Chapter III - 'Sow the Wind'

Work in progress: excerpt from Sow the Wind - a novel.

Chapter III

I gave the opening address of my lecture series in the main auditorium of the Society, the day I returned from Aegina. Demetrios had brought me back to Athens that morning, to give me time to put the finishing touches to my lecture. Iris had refused to come with us; she had a migraine and had slept badly.  I promised myself that as soon as my lectures were over, I would return to Aegina and try to persuade her to change her mind about touring Greece with me. Before I left, Demetrios and I had returned to the temple of Aphaia, for I wanted to see if I could find a natural explanation for the apparition I had seen. I soon located a track leading up the hill to the rear of the temple, as well as a gap in the fence that would have made climbing over it unnecessary. Desperate for reassurance that all was well with consensus reality, I concluded that my hypothetical tourist could well have come in that way. My doubts laid to rest by this feeble rationalization, I went back to Athens with Andreas the next morning to prepare for my Monday night lecture.  I know now that I was suffering from cognitive dissonance, the emotional turmoil we experience when we try to reconcile the actual with the seemingly impossible.

I dislike giving public lectures, especially full-dress affairs. Ceremony irritates me; I am at my best in a university lecture theatre, with an audience of students, or in a seminar with my colleagues. I was dismayed to see that this auditorium was packed to capacity; there were even people sitting on the broad windowsills. I was also surprised to have learnt from Andreas that this lecture was being broadcast throughout Greece. Why are people so often interested in history? Perhaps because they look to it for answers to those questions which used to be provided by religion and metaphysics. History, said Joyce, is a shout in the street – a meaningless cry in the dark. I could not agree with that nihilistic view. But faced with an educated audience like this one, hot for certainties and eager for answers to the perennial questions, I was tempted to warn them that history gave, at the best, only partial answers. If history was a mirror, it was a clouded and distorting one, bronze rather than glass.

I began by quoting Auden’s dictum: ‘Had Greek civilisation never existed we would never have become fully conscious, which is to say that we would never have become, for better or for worse, fully human.’ So Hellas had humanized us all. Yet that very morning, in Athens, cradle of western civilisation, a terrorist bomb had been hurled into yet another hotel swimming pool, exploding among a group of frolicking deaf-mutes children. They had mimed their agony, dying silently in dumb crambo. What had such violence to do with Athens, ‘Mother of Hellas, violet-crowned’, to quote Pindar? Perhaps more than most of us would care to admit, given the city’s growing reputation as a safe haven for terrorists.

Why did civilisations collapse? Many attempts had been made to answer this question, none of them wholly successful. One might begin by defining ‘collapse’, with Joseph A. Tainter, as ‘a rapid, significant loss of socio-political complexity’. Such collapse was not limited to civilisations; it could occur even among tribes, as Colin Turnbull had demonstrated in his harrowing study of the hapless Ik of Uganda. But it was the collapse of high cultures that aroused the most interest, perhaps because their end reflected our deepest fears for the continued existence of our own society. As Wilamowitz said, with reference to the fall of the Roman Empire: [We know now that] ‘civilisation can die, because it already died once.’ Or as Christopher Dawson had put it in The Dynamics of World History (1956): ‘Of all the changes the twentieth century has brought, none goes deeper than the disappearance of that unquestioning faith in the future and the absolute values of our civilisation which was the dominant note of the nineteenth century.’

The fall of Rome was perhaps the example that came most readily to mind when we thought of the collapse of a civilisation. For some years I had been devoting my research to the question of why the Western Roman Empire succumbed when the Eastern Empire did not. Explanations of the coming fall were being given by historians long before the collapse actually occurred. In his Rise of the Roman Empire, the Greek historian, Polybius, inspired by Plato, had argued as early as the second century BCE that Rome, like all states, must pass through a natural cycle of growth, maturity and decay. Later, Sallust, Seneca the Elder, Cyprian, Vegetius and Bishop Ambrose of Milan had developed this argument, contending that Rome must perish because everything that is born dies. Only the fourth-century historian, Emperor Julian’s officer, Ammianus Marcellinus, disagreed, asserting confidently, on the very eve of Rome’s downfall, that it was immortal. Later writers, ranging from the early Renaissance historian, Flavio Biondo, to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Gibbon, Herder, Hegel, Bruckhardt, Spengler, Toynbee, Borkenau, Sorokin, Kroeber, Dawson, Charles Gray and many others had all put forward similarly unconvincing and often ludicrous idealist explanations for the collapse of Rome. None of these theories could claim any scientific validity, for none of them were, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term, falsifiable. Of more interest were materialist theories ascribing the collapse of the Western Empire to resource depletion, barbarian invasion, catastrophe, class conflict, mismanagement, poor leadership, overtaxation, disease, social dysfunction, pure chance, climactic change or economic factors. The economic theories were both logically and structurally superior to the others, since they could identify characteristics of Roman society – rampant inflation, chief among them - that led to its downfall. Moreover, these characteristics could be found in other societies that had collapsed, thereby paving the way for a universally applicable theory explaining the demise of civilisations.

At this juncture I cited Ester Boserup’s thesis that growth of population led inevitably to a decline in marginal returns from agriculture. Boserup’s arguments had been extended by Clark and Haswell (I displayed their graphs), who had proven that in any subsistence regime marginal returns on agriculture declined with increasing labour. Declining marginal returns, therefore, held the key to the collapse of complex social organisations. What were the implications for us, with a population headed for seven billion by 2012, only twenty-seven years from now?

