Thoreau Bound, page 27
“You have never smoked, Thoreau, so you might not know that a ‘Dutch fuck’ means lighting one cigarette by touching it to the tip of another one already lit. That remark fried my fritters all right, but I didn’t show anything. I was burning inside, but fighting about it couldn’t make things better. Instead, I became determined to find out the secret, to change myself, to learn, to solve my problem and transform my dull life into a real adventure.”
Kosmos laughed at the memory of his young self. From his pocket he pulled out a small mirror, gazed at his aging face, then returned the mirror to its place. We continued walking and he talked on.
“How did I start my self-education? With books, of course. My uncle had a fairly large library and I started there. The poetry of Ovid, the dialogues of Aretino, the Kamasutra, and a few Oriental manuals. Books took me as far as books can take a man. But one morning I realized that I needed experience. And soon after that I met three amazing human beings: an old woman, a stick woman, and a dead woman. They taught me that everything important about love can be epitomized by thinking ‘FIE!’ — Foresight, Insight, and Excite!”
He began to hum an old Cretan folk tune and shuffle his feet across the beach. Would his joy carry him away into the heavens of songs and dances, or could he resist temptation and continue to impart his tale?
“Tell me more, Kosmos!” I said. “Dance later and talk now!”
“All right, Thoreau, I’ll keep going for as long as it gives you joy to hear. I told you it was that idiot Marcos who got me mad enough to change my life. What writer said: ‘Love thy enemies, because thy enemies are part of your destiny’? ... Well, one afternoon Marcos came to me and blustered that he would be sleeping with a girl named Angelika — the one girl I was secretly in love with more than I loved anyone else! They were to meet at the local cemetery when the twelve church bells resounded at midnight that night. My beautiful Angelika screwing that scumbag! — the notion made me insane. I did the logical thing for a young madman: I resolved to hide in the cemetery, kill him if he showed up with her, force myself on Angelika, then end my worthless life by jumping into the sea.”
He shook his head in disgust.
“That evening, everything felt out of joint. At dinner, I was too nervous to eat anything. Even my father — who had always been radiant and joyful at our dinner table — seemed unusually solemn. After the meal he told me to take his antique urn to his brother’s house, then ask his brother to fill it with his best wine. This urn we are talking about was thousands of years old. It was painted black and etched all around with a picture of the lithest and most beautiful Cretan maiden you could ever imagine. My father had found it years ago when he had been digging a foundation for an outhouse near Gortys. Ever-so-carefully I carried this treasure to my uncle’s house; my uncle hugged me then filled it up with wine. When I got back home my father took the urn from me and held it his powerful hands.
“‘Start counting!’ he commanded. And I began ‘Ena, dia ...’ — one, two — but as soon as I did my father released his grip and the priceless urn fell to the ground and smashed.
“When he glared at me his eyes blazed like the Crete sun on an August afternoon. ‘Now remember son, and never forget,’ he told me. ‘Remember how easy it is to destroy something that can never be replaced.’
“And saying that, he walked out of the house then walked toward the mountains. He walked all night, and he didn’t return until the morning next.
“When my father left I looked over my shoulder, then sharpened my fishing knife. Like a zombie I walked toward the cemetery to kill my rival or to be killed. On the way I passed the house of the oldest woman in the village. Her name was Kara. She stood in her doorway dressed in black, skinnier than a skeleton, older than olive trees, uglier than greed. But beneath her wrinkled skin she was kindly and wise with a hundred years of experience. As I waved to her her eyes peered back at me like two torches in the darkest night.
“Kosmos, come here and help me,” she called. It was four hours until midnight and I had lots of time. I chopped some wood for her then filled her lamps with oil. Kara set the table with cakes and made a cup of hot coffee for me, commenting that the drink would help me to stay awake. By candlelight we ate and drank and talked.
“I told her that I admired her kitchen: simple, stark, filled with flowers and flowering plants. ‘I wanted to tell you about them,’ old Kara said. ‘There are only four varieties of flowers: some bloom for one night, some for one season, some for a year and some for a lifetime. Katalavehees? Do you understand?’ ... And she showed me examples of each kind.
“And suddenly she smiled a toothless grin then said to me: ‘You’re in love, boy, aren’t you?’ She cut a flower from a stem and told me to place it in my shirt pocket, against my heart, for luck in love. ‘And you believe, young Kosmos, that this angel you worship from afar is the flower of all womanhood?’
“I know that you’ve already guessed the secret, Thoreau. What she was saying about flowers was true about women, too! Some for a night, some for a season, some for year, some for a life!
“Between my fingertips I twirled the flower stem. ‘How can I tell,’ I asked Kara, ‘which of the four varieties is which?’
“Kara curled her withered forefinger at me, then with her bony fingers she gripped my arm. When I moved close to her her old dry lips brushed my earlobe and she whispered the answer into my ear.
“‘Go one step at a time, Kosmos’ she said, ‘and you’ll still reach the mountaintop. I cannot teach you how to tell the difference. But I can tell you what the difference is. The woman for a night wants your money; the woman for a season wants your body; the woman for a year wants you to cure her loneliness; and the woman for a lifetime wants to make you happy. When you find the last type, give up all the rest.’
