Impressions from a Hellenic summer

Syracuse: what a sparkling, spacious, airy Hellenic city! The Greek part of Sicily, from Selinus through Acragas and Syracuse to Tauromenium, exhibits an unadulterated historical magic that on pinions of pure feeling carries you back to that superb age of archaic finesse and cruelty which is the root of the European spirit. My visit was a baptism in lofty meditation that -temporarily- cleansed the soul of the muck of pettiness and foreboding that is its fate in the sorry place to which it has since returned.

The sun was sharp as, from the top of Archimedes' fortress, Eurylaeum, I surveyed the plain surrounding that natural wonder which is the port of Syracuse. In the play of hues and shadows in the distance it was as if that sublime confrontation, in which the sea pride of the foolish Athenians was reduced to so much floating timber, was being reenacted for my sake. Nobody else, though, saw what I saw.

When I eventually got to the port there was a big summer fire burning on the other side in the vicinity of the temple of Zeus. Nobody seemed to bother much -simply because, I think, it posed no threat to the landscape and its cultural identity. This is a fearless land, one in which through untold vicissitude and upheaval the brightness of its Hellenism has always managed to shine through. What was more impressive was how aware the locals were of these demons still inhabiting their portion of the earth and how they sought their company.

When she was informed that we came from Greece, our guide at Selinus had earlier simply said: "welcome home". This to me was like a potion of divine youthfulness running through the veins, a precious gift that I will always cherish.

Later on that day we climbed the heights of Neapolis and I spent the afternoon just gazing awestruck at the rungs of the ancient theater opening into the horizon like a giant fan of pure spirit. The white stone pulsated with religious and rational energy. It is merely the face of a cruel quarry, but no matter.

As we were getting there driving through the multiple quarries of Achradina, some gaping ominously in their underground darkness, I thought I caught a glimpse (it was probably self-suggestion) of that other theater that the wretched Athenian captives had hewn in those infernal depths, simply to while away some hours of their living death by the sweet and invincible sounds of Sophocles and Euripides.

Both the victors and the defeated, separated by absolute and pointless hatred, worshiped at the same altar. How odious is human vanity, all the more so as the vain souls are equally giants of taste and desire and capable of scaling the pinnacles of thought. The foolishness of the great deserves so much more contempt. The above-ground faces of the quarries of Achradina were scintillating in the pure sunshine reflected off the calmness of the Ionian sea.

There was one jarring note. Right across from the Paolo Orsi archaeological museum (a true gem) there stands this ugly modernistic catholic church with a pyramidal roof rising to a stupendous height and thus brutally effacing the low-voice beauty of the surroundings. This insolent cement spear can be seen from miles around, another attempt by the Christians to impress their unnatural, perverted sensibility upon a historical and physical plate that simply chokes in their violent embrace.

Medieval morbidness, either of the Western or the Eastern Christian type, has simply no place here, or anywhere else in the Hellenic universe for that matter. It makes a mockery of all that the spirit of the Hellenes strove for, namely the spirituality throbbing at the very core of physical existence and deep within the human body.

But truly there is no more egregious manifestation of this Christian violation of Hellenism than the one seen on the acropolis of Ortygia, the heart of Syracuse. There the temple of Athena, one of the three erected in Sicily to celebrated the Hellenic victory over the Carthaginians in the battle of Himera, has been usurped and defaced in order to serve as the catholic cathedral of the city.

You can see and feel the mighty Doric columns of the archaic edifice, entombed in the superimposed medieval structure, still fighting to break loose from this deadly embrace. This is a spiritual atrocity that makes one gasp (I was the only one gasping). I suppose that the original Byzantine enclosure of the ancient temple would have been insensitive enough. But what intensifies the ugliness of the rape is the addition of that execrable Baroque facade that was erected in the Bourbon 17th century. The empty pomposity of its catholic "saints" in their faux tortuousness simply makes one cringe.

It is fortunate that the temple of Apollo, a few hundred meters up the street, although itself once subjected to the same sad fate of forced Christianization, has managed to get rid of this burden, probably through earthquakes that shook off those sick prostheses. So now its two remaining columns stand proudly alone to proclaim eternally their message of freedom. Athena, however, has not yet been liberated.

The island of Ortygia is a charmed world. An attractive village of Italianate refinement that blends well with the Hellenic aura surrounding it. Its main thoroughfare opens up to the spring of Arethusa and the great port, still populated by the suffering shadows of those Athenians sacrificed in vain.

A predicted debacle

As anticipated the ingenious "political" strategy of Greece's new minister of economics blew up in his face. That his personal standing was thus shattered is a negligible loss -nobody is going to miss the ugly mannequins running the show here for the past forty years when they are finally kicked off the stage.

The more consequential thing is that his attempted blackmail (see the previous post) precisely galvanized all those forces in Europe convinced that the country's place in the EU is plainly untenable. This conviction is now an iron-clad consensus and the only thing remaining is to work out the technicalities of Greece's ejection in such a way as to minimize the horrific consequences for all involved. This may take some time -a couple of weeks at most I reckon.

