Chambers of the Sun Part 4

---

Ecce Homo

Yellow Rose Pension, Çanakkale, nr. the Hellespont - September 6th

I must have written university essays shorter than that last entry. This is becoming less a travel journal than a series of nascent dissertations, and is doubtless thoroughly tedious reading matter. I can only say that I am churning with such a ferment of ill-digested ideas that I have to condemn some of them to paper.

Readers will be delighted to learn that the last two days have been almost wholly uneventful. Turkey is effectively a large network of coach rides with towns in between, and unless you are feeling wealthy enough to fly you have few other options for travel. I took the five-hour long journey through Thrace to Eceabat on the Gallipoli peninsular with some trepidation, but thankfully there were no logistical glitches.

The packed bus was far less of a trial than I had foreseen, with air-conditioning, waiters and shoddy Turkish pop played over the tannoy. The only drawback was the absurd film that came on after a couple of hours, which was titled, as far as I could work out, "The Adventures of Recep the Fat." The man lives up to his epithet, shouts at women, shouts at his car, gets into fights, engages in farting contests, shouts at men and breaks things. For the first time on this trip, I was glad of my inability to understand spoken Turkish. Istanbul's film industry has some little way to go yet before they overhaul Hollywood; this looked like something from Borat's Kazakhstan.

Thrace is dull. Vast tracts of russet sunflower-fields are punctuated by olives and cypresses, and everything wilts in the heat. Nonetheless, we are coming into poetry country, and I had better explain the fascination that this land holds for me. Put simply, early Greek poetry was alive, in a way that it would never again breathe after the great dramatists of the fifth century. Current theory suggests that it was only coincidentally an art-form: it was a mode of instruction, of drawing the shards of a community and its larger culture into coherent blocks, of making the darkness outside the campfires a known place - although the artistic element is doubtless in the ascendant in the later and greater pieces. Like the Bedouin poetry of the desert, it was a silver thread shot through the whole of life.

It was inextricably bound up with the melody and dance that accompanied it in such a way that, even when we can understand all the prosody and allusion, we cannot begin to conceive the full effect. Lyric poetry itself is music - the gently undulating vowels of the Doric and Aeolian dialects with their fluttering cadences are more song than poetry, and only occasionally punctuated by the soft click of a consonant. People wrote it at drinking parties and sung it at every ritual event. It is characterised by the absence of affectation and the presence of a certain power which, one feels, could almost move the sun and the stars. This material moment of poetry is well-expressed in Apollinaire's preface to his Cortege d'Orphée:

"Wonder at this bold vivacity
And at the firm lines' nobility
At 'let there be light' the voice was heard." (tr. Schmidt)

And what better poet to begin with than Orpheus, for that matter? We have little or nothing that can be said with any certainty about his life or his works, but this Thracian's numen is felt throughout the ancient world. The Orpheus myths take poetry right down to its most primitive and powerful effects: a strain so moving that the world moves with it. Vergil's account of the resurrection of Eurydice in his fourth Georgic conveys this in a tone almost as potent as the song it describes:

"Then from the deepest deeps of Erebus,
Wrung by his minstrelsy, the hollow shades
Came trooping, ghostly semblances of forms
Lost to the light, as birds by myriads hie
To greenwood boughs for cover, when twilight-hour
Or storms of winter chase them from the hills;
Matrons and men, and great heroic frames
Done with life's service, boys, unwedded girls,
Youths placed on pyre before their fathers' eyes.
Round them, with black slime choked and hideous weed,
Cocytus winds; there lies the unlovely swamp
Of dull dead water, and, to pen them fast,
Styx with her ninefold barrier poured between.
Nay, even the deep Tartarean Halls of death
Stood lost in wonderment, and the Eumenides,
Their brows with livid locks of serpents twined;
Even Cerberus held his triple jaws agape,
And, the wind hushed, Ixion's wheel stood still." (tr. Greenough)

The whole house of Death ceases its action at his lyre. The very souls of the departed gather round. Sisyphus leans on his boulder, Allecto sheds a tear as black as night, and one of the three sons of Cronos grants a mortal's boon. Man stands, naked and unashamed, before the gods themselves. Ecce homo. Plato's famous scorn for Orpheus' "cowardice" in the Symposium is very poorly considered; this is love of such might that it can draw Death's sting.

Orpheus' story is a declaration of independence. If we are to believe the school that built up around him in later years, he taught that the human race was forged from the ashes of the smitten Titans in the great wars at the world's beginning. Man is weaker than the gods, says Orphism, but he can love, and wield a power far greater than any thunderbolt of Zeus', on account of its own transience. It is this spirit of pride and endeavour that suffuses the poetry of Homer and the great Tragedians, the feeling of being alive in the world's youth. As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so Orpheus stole spirit. Compare the choral ode from Sophocles' Antigone:

"How many wondrous things there are, and none more wondrous than man!
He rides upon the wine-dark mere and ploughs among the deeps
Through surging troughs of ocean as the wind rages and sweeps...
A cure he has found for every dread blight,
Though from Hades alone has he failed to take flight." (tr. (very badly) Moody)

Nil mortalibus arduus est.

- - -

---