Kazantzakis on the raising of Lazarus

 In Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation, Lazarus (whose feast day is on the Saturday before Holy Week), after being resurrected by Christ, doesn't seamlessly resume his old life but carries around the taint of death with him and becomes an object of fear, loathing, suspicion and ridicule.

 

‘Fatigued and reticent, Lazarus sat in the darkest corner of his house, for light bothered him. His legs, arms and belly were swollen and green. His bloated face was cracked all over and it exuded a yellowish-white liquid which soiled the white shroud which he continued to wear: it had stuck to his body and could not be removed. His sisters Martha and Mary were cleansing him of the soil and of the small earthworms which had attached themselves to him. The peasants came and stayed just a few moments to examine him attentively and speak to him. He answered their questions wearily with a laconic yes or no; and then others came from the village or the surrounding towns. Today the blind village chief came too. He put out his hand and fingered him avidly. “Did you have a pleasant time in Hades?” he asked, laughing. “You’re a lucky fellow, Lazarus. Now you know all the secrets of the underworld. But don’t reveal them, wretch, or you’ll drive everyone up here crazy.” He leaned over to his ear and, half joking, half trembling, asked, “Worms, eh? Nothing but worms?” He waited a considerable time, but Lazarus did not answer. The blind man became enraged, took his staff, and left.’

Theodoros Kolokotronis: ‘one of the leaders of our race’

One of my favourite parts in one of my favourite Nikos Kazantzakis’ books is the following from Travels in Greece: Journey to the Morea, in which the Cretan author reflects on the character of perhaps the foremost hero of the Greek War of Independence, Theodoros Kolokotronis, the Old Man of the Morea. I’ve always liked Kazantzakis’ description of Kolokotronis, which has him, for 50 years, patiently preparing for the fight against the Turks, for the moment when his life would begin and take meaning.

The Old Man of the Morea
Today as I sit in a Tripolitan coffeehouse watching the people and listening to their talk, I sense that if I were a young man living in Tripolis, I would concentrate – in order to save myself – upon the rich, aggressive and valiant soul of Kolokotronis. Here in Tripolis, air and mountain are still filled with his ample breath. From the days he spent as a merchant in Zakynthos, gazing at the mountains of Morea across the way, sighing:

I see the spreading sea, and afar the Morea,
Grief has seized me, and great yearning…

until his censure by the land that he liberated, and those final serene moments when Charon found him, Kolokotronis’ life was a dramatic, characteristic unfolding of a rich modern Greek soul: faith, optimism, tenacity, valour, a certain, practical mind, deceptive versatility, like Odysseus.

When the penpushers all lost their bearings, or the tin-soldier generals bickered among themselves, Kolokotronis would see the simplest, most effective solution. Gentle and softhearted when it served the great purpose, harsh and savage when necessary. Harsh and savage most of all with himself. When he served as a corsair on the ‘black ships’ he once found himself without tobacco. He opened his pipe and scraped it in order to get some burned tobacco to make a cigarette. But at the same instant he started to smoke, he felt ashamed. ‘Here’s a man for you,’ he muttered to himself with scorn. ‘Here’s a man who wants to save his country, and can’t even save himself from an inconsequential habit.’ And he flung the cigarette away.

Thus he conditioned and hardened himself, in order to be prepared. For years in foreign armies he studied the art of war, the ‘manual of arms’; aboard ship he learned the risalto, the assault; he made himself ready. And when the revolution burst out he was primed, fifty years old by then, organised from top to toe. Armed to the teeth. He had amassed knowledge by the quintal, cunning, bravery, wide experience; he wrought songs to relieve his ‘yearning’; by contributing an axiom at a crucial moment he would silence the unorganised chatter. Our modern Greek problems have not yet found more profound, humorous and epigrammatic expression.

