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The Greek temple implicated the whole of nature in its magical scheme—the world of animals as well as Gods. The notion of value was twofold, namely, material gain and also a degree of beauty which enslaved and ennobled, which enchanted and enriched on the spiritual plane. But how inadequate words were when it came to trying to point up the difference between these two degrees of excellence. There was, however, a continuity between the Greek temple with its ex-votoes and the modern Christian or Orthodox Church with its same pathetic objects of gratitude or propitiation. And the notion of beauty worshipped in icons, in paintings, in holy relics. One thinks of the golden statue that Cicero found “beslubbered by the kisses of
the faithful who loved its unique beauty”; today the icon is still kissed, but not for its beauty. For its power.

Martine took the idea and played with it for a while, making fun of my woolliness and vagueness—it is impossible to be too precise, for so many fragments of the jigsaw are missing. Everything is supposition.

But we have had enough experience now of the thought schemes of savages to be thoroughly on our guard when it comes to trying to imagine how primitive peoples think, how they associate. Were the ancient Greeks, with their highly organized and, to them, very logical superstitious systems, any different? I don't think so. Why, the notion of gold being valuable may well have come from the first golden Aryan head which the Greeks saw, with its marvelous buttercup sheen. The men went mad over this hypothetical girl—Circassian or Scythian or British perhaps? Gentlemen preferred blondes even then, so it became necessary to manufacture golden wigs, or tresses of beaten filigree gold as a head ornament. We know that prostitutes in ancient Athens were forbidden by law to imitate the blandishments of respectable married women by wearing rich gold ornaments, fillets, or clips, in their hair. That is probably why they set about finding cheap dyes in order to effect a transformation that was legitimate. They tried saffron and, like the modern Egyptian of the poorer classes, common soap with its strong bleaching agent. The story of Goldilocks. A theory of how beauty came to be evaluated. But where, then, did
the metal come into this scheme of things? These matters we used to argue to the point of sheer irritation with each other. In one of her letters she records our violent disagreements.

I couldn't help thinking of you and your wretched relativity notions the other evening when I went to see Loftus Adam who now lives here, just down the coast from me. He too said how irritated you made him by trying to subject everything to the merely provisional: and all truth as subject to scale. Yet he himself at last admitted that if you selected your coordinates you could prove anything from any evidence; he wants to write a modern history of Europe based on three coordinates, namely the moustaches of Hitler, Marinetti, and Chaplin, which have formed our unhappy age. They were all the same little smudge moustache which must prove something. And between them the new European sensibility was forged and founded. It sounds highly fanciful but why not? He is going to call the book
The Moustache; and Why
.

I went to sleep quite late that night and had a dream in which I recovered the name of the philosopher which had escaped her—the great Empedocles who was a native of the town and around whose name and memory gathered so many tales of necromancy and witchcraft as to almost obscure his real fame as a philosopher
as eminent and as fruitful as any of the great men of his time. Is it nothing to have won the respect of Aristotle, or to have influenced Lucretius? Moreover, enough of his system remains extant today for our scholars to evaluate and describe. Why has he been written off as a mythomane? In the case of Bertrand Russell the reason is plain; great as Russell is, he was, in the affective and intuitional sense, colorblind. He is no poet but a geometer. And it was inevitable, given the type of temperament that was his, that he should be as unfair to Plato as he was to Empedocles. Then one recalls the gibes and sneers of Epicurus when he referred to Plato's attempts to systematize reality and to comprehend nature. To him everything that Plato beheld was the purest illusion, the purest self-deceit. He believed in a world which held no mysteries and in consequence no great dangers. Temperamentally Empedocles lies on a tangent between the absolute behaviorism of one and the pure subjective vision of the other. To each his truth, and
qui verra vivra
to adapt the phrase to suit philosophers who are also visionaries (charlatans to the Russells of this world and the last). The two functions, however, the two arts of deduction and of intuitive vision must be complementary at some remove. Plato to Aristotle, Freud to Jung.… In this sharp diversity is born the marriage of true minds.