As Tainter, had ably demonstrated, a consistent pattern of declining marginal returns could be observed not only in all historical collapses, but also in our own society, world-wide, in fields as diverse as agriculture, education, information processing and government. It was costing us more and more to produce less and less. Sooner or later, we should be testifying to the truth of the Queen of Hearts’ dictum that one had to run very hard to stay in the same place. We had around thirty more years to go, if we were to believe a contemporary Greek economist, Xenophon Zolotas, who had asserted that shortly after the year 2000, Western society would enter a phase where the returns on its whole gamut of investments would decline sharply, leading to a collapse of the financial system in the West. I was prepared to go further and assert that this decline would be greatly exacerbated by the world’s reaching peak oil around 2015 after which the rising costs of all oil-based products would bring about a sharp decline in living standards worldwide, with the worst of the burden being borne by the poorer countries, who depended on oil-based fertilizers to support their swollen populations. The huge, ever-widening gap between rich and poor would place intolerable strains on our precariously balanced polity system. The result would be escalating conflict, in the form of both conventional welfare and terrorism. The car bomb, not the atom bomb, would initially be the preferred weapon, along with virtually unstoppable suicidal terrorists, most of whom would be Muslims, since Islam was already awakening after its centuries long sleep.   By that time the Soviet Union and its whole brutally ramshackle Communist empire would have disintegrated, for the reasons I have just outlined, probably no later than the mid-nineties, leaving the United States and a rapidly developing totalitarian China as the only super-powers in an increasingly anarchistic global order. We could therefore expect to find nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons freely available to anyone with the money to pay for them. Since terrorism was traditionally the warfare of the weak, and the weak would proliferate, the opening decades of the twenty-first century could well witness the destruction of millions of people through the acts of international terrorism, culminating in the obliteration of one or more cities of a leading developed nation – almost certainly the United States – by hand-delivered nuclear ‘suitcase’ bombs, probably supplied by one of the nations in the present Communist bloc, which by 2000 or even earlier would have ceased to exist, or else by a rogue Stalinist state like North Korea or a fanatical theocracy like Iran. The type of savage terrorism we were witnessing around us at the moment, of which the example I had quoted in my peroration was typical, was therefore to be seen as but the pale precursor of the terrorism to come, which could well end in the complete destruction of Athens and its four million people, through the use of chemical, bacteriological or nuclear weapons. The violet crown that Pindar had ascribed to Athens could assume the form of the Medusa glare of a twenty-kiloton terrorist suitcase bomb.

These remarks provoked a considerable stir within the auditorium. It is one thing to be told that civilisation is threatened; it is quite another to be told you yourself are at risk. Clearly, my audience, which had come to be enlightened and entertained with comforting platitudes, had not been prepared for this unpleasant development. Furthermore, my remarks about the forthcoming demise of the Communist bloc had not gone down well with a largish section of the audience, though greeted with enthusiasm by the Establishment in the front rows. I suspected the left-wing papers would handle me roughly the next day. In the meantime, I pressed on with the final paragraphs of my lecture.

Though we could now point to the mechanism which brought about the downfall of our societies, I went on, we should not rest content with this. Ultimately, the historian was forced to explain why the fall of these societies, whether simple or complex, was preceded and accompanied by such appalling slaughter. This was equally as true of the disintegration of the Ik of Uganda as of the fall of Rome. To understand this, one had to turn to psychoanalysis, which alone gave us the insight necessary to comprehend why social disintegration brought with it such universally bloody consequences. 

In every human being an incessant battle went on between forces that Freud had dubbed Agape or Love, and Thanatos, or Death. All the great Traditions had warned us that, if we did not embrace Love, we should have to embrace Death. Our civilisations seemed already to have made its choice. Death was the primary problem that confronted us all. Within each of us there were two conflicting opposites, namely the conviction that we were immortal and the certainty that we would die. From this collision of warring polarities, our lifeless life, our deathless death, sprang the synthesis we call civilisation. All our cultures were essentially what Ken Wilber had called “Atman Projects”, or attempts to deny death. And the deaths that we inflicted upon others, whether in the form of murders, ritual sacrifices, or slaughter in battle, were simply attempts to deny our own feared mortality by dealing out death to our fellows.

From this followed certain, ineluctable conclusions. If the struggle between death and immortality was at the core of every human being, then it must also be at the core of every culture. We could therefore classify civilisations, as Borkenau had suggested, on the basis of their attitudes to death. Highest were the death-transcending cultures, like India, or pre-modern Europe, with their insistence that the human being could not be identified with the body; next came the death-accepting cultures, like the Hellenic, or the early Hebraic, which stressed the necessity of living life to the utmost; lastly came the death-embracing cultures, from the Assyrians and Aztecs to the contemporary totalitarian states and a recrudescent Wahabi Islam. Was it not a Spanish, fascist general who had cried out Viva la muerte! (Long live death!)? And were not the Islamic “martyrs”, the youthful suicide-bombers, the child soldiers sacrificed by the thousand in the bloody conflict between Iraq and Iran, where, among other atrocities, they had been used to clear mine-fields by running through them, each bearing a cheap, plastic Key to Paradise - were they and their commanders the mullahs not equally in love with death?

Our own civilisation stood at a crossroads, uncertain whether to embrace death or life. Warfare and its half-brother, terrorism, were examples of our culture’s blind urge towards extinction. The twentieth century had well been named ‘The Age of Death’. Modern civilisation was the barbarous, scientistic ‘reign of quantity’ that Rene Guénon had foreseen; desperate for reassurance that all was well with consensus reality, it had become materialistic, reductionist, violent and nihilistic. It had even resurrected – and on a grand scale – torture, a practice which the nineteenth century had thought it had banished for ever. Militarists and terrorists throve in those conditions. However they might disguise their motives with high-sounding rhetoric, their real war cry was the fascists’Viva la muerte! Unless we were prepared to act decisively against terrorism, we should be acquiescing in our civilisation’s shift from accepting death to embracing death, and so paving the way for our own extinction. Ultimately, all these death-embracing creeds, whether communist, fascist, religious or purely nihilistic, were founded on Thanatos, not Agape. Essentially necrophiliac, they manifested a cold hatred of life and a contempt for humanity which one might well call Satanic.  They could only be opposed by the perennial philosophy, the sānatana dharma, which emphasised love and compassion. For only love and compassion were stronger than our ancient Adversary, Thanatos.

When I lecture, it is my custom to pick out certain people in the audience and address my remarks to them. I look directly into their eyes and so make contact with them, before moving on to someone else. So as I was speaking, I had gradually been letting my gaze travel further back in the auditorium. As it reached the corner of the left-hand side aisle at the very rear of the hall, I suddenly realised I was looking directly at Alethea.

