Nothing is certain. For that very reason every people, every individual, has a great responsibility in our amorphous, uncertain age, a greater responsibility than ever before. It is in such uncertain, possibility-filled times that the contribution of a people and of an individual can have incalculable value.
What, then, is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.
When I completed my full pilgrimage and remained in Bokhara a few days in order to rest, I felt the beloved sun finally striking me after Siberia’s inhuman gelidity, warming my spine and my soul. I had arrived a little before noon. Torrid heat, but the streets had been watered down and the air smelled of jasmine. Mohammedans with colorful turbans were sitting beneath canopies of straw matting drinking refreshing sherbets. Chubby youngsters with open shirt fronts were singing passionate oriental amanédhes, installed on high stools in the cafés. Feeling extremely hungry and thirsty, I bought a melon and sat down in the shade cast by the celebrated Kok-Kouba mosque. I placed the melon on my knees, cut it into slices, and began to eat. Its aroma, its sweetness, reached to my very bones. I was like the wilted rose of Jericho; I dove into this melon’s coolness and was revived.
A little girl went by, about seven years old, her back covered by a multitude of tiny, tiny braids with a shell, turquoise, or bronze half-moon tied to each in order to ward off the evil eye. As she passed in front of me, her hips swung like those of a mature woman, and the air smelled of musk.
At noontime the green-turbaned, white-bearded muezzin climbed the minaret opposite me, placed his palms to his ears, gazed at the heavens, and began in a sweet, sonorous voice to call the faithful to prayer. While he was calling, a stork sailed through the burning air, came to the minaret’s tip, and perched there on one leg.
I sat with open ears listening; with open eyes looking. I savored the sweeter-than-sweet, aromatic fruit. I was happy. I closed my eyes, but afraid that I might fall asleep and lose all this happiness, I opened them again. Bokhara’s celebrated square, the Registan, stood deserted in front of me. Each spring, once upon a time, maniacal pilgrims descended upon this city from every Mohammedan land and bewailed Hasan and Hosain, Ali’s two unjustly murdered sons. Caravans arrived laden with spices, apples, dates, and sacred prostitutes; young boys came mounted on white horses, with white doves in their fists, their shaven heads powdered with ashes and chaff; behind them the frenzied faithful in their brilliant white jelabs, striking their heads with their yataghans until the blood ran onto their twirled mustaches, their beards and white robes. They lamented forty days and forty nights, bellowing Hasan! Hosain! Hasan! Hosain! Afterwards, still lamenting, still covered with blood, they reclined beneath the blossoming trees and copulated with the sacred prostitutes.
But now Registan Square was deserted and the marvelous, colorful mosque lay half in ruins. They were ghosts; the cock had crowed, and they had vanished.
Toward what did men direct all this divine mania, this tumult and wailing? What was its purpose?
My soul felt overwhelmed with bitterness. I had grown weary of resurrecting the dead. In order to sleep and escape, I closed my eyes. I had a dream. Two stormy lips, woman’s lips, suspended themselves in the air without a face. They moved, and I heard a voice: “Who is your God?” “Buddha,” I unhesitatingly replied. But the lips moved again: “No, no. Epaphus!”
I jumped to my feet. All the hidden labor going on for the past three months in the cellar of my mind, all had been uncovered. The trap door to my vitals opened, and I saw. The whole of that time I had been agonizing and struggling like a serpent amidst thorns, toiling to change garment, to put forth a new one. I had been in pain without knowing why. Now, here was this dream: Buddha was the old garment, Epaphus the new.
Epaphus, the god of touch, who prefers flesh to shadow and like the wolf in the proverb does not wait upon the promises of others when it is a question of filling his belly. He trusts neither eye nor ear; he wants to touch, to grasp man and soil, to feel their warmth mix with his own, feel them become one with him. He even wants to turn the soul into body so that he can touch it. The most reliable and industrious of all the gods, who walks on earth, loves the earth, and wishes to remake it “in his own image and after his likeness”—that was my god.
Russia had performed her miracle noiselessly, without words. Like the serpent whose new garment has not yet developed and which is cold and creeps into the sun to warm itself, so too my soul crept into the new sun. When I awoke, I was no longer the same person, because formerly I had not known, and now I knew. I kept asking myself how a dream could change a man’s life. It does not change it, I replied; it simply announces that the change has taken place.
Toward what do men direct all the frenzied efforts they feel compelled to make? What is the purpose? Formerly I would have smiled beatifically and answered, “Phantasmagoria. The world does not exist. Injustice, hunger, joy, sorrow, and effort do not exist. Everything is a specter. Blow, and all will be dispelled.”
Now, however, I jumped to my feet with a feeling of relief. Dusk had begun to descend over Registan Square. I raised my head. “What is the purpose? Do not ask. No one knows, not even God, for He advances along with us, He too, searching and being exposed to danger; He too is given over to the struggle. Hunger and injustice exist in the heart, as does an abundance of darkness. These things you see are not specters; no matter how much you blow, they will not be dispelled. They are flesh and bone. Touch them; they exist. Don’t you hear a cry in the air? They are crying. What are they crying? Help! To whom are they crying? You! You: every man. Rise up. Our duty is not to ask questions, but to clasp hands one and all and mount the ascent.”