What may still save us for a little longer (i.e. a couple of months) -as a thoughtful colleague remarked this morning- "is Aristotle" and the fear of uncontrollable chain reactions in case the Rauswurf is clumsily handled. This last possibility has even roused the somnolent Obama people, who are sending their treasury secretary to Poland to participate in the meeting of the European finance ministers at the end of the week.

As for "Aristotle" what the friend meant to evoke is the immense cultural and historical significance of Hellas as a concept in the collective European mind. For those that admitted Greece into the Union back in the 80's and for a still significant segment of current opinion makers in the old continent, Europe is not just an economic arrangement but a wager in civilizational paradigm change, in which a new collective identity is to be built around the values of democracy, social and trans-national solidarity and critical historical thinking. And of course in all this one discovers Hellenic roots and foundations. Europe without Greece, thus, still seems to a lot of Europeans a truncated concept, a "body without limbs" as J. Delors recently expressed it.

For all of educated Europe Greece is a crown of spirituality that adds an eternal glow to the European institutional edifice, despite its having become an economic crown of thorns recently. Hence the last lingering hesitations concerning the (inevitable) exit of this failed state from the consort of serious, civilized countries.

When I say "all of Europe" I must, with heavy heart, exclude from this company the country named "Greece" itself -or, to be precise, its ruling elites and the greatest part of its population in its current numb and brutalized state, for whom the European cultural project as well as the Hellenic idea meaning nothing at all.

It is only the small minority of European Hellenes cowering in their hiding places that perceive the horrendous events unfolding these days as a cultural and moral catastrophe of unparalleled dimensions.

For the rest this society resembles but a ship of fools going merrily to its doom.

An autumn of futility and despair

The weather is still hot and sunny, but the summer with its deliberate forgetfulness is definitely over. More about the remarkable experiences of this summer in future posts, but for now it suffices to note that we are back on the track of collective destruction. Our abject leaders, whom we had gleefully erased from our mental screens for the duration of a few weeks, are back with a vengeance and still bent upon their same old pursuits of dismantling the little that has been left of this place -and this applies to all of them.

The government is paralyzed. After the stressful days of June, when they passed in Parliament the tough measures demanded by the EU in order to continue to keep the country artificially alive, they reverted to their time-honored game of doing absolutely nothing in order to put these measures into effect. The idea is to give to the Europeans what they want on paper, and then to proceed to violate all these verbal commitments in practice.

No wonder that the latest round of negotiations concerning the progress of the (fictional) reforms supposedly implemented by the government collapsed in acrimony. The Europeans departed last Friday in disgust at the tricks of the Greek ministers and bureaucrats trying to evade their legal obligations. The fact is that no one in government, with the exception of one or two individuals, supports the goal of trimming the monstrous public sector, for this means going against their very electoral base.

The strategy of the new economics minister is "political". This amounts to a blackmail of the Europeans, to the effect that they should accept that no structural reforms (opening up the closed-shop professions etc.) will be carried through and that they should be satisfied with the savage reductions of the salaries and pensions of the weakest groups that have been imposed so far. So they should shut up and continue funding the obscene absurdity that is the Greek state sector, for if they refuse the bankruptcy of the country will sweep the whole Euro area away.

This gamble is certainly desperate, but it has to be admitted that it has its own implacable logic. As I have remarked in the past in a very real sense Europe is Greece's captive under the present circumstances. But of course if matters are taken to that extreme, then the "political" -again- reactions of the European political classes and electorates become highly unpredictable. In this climate the attitude may very well prevail that it is preferable to let Greece go to the devil (given that its ruling elites ardently desire it), with Europe then going through a sharp but manageable crisis with highly beneficial consequences for its healthy core in the medium term. Europe will thus be rid of a stone around its neck.

This kind of thinking seems to be gradually winning the day in Germany, despite the protestations of the likes of Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schroeder. What also weighs in its favor is the fact that the other countries of the European periphery are following a course of genuine reform quite the opposite of the sham "corrections" effected here.

It could well be argued that that contagion is a real and present danger as long as an unreconstructed Greece of rotten and stubborn Sovietism remains inside the Euro system. Whereas if this abscess is lanced immediately by letting the country go bankrupt and kicking it out of the European institutions altogether, the healthy core of the European project will soon recover: this would be the Befreiungsschlag as the Germans call it.

I personally dread such an eventuality, for it would forthwith destroy this place as a viable economic and cultural concern. This society would immediately descend into the savagery of a Hobbesian state of nature, a civil carnage much more barbaric than the one we went through back in the 1940's -and then Europe would have another kind of problem in its hands. And yet this is the outcome that our present leaders are blindly steering towards. This seems incredible to the average rational individual observing events from the outside. But for those of us who have lived through the moral and political beastliness of the Greek system of the past few decades it remains, unfortunately, a probable denouement.