The Colossus of Maroussi (7 page)

The man who has caught this spirit of eternality which is everywhere in Greece and who has embedded it in his poems is George Seferiades, whose pen name is Seferis. I know his work only from translation, but even if I had never read his poetry I would say this is the man who is destined to transmit the flame. Seferiades is more Asiatic than any of the Greeks I met; he is from Smyrna originally but has lived abroad for many years. He is languorous, suave, vital and capable of surprising feats of strength and agility. He is the arbiter and reconciler of conflicting schools of thought and ways of life. He asks innumerable questions in a polyglot language; he is interested in all forms of cultural expression and seeks to abstract and assimilate what is genuine and fecundating in all epochs. He is passionate about his own country, his own people, not in a hidebound chauvinistic way but as a result of patient discovery following upon years of absence abroad. This passion for country is a special peculiarity of the intellectual Greek who has lived abroad. In other peoples I have found it distasteful, but in the Greek I find it justifiable, and not only justifiable, but thrilling, inspiring. I remember going with Seferiades one afternoon to look at a piece of land on which he thought he might build himself a bungalow. There was nothing extraordinary about the place—it was even a bit shabby and forlorn, I might say. Or rather it
was,
at first sight. I never had a chance to consolidate my first fleeting impression; it changed right under my eyes as he led me about like an electrified jelly-fish from spot to spot, rhapsodizing on herbs, flowers, shrubs, rocks, clay, slopes, declivities, coves, inlets and so on. Everything he looked at was Greek in a way that he had never known before leaving his country. He could look at a headland and read into it the history of the Medes, the Persians, the Dorians, the Minoans, the Atlanteans. He could also read into it some fragments of the poem which he would write in his head on the way home while plying me with questions about the New World. He was attracted by the Sibylline character of everything which met his eye. He had a way of looking forwards and backwards, of making the object of his contemplation revolve and show forth its multiple aspects. When he talked about a thing or a person or an experience he caressed it with his tongue. Sometimes he gave me the impression of being a wild boar which had broken its tusks in furious onslaughts born of love and ecstasy. In his voice there was a bruised quality as if the object of his love, his beloved Greece, had awkwardly and unwittingly mangled the shrill notes of ululation. The mellifluous Asiatic warbler had more than once been floored by an unexpected thunderbolt; his poems were becoming more and more gem-like, more compact, compressed, scintillating and revelatory. His native flexibility was responding to the cosmic laws of curvature and finitude. He had ceased going out in all directions: his lines were making the encircling movement of embrace. He had begun to ripen into the universal poet—by passionately rooting himself into the soil of his people. Wherever there is life to-day in Greek art it is based on this Antaean gesture, this passion which transmits itself from heart to feet, creating strong roots which transform the body into a tree of potent beauty. This cultural transmutation is also evidenced in a physical way by the vast work of reclamation which is going on throughout the country. The Turks, in their fervid desire to desolate Greece, converted the land into a desert and a graveyard; since their emancipation the Greeks have been struggling to reforest the land. The goat has now become the national enemy. He will be dislodged as the Turk was dislodged, in time. He is the symbol of poverty and helplessness. Trees, more trees, that is the cry. The tree brings water, fodder, cattle, produce; the tree brings shade, leisure, song, brings poets, painters, legislators, visionaries. Greece is now, bare and lean as a wolf though she be, the only Paradise in Europe. What a place it will be when it is restored to its pristine verdure exceeds the imagination of man to-day. Anything may happen when this focal spot blazes forth with new life. A revivified Greece can very conceivably alter the whole destiny of Europe. Greece does not need archaeologists—she needs arboriculturists. A verdant Greece may give hope to a world now eaten away by white-heart rot.

