Thoreau Bound, page 17
He glanced at the young woman. “Irene, your new friend Thoreau — or should we call him Priapus? — would like some oranges. They will perk him up. Will you please go to the backyard and find some for us? Thank you, little dove.”
Happy to serve the two men she loved in different ways, the young woman ran to the backyard. Kosmos sat down on the carpet, eager for a serious session of listening and talk.
“It’s time to tell you about Irene, Thoreau. She is my daughter; she is eighteen years old; I love her more than I can say.”
“But she calls you ‘Uncle’?”
“That is a one of the many games we play. All the teenagers in this town call me that. Irene says that she’ll call me father when her mother and I live together again under one roof.”
“Do you and Irene’s mother see each other?” I asked.
“What a question! Every Friday night Irene’s mother sleeps with me here or at her house, and then on Saturday mornings we have breakfast, and we talk. And then I read aloud to her from my collection of marvelous books. Around noon every Saturday we separate, because after a few hours together we will start to fight. She’s a good woman — I’ve never met one better — but our twenty years together have proved that we are two stubborn people who are incompatible.”
“And Irene lives here with you?” I asked.
Kosmos smiled.
“Irene lives here with me when her mother is working, and she lives at her mother’s house when her mother is home. Sometimes, when I have a woman here to stay the night, Irene stays at the house of her grandmother, or one of her friends. Unfortunately or fortunately — I’ve often wondered which — the women in my life change more often than you change your socks.”
He shook his head, laughing at his own predicament.
“Until today, I’ve been the only man in Irene’s life. A father to her, not a lover, if that’s what you’re wondering about. Irene resembles the girl in that tempestuous comic play by Shakespeare. Except for the deformed slave, the only man Miranda knew was her father, Prospero. One day she meets the shipwrecked Ferdinand, becomes enraptured by his good looks, and at first sight falls in love with him. Love at first sight! It sounds ridiculous, but young women do that all the time. ... And so do old men.”
“Kosmos, I’m surprised that a Greek garbage man in a one-mule town knows Shakespeare.”
“I know all the writers and artists worth knowing, Thoreau. That’s my business. Writers — like Shakespeare and Homer and Goethe and Kazantzakis — point the way to new worlds. They show me possibilities in life, in living, that I alone would otherwise have never even dared to dream.”
Kosmos broke a chunk of feta cheese in half, handed the larger part to me, then placed his morsel on top of a slice of pear.
“Ah, it’s so good to talk like this! Later, Thoreau, we’ll speak about writers and books. But now, if you don’t mind, I must finish telling you about Irene. She has just had a birthday that marked eighteen years. She is still childlike, still innocent. That doesn’t mean she’s stupid, Thoreau! She can do math as well as any girl or boy her age; and I taught her to speak and to write our Greek language, and English too, the second language of the world. Every day I instruct Irene about those dead things that the world esteems — facts! — those poisoned darts that blast the gods out of the creative sky. And every night I give her a real education: I tell her stories and fables and myths. As you can see, her favorite way to play is to act them out. Today she is the Snake Goddess, yesterday she was Nausicaa. Tonight, who knows who she’ll want to be?”
Two thoughts at that moment took hold of me: there is no need to keep secrets from this man; and no need to refrain from asking about him about his secrets.
“Kosmos, you impress me as the kind of man who likes to ask — and to be asked — the questions that are the deepest and most personal.”
Kosmos laughed heartily at this.
“Thoreau, you are too polite. What good are the superficial questions? Ask anything you want. If I have it, I will give it. If I know it, I will tell it. If I don’t know it, then together we can find out.”
I swallowed the salty feta cheese, then paused, then looked up at Kosmos, who had guessed my question long before I asked.
“Kosmos, I’m curious why you don’t seem to mind at all if I sleep with your daughter Irene.”
Kosmos laughed again, then moved closer to me, his wild eyes searching the depths of my curious eyes.