He had both impulse and restraint, he knew how to retreat so that he could advance; hemmed in by enemies, Greeks and Turks, he was forced to mobilise all his bravery and wile so that the Race would not be lost. Often all would desert him, he would be left alone in the mountains, and then burst out weeping. He sobbed like the Homeric heroes, with his long hair and helmet; he sobbed and was refreshed. He regained his fortitude, formulated new schemes in his mind, sent off messages, involved the elders once more, mocked the Turks, conciliated the Greeks; and the struggle began again.

Kolokotronis, with all his faults and virtues, is one of the leaders of our race. Here in Tripolis, which he took with mind and sword, his scent still lingers dissipated in the air; with patience and concentration a youth should be able to reconstruct, as model and guide, the peerless Old Man. And thus, with a struggle now invisible and spiritual, to reconquer and ravish Tripolis.

Dragoumis, and Kazantzakis

‘I am free because I create everything’
(Samothrace)

Ion Dragoumis – born 129 years ago today – was the most important theorist and exponent of Hellenism in the modern era.

In essays and books – such as Hellenic Civilisation, Those Who Are Alive, The Footpath, Samothrace and My Hellenism and the Greeks – and through direct engagement as a soldier and diplomat in the struggle to liberate Macedonia and advance the cause of Greeks in Constantinople and elsewhere, Dragoumis informed the views and deeds of a generation of Greek intellectuals and men and women of action who managed to double the size and population of Greece.

Dragoumis belonged to the generation of Greeks appalled by Greece’s defeat to the Turks in the war of 1897 and the despondency that followed it. He denounced Greek society, which he described as listless and mediocre, blindly imitating Europe – which he associated with enervating materialism, cosmopolitanism and socialism – and urged Greeks to look inwards, to their own culture and history, to find the solutions to national revival. An ardent demoticist, Dragoumis argued that the Greek state had become a burden to Hellenism – which he described as ‘family of Greek communities’ – and advocated local self-reliance to reverse the trend of emigration and rural depopulation and promoted an education system that went beyond ‘the false worship of the Ancient Greeks’ and expressed and taught instead the living culture of the Greeks (which would include learning the meaning of ‘danger’ and ‘war’).

Dragoumis’s nationalism also possessed a strong Nietzschean streak, in which devotion to the nation and its advancement is the realm where the will to power becomes possible, the means by which the individual can overcome himself – become ‘better than myself’, as Dragoumis puts it in Samothrace – and ascend to the status of an yperanthropos (superman).

Dragoumis is one of Nikos Kazantzakis’s ‘pale shadows’, men who accompanied and influenced the Cretan personally and intellectually throughout his life. Radical voluntarism, the rejection of bourgeois and liberal society, the creation of a new Greek civilisation, the identification of Hellenism as a fast current ready to overcome the ‘tubercular’ Turks, were all beliefs and attitudes Kazantzakis learned from (his friend) Dragoumis.

Writing in 1936 – 16 years after Dragoumis’ assassination – Kazantzakis refers to Dragoumis as a ‘brilliant man full of contradictory forces and lofty anxieties’; who, in 1937, Kazantzakis says, Greeks should admire most if they still aspired to create a new Hellenic civilisation’; while, in 1940, Kazantzakis refers to Dragoumis (along with the poet Petros Vlastos) as one of ‘the two people I have most respected and loved in my life’.

In his manifesto For Our Youth, a patriotic call to arms written in 1910, two years before the Balkan wars, Kazantzakis reveals the crux of Dragoumian nationalism and how much at the time he was under its sway:

'The more fanatically patriotism manifests itself, the more completely and quickly does it serve humanity. For if it destroys its neighbour-nation, is not that destruction, when viewed in perspective, a benefaction to mankind? It is proper for all those who are old and tired to vanish — all who have already fulfilled their destiny and given to thought and action what they could. In this way they relinquish their place to other nations that are young and vigorous… nations that will vanish in their turn as soon as they fulfil their destiny. Then they, too, will grow tired, will preach cosmopolitan ideas, will consider patriotism a leftover relic from barbaric times, and will die. That is how it always happens: cosmopolitanism and patriotism are the results and not the cause of a nation’s withering or vitality… As soon as cosmopolitan ideas, philanthropy, tolerance, and Christianity begin to prevail, that moment is an infallible symptom of fatigue and death.’