The shock of encountering this apparition in a public place was so great that my heart lurched within me, and my voice faltered. For a moment, I felt the platform shift beneath my feet, then, like a circus acrobat who keeps on performing after he has almost missed the trapeze, I went on with my address. Yet even though my voice continued to pronounce the words, my whole attention was riveted on Alethea. Once again, she was clad in white. Once again, her black hair fell loosely about her shoulder. But this time, I could see her eyes, unshaded by dark glasses. She sat there watching me, unmoving, a ghost of a smile on her lips, the exquisite oval of her face uplifted whitely in the gloom. Once or twice, I fancied I saw her change position slightly, and even nod as though in agreement with what I was saying. But under the balcony at the back of the hall, the light was so dim that I could be by no means sure of what I was seeing, yet it did seem as though this figment of my deluded cortex, this lovely aberration from consensus reality, this right-hemispherical divagation, was actually responding to my words. In the end, I gave up the struggle and abandoned myself to this sensual hallucination.

Alethea, untouched by the harsh years that were aging me, freed from the tyranny of time, as young and beautiful as she was when I had said goodbye to her for the last time, was sitting in that gloomy hall, drinking in my words, as though we had never been parted. The rest of the world receded in a haze; I had eyes only for her. It was to her I spoke of love and death. To her I appealed for compassion, wisdom and love, as the only way out of the labyrinth where the Minotaur was waiting. As in a dream, I heard myself delivering the peroration without taking my eyes off her. The moment my speech ended, I was tempted to leap down from the platform, sprint up the aisle, and see if I could clasp her in my arms. But I envisaged the newspaper headlines (‘Deranged Professor Sexually Harasses Hallucination’) and thought better of it.  By the time I had made my way to the back of the hall, after listening to the usual speech of thanks from the President of the Society and having my photograph taken, Alethea – or rather her hallucinatory image – had vanished again.

I returned to the hotel, exhausted and deeply shaken by the vision I had seen. Unable to sleep, I poured myself a glass of Glennfidich from the mini-bar and sat down to brood on the events of the past few days. Was I destined to be haunted by this phantom, this aberration of my cortex throughout my stay in Greece? Her continual reappearance was sapping my strength, drawing me ineluctably into a past I had struggled to forget for over two decades. Iris had been right to compare me to Orestes, whose words in the Choephoroi of Aeschylus kept running through my mind: ‘You cannot see them you cannot, but I see them. They are hunting me down!’

They were indeed hunting him down. The Erinyes! These terrible Furies had appeared to him in the guise of two beautiful women with blood-red eyes and snake-wreathed hair, like that of Medusa. Only the intervention of Athene and Apollo had saved him from being driven insane, like Hercules or Lycurgus, persecutor of Dionysus. The Furies were obeying the law of revenge, for Orestes had slain his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus, to avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon, as he later slew Helen of Troy to requite Menelaus for his ingratitude. I felt I had willingly and unwittingly become part of this terrifying world of the ancient Greek myths that so haunted Iris. I too had blood on my hands – the blood of Chloe as well as that of Alethea. Were these now materializing as two Furies who were finally to drive me insane? To rend every nerve in my body with guilt, as they had vowed to do to Orestes? Unlike Orestes, I could find no Delphic temple of Pythian Apollo, no shrine of Athene on the Acropolis in which to seek refuge, clinging to a pillar. The gods did not intercede for unbelievers. Neither pagan nor Christian, I was caught between two opposing creeds, stranded in a ravaged No-man’s-land of barren, rationalistic scepticism.

My ruminations were cut short by the shrill ringing of the phone. It was Andreas, sounding very flustered and apologetic. I had provoked a greater reaction from my audience than I had intended. The President had just received several anonymous phone calls, threatening to kill me and the leading members of the Committee, as well as blow up the auditorium building, unless my next lecture was promptly cancelled. Athenians had resurrected an ancient tradition going back to Socrates: Kill those who disagree with you. Under the circumstances, the Society had reluctantly decided to postpone my lecture until the hue and cry died down. Nevertheless, I would receive the agreed lecture-fees, and have all my hotel expenses paid.

It took him some considerable time to deliver this message. He kept apologising, now in Greek, now in French, now in English. Had he known a dozen other languages he would doubtless have apologized in them too. I felt sorry for him. This was a task that the President himself should have performed, instead of leaving it to the hapless Andreas. Eventually, I managed to interrupt his apologies and stammered explanations long enough to tell him that I was not at all put out by what had happened.  I was going to hire a car, tour all the major archaeological sites, and have a long overdue holiday. He was so relieved at my reaction – I think he had expected me to threaten legal action for breach of contract – that he even offered to chauffeur me himself. I declined his offer politely; it was Iris I had in mind as a companion, not him. I told him I would be grateful if he could hire a sports car for me and make a hotel booking in Nauplia, which would be my first stop. Then I said good night, and turned in, after informing the management to tell all callers besides Dr Yiannouri that I had already left. I did not want to spend the night listening to the local lunatics breathing death threats into my ears. Viva la muerte!  

Twenty minutes later I got a triumphant call from Andreas. The car would be at the hotel at eight the next morning. He had even managed to wring a fifteen per cent discount out of the hire-car firm, thanks to his connections. He has also booked me into a suite at the Sparta Palace in Nauplia, the best xenodochia in town. With my plans thus in order, I drifted off to sleep, only to find myself once more caught up in the nightmare world of the Dream.

