hour, they bend over their handwork and embroider traditional motifs—tiny roses out of red silk thready crosses, monasteries, vases full of carnations, little cypress trees. You are overcome with sadness when they proudly spread these embroideries before you, as though showing you their dowries. They smile, say nothing, but you know that the bridegroom does not exist.
Pandánassa gleamed in the honey-green twilight like a small Byzantine pyx of ivory, worked with patience and love to house the Virgin’s sweetly effluent breath. What unity, concentration, and grace this church possesses, from the cornerstone of the foundation to the erotic curves of the dome! The whole of the charming temple lives and breathes, peacefully, like a warm animate organism. All the stones, carvings, paintings, and nuns exist as organic ingredients of this convent, as though one midday they had all been born simultaneously, from the same procreative shudder.
I had never expected to find such tenderness and warm human understanding in Byzantine paintings. Previous to this I had seen only fierce ascetic forms holding parchments covered with red letters and calling to us to despise nature and flee to the desert; to die in order to be saved. But now here were splendid colors, here were faces of the utmost sweetness. Christ entering Jerusalem on his humble beast, kindly and smiling, the disciples following with palm branches, and the populace gazing at them with ecstatic eyes, as at a cloud which passes and then scatters. . . . And the angel I saw at Aphendikó, a beautiful stalwart the green color of oxidized brass, his curly hair bound in a wide ribbon. With his impulsive stride and firm round knees he resembled a bridegroom heading for—But where was he heading with such joy and haste?
Just at that moment the bell began to ring softly, sweetly, for the Good Friday vigil. I entered the church’s warm domed interior. In the center, covered with lemon flowers, was the epitáphios, the sepulchral canopy, and lying dead upon the lemon flowers, He who is incessantly dying, incessantly resurrected. Once He was called Adonis, now Christ. Pale black-robed women were kneeling around Him, bending over Him, bewailing Him. The entire church smelled of wax, like a beehive. I thought of those other priestesses, the Melissae, at the temple of the Ephesian Artemis; also the temple of Apollo at Delphi, built of wax and feathers.
Suddenly the women’s laments, the unbearable dirge, broke out in full force. I knew that human suffering was the force which would resurrect God, but here in Helen’s kingdom my heart was not at all prepared to wail. Darkness had not fallen yet; I rose and continued to climb this hill with its ruined mansions, its towers sprawled on the ground, and, as a stone crown at the summit, the celebrated citadel of the Villehardouins. The great fortified gate was open, the courtyards deserted. I mounted the crumbling stairs and reached the battlements, forcing a surprised flock of crows to take wing. I looked down at the fertile plain below me and at the smoke which rose from the squat cottages; I could hear the creaking of a cart and a song filled with passion. The atmosphere all around me heaved a sigh. Specters filled the air. The blond daughters of Frankish seigneurs rose from the grave, together with the armor-encased knights who came here to the Peloponnesus in the role of conquerers, married Greek girls, became inoculated with Greek blood, and forgot their homeland. Thanks to our dark-skinned women with their raven-black hair and large eyes, the victors were vanquished.
A few days later I enjoyed another scene. You cross a dry riverbed shaded by plane trees and beflowered by osiers, you climb an austere mountain fragrant with savory and thyme, devoid of villages, people, goats, and sheep—utterly forsaken. Then, suddenly, behind a turn in the terrain, looming unexpectedly before you in the heart of the Peloponnesus is the famous temple of Apollo at Bassae. It is constructed from the same gray stones that compose the mountain, and the moment you face it, you sense the profound correspondence between temple and site. It seems a piece of the mountain, rock of its rock, wedged indistinguishably between the crags—itself a crag, but one over which the spirit has passed. Carved and placed as they are, the columns of this temple express the very essence of all this montigenous austerity and forsakenness. It is as though the temple were the cranium of the surrounding landscape, the sacred mound-circle inside whose sheltered precincts the mind of the site keeps ever-vigilant watch. Here the artistry of the ancients, continuing and expressing the landscape to perfection, does not make you gasp with astonishment. It lifts you to the summit along a human pathway, so gently and dexterously that you do not grow short of breath. You might say that the entire mountain had been longing for eons inside its tenebrous bulk to find expression, and that the moment it acquired this temple of Apollo, it felt relieved. Felt relieved—in other words assumed a meaning, its own meaning, and rejoiced.
