Dinner with Persephone (37 page)

A sign framed in laurels proclaiming
Zito I Ellas
, Long Live Greece, has been hung on one wall. A cheap colored poster decorates another. Its central image is the Annunciation to Mary, the Evangelismos, and it is surrounded by a constellation of smaller icons of the revolution—Kolokotronis sitting on the rocks in his familiar pose, a famous naval battle, a picture of the oath at the beginning of the siege of Missolonghi, an allegorical portrait of Greece as a mourning woman in a torn gown—curiously, men in the poster exist in time, but women in allegory. I am puzzling over this when a heavyset woman smiles at me and asks if I am married. I say no, and though the convention in these villages is to marry by eighteen or nineteen, she says, “That is wise of you. Make sure you first have your own money, and depend on no one. Then with luck, a good groom. But first, I wish that you have your own money, and second a decent man.” I ask after her own husband, not knowing whether her black is for him or another relative, and she tells me she is a widow. I say I am sorry, and she looks at me, leans forward almost imperceptibly, as if she is under surveillance, fixes her eyes on mine, and says, “Long live death.” The shock of what she says is
greater because of the implicit parody of the Greek wish to parents of a newborn child, “May it live for you.” She smiles at me warmly as I am leaving and says, “And a good groom to you. Go in the good.”

We climb up to a church with a spectacular view over a deep gorge, a clear aim at the imagery of heaven and hell, the fall into the gorge a deadly, terrible possibility, the church hovering over it like an angel in flight in the clear air. The small chapel is dwarfed by monumental flowering apple trees, each one a world of flowers. My friends take out their cameras, but I am not a skilled photographer. Any picture I take would fossilize these trees, while in my memory they will be growing. My looking at them is my attempt to record them, these wellsprings of flowers so inexhaustible that the bright pink blossoms dropped on the green grass are mere overflow, not loss at all. I look at them as you listen to the talk of someone you love, watch his face, the infinite unphotographable range of his expressions.

We take a trail down into the gorge, walking its dry riverbed, from boulder to boulder. This is exhausting walking, strenuous, and requiring constant judgment, calculating the distance between one boulder and the next, judging balance, strategizing how to save yourself the extra work of climbing all the way down into the riverbed and all the way back up onto the boulders, an important consideration for me, since each descent represents a drop of nearly my full height, so I am not climbing with my feet, but my entire body. In the gorge, it is as if we are in the underworld, with the dense mysterious gray and green shade overhead, yellow butterflies visible and then invisible in this hidden region where there is no sky, and where the ground still turns up bullets and World War II debris. Up again among the villages, everything is startlingly human, tended, the fields like well-made beds, flocks of grazing goats and new baby lambs, who don’t have long to live, since Easter is coming, cottages. One group of goats is drinking from the central village fountain, their front hooves poised on its rim. The paved path
alongside the cottages is black with crushed olives, and a hoard or olivewood kindling is stacked outside one, with olives still clinging to branches and twigs, like pairs of earrings.

In Kardamyli again, as evening is coming on, I sit on my balcony, watching the water, and feeling the cold sharp night winds starting to come off the sea, night coming to take back everything the sunny spring day promised. The blond boy I met at the bus stop this morning appears, running straight toward my balcony as if he has an urgent message to deliver. He stops in the narrow street just under the balcony, and looks up at me with a beatific expression on his face, a kind of rapturous collision between two states of being, like being awake and asleep at the same time. His eyes are radiant, his arms floating weightlessly by his side. “I’ve just been kissed for the first time,” he says disbelievingly. “Congratulations,” I say. “It happened in that car over there, see it?” “The blue one?” I ask, for historical accuracy. “Yes, that’s the one. I’ve only ever been kissed on the cheek before,” he says breathlessly. “It was a lot different.” “Happy Independence Day,” I say to him.

T
he bus to Sparta shuttles through a swirl of mountains that look like melting candles dripping into valleys. As we left Kardamyli, I saw that someone had written in red Magic Marker on the wall outside the school, “You are all masturbators.” My guess is that along with its other implications, this is the grandchild of an old class slur. In paintings on the Greek vases in museums and books that show scenes of masturbation, the people participating seem to be mostly slaves, satyrs, and women, all people of inferior or of no social status. It would make sense if this accusation also meant, “You are so low in the world you can’t afford either a prostitute, a schoolboy, or a wife.”