The world had changed when I stopped in Berlin again and then in Vienna on my way back to Greece at the end of those three months. No, not the world—my eyes. The brazen dances, barbaric modern music, mascaraed women, mascaraed men, the cuttingly ironic smile, the lust for gold and kisses—everything that had formerly seemed so strange and enticing to me, now called forth nausea and horror. I saw that they were portents of the end. An oppressive stink hung in the air, as though the world was rotting. Sodom and Gomorrah must have smelled the same.
So too must have Pompeii just before it was reduced to ashes. I felt the condemned city of pleasure rise suddenly into my thoughts one night as I roamed through Vienna’s brightly illuminated streets that teemed with women and laughter. I was very young when I first saw Pompeii, and incapable then of discovering the fearful message it has for us. Nor did I seek this message. At that time it never entered my mind that Pompeii’s fate could one day be our fate as well. The world for me then was still firmly, cozily glued to the shoulders of Christ. But now? . . . I decided to make a slight detour on my return trip, in order to see Pompeii again.
The sky was lightly overcast, the springtime grass had blanketed the thresholds and courtyards; the streets were the way I like them, deserted. I roamed all by myself in the empty city, whistling.
The houses were open, without doors, without owners. Taverns, temples, theaters, and baths—all deserted. Still preserved on the walls in faded colors were nude dancers, moronic-looking cupids, cocks, dogs, and shameless depictions of intercourse between humans and animals.
A voice suddenly rang in my ear: “May my god likewise enable me to walk in Paris and London, talking Russian to the comrades!” I shuddered; a terrible foreboding traversed my spine.
Pompeii’s larders had been full; its women brazen, freshly bathed, and sterile; its men faithless, ironic, and tired. All the god-denying gods—Greek, African, Asian—were there in a cowardly swarm, herded into one democratic flock of wickedness. Smiling cunningly, they divided up offerings and people. The whole city lay stretched on its back at the foot of Vesuvius, guffawing uncon
cernedly.
I ascended a rise and looked. Now, after so many years and so much struggle, I understood. Blessings upon this sinful city for bringing us the message that the entire world is a Pompeii shortly before the eruption! What is the use of such a world with its brazen women, faithless men, with its villainy, injustice, and disease? All these sharp merchants, anthropophagic triggermen, these priests trading god in retail, these panders and eunuchs—why should they live? Why should all these children grow up to occupy the places their parents occupied in the taverns, factories, and brothels? All this matter prevents the spirit from passing. Whatever spirit this world once possessed was expended in creating a brilliant civilization—ideas, religious, arts and crafts, sciences, deeds. Now this world has vented its strength. Let the barbarians come to clear the obstructed road and open a new riverbed for the spirit.
I see multitudes of the oppressed and hungry charging the laden tables where the masters sit stupefied from heavy eating and drinking. The chimera ignites those who are making the assault; the others, the ones who are sitting, suddenly hear the noise. They turn. At first they laugh; then they grow pale, look down anxiously, and perceive, perceive that their slaves and servant girls, the sharecroppers, the workers, the barefooted, are rising. A sacred moment! The greatest feats of thought, art, and action were begotten during these times of man’s headlong ascent.
The masters band together to resist, and they do resist. But the entire momentum of our times is against them. They have eaten, drunk, created a civilization, lost their vigor. The moment has come for the final form of their duty: they must vanish.
As soon as the new tables are laden, the slaves will begin to grow fat and stupefied in their own turn. Other tyrannized multitudes will rise from the soil, with Hunger and the Chimera, the soul’s generals, once more leading the way. And this regular rhythm will continue forever, without cease.
This is the law; only in this way can life renew itself and advance. All living organisms (and ideas and civilizations are living organisms) feel the irresistible inner need, and beyond this the obligation, to grasp and assimilate whatever they can from their surroundings, making this their own—to rule, if they can, the world. And a new idea is the most famished and grasping of all beasts.
But at the same time another law begins to operate, the pitiless law that by however much the living organism carries out its duty to expand and rule, by so much, and more, does it approach its downfall. Hubris is perhaps the only sin which the universal harmony considers mortal and does not forgive. The culmination of an organism’s power is fated to engender its destruction.
There is also this incomprehensible fact: precisely because the living organism has accomplished its duty, that is why it is annihilated. If it had not carried out this duty, it would have lived—vegetated—for a much longer time, without bothering others, without being bothered itself.
It would seem that this disastrous duty was embedded in the organism’s heart to help it disappear once it has completed its mission to overtop and conquer, to disappear lest it stand in the way of another living organism which begins to lift its hand in revolt and wishes, in its turn, to rule the world. It would seem that a great explosive élan exists in life’s every molecule, as though each such molecule had compressed into it the impetus of life in its entirety, ready to explode at every collision. Life liberates its inner yearnings in this way, and advances.
This law seems unjust to us at first and throws us into a rage. But if we bend over to look more closely, we are overcome with admiration. Thanks to this law the barbaric force loses its almighty strength. The strong man does not swell up inordinately with cheek and insolence, for while on the one hand this law of harmony prods him to expand his might to the utmost, on the other it reminds him that each moment he advances in the service of the All, he advances toward his own personal annihilation.
