Chambers of the Sun Part 5

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Swimming the Hellespont - a Brief Lesson in Love and Strife

Yellow Rose Pension, Çanakkale - September 7th

First up, good tidings - photos are on the way. A website called Photobucket will take them, and I then somehow transmute them through the ether into these entries. In theory, anyway. Just for the moment they're available raw and uncut at http://s449.photobucket.com/albums/qq220/ollie_moody/.

There are four tasks that I have set myself for completion before I die:

1) To run the original Marathon from Athens to Sparta and back, and then to Marathon,

2) To win a bardic chair at the National Eisteddfod,

3) To reconstruct a lost tragedy and have it performed at Epidauros, and

4) To swim the Hellespont.

There may have been a lot of rubbish written about bridging the gap between Europe and Asia, but the Hellespont is still undeniably one of the most potent symbols of the depths that lie between men that the world can offer. It is far more than just the closest point between Europe and Asia; it has been the proving ground for empires, lovers and gods, and even today is guarded jealously by the Turkish military. It was here that Xerxes brought an army large enough to drink the River Scamander dry, and crossed over a bridge held together by single cords of papyrus and white flax, here that Alexander first kindled his glorious career through the deadwood of Xerxes' succession, here that the Ottomans took their first foothold in Rumelia, the gazi's promised land. There is an annual swimming race here, where some four thousand gather to emulate Lord Byron in floundering across the 1.4 kilometres that separate the ruins of Sestos from the site of Abydos. Byron himself, a clubfooted aristocrat suffering from syphilis, wrote the following lines after his crossing (with more than an iota of smugness):

"If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont,
If, when the wintry tempest roar'd,
He sped to Hero, nothing loth,
And thus of old thy current pour'd,
Fair Venus! How I pity both!
For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I've done a feat today.
But since he cross'd the rapid tide,
According to the doubtful story,
To woo - and - Love knows what beside,
And swam for Love, as I for Glory,
'Twere hard to say who fared the best;
Sad mortals! thus the gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drown'd, and I've the ague."

For of course, flippancy aside, the fascination comes from another myth that deals with Man's strife with the forces greater than Man. Hero and Leander have been treated by some of the greatest writers ever to shape a line of verse. As with the tale of Orpheus, this legend pits a mortal against two powers that held an almost primeval grip over the Classical psychology: Love and the sea.

Hero is the priestess of Venus, bound to her chastity and confined to a lonely tower upon a rock out over the waves. She is so beautiful that Cupid himself, Marlowe tells us, would mistake her for his mother, and nestle in her bosom, "and there for honey bees have sought in vain, and, beat from thence, have lighted there again." Musaeus, writing what Koechly called "the last rose of the fading garden of Greek literature" in the fifth century, spoke more simply: "a priestess of Cypris, she seemed Cypris returned." Leander is the son of noble parents in Abydos, on what is now the Asian side, and is so exquisite that he would have set even Hippolytus aflame. They meet at a festival of Venus in Sestos,

"For every street like to a firmament
Glistered with breathing stars who, where they went
Frighted the melancholy earth which deemed
Eternal heaven to burn, for so it seemed,
As if another Phaeton had got
The guidance of the sun's rich chariot."

Though they are proud and chaste, the torrents of Destiny dash these souls together and fuse them into one single seamless, irresistible passion, the kind to which gods harken and which no man can tear asunder. Between them lies the might of the Hellespont, not a river but rather a limb of the sea constrained to seethe through a strait. It must be remembered that for the ancients the Ocean was a far more ineffable and lethal force than she is for the modern sailor - see the calamitous wreck of Aeneas' ships, the horror in the fifth poem of Horace's first book of Odes and the helplessness of Odysseus. Still, Leander entrusts his body to the swell, a mere accidence of flesh and bone thrust against the elements. And in this contest between Man and Nature, the land disappears, the cities of men fade into the void, the stars themselves are extinguished: "there is another light, far surer for me than those, and when it leads me through the dark my love leaves not its course; while my eyes are fixed on this, I could go to Colchis or the farthest bounds of Pontus." (Ovid, Heroides xviii)

He succeeds. And again, night after night, guided by the glimmer of that little star brought down by Love from the heavens, he swims across a mile of ocean. But nature is not so easily beaten, and the winter brings storms so great as to hold even the boats in their harbours. It is at this moment of longing that Ovid catches the lovers, in two letters infused with bitter dramatic irony. He captures the despair with the utmost poignance: "I can almost touch her with my hand, so near is she I love; but oft, alas! this 'almost' starts my tears..."

