The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  “But if you can’t take it with you, you can’t entirely leave it behind either—the inheritance. Now comes the big historic dilemma. His sense of plastic had to cling to the morphology of what he now, tactually as well as factually, knew. The scale of his vision, however much it might include past, present and future, had to remain human. The fruit of this struggle, and this dilemma, you can see partly resolved here in this stone cartoon. Vitruvius has told us the story—how when Ion started to found the 13 colonies in Icaria he found that the memories of the immigrants had begun to fail them, to turn hazy. The workmen entrusted with the task of setting up the new temples found that they had forgotten the measurements of the old ones they wished to imitate. While they were debating how to make columns at once graceful and trustworthy it occurred to them to measure a human foot and compare it to a man’s height. Finding that an average foot measured one sixth part of a man’s height they applied this to their column by laying off its lowest diameter six times along the overall length, the capital included. Thus did the Doric column begin to mimic and represent the proportions and compressed beauty of the male body in temple-building. And the female? You cannot have one without the other. Our author tells us that when they came to the problems raised by Diana’s temple they thought of something which might symbolise the greater slenderness of the female form. The diameter would be one-eighth of the length in this case. At the bottom, then, a foot representing the slender sole. Into the capital they introduced snails which hung down to right and left like artificially curled locks; on the forehead they graved rolls and bunches of fruit for hair, and then down the shaft they made slim grooves to resemble the folds in female attire. Thus in the two styles of column one symbolised the naked male figure, the other the fully dressed female. Of course this measure did not remain, for those who came later, with finer critical taste, preferred less massiveness (or taller women?) and so fixed the height of the Doric column at seven, and the Ionian at nine, times the mean diameter.

  “How to forbid oneself to elucidate reality—that is the problem, the difficulty. How to restore the wonder to human geometry—that is the crux of the matter. I do not feel that this marble reproaches us for a finer science, a truer engineering, but for a poorer spirit. That is the rub. It is not our instruments which fault us, but the flaccid vision. And yet … to what degree were they conscious of what they were doing? Perhaps like us they felt the fatal flaw, saw ruin seeping into the foundations as they built? We shall never know the answer to this—it is too late. But we, like them, were presumably sent here to try and enlarge infinity. Otherwise why should we read all this into this bundle of battered marble? Our science is the barren midwife of matter—can we make her fruitful?

  “But what, you will ask, of the diurnal man? What of his housing? We can of course see that the individual house bears the shadowy narcissistic image of himself embedded even in its most utilitarian forms. The head, the stomach, the breast. The drawing room, bedroom, the kitchen. I will not enlarge on this. All the vents are there. I would rather consider the town, the small town, whose shape can embody both trade and worship. Now Vitruvius, in common with the whole of classical opinion, describes the navel as the central point of the human body. For my part the argument that the genital organ forms the real centre has more appeal to one who has always kept a stiff prick in an east wind. But I have only once met with it, and then in a somewhat corrupt text—Varro! But perhaps this was mere Roman politics, an attempt to oust the Delphic omphalos as the true centre of the world? That would be very Roman, very subtle, to try and oust the deep-rooted matriarchal principle and set up father-rule in order to promote the power of the state. This is as may be. Let us deliberate for a moment on the little town itself.

  “Do you remember the rite practised specially by the Mediterranean nations in town-building? It was established around a previously marked-out centre, the so-called mundus. This centre was a circular pit into which they poured the first fruits and the gifts of consecration. After this the limits of the town were set by a circular boundary line drawn round the mundus as a centre of ritual ploughing. The simple pit or fossa, the lower part of which was sacred dis manibus to the spirits of the dead and the underworld Gods—was filled up and closed in with a round stone, the lapis manalis. Do you see the connection establishing itself between the two ideas—urbs and mundus?