Andreas was not one to stint when it came to spending someone else’s money. A gleaming, white Mercedes 350 SL, current model, was waiting for me outside the hotel the next morning. I winced a little, signed away a small fortune, had the porter put my bags in the boot, slid behind the wheel, and a few seconds later was picking my way through the rush-hour traffic on my way to the Corinth, Nauplia, and the Southern Peloponnese. I felt a sense of relief at escaping from Athens, as well as at leaving the hotel with its disquieting memories. My only regret was that I was going to be alone on my holiday. I had rung Iris, pleading her to come with me, only to have her refuse. She was still too frightened even to want to talk to me for long. She had made up her mind that I was unlucky, perhaps that I had the evil eye. And once a Greek decides that someone is unlucky, they keep well away from him

In spite of this, I was in high spirits. The weather was sunny, with a gentle southerly breeze, and a forecast maximum of only thirty centigrade. Not a cloud was in the sky, which soon took on that iridescent blue for which the Aegean is famous, once I had left the smog of Athens behind me. The new corniche to Corinth ran high above the Mediterranean, cut into the mountainside which in places dropped sheer away into the sea far below. Above me on my right, stark hillsides, long ago stripped of their trees and strewn with gaunt boulders, lay shimmering in the fierce September sun. The car purred smoothly, like a sleek, white cat, effortlessly licking up the miles. Like many men, I had a weakness for expensive cars. I could afford to indulge it, since I had never married. Luxury cars are far less costly than wives and children.

I switched on the radio, expecting to hear Greek music, and found to my delight that I was listening to Vivaldi’s Magnificat in its final version. As the moving Et Misericordia bathed me in its rich harmonies, I found myself relaxing for the first time since I had left Canberra to embark on my lecture tour, three weeks earlier. I was at last escaping from the Furies who had haunted me so relentlessly both in my dreams and in reality – the two were beginning to blend into each other – ever since my arrival in Greece. On the open road I felt free; and I resolved that for the next couple of weeks I would try to enjoy myself, for once. A pity Iris had let me down. Halfway to Corinth, I noticed a red Škoda tailgating me, though he had plenty of room to pass.

Well I was in no hurry, even if he was. I slowed down a little to let him pass, but he still persisted in hanging stubbornly onto my tail. In exasperation, I put my foot hard down on the accelerator, and felt the car leap ahead until the needle reached the two hundred-kilometre mark. There were few traffic policemen on these roads, and no radar traps. When I next glanced in the mirror, the Škoda was a dwindling spot of red in the distance; Czech communist engineering was no match for German capitalist ingenuity. This car was as smooth and steady at high speeds as it was when ambling around Athens. Had there been an autobahn to Nauplia, I could have been there in well under an hour. As it was, my journey was going to take over twice that long, counting the stop at Epidaurus. At the Corinth canal, I stopped for a sketos, a small cup of sugarless, Greek coffee (never call it ‘Turkish’ in Greece!) It was now well after nine, and the sun was beating down with an intensity reminiscent of Australia, where I normally spend six months of the year. I found a table next to the window, overlooking the canal, which links the Saronic Gulf with the Gulf of Corinth. Far below me, a freighter was making its way through the great cleft in the rocks. Ancient Corinth, Homer’s Epyre, where King Polybus and Queen Merope had raised Oedipus, had been a by-word for luxury and the sins of the flesh. No wonder that the cult of Aphrodite had erected its chief shrine here in Corinth. I sipped my coffee meditatively, and wondered what I had done to offend the goddess of lust and love; she had given me a hard time for years.

The sudden, violent slamming of a car door startled me from my reverie. A pretty young woman, tall, blonde, and slim, fashionably clad in ragged, blue denim shorts and a white cheesecloth blouse, and carrying a haversack, was walking quickly towards the zakharoplasteion. The driver of the BMW she had just left, a middle-aged, heavily-jowled man with horn-rimmed glasses, rolled down his window and shouted a curse after her in Greek. In summer, the country was swarming with hitchhikers, called “snails” because of their bulging haversacks.. It was dangerous for such women to travel in Greece; men assumed they were freely available. Many a hapless female hitchhiker ended up in a police station, sobbing out a story of sexual assault and rape to unsympathetic ears. From the scene I had just witnessed, this one had fallen victim to something of the sort. I shrugged, and opened my copy of Procopius’s scandalous Anekdota. This Byzantine historian’s frank account of the riotous sex-life of the Empress Theodora, written in a style modelled on Thucydides, never ceased to amuse me. Fifteen minutes later, I decided it was time to go. I was paying my bill when my over-friendly Škoda came chugging into the parking lot. I had certainly outrun that Czech contraption! I had just strolled back from the loo and was about to start my engine, when I was startled by a sharp rap at the driver’s window. The blonde woman I had seen earlier was smiling at me, somewhat nervously. I rolled down the window and smiled back.

“Hi! Could you like, possibly give me a lift to Argos?” she asked.

She had a pleasantly musical voice, with a marked American accent. I didn’t hesitate. Why not? She was far safer with me than out on the road. Come to think of it, she might provide me with the companionship I was seeking; I badly needed some distraction from my own obsessive thoughts.

“I’d be delighted to do so,” I told her warmly, leaning across to open the passenger-seat door for her. “You can stow your rucksack on the back seat.”

I took stock of her approvingly as she settled herself gracefully into the car. Her eyes were her most striking feature. Long and narrow, of a brilliant green, they were reminiscent of a Byzantine icon. She wore her short, platinum blonde hair cut in a fringe across her forehead. Her nose was straight, though rather overlong, and her mouth a shade too generous for real beauty. Though she had tanned herself to a fashionable shade of brown, the summer sun had reddened her nose and coarsened her skin which should never really have been exposed to it

 “Yo! I'm Helen Moore,” she said, as she slid deftly into the seat, with a sigh of contentment. “Omigod! Am I glad to be out of that heat! I swear to God, it was like, killing me.”

She glanced around her approvingly. “Cowabunga! I like your wheels. Really cool! Mondo stylish! Totally tubular.”

(Cowabunga? Tubular?  Mondo? I reproduce her dialect as I remember it, though as I write today this 80’s Californian surfing slang has a quaint, dated feel about it. Totally retro!)

“It’s just a hire car. Have you come far this morning?”

“Only from Athens. I had like mondo hassle getting a lift.”

I raised my eyebrows at this. “You astonish me. I’d have thought drivers would be queuing up to take you anywhere you wanted to go,”

She grimaced. “Oh, sure. They were. But I wasn’t too jazzed about any of them. I didn’t want to get pawed all the way to Argos. I wanted a lift, not a lay. You know, as soon as I saw you in the café, I knew you’d be cool. You looked like for real.”

