Carte Blanche

Odysseas Elytes, David Connolly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781134428779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

First Published in 1999. Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) was born in Crete, and published his first poems in 1935. He established himself as one of the leading figures in the 'Generation of the Thirties'. As well as publishing seventeen collection of poetry and a number of translations from Ancient Greek, he created two large volumes of prose writings. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book is illustrated with ten colour reproductions of collages and paintings by Elytis as well as selected writings.

1

DRAFT FOR AN INTRODUCTION TO THE AEGEAN WORLD

Before the ridge of Serifos, as the sun rises, the guns of all the great world theories fall silent. The mind is overcome by a few waves and some rocks; absurd perhaps but nevertheless sufficient to reveal man in his true dimensions. And what else could possibly be of more use to him in life? If he likes starting out in the wrong way, it’s because he refuses to listen. In his absence, for thousands of years now, the Aegean has been saying again and again in the voice of its plashing along an endless length of coast: this is you! And it is repeated by the shape of the fig leaf against the sky; it is grasped by the pomegranate that clenches its fist until it bursts; it is chanted by the cicadas until they become transparent. Death may seem more or less right, by which I mean more or less of an irreparable loss, depending on how you accept it. Force and number have always prevented us from accepting the one true justice, which is an “exact moment”, or the one true morality, which is but a continual reduction to the most elemental form of our being.

It is impossible for us to calculate the enormous gulf separating a Cycladic figurine from a pebble with the same ease that we can calculate entire aeons of light–years. And it is precisely this that constitutes our Achilles’ heel, which is why in desperation we try to compete with knowledge. However, the Gods’ portion, if it exists at all outside religions, is without doubt a form of bounty. A seagull with outstretched wings over a limitless expanse of azure. We pretend to ourselves that we can blot it out, that we have the means. But then what? The day after we disappear forever, it still goes on. Two unknowns that are out of reach but that could shed light in an instant; such a shame!

Is it true then that light leaps from the darkest shade of black? Love comes to confirm it in another way. When two naked bodies converse, something from the untold part of their tale – the unbearable part – is erased. The kiss, which has not evolved in the slightest since the dawn of time, happens to be the most novel and unhackneyed thing that we possess. Some tale of love with divine dimensions must surely have preceded the tectonic tremors and the displacement of the waters when the Greek archipelago was created. The irrationality that we find in myths is sometimes redressed by nature itself. Only then do we reflect that, in spite of everything, it is we who created them, perhaps even against our will. There still remains something for us to discover: this light, these clusters of islands, what are they? Are we dreaming?

Journeying in his mind’s eye to Patmos and Anatolia, Holderlin perceived the golden vision from the distant reaches of Swabia much more clearly than the modern passenger in a jet at a height of 11,000 feet. Not just a few turtles on the surface of the water, aber

Es rauschen aber um Asias Tore

Hinziehend da und dort

In ungewisser Meeresebene

Der schattenlosen Strassen genug,

Dock kennt die Inseln der Schiffer.

The divine touch is what did not escape him. Magic has its own ways. It knows when to open a doorway even in the walls of science so that we may breathe. Such a door may prove to be a whole encyclopaedia; all we have to do is open it: the water level has only to rise or to fall by fifty or a hundred metres and the most wondrous, most vibrant achievement of matter will be enacted before our very eyes, and will, of course, also have its analogies – provided we are receptive enough – in the spirit.

A transformation of Picassian power in its lines and masses divides one island into two, joins another three into one, creates new clusters, causes old ones to disappear. Channels and isthmuses emerge, ridges with fresh red and green traces of marine life stretch out in the sun; in short, all that a living organism has to offer (together with the turmoil of its emotions) transferred by analogy to the physical world. The other side of things leads further as we shall see.

The thought of the Ionians, the first lyrical voice in poetry, the subservience of marble to man’s caress, the triangle of mountains introduced into architecture, Socrates, Jesus, everything, or almost everything, came from the School of this sea. How are we to explain it? If we think as millionaires do, the phenomenon is of little concern and the world certainly too big for us to discuss such matters. Yet I am afraid that the moon created by electronic technology will – whether we like it or not – always be inferior to the moon of Sappho, the beams of which, striking us as they do from the depths of one of Lesbos’ olive groves, enable us to come closer to ourselves, to “the things we love” – ὄττω τίς ἔραται as the poetess put it. A simple phrase perhaps, but one that has taken on the force of a natural law in this region and has survived in the souls of the islanders, finding expression in innumerable ways, and primarily by way of the instinctive and unconscious gesture that knows how to identify what is useful with what is beautiful, and, at the same time, what is beautiful with what is moral, in the most radical sense of these terms.