For Empedocles also the world was arranged in not too mysterious a fashion, though it was far from an impulse-inhibition machine run by invisible and
soulless engineers. One could best comprehend it as a sphere ceaselessly agitated by two primordial impulses or dispositions which in turn acted upon four primary roots of all being—fire, air, water, earth. This joining and separating motor (the Love and Strife machine) in its quite involuntary convulsions manipulated matter and shook it out in a million differentiated patterns and mixtures like a kaleidoscope shakes out pictures at the slightest jog. The arch movers of all process were Love and Hate—the joining and separating impulses. The domination of one or the other produced quite recognizable effects in nature, alloys of the four basic elements. It seems fair enough.

The original condition of matter was to be envisaged as a sphere in which Love played the dominant role and where the four basic elements were perfectly accorded and mixed. Into this primordial harmony entered the principle of Strife, which set off the whole dance of process and foxed up the original harmony of things. First air became separated, then fire, then earth—the motion acted like a milk separator, forging unexpected unities and dissonances; and the effects of these changes were reflected in every department of man's life and thoughts. Quantity was all-important—a hint perhaps of a Pythagorean influence? The present world—the world he knew and which has not noticeably changed since his time—is a theater where Love is being everywhere assailed by Strife; and where Strife becomes dominant species and sexes become separated,
lose their coherence and identity—it is matter in a state of hysteria. But at the other end of the cosmic seesaw—for the gain of one element turns to loss by over plus and gives ground to its opposite—the overwhelming force of undiluted love could bring about bizarre physiological changes in nature. Empedodes, in his vision of the disorder brought about by the mixture of unequal quantities of the four elements, speaks about separate limbs being begotten, arising and walking around, as in the canvases of Dali; hands without shoulders and necks, bodies without hands. And all sorts of singular combinations like oxen with human heads, fishes with breasts, lions with hands, birds with ears.… A chaos of undifferentiated forms ruled.

But nature aspired to the functioning rule of the sphere, and only the sphere mixed the elements rightly, in the proper proportion and harmony. Yet the slightest push from one side or the other and one got an imbalance in nature which only hazard could redress. This then was the reality of things as we were living it, for we were part and parcel of the whole convulsion, our thoughts and feelings were all influenced by it. As for thought, Empedocles was convinced that we think with our blood, and more especially with the blood around the heart, because in the blood here all the elements are more correctly fused than in other sectors of the body. What is endearing, and indeed peculiarly modern, is his interest in embryology and in the growth systems of plants; whenever possible he drew
his analogies from this department of knowledge. For him thought and perception were materially functions of our bodily constitution. All this was down to earth, was perfectly functional, was the fruit of sweet reason and not of fantasy; somewhere at heart he was temperamentally akin to Epicurus.

Yet in spite of this rational disposition the visions kept intervening—Nature kept unfolding itself before his eyes, delivering its secrets to his curious and poetic mind. By some strange alchemy, too, he somehow managed to include a purely Orphic notion about the transmigration of souls into his system, where it sits somehow awkwardly. But so much of his work is missing that it is really a miracle that the extant remnants present as coherent a view of things as they do. It is rather like trying to reassemble a beautiful vase from a few recovered bits and pieces of it—the task which faces the archaeologist. Inevitably there will be here and there a shard which does not fit. In the case of this great man I was always struck by the fact that he felt that he himself had forfeited the final happiness; he describes himself as an “exile from a possible Bliss,” because he had put his trust in “senseless strife.” Was there any way to escape from such spiritual contamination? Apparently there was—by fasting, abstention from animal flesh, and the performance of certain mystical rites….

For him also the first completely realized forms to grow on earth were trees in whom male and female
sexuality were so perfectly conjoined. And so on. Apparently the intoxication of these high thoughts was matched by a brilliant fuliginous style which made Aristotle christen him the first of rhetoricians or the father of rhetoric.