  “Then came other factors, deriving perhaps from old half-forgotten complexes—like the propitiatory building sacrifice, for example, which has hung on until today. On your way home look at the skeleton of the new gymnasium in Pancrati. Today the workmen killed a cock and smeared its blood over the pillars. But even closer at hand—do not the caryatids over there speak clearly of such a sacrifice? If ever they should be opened or fall down will we not find the traces of a woman’s body in one of them? A common and deeply rooted practice. In your great narrative poem on the bridge of Arta the same ceremony is mentioned—the girl bricked into the piers. It has hung on and on in the most obstinate fashion. Stupidity is infectious and society always tries to maintain the illness in its endemic state.

  “Now comes the important question of orientation to be considered so that the inhabitants or worshippers might find themselves within the magnetic field (as we should say today) of the cosmic influences pouring down on them from the stars. Astrology also had a say in the founding of temples and towns. Spika was the marking star for the ancients—people far earlier than the sophisticates who built this sanctuary. In those times it was accurately done by the responsible agent, the king, with the aid of two pegs joined by a cord, and a golden mallet. The priestess having driven one peg into the ground at a previously consecrated spot, the king then directed his gaze to the constellation of the Bull’s Foreleg. Having aligned the cord to the hoof thereof and to Spika, as seen through the visor of the strange head-dress of the priestess, he drove home the second peg to mark the axis of the temple to be. Boom!

  “Mobego, the god of today, does not require any such efforts on our part. Yet perhaps defeat and decline are also part of an unconscious intention? After all, we form our heroes in our own likeness. A Caligula or a Napoleon leaves a great raw birth-mark on the fatty degenerate tissue of our history. Are we not satisfied? Have we not earned them? As for the scientific view—it is one which drags up provisional validities and pretends they are universal truths. But ideas, like women’s clothes and rich men’s illnesses, change according to fashion. Man, like the chimpanzee, cannot concentrate for very long; he yawns, he needs a sea-change. Well then, a Descartes or a Leibniz is born to divert him. A film starlet might have been enough, but no, poor nature is forced to over-compensate. We are all supposed to be pilgrims, all supposed to be in search; but in fact very few among us are. The majority are mere vegetables, malingerers, fallers by the wayside. All the great cosmologies have been stripped of their validity by human sloth. They have become hospitals for the maimed, casualty clearing stations.”

  Hippolyta, understanding little of all this, was in a state of deep depression though tinged with relief. But Caradoc swept on, hair flying, voice booming. My only concern was for my devil box. I was anxious lest the faint wind in the mike should give me boom as well as rasp.

  “There is no doubt in my mind that the geometries we use in our buildings are biological projections, and we can see the same sort of patterning in the work of other animals or insects, birds, spiders, snails and so on. Matter does not dictate the form but only modifies it in order to make sure that a spider’s web really holds the fly, the bird’s nest really cherishes the egg. And how much the whole matter is dependent on sexual factors is really a dark question. Among squids and octopods, for example, the males have a special arm with which to transfer the semen to the female, inserting the spermatophore into the cloak or mantle of the lady. In the chambered nautilus the female clutches and retains the arm which breaks off. Spiders are differently catered for; the end of the pedipalp is used as a syringe to suck up and transfer the sperm;
but before this can be done the male must discharge this into a special web which he weaves for the purpose. In fact the female does not have to be present. In the axolotl however the female picks up the sperm case with her hind feet and inserts it—a labour-saving device which Mrs. Henniker’s young ladies would be prepared to perform for elderly clients. In birds sometimes, by fault an egg can produce weird gynandromorph forms, half male and half female. Aye! In the smallest thing we build is buried the lore of centuries.

