The Revolt of Aphrodite (3 page)

The young man that I was then cannot escape the charge of
exercising
a certain duplicity towards her; he condescended, letting his narcissism have full sway. Well, I don’t know, many factors were
involved
. This little angel had dirty toes and was something of a thief I believe. I found some notes from this period whose irrelevance proves that even then Charlock had an obstinate vein of
introspection
running along parallel, so to speak, with his mundane life of
action. The second, the yellow exercise book—the one with the drawings of the cochlea and the outline for my model deafness-aid—had other kinds of data thrown about in it.

Walking about Athens at night he might note: “The formication, the shuddering-sweet melting almost to faintness…. Why, the structure of the genitals is particularly adapted to such phenomena, Bolsover. (Bolsover was my tutor at Kings. I still converse with him mentally in prose and worse.) The slightest friction of a white hand will alert the dense nerve ganglia with their great vascularity. The affect disperses itself through the receiving centres of the autonomic nervous system, solar plexus, hypogastric plexus, and lumbosacral or pelvic…. Hum. The kiss breaks surface here. The autobiography of a single kiss from Iolanthe. Note also, Bolsover, that in
embryology
the final organ is progressively differentiated from an anlage—which may be defined as the first accumulation of cells recognisable as the commencement of the final organ. This is about as far as one can go; but even this is not far enough back for me. Surely once in the testes of my old man, in the ape-gland once,
I
was
?”

These problems brought sadness and perplexity to my loving. I would light a candle and examine the sleeping figure with concern for its mysterious history; it seemed to me that it might be possible to trace back the undermeanings of pleasure and pain, an
unreasonable
wish I now recognise. Ass. Ape. Worm.

Her teeth were rather fine and small with just a trace of
irregularity
in their setting—enough to make her smile at once rueful and ravenous. She was too self-indulgent to husband her efforts in the professional sense—or perhaps too honest not to wish to give
service
? She could be blotted out sexually and retire into an exhaustion so extreme as to resemble death. Poor Iolanthe never got enough to eat so it was easy for a well-fed man to impose orgasm after orgasm on her until she reached the point of collapse. In our case the thing worked perfectly—indeed so perfectly that it puzzled her; we ignited each other like engines tuned to perfect pitch. Of course this is purely a technical question—one of perfect psychic and physical fit—queer there is not a science of it, nor a school in which one can try it out experimentally. If we could apply as much exactitude to sexual habits as, say, a machine turner to his toys, much unhappiness in
love could be avoided. In an age of advanced technology it is
surprising
that no attention is given to such problems. Yes, even with her eyes closed, piously trying to think about something else in order to avoid exhaustion: even then, the surf carried her irresistibly to the other beach, rolled her up into the blessed anonymity of the fading second. Sometimes he shook her awake simply to stare into her eyes. But if at such moments she had asked him what he was thinking he would probably have replied: “The true cancer cell, in the final analysis, an oxygen-deficiency cell, a poorly breathing cell, according to Schmidt. When you coughed I suddenly saw in the field of my instrument a patch of tubercule bacilli stained with eosin to a pretty red—anemones in some Attic field.” People deprived of a properly constituted childhood will always find something hollow in their responses to the world, something unfruitful. You could accuse both of us of that, in order to explain the central lack. The weakness of the marrow. A racing heart. Of course other factors help, like
environment
, language, age. But the central determinant of situations like this is that buried hunger which is only aggravated by the sense of emotional impotence.
Om
.

T
he Parthenon left stranded up there like the last serviceable molar in some poor widow’s gum. Ancient Grief, my Greece! “Art is the real science.” Well, well. Where they made honey cakes in the shape of female pudenda. Yes, but the Acropolis then was our back-garden—hardly a corner of it where we didn’t make love. The smallness of its proportions gave it a monumental intimacy. In that clear hard enamel air the human voice carried so far that it was possible to call and wave to her from the top while she walked the Plaka streets below. “I-O-lanthe!” Note that the stress falls upon the second syllable not the third, and that its value is that of the
omega.
Now she is known to the world in a hideous Erasmic pronunciation with the stress on the third syllable. Actually I don’t mind, as it makes her real name private property. She belongs, then, to Number Seven, and to the Nube, to the eternal Athens which miraculously still
survives
outside memory. In that mirror over there she wrestled with her eyebrows which had a tendency to grow too thickly. You should see them now—single soft lines of the purest jet. Though the room squints out on the marbles we dared not open a shutter until dusk; we lived all day in brown shadow like carp in a cool pool. Until
sunset
.