I look out the window to three loops of road that coil over each other, like the circles in Dante’s hell, each potentially a fatal plunge. The topography of Greece is perilous, you are caught between the danger of height and the danger of depth, the jagged mountains and the sea. You travel in Greece over one abyss or the other, an abyss out of which in spring, trees flower. The bus is full of old Mani faces, sun-cracked so that they look like the time-cracked rock out of which these roads were carved, while the rocks in their turn seem
to mirror human struggle and endurance, slashed and furrowed like old alcoholics’ faces. The bus stops by a stone wall to pick up a woman with tired blue eyes wearing a cheap print scarf and carrying an overnight satchel; she must have walked down the mountainside to get here, through clean small streams running over stones, through trees not in leaf yet. We drive under an overhang of rock, which scrapes the bus roof—here you drive through, not in the mountains.

We are on our way to Mystras, the ghost town which gazes down on the Spartan plain, perhaps the most significant of medieval sites on the Greek mainland, remnants which have the direct link to contemporary Greece that the classical sites do not—in these settings, the never-resolved struggle between Christianity and classical culture, between philosophy and theology, was engaged, the struggle which is powerfully present, both overtly and covertly, in the living Greece I am traveling in. The schizophrenia of modern Greek history, as well as thought, is demonstrated here, since this site, which became one of the last outposts of the Byzantine Empire, was built by enemies of the Byzantine Empire. Mystras is in a sense a medieval French town, its famous castle having been built in 1249 by a French princeling, William II of Villehardouin (a generic Greek term for Europeans, with a somewhat deprecating overtone, and still in daily use, is “Franks”) to consolidate the French possession of the Peloponnesus, their prize for participation in the European conquest of Byzantium during the Fourth Crusade of 1204. The city later became a source of recurring contention among members of conflicting Byzantine dynasties, as the encroachments of the Turks further fragmented the centralized power of the empire. Its last ruler was a Byzantine prince of the Paleologus family named Demetrius, who, along with his brother Thomas, the governor of Patras, presided over Mystras’s characteristically Greek finale, in their split allegiances to the Western and Eastern worlds. Demetrius was one of the powerful Greek party who preferred alliance with the Turks as more advantageous to the Orthodox Greeks than any connection
with Roman Catholic Europe. He surrendered Mystras to Mehmet II in 1460, seven years after Constantinople fell, and became a vassal of the sultan. His brother Thomas, who favored a degree of reunion between the remnants of the eastern empire and the resurgently powerful western empire, went into exile in Italy.

But Mystras was above all the workplace of the philosopher George Gemistus, the passionate Platonist who taught here and took the additional name of Plethon as a further invocation of his philosophical master, through its play on sound, and whose magnetism at the Council of Florence in 1439 inspired Cosimo di Medici to found Florence’s Platonic Academy, contributing to the philosophical underpinnings of the Italian Renaissance. Plethon was another embodiment of the paradoxes of Greek history: although scholars often declare him the supreme philosophical mind of Byzantium, he was a philosopher who had little influence on Greek thought, but a strong impact on its imagination. Plethon was one of the thinkers who, in the twilight of Byzantium, chose to begin again to call themselves Hellenes, a term which the installation of Christianity as state religion had made a slur; it is partly due to the revival of the term in his era that Greeks today call themselves Hellenes. One measure of how controversial the term was, and how conscious the decision to use it, is the opposite choice of Plethon’s own student, George Scholarius, who was chosen by the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet II, to be the first patriarch of Constantinople under Ottoman rule—in effect the governor of the Greek population. Scholarius said, “I do not call myself a Hellene because I do not believe as the Hellenes believed.” He chose, by contrast, to call himself a Christian. Plethon’s identification of himself as Hellene reflected a grappling with both national and philosophical perplexities. It must have represented a rejection of the term “Roman”—Rome and the Western church had participated in and sanctioned the brutal sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. It also, as an illustration of the collaborative nature of all cultures, probably represented a response to the Italian Renaissance intellectuals’ admiration
of classical culture, which helped recreate for Byzantines a sense of its value, and a wish to be associated with it. And it also represented a recognition of the fundamental split between Christianity and classicism, for which various solutions had been tried but which could only be glossed over by false syntheses. It had been critical for Christianity to root itself in the empire by taking control of education, which was the province of polytheists and based in part on polytheist myth; but education had been in the hands of people trained in philosophy, which by and large treated human thought (as opposed to social practice) as exploratory, incomplete, reaching for conclusions which may lead to other conclusions. Christian theology, on the other hand, held that absolute and final truth had been revealed, and that thought itself could go no further, but could serve largely as an inspiring and illuminating embodiment of different aspects of the perfect truth. Its involvement in government made its social prescriptions, too, a form of theology, and so unchallengeable. And it tried to solve the problem of how it arrived at perfect truth, given human moral and intellectual limitation, by presenting the inspired illumination by divine revelation as superior to thought. The notion of divine revelation, surprisingly, raised issues concerning political power. What happened when ideas and revelations inspired by divine grace conflicted? Who had had the true revelation; would grace always be in the hands of the establishment then, and divine truth possessed by the people with the power to enforce their revelation and anathematize those who questioned it?