“Why should I mind, Thoreau? Freedom is my life. Freedom absolute. And along with freedom, the complete responsibility that saves us from hurting others and from destroying our own selves. This freedom is so precious — what kind of man would I be if I wanted it only for myself? Freedom is for everyone. Even if I love the other persons — and especially if I love them! — I must let them be free.”
Kosmos observed my face, and knew his words had failed to penetrate. He slapped his hand against my side then gripped my skin above the ribs.
“The more you free yourself, the more you’ll understand, Thoreau. You’re Bedlamerican, you can’t escape from that. You try very hard not to behave like one, but your bones will be buried in your country, and your country is buried in your bones. Your priggish culture ties you to the rock. And every morning the vulture swoops down and claws your skin, sticks his beak into your side and then breakfasts on your bitter liver.”
I nodded, amazed to discover that this man could see into my soul as easily as I could scan a line of verse. “I’ve been fighting that culture and that vulture,” I confessed, “and writhing on that cold rock for all my adult life.”
“Bravo, Thoreau! You are winning that fight, my boy! That is clear. But you have to realize that you live surrounded by an artificial world that is desperately starving for real life. Love is one goddess of that real life; Nature is another. And Sex is one goddess more, the most complicated of them all, because whenever she’s in the mood she swallows up the other two.”
Kosmos glanced upward as if he were searching for words which, any moment now, might be falling from the all-wise sky.
“A free man — the kind of man you want to be — walks on a tightrope high above the circus spectators. Fall to the right, and he plummets into the fires of the puritan morality, stoked by the sex-haters who hate sex because they despise themselves and hate their life. ... Fall to the left, and you dive into the pit of the future: ‘Sex technologismo’. Isolated and passionless, it caters to immature men who pleasure themselves by using women at a distance. The strange pre-scripted voices over a telephone wire; the flat photographs in magazines; the untouchable images on televisions and computer screens. Some people call that sex, Thoreau. But for me, that compares to real sex the same way as eating a piece of cardboard compares to eating a home-cooked feast.”
A shadow passed over his light face, and for a brief moment the face filled up with care. When he continued speaking the words fell out in deeper and more pensive tones.
“Years ago I laughed at all this! This morality that wants to kill everyone who won’t agree with it; this bizarrely-isolating technological substitution for real-live companionship and sex. But one day, Thoreau, I stopped laughing. Because this new world of stupidity is coming here, here to Greece and here to Kreetee. The Greeks should be teaching the West how to live and how to love — love persons, love freedom, love life. But we, too, are succumbing to the mass foolishness. Instead of teaching the West, instead of fighting to preserve what is good and right in our culture, we are imitating every one of your self-destructive practices and ways.”
His care-covered face, weary from these anxious reflections, came home to its natural smiles. I decided to test him with a formidable question. I had read much, but never before had I heard this question answered thoroughly.
“Tell me, Kosmos, because as Socrates and Plato knew, it’s easier to refute a thousand fleeting falsehoods than to discover one eternal truth. To a free man, what would the world of sex be like?”
Kosmos answered instantly, without needing even a split second to ponder his reply.
“Sex is a mystery! A mystery we must surrender to. A mystery that each individual must explore until he or she understands.”
“And after we understand?” I asked. “At the end of our exploring?”
Kosmos laughed.
“Keep on exploring more! Real learning is a donkey with two heads — he always wants to eat more, and he has no end. But pity those poor creatures you call ‘academics’: headless donkeys with two rear ends. Nothing new ever goes in, and all the time the same old hash of you-know-what plops out.”
I laughed at his analogies, almost forgetting to return to the essential theme. When Irene’s voice began to sing a soft soprano melody, I remembered the issue that had set my curiosity aflame.
“And you still think, Kosmos, that a man like me should explore the endless depths of your beautiful daughter?”
Kosmos nodded yes.
“Thoreau, you have no money, and little desire to get any, and that lack of ambition can be either a blessed virtue or a fatal vice. But your biggest problem and your greatest quality is that you make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Sex is such a simple thing! Two bodies for a time being one, a whisper of joy between two persons who desire. And you want to strangle it with your rights and wrongs and overcivilized moralities! Sex between you and Irene is an affair between you and Irene. It shouldn’t bother anyone else and it doesn’t bother me.”
