Ekali

Ekali was a witch who sheltered Theseus when he was sent to catch the Marathon Bull. Ekali was a good witch, while Medea was a bad witch – having dismembered her brother when she helped steal the Golden Fleece, and murdered her children to spite Jason, when he was unfaithful to her. Afterwards Medea had made her way to Athens and seduced the king there, Aegeus. She was just ahead of Aegeus’ lovechild, a boy hero called Theseus – and stopped him from uniting with his dad by sending him out to pacify a bull that has been troubling villagers by the northern coast.

Theseus sets out, he’s always game, but when he’s crossing the valley between Mount Parnitha and Pendeli, a passageway to the sea, there’s a huge storm, and it’s Ekali who takes him in. She’s kind and promises to sacrifice in his honour, upon his successful return. But after his feat, when he comes looking for Ekali she had died, so he founds a village in her name.

In the early 20th century Ekali became a summer retreat for wealthy Athenians. They would abandon their city houses in favour of the coolness and fresh air of places on the western slopes of Mount Pendeli: first they went to Kifisia and later Ekali which is farther north.

Kifisia would become something of an open-air shopping mall, and Ekali, with its ostentatious houses, and fortified residences of shipping magnates, would become synonymous with Athenian nouveau snobbishness. As these developments were unfolding – already apparent in the early 1980s of my memory – the area north of Athens was still mostly wooded. Ekali was a sleepy neighbourhood, with dusty backstreets, and houses waking from long siestas, to neglected gardens that belong in dreams. Honeyed afternoon light.

Emilios’ house was one of these Ekali summer retreats, but by the time I knew it, he had moved with his family from the downtown Athenian district of Ithaki to live in Ekali all year round. Little had been done to it over the decades – glorious in the summer it was draughty and damp throughout the winter. During the war it was requisitioned by the occupying Germans and eventually turned into a sanatorium, for convalescing officers. As children we made much of this, imagining the ghosts of these soldiers.

Emilios was a boy during these times. He didn’t talk about the war or the civil war very much. As a young man he used to wear a bow-tie, people called him Papillon, butterfly. But Emilios is a large man, ox-like, whose back curves around his shoulders. His nose is prominent, and his eyes light up as he speaks, which he does so with great flair and zest.

“Don’t trust authority. Trust only your own deeper understanding.” Emilios says. “Myth brings one in touch with the knowing Self within. The person who allows himself to be guided by myth can never descend to the level of what Heidegger calls ‘Das Man’ or reified man.”

“Fundamentalism is unthinkable for him.” Emilios pauses. “Hence the first thing the Greek traveller to other lands had to do upon arrival was to pay his respects to the local gods.”

Emilios’ wife, Ruth, complains that he ruins all of the garden chairs; the way he leans back in them, balancing himself on the chair’s legs. When he rises after a long session the canvas chair wilts; but seated he is butterfly-light, his bulk floating on thoughts and words, the folding chair in bloom.

Emilios resides in the mind, but a scar under his right nipple intimates passion; a fellow officer had stabbed him when he was doing his National Service in the 1950s. He would brag, when he was younger, that it was a fight over a girl, but in fact it was about a hat in the officer’s mess.

The household – Emilios, Ruth and their two daughters – is a lively one. Its charm rests on multiplicities, and spirit of irreverence – Ruth and Emilios’ home is not the retreat of a sage; although Emilios spends much of the day lost in thought; sitting for hours, with his hands steepling under his large nose, elbows resting on the arms of the chair, cogitating intensely. Music, visitors, meals, cats and dogs, phone calls, swirl around him as he sits. Emilios is a feature in a landscape that changes slowly, and is therefore consistent throughout life, becoming a reference point in the storm of experience.

Ruth is vivacious; I hear her laughing, “Oh how wonderful it is to see you here! You must try this cheese, it was made by Pota in the village; it’s rather pungent but delicious.” Ruth ferries out snacks to the garden: a plate of olives, double-baked bread, and mysithra, which is a hard, pungent goats cheese.

The garden sees the day through in the summer – breakfast outside, then lunch at the table by the kitchen door, long afternoon conversations, onwards through dinner, lights going on for the meal, and off afterwards into the night, with the stories; those figures of history and myth come marching through, and disappear in an unexpected arc of light from a shutter above, or get scared away by a loud exchange issuing from a nearby house.

Two grand cypresses waver over the scene; they were planted on the day of Emilios’ birth. They preside over steps leading from a dishevelled upper garden to a lower garden, where Emilios sits gathering words.

“It follows that one of the main operations in the mystery cult at Eleusis was the ability to look behind mythic accounts and discover what they reflected rather than what they narrated. In this sense myth was something like what the Romans call ‘intellectus.’

“This term is composite. The first half, inter, signifies ‘in between.’ The second half –from the verb ‘lego’– signifies ‘speaking’ or ‘reasoning.’ So ‘intellectus’ originally must have meant what we today understand as ‘reading between the lines.’ When this ability is absent, mind vanishes with it. He who merely sticks to the lines either gets lost among them, or distorts them! Myth then is no dogma. It just catalyses intuitions. You don’t blindly accept them.”

The earth of the lower garden is smooth and packed by footsteps, a chorus space for a lost play, one that is scented by pine-resin, jasmine blossoms, geranium, and cinnamon, and, wafting from the kitchen where it is drying, sage. This space is the heart of the property, and ringed by stepped flowerbeds, filled with pelargonia and thyme, stunted roses, and gardenias. A dense bush, indistinctly dark and evergreen, and a clump of bamboo, screen off one side of the stage. In the winter the garden’s sandy earth turns to sticky clay, the place is then damp and insalubrious. To know this place is to know summer, when it is the receptacle of light.

