Enlightened Librarian: Asine

Asine · Oct 10, 05:27 PM

Greece is a country that burns through the imagination. You might crave to walk on long-inhabited ground or step through a passageway where others have stepped for five millenia. Sooner or later, the immense accumulation of the past will burn through you and addle your mind.

Greece, which shows from the passing window of a bus not a strip mall but the battered stones of a 3,500-year-old citadel surrounded by a parking lot, is a country that says: get over it.

I had wanted to go back to a place that gets a four-word mention in the Iliad. Robert Fagles translates it as “Asine commanding the deep wide gulf.”¹ I had been there 17 years ago, at the impressionable age of 20, having begun to understand the life of books and to notice the freshness of the past that could be lifted whole from words. Like much of Greece, at bottom the ancient acropolis of Asine is a lump of gray rock—a rugged outcrop the size of a city block with a cave on one side next to a long beach, a tiny gravel cove on the other. It’s a modest place—just a jagged horn of rock in the Agean that had been occupied for 5,000 years. I had wanted—and I still want—a private piece of the bronze age. All I had to do was climb up and look.

As I found out later, the Greek poet George Seferis had been there in 1938, hungering for the same reward—to sink down through the lonliness of a solitary life and sense an earlier heartbeat. Seferis, however, tracks a much grander and more magnificent failure of the imagination when it tries to project itself to an earlier age that is present only in alienating fragments.

All morning long we looked around the citadel
starting from the shaded side, there where the sea,
green and without luster—breast of a slain peacock—
received us like time without an opening in it.
Veins of rock dropped down from high above,
twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive
at the water’s touch, while the eye following them
struggled to escape the tiresome rocking,
losing strength continually.

Seferis has nothing to do with dilettante tourism—he wants to know if he is strong enough to reanimate the place with only his own mind and art. The test is fraught with perils: he is surrounded by the “slain peacock” of overdescribed scenery and overabundant literary cliché. The poem’s opening atmosphere suggests that Seferis, in his 38th year, is well past the easy epiphanies of youth; he has already seen that the passage of time is heavy, seamless and closed, and its rhythm—the tiresome rocking—encourages you to stop trying so hard. Why not take it easy? Brilliantly, Seferis is a man standing in a place, seeing what he can. There is the theatricality of the light, the scouring erasure of the wind, and a third thing: the blind spot in every bright place.

On the sunny side a long empty beach
and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls.
No living thing, the wild doves gone
and the king of Asine, whom we’ve been trying to find for
two years now,
unknown , forgotten by all, even by Homer,
only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain,
thrown here like the gold burial mask.
You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light
like a dry jar in dug earth:
the same sound that our oars make in the sea.
The king of Asine a void under the mask
everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name:
“Αsίνην te… Αsίνην te…”
and his children statues
and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind
in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships
anchored in a vanished port:
under the mask a void.

Seferis visited Asine while it was being excavated by Swedish archeologists, and as they dig down through their grids of dirt, Seferis also lowers himself into the shadows. The country does not encourage this. Greece can seem a place devoid of privacy. Living takes place in the open, and a modern village is a reverberant echo chamber of concrete and whitewash holding the sounds of barking dogs, roosters, motorscooters, shouting arguments and cutlery falling back into the drawer. I live in a culture of institutionalized obsessions, especially of the retention of important life moments locked inside photographs. In Greece there is an easiness of the present and the past; either or both can exist in a moment’s conversation, and memories exist because they are passed from person to person. But there is also a hint of avoidance, a whiff of neurosis and taboo: stay still too long and you might remember too much and be dragged down. So far to fall! Better to twirl coloured beads and ward off the evil eye.

Seferis is doing the poet’s job—turning over rocks and watching the squirming truth underneath.

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls
carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence
a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish
in the dawn calm of the sea:
a void everywhere with us.

Sure, this is poet’s boilerplate: paraphrase most poems, and you’ll end up down this same dead-end road thinking about death. But the beauty of this poem is how it stays rooted to the act of looking at old stones. In this place the imagination does fail, releasing its grip; there is only abstraction, where memories themselves dissolve. Language can’t hold them: it is a hollow calcification that is outdone by an escaping phantom. What you will into being does not exist.

And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the
tenderness
of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with
the sea’s boundlessness
or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of a terrible willow-tree heaped in
permanent despair
while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes up-
rooted in the mud
image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness
has turned to stone:
the poet a void.

Seferis, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963, affirms that there is no escape from the rational course of dissection—fragments cannot be rebuilt, and dissolution is the end of both object and beholder. In that way, Plato was right: poets caught in the appearance of things will not escape the endless cycle of generation and decay to a more noble philosophical truth. Their’s is a wrong direction, and they are false guides. But Seferis winks and says Plato was too strict. Metaphors contain the idea of an impulse outside the forces of the will that can lead to a momentary flight from Plato’s cave. Seferis fully acknowledges the despair of temporal things falling apart, but he also suggests you can—if your excellence is sufficient—write a sentence the will create a glimmer of life. He does that at the end of the poem in a moment of alchemical brilliance.

Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring,
and from the depths of the cave a startled bat
hit the light as an arrow hits a shield:
“Αsίνην te…Αsίνην te…” Would that it were the king
of Asine
we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis
sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon
the stones.

The last line is meant to make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end: Seferis conjures a ghost as present as his own hands.

The line holds the shiver that comes on a sweltering day standing on the rocks of ancient Asine.

Maybe it was the wind shifting.

Oh, and there are holiday snaps.

¹ Homer, trans. Robert Fagles. The Iliad. New York: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 117.

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