The knight in shining armor, or in other words the Citroen Saxo of impenetrable tires and wide rear axel, mounts the jagged road. Stones like dragon scales undulate beneath the chassis, mocking us. The drivetrain whirrs. ‘Two kilometers. No Saxo, no go.’ H. says in broken English. Not really broken English, but halting words of importance, like those he’d use with us when entering the mine. M. is first out of the car. The sun beats down in Greek brightness. We are drawn towards the edge of a gaping enclosure, perfectly circular, bored into the earth some 300 meters down. There is the impulse to throw a rock in but no one follows through. H. in the meantime changes behind his car into an orange jumpsuit and boots. He brings us gloves and each a headlamp which he shows how to tighten. A small bag with extra water. Standing here beneath a pine it seems there is all the time in the world.
This is just an excursion. H. helps us fieldwalk on other days, drives us to sites as we ride alongside, staring into the depths of his knowledge. I call myself ‘The Writer’ for project Besa, aka The Besa Project. Also the fool. If I as a writer were really perceptive these notes would contain more perceptions, they would be as ample as the mountains they call the breasts of Aphrodite, nourishing Lavrio with ore, flowing toward the sea. They would detail everything which preserves a culture, which resists its transformations, from the rosy-fingered dawn enthronged by running lights, to the unbearable jazz sequences of groaning metal at each metro ‘stop’. But I’d need to know the language for that, and I don’t.
My own meek smile is quite inadequate to meet that of H. when he asks us each day ‘Eiste kala?’ or are we good. It’s such a simple question but to answer with equal or commensurable enthusiasm I’d have to be in love with something—anything—as H. is clearly in love with the landscape of Lavrio, its scattered pine forests, cedar and olive trees, clumps of old needles on the ground, the way Savatiano grape clusters hang low in furrowed field rock-hard having been plowed a year ago, littered with potshards; it’s as if you took all those sand and dirt and bark browns and mixed them with the rays of the sun, to arrive at the color of hazel eyes which have reflected the landscape since H. was a boy, playing down in the same mines his father worked, a Thessalian. He pulls off a cicada unseen.
We put on our gloves, steer our eyes toward the hill where there is the entrance to North Frere (friar?) the mine. A scraggly pine is grown into the shale-laden hillside. Few large trees survive in the area on account of wildfires. Directly across on the rusty base of the mining tower someone has inscribed a five-pointed star within a circle. It’s the same sign (drawn in the same hand?) we’d seen on television the other night, on the equivalent of a Nancy Grace type show, somewhat sensationalist. That night we tuned in because H. was part of a panel—the discoverer, a lawyer, an expert on border smuggled antiquities. Nancy Grace has call line operators ready for any important tip from the public. Although it’s hard to imagine there being much of a public when in order to watch the segment you first have to endure five minutes of commercials for cleaning products like Swiffer. I’m most struck by the anchor’s body language, her manish hands clutched tightly together, interwoven fingers pressed together as though criminal, lady Macbeth style. They could sure twist a bloody rag. Of course she interrupts H. at every opportunity, but it’s hard to know what this signifies as all impassioned Greeks speak at the same time. It seems the gist of it is that they had found a thighbone of a man who was part of the looter’s team. The old trope of thieves killing off each other to have the lion’s share. While tourists are dropping like flies, or cockroaches, on account of the heatwave it’s remarkable there are so many cisterns, caves, mines, and open wells in which to dispose of a body.
The difficulty of entering the mine—and perhaps this is less true of an active mine—is the change in air. Flashlights show the influx of hundreds of particles rushing toward mouth and nose, intermingled with what feel like small flies, though in actuality funnel spiders pose more of a worry. Not to mention one single reckless bat. We wait so he can lead the way forward. Entering the mind is not much different.
H. points to veins of schist as we walk away from the light, schist and bauxite, the ore some petite miner apparently had followed through what looks like a hole in the ceiling. Some azurite, which is as it sounds. He makes clear that if we say ‘Stop’ we stop, otherwise we go. The same ‘stop’ applied to the left foot sliding down rubble before it was to be met by the right foot, or visa versa. Other important commands were: ‘No touch, kaput’ as applies to a wooden post buttressing the shaft at an impossible angle, an uncalled for angle like the pictures of cocks on plates in Plaka.