Kosmos sliced a red pomegranate then tossed one half of it onto my lap.
“You must sleep with Irene, Thoreau. I not only approve, I will celebrate the day! I can see — by the way you walk, by the way you talk, by the way you blush when my daughter touches you — ”
At this remark, Kosmos jabbed me in the ribs, then laughed playfully.
“ ... I can see that your sexual experience has been very limited, very closed. From your end, a week of nights with my daughter — or maybe a month or two of nights — would liberate you. For the both of you it would be the best university in the world. Irene’s future is in your hands. If her first sexual experience is tender and filled with love, then imagine, for the next thirty years, what a wonderful sex life she could enjoy! How could you deprive a young woman of all those nights of bliss?”
He bit his half of the pomegranate.
“Thoreau, listen to me. You are a god, we are all goddesses and gods. And the secret of the goddesses and gods is that they always do what they passionately want to do. Some people wait their whole lives to realize this. Others never learn at all.”
19
The Heart of Kosmos
To live the natural life is nearly impossible amidst this hypermodern age. Indoor living is too expensive: a man buys a house and exchanges the heart of his life for a 30-year mortgage, or rents his dreams by slave-working to pay his rents. Outdoor living is too unsafe: no mad nomad can drink chemically-polluted waters; and the sunrays which once gave vitamin-D and joy, now — thanks to a thinning ozone layer — cause skin-burning cankerous moles.
Sex, in an artificial culture, has a hard time being natural. For a moment it seemed that human sexuality was ripping off two-thousand years of church-dictated chains. But the virgin intacta becomes a vagina dentata, and a yawning abyss of new dangers swallow our chances for toothsome erotic liberation. About 650 years ago when the Crusaders returned from Asia, they brought the Black Plague to Europe, which decimated its population by one-third. Today a potentially more devastating epidemic threatens: HIV/AIDS. In the mere twenty years between 1980 and 2000, almost 50 million cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported, resulting in 14 million deaths worldwide.
Thus, I had reservations — medical, ethical and practical — about Kosmos’s philosophy of complete sexual freedom. It may still be true that “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” But in today’s planetary culture spinning in a frenzy of frazzled facts, the greatest threat to survival and to the quality of life is the bete noir of Voltaire: ignorance.
Grasping a pitcher of water I refilled Kosmos’s drinking glass and then my own.
“Kosmos, what good is freedom without love and knowledge? What does Irene actually know about the intimate relations between women and men?”
Kosmos waved his hand and snatched a horsefly in mid-air, then opened the fist and let the fly fly flightily away.
“Thoreau, I am still trying to explain to you that you think too much. And when people think too much then all they can do is worry and complain. You’re like the American tourist who traveled to the nude beach on the island of Ios. All day, surrounded by topless women, he turned his head left, right, everywhere to look at the bouncing breasts. And after twenty-four hours in that paradise of pulchritude, what words of thanks do you think he uttered to the ears of gods? ... Nothing! He griped and he complained about the neck strain!”
“Kosmos, I’ll buy a railway ticket and take the neck strain to Athens if you dodge my question one more time. Does Irene know how babies are made? How men lie to women to lie with them? And how sexual activity involves the risk of a sexually transmitted disease?”
The Greek gods were not perfect, not reasonable, not omnipotent — and these flaws were the secrets of their great charm. There were so many godlike qualities about Kosmos the man. But even this tender knight had a chink in his armor. After hearing the question, Kosmos started sweating like a toilet tank. He removed a bright cloth from the pocket of his jeans, then wiped the perspiration from the furrows of his child-burdened brow.
