Kazantzakis – Aegina

Somewhere in all our life we are drawing up a journey. And together, along with the same breath, we create Ithaca as well. Kazantzakis in his nice exaggeration, in a letter to my father wrote: “I have found myself again, a descendant of the Arabs in the African island of Crete”. He conceived both perfectly. In art he created the “Odyssey”. In hi personal life he created his spiritual Odyssey and Aegina. Aegina was for Kazantzakis what Ithaca was for Ulysses. Yet, just as in Homer’s Odyssey Kazantzakis interfered with his own vision, so his Ithaca is different from Homer’s Ithaca.

For Homer Ithaca constituted two particular spots: the start and the arrival. Between these spots there is adventure, revelation, hell and the paradise of personal experience, in a word life. In Homer, when Ulysses arrives finally at Ithaca, he rests. Yet, in Kazantzakis’ Odyssey the arrival is something temporary. Kazantzakis’ Ulysses immediately recognizes how restricted is the horizon of each anchoring, how fast boredom takes place of nostalgia. So, as soon as he kills the suitors of Penelope, he takes care of financial and family matters – he marries his son Telemachus to Nausika from the island of the Phaeacians, whom he had met naked, brilliantly dressed in her princely youth – he yearns to leave again.

In a letter Kazantzakis writes: “The same was for Ulysses. Every big soul pines at some point because it feels that even the biggest exploit and the biggest joy or sadness and the most audacious ideal cannot contain it. Nothing can contain it, expect Nothingness”. So he leaves again. He will kidnap again beautiful Helen, who meanwhile was sick and tired of idleness and middle-aged pleasure. He will again conquer burn and be burnt by gods and men. He won’t go back to Ithaca.

In Aegina Kazantzakis created slowly his Aegina like the silkworm creates silk – a comparison he liked so much. He chose the rock, built the eagle nest for himself and his beloved Helen. “I get very tired, all day long at the building site, I don’t eat any more nor do I sleep… I tire you with this house, but Buddha was right: Whoever builds a house, becomes a door and a window”. But Kazantzakis’ Aegina-Ithaca is not a dead place, a place of withdrawal and serene contemplation. It is a place full of energy and power, lots of work and pleasure provided by the outer miracle of nature and the inner miracle of the Titan man. “Divine are the days here, now that I’m left alone I’ve gone wild, and work a lot. I also feel here totally happy… I Watch the sea, the absolute quietness, all the time as my garden and I go down there and cut the fruit. As long as the travel demon does not take hold of me, I feel I don’t need anything. I only have to take the demon in my inner world and the all is complete and self-sufficient”. (Letter,1933). Yet, the travel demon comes often out on the surface and asks for justice. We could really name this period of Kazantzakis’ life – that is from 1931 to 1946 – as the Aegina period, when Kazantzakis travels a lot, and gets to know the world.

Kazantzakis had a passion for mountains. Over there, the air and the feeling of the sky reminded him of the climate that tried always to dominate his soul. Each mountain was steepness, and each steepness constituted an elation for Kazantzakis, because the writer of “Askitiki” (or Salvatores Dei) based in this expression of the utmost in nature his vision, his ideology. Man should always tend higher, tougher, steeper. He should fight comfort, habit, soul’s sleep, flatness. You have to keep climbing. And ascent means struggle. And struggle means freedom.

In Aegina, where there was “divine loneliness and sweetness”, Kazantzakis worked like mad. The translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, a series of cantas “to honour: the masters of the souls that encourage me in this battle”, among them “Tsenghishan”, “Saint Tereza”, “Lenin”, “Don Quixote”, “Mahomet”, “Buddha”, school textbooks for money. Yet, all these were wandering, flying like bugs around a lamp. The lamp was Odyssey his great work – as he considered it to be when he notes. “Odyssey is a work, all the rest is side-line”.

On Aegina the three last scripts of the “Odyssey”, which was printed in 1938, were written. At the same time he started translating along with J. Kakridis Homer’s “Illiad”. And how can one forget “Zorba the Greek”, written in 1841 in 40 days! But “what is the use of the poets of Myths, when times declare such a poorness”, the German poet Helderlin wrote. And Kazantzakis had absolutely the same feeling of vanity, when isolated on Aegina lived on the one hand the horror of the German occupation and on the other the child-Odyssea was pressing him to come out. He writes again and again to friends that he is feeling at this moment he must leave art and join the fighters. The island around him is suffering, people are dying of hunger and he also suffers and is hungry.

One morning he doesn’t even have the strength to get out of bed. Yet with his dragon obstinacy he sits again at his desk and continues fighting. His is a different fight, but still a fight. It is said that it was suggested to him to go to the “mountain” but that he refused to do so. Others say that he offered to go and the leaders refused, adding that they didn’t need intellectuals among them. Who knows the truth, and what is finally its importance? The important thing is that Kazantzakis was conscious of the division between action and analytical thought, art and all kinds of activity, even when this activity is for a holy cause. This problem is like passing a thread through his entire work, to become particularly sharp and stressed 20 years before the German occupation on Aegina, that is in Germany of 1922, when the seed of “Askitiki” matured inside him.

With this poetic-philosophical book – basic for his entire work – Kazantzakis tried to bridge the gap between thought and action, the philosophical view of life and man’s desire to change the world. Surrounded by a doddering Germany – inflation, hunger, misery, people throw themselves into the river everyday to save themselves from the misery followed the destruction of the First World War – Kazantzakis felt the need to give people a new belief.

