From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

  Time and causality have very much preoccupied our age, and science has so much overflowed into the field of artistic creation that it has provided new forms, new moulds for the fiery magma. Proust, Joyce were both time-intoxicated artists, soaked in history and the historic consciousness. They were hunting for the Nunc Stans,[61] the permanent Now of the philosopher.

  Often, effects and causes seem not to be joined, not to depend on each other, when it is simply that the distance is too great to discern the connection. Yet they are.

  Once upon a time, Aristotle, who only pronounced upon nature when he was sure of the truth of his statements, asserted, “Natura non Facit Saltus,”[62] thus upholding the unbroken chain of causality. “Nature does not do Anything in Jumps.” It moved in orderly process, link by link, respecting a perfect determinism—that is how he saw it. Then after two thousand years Darwin timidly, haltingly puts down in his private notebook a tentative repudiation of this flat assertion. He writes, “One species does not change into another, it does so at one blow, per saltum.”[63] The jump! It was a treacherous thought to harbour, for it compromised the rigid determinism of the pure Aristotelian thought. Nature could jump, nature could, if she wanted, syncopate! Quanta!

  I like to compare these two views of reality in symbolic terms by imagining the contrast between a European cathedral and an Asiatic pagoda; my own word-pagoda is to have five faces. But the cathedral is built like a boat or a bird; you have to enter it to reach its centre of gravity which is the altar which an Asiatic would see as a sort of telephone booth. By putting in the right coin (prayer) one could contact God, the presiding personage or principle, and bargain with him. The altar is the bar or the counter at which the transaction takes place, where your soul is tested for its qualities and defects. Heaven and Hell are the two possibilities which are offered to it; bliss or eternal anguish. It is a very simple and brutal view of the human option; moreover among the extreme dangers or sins is human sexuality. Well, the cathedral seems to have had its day. Once they were prayer-factories generating good behaviour and a kindly disposition towards men; now they seem like out of work computers. The belief in Christian prayer has been very much eroded. It seems to have been replaced by a communal will to unhappiness which I think we can read into our architecture which breathes confinement, regimentation, heralds of insanity. If this goes on, within a short time it will be hard to decide whether a building is a residence or a barrack or a factory or an insane asylum…They are getting to look so alike.

  By contrast to this attitude, the five skanda pagoda mind, which has begun to enjoy a great vogue, is perhaps equally full of traps though for us it seems to represent a blissfully calm view of reality. This is because it seems to offer a relief from materialist thought. The non-ego attitude is its ideal, and its science emphasizes the insubstantiality of matter, and posits a kind of energy over mass state of mind which perhaps is what Einstein really meant, for he was as deeply religious in a pantheistic way as Newton![64]

  I am trying to move in my selfish and hesitating way from the fourth dimension to the five skanda view, using the same old equipment of the domestic novel, as a kaleidoscope uses the same bits of glass for different patterns. I would like to try and use the by-products of Asiatic philosophy as I tried in the Quartet to use the by-products of relativity philosophy. I think the new form I am chasing will be less schematic and more floating, to fit the oriental notion of reality; slowly already some of the characters who only exist in the imagination of the others, are coming on to the stage to compromise the orthodox ideas of “reality.” I wonder if it will work satisfactorily, and produce a group of books which satisfy as an organic whole? In this new Asiatic domain the passport is the “mandala” (which Jung kept finding in the unconscious of his patients!). It’s a sort of cardiogram of the human being’s destiny. My cast is more or less the same—the two women blonde and dark, two clowns, lovers, poets, warriors, monks, villains, and seers.[65] The old stuff of fiction and Christmas pantomime, under different names. Looked at in this way one should ask oneself not if they are “real” but if they are “true”; that is to say true to this prismatic poetic reality. A single individual’s experience of people and places is extraordinarily limited, and if he is an artist he feels forced to accept these limitations and do his best within them. But certain sharp contrasts of a formal kind will impose themselves; the moving staircase of the “linear” progression will be replaced by something closer to the “flying carpet” of the fairy tales. And people? They will be spare parts of one another from the cosmic point of view, though quite real and discrete from a worldly, novelistic point of view.[66] Underneath the action will, I hope, be the Asiatic notion of a world renewed afresh with each thought; therefore, man as a Total Newcomer to each moment of time. It will need readers indulgent to this rather sphinx-like way of thinking; but then the “real” reader has always known that he or she must read between the lines. That is where the truth hides itself. Process in scientific terms is irreversible, though not in Asiatic, while truth as such is ambivalent. The sages appear to have co-opted it successfully for use as a pivot, so that it gives cosmic balance to the human animal. It would be a wonderful thing to feel that, having paid my respects to Europe and its relativity principle in the Quartet, I could now, as my star is sinking, touch my forelock to the Indian view of life. I would like to plant this Quintet at the point of tangent between these two cultural principles, so that it could be fruitful as well as entertaining.