“Thoreau, I can’t hide it, you’ve guessed it right! Irene knows as much about the birds and the bees as the birds and the bees know about Irene. I haven’t told her anything, Thoreau. To say these things requires the right time and the right words. I tried to tell her — believe me, and give me the Odyssey to swear on! But I am an impulsive man and a blunt man, and if Kreetee was filled with a hundred Kosmos’s, then all put together they would not have enough patience and tact for something as delicate as this! Every time I sat down with her to say something, Irene looked up at me with her baby-lamb eyes, and I melted like granita lemoniou in July.”
He gripped his beard with both hands, a gesture he would always make whenever he was grappling with a difficult idea.
“What could I do, Thoreau? I kept asking myself: ‘Can I be the one to spoil her joy and innocence?’ You see, Thoreau, Irene still lives in the blissful world of childhood. Before the grownup world storms in, let her live there and play there for as long as she can stay.”
Kosmos laughed as he patted my cheek three times.
“So make love with Irene, Thoreau! What are you afraid of? Something is holding you back, and if you can cut that rope, you’ll save yourself. And if you save your own self, then someday you might be able to help others to do the same.”
Was Kosmos right? Or were his ultra-liberal sexual ideas perfect for Kosmos but not for everyone, and not ideal for me?
“Irene is a wonderful young woman, Kosmos, and I enjoy her company. But as a sex partner for me, she is too young.”
Kosmos shook his head.
“And there, my friend Thoreau, is that constipated prig inside you, talking as if there is a right and a wrong in sex! There is no right and no wrong, as long as the two partners — or however many are involved — as long as the participants willingly agree.”
Tempted was I, but not totally convinced.
“Give me a little time, Kosmos, to think about these things. Until I’m sure, I’ll stick with my old ways. And now you’ve made me curious about something. With your permissively broad-minded ideas, aren’t you afraid that Irene will get involved with one of the younger or older men here in town? She’s heartbreakingly attractive, and she’s at the age where falling in love is the only important thing in life.”
Kosmos threw two figs into his mouth.
“In this town, Thoreau, Irene is as safe from the lechers as a ninety-nine-year-old widow with a face like a wild boar. Every male in Dembacchae knows that if they put one finger on my Irene, I’ll skewer his hams and barbecue his beans.”
I laughed and raised my hands.
“But wait, Kosmos! What was all that sexual freedom business you were just blathering about! I thought I heard you say that sexplay is a private matter between Irene and her partner.”
Kosmos pointed two fingers at me then edged his face closer to mine.
“If you are her partner, Thoreau, then it’s between Irene and her partner. But if it’s anyone else, then I cut off his souvlaki and feed it to the fish! You laugh about that? Good! I’m laughing too! I can’t help thinking that way, Thoreau. I was born a Greek, and Greek men can be hard as marble and crueler than the widow-making sea. For eighteen years she has been my daughter. Do you understand?”
He didn’t wait a blink for my reply.
“Of course you don’t understand, you’re too young! Your eyes are saying that all this is unreasonable. Do you know the first thing I do when I wake up each day? I thank the goddesses that Life is not managed by that conscientious taskmaster, Reason! Live by Reason — cut off all your intuitions, passions, feelings — and what will your life be? Boring, predictable, unfulfilled! Every morning at exactly six o’clock you’ll walk your dog around the park carrying a plastic bag in your hand, and every time the dog shits on the grass you’ll bend down and say “Good poopsie” then scoop up the dung and carry it all the way home!”
He opened his arms and laughed.
“Was it Reason that led you to Greece in the first place, Thoreau? And why did you come to Kreetee, and to my doorstep? Did you follow Reason, or did you follow something else, or someone else? Something deeper and wiser than Reason can ever be. Katalavehees, my friend?”
Kosmos picked up a pile of grapes then stuffed his mouth with the whole bunch. He gulped a glass of water with the slice of lemon floating on the top, then he chewed the lemon slice, and swallowed it — rind, pulp and seeds.
“Already, Thoreau, I’m wearing you out with the talk! Would you like to relax a little? There are two more rooms in this house that you haven’t seen, a bedroom and a library. You can rest there now, if you like.”
