The Apophatic

The melange of Greek and Thai superstition, that I cannot repudiate, reminds me I had promised Emilios’s daughter Emilie that I would share the film I made. I have neglected this small act of kindness.

When dad and I travelled to Ekali those years earlier, I shot it knowing that one day Emilios would be gone, and it would be almost impossible to bring back a feeling for how those times had been. A film is a semblance, but as inadequate as this is, it’s my small rebellion against time. However, with inertia, it takes me almost a year to find the piece. Fortunately the hard-drive still works, the film is around thirty minutes long, it has poor sound, and could have been more elegantly composed but it does the trick.

Hopefully the documentary will last for a few more years on the site where I upload it. I am not convinced that any of us will spend much time watching it because, while the effort to preserve someone is laudable, after they are gone we want to hold onto the memories we have without mediation. After my mum died I didn’t want to look at pictures of her, because I was fearful of false, or at least elaborated, memories.

The process of journeying to Ekali, and spending a week renewing experiences, and the act of recording, transcribing, and editing the work is the point. It is another example of the voyage being the goal.

Now I am back in Bangkok, in my suburban life, going on school runs, and occasionally heading into town, where I still feel like the evil imp is busy switching everything from our world with plasticky replicas. The heat is almost unbearable, this is an El Niño year and the hot season started in February, a month early, the days are frequently above 45 degrees Celsius. By May it feels like there’s a burning stove iron an inch above my head when I go outside.

Although have put aside writing about Athens, in Greece I retrieve from my boxes some useful books: Junichiro Tanazaki’s In Praise of Shadows, Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo, and particularly timely, a set on Athens and Attica by John L. Tomkinson. His guide to folkloric landscapes is indispensable, often as an aid to memory, and in many cases a source of details that I love. For instance, the story of a child-ghost who tried to strangle passersby in the suburb of Filothei. This was where I spent every Saturday morning at the age of ten practicing Martial Arts, in a house belonging to a Sai Baba follower. Tomkinson gives me the story of a man in the Ottoman era who, hunting on Hymettos, was abducted by female spirits who had their way with him for a week, when he was found, in a state of disorientation, the locals had him exorcised by a priest. It matches an urban legend told by a school friend, this time it’s a boy and a group of girls on a school trip – they tied him to a bed and had sex with him for the entire time. At fourteen, oh how we wished we had been the boy. “Really, against his will. But how?” I remember asking.

Tomkinson knows everything about Attica but he’s pompous and judgemental, and not a fan of Henry Miller, calling his Colossus of Maroussi, “pretentious and almost unreadable.” While it is true that Miller is excitable, and dated, what’s the point in being detached? If only Tomkinson had told us why he had been moved to spend so much time exploring Attica, and what this quest meant to him. However, I am grateful for Tomkinson, but suspect he would frown at my own quasi-mystical attempt at getting to Attica. He takes modernity to be a blight, and this is contrary to how I see things. I am fascinated by Bangkok and Athens because they are capital cities, the beauty is in living with the past, our conflict is finding a way to exist without cheapening experience, to preserve without being Conservative.

As much as I love Tomkinson’s guidebook, the trouble is that it is just that, a scattered series of stories. My friend Clio says something that resonates. Over the years she has designed sets for plays at the ancient theatres of Epidauros, Herodes Atticus and Eleusis. She’s spent an inordinate amount of time reading around the subject of classical drama: the trouble is that we don’t really know how the ancients thought so instead we are presented with a cloud of speculation, which is a beautiful and delightful cloud, but it is self sustaining and keeps growing.

My desire, the creative principle that will stop me from continuing with this fool’s errand, is unity. By now my text is a jumble of different things, a mystery story, a piece about the zeitgeist of 2004, notes on Athenian myths, memories of childhood; when I read through these materials I feel nausea – instead of ordering the world into a coherent narrative, for the benefit of others, I have created another world that has the disordered and frenetic character of the original.