I smiled. “You mean I look harmless.”

She laughed. “I guess that’s what I mean. I always go by my gut feelings about people. You have to when you’re hitching lifts like this.”

I smiled. “Forgive my saying so, but you seem to have made an error of judgement with that last character. You didn’t seem too pleased with him.”

“I swear to God, I wish I’d never met him. You think people like him are for real, but they turn out to be sleazebags. I was clueless!  I just walked right into it. He picked me up at Piraeus. As soon we got out of Athens he started trying to nail me. Couldn’t keep his paws off me.  I waited until I got a chance to split, and then told him to like, fuck off!”

She paused, shook her head in disbelief at the unfathomable depravity of men, and looked at me disconsolately with those fascinating, emerald eyes No wonder men found her irresistible; I could feel my own head swim slightly when she looked at me like that, especially since she was clearly naked under her thin blouse. Was she really surprised that Greek men made passes at her? I took a deep breath and concentrated on the road ahead of me, shimmering in the summer heat.

“This is only my third day by myself, and I’ve already had like, mondo hassle,” she went on. “First on the Mykonos ferry, then at Kantheros, and after that with that scumbag in the Beamer. You see, my boyfriend like, backed out on me three days ago. He went to Paradise and fell for some gorgeous Greek dude.”

 “Paradise? Is he dead then?”

She laughed again, displaying splendid, white teeth. “Dead? Oh! Don’t I wish! No such luck! Paradise is like, the bi nudist beach on Mykonos. Super Paradise is like, the gay nudist beach. They’re happening places on Mykonos. Jason is like bi, you see, and totally horny. So when he met Ajax, he lost his cool. Thought he was to die for. He threw me over and took off with his new boyfriend. He also took off with like ninety-nine percent of my money. Sleazebag!”

“A modern version of Jason and the Golden Fleece in fact.”

I had translated the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius when I was a graduate student, largely to make money. Alethea had proofread the book with her usual patient industriousness, sitting up late night after night to meet deadlines. I had taken all this for granted at the time. No wonder she had grown bitter as Medea when she thought I betrayed her. And her revenge had been almost as deadly.

The classical allusion was lost on Helen. “Fleeced me? You betcha! He’s like grody to the max. Just gruesome! The night before we’d had one hell of a bust up over Ajax, and ice, and stuff. He was like ‘Ajax is my ace buddy now, so get lost, you bitch!  You’re in Dumpsville right here and now.’  So I went really postal.  I was like, “Hello Jason! So I’m a bitch, am I?  And in Dumpsville?  Well, I swear to God you’re just trash. A doober. A creepazoid. A Dudley!  And so’s that dung stabber of yours. Go get some duke! Some more brown sugar! You’re a duo of dumpers. Crankers.  Pure, unadulterated shit. You dudes are both just nada. A couple of mincing cream puffs. And deep down, you both know it. You make me puke!”

She paused, dramatically, after this rhetorical tirade to show me the small bruise on her chin. “So he decked me. Hit me right on the jaw, the skuzzball. Coulda knocked my teeth out.  Now I’ve got to get back to Rome with under fifty dollars. My parents are living there. I’m too freaked out to call them and tell them what’s happened. They’d be mondo mad at me.”

“Rome? Then what on earth are you doing in Corinth? You’re heading quite the wrong way for Rome. You should be going north, not south-west.”

She looked at me in dismay. “Omigod! The scuzzbucket who gave me a lift told me this was the best route to take. He said I had to go through Argos. Said we could have lunch at his house there. Lunch! I can guess what he had in mind for lunch. Me! The sleazeball! I should have decked him. Like I said, that dude  couldn’t keep his greasy hands off me.”

“Argos is south-west of Athens. You should have been heading up north through Volos and Larisa, to Thessaloniki, and then made your way through Yugoslavia as far as the Italian frontier. I’ve done the trip myself from Skopje, taking the coast road through Titograd, Split and Rijeka. It’s quite rough going. Frankly, I don’t advise you even to try it, especially with as little money as you appear to have. You’d better call your parents, and tell them what has happened.”

She shook her head, and wrinkled up her sunburnt nose. “Eek! No way! But you’re right about no bread.. That sleazeball, Jason, ran off with well over two thousand dollars. He cleaned out the lining of my haversack when I was sleeping. He even lifted my traveller’s cheques.”

“Have you told the police?”

“No way! I don’t want any publicity. My parents would like, kill me if they found out. I’ll be O.K. I’ll like, give them a ring when I get to Venice.”

I shook my head doubtfully. “If you ever get to Venice. You’ve got close on two thousand kilometres to cover to the Italian border. And then a long trip to Rome. It’s a hell of a journey, especially for a woman on her own…”

Her pretty face was now such a mask of misery that I thought she was going to burst into tears. The events of the last three days must have been traumatic for her. Having your boyfriend knock you down, steal your money, and leave you stranded two thousand five hundred kilometres from home would unsettle anyone. And her troubles were only just beginning. Clearly, she had no idea of the perils of what she was attempting. Her knowledge of geography must have been rudimentary, to say the least.

“You’d better stop the car,” she said despairingly, uncrossing her shapely legs. Her eyes had filled with unshed tears. “I guess I’ll just have to start heading north.”

I had already made up my mind to help her. It would be madness for her to try to make her way through the Balkans alone.

“Look, I’m touring Greece for the next couple of weeks. I’d be delighted to run you up to the Yugoslav border. But first I want to look at some archaeological sites in the Peloponnese. If you’re not in a hurry, you’re very welcome to ride with me.”

She was staring at me in delighted disbelief. “Do you really mean that?”

“Of course.  I’d be more than glad of your company.”

She looked at me, pursing her lips suspiciously and narrowing her Byzantine green  eyes “What’s the catch, dude?”

“There isn’t one.”

She put her head on one side, knowingly. “Like when we stop for the night. You and I share a room, right?  So what then?”