The parallel and simultaneous elevation of everything humble to a divine magnitude, and the bringing down of the divine to what is tangible and commonplace without the slightest trace of legerdemain called for strong resistance to the Christian superego created from the alluvium left by the superstitions of the middle ages.

Among the finds from archaeological excavations that we present–day Europeans neglected to collect and study are certain concepts which were buried in the same soil along with the products of their art. Humility, for example, which discarded the pungent and pure fragrance of aromatic herbs to become permeated by incense, was unreservedly bequeathed to us and remained within us more as the touch of a slave’s bare feet on stone slabs than as the pride of a footprint gathering wisdom in the sand. Nevertheless, in this corner of the earth, an invisible hand has always managed to point towards what is correct (I might even venture to say towards what is healthy) with the stubborn insistence of a compass needle pointing North. The inconceivable operation at every moment of this invisible mechanism, whose parts are as distant as the sun and as deep as the veins in the earth, or the currents of the deep sea that are in complete and harmonious correspondence, can be verified provided one dissociates it notionally from what we call immediacy. At least, to the extent that our – alas – limited intellectual abilities will allow. Unless, at such moments, the so–called poetic view (which is not a straightforward analysis, but consists of a shift from the rational to the transcendent and the search for analogies between feelings and actions) again acquires the significance it had originally.

We must not forget that only in this way did Pythagoras reach the point of declaring that the square is fire, the cube earth, the octahedron the winds and the dodecahedron the entire cosmos.

From the polypods on the Cretan vases or the flying fish in the recently discovered frescoes from Santorini; from the bare breasts of the Minoan women or the tridents in the mosaics on Delos; from the expanse of sea between two columns of a temple or the geometrical setting of a flute–player in Parian marble, there rises like a light east north–easterly wind a feeling that, inversely, we might call “holy”, which, without the slightest difficulty and as if nothing was amiss, comes to settle on the whitewash of remote churches, on the dark faces of Orthodox saints, on the arched passageways of the houses in Sifnos or Amorgos, on the blue and yellow of the humblest fishing boat. The enumeration may seem arbitrary, perhaps tiresome. It is, however, to some extent deliberately contrived so as to reveal something that takes place much more mysteriously in the souls of a community, where the forces of nature, restrained as they are on all sides by excess (the major scourge of our civilisation), always have the last word, by which I mean that they enable us to understand in what way time may be subjected.

A sun of assimilated love but forever fierce? Not enough! In essence this is nothing but one aspect of the phenomenon. The other aspect, which appears to us as a direct reflection of the same feeling that comes from works of art on the works of life, actions and reactions to those daily events that we might term “human behaviour” or “conduct”, is even more impressive, as it is indiscernible. It is this “conversely” that, by taking it to its other extreme, you see.

Enfin ô bonheur, ô raison, j’ écartai du ciel l’ azur,

qui est du noir, et je vécus, étincelle d’ or la lumière

nature.

Once when I wrote that diving into the sea with eyes open I had the sensation that I was bringing my skin into contact with that whiteness of memory that pursued me from some passage in Plato, it was regarded as being incomprehensible. Yet it is in the most pure–blooded Greek language that the helmsman finds the equilibrium in his vessel, in precisely the same way that Ictinus found it in the Parthenon. It is in this that, for example, the actions of a great statesman approach the pureness of the most noble form of marble. It is in this that the most sublime erotic sensation approaches the bitter taste of a black grape, which might give cause to believe that poets play with words, whereas in reality, if you think carefully about it, they are more serious than is permitted by a conversation before an unlit screen, with no horizon.

The Aegean has no screen; it never acquired one. It is led, whether by matter or spirit is of no importance, to what is essential. What is everything – for whatever the incomprehensible presumably represents – is transparency: the possibility of seeing through the first and the second and the third and the umpteenth level of one single reality, the one-dimensional and at the same time polyphonic point of their metaphorical significance.

So you see how you come to encounter morality even on the path that you take to avoid it. And perhaps then, its tap on your shoulder will appear even more persuasive.

A person waking with the dawn and gazing at a tiny mauve harbour, wishing that he’d never learned to read and write – how marvellous! He goes down to the rocks to untie the boat. Presently, one of the mountain’s ridges begins to redden. Soon the Kouros will appear and behind it the outlines of the other islands, the unladen fishing smack, a tiny church of the Prophet Elijah. Then, everything will vanish leaving a swarthy clear face with large eyes: the fisherman with his basket, your present–day neighbour, yet at the same time, the eternal Fisherman of treasures – and of men.

