A. Nature: Physis and Nomos

Every landscape is culture because birthplace of thoughts making possible human civilization, yet the Greek one is most unique because its physis, the emporia of nature is very close to invaluable material lessons because of not excluding theoria: the intellectual way of looking at things. This kind of nature needs to be understood, and more to be lived than used.

Sunset outside Piraeus

Seferis would say, 'once the tourists have left, the beaches are given back to the winds'. Such a sojourn in the light of a day becoming a year, or indeed a century of experiences, is still possible today. Hence this landscape provides the nomos, the spirit of thought. It was first heard in Ancient Greece, perhaps as a tune of a song about what safeguards man's life on this earth.

Ancient Greece did not develop out of nothingness, but out of a unique nature not hostile to man. In such a landscape, it makes sense to touch things even if only with the eyes: rocks, light, water, wind. Freedom can be found in the soaring heights, heavy thoughts like huge bolders of rocks and experiences of eternity the blue waters. Altogether they let the Heavens set the context for words.

Once mankind understood that a bit, there followed deeds and challenges. Man and woman had to learn to recognize themselves in this light, that is in a true relation to deity. It started the search for the proper role of men and women in such a world.

Some thought, it could be found behind a rock, others searched for it in a cave and still others looked into the depth of the water still transparent blue even ten meters down. The Ancient Greeks had always in mind that the proper role could be found when close to the being of light: Zeus. It meant facing the winds and being able to by-pass hostile forces, in order to stand one's ground and not wavering a bit. It meant a life in which to set out on a voyage.

It meant courage and the ability to go through the pain of humility, for if defeated not by nature but by other men who came to the land and to the villages, then something had to be learned. For the Ancient Greeks felt intuitively that conquest was not the only way of surviving in such a nature. They thought differently, and hence in their practice they showed deity as a tribute to the Gods who have created this world of rocks to make humble speeches truly noble.

There followed the development of language until the 'human voice' could be heard. With the phonetics resounding in the foot hills, something else was added, namely writing. It began perhaps as an inscription in the rocks or on vases. Fragmentary powers of communication were glimpses into the future. Many early texts started carrying man's wisdom forward.

In that sense, memory has a consequential depth if energized by the anticipation of future. Never out of breath or strength, here exists the spring of man's civilization based on texts. Their voices can never die, as long birds soar in the heights of Olympus and light between the pillars of Cape Sounion reveal measures of perfection. Such a resounding past filled with visions for the future, and offerings of solutions, gifts of the Gods to man, that is inconceivable without its nature: sea, majestic slopes with rock formations acquiring looks of goats standing still or Gods looking down.

Ancient Greece could express visions of life for the community of man due to their anticipatory hope and belief in the future of mankind. Futures are marked already in the present by the kind of survival strategy pursued, yet it should not be forgotten that for every move we make daily, there is still to be answered the question of right and wrong. Movements of men and women, children and elderly people have to be in accordance with laws that are not arbitrary, but made in deep respect for the will to freedom. It is like Cleisthenes calling upon the citizens of Athens to be free under the stars and the blue sky, thus day and night not making any difference in the realization of isonomia - the freedom to enjoy equal rights by all before the law. If so the case, justice prevails and nature persuasive enough upon man to develop friendly attitudes to the world.

Sailing past Souion Photo by Heinz J. Kuzdas, Berlin

There are many beautiful descriptions of the Greek landscape filled with thorn bushes, donkey paths and steep slopes looking down at forlorn bays, that is sudden curvatures in which they hid their ships, or ventured forth from when the horizon was free of pirate ships:

"Greece is a barren land, the earth so stubborn and austere that it breaks the hearts of the men who farm the narrow valleys and the small patches of arable land at the foot of the steep-sided limestone mountains. There are few rivers, few plains, few beaches. There is a host of small craggy islands which are the fragmented eminencies of mountains drowned long ago, and the islands are as austere as the mainland. In this hard land, where men must live close to the earth, life goes on very much as it did in the heroic age....It is a land which has been cut to the bone, fit for a race of ascetics, a desert of broken rocks."

Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, Toronto 1964, p. 19

Rock seen from the boat

'Going out to the Greek islands by boat, is like experiencing again the birth of the earth' wrote Zbigniev Herbert in 'A Barbarian comes into the Garden of Civilization'.

In Greece, nature means above all 'light': its landscape knows so many shades, layers, rhythms, innocences and a kind of brightness. The whole life depends upon it:

Make the sky clear, and grant us to see with our eyes.

In the light be it, though thou slayest me!

Ajax praying to Zeus in Homer's Iliad

Here then nature is still a measure of man's freedom: what can he 'see' to do 'freely', that is when not chained to the ground, avoiding thereby the fate of Prometheus? He can be free by following a call for theoria - that is, the knowledge to be gained from nature by finding the right measures on how to prepare oneself for the coming of the Gods; if not prepared, then it means a life in darkness, or even worse to sink in oblivion and be forgotten, forever lost in the dark sea:

How shall I receive the god, the proud one,

The arrogant one who stands in the highest place

Above all the gods and people of the teeming earth?

My heart is fearful at the thought of his coming,

For when he sees me at the first leap of sunrise

Surely he will despise me, a heap of barren stones!

He will press his foot on me, he will thrust me

Into the depths of the sea, and the waves will wash over me,

And then he will turn away into another place

And build his temple in a land of fruitful trees,

And I shall be lost in the dark sea. Only the black seals

And the many-footed creatures of the sea shall dwell on me.....

Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo

Later on, the coming of the Gods shall be replaced by the coming of the stranger, the carrier of new knowledge and information, but also of other laws. That is, when the community of man had started to come together under the one God, Zeus, and learned to organize things. For that many things were needed, including the ability to take measure, nature there always as a prime model and inspiration for both greatness and perfection, even though filled with a dazzling beauty while hardships endured made hearts strong and the people courageous.

To take measure is to realize something, but there is the risk that a golden chain shall tie down the free spirits. The Greeks started to learn to survive in lofty heights, there where Zeus begins to acclaim the throne of nature on Mount Olympus:

Hearken unto me, all you gods and goddesses,

I shall say unto you what my heart biddeth me.

Let no gods or godesses come between me and my desire,

Or attempt the thing I shall do.

Come, make trial, O you gods, that you may know -

Bind to the heavens a chain of gold,

Lay hold of it, see whether you can throw me down,

Though you labor, from my highest heavens.

But should I desire to draw you up by my chain,

Then would I draw up with you the whole earth and the sea,

And tie the chain like a ribbon around Olympus,

Leaving you hanging in space.

So am I greater far than any gods or men.

Homer's Zeus

Not to barely survive, but to go and find the right measures for life, that is not so easy despite such a nature being close at hand, and yet distant, as if ashamed to be touched by man's hands:

If you have no resources of your own, you learn to survive with other means. Bare are the rocks, simple the life with fields wrested out of the grip of infertility. Eagles carrying Zeus' messages glide down from the mountains. It is a vivid 'icona' still to be experienced in Greece despite the many holocausts which since then have shattered many dreams.

In modern Greece there are no longer so many protective fields indicating rhythms of time about which Hesiod would sing. Gone is this true sense of belonging to nature. Everything else has much more to do with the rulers over the fields.

Yet up in the mountains, there is still a contemplative silence. It explains why Delphi and Olympus relate to majestic heights beyond the reach of everyday life. Thus there is a need to differentiate between mere gossip about a wild beast living up there, in the mountains, and the kind of perspectives to be gained when outside everyday life. For that no one should be singled out as a hero, since all must seek out such heights where images are silenced. Then it is possible to see the different levels of man's life.

Among the most important things to be sought is happiness which has no apparent roots, but fulfils life like a spring of fresh water. It does so in a mysterious way and makes even the donkeys follow calls without obeying.

