Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  It is not the dead who concern us here, but the living. When I say this I am reminded of Hamlet, acting in his wife’s bed in a sort of convulsion that is pure theatre to me. He is beyond her, days ahead, watching the calamities which wait for her. In this dimension it is as if he were suddenly trapped in a vacuum. He writes an occasional note but the words are like stale urine. The unique gift of swords in language is not his. He comes to me and says: “Write.” And I close my hands on the wood and try for him. But there are only new ways of dressing the spirits for her. The spirits themselves we cannot seal down in a commonplace envelope, under an ordinary stamp.

  Dear Ophelia,

  There are five of us here who would interest you if you could have faith. We cannot see clearly but we are certainly fit to lead the blind. It has rained as usual this Christmas. Old Sam has died. I would send you roses but it costs too much. Fifi broke faith and hung herself in the lavatory. Her breast hurt her a lot and there was a mess on the floor. I hope the kingcups are still signalling to you, because we cannot. We have not art to reckon our groans. Yours, dear wretch, while this machine is to us. Hamlet.

  After that the immense ocean in which the goldfish pioneer like elderly clergymen. We keep telling them that everything has been discovered that is worth discovering by their methods, but they will not believe us. They make immense goggling rotations, eternally amazed to find that the world is round, and that two and two goldfish make four goldfish, not counting reflections. And that the poor in spirit have inherited the world. But goldfish, if you could turn your snouts inward on yourselves, what adventuring would be possible! What a superb cartography to see yourself for the first time, filleted, impure, translucent, and ready for the apocalypse. If you could make a scalpel of your love that would cut down to the very juice of the bone, then there would be some hope for you. Alas! You are essentially clerical. It would be useless to make a new set of beatitudes for you and feed them to you like breadcrumbs, or spores, or ants’ eggs. Rotate on to oblivion, you shining gorgons. The new numen shall swallow you whether you like it or not, when the hour falls in many melodious strokes from the steeples. Ineluctably.

  With Pieter it is so tragic, these harmoniums belching at him all night long. I would get impatient and cross him out, if I were not certain that the Holy Ghost is swimming in his ribs and deltoids at times. Vasec is different. It is no ghost but a kind of luminous thing in him. Towards the end of the journey he would sit quiet, I feel sure, and contemplate his thumbs, plotting against himself. Then a quick act of blood with a rusty chopper, or a secret shotgun. He is like that when faced with verities. Copious.

  Well there is the snow. This damned carpet which makes everything sane white. The bed, the walls, the flowers. The robins appear like toys and swell with indignation. It is towards the time of the star that I empty this paper on to the floor, and walk up and down in my little whitewashed slaughter-house maddened by sanity.

  The Dancer is hymning over the lake forever, uttering little wild cries. Soon he will fall to earth like a bird and they will have to find him before the rigor sets his jaw in that gnomic smile. He is very madrigal, with luminous eyes and hair like soot. He leaps to the ceiling and returns of his own accord. I am excited by the process of the muscles that make this quilt of flesh for him so easy to land on. He does not fall.

  As for me, I am sitting here as usual. Did you think I had gone? Tonight the cattle are full of the nostalgic malaise of the nativity. I am sitting here with my coat on murdering everything as fast as I can write it down. There is a kind of humour in me, but no malice. Only the agony that starts from the hip and cripples one. If you see my wife in Venice, or in Vallombrosa, or in cardinal-crimson Urbino, or in the torrid straits, or in the doldrums, give her my love. I tell you this with my wrists turned outwards to show my sincerity. If you could see my face there would be no need. Every night it is the warm bed, the flesh of the seal, the pure taste of hair in the mouth. This is in confidence. I think you will find her where four oceans meet, in a favourable trade wind, dancing southward under white canvas. I cannot be sure, because from this my slaughter-house, my ark, my monastery, I can see nothing. It is a sort of lighthouse, but it looks over totally unique oceans, Asias in which strange flora and fauna look at me with the faces of a new childhood. It is very lonely, but there is nothing to be done about it. When I speak the words torment the doctors, because there is as yet no vocabulary, no glossary in the tongue I am using. It is a magnificent experiment, but I am lonely.