“You and I don’t share a room. You have your own room. And you can keep your door barred and bolted all night. In fact, I’d strongly advise you to do so, anyway.”

She looked puzzled. “I don’t get it. Then what’s in this for you?”

“The pleasure of your company.  I don’t want to spend two weeks by myself.”

Not with my memories.

She hesitated, and then gave me a sudden dazzling smile. “Totally awesome!  I swear to God, my luck’s really changed. I knew when I saw you that you were for real. I’m like, quite psychic, you know.”

I groaned, silently. Not another psychic, surely! Was there no escape from the blasted New Age?

Typically, her mood changed with bewildering rapidity lightning.. She had already forgotten her earlier despair. She settled back in her seat with a contented sigh, rocking her blonde head from side to side with pleasure, as though listening to unheard music.

“Rare! Like this is really cool! You know, when that scuzzball, Jason, like stole me blind, I was mondo mad at him. He was hooked on basuco, you know, and totally gross.”

I was finding it hard to follow her.

“What’s basuco?”

“Basuco? You don’t know basuco? Far out! Basuco’s like, coca paste mixed with marijuana, tobacco and stuff. Sometimes the dealers mix ether, gasoline and sawdust in it too.  Crack’s wack and so’s basuco.  Totally wack.”

Her world was absolutely foreign to me, as was much of her vocabulary.

“Are you into basuco?”

She shook her head. “No way, Jose! Do I look like it? I never touch drugs. I’m only sorry I touched Jason. He and his sleezeball ace buddy were into ice too. And rocket fuel when they could get it. Not to mention dogfood. They were like, gruesome. Totally scuzzy.”

Ice, formerly known as crystal meth, or glass, was a crystalline form of methylamphetamine, and on of the very newest drugs. I had read about it in the International Herald Tribune only a few days earlier. It was then largely confined to Hawaii, was extremely addictive, and had devastating effects on the idiots who smoked it through so-called ‘incense burners’ or ‘crack pipes.’ Rocket fuel, however, was beyond me.  Did Jason work at Cape Caneverall?

Helen was amused at my ignorance. “Rocket fuel’s like, loopy dust. You know. Cornflakes.  Goon.  Angel dust.  Gorilla biscuits. Ace.  Pig Killer. White horizon. Wobble. Black whack.  PCP.”

PCP.  That I did know. Phencyclidine hydrochloride. A very dangerous street drug based on pig tranquilizer. And the dogfood? Were Jason and Spyros really that hungry?

She shook her head in silent amazement. “Where’ve you been hiding? Dogfood’s just gumball, candy, tootsie roll, bugger, peanut butter, Mexican mud. You know, black tar. It’s like, heroin from south of the border.”

She was clearly well rid of Jason and his ace-cool Argonaut..

‘If it’s any consolation, the Elizabethans called their lavatories Ajax,” I told her.

She was amused. “Get out!  That’s like, the perfect name for that shiuthook!”

The road to Argos, where we were now heading, en route to Nafplion via Epidaurus, was quite new and almost entirely free of traffic. It ran alongside the Saronic Gulf for some thirty kilometres or more, winding through picturesque villages, each with its own small hotel and beach, before rising steeply as it climbed into the mountains. The hillsides were covered with feathery Attic pines that formed an unbroken canopy of green, stretching down to the tranquil Prussian-blue of the Gulf.

“So, are you like gay?” Helen asked suddenly. She had now put one slim, brown leg up on the dashboard and was tapping her white sneaker against the windscreen in time to that unseen music which had earlier set her head rocking. Her other foot was firmly on the seat.

“No. why do you ask?”

“Well, you’ve got like – no offence! - this weird British accent. And you don’t seem interested in fooling around. Not with me, anyway. And you’re well-built, like so many gay guys. They’re always working out in gyms, you know, looking over the younger boys. I guess they like to see what they’re getting.”

“When I work out I keep my mind strictly on the weights. That way I avoid nasty accidents.”

She laughed. “Like Aids. That’s a nasty accident. I told Jason that with all those needles he’d end up with HIV. That’s why I’d like, never let him screw me. Not even if he wore two dozen condoms. Guess that’s why he ran off with Ajax.”

Unexpectedly, she reached over and felt my biceps. “Omigod!  You an all-in wrestler or something? Like the Honolulu Turk or the Maui Mauler?”

“In a way. I’m what you might call an intellectual all-in wrestler. No holds barred.”

She looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

“I’m a university professor.”

Her hand flew to her mouth in amazement. “Get out!  Totally awesome! I swear to God, man, you don’t look like any of my professors. Don’t I just wish! They’re all dweebs.”

So she was a university student. “Which school are you attending?”

“Suntan U. University of Hawaii. I picked it because I like surfing. I’m majoring in art, English, philosophy and history.”

English?  Cowabunga!  Now that I would never have guessed.

“I teach history myself. Perhaps you’ve used one of my books for an assignment.”

I didn’t say “read”.

“Could be. What’s your name?”

“I beg your pardon. I should have introduced myself earlier. My name’s Hector Terries. How do you do?”

“Hector Terries! You mean you’re the one who writes all those books and stuff?”

I wasn’t too sure about the “stuff” part of it, but admitted to the rest. Perhaps she meant my articles and reviews. Probably  not. Stuff’s just stuff, man!

“Hector Terries! Totally awesome! We had to read chunks and chunks of your Meaning of History last semester. It was really rad.”

Again, I wasn’t sure what “rad” meant. If it was short for “radical”, however, she was spot on. Ask the New York Review of Books.

“Thank you. I’m glad you liked it.”

“Liked it! I was just rapt. I should have guessed you wouldn’t be a dweeb, just from reading your book.”

“What’s a dweeb?”

“A dweeb is like – well, a nerd. You know. They wear running shoes with tailored trousers and think they’re cool. They’ve got thick horn-rimmed glasses, twenty-eight inch chests, and two-inch penises. I guess they have to nail their computers when they’re feeling horny.”

“I gather you don’t care much for dweebs.”