It has been often said that had he lived in other immature, antiquated eras when history and humanity were still malleable dough and were shaped all the time, Kazantzakis would not be a writer, but a spiritual leader. He would be a religion founder. And this because the Great Breath that goes through his work is not related so much to the humbler occupation of the writer or the simple poet who struggles to find a nice image, an original simile. “What do I care if I write two-three fair verses, if I make a good simile and a passable tragedy. All this seems to me as sins. This is how much I feel they sidetrack me from the hard, awkward, beyond beauty and individuality mandate I have undertaken”.

But which is this Great Breath? It is Kazantzakis’ anxiety to serve man, help him get out of the dead end of his history and personality and achieve again great things. Kazantzakis names this quest for a motive power of the soul, God. A God, as it is clearly defined in “Askitiki”, is not the good or severe father, is not the boss that will pay us our wages work at the end of the day, is not a seducer who is promising Paradise if we act correctly on this earth. He is a flame that resides inside man and burns him, pushes him to overpass himself, go beyond his limits, build his handout proudly in the chaos. God lives inside us, not outside us, in every act we ruin him or glorify him. A shout for HELP is heard. Who shouted? God shouted, who won’t be saved unless we save him.

Yet, in this ascent, in this effort to fulfill our absurd debt – to whom? – we are not alone. Strangely, the entire world around us follows a similar natural, visible and invisible ascent. In an evolutionary course where its cause and meaning is the course itself, the inanimate matter struggles to become a life, the rock to become a tree, the ground to become a plant and then again the animal moves towards the most perfect consciousness that this world has ever experienced, that is man. Thus, we see that while the entire irrational world around us is heading for consciousness, man, who is the only consciousness we know, is heading towards an increasingly wider control whose ideal is to embrace the entire world.

The end of “Askitiki” is even more merciless than the beginning. The beginning: “We ate coming from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, the luminous interval we all life”. At the end of the course, at the end of “Askitiki”, Kazantzakis reveals the terrible secret, hard to bear for whomever secretly was having hope. “And this One does not exist”. The One we are after, a hyper-unity, a hyper-consciousness, in a word the answer; we won’t find it either.

But in the meantime we have won life, or better a quality of life which justifies by itself the struggle, a quality worthy of man’s uniqueness, who even though inconsolable, he consoles people. “We defeat detail, we defeat boredom, we defeat heart’s narrowness, we feel that all men and people – and even more, all plants and animals, we all collaborate, we ascend all together, carried away by a mysterious, invisible breath. Where are we heading? No one knows. Don’t ask, keep ascending! Perhaps we don’t go anywhere, perhaps no one is paying life’s tip. So much the better. Thus, we overcome the last, the biggest temptation – hope. We fight because that’s what we want, with no reward, we are not mercenaries. We sing even if we know there is no one to listen to us, we work even though there is no master when the night falls to pay us the day’s work. We are desperate, serene and free. This is the real heroism, man’s, I suppose, highest achievement”.

“Askitiki” is the basis of the entire creative work of Kazantzakis. The novels – written much later – the tragedies and especially the “Odyssey” are but mere illustrations of “Askitiki”. The heroic pessimism, which is expressed in “Askitiki” as a lyrical commandment, is mixed in the other books with a sweet sensation of life, a delight about the natural world that surrounds us. In nature man’s metaphysical anxiety bursts out in a flower. Kazantzakis often used to say, that the almond-tree was asked about God and it immediately blossomed. “This earth is good, we like it, like the curly grapes / in the dark blue air, God, it hangs, in the blizzard it moves / and it is nibbled by the spirits and the birds of the air / let us nibble it too, so as to freshen up our minds!”, Kazantzakis sings in the preface of the “Odyssey”.

Aegina was for Kazantzakis his Ithaca not only from his life’s point of view but also from his creative one. Because there not only did he anchor himself physically, but also spiritually. He was wedded to the verse, the language, he fought with his “24 soldiers”, the 24 letters of the Greek Alphabet, as he used to say. Aegina’s landscape seemed to protect him from the vain personal fights of petty-minded Athens. The island’s people that loved him, the friends that visited him on Sundays, was as much human presence as he needed. The Athens intelligentsia not only didn’t accept him but also opposed him. He left Greece in sorrow.

Kazantzakis is a legend. In his pages we find something more than a message: a prophecy. Because the question that 60 years ago was more a suspicion than an experience has now become a daily, complete anxiety. How will we live? Our archives are perfect, step-by-step, we can study the different games that always end with the same sad understanding: The powerful always wins. Thousands of young people today, without even understanding it, have chased away the sense of FUTURE from their lives. The idea of absolute destruction is something almost familiar, close by. The same holds for the people of art – maybe even more so. Because when from the artist’s creative impetus you remove all possibility of his work’s continuity, even after his death, it is asif you clop a bird’s wings. But what continuity and in what world?

“The thing that has always renewed Earth had been passion, enthusiasm, FAITH without any intellectual argumentation”, writes Kazantzakis somewhere. And this faith has helped him build his work. With his writing – that was his weapon – he wanted to support man in difficult times, which – as if he knew it then – are getting more and more difficult. He wanted to make man learn how to build in chaos. “Let us unite, let’s hold each other tightly, let’s join our hearts, let’s create, as long as this Earth temperature still holds, al long as there are no earthquakes, floods, icebergs, comets that will make us disappear, let’s create a brain and a heart for the Earth, let’s give a human sense in this superhuman struggle!”, he says in “Askitiki”. And the famous “I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I am free”, which is inscribed on his grave, shouldn’t perhaps be considered as a figure of speech, but as an opening of a road, a proposition for freedom, a proposition for life.