Indeed, there is a twist in logic in everything, for nothing must be understood completely, in order to appreciate life. Still, life depends upon a realistic appraisal of what is going on. However, it is all too easily said by those claiming to be the modern Greeks that a foreigner coming to Greece does not know this reality nor that of Ancient Greece, but if Ancient Greece is the adopted childhood of Western Civilization, then everyone can enter, feel and understand this reality, and sing or else write about it. Nevertheless there is a pain to be felt, as Seferis would say, for this pain of Greece is everywhere one goes. Partly this is because modern Greece has been forced according to Spros Bokos to import its own past. Although present throughout the ages, there to be seen, and felt, it is hard nowadays to imagine this past where it not for the existence of such a nature but one which is rapidly vanishing underneath the language of cement and construction everywhere. No place remains untouched and instead of the donkey path, roads make way for four wheeled jeeps climbing up the hill to a modern villa looking very much similar to the one found in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

What follows are then some forlorn thoughts in having come to modern Greece at the end of the twentieth century, and asking what can be done when seeing that similar things are happening here as in the rest of the Western World. Too many natural things are left out in the daily struggle for survival, forgetting that without 'curvatures of the earth' or 'lightness of the air', there is no space for doubt. Thoughts about life need both a community of man and a nature still untouched by man's hands, but accessible to all. Like everyone having access to the sea, the same law should exist to the land. But today too many houses outside towns and villages leave scars in the landscape and new roads cut through nature, where before villages in valleys or on islands were merely connected by the water way only. That leaves less and less space free to hear the true spirit. Some claim, it can only be attained when prepared to listen to Delphi and to the Homeric songs, that is by entering a dialogue with the wisdom of that past.

To take up this dialogue with the past, an immediate presence of ongoing life in Greece has to be created. It means taking once more, as they did then, the freedom to alter within a life time the charts set out to define the course of voyage in front of mankind: seekers of knowledge that we are, in order to prepare for our coming, strangers that we have become to ourselves.

To set out on a journey, there are needed charts, a way of keeping orientation, while knowing which boats are not safe, and instead a raft should be taken with light clothes on, as learned Odysseus once he started to listen to the right advice. Only then had he the faith to make it through the reefs back to the safe shore. Indeed, what is language without faith in man, what are winds when there are no words to take thoughts like boats across to other shores? Indeed what is a journey when there is no return home? A saying is even favorable winds make no difference if the boat does not know its home port.

One person did give this faith to the Greeks:Homer. His story about Odysseus following the 'wayfinder' has a beginning and an ending:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

Book I

O Father Zeus, if over land and water,

after adversity, you willed to bring me home,

let someone in the waking house give me good augury,

and a sign be shown, too, in the outer world.

Book XX

Homer, Odyssey

Odysseus returned as a stranger, but the Greek landscape never transpires, like the Gods who continue to live on despite claims that they have died, as did Heinrich Heine. This landscape is close to those men in search of true life, while others seek to conquest this world with 'rational thought': the ability to be logical and to comprehend things behind the mountains is definitely not Greek, but a Western invention.

In the morning sun songs about love reveal the renderings of the heart not only to winds and soft houses filled with life, but to desires for truth experienced outside everything: shelter, sleep, temples and roads. This is a humble start for both philosophy and poetry of not the broken spirit nor of a mere outcome of compromises, but of contemplation about life ready to speak out truthfully in a human voice:

Let my song begin with the choir of the Muses

Who own the great and holy mountain of Helicon.

They dance around a spring as dark as violets,

Around the altar of Almighty Zeus.

To Hesiod one day they taught the art of song

While he shepherded his lambs under holy Helicon.

They were Muses from Olympus, daughter of Zeus,

The bearer of the Terrible Flame,

Saying, "Shepherds of the wilderness, poor creatures,

We can say many false things as though they were true,

And when we want to, then we have also the power

To speak the truth truthfully."

So sang the neat voices of the daughters of Zeus,

As they plucked from a gnarled olive tree a spray,

A most marvellous spray, and breathed upon me

The power of a divine voice, celebrating

All things past and future.

Hesiod, Theogony

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