Each day as I walked over the Greek land, I realized more clearly that ancient Greek civilization was not a supernatural flower suspended in mid-air; it was a tree that rooted itself deeply in the earth, consumed mud, and turned this mud into flowers. And the more mud it consumed, the more richly elaborate did this flowering become. The ancients’ splendid simplicity, balance, and serenity were not the natural, easily achieved virtues of a simple and balanced race. They were difficult exploits, the spoils of painful, dangerous campaigns. Greek serenity is intricate and tragic, a balance between fierce opposing forces which after a toilsome and prolonged struggle succeeded in making peace with one another and in reaching the point prescribed by a Byzantine mystic-effortlessness. In other words, effort’s peak.
The factor which renders Greece’s mountains, villages, and soil buoyant and immaterial is the light. In Italy the light is soft and feminine, in Ionia extremely gentle and full of oriental yearning, in Egypt thick and voluptuous. In Greece the light is entirely spiritual. Able to see clearly in this light, man succeeded in imposing order over chaos, in establishing a “cosmos”—and cosmos means harmony.
A little old lady emerged from the custodian’s hut next to the temple. She held two figs and a bunch of grapes in her palm. They were the first to ripen on this high plateau and she wished to present them to me as a gift. She was a sweet, thin, jovial old lady who surely must have beamed with radiance in her youth.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Maria.”
But as she saw me grasp a pencil to make note of this name, she extended her wrinkled hand to stop me.
“Mariyítsa,” she said with juvenile coquetry. “Mariyítsa.”
Since her name was to be perpetuated in writing, she seemed to want to save her other name, the pet one. This would awaken life’s sweetest moments in her memory.
“Mariyítsa . . .” she repeated, as though afraid I had failed to hear.
I was glad to see the eternal feminine rooted even in this most ramshackle of bodies.
“What’s all this around us?” I asked her.
“Don’t you see? Stones.”
“And why do people come from the ends of the earth to see them?”
The old woman hesitated a moment. Then, lowering her voice, she asked me, “Are you a foreigner?”<
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“No, Greek.”
Encouraged, she shrugged her shoulders.
“Foreign idiots!” she exclaimed, bursting into laughter.
This was not the first time I saw these old ladies, the ones who watch over ancient temples or famous churches containing wonderworking icons, laugh sacrilegiously at the saints or ancient marble daemons they guard. They associate with them daily, after all, and familiarity breeds contempt.
Old Mariyítsa watched me with satisfaction as I pecked at the pleasantly tart grapes she had given me.
“And what do you think about politics?” I asked, trying to tease her.
“Eh! my boy,” she answered with unexpected pride, “we’re very high up here, removed from the world, and we don’t hear its racket.”
We—in other words “the temple and myself.” And she had uttered the word removed in a proud tone which meant superior. I felt glad. The old woman’s remark, even more than the temple itself, satisfied my heart to the full.
I walked to and fro beneath the columns. It had rained two days before and pools of water still lay motionless and clear in the hollows of the broken marble. Leaning over, I saw fluffy white clouds pass like ghosts across the water’s surface. I had read that divinity had once been worshiped similarly in the Far East, in water-filled hollows over which clouds passed.
As I was returning to the plain, I saw an old man kneeling on the stones. He was leaning over a channel and watching the water run, his face bathed in inexpressible ecstasy. It seemed as though his nose, mouth, and cheeks had vanished; nothing remained but the two eyes which followed the water as it flowed between the rocks. I went up to him.
“What do you see there, old man?” I asked him.
And he, without lifting his head or removing his eyes from the water, replied, “My life, my life which is running out . . .”
All things in Greece—mountains, rivers, seas, valleys—become “humanized”: they speak to man in a language which is almost human. They do not torment or crushingly overwhelm him; they become his friends and fellow workers. The turbid, unsettled cry of the Orient grows pellucid when it passes through the light of Greece; humanized, it is transformed into logos—reason. Greece is the filter which, with great struggle, refines brute into man, eastern servitude into liberty, barbaric intoxication into sober rationality. To give features to the featureless and measure to the measureless, balancing the blind clashing forces, such is the mission of the much-buffeted sea and land known as Greece.