OTR Dispatches - July, 2004

Off To Mycenae.

We had been sitting in the Athens apartment of an old friend, K., and talking about the Peloponesus. It was wintertime there and a Mediterranean cold had settled in. It was a cold you can’t brush away. We were getting excited. Dan was leaving to go back to San Francisco soon and he wanted to go to Mycenae. He was getting agitated in his rumpled sweater and he was pacing around the room working himself into a frenzy about the Peloponesus. K. wasn’t helping. He kept bringing out books and maps. Books and maps always make a place more mysterious and beautiful. If you have books and maps then your desire to go somewhere can become desperate.

I looked at Stefany excitedly looking at maps and I realized that we would soon be going to the Peloponesus. She is too beautiful to say no to. People don’t say no to her. At best they just avoid her completely.

Truth is, with all those books and maps I wanted to go to Mycenae too. What I failed to notice at the time was that Dan had another reason he wanted to go to Mycenae. It was because of a little book he had tucked into the crook of his arm, a book by Henry Miller called The Colossus of Maroussi. In fact, that book was to drive us all to Mycenae again and again and down into the horrible well. But that comes later.

The only image I have of Corinth is the terribly blue sky and a looming, loping, green hill snaked by ancient walls. I’m barely taking my eyes off the road. Just enough to catch a glimpse of pure blue and pure green. It is the winter before the 2004 Olympics in Athens. They have torn up all the roads. They are remaking them, one supposes, though it is unclear. The Greek Driving Mind has thought through the situation and come to the conclusion that road-work is best bypassed at a rate of speed far greater than the already excessive speeds one would use on completed roads. I have responded in the only way possible and that is by going even faster than that. Every car is a car I have to pass—the only way to stay safe is to stay slightly ahead of all of the rest of the cars in Greece. Such is the state of the Greek Driving Mind and of my mind and of the Hellenic roads during the winter before the Olympic games, 2004.

As we come down the collection of hills that open up into the planes around Mycenae the whole world seems to slow down and get quieter. Mycenae. You roll into it past the dumpy cafes and hotels called such things as Agamemnon’s Hut and Clytemnestra’s Motel.  What is this place? I haven’t really thought about it before. And then we park and walk around the bend and realize that it is more than we expected.

You can’t write anything about Mycenae without somehow selling the experience in the wrong way. You either make it too epic and lose the reality in those stones or you try to keep your cool and the stones lose their tremble. And they undeniably tremble, or fizzle, or do something that makes them more (or less) than what they are. They call the architecture Cycladic because the huge stones that make up the walls seem like they could only have been put there by a Cyclops. Something huge, monstrous, and more grand and primal than the things of our world had to do with this place. But that already sounds a bit silly again. Simply, the place really shouldn’t be here at all, in this world, but it is.

We stand around the base of the ancient city for a while not doing very much. Two reasons. In the first place we’re a bit stunned. In the second I’ve suddenly felt the full brunt of the ouzo consumed the night before. The intense concentration of driving better than everyone in the entire country had dulled the pain. Now memories come flooding back. K.’ apartment filled with smoke. People arriving in various waves. Arguing with some Greek mathematician and communist about whether there is such a thing as an organic intellectual. Mad things. And the steady consumption of ouzo.

I wondered then that all the Greeks seemed to be drinking whisky or wine. Even the communist mathematician eyed my bottle of ouzo suspiciously. It’s a drink that tears into your gut. It gave me the hiccoughs on more than one occasion, like a drunk from old movies. And then to top it off ouzo is able to produce the unique next day’s sensation that a cat is living in one’s hair. A fat, lethargic, and uncomfortable cat. I did not want to carry the cat up the steps of Mycenae just yet.

And then Dan says,

“I wonder where the well is?”

“What well?”

“Henry Miller’s well.”

“What . . . ? My head hurts.”

“He saw something in the well.”

“Who saw what well?”

