Editor's Note: The essay is its own unique form, whether under the guise of creative non-fiction or the new journalism, the classic essay, as practiced since Montaigne, has been an attempt to describe the objective world from the subjective experience of the individual. As such, it takes as its goal a very Kantian aim, to explore the nature of the phenomenal, with a profound faith in the existence of the noumenal. Essays, at their best, provide a literary self-portrait of their author as a being in the world.
I dumped my backpack into the closet, pulled back the curtains, threw open the windows, and took a breath. I’m here, I thought. At last, I’m here. Then I flew out the door, down the stairs, into the street. There was no time to wait. I had only two weeks. And first things first: I must see the Acropolis.
I picked the Hotel Athineikon because it’s central. Down the street, across a plaza, past three living statues painted white – the Acropolis is only a quarter-mile away.
I needed a reference point. The Acropolis, the origin of Western Culture. I huffed my way up the inclined streets, where the walls were covered in graffiti. How many thousands of young men with paint-cans had ruined this walkway before I came? As I ascended the stairways and sidewalks, I passed a gallery of angry scrawl: ghostly faces scowling from the brick. Anarchist signs. A swastika. LOVE THE BUNS. DENI-DENI-DENI. TSIS! DIMI. SEXYBOY. FUCK AMERICA. FREE TIBET IS OK WORLD, OK DREAM. The rest was nonsense geometry, words neither Greek nor English. Every shop that dared to close its door was sprayed over by angsty punks – multi-colored gibberish, not gang-sign, not portraiture, but bland parodies of written language, the hieroglyphs of absurdists with too much paint on their hands.
Climbing more steps, turning down walkways, I found the souvenir shops beckoning: racks of peasant-shirts, patterned scarves, watches, windows full of miniature busts – Socrates, Herodotus, Plato, Homer – staring through the glass with ceramic eyes, their faces full of Hellenistic beards. I ignored them, scissoring up the hill, until I reached an iron gate crowded with tour-groups. Guides shepherded their sunburned guests together. Bony Arab boys manned the side of the trail, holding out bottles of water, shouting, “One Euro! One Euro!” A man played an intricate xylophone beneath the shade of an olive tree, the triangular sleeves of his gown bouncing with each plunk. A guard tore my ticket and ushered me up the hill, where a walking path turned into steps, and the steps led through ruins, the ruins led to a stone gate glutted with people and digital cameras. And when the gate opened up, there, on a vast lawn of rock and gravel, stood the Parthenon.
Even though the roof had long collapsed, and the intricate carvings had been chiseled by time, and many pillars were covered in a network of scaffolding, the Parthenon stole my breath. All around it, the stone was as slick as soap, and the visitors took careful steps around the structure, like a whirlpool of admirers, all gazing, slack-jawed, at the Parthenon’s muscular pillars.
Free from the hectic Athenian streets, far above the vandalism and growling motorcycles, the Acropolis stood like a marble crown – and so quiet. I heard only whispers and the clicks of cameras. Tourists in sunglasses silently scanned the horizon with their camcorders. Lovers held hands and embraced on the stone walls, peering over the edge at a 50-foot drop. I hadn’t expected this – the reverent wordlessness, a place as still as a library. I walked slow circles around the Parthenon, imagining the men in togas who took these same paces, toting scrolls and pondering the world’s first democracy. The bearded hoi oligoi, who padded their feet with leather sandals and contemplated their next vote. The men who drank wine from skins and spun poetry in dactylic hexameter, memorizing every syllable of every line and reciting them at raucous symposia. All of it happened right here, over two thousand years ago. Hypnotized, I crouched low and touched a rocky outcropping, wondering if Pericles, the legendary statesman, once touched the same spot.
A husband and wife smoked a cigarette on the edge of the wall, posing before the green nipple of Mount Lycabettus in the far distance. A security guard stomped over to them and growled, “Get down! Off the wall!” The couple looked annoyed, but they slid down. Safety first.