In a way, Byzantine church decoration helps us understand what role philosophical experiment and searching, critical inquiry might play in relation to theology, for Byzantine art is primarily theology, and only secondarily art. It was made to embody, illustrate, celebrate, and repeat doctrinal truths, in patterns that may not deviate, although there is room for inspiration and artistry in the embodiment.

Plethon grappled with the problem of being a classicist and a philosopher under an order which had a fundamentally different idea of the nature of knowledge. He is said to have used the terms
“God” and “Zeus” interchangeably, and to have spoken of the divine with the plural “the gods.” But scholars can’t know what these terms meant to him—after his death, his former student George Scholarius, the patriarch of Constantinople, had his book
On the Laws
burned.

Mystras floats in the distance crowning its mountain as we approach the town. Through the tearful soft gray light of the rainy afternoon, I make out the softened image of the castle. It is a regal site, whose churches and monasteries themselves have the air of being royal castles. The ground is covered with oranges and lemons that split open as they fell, and the rain dramatically draws out their perfume. A shepherd walking beneath an umbrella drives a small flock of goats through the main street in front of the general store and the central square with its war memorial, one of the few monuments I have seen that memorializes soldiers who died in the Greek civil war, such a controversial topic that among my talkative and abundantly opinioned friends, there is a silence on this subject as on no other. As I walk along the roads of Mystras, I look down on the Spartan plain, covered with the shadows of clouds, and yellow spurge flowers spray out of the stone walls, while geraniums planted in old detergent bottles brighten the doorsteps of houses. The streets are full of “the black-wearers,” the widowed and mourning women—if a couturier were to describe the color of their dresses in a catalogue, it would be “shadow of death.” I am reminded again that what looks like the same color is different in different countries, just as a sister and brother may have completely different upbringings and experiences in the same family.

I wander around the town on my own, below the medieval ruins; the modern town itself has an odd deserted quality. I stop in the dark little cavern of the local general store, often a good source of conversation in Greek towns. Its shelves offer ready-made béchamel sauce to top moussaka or pastitsio, ouzo, wine,
mastikha tou Khiou
, the Chiote mastic, individually wrapped
kataifi
, a Greco-Turkish pastry of blowtorch sweetness—a fortunate symbol in my
manuals for Greek dreamers, which would be an uneasy image in mine. Domestic needs are interpreted so differently from place to place—none of these would be considered staples in America, and even the overlap with other EEC countries is not substantial. A middle-aged man just approaching the borders of elderly strikes up a conversation with me. “This is a place,” he says, “almost without young people. They go to Australia, or like me, to Canada. I live half the year in Toronto, where I work for a Jewish factory; we make doors and windows. Then I am here for the other part of the year, this time for Easter. I will retire here, like many of the other emigrants. We come back old to this old world.” He launches into a family history, and I learn of his mother’s diabetes, and where his aunts and uncles are buried, while my attention wanders a little, and I look through the window with its brassy synthetic orange curtains to the cypress-punctuated medieval castle. The man follows my drifting gaze, and says, “Yes, the castle dwarfs the
plateia.
This is one of the strange Greek towns whose life must always depend on what happened in the fifteenth century. The dead and the living have to share life in Mystras, and maybe the dead have a larger than equal share.” I hear more family history, and begin the work of excusing myself, since I want to get a glimpse of the town before I rejoin my
parea.
“I talk too much, I know,” he says endearingly, and wishes me good walking in the Taygetus.