She laughed gaily, and squeezed my arm again. “No way!  Dweebs are grody to the max!  Like gross!”

We were now running alongside a particularly beautiful stretch of coastline, where far below us, water the colour of jade met trees the colour of emerald, with a long beach of yellow sand tantalizingly visible through the foliage.

“Rare! It reminds me of Oahu,” said Helen, almost wistfully. “I’d love a swim!”

“It’s lunchtime,” I reminded her. “Are you hungry?”

“Hungry! Omigod! Am I hungry? Ooooh! Only had Greek coffee for breakfast.  Just one tiny metrios. Then zilch! Trying to economise.”

Since she had discovered I was an academic, her language seemed to have mercifully diverged somewhat from Moon Unit Zappa’s. Obviously, she could speak English intelligibly when she wanted to. I suspected that much of her modified Valspeak was only protective coloration. Doubtless, it had survival value among the sophomores of Suntan U.

I swung the car into a side road and headed for the beach, a thousand feet below. The road ended in a dirt track, which eventually brought us out onto a deserted beach. I parked under the shade of the pines and took a picnic hamper from the boot. The hotel had packed it for me that morning. Helen exclaimed with incredulous delight when she saw the contents. The chef had given us a pork and veal terrine, kalamata, olives,, horiatiki, crusty French bread, fresh black figs, graviera (the Greek version of gruyere), Cretan mizithra (goat’s milk cheese) mineral water, and a bottle of red Porto Carras.  Helen was clearly famished.

“I’ve been living on bread and tomatoes since that scuzball Jason took my money,” she confided, as she wolfed down the terrine. “Cowabunga! This is delicious. I didn’t know how hungry I was until I smelt this! I guess my belly was just about meeting my backbone.”

She had pulled up her cheesecloth blouse to show me how much weight she had lost.

“Another forty-eight hours and I’d have been like, totally anorexic,” she confided, sticking out her bottom lip and nodding her head seriously.

A moment later, she forgot her woes when she caught me looking approvingly at her flat, tanned stomach. “Go on! Poke my belly muscles. Surfing and boogie-boarding. That’s what’s made ‘em like that.”

I probed them, hesitantly. They were hard as iron.

She looked at me proudly, “Good, huh? Like a boxer’s.”

She hesitated. “Mind if I take my top off? I  just love to feel the sun all over.”

“Not at all.  I’m used to European beaches.”

“They’re like great, huh? Totally enlightened! Not like back home. They won’t let me go topless in Hawaii.  No way!”

She peeled off her blouse and tossed it carelessly onto a branch of the tree under which we were sitting. She had small, well-formed breasts, rather like Iris’s, with delicate pink tips.

“You look good in jeans and a tee-shirt,” she told me, “But you must be like, totally sizzling in this heat. Why don’t you just strip off?”

A sensible suggestion.  It was hot, even under the aromatic shade of the pines.  I peeled off my shirt and felt the sea-breeze cool on my skin.

She reached over, and ran her hands appraisingly over my back. “Hey! You’re a real granola!  I used to work out at Muscle Beach myself. You saw some real hunks there.  Mostly like gays, of course. But built like Schwarzenegger. You know, he used to work out till he like fainted. He’d do six sets of twelve reps of everything. And he used totally awesome poundages. Like six hundred for the squat! He said he didn’t mind the pain, as long as it was like helping him grow.”

I could have told her a thing or two about pain. It doesn’t always help you grow.

“You married or something?” she asked. She had taken my left hand in her own and was examining my ring cautiously.

“No. that’s a signet ring. A family heirloom. It’s antique.”

She was intrigued at this. “Awesome! How old?”

“Early fifteenth century. An ancestor of mine was wearing this when he was beheaded in the market place for being on the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses.”

She was aghast. “Get out! Beheaded! Omigod! In like, a market! Fighting over roses! Roses!  I’ve like, gone goose bumps all over!”

She was turning the ring round on my finger, fascinated by its intricate workmanship. “Hey! What’s this?  A dragon or something?”

“It’s a stylized scorpion. Centruroides sculpturatus. It’s on the family coat-of-arms.  Dates from the sixth Crusade, led by Frederick II.  Another of my misguided ancestors must have run into one in Syria. Hence our motto:  Cave ictum! ‘Beware its sting!’”

She shuddered, prettily. “They’ve got one hell of a sting!  Seen them in Acapulco. Wouldn’t want that thing on my pinkie. Thought it was like a wedding ring. So I guess you’re not married, are you?”

“No.”

“Ever been married?”

“No. Not even once or twice for fun. How about you?”

She shook her head, vehemently. “Married? You’ve gotta be joking? You think I’m from like Alabama or somewhere? I’m like, only twenty-three. Shacked up with a few guys. You know. But nothing serious.”

Living with someone wasn’t serious? They do but jest, copulate in jest? The generational abyss between Helen and myself –a full quarter of a century – echoed with unanswered questions.

After lunch, she wandered off for a swim, clad in what she called her “floss” – a minute, ‘thong’ bikini bottom. I declined to accompany her. I had reached the late forties, when one begins to appreciate the good sense of a siesta in the heat of the afternoon. All Greece slumbers from one o’clock till four or five in the summer and God help anyone who disturbs those sacred hours. I was damned if I was going to be the exception. I changed into my swimming trunks, and lay down gratefully in the shade of the feathery pines, through which the sun came dancing in a myriad, sparkling, ever-shifting diamonds of light. A gentle breeze was blowing, rustling the pines and abating the fierce heat of the day, for it was now past noon. I noticed a lemon tree, hung with small, green fruit, a few yards away. Goethe’s poem came immediately into my head. Kenst du das Land wo die Citronen bluhen? The high-pitched, incessant shrilling of the cicadas, a sound I have always loved, harmonized with the incessant murmur of the waves to lull me into a doze.

I was awakened by cold water dripping on my face. I opened my eyes with a start, to find Helen standing above me, dripping damply. She had her floss in her hand and was naked as Aphrodite rising from the sea-foam, a nymph au naturel, a knickerless nixie. Das Ewig-Wiebliche zieht uns hinan, I said to myself. What would Goethe have done, confronted with this manifestation of the beckoning Eternal Feminine?

