The Larissa interlude was lost and worthless—he was now in Kalambaka at the Divani and it was morning. Meeting those two mountain climbers, Seymour (with his pot gut and Slavonic-thunder-god face) and William (a classic Centaur) last night at Cafe Zeus was a lucky break. Mason trusted the calmness of their eyes. Seymour, drunk by ten, sang Leadbelly: “Green corn, come along Cholly!” He was good. Feeling chipper, Mason gave him a voodoo warning, “You sprinkle goofy dust around my bed/ You might wake up and find your own self dead.” The point: in the morning (this one) they were going to climb to the untouched, secret cave of an ancient monk called Hecrate, Knower of All Truth. Legend had it he'd left (in some form other than writing) a “text” which addressed itself to the problems of the soul's relationship to the body and the body's to the group of other bodies beyond itself. Mason was not getting his hopes up but he was damned sure interested. . . . (Late yesterday, on arriving in Kalambaka, he'd followed his nose and driven up a road through the Meteora Rocks because those ancient hermits might've held part of the question if not the answer. He parked near Varlaam Monastery: a giant eagle's nest perched at the top of a peak. On a swing-bridge a group of German tourists were being conned by a Hindu maker-of-little-wood-images of Ereshkigal. Mason looked up through the monastic aura and saw, from the embankment, a delivery man loading a satchel of goods for the monks. He watched the guy wheel it over on a pully. The bundle reached a tiny opened window. Hands jutted out but rather than capturing the supplies upset them: meat and milk, eggs and bread, turned into birds with broken wings. Mason uncrossed himself and moved on, deciding against entry. At nearby Monastery Hagios Stephanos he cornered a nun and told her his name. She said, “So?” He whispered, “Be in love and you will be happy. Be mysterious.” He knew she was wise to him when she responded: “You are a relief in bad wood: esoteric, sarcastic. Go cast yourself in Tamanu.” Three alarmed nuns approached them and stopped a few feet away. Carpenters in the background were hammering on the facade of a nun's dwelling. He turned and ran. Driving down: no time for sentimental reflection. All experience was a smooth swift surface. Really? The fourteenth century couldn't be trusted! He was sure now there was no difference between the Garden of Eden and Hell. After a few drinks down in the town he sped back up and parked on the road near Monastery of Metamorphosis. The dusk-sky was a traffic jam of old cars with their headlights on. Mason didn't expect the real Transfiguration. Nor any help from the monks. But he was surprised! He was led to the Charnel House of skulls and thigh bones. The guard told him to take his time. Once the door was closed, Mason sat on the floor and picked up a dusty skull. He placed his ear to the thing. It spoke: “Do not eat of the turpentine tree.” He put it down and took up another. It too spoke: “Do not trust the cult of the gods.” He lifted yet another to his ear. Its message: “Father Divine is the supplier and satisfier of every good desire.” After listening to eighty-eight cryptic messages similar to the first three, Mason gave up. On the way out he left a donation of a hundred bucks. From there, he stumbled on through farther gloom to baroque icons. He tried to kiss them through the glass, he placed his ear to the cases: nothing! In the museum a shabby man who said he was from Phigaleia wouldn't leave Mason alone. He kept explaining Truth and Reality. According to him both had been documented in the ninth and twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mason finally gave in. “But what about transfiguration?” A group of tourists came in with a guide and scattered the man's response. The guide said, “The manuscripts in this room were restored after the war with money from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation in America.”)
Mason, Seymour and William went up in the jeep. The air was fresh, clean, even sweet. Sky was a honeymoon, a tapestry of fauves gaiety! In the climb, Mason was in the middle. Just in case. Progress was slow. Inch by inch. They stepped upward, testing rocks that looked like underwater roots, fuzzy rocks, slick ones. Mason did'nt dare look back nor down. His hands reached, alternately, for a bright forest of flowers and a grove of weeping spruce. One way to transform the harshness! He kept reaching! When he thought he was grasping leaves of hemlock, his fingers curved around steep stonerock. Then, unbelievably, they made it! And what a grand view! There was Varlaam over there—and in this direction—there was Hagios Stephanos! Then they turned and entered the cave. Mason was still in the middle. He held his breath: an old habit left over from early childhood, perhaps infancy. Darkness. The three men stood together in darkness. Strangers. Nervously, Seymour cracked the first corny joke. Then Mason said, “There are thirty-eight types of ants in Jerusalem.” William snickered then spoke: “The Royal Poinciana is the most flamboyant tree in the world.” Mason said, “I'll buy that!” Seymour then clicked on his flashlight. “No!” hissed William, “Let's wait for night vision!” Mason's night-vision had already come. He saw the full contents of the cave the second before the light went on: there was nothing but dust, dust, dust—and dust!
He drove through the mountains and small villages and towns up to Delphi. Herds of goats got in the road but Mason was patient. He arrived at mid-afternoon. Hazy, hot, pretty. Nobody here rolled out a red carpet: he wasn't expecting to meet a man named Menekrates nor one called Dionysos. Mason was alone. His heart beat too fast as though something was about to happen. He was afraid. He threw his luggage on the bed and went down for a drink. For a change: gin and tonic. Finished, he walked: tourism up the ass. But cute. Real gentle: not mean to strangers. And cheap drinkable wine, he later discovered, in an effort to avoid getting drunk: Athos—made by monks. A tremor of fear swept through him. He saw double. Closed his eyes. . . . In the night while struggling with a griffin then a sphinx he was awakened by the gawdawful cry of some beast in its struggle to escape wooden walls—which woke all the dogs and the barking went on till dawn. Mason sweated it out in the air-conditioned dark. Was this damnable hotel below the earth! . . . A relief when first light came. It was on the hillside site of the classical past, the archaic stones, that he stumbled and cut his hand on the wing of a shredding woman-lion. Caught in a brief morning shower, he found the stadium at the top nevertheless. Above and below were the winding slopes and nerve-system of Parnassos. Before the Oracle he had spread himself on the ground. Unaware that he was not alone he kissed the earth. A little girl giggled. Mason leaped to his feet. Stumbling over a sudden line of peasants trudging up the narrow path with sheep and goats under their arms, he dashed down through their ranks. The smell of blood lifted behind him through the trees toward the iron clouds. Below, he saw the tourists' buses arriving. Apollo's shrine was the bone structure of a dinosaur, below: its hymn was not in honor of Chicago. No sanctuary for Mason here? Mason paused before the guardian of the Temple. His body did not suddenly merge with his soul, nor separate. The sky was clearing as he drove up to Arahova—only ten minutes up from Delphi. He poked around this village of weavers looking at the tapestries. In one dingy shop he spotted a table cloth with an interesting design: at its center there was an elusive cunt-shaped structure. While the clerk was trying to pressure him into buying the thing he picked it up for a closer look at the paradigm. It changed before his eyes: an old T-Model Ford was smashed into a huge rock at the edge of a cliff. That was it. Maybe he was still back there drunk as Blackface Hermes or needed to push on to Glarentza fast. Something was going wrong with his eyes; his mind perhaps. Was the boulder meant to reveal something? He put the damned thing down. He turned to leave the shop. The clerk held him by the shoulder. Pleading. Mason looked back at the cloth: the center had changed again: this time to a fat cow on a table in a speakeasy. Beneath the circular picture was the word “Oxford.” When Mason got back to his car a little boy leaped from it and ran. A woman stuck her head out of an apartment window overhead and called, “Herakles!” As he drove back it became increasingly clear that the separation of body and spirit was going to remain a problem. Oneness was lost somewhere back there in the ruins. May as well move on, buddy. Make the best of it. Unless, uh, unless you're ready to search in the remote depths of A
frica. . . . But for the moment live with the erosion. You have no choice. You don't have to be deterministic to dislike the present tense.