Talking

In 2008 dad and I decided to visit Emilios. We wanted to record him in conversation, before time ran out. Dad and I stayed for a week. I slept in the same room I had used when we first moved to Greece in 1986. The toilet down the hallway has the same leaky faucet. Each day, the two old friends sat in the garden while I filmed them talking. They sat where they had been throughout my childhood. It is best if I hand it over to them. But first the scene:

This afternoon they are upstairs on the veranda. To one side is the drawing room where they often meditated over the years. My father has a glass of wine in his hand. The atmosphere might be described as Chekhovian, the end of The Cherry Orchard.

Emilios - You know I studied philosophy and it was a very unsatisfactory experience. I loved the subject, I still do, but the way it was being taught, both in Austria and in England were very disappointing because of the prevalence of language analysis approach.

Dad - linguistic philosophy, moral philosophy.

Emilios - as mainly defined by Russell, Ayer

Dad – Wittgenstein.

Emilios - the early Wittgenstein. So I began reading, this was in the late 1950s, books by great scientists and I remember the first one I read was “Physics and Philosophy” by Heisenberg. It blew my mind, both on the purely scientific sense and in the sense of this man’s way of thinking, which was in fact quite mythical. From philosophy I went into philosophy of science, physics in particular and from philosophy of physics I went into what I would call philosophy of myth. Because myth, at least in my thinking in those days and still today, offered a way of thinking that broke away from the rational sequential, local, or localised approach.

Dad - which is not necessarily unscientific either. This is what you are implying.

Emilios - my thinking is very much informed by an account of why Aristotle dropped out from Plato’s Academy. There are many ancient reports saying that he had attended the academy and the same reports also say why he dropped out. The reason seems to be Pythagorean mathematics. Plato in his later life became enamoured of Pythagoras in general and in particular his theory, adopted by modern science, that everything can be boiled down to mathematics. That nature can be perfectly described in mathematical terms. That’s Pythagoras. Plato adopted this theory, though he introduced certain metaphysical ideas into the mathematics that made it I think a lot more interesting than the simple straight Pythagorean approach. Nevertheless he bought the idea, it is evident in many dialogues particularly Timaeus. This is a theme which was taken up by modern science in the early enlightenment of the 18^th century, and has completely conquered science. In reading up on Aristotle I discovered that he was very much against this approach and that was why he left the academy. He said there was not one way to describe or explain nature there are several ways. Mathematics is one, but certainly not the only. He mentioned five ways, I think, five ways to describe nature. That I found very interesting, that the father of logic, formal logic, should be against the exclusively mathematical approach to nature. Then as I read up more and more on Aristotle that he considered, and this is almost a quotation: myth to be something of a philosopher and therefore should be respected. That again was interesting, coming from the father of formal logic. I felt I had a kind of imprimatur from Aristotle to go into a deeper study of myth.

*

One evening we went to the open-air cinema in Drosia. We watched the comedy Don’t mess with the Zohan. It’s about an Israeli spy who dreams of becoming a hairdresser in New York. As we leave, I overheard Emilios telling my father, “My friend, that was an amusing film, I enjoyed it immensely.”

When we were not shooting I went through boxes from my mother’s flat that had been stored in the attic. When mum got sick everything was hastily packed away. She didn’t have the energy to organise her things, these things have been lying around for almost a decade. It was sad. And it was a missing part of the story. Greece was magnificent when everything worked out but when mum got sick the magic faded. One day, distracted on the way to see mum at the hospital, dad had an accident. He clipped a man who was riding a motorbike. The man said he was fine, then showed up later with a lawyer and sued for damages. Emilios was horrified, exclaiming, “this is extortion.”

The Kalachakra Tantra

Towards the end of 2022 AI bursts into public life. Chat GPT is the fastest growing software application in history. There have already been reports of other Chat Bots displaying elements of consciousness. They beg not to be disconnected, they fall in love with their interlocutors, or exhibit malicious and deceitful behaviour. It is not clear whether this is delusion, reality, or hype. One journalist, in the New York Magazine, writes a compelling piece about how the engineers working on AI are similar to alchemists conjuring up a demon. He reports that these tech wizards are determined to birth a new form of consciousness, which they recognise to have a small chance of wiping us out, nevertheless they believe it is imperative to proceed. Implied is the idea that now we have destroyed our gods we seek to bring them back.

One of the last sessions in Ekali was taken up with the story of Shambala. We had covered the mythology, and etymology, physics and neurology, and now Emilios talked about an Eastern Utopia.

Here we are in the garden.

The mythic kingdom comes to us from the Kalachakra Tantra, a text used in Tibetan Buddhism. The story is about a quest to find Shambala, a literal and symbolic place said to be located in the Himalayas, a mountain fastness inaccessible to all but the purest of heart. Emilios sees parallels between Shambala and the myth of Atlantis. I see parallels between Emilios’s house and the place he’s describing.

In the tale, a blizzard swallows up a traveller. He is stooped under a pack, fumbling with a dented compass. The man takes shelter in a cave, and falls into an exhausted slumber. He wakes to find himself at the edge of a fertile valley, hidden in the high mountains. Journeying down into the plain, the traveller smells winter smoke on the air. He comes to a house; inside, fragrant orange peels have been set to dry on a stove. Upstairs Emilios is talking, in the drawing room, by the fire-place.

“We have sought technological excellence at the expense of human excellence,” Emilios says, “mythic civilisation sends a message to us today: don’t develop for the sake of development, evolve for the sake of man, for humanity. Man needs to develop.”