The Bolshevik leaders do not know this, nor should they. Destiny places a blindfold over their eyes to keep them from seeing where they are headed. If they saw, their élan would decrease.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability, to divine which wind is urging all these waves of mankind upward. I bend over the age in which I live, that tiny, imperceptible arc of the vast circle, and struggle to attain a clear view of today’s duty. Perhaps this is the only way a man can carry out something immortal within the ephemeral moment of his life: immortal because he collaborates with an immortal rhythm.
I feel most deeply that a man given over to the struggle ascends from minerals to plants, from plants to animals, from animals to man, and then fights for liberty. The struggler assumes a new appearance in every decisive age. Today he is the leader of the rising proletariat. He shouts Justice! Happiness! Liberty! giving the comrades slogans and encouraging them, while no one possesses the terrible secret that justice, happiness, and liberty keep growing ever more remote.
It is right and useful, however, that all who struggle for an ideal should believe they will reach it and that as soon as they do reach it, happiness will reign thoughout the world. In this way the spirit acquires a stout heart and gathers up courage for the endless ascent. It is just the same when the carter places a handful of fodder before the mouth of his horse. The horse, pulling the heavily loaded cart, stretches its neck and eats a stalk, but the fodder grows ever more remote. The horse follows, struggling to reach it, and thus advances and mounts the ascent.
I am overcome with respect. In the midst of these dark masses I clearly discern the Cry of the Invisible that is ascending and prodding mankind to ascend with it. Had I lived in other times, I would have discerned this Cry within the masses of nobles, burghers, manufacturers, and merchants who were rising then, and would have allied myself with them. Men are caught up in an eternal assault higher than themselves, an assault which pushes them upward, leaves them when they are finally exhausted, and dashes to other raw material that has not lost its vigor.
We have a duty to follow and aid this eternal assault in our own epoch, to work in collaboration with it. Today it has seized upon the multitudes who slave and hunger; these multitudes today are its raw material. The masses cannot apprehend this merciless Assault. They give it tiny appellations to enable them to render it intelligible to their narrow minds and agreeable to their everyday needs.
They name it happiness, equality, peace. But the invisible Struggler, leaving these lures to hearten the masses, battles harshly, mercilessly, to pierce through minds and bodies and create a message of liberty out of all the contemporary cries of wrath and hunger.
It is extremely dangerous to lean over and see. You may be terror-stricken then, because you will discover an appalling secret: the Struggler is not interested in men; he is interested in the flame which kindles men. His course is a red line which perforates men as though they were a chaplet of skulls. I follow this red line; of all things in the world it alone interests me, even though I feel it passing through my own skull, piercing and smashing it. Of my own free will I accept necessity.
But let us stop at human boundaries; only inside them can we work and do our duty. Let us not advance beyond them to the brink, because the abyss yawns at the brink, and our blood might run cold. Standing at the brink with his calm, venomous smile is Buddha, the great prestidigitator who blows and makes the world disappear. But we do not want the world to disappear, nor do we want Christ to load it on His shoulders and transfer it to heaven. We want it to live and struggle here with us. We love it just as the potter loves and desires his clay. We have no other material to work with, no other solid field over chaos to sow and reap.
27
THE CAUCASUS
I WAS still in Italy when I received a telegram from the Ministry of Social Welfare in Athens asking if I would consent to undertake the Ministry’s General Directorship, with the specific mission of going to the Caucasus, where more than a hundred thousand Greeks were in danger. I was to try and find some means by which they could
remove to Greece and be saved.
It was the first time in my life I had been presented with the opportunity to engage in action, to wrestle with living, flesh-and-blood men instead of having to struggle any longer with theories, ideas, Christs, and Buddhas. I was delighted. I had grown weary of this shadowboxing, of wandering from place to place carrying questions and seeking an answer. The questions kept constantly renewing themselves; the answer kept constantly shifting. Question had heaped upon question, serpent upon serpent, asphyxiating me. The moment was ripe to test whether action, by slicing its sword through the insoluble knots of speculation, was alone capable of giving an answer.
I consented for another reason as well: I pitied my eternally crucified race, once more endangered in the mountains of Prometheus, the Caucasus. Once more the State and Violence had nailed not Prometheus now but Greece herself to the Caucasus. This was her cross and she was calling, calling not on the gods but on men, her children, to save her. Thus, identifying today’s adversities with Greece’s eternal suffering, elevating the contemporary tragic vicissitudes into symbols, I consented.
I left Italy, stopped at Athens, took ten choice colleagues with me (mostly Cretans), and departed for the Caucasus to see at first hand how these thousands of people might be saved. On the south, the Kurds were nailing horseshoes onto every Greek they caught; on the north, the Bolsheviks were descending with fire and the axe. Naked, hungry, ill, the Greeks of Batum, Sukhumi, Tiflis and Kars stood in the middle and awaited death, the noose growing ever tighter around their necks. Once again it was the State on the one hand, Violence on the other—the eternal allies.