Not far in, we find a fairly level spot where some miners ate and left their sardine tins. The pin and rusted rollback lid suggests mid twentieth century. The buxom fisherman’s wife on the label smiling with her wares which must have meant nourishment to the miners suggests mid twentieth century. H. once found an old cup, completely grown over with minerals. Like the bathroom mold I confront when I fly back, nature wanted to take it back, early 21st century.
Atmospheres above: ‘Do we need mines to appreciate, do we need travel as opposed to silent meditation—or do I always run the risk of making every momentous opportunity insignificant, every felt necessity superfluous?’ Concupiscent curds curdling below my drooping eyelids whose temples form a moving shelf—or like a foundry of unsettled clay, dimples that await the lightest touch of natural light—bundled beside me, someone soft asleep, braving the ice flows of an unconscious doubt: how can there be peace if not within the heart of each? Thoughts trail off on tips of angel wings—could I have found everything I had wanted here? Among rows of senators in the sky’s curved amphitheater, one snub-nosed Socrates glares among them (would I be deprived of the one pleasure I can experience now, the visual experience of the clouds?). You know you are seeing a cloud, but experience immediately seeing something else, the disposition to believe there is something else—H. on a boar hunt, pines toppled in a ruined distant vale, oyster mushroom clouds—if the plane falls I would like to have the most complete awareness of my own demise (a reason besides beauty to not shutter the window, even if it does infringe on other passengers’ ‘entertainment’) floating as memories of minor glory. Back to the Below.
*
H. coaches us along the rough surface covered in gravel, a grey dust whose pallor is that of an old miner in a faded picture, lead. ‘Slowly, slowly…lígo (a little bit)’ he motions forward. I flash back to the train ride from the airport, where we saw what looked like a roach, but was too easily squished to have been one, not the German variety, anyway. A bug in a place it shouldn’t have been. Certainly the arresting quality of mineral formations (the stalactites and stalagmites we see as children in coloring books, if not in person), not to mention gemstones or even uncut, unpolished semiprecious stones, stems (hails?) from the sense of unfamiliarization, the reflection of ‘I shouldn’t be in this place as a non-human abode’, as well as the prospect of the beautiful as a point of orientation, a sign pointing back toward warmth and light. Yet for H., isn’t this place close to home, the same area where as a teenager seeking to live up to his namesake he turned up rocks looking for a snake or two to strangle? What else would he have sensed besides living in the breathless coldness a certain pattern of alternating scales, red and grey and red. He is quick now, and I can only imagine his reflexes then.
H. shows us his house sometime later. Like many Greek households, it doesn’t look like much from the outside, but is a gallery within. Twenty-five years of mineral finds, each with its own pedestal of plexiglass, in a wooden display case with the bold letters: ‘Hercules Minerals of Lavio’ above. Each tells a story of its discovery, thus the case is a book detailing the adventures of H., the narrator. Yet I find myself less struck by this particular way of encoding a personal history, and search my mind for some untranslatable philosophical question—not to show off, not to act in my capacity as The Writer, but sometimes in formulating a question which takes time and whose contours are initially perplexing to myself, there is the feeling of genuine thinking going on, not some sham of questions to which he’s rehearsed answers, having heard them before. (How do you ask any wise person a good question?) I wanted to ask him: if each piece is a meditative focal point of both the miraculousness of nature, and nature’s inexhaustible variety, what difference remains between the contemplation of such forms and the worship of Triptychs, roadside idols so common in Greece? Even the veil of privacy between saintly face and miniature rock face is present (or have I already identified God and Nature?), in the delicate fusion of beauty and beholder there is a tacit understanding to respect—as the photo shows, where I am pointing toward a vein in the mine and H. stands observantly by, waiting until I ask the obvious; or the occasion where I thought a small monastery on a hill in the middle of the day must have been empty, but upon opening the door witnessed the sapphire blue eyes of a woman in rapt attention, not surprised by the sudden flood of light as our gazes briefly met—leave them to their paradise, I thought, but said in closing the door behind me, not to disturb their peace.