They'd gotten his signature on a document, threw women in his path, plotted God knows what else. Delphi was not safe. They must be here too. Behind every stone. The thought made his search seem so innocent, so childish. He tried to write. Florence Soukhanov wouldn't come. He felt like a slightly porous opaque clay pot fired at low heat. Think, Mason, think. What is your true name? Buster Brown. No. Think, boy, think. I know it's not Mason. I'm not Ellis. Can't they see I've given up? Why won't they call their dogs off? Get off my back. Mason was drunk in his room. A young man on his terrace across the way was watching Mason pace. Mason pulled the drapes across the sliding doors. Even that guy was probably one of them. His chuckle was a mad cackle. “A Cowie man. A hit artist.” No, if they wanted me dead they could've knocked me off long ago. They want to use me. But how and why? And for how long? He smoked and sipped scotch and continued to pace. . . . Fell asleep on the floor. In one alcoholic dream he was a writer on a lecture tour. Nobody knew his name. He couldn't remember it either. Every town and city he stopped in had announced his coming but with some embarrassment. They hadn't known what to call him. Leaving. Leaving was difficult—and a relief. Early in the morning he drove from Delphi. Thinking about Greece: there was something you could hear in the music and taste in the food. Then, an old man jumped in front of Mason's rented car—apparently trying to get killed. He was hysterical. A death in the family? He demanded Mason drive him to Clovino. Mason opened the door for the smelly old guy who chattered away in Greek the whole distance—which took a half hour. At Clovino the desperate man leaped out and dashed down a dirt road toward a cluster of shanty houses. Mason drove over to Clovino Beach and parked in the lot of a beach front restaurant. He had a coffee and gazed at the sea. His goal was to reach Olympia by nightfall. He had to step on it: yet a sluggish sadness gripped him. Hard to push. What would he find useful at Olympia? This was not just tourism you know; pieces to the puzzle were supposedly here. Surely. Anyway, he drove onto the ferry at Andrirrion, disembarked at Rion, drove through the bustling city of Patras. He held his breath: almost all the way to Killini. He felt a bone-rattling chill as he drove past Hotel Glarentza. Name sake? The red carpet? No way. He drove down to the beach and parked. He couldn't feel anything of “himself' here. He might as well have been in Watertown, South Dakota or Watertown, Wisconsin or Watertown, New York or Watertown, Massachusetts. People were coming off the boat from Italy as he ate fried fish at one of the beach front restaurants: American backpackers and Germans; also Greeks returning from holiday in Italy. It was frustrating to Mason that nobody greeted him. Him? Shouldn't he have been automatically declared the prodigal son returned from chaos? . . . His arrival at Olympia was equally uneventful. The band was not waiting. The ruins though were worth it: step by step. But the next day he left and stopped at Khora. Men at cafes eyed him with that careful scrutiny you know about. Wall scrawlings here as everywhere before: KKE on the one hand and PASOK on the other. Then he found in the Mycenaean ruins of Pylos the Linear C Script on eight clay pots locked in late-Helladic silence. And Nestor's Palace itself was no match! He celebrated the find by buying a good bottle of Villitas and finding a park with drunks on a bench and sharing the wine with them. Even this disappointed him; they didn't warm up to Mason. He moved on. Here he ate octopus in olive oil and felt sorry for himself. In fact he stuffed himself. He was thankful that sleep that night in a plastic Kalamata hotel, was not memorable. In the morning he set out for Mistra—up through the mountains: roadside vendors beckoned in attempts to sell pine-cone baskets and honey. Herds of goats frequently blocked the road. Mason was patient. That Linear C Script kept pressing in on his consciousness but he resisted assigning it a place in the puzzle; it might not fit—exactly. In any case it was too soon. Mistra: a medieval hill city with few ruins. Didn't matter though. The sought-after connections were not necessarily in the ruins: in fact, they might be more persistently in the living presence, the people, the spirit of the people. If he were a “product” of the West—and this was the “cradle” of the West, then . . . well, add two and two. Do you get Africa? or the doorway from Africa . . . ? He got Sparta as the next step in the chain of possibility: nothing much there: he of course did check the skimpy ruins but found only the dust from boys driving their motorbikes around the grounds. . . . Time to move on to Tolon! There one could give up and just relax. . . . Not worry. . . . At Tolon Mason parked on the beach. Walking down to the hotel he was bombarded by word-messages: Beach Skiing Lessons! Rent Pedalos! Take a Sea Cruise! Boats for Rent! Each one was like a left hook in the right eye. The spirit here was seedy. It made Mason feel shabby. He checked into Hotel Coronis but didn't like it and moved right away next door to Hotel Knossos. Not much better. He went back down to the beach. A group of vacationing French mignonnes sunning themselves on the beach and smoking Panamanian noir. . . . He gave in to a Camel and turned his lust toward the sea. Rented a motor boat and headed for one of the islets. Already windy and cold. Half way there he lost faith in his mission, but pushed on anyway. He landed, turned the motor off and climbed the rocky path. In a clearing at the top was a tent. Pull here? Yes. Mason went to the tent, looked in: a man with a beard sat yoga-still, arms crossed. He was covered by a leather garment. A woman sat next to him in the same manner. The man didn't focus on Mason. The woman did and she spoke: “I could love perhaps any single male individual among, say, seventy-five-percent of the men on earth. You are one. Also there is this: you are no longer in parentheses: you are in brackets: falling upside-down in an effort to be a union of two sets. Rain and snow coming your way. No stationary front. Your given name is not exactly a subset. Let my advice sink calmly: do not let your visibility be reduced by smoke. That is all. Go.” She closed her eyes. . . . That night Mason tossed and jerked—struggled to separate a swastika from the infinity sign then the whole mess got tangled up with the Christian cross. Having decided the swastika was a hunk of cheddar cheese and the two circles were pots of poison the situation became even more dangerous and paradoxical: he had to keep them separate at all cost. Then around three he heard the fishermen starting up their motors. He went out on the terrace. Half moon lighted the bobbing boats. He looked toward the islet he'd visited. Hovering above it was the lighted arc of a circle. The moon reflected? No. Part of the sun? No. “ . . . do not let your visibility be reduced by smoke.” He went in and got his cigarettes. He realized he must not get carried away at these intersections.
Greece was winding down. He stood in the center of the circular theatre at Epidauros with raised arms—hearing the cheering of thousands seated on the stone benches. They loved him. That love became his bridge. It nourished him. Blackface Hermes the clown was happy! Celt CuRoi should see him now! A group of American tourists arrived and jolted him out of his itinerant glory. He then jogged around the place. He bought a basket of figs from a peasant and drove on. . . . At the walled city of Tiryns, the one Homer wrote about, he met a stone worker who was hiding in the shadow of an archway. Mason squatted with him and chewed the fat. They agreed that there were thirty-three million, three-hundred-and-forty-thousand people in Thailand and eight million, eight-hundred-and-sixty thousand in Ghana. They agreed on many other important points. The guy had stone dust in his woolly red hair. Mason liked his leathery skin and sharp rat-eyes. But agreeable masons and the ruins of walled cities had their limits. . . . As Mason drove toward Corinth he remembered that that old stone cutter back there in Tiryns indeed had connections back in Twenty-five hundred B.C. . . . On the way back to Athens, Blackface Hermes stopped at Sounion. The sky was ice. He climbed a path to the Temple to Poseidon. Vanity. All was vanity. Tourists since way-back-when had chiseled their “glorious” names into the stone foundation of the restored structure. The insistence of it! (bringing one's own chisel and mallet up was a bit much)! And wouldn't you know it: Byron too had left a sign of his own desperate
arrogance and insecurity. Graffito was a chisel. . . .
In no time he was back in Athens. The minute after he checked into the King George he was out exploring. At a cafe, workers were singing rebetika songs. A couple of tough young men started dancing. Beer was spilled. Mason finished his Robola and squeezed out just as a table loaded with octopus, macaroni, keftedes, souvlaki, pastitsio, mousaka and fetta was accidentally knocked over. The bartender got his hatchet. . . . At a sidewalk cafe, in shadows, he heard a violent argument: The Greek War of Independence was not over! Yes, yes it was! Ecclesiastical hymns somewhere in the dense background chopped by traffic noise. . . . Mason restlessly moved on. He became a dolphin in the sea of Greece. What bullshit! Yes—Mason reached out now to the Hellenistic Koine and felt the click of the testament inside his own mouth: one exslave knew another exslave. Stress was right. The Benaki? It was the next morning—and he hadn't understood what'd happened to the night. He got the drift of ancient wealth—before the Akritic cycle. Turk rule. Then in the park he was dazed by a man balancing chairs and bottles in a high fortress on his own head. Nothing toppled. . . . A snatch of conversation: “My cousin in Chicago got the niggers to hassle. We still got the Turks. It's all the same.” His erection woke him—when he didn't even know he was asleep. He opened the anthology. George Seferis: “The stranger and the enemy, we have seen him in the mirror.” Mason wandered the night market around Sofokleous and Klistohenous and Athinas: veal was glossy, so was lamb; whole skinned pigs hung upside-down from iron hooks. Tripe bloomed under glass. Each black olive emitted one glowing cuticle. Plush tomatoes winked their red lights. Dates in brown profusion, soft as plastic wood. Then the dried fish with its salt-covered skin. Crates. Boxes. Cries. Crowds under electric bulbs. While asleep—again—Mason was in great distress. There was no place to sleep. Dream within a dream? He entered a furniture store to buy a bed. Decided to test the mattress on one. It was comfortable. He slept. Then something woke him. He jumped up, greatly alarmed: he'd to get to the party. Everybody was surely already there. He'd probably missed everything. Painted Turtle would be there. He knew if he tried to penetrate her his thing would turn to paper, fold up. It was raining. Where was Athens? Which city was this? . . . He got in his rented car. He had to decide between driving up a washed out dirt road and getting stuck or missing the party.
My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) Page 20