My talks with Seferiades really began on the high verandah at Amaroussion when, taking me by the arm, he walked me back and forth in the gathering dusk. Every time I met him he came to me with his whole being, wrapping it around my arm with warmth and tenderness. If I visited him at his chambers it was the same thing: he would open all the doors and windows leading to his heart. Usually he would put on his hat and accompany me to my hotel; it was not just a polite gesture, it was an act of friendship, a demonstration of an enduring love. I shall remember Seferiades and all my Greek friends for this quality which is now so rare among men. I shall remember his sister Jeanne too, and other Greek women whom I met, because of their queenliness. It is a quality we scarcely ever meet with in the modern woman. Like the warm friendliness of the men this quality which all Greek women share to a greater or less degree is the counterpart, or shall I say the corresponding human virtue, which goes with the supernal light. One would have to be a toad, a snail, or a slug not to be affected by this radiance which emanates from the human heart as well as from the heavens. Wherever you go in Greece the people open up like flowers. Cynical-minded people will say that it is because Greece is a small country, because they are eager to have visitors, and so on. I don’t believe it. I have been in a few small countries which left quite the opposite impression upon me. And as I said once before, Greece is not a small country—it is impressively vast. No country I have visited has given me such a sense of grandeur. Size is not created by mileage always. In a way which it is beyond the comprehension of my fellow countrymen to grasp Greece is infinitely larger than the United States. Greece could swallow both the United States and Europe. Greece is a little like China or India. It is a world of illusion. And the Greek himself is everywhere, like the Chinaman again. What is Greek in him does not rub off with his ceaseless voyaging. He does not leave little particles of himself distributed all over the lot, as the American does, for example. When the Greek leaves a place he leaves a hole. The American leaves behind him a litter of junk—shoe laces, collar buttons, razor blades, petroleum tins, vaseline jars and so on. The Chinese coolies, as I also said somewhere before, actually feed on the garbage which the Americans throw overboard when they are in port. The poor Greek walks around in the remnants dropped by rich visitors from all parts of the world; he is a true internationalist, disdaining nothing which is made by human hands, not even the leaky tubs discarded by the British mercantile marine. To try to instill in him a sense of national pride, to ask him to become chauvinistic about national industries, fisheries and so forth seems to be a piece of absurdity. What difference does it make to a man whose heart is filled with light whose clothes he is wearing or whether these clothes be of the latest model or pre-war in design? I have seen Greeks walking about in the most ludicrous and abominable garb imaginable—straw hat from the year 1900, billiard cloth vest with pearl buttons, discarded British ulster, pale dungarees, busted umbrella, hair shirt, bare feet, hair matted and twisted—a makeup which even a Kaffir would disdain, and yet, I say it sincerely and deliberately, I would a thousand times rather be that poor Greek than an American millionaire. I remember the old keeper of the ancient fortress at Nauplia. He had done twenty years in that same prison for murder. He was one of the most aristocratic beings I ever met. His face was positively radiant. The pittance on which he was trying to live would not keep a dog, his clothes were in tatters, his prospects were nil. He showed us a tiny patch of earth he had cleared near the rampart where he hoped next year to grow a few stalks of corn. If the government would give him about three cents more a day he would just about be able to pull through. He begged us, if we had any influence, to speak to one of the officials for him. He wasn’t bitter, he wasn’t melancholy, he wasn’t morbid. He had killed a man in anger and he had done twenty years for it; he would do it again, he said, if the same situation arose. He had no remorse, no guilt. He was a marvelous old fellow, stout as an oak, gay, hearty, insouciant. Just three cents more a day and everything would be jake. That was all that was on his mind. I envy him. If I had my choice between being the president of a rubber tire company in America or the prison keeper of the old fortress at Nauplia I would prefer to be the prison keeper, even without the additional three cents. I would take the twenty years in jail too, as part of the bargain. I would prefer to be a murderer with a clear conscience, walking about in tatters and waiting for next year’s crop of corn, than the president of the most successful industrial corporation in America. No business magnate ever wore such a benign and radiant expression as this miserable Greek. Of course there is this to remember—the Greek only killed one man, and that in righteous anger, whereas the successful American businessman is murdering thousands of innocent men, women and children in his sleep every day of his life. Here nobody can have a clear conscience: we are all part of a vast interlocking murdering machine. There a murderer can look noble and saintly, even though he live like a dog.

Nauplia
…. Nauplia is a seaport directly south of Corinth on a peninsula where are located Tiryns and Epidaurus. You can look across the water and see Argos. Above Argos, going north towards Corinth, lies Mycenae. Draw a ring about these places and you mark off one of the most hoary, legendary areas in Greece. I had touched the Peloponnesus before, at Patras, but this is the other side, the magical side. How I got to Nauplia is a long story. I must go back a bit.

I am in Athens. Winter is coming on. People are asking me—have you been to Delphi, have you been to San Turini, have you been to Lesbos or Samos or Poros? I have been practically nowhere, except back and forth to Corfu. One day I had been as far as Mandra, which is past Eleusis on the way to Megara. Fortunately the road was blocked and we had to turn back. I say fortunately because on that day, if we had gone another few miles, I would have lost my head completely. In another way I was doing a great deal of traveling; people came to me at the cafés and poured out their journeys to me; the captain was always returning from a new trajectory; Seferiades was always writing a new poem which went back deep into the past and forward as far as the seventh root race; Katsimbalis would take me on his monologues to Mt. Athos, to Pelion and Ossa, to Leonidion and Monemvasia; Durrell would set my mind whirling with Pythagorean adventures; a little Welshman, just back from Persia, would drag me over the high plateaus and deposit me in Samarkand where I would meet the headless horseman called Death. All the Englishmen I met were always coming back from somewhere, some island, some monastery, some ancient ruin, some place of mystery. I was so bewildered by all the opportunities lying before me that I was paralyzed.