*
In some ways H. is as helpful as a time machine. The sensitivity between natural imitation and eroded-but-human-made forms is pronounced in him. We stared a good while at a square limestone block before seeing the gestalt initials of the mining operation, and would not have noticed it at all unless pointed out. What we thought was a rock on a well-worn path H. immediately dug out, revealing the curve of an amphora handle. If natural forms are inexhaustible, there is no limit to the type of sensitivity H. embodies. There is also no limit to the blindness of those who lack it. But to acquire some awareness of where you stand, that might be something, some tributary to the beginning of wisdom.
I know I would have missed the sunsets here. Its image is the eye’s transit across the sky beginnings, endings, intermittencies—would the miners who worked long hours have found them streaked on the walls in comet trails of ore? If nature is inexhaustible in its forms, it follows that for everything we see, everything we imagine, every artwork in any medium, there is some natural object it resembles. It is a short step from this to Plato’s thesis that all art—art considered as a practice—is mimesis. As I looked in the case, the most obvious (there was also abstract art) candidate to represent this idea (and not trivialize it by claiming, art itself in natural), at least to my naïve eyes, was aragonite. The aragonite here took the form of a miniature tree, like the ‘sculptures’ of fake olive saplings you see in the tourist traps in Plaka, but much smaller and white as snow, its branches the result of water dripping through marble for millennia. A fragile marble without the veins, a textured bark of marble without the foot’s occasional yet incessant polish as you find on the Hill of the Muses; a snow white tree whose boughs lay undisturbed except by droplets from the cave above, pooling undisturbed. Even in the case I feel its sleep awaits no human hands, or like frosting of a day old cake it should crumble.
The feeling of wanting to preserve it, or to be less self-effacing, of wanting that it should be preserved, in situ, having fully and finally ‘blossomed’ here. I enjoy that feeling. So does H., I think. What applies to this observer applies equally to those similarly situated: that if an object is preserved, not despoiled, in this sense, then it can create within the observer some state indefinably similar to that state when it was first beheld. Aren’t antiquities different on account of changing hands, of being assigned different meanings in different eras, so that it’s excusable for even columns of a given structure to be parted out across the globe? For in that case there is no pretense that the object, barring a working time machine, could ever inspire its original meaning.
Writing can be a form of flint knapping, paring down ideas using a blunt object called the pen, honing delicate, bright, stony edges until a form is reached, cutting ‘delicate’, ‘bright’ and ‘stony’ to complete the arrowhead, sharp enough to penetrate a boar’s hide, dazzling enough to be visible lying in plain sight on the floodplain after the rain, or if you are a novice, so brittle it breaks with the next strike, and you have to begin again, and as with other ancient technologies, you always will begin again. The difference between the wise and the foolish is the same difference between humans and the Phoenix which outspreads its wings in birth of the reddening sunset: awareness. The kind Sisyphus brings back with his stone each time the sun rises. There are so many dusty stones, a stone for each. Suddenly H. smashes one open: ‘metal’, he says, pure silvery glittering in the darkness, heavy and cool to the touch.
Arresting.
There are those who say miracles are not merely improbable but impossible, incompatible with what we know. It is one of the poet’s biggest confusions to treat time as though it were a particular that could be fixed, held in place, and to treat being as though it were a passage, a flash in the hallway, a form of knowing in search of a language to show itself. Yet how could any object, placed in an entirely different context, seem like what it really is, so that like a cloud it loses none of its original grandeur? So for objects and ideas, and I begin to wonder whether my confidence in in-situ writing is misguided—couldn’t it be that cuts, or for that matter more porous revision, does most the work, or is this like the flint knapping where one more small tap destroys it? What if a person doesn’t have anything so stonelike to hold their life together, what if all there is is floating narrative?
I stood before the iron ladder within the mine. There was no time to descend to the third level which held the most miners carts, largest buttresses, and featured what might most aptly be called ‘galleries’. It was one of the rare times I felt beholden to someone above, who was waiting—