When the security guard roamed off, I took my chance to lean against the wall and look down. Fifty feet below, the sheer cliff broke off into gravel paths, then trees, then a labyrinth of streets. From my vantage point, the streets and squares were swallowed by a mishmash of rooftops, the metal glinting, the terra cotta burning bright, so that Psiri seemed to undulate into the distance, its thousands of shimmering roofs forming a chainmail of fragmented light, halted not by the mountain ranges or the sea, but by the jaundice-colored smog that hazed the horizon. I walked the entire perimeter of the wall, watching the crushed city scroll past, until I looked down and saw the steep terraced steps of a theatre – the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, one of the oldest theatres in the world, its wooden stage swirled in pentelic marble seats. Through the eyelets of the Odeon’s massive stone arches, I looked at the clutter of Athens and felt, for the first time, the city’s age – 3,400 years, the continent’s oldest metropolis, the birthplace of Western law, science, art, medicine, commerce, philosophy. Here, people spoke the roots of half our modern words. On this hilltop, humans first pondered logic and absolute beauty. And for three millennia, we have aped their movements, echoed their thoughts. We have tried to make improvements. Now the world’s population is 60 times larger. Our people can live twice as many years. Our water must be filtered. Baboon hearts can replace our own. All life can be erased by opening a briefcase.
Sarajevo destroyed by four years of siege, half as long as Troy.
Half the Balkan nations yearning to join the European Union, just as barbarians begged to become Athenian citizens.
The world economy swinging like a pendulum, people everywhere praying for a bailout. Wasn’t the Peloponnesian War fought around the coveted silver mines of Amphipolis?
Three millennia later, are we any better off?
I have visited scores of churches around the globe: I’ve stood in the buttressed shadow of Nôtre Dame and proceeded through the choir of the Washington National Cathedral. I’ve lit candles in St. Patrick’s Cathedral to appease my ex-girlfriend and her stern mother. I’ve roamed the dust-matted square outside Notre-Dame Basilica in Saigon, and I’ve been chilled by the coal-blackened spires of Cologne Cathedral. In each nave, I’ve stood beneath a vaulted ceiling, watching the light stream through massive stained-glass windows, painting the stone floor in a thousand glowing colors. And I know, looking up – up at the taloned iron lamps, up at the carved pillars, up at the panelled Gospel murals, up at perfect wooden carvings of a naked, bleeding man nailed to a rough-hewn cross – that I should marvel at the glory of God. Even the stone ribs, which rise and merge into a spine directly above my mortal’s head, should incur divine inspiration. Using only stone and mortar, simple cranes and hemp ropes, the builders sought to win my awe – and to express with granite blocks their love of Heaven. Even if the architecture no longer enthralls me, I admire the men who chipped the stone into seraphim faces, saintly robes; because most builders never saw their cathedrals complete. Only their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, living in another century and in a busier city, would ever see their ancestors’ toil rewarded.
But the Acropolis moved me more – stirred me, calling me the way that saints are called. Now I’m 29 years old, plus change. I wear a beard and cargo pants and no wristwatch. I’m 7,000 miles from any obligation. My cell-phone doesn’t work here. My gods are quiet and have no names. My loves lurk everywhere, and some even haunt me. I wear no wedding ring. Most of my money is wadded in my pockets. Today I am a secular pilgrim. I don’t need frescoes or carved liturgies. The Acropolis is clean – clear walls, swept floors, naked pillars, only a handful of statues, and this view – a 360-degree panorama of sun-baked Athens, Europe’s oldest city, the birthplace of all reasonable thinking, still basking in its ancient glory. Love, reason, moderation – these are the virtues that I hold highest, and I have now stood in their birthplace.
And I realize, suddenly, why the Greek gods lived on powerful mountains, and not in the empty sky.
Edward Simon, Editor, Thirtieth Bird Review
It was cold enough in the temple that I could see the fog from my breath, blowing out little puff-clouds like a child pretending to smoke a cigarette. The line of candles that was concentrated at strategic points throughout the temple gave off little light and less heat. The little illumination that there was, fell on sumptuous painted surfaces, ancient chipped wood that despite its fading paint still evoked the merlot reds, celestial blues and rainforest greens of the Buddhist shrine. In the pre-dawn Japanese air of this winter Kyoto morning, nothing was made for our Western convenience. Sitting on spine-crushing little pillows, with fat American legs awkwardly crossed, this was not meant to be a market-driven experience of entertainment.