Then one day Seferiades and Katsimbalis introduced me to the painter Ghika. I saw a new Greece, the quintessential Greece which the artist had abstracted from the muck and confusion of time, of place, of history. I got a bifocal slant on this world which was now making me giddy with names, dates, legends. Ghika has placed himself in the center of all time, in that self-perpetuating Greece which has no borders, no limits, no age. Ghika’s canvases are as fresh and clean, as pure and naked of all pretense, as the sea and light which bathes the dazzling islands. Ghika is a seeker after light and truth: his paintings go beyond the Greek world. It was Ghika’s painting which roused me from my bedazzled stupor. A week or so later we all boarded the boat at Piraeus to go to Hydra where Ghika had his ancestral home. Seferiades and Katsimbalis were jubilant: they had not had a holiday in ages. It was late Fall, which means that the weather was beautifully mild. Towards noon we came within sight of the island of Poros. We had been having a bite on deck—one of those impromptu meals which Katsimbalis loves to put away at any hour of the day or night, when he is in good fettle. I suppose I’ll never again experience the warmth of affection which surrounded me that morning as we embarked on our journey. Everybody was talking at once, the wine was flowing, the food was being replenished, the sun which had been veiled came out strong, the boat was rocking gently, the war was on but forgotten, the sea was there but the shore too, the goats were clambering about, the lemon groves were in sight and the madness which is in their fragrance had already seized us and drawn us tightly together in a frenzy of self-surrender.

I don’t know which affected me more deeply—the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land. Coming into Poros gives the illusion of the deep dream. Suddenly the land converges on all sides and the boat is squeezed into a narrow strait from which there seems to be no egress. The men and women of Poros are hanging out of the windows, just above your head. You pull in right under their friendly nostrils, as though for a shave and haircut en route. The loungers on the quay are walking with the same speed as the boat; they can walk faster than the boat if they choose to quicken their pace. The island revolves in cubistic planes, one of walls and windows, one of rocks and goats, one of stiff-blown trees and shrubs, and so on. Yonder, where the mainland curves like a whip, lie the wild lemon groves and there in the Spring young and old go mad from the fragrance of sap and blossom. You enter the harbor of Poros swaying and swirling, a gentle idiot tossed about amidst masts and nets in a world which only the painter knows and which he has made live again because like you, when he first saw this world, he was drunk and happy and carefree. To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb. It is a joy too deep almost to be remembered. It is a kind of numb idiot’s delight which produces legends such as that of the birth of an island out of a foundering ship. The ship, the passage, the revolving walls, the gentle undulating tremor under the belly of the boat, the dazzling light, the green snake-like curve of the shore, the beards hanging down over your scalp from the inhabitants suspended above you, all these and the palpitant breath of friendship, sympathy, guidance, envelop and entrance you until you are blown out like a star fulfilled and your heart with its molten smithereens scattered far and wide. It is now, as I write this, just about the same time of day some few months later. The clock and the calendar say so, at any rate. In point of truth it is aeons since I passed through that narrow strait. It will never happen again. Ordinarily I would be sad at the thought, but I am not now. There is every reason to be sad at this moment: all the premonitions which I have had for ten years are coming true. This is one of the lowest moments in the history of the human race. There is no sign of hope on the horizon. The whole world is involved in slaughter and bloodshed. I repeat—
I am not sad
. Let the world have its bath of blood—I will cling to Poros. Millions of years may pass and I may come back again and again on one planet or another, as human, as devil, as archangel (I care not how, which, what or when), but my feet will never leave that boat, my eyes will never close on that scene, my friends will never disappear. That was a moment which endures, which survives world wars, which outlasts the life of the planet Earth itself. If I should ever attain the fulfillment which the Buddhists speak of, if I should ever have the choice of attaining Nirvana or remaining behind to watch over and guide those to come, I say now let me remain behind, let me hover as a gentle spirit above the roofs of Poros and look down upon the voyager with a smile of peace and good cheer. I can see the whole human race straining through the neck of the bottle here, searching for egress into the world of light and beauty. May they come, may they disembark, may they stay and rest awhile in peace. And on a glad day let them push on, let them cross the narrow strait, on, on, a few more miles—to Epidaurus, the very seat of tranquillity, the world center of the healing art.