  This morning the old man said to me: “Come, it is getting on towards Christmas. Have you nothing more to confess?”

  I looked into his spectacles and saw once and for all the utter ignorance which he was hiding in his beard. In the strange playground of his mind the apparatus of the watercloset logic laid down like millions of sets of railway lines. All leading nowhere. I was candid.

  “I am a writer. This room is the theatre in which my surgery is made complete. I am trying to eat the whole pantheon of spirits, with a dictionary. It is quite fatal to approach me unless you have the faith. Otherwise I can only hand you my little bowl of green laughter and turn aside in sorrow. Why do you fear?”

  He said: “Are you lonely? Would you like a nice bowl of flowers?”

  I said: “There are five of us who alone exist.”

  It was not true as I realize now, but he said, being very masterful: “Come, speak to me. You do not deceive me for a second. I know when you have your lucid moments.”

  Then I began to breathe in a certain way and he left quickly, for fear of causing me more pain.

  I am sitting here as usual, but in a total loss. This is a lamentation because they have failed me. I said that five of us existed, but it is not true. In the night which is neuralgic with snow I weep and admit to myself it is not true. The Dancer does not. He can dance like a feather, but he does not. Vasec does not. Pieter will not. In the fantastic barracks of the idea I made many coloured regiments, but they have all failed. Fifi was hanging from a rusty nail. She did not either. Then when the curtain begins to descend, in the music, the shuffle of programmes, the applause, I see the terrific protagonist: the last one left on the stage: and it is I. In the final blaze of light, so tiny on the immense stage, and so awake, I kneel down before the annihilating ego who has no id. In this washed white room, among the snows, I kneel down with the pen in my hands. It is nearly Christmas and there is much to be done. There will be great fires, sumptuous with logs and flames: wine: charity. The charity that is a familiar word.

  I will be sitting here as usual. The paper is in many sheets, but finished now. The weather is cold, but topical. We shall have snow as the eternal novelty. There will be lighted nobility on the lake again tonight.

  This is my carol.

  Corfu, December 1938

  Delphi

  Published in Réaltiés. Paris and New York.

  Republished in Venture. New York. 1965.

  TO WANDER ACROSS this country of stone fables, shattered mythologies, blunted statues which have been passed (like wax in a flame) across the sun’s burning-glass can be both frightening as well as inspiring. How different from Italy, where the beauty comes out of domestication—the touch of the wise human hand is everywhere. Everything has a history, can be traced, decoded, understood. But Greece … everything is confused, piled on top of itself, contorted, burnt dry, exploded; and the tentativeness of the scholar’s ascriptions is a heartbreak. It is as if nothing were provable any more, everything has become shadowy, provisional. The scholar begins to stammer; he can hardly tell us anything without using the words “probably,” “possibly.” Sometimes, greatly daring, he advances towards a phrase like “it seems likely that.…” One feels that one has arrived too late; after all, most of what we know comes from so late a traveller as Pausanias, for whom Greece was as much of a tourist centre as it has become today. But long after the ravages of Sulla, the Emperor Hadrian had tried to revive Greece with gifts and temples, and superfi
cially it must have seemed busy and prosperous enough. But this Neo-Greek revival was a hollow thing.

  Yet if this disappointment persists for the traveller today there is something more certain upon which he can base himself; the landscape remains as unchanging, uncompromising, ravishingly pure and vertical. And each of the ancient sites has its own flavour—expressed from the very ground, it seems. I use the word “express” since it suggests also the extraction of precious oils from a fruit like the olive. The rareness of Greece lies in this singular purity of landscape-awareness; the historic memories echo on, drone on like the bees that once droned in the tomb of Agamemnon. (Alas, they have been killed off by the injudicious use of a modern chemical spray on the fields of corn and barley around the tomb, where they fed.)