And even despite the cold, the darkness, the early morning fatigue that plagues any college student forced to wake before noon, much less dawn, the temple still evoked that theoretically unfashionable Orientalist aura that Westerners have associated with this chain of islands punctuating the pacific like an ellipse since the Sun Goddess pulled her spear from the ocean at the creation of the Earth. All around were bells, and candles, sweet smelling incense of unknown province, with its utterly foreign odor, its composition completely impossible for the amateur nose to guess the contents of. And of course, there were statues. This was no minimalist Japanese Zendo, all linear black lines, and tasteful rock gardens. This was a Pure Land Buddhist temple, the most popular denomination among Japanese (as much as one can say religion is practiced in any denominational way here), and aesthetically it was the equivalent of a crammed baroque chapel, or a plastic Pentecostal revival tent with all of its Jesus kitsch. This is not to say that the temple was not beautiful, and it was certainly not tacky, and I have learned that there is nothing to be critical of when a little tackiness is concerned. But rather it was part of a continuum of religious images, maximalist and unashamed to use every available surface to explode with sense, color, and deity. It was more Coleridge’s pleasure dome then Zen meditation room, more comic book and Saint Card then iconoclastic Puritan church.
The other Americans – fellow students from my college who were part of a cultural exchange program – lined up slowly to bow down before the statue of the Amidha Buddha. This being, not to be conflated with the historical Buddha Siddhartha, is very distant from most Western expectations of Buddhism - in part - because of how Western - in fact - how Protestant belief in him is. In Pure Land Buddhism salvation is conferred through faith alone, a genuine cry for redemption directed toward the Amidha Buddha promises eternal life for the faithful – it's Teriyaki sole fide, an Eastern faith that wouldn’t be entirely foreign to Luther. But what would have been distasteful to him, and certainly his more radical Reformation colleagues, would be what in my eyes at the time was obvious idolatry.
The little statue sat silently like Abraham’s father’s idols, a little golden midget with a canonical head and a permanently serene expression. With little hesitation student after student found themselves before the Amidha Buddha and none seemed to have any problem prostrating themselves before the golden being. Though I was a religious skeptic, one whose sectarian education ended before his Catholic confirmation (presumably my baptism saves me from being with Plato and Saladin in Limbo, but my lack of confirmation consigns me to the unconsecrated ground with Voltaire), I was disturbed by the thought of breaking this commandment. For though Catholicism should have well trained me to be perfectly fine with the colorful bells and smells of this experience, (my grandmother with her neon saint paintings, and her plaster pieta would certainly have had no problem praying to a statue of the Virgin or a crucifix of her Lord, though admittedly the Amidha Buddha may have been radically different) it was the sentiment that was the same.
No, I was disturbed because I had recently discovered my own internal idol smasher, my own whitewashed-soul and rood-screen-collapsed-mind. While iconoclasm has always had an appeal to me – this was shortly after a punk rock fandom phase after all – I had recently been engaged in rediscovering, or concocting a largely imaginary Hebraic background. With little more evidence then the common source of my surname, I had invented a complex ancestry with Marrano roots, tracing back to the Jewish courts of Islamic Spain... well maybe I didn't literally believe this, but it was my Orientalist pose nonetheless. While under no circumstances would I have been considered Jewish by even the most liberal of movements, I saw myself as a lost tribe unto myself. I had set about during my early years of college to create my own convoluted faith, and a non-committed goyish Judaism was part of it. Never mind that my appropriation was just as disrespectful as the uneducated freshman who declares themselves Hindu, or the white Rastafarian who “converts” out of a fondness for reggae. My “practice” of my invented Judaic faith had more to do with my own positive stereotypes then it did with any lived ritual. As such, I didn’t see bowing to the Amidha Buddha as an act of intercultural exchange, but rather as Ester’s uncle being forced to bow to Mordechai, or as Elijah being persecuted by the priests of Baal.
Or at least that’s what I wanted to see my hesitation as, but it wasn’t quite that hyperbolic. More of a general discomfort, and a desire, somewhere in the primate-mind, not to piss off God, whatever His confession of faith. So when my turn came I paused and hesitated. Everyone before me had kneeled down full kilt, with their head on the floor like some cartoon Hollywood terrorist. When I got up, sitting akimbo on my little pillow, I decided to make a compromise: I sort of nodded my head to the Amidha Buddha, something I saw not as an act of worship, but more as a sort of polite “Hey, what’s up? Amidha Buddha? What’s going on?”
I stiffly got up and moved into the rear of the temple, embarrassed at having been rude to the monks maintaining the shrine, who after all, had let some thirty odd American college students into their sacred place. I am sure no one actually noticed – or cared – one way or the other, but in a confused short moment I had moved from the feigned righteous iconoclasm of John Calvin to being slightly embarrassed at having not committed “idolatry.”