The Angels of Cyprus, by Nikos Kazantzakis

'Remember that the British fought in Cyprus, and seemingly had everything in their favor. It is an island half the size of New Jersey. The Royal Navy, which can be trusted to do its job, sealed off the island from the outside. There were 40,000 British troops on Cyprus under Field Marshal Sir John Harding, and his opponent, Colonel George Grivas, had 300 Greeks in the EOKA. The ratio between regular troops and guerrillas was 110-to-1 in favor of the British! After five years the British preferred to come to terms with the rebels.' (Bernard B. Fall)

EOKA (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών, National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters), under the leadership of Giorgos Grivas-Digenis, began its struggle to liberate Cyprus from British colonial rule and unite the island with Greece with a series of bomb attacks targeting government installations on 1 April 1955. Cypriots had been agitating for liberation and union with Greece since the Greek Enlightenment and the campaign came to a head after the Second World War, with anachronistic colonial empires collapsing and subject peoples winning their right to self-determination. The British responded to Cypriots' peaceful agitation for enosis with repression and in July 1954, the British government declared that Cyprus was too important to Britain's strategic interests and would 'never' be allowed self-determination. It is in this context of British cynicism and duplicity that EOKA was formed and in which Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in Nea Estia on 25 September, 1955, the following attack on Britain's Cyprus policy.

The Angels of Cyprus (The fate and honour of an empire)
These very days, a great people are crossing the Bridge of Trika. [The site of a heroic battle in the Greek War of Independence]. It is not only Cyprus' fate that is being judged. It is not the fate of Cyprus alone that is at stake. For the just rock is sure to devour the unjust mountain. What is at stake, what is being judged at the present moment is the fate and honour of a whole empire! The nation that had risen with such national pride and moral exaltation, as one man, to save the honour of the world in those critical hours of the war, is now undergoing one of the fatal apocalyptic trials that will reveal whether its value is genuine or counterfeit.

And at a still deeper, broader level, the fate and honour of the entire Western world is being judged. Always until now, it has boasted that it was fighting for the justice and freedom of other nations. But now we will see whether that world is worthy of using these sacred words, whether the soul of any honourable man at the present time can have confidence in world leaders such as these…

In a major island, 400,000 spirits are raising a hue and cry, demanding their liberty. And the thrice-noble nation where liberty and light were born is raising a hue and cry along with them. From the four corners of the earth (and even from English throats) voices of anger and protest are exploding. By now it is no longer possible for violence and injustice to stifle a whole people in secret, without protest. Apparently, this world we thought had gone rotten, still has spirits that dare to rear their head against hypocrisy, injustice, arrogance.

It is a critical moment. The moral salvation of the whole world depends on the answer given to the Cyprus question. And on this moral salvation, the political, social, cultural salvation of the world has always depended. Cyprus is no longer a detail now, a mere island at the extreme tip of the Mediterranean. It is becoming the fate-marked centre, where the moral value of contemporary man is at stake.

How is the British Empire facing this tragic moment where its own value is on trial? Alas! With means unworthy of a great nation; with unmanly silence at first; and then with deceit, sycophantism, violence. Shame has hidden its face, far off from the disgraced quarters of the Foreign Office.

The genuine people, though, are not despairing. They know that in this dishonourable, inconsistent world, certain fundamental principles still live and reign, daughters of man, whom he has created with his own sweat, blood, tears. And these are the immortal ones. Most of them were born in Greece: freedom, human dignity, the thirst for justice.

Great mysterious forces are multiplying and bearing fruit even while they are being pursued. Hear the words of an age-old myth: An angel came down to earth, and the ruler of the world was enraged on seeing it. And he lunged at it with his sword and split it in two. And at once the angel became two. And again, the ruler of the world lunged at them and split these two angels in two. And the two angels became four, and the four eight, and the eight sixteen, and soon the earth was filled with angels.

Who was this angel? The angel of freedom? Cyprus will soon be full of angels. And the ruler of the world will be crushed, disgraced in Tartarus, his sword shattered.

There is some mystic law in this world (for if there were not, this world would have been destroyed thousands of years ago), a harsh, inviolable law: in the beginning, evil always triumphs, and in the end it is always vanquished. Apparently, for man to buy this privilege, much effort, much sweat, many tears are imperative. And freedom is the most expensive good that can be bought. It is never given for nothing, either by human beings or by the gods. It goes from land to land, where it is summoned, from heart to heart, unsleeping, unsubduable, uncompromising. At the moment we can watch it traversing the soil of Cyprus with steady momentum. And soon its limbs will be spattered with blood. For this is the way freedom always forges its path.

For us this is a good moment to forget our passions and petty cares; for each man of us with his own God-given gifts to follow the path of freedom throughout the land of Cyprus. And we must share her grief, her upsurge, her danger, insofar as we are capable, and surely later on (for this is the law, we said) her great joy as well.

I myself represent nothing. I am not anything. Only a clear conscience. But a clear conscience weighs more in the scale of God and time than an empire. And now that Cyprus has been saved from the waves and is crying out, all clear consciences – from all the quarters of the world; wherever they may be – can hear this cry and see the injustice and cast the stone (the curse) against the ruler of the world, the wrongdoer. The ruler laughs and acts in a cynical manner. He has the power on his side, soldiers, fleets, lethal birds of the air, vast wealth and traitors – and great hubris. He laughs and acts in a cynical manner, but one day (such has always been the omnipotence of man when wronged) – one day, Clear Conscience will hurl this stone at it and it will hang around the neck of the empire and sink it. The great empires have always sunk.

Several years I went back to Cyprus, enchanted by her Greek light and pleasant air. An old man emerged from a peasant home near Famagusta. We picked up a conversation. He was discussing (what else?) the union, and his eyes flashed. And suddenly a broad smile flooded his sunburned face. He put his hand over his heart, and he said, slowly as though confiding some great secret to me:

'The foundation stones of England are shaking! They are shaking, because the human heart has stirred.'

Yes, the human heart has stirred, O great Empire!

Kazantzakis on Greece and Japan

In my recent post, Angelopoulos, Takeshi Kitano, Cacoyiannis, I mention that Greek and Japanese civilisations have some striking similarities. In his book, Travels in China & Japan, recording his impressions of imperial Japan and revolutionary China in the 1930s, Nikos Kazantzakis explains what I mean:

‘There is no country in the world that reminds me more than Japan of what ancient Greece might have been in its most shining moments. As in ancient Greece, so in old Japan and here in whatever of it still lives, even the smallest thing that comes from the hands of man and is used in his everyday life is a work of art, made with love and grace. Everything comes out of agile, dexterous hands, which crave beauty, simplicity and grace – what the Japanese call in one word: shibui (“tastefully bare”). 

‘Beauty in everyday life. And many other similarities: both peoples had given to their religion a cheerful aspect and had placed God and man in goodhearted contact. They both had the same simplicity and grace in dress, food and abode. They had similar celebrations devoted to the worship of nature, the anthesteria and sakura; and also from the same root (the dance) they produced the same sacred fruit, the tragedy. Both peoples had tried to give to physical exercises an intellectual aim… 

‘The ancient Greeks received the first elements of their civilisation from the Orient and from Egypt, but they succeeded in transforming them and in freeing the sacred silhouette of man from monstrous gods by giving human nobility to the monsters of mythology, theology and fear. In exactly the same way, the Japanese took their religion from India and the first elements of their civilisation from China and Korea, but they, also, succeeded in humanising the physical and the monstrous and in creating an original civilisation – religion, art, action – adapted to the stature of man.’