*

I tried to escape from one place to another but the old repeating question was always there. Exchange Proust for Perec, or Antonioni for Pasolini, Athens for Bangkok, Marinos for Emilios: I can feel the breath in my ear, but still can’t make out the words. I can see the magical layout of Bangkok but can’t discern the picture made by all those lines.

It becomes clear to me that the message is not impenetrable, but I still don’t know what to do with it. The prickle of aesthetic insight, the madness of falling in love, and the pain of loss, have a lot in common: they alter the way you see the world, and they fade, and renew. This intensity can’t always be present, or we would go insane.

*

I post the video of Emilios and a small chorus of people respond with appreciation, but there’s something wrong with the sound at the end, so I need to reconnect the audio. As I watch through, checking for errors, I come to a story.

Emilios speaks.

There was a rich art collector in ancient Athens. He could buy anything he liked, and was by this point bored. A strange man came to his house one day and told the collector that he wished to show him something of extraordinary value. The collector was intrigued and ended up following the strange man to the island of Delos. When they arrive he is impatient to see this precious object. The strange man leads him to a temple, and down some steps. There on the ground is a rotten piece of wood. The collector is baffled, is this a joke he asks, and the strange man says, this is the root of the tree under which Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. In an instance the collector understands, he grasps something beyond words and logic. He turns to the strange man and says that he has decided to give up all of his worldly possessions and dedicate the rest of his life to tending to this piece of wood.

I don’t know where Emilios got the story from, was it from a neo-Platonist called Proclus, whom Emilios has also been talking about, or is it part of Orphic, or Gnostic tradition? I have turned it over in my head many times trying to make sense of it. Emilios called the conclusion of the tale apophatic, which means to employ a negative in the proof of something abstract. Apophasis, denial.

I sense within the story an allegory. The man who has everything is the soul that is idle but still hungers for something higher, a divine principle, and the stranger is the impetus to go forth. The journey by sea is the challenge of leaving behind security and the possibility of disaster, only to arrive at a sacred place and still not understand. It is the lowly, everyday object, the root of the tree, that shocks the soul into awareness.

The vexing word apophatic from Emilios’ story is a negative positioning that unlocks insight. Emilios gives us a story and lets us turn it into a myth: something grander and multifaceted, that wakes you up at night and gnaws at your conscience. However, without Emilios’s voice animating it the tale is flat.

I try to open a door into the story by making it personal. The rich art collector and his companion traveled to Delos by boat, I have made this journey many times, not to Delos but to Tinos, Mykonos, especially Paros. The same journey: Piraeus, passing Andros, and Tinos. I put myself in the collector’s shoes but I am traveling with a girlfriend.

Athens is a foamy wave of white buildings over rolling terrain. We lean on the deck of the ferryboat; eyes inland as we sail away. On the afternoon ship, all fresh apricot smiles, we see that the city was not entirely on land, being a place of seafarers’ tales, and stories of the summer that spin out through the winter months.

The mortal sea froths with stories: Aegeus waiting for his son Theseus to return from Crete, becoming grief stricken at the sight of black sails, he hurls himself into the sea; Perimele, pregnant after a rape, she gets thrown into the waves but is transformed into an island. The sunset sea is rapturous; I feel the pitch and roll of maritime history; and imagine falling into the water, swimming to an island, where I climb up to a house in blustery dusk, where a party is in progress, where they have been expecting me.

She says that in ancient times they warned: take to the seas only during the summer, or if risking the spring, after the buds on a fig tree are the size of a crow’s foot.

Bodies prone on the empty beach, far now from our real lives. The waves lazy beyond our feet, she has sand on her cheek, grains like barley and Lilliputian shells. The jagged hills inland are the colour of raw umber; out to sea, beyond the sheltered bay wind catches, creating patterns in the rippling water; spears of light shimmer against a deep blackness.

She tells me that a relative had been exiled to one of these islands for his politics. The locals had been very bored so they followed him around everywhere, keeping tabs, making his life a misery. Her eyes are shut. I roll over to the sky picturing her uncle: a stranded Philoctetes.