Yes, it is not hard to see why the notions of magic, of necromancy, clung to the name of old Empedocles—one thinks of his final leap into the maw of Etna. A suitable way for a great magician to take his leave of his fellow Sicilians. But the truth appears to be that he actually died far away, in the Peloponnesus. He must have been a very dramatic figure, this great rhetor, poet, visionary. In my mind's eye I see always someone of the aspect of the modern Greek poet Sikelianos, who so charmed and bewildered us all with his strange mixture of greatness and histrionic absurdity. He became as much beloved for his aberrations and exaggerations as for his truly great verse which he insisted on declaiming at gale force and with gestures—which so often all but disguised its real merits. He too chose “big” subjects like his contemporary Kazantzakis—St. Paul, Buddha, Socrates.… They were grist to his poetic mill. I remember how Martine used to adore anecdotes about the Greek poets of our time—she was fully aware of their European stature in a period when Greece had yet to find its immortal echo outside Athens and Alexandria. Sikelianos at that time was already a walking reincarnation of an ancient God. He had founded the Delphic festival not as a piece of tourist
folklore but, in true Empedoclean fashion, because he believed that the spirit of place was ever present, and that Delphi despite its silenced shrine of the Pythea was still pregnant with life. The meeting of great European minds at this sacred spot could have an incalculable effect on the poetic destiny of Europe—so he thought. He did not lack detractors, as may be imagined; but the incontestable greatness of his poetry silenced them. But sometimes he got so carried away by his vatic role that people thought of him as a mountebank. Yet the peasants at Delphi saw him as a sort of magician of today.

He was a strange mixture of vagueness and gentleness; and his great unassuming physical beauty made one sit up, as if in the presence of the Marashi. Nor was he foreign to the most endearing absurdities. One hopes that there will soon be a biography to enshrine the many anecdotes born of his flamboyant life and thought. One that Martine particularly enjoyed was concerned with death, for old Sikelianos believed so firmly in the absoluteness of poetic power that he went so far as to declare that a great poet could do anything, even bring a dead man to life by the power of his mind and vision. He was rather belaboring this theme while sitting in a little taverna, having dinner with Kazantzakis and, I think, Seferis, when the waiter, who had been listening to him with sardonic disgust stepped forward and informed him that someone had just died on the second floor, and if he wished to prove his
point he had a subject right under his hand. Everyone smiled at this but Sikelianos appeared enchanted with the chance to show, not his own greatness, for he was a modest man, but the greatness which resides in poetry. Moreover, he believed in what he said, he could bring the dead man back to life as he had promised. They did not ask how he proposed to do such a thing. But anyway, the poet rose and asked to be taken to the room where the corpse lay. In a resigned mood the others continued their dinner; they were not entirely unconvinced that the old poet might, by some feat of magic, actually be as good as his word and make the dead man breathe again. But he was a long time gone. They listened but there was no sound of poetic declamation. He must have chosen some other method of raising the dead. Well, after quite a time a crestfallen Sikelianos made his appearance once more, deeply disappointed. Pouring himself a glass of wine he said: “Never have I seen such sheer obstinacy!” He was very sad about the failure of the Muse to come to his aid. This was the delightful man whom once Seferis brought to meet me—indeed it was to chide me for a bad translation of one of his great poems. I was terrified, but he rapidly put me at my ease by his gentleness. He had just come from the doctor where he had been informed that he was in danger of a thrombosis. A vein in the brain.… But far from being despondent he was wild with elation. “Think of it,” he said to Seferis, “a little gleaming swelling in there, shining like a
ruby!”
And he placed
his long index finger upon the supposed place in his skull where the swollen vein was situated. He should have disappeared into Etna like Empedocles, or have been found half eaten by the Minotaur in Crete, or suffocated by the Pythean fumes at Delphi. But his death was the more tragic for being so banal. He suffered from a chronic sore throat and to soothe it drank quantities of a glycerin mixture the name of which differed by one letter from that of Lysol. He sent a boy out to the pharmacy for a bottle of his medicine and by a tragic mishearing the boy bought instead a bottle of the poisonous detergent. Without thinking the poet raised the bottle as he had always done with his throat mixture and half drained it before he realized the full horror of what he had done. By then it was too late.