Then, with a fell wind raging in the channel and the waves rising in combat over the iron-grey sea, he can yearn no more, and stands on the pebbled strand. Musaeus gives us his final words:

"My Love grows dread, and the sea will not fall;
Yet the sea is but water, and Love carries all.
Heart, grasp the flame, lest you fear the grim wave -
What heed for the swell? I go forth to my fate." (tr. with apologies by Moody)

"Love," the Greek novelist Longus tells us, "my children, is a god, young and winged, and he can do greater things than Zeus himself. He has power over the elements, he has power over the stars, he has power over his fellow-gods. The flowers are all Love's handiwork. These trees are all his creations. He is the reason why rivers run and winds blow." (Daphnis and Chloe tr. Turner) The philosopher Empedocles of Agrigento famously made Love and Strife the twin motive forces behind his four constantly interleaving elements, the one drawing the substance of matter together in a swirl of pure creative energy only for the other to tear it apart into its base components. There is even a myth where Hermes compels the Fates to fall in love with him, and they "at his fair feathered feet the engines laid which th' earth from ugly Chaos' den upweighed." (My compliments to Marlowe again) He banishes Zeus to the nether regions of the world, and reinstates the Titans as the rulers of the earth for a brief period of bliss.

Of course, none of this is particularly new or suprising, but if you are going to look at it like that then the whole book of erotic poetry is but a varied gloss on the phrase "I love you."

With these words ringing in my ears, I set forth from the bustling seaside town of Çanakkale to try and find Abydos and see what I could see. As I found out, magic as powerful as that with which the Greeks bound their stories to the landscape does not fade easily, and little flashes of legend still spark up today. I went into a shop to buy some water, and the owner bade me sit down and plied me with tea. Next thing that I knew, like Poseidon with Leander, he "clapped my plump cheeks and with mine tresses played/and, smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed." Let's just say that Hermes does not wing faster o'er the snow-clad peak of Atlas than I winged my way out of that shop.

Further on up the hill a huge ruin sprawled, all imposing bastion walls and triumphal arches with a rotting Ionic portico. There was not the faintest hint as to whether it was Byzantine, Ottoman or even from the early Republic. For all that I knew, it could have been the palace of Asius. I turned to the guard at the military installation over the road and asked him what it was, only to discover that he didn't know what he was supposed to be guarding either, although he was glad of the conversation. Standing around in the midday sun in combats and looking fierce must be maddeningly monotonous.

Another official-looking bloke manned a barrier that stood between me and the site of Abydos. He wasn't inclined to let me through. I wasn't inclined to pick a fight with the Turkish army, even in the name of poetry. Still, I got as close as I could, to the top of a hill where you could see the lighthouse of Sestos from a cornfield. It looks a mere step away; I could run the distance in five minutes. And yet, having scouted the Hellespont from both sides, I began to realise that there are certain problems that Leander and even Byron did without. For a start, the channel is now one of the world's densest shipping-lanes, with everything from pleasure boats to lumbering oil tankers drifting by. The problem, however, is not so much what is on the water as what is in it: sewage from Eceabat and Çanakkale, the odd oil-slick, and millions of jellyfish looking like sad little plastic dinner-plates. With a navy base on the one side and an army ammo dump on the other, it really looks as though I am going to have to wait to take my chances in the official race. And then the treacherous thought occurs: "if I
really wanted to do it, none of this would matter." Right, but I would need the right star to swim by.

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I am just finishing this entry off when a deafening explosion rattles the glass in the windowpane. I don't even bother to look up. Turkey are playing Armenia in the World Cup qualifiers tonight, and they are letting off a fusillade of fireworks to celebrate each goal. Mythology.

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