Unlike the collector I am not in rush. Later in the day we pick our way through thorn bushes along a narrow headland. The chapel has long since fallen in. Its remains hug the hillside, with a small forecourt looking out to sea. She sits on a block of stone while I take in the view before stooping into the cave mouth. It is damp inside, earthy; all I have is the beeswax candle I picked up at the entrance. I concentrate on not slipping as I take the steps down, and worry that the flame might go out. My heart is beginning to beat faster, it’s giddiness and then it’s close to fear. I stop to look back, and resist the urge to call out to her. It is dark and claustrophobic, very still. Now I am in the chamber.

As agreed I blow out the candle, my hand on the rock-face, so I know which way to clamber out if I drop my lighter. I am not frightened because of the pitch black, or the silence: the chamber crackles with intensity.

In the darkness. A many-headed beast, its mouths snap at me. How honest have you been, are you sure you’re not a hypocrite? You play up your grief for Marinos but were you really such a great friend? What gives you the right to claim memories that belong to others? These initial reprimands make me want to get out of there. It is fine to cherry-pick the moments that suit you, the fine friendships and conversations which cast you in the best light, but what about the stupid things you said and did, and the people you let down? There are those you remember disappointing, girls you dumped, friends you grew tired of or ignored, and then – even worse – are the people you have forgotten, and aren’t aware of hurting – where do they feature in your narrative? The dark chamber fills with the two entities: my desired self-image, and the antipode of insulted moments.

These small mortalities are followed by the deaths of loved ones, by sickness, accident, murder, time, then night-churning regrets of youth and middle-age, responsibilities I shirked, places I should have done better at protecting – all of these painful and seemingly needless things gain mass. They become, through their latitude, the means to perceive something else.

Here too are the contradictions, pain and beauty, the gentleness of Greece and the harshness of its history. There is something paradoxical, and utterly logical in this: people who have suffered calamity are not predestined to be brutal. If you have known pain, you need to laugh. If you have seen death, it’s life that you cherish. Attica is a catalogue of gory tales, I believe after so many episodes of suffering, the Greeks recoil from the violent past, so we get tenderness and light from the place, and not horror. This attitude ebbs and flows, returning a respect for the land and its dead, so as not to incur misfortune.

It is almost impossible to see oneself from the outside, and harder still to feel the weight of your own soul. I can almost grasp this, it is as fleeting as a pine-scented memory, but much more painful. It hurts to see the psychic scars and dirt; if not for which, the chance of a grander life; but equally I would not let go of my taint, because it’s mine, and I want to see what it is.

All along, what I sought was not a clear image of the place before me, but a reflection of the place I left. I am the person who identifies through what I am not. I know myself in Thailand, or England, because I am not that. I know myself through negative identification, not through the clarity of what I am and what I want, but if I cannot name the thing I want, I can name the things I do not want: dullness, distractions from the heavens, destructive change, uniformity, falsehood, ignorance, barbarism.

Are the opposites freedom, happiness, fulfillment? It doesn’t seem so. I cannot approach the destination by using generalities, or words like insight, and spirit, and divinity. I have been compelled to be specific about fleeting things, and this has taken me to another fragile idea: beyond the aesthetic moments, that I love like a drug addict, Athens and Bangkok are just kinetic structures.

In this apophatic framework the impossible siblings, Bangkok and Athens, levitate over the axis of my experience – between their repelling magnetism, they create a vast third space and that finally is what I recognise to be a ghost.

And here I go quiet.

I will not stay in the gloom beneath the chapel. The last thought-images are wholesome.

We go for a walk through Athens in the evening, up to the Areopagus, where we watch the clouds; with the cool weather, the city is clearer than ever. She helps me pack up my stuff. We sleep in the empty flat; its echo has come back. As I close the front door the next day, it doesn’t register that this is final. The morning is bright. On the way to the airport we stop by the sea and have grilled sardines and a carafe of wine, the day is warm and clear, and it is endless, undying.