  Among these ancient sites Delphi is the most grandiose, as well as the most sphingine; the long winding roads leading away north from Livadia coil like the sacred serpent. The landscape, curled inwards upon itself, reveals itself only in snatches; the mountain ranges come up and recede, recline and rise up. It is almost as if the dose had been one measured by the ancient physicians who built this road towards the centre of the earth—towards that mysterious omphalos which I first found as a boy, lying in an open field above the road. I still have an impertinent picture of myself, leaning negligently against it as if at a bar.… But among so many visits to Delphi I have never found the slightest variation in the impression it makes on me; the latest was last year, after an absence from Greece of nearly twenty years. What is this strange impression? As I have said, each site in Greece has its singular emanation: Mycenae, for example, is ominous and grim—like the castle where Macbeth is laid. It is a place of tragedy, and blood. One doesn’t get this from its history and myths—they merely confirm one’s sensation of physical unease. Watch the people walking around the site. They are afraid that the slightest slip and they may fall into a hole in the ground, and break a leg. It is a place of rich transgressions, tears, and insanity. A few miles away lies dream-saturated Epidaurus, so lax and so quiet; one would not dare to be ill for long if one lived there. Its innocence is provoking. But Delphi.… The heart rises as the road rises and as the great scarps of mountain rise on either side; the air becomes chill. Finally, round the last corner, there she is in her eyrie like a golden eagle, her claws clamped around the blood-coloured rock which falls away with vertiginous certainty to the dry bed of the Pleistos. The long thrilling sweep of the olive groves—greener than anywhere in Greece—is like the sudden sweep of strings in some great symphony. And then the ribbon of sea, the small port; for once the sea seems diminished. Behind one the rock climbs, the paths climb, the trees climb with one, until all is bare rock and blueness once again. Up there an eagle flies—one thinks of Zeus! But the atmosphere is so pure that one can hear the stroke of his great wings as he frays the air. A slight wheezy creaking, like a man rowing across water.

  Aesthetically there is nothing much to see at Delphi except Delphi itself: would you go to Lourdes to study modern sculpture? Once again the fragments belong to different epochs, different cultures. Moreover they are all votive objects, mere genuflections in stone or terra cotta. Even the famous charioteer is of a poor provenance and hardly gives one an echo of Plato’s metaphor.

  But the place itself; it is built upon two enigmas and neither of them is easily decipherable—the omphalos and the oracle. In an age looking for both physical and intellectual points of reference these two symbols stand for something important, even momentous. Somehow in Delphi while one is uneasy it is not with a sense of fear so much as a sense of premonition; what is here, one feels, is intact in its purity. The force is still there buried in the rocky cliffs. It could speak if it wished and overturn everything with one reverberating statement—but of course one of those statements curled up in a double negative. Is not Truth two-sided? Walking about the hillside in the shadow of the pines, listening to the gentle creaking of the wind and the pleasant susurrus of the cicadas, one has sudden moments of panic. Perhaps this is the moment—perhaps today the oracle is due to make its reentry into the world. If it did, if from the heart of the rock we heard one of those terrific and yet ordinary judgements upon the world of affairs, would we be ready to receive it, act upon it? Delphi is a sort of mute challenge. All the other considerations seem vague, confused. Side by side with the confusion of periods and styles in the Museum one finds in the main street of the little town ample evidence that the Greeks, with their passion for novelty, are still busy accumulating influences. Among the many beautiful carpets hanging up for sale in the little shops along the main street my eye catches something; they hang like dead rabbits in a poulterer’s shop. Closer examination reveals them to be the coon skin hats sacred to that great modern god Davy Crockett. His film must have passed this way! The small commerçants of Delphi are not slow to catch on to what the tourist public might need. Indeed the idea is a delicious one. That one should travel from New York to Delphi to buy a coon skin hat for oneself is typical of both modern and ancient Greece. After due reflection I bought one and had it despatched to Henry Miller.…