  “All this and much more occurred to me in my youth as a prentice architect playing about among the foundations of Canberra with Griffin, one of Sullivan’s lads. It has occurred to me all over again here in Athens among the girdling shanty towns like New Ionia which your refugees from Turkey have run up, almost overnight. In these provisional and sometimes haphazard constructs you will find many a trace left of the basic predispositions we have been discussing. They have woven them up spider-wise out of old kerosene tins, driftwood, scraps of bamboo and fern, rush matting, cloth and clay. The variety and inventiveness of their constructions are beyond praise. Though they are unplanned in our sense of the word these settlements are completely homogeneous and appropriate to their sites and I shall be sorry to see them vanish. They have the perfection of organism, not of system. The streets grow up naturally like vines to meet the needs of the inhabitants, their water-points and sanitation groupings intersecting economically and without fuss. All the essential distances have been preserved, needs sorted and linked, yet everything done unprofessionally, by the eye. A micro-climate had been established where a city could take root. Streets of soft baked earth into which has soaked urine and wine and the blood of the Easter lambs—every casual libation. Flowers bloom everywhere from old petrol cans coaxed into loops and trellises, bringing shade to the hot gleaming walls of shanties. On a balcony of reed mats a cage of singing birds whistling the tunes of Pontus. A goat. A man in a red nightcap. There is even a little tavern where the blue cans go back and forth to the butts. There is shade where bargainers can fall asleep over their arguments and card players chaffer. You must compare this heroic effort with the other one we are contemplating tonight. They have much in common. A city, you see, is an animal, and always on the move. We forget this. Any and every human settlement for example spreads to West and North in the absence of natural obstacles. Is there an obscure gravitational law responsible for this? We do not know. Some law of the ant-heap? I cannot answer this question. Then reflect how quarters tend to flock together—birds of a feather. Buildings are like the people who wear them. One brothel, two, three, and soon you have a quarter. Banks, museums, income groups, tend to cling together for protection. Any new intrusion modifies the whole. A new industry displaces function, can poison a whole quarter. Or the disappearance of a tannery, say, can leave a whole suburb to decay like a tooth. Think of all this when you read of the shrine of Idean Zeus, floored with bull’s blood red and polished—as in South Africa today.

  “And now that we have spoken at length about womb-building and tomb-building it is time to consider tool-building and perhaps even fool-building.”

  Here the transcript became blurred and faulty for as he spoke an extraordinary interruption had begun to take place, a completely unexpected diversion.

  A large white hand, with grotesquely painted fingernails, appeared around the column directly behind Caradoc’s back. It advanced in hesitant snail-like fashion, feeling the grooves in the stone. The speaker, noticing the thrill which had rippled through his audience at this sight, and following the direction of everyone’s gaze, turned his own upon this strange object. “So there you are, Mobego” he muttered under his breath. “Good.”

  We all watched with intense concentration as the hand became an arm clothed in a sleeve of baggy black with a preposterous celluloid cuff attached to the wrist. Hippolyta drew several sharp breaths of horror. “It’s Sipple” she whispered with dismay; and indeed it was, but a Sipple that none of us had ever seen, for the creature was wearing the long since discarded equipment of his first profession. Slowly the apparition dawned among the columns of the temple, and the singularity of his appearance was dumbfounding in its wild appropriateness to the place—like some painted wooden grotesque from an ancient Greek bacchanalia which had suddenly stirred into life at the rumble of Caradoc’s words. First the face, with its rhinoceroid proboscis of putty, the flaring nostrils painted on to it as if on to a child’s rocking-horse: the bashed-in gibus with the coarse tufts of hair sprouting from it: a tie like a cricket-bat; huge penguin-feet in bursting shoes: ginger hair pouring out of rent armpits….

  A shiver of apprehension ran through us all as this semi-comatose little figure stepped shyly blinking into the soft lamplight. Hippolyta’s shiver was naturally one of social apprehension; but the audience stayed mumchance, unable to decide whether to laugh or cry out. Here and there one heard a few giggles, quickly repressed, but these were purely hysterical reactions. We were riveted to our seats.

  Still blinking, this grotesque advanced slyly on Caradoc, who for his part seemed also to be immobilised by surprise and indecision. Then, while we were all in this state of suspended animation, hardly daring to breathe, Sipple made a sudden rush in the direction of the bottle. Caradoc, awakened from his trance, tried to counter this somewhat ineffectually by grabbing at the clown’s wrists. But with a dexterity one would hardly have expected from this strange batrachian, Sipple secured the heavy bottle, and with a single wild leap jumped into the audience and began to run like a hare towards the north battlements, scattering deck-chairs and the ladies in them on either side of his passage.