“Henry Miller.”

Next Stefany is off, through the famous Lion’s Gate and scrambling over the old stones. I am following a little behind and Dan rambles around mumbling something I assume to be about Miller’s well. It’s just a pile of rocks on a hill between two bigger hills. A collection of shrubs and little tufts of green. But it is amazing. None of the real structure are left, just a hint of these mesmerizing walls and the perfectness of location. Why is it amazing? It is so clearly the left-over of something that was powerful and self-assured.  There is the lingering feeling of evil in it too, the evil of great places. I didn’t see a turd anywhere, just tufts of grass and weeds. The light is so clear it cuts through the fur on the ouzo cat. As you climb up the hill to the top you look back over the Mycenaean plane. You can see Nafplio and Argos and you can see the coast of the Aegean sweeping around in an arc across one of the fingers of the Peloponesus. You would have to be a complete asshole not to shudder a bit.

Eventually we made our way to the back of the ancient city, to where the walls peters off between two old hills that frame the whole thing. Earth, sky, air—the whole deal. The cat’s belly was sliding down over my forehead. I sat on a rock and thought about Homer, about the famous passage in the Iliad where the sun shines off of Hector’s helmet. So vivid and distinct.  It’s an instant where the ancient world springs into clarity as a real world. It never lasts. Stefany and Dan had disappeared somewhere. Then I heard their voices coming from an aperture in the rocks.

“I can’t see a thing,” said Stefany.

“The steps keep going down,” said Dan.

“You’re right in front of me,” Stefany, laughing, “I didn’t even realize.”

“It’s slippery,” said Dan.

“Lets get out of here,” said Stefany.

Such a simple conversation about a simple dark staircase. I didn’t realize it at the time but that was the well. Which began my obsession for the next two weeks and something that will remain like a little pebble wedged into my brain forever.

A day later we are on a ferry to Mykonos. I love the way ferries lumber through the water like mechanical floating whales. Dan is gone, he’s on a plane back to San Francisco. He left me the book, which I begin to read mostly out of some lingering curiosity about Dan’s well mumblings.

The ferry sloughs through the water deliberately. K. refuses to take the newer faster ferries that skim across the surface of the sea and have no doors for getting on deck. He likes the slow ones that smell like old sandwiches. He likes the carpet that has been vacuumed too many times. His mother’s family is from Mykonos and that has meant splitting time between the islands and the mainland.

Greece is particular in that way, the way that its identity is split between the islands and the mainland. Its like poor Philoctetes from Sophocles’ play. Philoctetes is left on an island by the Greeks, who are on their way to Troy. His leg wound has become so putrescent that he is no longer fit for human contact. He is disgusting. Later, when the Greeks find out that his bow is needed to defeat the Trojans, they return to the island and Odysseus must persuade Philoctetes to come back to the expedition. That’s the thing about Greece. You can’t ignore the islands. As soon as you try and ignore the islands you find out you need them again. Don’t forget about Philoctetes.

The huge ferries docked at the Peiraeus are like the lifeline that connects the big idea of Greece with the little idea of Greece. They are like cities in their own rights, in a country based on city states, islands, shrines, enclaves.

There is a cold rain that turns into small balls of hail when we reach Mykonos. The white houses and tiny streets are beautiful with bits of white ice bouncing on slick stones. It isn’t a homosexual paradise right now, just a lonely enclave in the middle of the sea. I can see the bald head of an old man from the yellow of a second-story window. He looks as if he is remembering something.

The next morning we can see snow in the mountains of Tinos across the bay. A woman K. knows is taking her children there because they have never seen snow before. The sky is pure blue and so is the water. It is a frozen ice village suddenly. Time, maybe, has stopped too. The pelicans look bewildered, they look fucking pissed. In the little stone restaurant at the docks everything tastes better than it possibly could. And that is when I begin to start thinking about Mycenae again.