My theology was – is – confused, and it was in retrospect that I began to have greater regret at not giving the poor Amidha Buddha better regards. My iconoclasm was weak, it had none of the subtlety of the Jewish, or Islamic, or Protestant interpretations of that concept, that emphasize simplicity and absence. I had also betrayed, in a sense, my own Catholic upbringing that knew there was a sin of semiotics, that an unemotive iconoclasm is the worst form of idolatry there can be, since in the heart, mind and soul it makes the greater confusion of seeing the thing-in-itself and its representation as identical. More importantly, I had violated the humanist commandment, to find wisdom where it may be, whatever the language it may be spoken in. I denied the spark of divinity in this piece of gold plastered wood and the holy men who maintained it. Images, and their place in our worship, are not to be understood simplistically. Truth lives in the chasm between iconoclasm and iconophilism, and in my rudeness I judged God’s wooden home. Mine was a bigger idolatry, for I was extolling my own ego over the simplicity of supplication, I aggrandized myself, the exact opposite goal of any true religious faith.
In Melville’s great American Bible of a book Moby-Dick – that great allegory of sinners in the hands of a nonexistent God – that Ishmael, much more of the world traveler then I was, shares a room with his new found fierce Maori friend Queequeg. The savage is not a Christian man, but he is a religious man. In their Nantucket lodging the tribesman takes out a small “Negro idol,” a little carved fetish that he wants the Presbyterian Ishmael – as iconoclastic a denomination as there will ever be – to pray before. Like me before the Nipponese tiki, Ishmael has a few pangs of conscience, before the higher consciousness wins out against the pettier angels of his nature. Melville writes:
I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth-pagans and all included-can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?-to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?-to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me-that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.
This is not mere sophistry, nor is it simply humor – though Melville is hilarious - both him and Kafka are the most underappreciated comedians of the past two centuries. There is a deeper point about the idolatry of iconoclasm and the place where contradictions and holy paradox reside. It is in bowing to the wood that we simultaneously honor what it symbolizes, and also dispel it of its magic. The iconoclasts chipped away mosaics of Jesus and the Reformers whitewashed paintings of Mary and smashed statues of Jesus not because they didn’t believe in their power, but because they did. And they were not wrong in seeing this transcendental meaning in them. Culture and faith must oscillate between the extremes, and the individual must know when a face is a mask and a mask is a face, and when it doesn’t matter.
My hypocrisy became most evident to me a few days later, when standing in front of the great wooden temple at Nara I began to show my college roommate Plumb the various tchotzkies I had been accumulating on our travels through Japan. A fat, drunken, sake-soaked Hotoi clutching a gourd full of alcohol to his chest, a Tanooki – sort of a raccoon monster with pendulously huge balls, and cheap plaster reproductions of the chaos statues that stood guard on the entrance to the temple in Nara. I shared with Plumb – perhaps a man as Presbyterian as Ishmael – the collected detritus of our Japanese expedition. Familiar with my fake and feigned moral conundrum of a few days earlier, he asked in a tone that he is not altogether unknown for, why I was willing to spend all of my money on “idols,” but I couldn’t bow down to them? I blustered angrily through some explanation, but my hermeneutic wasn’t advanced enough to explain the difference between art and religion.
Now all of my little statues line my bookshelves and table, little anthropological curious for my cabinet of wonders. I can pick up and play with my little statues as surely as Ishmael could burn a little bit of food to Queequeg's god. And yet… and yet…. And yet… I wish I had taken the opportunity to do more than just nod my head to Kyoto’s Buddha. I wish my understanding of holiness had been expansive enough to find it where it exists – maybe I would have been given some knowledge my friends got that was denied to me by the Amidha Buddha.
So this is the strange status of my confession, I regret not breaking a commandment. But that is the nature of antinomian faith, always contradictory, always unexpected. It is in the transgressing where we find the transcendence. Maybe I should make my way over the jagged green hills of my Pittsburgh, dotted with onion domed churches and high steeple cathedrals not unlike the thousand temples of kudzu forested Kyoto, and step into a confessional to tell a priest my contradictory sin, my sin of blankness, of absence. And as I make my way through the church, with candles that give off little light and less heat, with incense of unknown composition wafting through, past statues of saints and stations of the cross, maybe the priest will see a little of my position. He will, possibly, remind me that the second commandment is different for Catholics, and that idolatry is just a side comment to the first, the closest the Decalogue has to a throw-away line. And maybe on my way out I will bow down to a crucifix, hoping that in the interests of apology, a little bit of the Buddha is living within that piece of wood, as a little bit of God was living inside of Kyoto's Buddha.
© Edward Simon 2009