  But the oracle, the Pytho? Once again the historians begin to stammer. Apollo killed the Dragon and left the corpse of this gigantic dead beast to rot. Out of this grew the oracular power of the Pytho. The word means “to rot.” But what is one to make of this farrago of apparent rubbish? The modern Greek poet George Seferis ventures a thought. “In such fertilizing compost the power of the god of harmony, light, and prophecy took root and sprouted. Perhaps the myth means that the dark powers are the light’s yeast; and that the stronger they are, the more intense the light when they are overcome.” One notices above all, the word “perhaps”; for if anyone should know for certain it would be Seferis. But like the rest of us he is left guessing. This must excuse my own small venture in interpretation. The word “to rot” for me is symbolical and suggests a spiritual truth into which the Delphic visitor was initiated. One does not know out of what ancient rites grew the notion of re-fertilizing ground with dead flesh. It is older than Athens. But perhaps the “ripeness” of Shakespeare’s “ripeness is all” is not far from the Delphic notion of “to rot.” The point at which the body begins to rot is the fertilizing point of death; this manner of trying to make death fertile may have had a symbolic value.… From “ripe” to “rot” is a short distance in English, as Shakespeare has told us in a famous passage. But there was something special about fruit that had dropped for the Greeks, in distinction to fruit that had been picked. Athenaeius, quoting from a lost writer, says that the Athenians when they placed a ritual meal for the Dioscuri (the twins) made sure that it consisted of cheese, barley cake, and fallen olives and pears, in remembrance of their ancient mode of life. The gods preferred the perfect maturity of the fallen fruit. Even today the oil of the fallen olive is reserved for the use of the Church. And as for the twins … did they represent perhaps (notice the perhaps) the dichotomy which resides at the heart of man’s psychology and which is reflected in his language? The Truth-telling oracle of Delphi never lost sight of the double-axe in man’s mind, and the double nature of his consciousness, the double sex of his psyche.… Even today we have such an idea in the American phrase “double-take” and the English corruption of French “double-entendre.” Truth, like the sword, has a double edge.… The oracle with all its theological sophistication knew this only too well.

  The fact that Apollo created the Delphi we know today does nothing to qualify the confusion, for if you turn to read his biography in the Dictionary of Classical Mythology you come upon a God who sprouts attributes as ivy sprouts leaves.… Most of them too seem to be mutually contradictory. He is remarkably elusive, uses a number of different passports, while his personal behaviour on many occasions seems quite unsuitable for the god of harmony, light, and prophecy. Once again it may be that our authorities are too late; they came here long after an age of darkness had settled over Greece. Now only these fragments remain to echo on in our troubled
twentieth-century minds.

  Nor will the long excursion to the Corycian cave do anything to clarify matters, though in itself it is worth making if only for the magnificent scenery of the Delphic hill complex, and the taste of the pure Greek air. It is so dry and clear, the atmosphere, that you can hear sounds a great way off—such as a distant shepherd’s pipe in the valley and the tonk of sheep-bells; or sounds much smaller in the scale which startle one by their purity. I am thinking of the clicking of a tortoise walking over the burning rocks by the stadium, of the whiplash of a sudden gust of wind in the pines; of the steady susurrus of plain unstirred air among the dry grasses of the theatre. They utter a faint breath while remaining apparently quite still.

  The cave of the oracle was blocked about a hundred years ago by a fall in the cliff, but the famous waters of inspiration still pour out into the glade and rush down the steep precipice to the bed of the Pleistos. Seferis records that the waters of the Castilian spring have a taste of thyme, but for me they have had always the faint flavour of mint. Cold and pure, they nourish the roots of the giant plane-tree which stands guard over this ancient precinct. Last year, peering up into the dense shadow of its leaves we saw a brown paper parcel hanging there, tied with string. A votive object? This was not as unlikely as it sounds for even today the folklore of Greece is full of the habit of leaving ex-voto’s in sacred places. Alas! the truth was, though charming, more prosaic. The guide explained that the parcel contained his lunch; he kept it cool by hanging it in the shadow of the huge plane leaves. “This tree is my ice-box,” he said, not without pride at his own perspicacity.

  The traveller who stoops to take up some of the sacred water of inspiration should remember to drink to the poets of modern Greece who have now begun to take their rightful place in the European tradition to which they belong; it is a slender chain of gold links … Solomos, Palamas, Sekelianos, Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis.…