Night on the Sea (1986)

2

REPORT TO ANDREAS EMBIRIKOS

In the land where it was given to us to be eternally present – thanks to our other dimension, the Koh-i-noor diamond continues to radiate its sparkle and the distant mountain ranges in the Andes to shine blue in the Galaxy.

Alliteratively speaking, the pairs “Ear – Eros” and “Ares – Eris”¹ reciprocally exchange their properties, and euphemistically, the experienced Embirikos² himself remains a callow middle-aged man, with black and white goatee, smoking Player’s cigarettes and speaking in fluent Katharévousa³.

You often encounter him sunk in an armchair, with a large coffee in front of him, conversing with Sigmund Freud or André Breton. At other times, you can see him walking up onto the deck of a ship, with his sailor’s cap pulled down over his ears, lovingly holding a huge camera as if it were a baby. As usual, it’ll be an old-style ocean liner; one of those with two or three funnels that his father used to run between Piraeus and New York. He’s on one of those at this moment. It looks about to leave. The engines have already started up as a slight shaking has gripped the vessel and a smell of smoke hovers over the port, while sailors and stewards scuttle back and forth among the unconcerned passengers, men and women from every race in the world, with turbans and beards, with shawls and hair-buns, gold uniforms and kepis. Every so often, you hear strange orders being given in an unknown language, “Megabercha” or “Toranina Echbatomvia” and such like, and, not a few times, at the turn of the double inner staircase with its shining bronze, your eye catches a gorgeous young thing with a 1900s hairstyle, supposedly with her heel caught in the step but who gives you a meaningful smile.

So then! The things we imagined existed. Or will exist. Only now does it appear how time in the poems that we write has proved inconceivable for the learned of every age. And the couple that has already managed to kiss behind the boats strapped and fixed to the rail is in fact simply one more confirmation of the awkwardness that afflicts us when faced with the idea of death. For, already while living, we have distorted the concept of duration. Unfortunately so. We base everything on an identity that was given to us without our having asked for it. And our struggle to live up to its aspects ends in continual falsification, the consequences of which we have to pay for throughout life without reality ever having charged us. Yet the fact is that we always grasp the glass – and never the burning matter that forms it; much less so its final transparency. If, however, you don’t start from matter to reach the point where the perishable part of yourself can no longer observe you, then from where? Who’s responsible in the end?

To the Magi’s question, the stars respond only approximately. The poet prefers the essence; aware that even if he fails with the details, the whole does not cease to exist.

An incomprehensible association of words, to the extent that this, nevertheless, adds to the chance factor, is by no means pointless. We, as rational beings, remain on the outside – and meanwhile strong storms carry off life’s sphere, that has risen like a hot-air balloon into regions where all communication is rendered impossible. The binoculars that Andreas Embirikos is actually using at this moment, standing on the bridge, are trained, with a magnification of 7 x 10, on the birds that escaped from his poems. To be exact, they are not birds; they are signals that for many mean nothing – and then what? Let’s not forget that there are words that not only fail to serve but in fact undermine the meaning that they purport to express. The way we’re going, it’s not unforeseeable that one day we’ll be through with the written word altogether. We ought even from now to attempt to communicate using other means. Both by way of “emitting fragrance” and by way of “soaring” above and beyond the fact of death.

It’s friday evening, my dear Andreas, and yet were not going to meet as usual. I say this more with perplexity than sorrow, believe me. Since the day I left you behind those white stones in Kifissia, I literally have had nowhere to turn. In the end, as Breton says, whether one is in life or not is a matter of the imagination. But to see the fleece that he’s been seeking for forty years or more, hanging from a hook and at the mercy of the winds without any hand reaching towards it, that really is too much. It seems that a conjurer, capable of producing an endless number of flags from his sleeve, happened to come between the four million oxen that wander aimlessly banging their heads and the priest, who strives to arrange violets, boats and naked girls on the seas silver screen.

Who could ever have imagined that in times of peace and prosperity, bounty would be unappreciated. Yet it is. Today, if you don’t have anything to gain from what you do, everyone stares at you agape. Poems have been replaced by newspapers. Every analogy between the co-ordinates of a place and the art that expresses it has ceased to exist even as a basic concept. It’s as if even the words themselves in Greek had suddenly become stubborn and refuse to obey, if, that is, you happen to be Greek not only from the point of view of nationality but also of imagination. What I’m saying is already heard by othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Greek Poetry Archive
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Reproductions
• Introduction to the Series
• Introduction
• 1 Draft for an Introduction to the Aegean World
• 2 Report to Andreas Embirikos
• 3 The Method of “Therefore”
• 4 The Collages
• 5 Address to the Swedish Academy
• 6 Things Public and Private
• 7 Private Way
• 8 Slow Ahead
• Bibliographical Note
• Index