  The spell was broken. There were some shrieks now from the tumbled womenfolk. Everyone else was on his feet gaping. Some began to laugh, but not many. Caradoc had lost his balance and fallen forwards off the plinth, still holding on to his lectern. Knocked almost insensible he lay motionless among the historic stones. His oil-lamp exploded and set fire to a chair; fortunately this was rapidly extinguished. But while a few concerned professors moved forward, impelled by compassion, to pick up the body of the lecturer, the greater part of the audience, still screaming, watching the dramatic trajectory of the figure with the bottle held high above his head as if it were an umbrella. The speed of his flight was astonishing; one wondered how he would manage to brake it by the time he reached the outer wall.

  But Sipple had other ideas. With one wild cry, like a demented sea-bird, he gave a leap clear into the sky and … crashed down into the lighted city far below him. It was a tremendous acrobatic leap, his knees drawn up almost to his chin, his coat-tails spread upon the night sky like bats’ wings. He seemed to hang up there for one long moment, outlined upon the shimmering opalescence of the capital below: and then plummeted down and vanished, his terrible yell fading behind him. More ragged screams went up and half the audience rushed to this high corner of the battlements to look down in the expectation of seeing the crumpled body lying far below. But just under the crowning wall there was a decent-sized ledge; relief and doubt began to mix, for surely this is where he would have fallen, out of sight of his audience? Or had he overshot it and actually fallen into Athens? They hung here pondering, hearing the deep burr of the traffic below and the soft honking of klaxons. From the ledge itself, too, there seemed to be no way down the cliff. Where the devil was he, then? The watchers craned, and turned perplexed faces to each other. The whole episode had been so strange and so sudden that some must have wondered if the whole thing was not an illusion. Had we dreamed up Sipple? His disappearance was so sudden and so complete. One could see nothing very clearly.

  But by now the keepers had been summoned, and a number of chauffeurs as well, to examine the slopes of the Acropolis for the supposed body of the clown. Torches were pressed into service. A line of glow worms appeared along the fringes of the cliff. It was all to be in vain, however, for the clown had clambered down a steep goat-track and made good his escape.

  Attention turned to Caradoc who had cu
t his forehead slightly and had the wind banged out of him. He was too incoherent still to answer questions about the episode and showed signs of being still a trifle drunk as well. Hippolyta herself was almost weeping with vexation. But with great presence of mind she delegated some of the local savants to conduct him lovingly down the staircases and ramps to her car. He went out like a hero, to ragged applause. Meanwhile Hippolyta bade her guests goodnight, fighting back her tears. But in fact, she found to her surprise, the whole evening had been—for all its strangeness: or perhaps because of it—a great success. People still stood about in excited thunderstruck groups, discussing what they had seen and trying to evaluate it. Accounts differed also, and arguments followed. I collected my boxes which had unaccountably escaped damage and followed her down the long staircases. She walked at a furious pace and I feared she would sprain an ankle.

  In the bushes below the winged victory a figure approached her and muttered something in an undertone. I took it, from its ragged clothing to be a beggar soliciting alms. But no, it handed her a letter. She seemed filled now with a sudden new concern. She tore open the envelope and read the message in the light of the car, and it seemed to me that she turned pale, though this may have been an illusion caused by the beam of light. I loaded my gear into the boot. Caradoc was asleep in the front seat now. We climbed in and she laid trembling fingers upon my arm. “Will you do something for me tonight, please? It is very urgent. I will explain later.”

  The car swirled us away towards the country house. I smoked and dozed, listening to the rumble of Caradoc’s voice; he was apparently continuing the lecture in his sleep. Hippolyta sat stiff and upright in her corner, lost in thought.