No break in the weather. Its clear now that we’re in for a real Mediterranean storm, the kind that drowned so many husbands and got so many poems going. There’s no getting off the island for at least a few days now. We’re holed up in the living room of K.’ parents house with some sardines and some bread and some bottles of ouzo with the picture of the girl and the skirt that you can look at for hours. She’s so clean. Why would she want to drink ouzo? She’s kicking her back leg up in such a carefree manner. But ouzo doesn’t make you carefree, it makes you want to sit on the toilet for days and fight with cats. That’s why I like it, I like to sit on the toilet in this beautiful old house while the storm storms and read about Miller’s adventures in the Peloponesus. I like to take an endless shit and listen to the house creak. That girl on the ouzo bottle, I don’t think she’s ever taken a shit in her life.

Later I’m on the toilet reading a section in the book where Miller is raving about Mycenae, the surrounding area in the Pelloponesus, and the essential Greek spirit. You have to admire a man who can rave with such unashamed abandon. There is only one way to read Henry Miller and that is fast. Any book of his ought to be finished in no more than a few hours. I have been reading the thing slowly because I haven’t yet understood what Dan found so compelling in it. But it is starting to creep up on me. And suddenly here it is. Miller is speaking about the well. He thinks that there is something dark, primal about Mycenae, some secret lurking there that cannot quite be fathomed. “Mycenae folds in upon itself,” he writes, “like a fresh-cut navel, dragging its glory down into the bowels of the earth where the bats and lizards feed upon it gloatingly.”

What a schlocky writer. So lovable. He shares one characteristic, at least, with Homer—fill up the line, keep the pace running relentlessly forward; parataxis. I was reading Matthew Arnold on the plane to Greece about how one ought to translate Homer. One thing is clear, you have to keep the thing running along at break-neck speed. No subordinate clauses by which to get reflective. That is one thing you have to give Miller, he is able to reflect simply be hurtling forward, adding more, never tying himself up. It is impossible to imagine what Matthew Arnold would have thought about Henry Miller.

About Mycenae Miller says, “Even the light, which falls upon it with merciless clarity, gets sucked in, shunted off, beribboned.” And now Miller is coming up from the slippery staircase with his friend Katsimbalis. They haven’t seen much down the staircase but Miller writes “I refuse to go back down into that slimy well of horrors.” But then he says, “In a few more pages we shall revisit Mycenae together and Nancy will lead the way down the bat-slimed stairs to the bottomless well.”

So there is still something more to happen with the well in Mycenae, which is making me want to go there again just as Miller went there a second time after the abortive attempt to descend the well with Katsimbalis. What is down in that well anyway? Some remnant of the chthonic forces that the Mycenaens worshipped in their secret cults? I’m starting to think about Mycenae all the time now, and about the well. That fucking well in that goddamned place.

I have to convince Stefany and K. to go back to Mycenae. We are supposed to return to Athens in two days. I keep seeing images of those Cyclopean walls and the plain leading down to the ocean and Argos across the bay and the Lion’s Gate. I can see the well and its staircase descending into the black. I can see in my mind Stefany going down and turning the corner into the abyss. It was so dark that they couldn’t get very far and they came back up while I sat on a rock and tried to focus on my shoes from all the ouzo. It was so dark it was like they were descending into nothing at all.

There is something important in that well.

“What did you see in the well?” I ask Stefany.

“The absence of light.”

“But you must have seen something. Maybe you felt something, a presence?” “It was a little . . . something,” she said.

She wasn’t giving me what I wanted. Maybe she had been changed in the well. Maybe she was in league with something in the well. She is smiling at me in a funny way.

We’ll have to go back down into the well again. Mycenae is crucial to everything, I am realizing. The people of Mycenae were the last race of heroes, those whose tales are told in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in Hesiod and the Homeric hymns. The physical place of Mycenae is an overlap between the world of history and that of myth: Gods, monsters, the dawn of all things. Miller prattles on about bat-slime and lizards but he’s also talking about something more primal and inchoate. The fact that this remarkable place has a stairwell that leads down into the murky depths is inconceivable. It has a direct hatch to the dark and unspeakable side of myth and ritual.