“The water was just totally tubular! It was like, far out.” she exclaimed, throwing herself down beside me.

She lay supine on her beach towel, eyes closed, hands behind her head, drinking in the shadow-dappled sun. We were, after all, miles from anywhere. I tried to resume my sleep, but could not. The proximity of her statuesque nakedness had dispelled my former drowsiness completely. Her breasts were so firm they could have been silicone. At her age? Why not? Anything is possible in Hawaii or California. They stood out like small, pointed mounds even when she was lying down. She smelled faintly of the sea, like foam-born Aphrodite.

After a while, restless as a child, she rolled over and began idly scooping up handfuls of coarse, yellow sand and trickling them over my chest. She seemed incapable of sitting still without fidgeting. Watching her was entertaining but exhausting. In a few minutes, her face would run through a whole gamut of expressions, like an over-indulged little girl’s, to increase the effect of her words.

“You’re quite a hunk considering your age,” she told me, running her hand appreciatively over my pectorals.

“Thanks. Remind me to tell you some time of how I fought in the Boer War.”

She was not interested in my legendary wartime experiences.  Her own pectorals were brushing my arm.  They were too soft to be silicone.

“Hey, you’re not bad for an old dude. Keep yourself in shape, don’t you?”

“I think and write better when I’m fit. The brain thrives on oxygen.”

“Are you sure you’re not like, gay?”

“Not even like bi. I am boringly, heterosexually melancholy. Quite the opposite of gay.  Always have been.”

“You don’t bore me, dude. I even liked your history book. Made me think you’d really been there. Especially the Egyptian bits. Now they were really cool.”

She paused, leant over me until her mouth was only a few inches from mine, opened her emerald eyes wide, and smiled mischievously. “Hey! Wanna fool around?”

I tried to sound casual. “On a public beach? We’d both end up incarcerated in some Greek jail.”

“There’s like, no one for miles. Everyone sleeps in the afternoon here.”

“I thought you were going to bolt and bar your door when we reached the hotel, like a pensive nun in retreat. What made you change your mind?”

“You playing hard to get. Plus I told you that you were a hunk. Besides, I’m really horny.” She added with a smile. “Of course, might just be the sun and the wine.”

So I was a hunk, as well as a dude, albeit superannuated. Hunk?  The word made me think of raw beef, or something equally inchoate. But she was right about the sun and the wine; they were having an effect on me too. Her blonde nakedness, pressed up warmly against my side, had set my ancient pulses racing like an over-revved engine. Now I knew why golden-haired Aphrodite sprang from the sea. Goethe might have resisted das Ewig Weicliche. Like Byron, another aficionado of Greek love-affairs, I did not even bother to try.

Unlike the maenad, Iris, Helen was no sexual Bacchante; like Charles II, she was in no hurry to die. Eventually, she gasped slightly, moaned, and raked my back fiercely with her nails. Then she went to sleep, still curled up against me, with her arms round my neck. I gently disengaged myself, covered her with a towel, and went off for a swim.

When she woke up, she stretched luxuriously, yawned like a contented cat, and asked me to pour her a glass of red wine.

“Cowabunga! That was totally awesome,” she told me, nuzzling against me contentedly.  “Far out!  Cranking!”

She drained the wine at a gulp, closed her eyes appreciatively, and asked for another glass.

“What did you like, think of my technique?” she demanded.

“Totally awesome. You really like, among other things, blew my mind.”

I was rapidly learning her idiolect.

She had a radiant smile, displaying slightly irregular but dazzling white teeth.. “Cowabunga! You’re not kidding?”

“No way. You were really cool. Totally rad.”

She gave me a playful push.  “Get out! I was afraid you’d think I was like, inexperienced. I’ll bet you’ve like, nailed a whole lot of Penelope Pitstops..”

I refused to admit ignorance of this character.  “Penelope Pitstops? Naturally. Hundreds of them.  But never one with your pristine freshness and wanton charm.”

She giggled. “Hey! Wanton charm!  I really go for that! No wonder you’re a great writer.”

I had like made her day.  It was worth the lie just to see her face light up. In fact, as with Iris, I had felt nothing beyond physical pleasure. The aching hollowness remained.

We stayed on that deserted beach throughout the heat of the afternoon, chatting amiably. I had expected her to bore me; much to my surprise, she did not. Her Valley girl veneer masked an agile mind. She had a surprisingly wide-ranging knowledge of history, was reasonably well read in English and American literature, and quite at home with modern philosophy.. She had, of course, been made to genuflect before the sacred texts of Marx, Marcuse, Althusser, Derrida, Gadamer, Habermas, Heidigger, Sartre and Gramsci. I was amused to hear her dismiss them all as “totally dweeby”. She like, preferred Whitehead and stuff!  Especially Science and the Modern World, which was, ‘I swear to God, totally rad.’

In fact, without knowing it, she herself was philosophically a pure Cyrenaicist, believing with Aristippus of Cyrene that the pursuit of sensual pleasure was the chief aim of life. Similarly, her views on death were purely Epicurean, for Epicurus had maintained that ‘when we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.’  Helen had said exactly the same thing to me, that afternoon under the pines, as I was rubbing suntan lotion onto her warm, golden nakedness.

“I want to like live, really live before they like, nail me up in that big box. I want to do my own thing, let it all hang out. When you’re dead, man, you’re like, long gone and nowhere. Es nada y pues nada. That’s what Carlos, my boyfriend in L.A., used to say before he got wasted in a neighbourhood drive-by shooting.”

Carlos had clearly been reading that old suicidal nihilist, Hemingway. But who was I to criticize her? Both of us were victims of an era that defined sanity as the gratification of every impulse and the dissolution of every inhibition, while demanding submission to arbitrary rules which it refused to link to any code of moral absolutes. Like Hemingway, our culture, led by a hubristic, vacuous academia, had blown out its own brains.  Cowabunga!  Cranking!  Totally awesome! And like, totally insane.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM