The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  It never ceases to amaze me that throughout all this period, unknown to me, Benedicta was approaching; she was sliding down the mighty Danube whose feeble headspring crawls out of a small opening in the courtyard of some German castle. Lulled by the voices of the Nibelungs she sees great castles in ruins brooding on their own reflections in the running water. Trees arch over Durnstein: then Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and down through the Iron Gates to scout the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria in a Rumanian packet slim as a cigarette; and so down the Bosphorus to where the crooked calligraphy of mosques and spires waited for her in Polis. And for Charlock.

  The journey had been arranged for her by the firm; young widows must do their forgetting somehow.

  Little eddies of thyme and rosemary lay about in parcels among the columns; one walked into them. There was no breeze. The sun had completed its impressive weight-lifting act and plunged into the darkness. Violet the Saronic Gulf, topaz Hymettus, lilac bronze the marbles. The oncoming night was freshening towards the dews of midnight and after. Here we were assembled, some two hundred people, at the northern end of the Parthenon. Tenue de ville, dark suits, cocktail dresses. It seemed a fairly representative lecture audience—members of the Academy and the Temple of Science, professors and other riff-raff of this order. In this cool stable air everyone was relaxed and informal, indeed mildly gay. Except Hippolyta, who was in a high state of nerves, eating valerian cachets one after another to calm herself. On the top plinth, among the columns, stood a lectern with a lamp. It was from here that Caradoc was supposed to be lecturing. The general disposition of the chairs for the audience was pleasantly informal. They were dotted about in groups among the shattered rubble. Everything promised—or so I thought. Doubtless the site itself was responsible for these feelings for who can see the blasted Parthenon at dusk without wanting to put his arms round it? Moreover in this honeyed oncoming of night with its promise of a late moonrise, an occasional firefly triggering on the slopes below, the owls calling?

  Below the battlements glowed the magic display of precious stones which is Athens at night: a spilled jewel-casket. The shaven hills like penitents bowed around us and domed the whole in watchful silence. Yes, but what of the lecturer?

  “I haven’t been able to reach him all day. He’s been out with Sipple, drinking very heavily. They were seen on bicycles at Phaleron this afternoon, very unsteady. I’ve hunted everywhere. If he doesn’t come in another five minutes I shall have to call the whole thing off. Imagine how delighted the women will be to see me humiliated like this.” I took her arm and tried to calm her. But she was trembling with anxiety and fury combined. It was true that a slight restlessness had begun to make itself felt in the audience. Conversation had begun to dwindle, become more desultory. The women had taken stock of each other’s clothes and were becoming bored. “Give him time” I said for the fourth time. People had started to cough and cross their legs.

  At this moment a vague shape emerged from among the distant columns and began to move towards us with a slow, curmudgeonly tread. At first it was a mere shadowy sketch of a man but gradually it began to take on shape as it approached. It held what appeared to be a bottle in its left hand. Head bent, it appeared to be sunk in the deepest meditation as it advanced with this lagging unsteady gait. “It’s Caradoc” she hissed with a mixture of elation, terror and doubt. The figure stopped short and gazed at us all with amazement, as if seeing us all for the first time, and quite unexpectedly. “He’s drunk” she added with disgust gripping my arm. “O God! And he has forgotten all about the lecture.”

  Indeed it was easy to read all this into the expressions which played about those noble if somewhat dispersed features. It was the face of a man who asks himself desperately what the devil he is supposed to be doing in such a place, at such a time. He gazed at the lectern with a slowly maturing astonishment, and then at the assembly grouped before him. “Well I’m damned” he said audibly. At this moment the despairing Hippolyta saved the day by starting to applaud. Everyone took up and echoed the clapping and the ripple of sound seemed to stir some deep chord in the remoter recesses of the lecturer’s memory. He frowned and sucked his teeth as he explored these fugitive memories, sorting them hazily into groups. The quixotic clapping swelled, and its implications began slowly to dawn on him. It was for him, all this! Yes, after all there was some little matter of a lecture. A broad smile illumined those heroic features. “The lecture, of course” he said, with evident relief, and set his bottle down on the plinth beside him—slowly, but without an over-elaborate display of unsteadiness. It was impossible to judge whether he looked as drunk to the rest of the audience as he did to us. They did not perhaps know him well enough to detect more than a desirable flamboyance of attitude—the nonchalance of a great foreign savant. Moreover his tangled mane of hair and his rumpled clothes seemed oddly in keeping with the place. He had appeared like some sage or prophet from among the columns—bearing perhaps an oracle? A ripple of interest went through us all. The Greeks, with their highly tuned sense of dramatic oratory, must have believed this to be a calculated entry suitable to a man about to discourse on this most enigmatic of ancient monuments. But it was all very well for him to remember the lecture at this late date—it must have been gnawing at the fringes of his subconscious all day: but if he had prepared nothing? Hippolyta trembled like a leaf. Our hands locked in sympathetic alarm we watched him take a few steps forward and grip the lectern forcibly, like a dentist about to pluck out a molar. He gazed around in leonine fashion under frowning eyebrows. Then he curtly raised his hand and the clapping ebbed away into silence.

  “All day,” he said on a hoarse and delphic note “I have been locked in meditation, wondering what I was going to tell you tonight about this.” He waved an arm towards the columns behind. Hippo sighed with growing relief. “At least he is not completely out.” Quite the contrary. His speech was thick but audible and unslurred. He was making a rapid recovery, hand over fist. “Wondering” he went on in the same rasping tone “how much I would dare to reveal of what I know.”

  He had unwittingly fallen upon a splendid opening gambit. The hint of mysteries, of the occult, was most appropriate to the place as well as to the gathering. There was a stir of interest. Caradoc shook his head and sank his chin upon his breast for a long moment of meditation. We, his friends, were afraid that he might indeed doze off in this attitude—but we did him an injustice. In due course he raised his leonine head once more, and with the faintest trace of a hiccough, went on in oracular fashion. “Time must inspirit us with all the magniloquence of the memories which hover here. Who were they, first of all, these ancestors of ours? Who? And how did they manage to actualise the potential in man’s notions of beauty, sidestep history, abbreviate eternity? Perhaps by prayer—but if so to whom, to what?” He licked his lips with relish and raked his audience with flashing eye. Hippolyta nudged me. “This is good stuff” she whispered. “But most of them don’t know English and they won’t realise that it means nothing. But the tone is perfect, isn’t it?” It was; he was clearly beginning to surmount his infirmity rather successfully. If only he could keep up the oracular note it wouldn’t matter much what he actually said. Hope dawned in our hearts.

  “Anyone can build, place one stone on another, but who can achieve the gigantic impersonality of such art? The cool thrift of that classical indifference which only comes when one has stopped caring? In our age the problem has not changed, only our responses are different. We have tried to purify insight with the aid of reason and its fruit in technics: and failed—our buildings show it. Yet we are still here, still full of sap, still trying, grafted on to these ancient marble roots. They have not disowned us yet. They are still lying in wait for us, the selfish and indifferent nurselings of matter, yes; and their architecture is the fruit by which ye shall know them. It is the hero of every epoch. Into it can be read the destiny, doctrines and predispositions of a time, a being, a place, a material. But in an age of fragments, an
age without a true cosmological notion of affect and its powers, what can we do but flounder, improvise, hesitate? A building is a language which tells us all. It cannot cheat.”

  “The only trouble” whispered Hippolyta again “is that all this is useless for my purposes. It’s all gibberish, damn him.”

  “Never mind. At least he’s here.”

  Caradoc’s self-possession was gaining ground. He had retrieved his bottle by a stealthy sideways movement, and placed it on the lectern before him. He seemed to draw courage from an occasional affectionate glance at it. He pursued his way, adding judicious and expressive gestures.

  “What can I tell you about him, this man, these men, who realised and built this trophy? Everything, in fact. Moreover everything which you also know full well, though perhaps without actually realising it. For we have all done our spell in the womb, have we not? We were all inhabitants of prehistory once, we all squirmed out into the so-called world. If I can give you the autobiography of this monument it is only because it starts with my own birth; I will give you its pedigree in giving you my own.

  “In the first twenty-four hours after birth we must recognise a total reorganisation of the creature in question from a water to a land animal. No transformation from chrysalis to butterfly could be more radical, more complete, more drastic. The skin, for example, changes from an internal organ, encapsulated, to an external one, exposed to the free and abrasive airs. This little martyr’s body must cope with a terrific drop in external temperature. Light and sound pierce eye and ear like gimlets. No wonder I screeched.” (At this point Caradoc gave a brief but blood-curdling screech.)

  “Then, to pursue the matter further, the infant like an explorer must supply his own oxygen requirements. Is this freedom? Nor could the stimulants of his puny machine be less irksome to come to terms with—small whiffs of deadly carbon monoxide, with its inevitable slight hypoxia. Aiee! Can you wonder that my only wish was to retreat, not only into the sheltering maternal pouch, but right back into the testes of the primeval ape for whom my father merely acted as agent, as representative? I can tell you that Caradoc found this no fun at all. My respiratory centre was labouring heavily. I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life—twitching like a skate in a frying-pan. But even this would have been too much if it had not been enough. Within a few hours an even more drastic reorganisation was to be forced upon me. My whole cardio-vascular system, so cosily established and equilibrated in the socialist state of the womb, had to change from the dull but munificent throbbing of the placental intake to a new order of things—a whole new system. From now on my own lungs were to be the primary, indeed the only source of my oxygen supply. Think of it, and pity the shuddering child.” Here the lecturer provided a few illustrative shudders and took a brief pull at the bottle, as if to seek warmth and consolation against these memories.

  “At birth the heat-regulating centres are sadly immature. It takes weeks of running-in for the motors to improve. At birth, as I said, there is the calamitous temperature-fall, but as yet no teeth to chatter with. It takes overcoming, and somehow I did it. I achieved the state known as poikilothermic—a shifting of temperatures to respond to the degree outside. The doctor was in raptures at the very word. Poikilothermic! He pushed a dynamometer up my behind and began to read off the impulses, beating time with his finger. But already I was dying to retire from this unequal struggle, to draw my pension and relinquish the good fight. But I must not deny that I had already had a little practice in swallowing during my period in utero. There had also been a few languid movements of the gastro-intestinal tract—a mere dummy practice. But I knew no more about its meaning than a conscript knows about the intentions behind intensive arms-drill; less, even, I should say, much less. He may guess—but how should I guess my own future?

  “Of course some sucking motions had been present before there was anything to suck on, so to speak. Ah the teat, when it came—what an inexpressible relief! What a consolation prize for the surrender I had made!

  “All this is essential to realise if we are to think seriously about the Parthenon, my friends. The inside of a baby is sterile at birth; but a few hours afterwards… why, it has apparently taken in all the germs that make human life so well worth unliving among our mortal contemporaries. As you can imagine I found all this most distasteful, and made it plain with whatever vocal chords I possessed. In the meantime however the skin had started to influence fluid balance by evaporation. But the whole thing felt so damn precarious—the capillary system is so liable to dilatation and contraction. Yet I went on—not consciously, by my own volition—but propelled by my biological shadow. Slowly the respiration began to stabilise. But how slowly the systolic blood-pressure comes up during childhood. The pulse-rate, so high at birth, slowly comes down to the average adult beat of 72 to the minute. But meanwhile I was also developing an enzyme system for digesting the various chemical entities I should be required to ingest in order to keep body and snail together. How slow! I mean the evolution of the body membrane in order to filter proteins adequately. At birth the lining of the intestinal tract is a hopelessly inadequate barrier which allows the more complex of the proteins to be absorbed in the blood-stream undigested. The key to later allergies may well be here; to this day I cannot face crab unless it is marinated in whisky. Then, too, the filtering and concentrating powers of the kidney are woefully immature at birth.

  “Up to twenty-six weeks after the fatal event I was struggling with the shift-over to an entirely different chemical type of haemoglobin. You see, my respiration was far more diaphragmatic than intercostal. I had to be patient, to let it settle into intercostal. I did. I have never had any thanks for this. Of course some muscle-tone had been present in utero. I am not boasting. This is normal. At birth the infant presents itself with a hypertonicity of muscle which gradually levels off. Mine did. I will not dilate on all the other skills which had to be mastered if I was ever to hope to live on to build cities or temples: bowel-control, feeding, self-feeding. I passed through all these phases until by the end of late infancy the homeostasis of my physiology had become more or less established. Biting and chewing had replaced sucking—but with great reluctance. Teeth, which begin to appear after six months, gradually reach the normal size of the first deciduous set at about two years. By then, of course, I had already marked my mother with my personality by biting her breasts to cause more than one attack of nipple inflammation.

  “I should add here that by the time I could utter one word I had passed through the university of a human mother’s care and absorbed from her—from her voice, taste, smell, silences—a complete, overwhelmingly complete, cultural attitude which has cost me half a century or more to modify, to objectify. A cultural stance derived from every scintilla of her own anxieties, disgusts, predilections, moral and mental prejudices. All this was conveyed to me as if by massage, by radio-wave—in a fashion quite independent of the reasoning forebrain. Mould-made, then, and with the classical penis in a state of erection I capered upon the scene to play my part—a remarkable and distinguished one—in the charade of people who believe themselves to be free. ‘Woman,’ I cried in parody ‘what have I to do with thee?’ She did not need to answer. In the confessional intimacy of these first few months of absolute dependence I had received an impress, a mould-mark, a sigil which will perhaps never be effaced. My very body-image I owe to her—my slovenliness, lubberliness, my awkward gait, propensity for strong drink—responses she bred in me by leaving me alone too long to cry: by going out of the house and leaving me alone…. How can I thank her? For all my cities have been built in her image. They have no more than the four gates necessary to symbolise integration. The quaternary of resolved conflicts—even though it is harder to construct creatively upon a rectangle than upon the free flow of a curve or ellipse.

  “And yet, even here, after so much struggle, can I say that I have succeeded? What is the education of the adolescent, the adult even, compared in power to this p
rimary school of the affect which leaves its pug-marks alike in human minds and the marble they quarry? The notion of education, used in its ordinary sense, is surely nonsense. O perhaps it once might have connoted some sort of psychic training towards freedom from this chain, this biological prison within which all mothers want their sons to be sexual bayonets and encourage them to be such, while all fathers want their daughters to be merely fruitful extensions of their wives. Yet bayonets end in battles and deep graves—look about you: and women in order to mask their satisfactions end up in lustful widows’ weeds, tailored for beauty.

  “How soaring an act of insolence, then, was a construct of this order, and my god, how fragile an act of affirmation! with all the dice loaded against him this man one day stood upright in his mother’s shadow and evolved this terrifying stone dream. He dared not yet conceive of the existence of another shadow, an unfettered one, the soul. A meaningless but fruitful placebo. Aye! For this early conception of a soul of the dead presupposed at first a subterranean continuation of life on earth, and led inevitably to tomb-building … the stone-age binding up of corpses symbolising their tethering to one dwelling place. The first house, the tomb, became the outer casing for the dead soul, just as the first house proper (its windows breathing like lungs) was a case for man—as indeed his mother’s body had been a case to house the water-rocked embryo. But from all this to the temple—what an imaginative jump! It takes him soaring beyond the chthonian tie; for here at last is a bus-shelter, and an ark for the immortal and the divine.

  “Somehow he managed, for one brief flash, to get a glimpse of the genetics of the idea and to break the incestuous tie. Hurrah, you might well say; well, but to escape chthonos is one thing and to face your own disappearance (without mummy there to help) is quite another. His tomb becomes a boat to sail him over the dark waters of the underworld. Poor little embryo, poor mock-giant. This recurring flash of vision is eternally lost and found, lost and found. His cenotaphs are battered into ruins as this has been.