Sunset! Wake suddenly against the lighted wall and you have the momentary impression that the whole marble spook has taken fire and is curling up like burning cardboard. You put your hand to the hideous wallpaper and feel the actual heat of the mere reflection—or so you imagine. Up there outside the honey-coloured marbles, after a full day’s exposure to the sun, echo on the heat long after nightfall, temperature of mammals’ blood. Gradually the light sweats dried… stomachs gummed together like wet leaves. Yawning and smoking they lay about in whispers. She has a toy vocabulary and an island accent.

The marbles still reflect back, translated into the whiteness of flour, the dying day’s burnish. Bit by bit she keels, veers, founders. The sun slithers down the nether side of Hymettus and into the sea with a huge inaudible hiss, leaving the islands to glow like embers which the young moon will soon reillumine. (They lie beside each other as quietly as legs; no kiss but would break the curvature of the unperfected thought.) Gradually leaks up from Salamis the smell of baked bread, melons, tar, borne on the breath of the evening freshets which will soothe wet armpits and breasts.

They had been refugees from Pontus, and had trekked down with a dancing bear to settle in Crete. When the bear died (their only means of livelihood) they had a last tearful meal of the paws in oil. A smallholding barely sustained her parents. To lighten the burden she had come to Athens in search of work—with the inevitable result, for work there was none. When she described these days she stood up and acted the bear, the padding and jingling of paw and bell, the harsh panting. The froth gathered at its snout where the iron ring ran through. It was half blind, the whip had struck out an eye.

The sheet had lipstick-marks on it, also the tooth-mug; our shoes lay side by side like fish. But she was gay, friendly, almost mannish in her directness and simplicity. A gaily coloured little parrot from an island. In those days for a whole summer black fingernails were
de
rigueur
among her friends and workmates. This beastly shellac stuff used to peel off on to the sheet. Her one brother had “gone to the bad”; her lip shut on the phrase, framing it instantly in the harsh rectangle of peasant judgement. Had she, then, “gone to the good”? It was an attempt at a pleasantry which miscarried; her long under-lip shot out, she was in tears. During the microfield tests on Abel I sifted a good deal of this stuff about her through the field, and the king of computers came back in oracular fashion with some chunks taken from another field—Koepgen I think. It was all about love, its scales. (After Io leaves I can watch her from the window. She takes the crooked path up the side of the Acropolis, swaying a little, as if she were a trifle tipsy, hand to heart.)

Thus Abel: “If we could only make all time proximate to reality we could see a little more deeply into the heart of our perplexities; the syzygy with its promise of a double silence is equally within the
grasp of man or woman. If ever they combine forces in their field you might speak of loving as something more than a term for an
unclassifiable
animal. It is unmistakable when it does happen for it feels as if the earth had subtly shifted its epicentre. How sad it seems that we, images of insipid spoonmeat, spend our time in projecting such strange figures of ourselves—delegated images of a desire perfected. The mystical gryphus, the ‘perfect body’ of the Alexandrian
psychology
, is an attempt on a telenoetic field. (What space is to matter, soul is to mind.) Some saints were ‘dry-visioned’. (Jerk, jerk, but nothing comes; taking the ‘distressful path’ towards after-images of desire.) They were hunting, poor buggers, for a renovated meaning or an infantile adoption by a God. Unhappily words won’t carry the charge in these matters, hence the deficit of truth in all verbal fields. This is where your artist might help. “A craft is a tongue, a tongue is a key, a key is a lock.” On the other hand a system is merely the shy embrace by which the poor mathematician hopes to persuade his bride to open up.” Koepgen never met her, I think, yet at his best he seems to be talking about her.

* * * * *

M
y frail old black recorders with their clumsy equipment were a source of the greatest concern; jolting about as they did with me on country buses, on caiques, even on mules. My livelihood depended on their accurate functioning, and this is where Said came in. The little watchmaker was a friend of Io. One-eyed, mission school, Christian Arab, he had his little workshop in a rotting hut in the Plaka, more fitting for rabbits than for a workman capable of
craftsmanship
of such extraordinary delicacy. Mud floor, fleas jumping in the straw and nibbling our ankles; we spent hours together,
sometimes
half the night, at his little workbench. He copied from any drawing. One-eyed Said with his watery optic pressed to a
butter-coloured
barrel, among the litter of fusees and escapements and hairs. Eager and modest in discussion of trade topics such as the use of invar etc. He made my echo amplifiers in a couple of weeks. Small as a garden pea, and beautifully done in mother of pearl. Graphos now! But I will be coming to that.

It was the recorders that brought me to the notice of Hippolyta. Vivid in a baroque hat like a watering can she dispensed tea and éclairs in the best hotel, coiling and uncoiling her slender legs as she questioned me about the mysteries of the black box, wondering if I could record a speech which was to be made by some visiting
dignitary
. My impression squared with all I heard afterwards of her public reputation. It was typical of back-biting Athens that she sounded so unsavoury a figure; the truth was that she was a mixture of naivety and wrong-headedness punctuated with strange generosities. The hard voice with its deeper tones and the fashionable boldness of the dark eyes were overcompensating for qualities like shyness which even her social practice had not enabled her entirely to throw off. The green scarf and the blood-red fingernails gave her a pleasantly old-fashioned vampire’s air. “O please could you do that for me?” She named a figure in drachmae so high that my heart leapt, it would
keep me for a month; and held my hand a trifle longer than formality permits. She was a warm, pleasantly troubling personage. Despite the impressive jewellery and the orchids she seemed more like a youth than a girl. Of course I accepted, and taking an advance made my way back to the Plaka delighted by such good fortune. She promised to let me know when the person in question—the
speech-maker
—arrived. “I can’t help liking slightly hysterical women” I confided to the Parthenon.

At Spiro’s tavern, under the vine-trellis, I paused for a drink and caught sight of a familiar object at an empty table; the little yellow exercise book which Koepgen used for theology and musing alike. It lay there with his pen and a daily paper. He must have gone to the lavatory. At this time Koepgen was a theological student embarking on the grim path of monkhood. A typical product of white Russia, he spoke and wrote with equal ease in any of four languages. He taught me Greek, and was invaluable on out-of-the-way factors like the phonetics of this hirsute tongue; things like the Tsaconian
dialect
, still half anc. Doric. Well I sat and riffled while I waited.

“The
hubris,
the overweening, is always there; but it is a matter of scale. The Greeks traced its path with withering accuracy, watching it lead on to
ate
—the point at which evil is mistakenly believed to be good. Here we are then at the end of the long road—races
dehumanised
by the sorceries of false politics.” Koepgen weeping for Russia again. I always want to shout “stop it!” At last he stood before me, full of a devout nonchalance. He was a small dapper man, contriving to look clean despite the threadbare soutane and grotesque smelly boots. His long hair, captured in a bun, was always clean. He seldom wore his stovepipe hat. He reproached me for my inquisitiveness and sat down smiling to hear my tale of good fortune. Of Hippolyta he said: “She is adorable, but she is connected with all sorts of other things. I came across her recently when I did some paid translation—O just business letters—for an organisation, a firm I suppose, in Salonika. She organised it. But something about it gave me an
uncomfortable
feeling. They offered me very large sums to keep on with the work, but I let it drop. I don’t know quite why. I wanted to keep myself free in a way. I need less and less money, more and more time.”

T
here are other data, floating about like motes in a sunbeam,
waiting
to find their place: the equipment in the abortioner’s leather bag. The needle-necked appurtenances which mock the spunk-scattering troubadours of a courtly love. The foetus of a love-song. (“One way” wrote Koepgen “might be to take up Plutarch’s idea of the
Melis-ponda
. This should be within the grasp of anyone.”) Mara the hag with a pair of tongs worked off a car-battery. I am not so sure whether in the brothels of Piraeus he did not achieve the
mare pigrum
of the philosophers and alchemists. Here one bares one’s sex to a whole landscape—internal landscapes of empty sea, nigger-head coral, bleached tree-trunks, olive-pits burnt by lye. Islands (each one a heart and mind) where the soft spirals of waves shoulder and sheathe floors awash with the disquiet of palaces submerged in folded ferns. Symbol of the search is the diver with the heavy stone tied to his belt. Sponges!

Then lying about among my own records I come upon some stone memoranda like altars and tombs; stuck in among them some moments of alarming happiness. If the portly Pausanias had seen the city’s body through that of a young street-walker his catalogues would have had more life. Names and stones would have become the real fictions and we the realities. After dark we often sneak through the broken fence and climb to the cave below the Propylea. Her toes are fearfully dirty in her dusty sandals, as are mine, but her hair is freshly washed and scentless. We are never quite alone up here. A few scattered cigarette-points mark the places where other lovers wander, or lie star-gazing. Up on these ledges in winter you will find that the southern gales carry up the faint crying of sea-mews, sacred to Aphrodite; while in the spring the brown-taffeta nightingales send out their quiet call-sign in the very voice of Itys. “Itú, Itú, Itú” they cry in pretty iteration. Then by
moonlight come the little
owls. They are tame. (No more!) Turning their necks in strange rhythms—clearest origin for ancient Greek masked dancing.

Down below in the later sequences of the play the tombs face east with their pathetic promise of resurrection. The modern town rolls over it all like surf. Prismatic gleams of oil-patches on macadam; coffee-grounds and the glitter of refuse (fish-scales) outside the smelly taverns with their climbing trellises and shelves of brown barrels. Once a golden apple was a passport to the underworld, but today I am only able to buy her a toffee-apple on a stick which she dips in sherbet, licking it like a tame deer.

A true Athenian, free from all this antiquarian twaddle, she knows and cares nothing for her city; but yes, some of the stories alert a fugitive delight as she sits, sugaring her kisses with her apple. It is pleasant to babble thus, floundering among the telescopic
verb-schemes
of demotic; telling her how Styx water was so holy as to be poisonous, only to be safely drunk from a horse’s hoof. They poisoned Alexander this way. Also how Antony once set up his boozing shop in the Parthenon, though his was a different sort of poisoning, a chronic narcissism. (She crosses herself superstitiously as a good Orthodox should, and snuggles superstitiously up to me.) Then … about embalming bodies in honey—human toffee-apples: or curing sick children by making them swallow mice coated in honey. Ugh! But excited by this she responds by telling me of witches and spells which cause nausea and impotence and can only be fought with talismans blessed by a priest. All this with such earnestness that out of polite belief I also make the sign of the Byzantine cross, back to front, to ward off the harms of public utterance from us both. (“There is no difference between truth and reality—ask any poet.” Thus Koepgen sternly, eyes blazing, a little drunk on ouzo.) The quiet wind blew dustily uphill among the moon-keepers. To make love in this warm curdled air seemed an act of unpremeditated simplicity that placed them back once more in the picture-book world sacred to the animal kingdom where the
biological
curve of the affect is free from the buggerish itch of mentation. Warm torpid mouth, strong arms, keen body—this seems all the spiritual instruction the human creature needs. It is only afterwards that one will be thrown back sprawling among the introspections
and doubts. How many people before Iolanthe? Throats parched in the dry air we drink thirstily from the sacred spring. She washes the sugar from her lips, washes her privates in the icy water, drying them on my old silk scarf. No, Athens was not like other places; and the complicated language, with its archaic thought-forms, shielded its strangeness from foreign eyes. Afterwards to sit at a tin table in a tavern, utterly replete and silent, staring at each other, fingers
touching
, before two glasses of colourless raki and a plate of olives. Everything should have ended there, among the tombs, by the light of a paraffin lamp. Perhaps it did?