It all gravitates around the Eleusinian Mysteries. Just to say the word is pleasurable and intriguing, Eleusinian Mysteries. Its all about the fertility and the productivity of the earth. Its all about Demeter. We still have the Hymn to Demeter. “We” being civilization, all of us. You’ve heard of Demeter’s daughter Persephone and her unintentional rendezvous with Hades. He came up from beneath the earth and snatched her away. So Demeter decided to whack all of mankind, stop the crops from coming up, mass famine, end the whole thing. A mother’s rage. The other Gods intervene. Without men, who is to see the Gods as Gods? Hades relents. Persephone is released but must return to the underworld for one third of the year. Persephone becomes, essentially, the crops, the cyclical process of birth and death in the crop season.

The terror that lurks in this myth is the terror of complete and total doom, catastrophe, the end. If it sounds Asiatic and Near Eastern you’re right. It is probably a borrowing from those myths and from places where that kind of doom was a real possibility. Famine that wipes out civilizations. Greek myths are different.  In them, Gods and men stand together in some strange compact over the abyss. Zeus intervenes with Demeter because he recognizes that Gods and men are intertwined. But there is a dark side to this relation, at its very core. It rears its head in the sacrifice. Greek religion was literally bathed in blood. Live animals of all makes and sizes were flung alive into great burning pyres, driven into holes in the earth, drowned en masse, and constantly sliced open upon the altar. Greek ritual was warm with blood.

I am sitting with Stefany at a café not far beneath the famous windmills of Mykonos. The sea is still dyspeptic. I’m reading Walter Burkert now. He wrote a book called Homo Necans, Killing Man. And that is the way it is—Homo sapiens is Homo necans. And this killing, from our earliest prehistoric evidence, was wrapped up with guilt. Killing man is also guilty man. It all has to do, one supposes, with the very origin of human beings as mortal creatures who toil and reproduce and kill and die.

The myths tell it this way. There was a Golden Age. Men either lived forever or died painlessly and went to afterlives of bliss. Gods and men feasted together. And then something goes terribly wrong. In the Promethean wing of the story mankind, through Prometheus, tricks Zeus into accepting the bones and innards of the animals while men keep the choice parts. Zeus takes revenge for this betrayal and withholds fire. Prometheus steals fire back. Zeus curses man with the first woman, Pandora. What is Pandora? The cycle of birth and death itself, maybe. Mortality. From now on, all attempts to conquer death will be punished and men will honor the Gods through their closeness to death and their power to kill.

In another version, the Gods and men are dining together in their accustomed manner when Tantalus inexplicably decides to feed his own son Pelops (for whom the Pelloponesian peninsula is named) to the Gods. The Gods are disgusted. The Golden Age is ended and Zeus wipes out all of humanity save two in a great flood. Why did you do it, Tantalus? Is there some clue down in that well that would help to explain such a monstrous act? Anyway there is one God who doesn’t seem to mind the human flesh so much. Demeter, our Demeter of the Eleusinian mysteries. What of it? A coincidence? But we are speaking of killing and shame and guilt, of the sacrificing of humans and the consuming of one’s own children. We are talking about the terrifying oblivion of absolute extermination and absolute origins in unspeakable acts beyond the realm of cause and motivation. In the language of philosophers we are talking about ungrounded grounds, and they are horrifying because they are beyond reason, hidden and unsayable.

Last night the surf was leaping up out of the bay and licking at the edges of the town as if it had gotten a taste and wanted more. Everything around us is beginning to feel treacherous.

The weather still isn’t breaking. The hours tick by slowly. It’s a sensuous exile.

Morgan Meis is an Editor of The Old Town Review.