  In conclusion it is worth stressing that the abstract symbols one uses in a disquisition of this kind—words like “relativity” or “Tao” or “matter” or “Maya” are to be regarded as road signs which indicate the destiny and direction of the intellectual traffic. They are not absolutes. I imagine that the sage considers them to be simply the paint rags upon which the artist wipes his brushes once the painting is complete. We must not let philosophy become a self-caressing machine.

  Personal Positions

  A Letter from the Land of the Gods

  1939

  Dear Potocki:[1]

  IT WON’T MISREPRESENT the reality of my enthusiasm for your work if I tell you that though I don’t always like what you think, yet I do always admire and subscribe to what you are. There is such brightness and warmth in your prose, and so much leisurely and wicked humour that I defy anyone not to be interested and delighted by it; there are good royal colours here, and I love the self-possession which makes each thrust—like a good fencer’s lunge—seem absolutely effortless. Power to your long right arm!

  To be a poet is to be religious: and to be religious is to be, in some way, a royalist. Is it not so? And if for me your admiration for the Fascists seems a little excessive it is only because I feel that if the Left are wrong today the Right are not right enough for me. I don’t want to barter the religion of the royal part of men for an inferior sort of totemism. And every man who feels the same will be more interested in your writing than in the prodigious squeaking and chirping that goes up from the leftist barnyards.

  Damn reservations ultimately: they are the critic’s drink—literary Wincarnis[2] with every issue of a paper instead of wine. I like men—not aggregates and contentions; and I admire the way you stand firm and speak because what you say is worth listening to. I respect the King in you and I respect the king in all men[3]—that is what I mean, I think; and this undercuts all dogma, which is after all only a man-made roughage.

  A King for all of us then: and the king in each of us. Would you accept that as a toast?

  Sincerely,

  Lawrence Durrell

  Airgraph on Refugee Poets in Africa

  1944

  Dear Tambi,[1]

  EGYPT WOULD BE INTERESTING if it were really the beginning of Africa; but it is an ante-room, a limbo. In this soft corrupting plenty, nothing very much is possible. The Nile flows like dirty coffee under the solid English bridges. The country steams humidly—a sort of tropical Holland, with no hills a
nywhere to lift one’s eyes to. The people have given up long ago—have lapsed back into hopelessness, venality, frustration. Outside the towns forever the sterile desert preserves its ancient cultures with clinical care. Dust-storms herald the spring; and summer comes in on such a wave of damp that the blood vessels in the body feel swollen and full of water. If one wrote poems here they could only be like marrows, or pumpkins—or like the huge pulpy Egyptian moon which rises like a sore every now and then on this fleshy sky.

  Nevertheless, shiftless refugees that we are, living in furnished rooms, something is being done.[2] Of the foreigners still working I think only the Greeks have claim to notice. News from Athens comes in little driblets—but the latest news tells us that the Athenian poets are still at work; and readers of Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi will perhaps be glad to hear that the Colossus himself is still alive, and still wonderfully talking.[3]

  But more interesting still is the fact that two Greek poets of more than local importance are with us in the Middle East. One of them, Seferis, has already been published in English translation, and on his journey across Africa he has continued to build up his personal mythology into poems of all kinds. He is the first Greek poet to write a limerick, and his notebooks are covered with Learish[4] little sketches.[5] For him exile is really a sort of martyrdom; he is not a dramatic poet who can exteriorise himself in his verse, nor is he an empty Alexandrine interested in form and colour. Under his rather artless choice and treatment of themes there is a sharp metaphysical struggle going on—which makes him largely incomprehensible to the Greeks, for whom the personal struggle in the European sense does not exist. By this I mean that the modern Greek critic would be likely to prefer D’Annunzio to Dante;[6] poetry that evokes and exclaims to poetry that says something tightly and categorically. Seferis always talks: he never groans and exclaims and points; nor is he seduced by mere music.

  All morning we hunted about round the castle,

  Starting from the shadowy side where the sea

  Was green without radiance—breast of the slain peacock—

  And received us like time itself without gaps in it.

  The veins of rock came downwards from above,

  Ribbed vine, naked and many branched, enlivening

  The utterance of the water, like the eye following them

  Struggling to escape the wearisome swing,

  Losing strength bit by bit.

  From the sun’s direction a long beach wide open,

  And the light shining jewels on the huge walls.

  No living thing, the wild doves having gone,

  And the King of Asini, for whom we’d searched two years

  Unknown and forgotten even by Homer.

  Only one word in the Iliad and this uncertain

  Like a sepulture mask of gold.

  You touch it—remember the echo? Hollow in light

  Like the dry jars in the dug earth:

  And the same echo in the sea with our oars:

  The King of Asini, a void beneath the mask,

  Always with us, always with us, under a name

  Ασίνη τε Ασίνη τε

  and his children statues,

  His desires the beat of wings and the wind

  In the space between his meditations and

  His ships anchored in an invisible harbour.

  Under the mask a void.

  Behind the huge eyes, curled lips, curved hair

  In relief on the gold lid of our existence;

  A point of shade which travels like a fish

  You see it in the peaceful morning of the ocean,

  A void always with us…

  (The King of Asini)[7]

  The evocation is always personal and immediate in Seferis; his choice of imagery deliberately simple and pure in transcribing the Greek landscape where rock, wave, light, and water present themselves as mythological ideograms rather than material things.

  And the poet leisurely looking at the stone, wondering

  Among these broken lines and edges,

  The points and hollowness and curves

  Surely exist

  Here where the passing rains meet wind and the decay,

  Of those who diminished so strangely in our lives

  Who remained wave-shadows and thoughts within the limitlessness of the sea…

  (The King of Asini)

  These fragments from a longish poem give an idea—though only an idea—of Seferis’s range and tone of voice. He is difficult to translate, and my Greek is not good: but what is difficult to render in English is the limpid way he manipulates his symbols. As a poet he is difficult not because he is allusive so much as because he depends on the association of words in their context—and of course the profoundest words in Greek carry overtones unmatched by their equivalent in any European language. “Under the mask a void” is a line thousands of years older and riper in Greek than it is in English.

  Apart from Seferis there is only, as far as I can see, one other poet at work who is worth a wider circulation than the Modern Greek tongue allows. This is a woman—Elie Papadimitriou.[8] Last year in Cairo in a refugee hotel appropriately named the Lunar Park[9] I discovered this intriguing and solitary authoress who had escaped from Greece with a suitcase full of short stories and one long poem called “Anatolia.” She had been working on the latter for some seven years, and it had remained unfinished; since then it has been published in a limited edition in Cairo, and has, of course, passed completely unnoticed by the neo-Hellenist quacks who are only interested in new translations of Byron. “Anatolia” is a sort of “Anabasis”—but written in demotic Greek and with a Chaucerian narrative-sense. It is a shadowplay in which recitatives are put into the mouths of various traditional characters of modern Greece. The theme is the Asia Minor disaster;[10] and the treatment is eloquently simple and bare. It is certainly the most important big poem to appear of recent years in Greek, and we are determined that the English shall have a translation of it some time this year.

  How did the women find time to hang

  From balcony to balcony the banners

  That when the sun rose Smyrna was ready to take sail

  With all her canvas on?

  From the barges the troops land.

  In heavy equipment. The slabs of the wharves

  Split, and hearts at each leap delight.

  First come the men of the island, from

  Happy villages in Samos, Chios, Mytilini;

  The first called up as green conscripts

  For an archipelago division; but war

  Had given them curling moustaches

  Pointed at the tips like wings…

  Then the Cretan soldiery:

  The swaying of their hips

  And the straightness of their necks

  Causes the balconies around us to melt.

  Roses are sprinkled on them

  And the bishop in his golden stole—

  O Chrysostom, doomed to martyrdom—

  Stands on a cart to bless them,

  And his tears stream down.

  The soldiers stoop to gather the roses

  And stop their gun-barrels with them….[11]

  The transition from narrative to reflection is managed with complete smoothness by the voices, and the whole poem has the quality of “speaking voice,” which gathers intensity for each recitative; “Anatolia” has what novelists admire so much—“canvas.” It is like a superbly cut film of the whole tragedy of Anatolia, where so much Greek blood was spilt. And, of course, being written now, when the new tragedy of Greece burns darker every day, it is charged with overtones of the present. Perhaps it could only be finished now when emotions of the hour match it perfectly. Or like “past grief which expresses the present.”[12] This is a recitative for the mad boy who succeeds in escaping back to Greece.

  NO NAME FITS ME

  When I stood at the tip of the cape

  Everything was complete, fingernails in proper number


  But no name whatsoever to condense me

  So when you speak to me stand a bit to the side;

  I too stand aside

  And talk in a low voice…

  __________

  THE WOMEN

  There let us pitch our tents;

  Let us not go further from those islands

  That look out towards Anatolia;

  Their accents and their sailing craft resemble

  Like next-of-kin standing near the dead.

  All this was no channel but a doorstep,

  Bays where we slept suddenly lost

  And where to go? Are we wanted anywhere?

  We are not one or two washed away

  But a sinful forest cut down.

  The clear night is swamped

  By the grief of one cow

  When its little calf is weaned from it.

  How can it contain the grief of so many partings?

  Will covered streets ever be empty of weeping?

  Will a shadow ever fall undisputed?

  These fragments are translated by Elie Papadimitriou herself, who is at present busy on relief work in Palestine.[13] I cannot tell whether they give an idea of the greatness of her poem. At any rate, they are an advertisement that something good has been done here; they help to keep us alive in this awful country which lies like a partly-conscious human being, dying of an internal bleeding.