“Well, by the time I left old Kara I was certain that she knew that things were going badly with me. I stumbled through the main gate of the cemetery then sat down on a grave with my back against a tombstone. I had everything planned out in advance. If Marcos didn’t have a knife with him, then I would not take an unfair advantage: we would fight with bare hands and feet. You see, Thoreau, why I could never be effective as a bad-guy? For me, the means are always more important than the ends!
“The bell rang twelve times. Soon after, I heard footsteps and voices approaching the cemetery. Marcos! He appeared walking with a young woman but I couldn’t see who she was because her scarf covered her head and the sides of her face. I tightened my fist around the handle of the knife.
“At that moment I smelled the flower given to me by old Kara. In one swift flash I understood!
“‘Marcos, come here!’ I shouted. Shocked to hear a voice, when Marcos saw me he knew the score. He jumped out of his shoes, he screamed, he trembled like cold dog. And when I pulled out my knife he wet his pants then fell down to his knees.
“I laughed and shouted at him. ‘Marcos, stand up like a man! I came here to kill you but I just realized how stupid it is to fight about a woman. And how stupid it is to fight about anything at all. Let’s stop this nonsense and shake hands! May your spring never run dry, may your lips be ever wet with wine, and may your bed be always filled with a hundred maidens, and may not one of them be your mother, your sisters or your wives!’
“With a twitching mouth and a sweating forehead, Marcos reached up and gripped my hand. A smile broke over my face when I observed that the young woman beside him was not my angel, not my Angelika. Once again I felt a flash of inspiration, I knew what needed to be done.”
For a few steps, Kosmos and I walked silently on the soft sand. These images from his past, from so very long ago, had stayed alive in his keen mind. The trick was to let his unconscious take over so that he could talk about these experiences freely — so that his unique listener would see and feel these things the way the teller saw and felt them: with passionate intensity.
“My feet carried me to the house of Angelika. In that Indian manual of erotic love, the Kamasutra, they talk about a charm a lover can use to sneak into the house of his beloved without making a noise and waking the rest of the family. I didn’t have much charm then, but luck was with me. On bare feet I managed to step through the house and get to Angelika’s bedroom unheard, unsmelled, unseen.
“As I opened the door to her room she gripped her nightgown at the neck then sat up in her bed and whispered, ‘Who is it?’
“I answered: ‘It’s Kosmos. I’m in love with you, Angelika. Do you love me even a little bit?’
“I was certain she would say yes, because the courage it took to enter her bedroom deserved at least a little bit of love. But damn her and bless her — for forty years women have shocked me and surprised me! Angelika explained that she was in love with Michaelis: a 15-year-old bookworm with thick glasses and pimples on his face. It took all my self-control to keep from laughing out loud and waking up the entire household.
“In the semi-darkness I could see the outlines of her body and her face. And suddenly all her beauty faded, all the beauty that had been created by my imagination and my loving gaze. ‘Here, Angelika,’ I told her,‘take this flower and give it to your Michaelis. I don’t love you anymore and I’ll never bother you again! You’re not even a woman for a night!’
“You see, Thoreau, old Kara was right: there are four kinds of women: women for a night, for a season, for a year, for a lifetime. And the first great secret is Foresight. When you meet a woman you have to figure out exactly which type of woman she is for you. If you mix them up then you’re as helpless as a skewered lamb.
“That was the last time I saw Angelika until ten years later, when she weighed two-hundred and forty pounds, and she looked like an angel that no wings could carry, an angel who had eaten up all heaven’s hoards of angelhair pasta and angelfood cake! Anyway, when the bells struck one that night I was strolling homeward and I passed old Kara’s house. Her lamps were still burning so I walked inside to tell her how she had saved my life.
“‘How can I thank you, Kara?’ I asked. ‘There’s no need for that, Kosmos,’ she said. Then after a moment, ‘Well, there is one thing you could do. Take this letter to my daughter in Nikolodeonos. Tell her I’m not going to live forever.’ Then she kissed me with her old lips and gave me some food for my trip.
“In a few hours I had matured twenty years. And that was only the beginning! The next morning I packed a sack with bread, cheese, olives, figs, blankets, my knife, and a few hundred drachs. I met Kara’s daughter, a stick woman who lived on the top of a hill with her two sisters and five doves. There I learned ‘Insight’, and a lot more. And a week later, on the once-sacred island of Delos, a dead woman introduced me to the sacred mysteries of sex.”
“A dead woman? Do you mean that she was no-pulse dead, or merely deadened in her capacity to be happy, to enjoy sex and to love life?”
“Someday, Thoreau — when you’re ready but not a moment before — I’ll tell you about that.”
“Kosmos, what was the heart of your education?”
“I had learned how to learn: how to seek and find the knowledge of the self. We can learn something essential from every encounter, every person, every moment, every unselfish act.”
A sea breeze blew across our faces. I looked at my friend’s perplexing smile.
“I’ve often wondered, Kosmos, if enlightenment is worth the price. In every generation, a small number of individuals find some kind of liberation. They grow one within themselves and with the Mind of the universe, then immediately thereafter they clash ferociously against the foolish world. Truth and Love blind the masses with their light. Socrates is hemlocked. Jesus is crucified. Abelard is castrated. Thomas More is beheaded. Rousseau forced to live like a vagabond. Blake deemed a madman by his contemporaries. Walt Whitman, for his sublime poems, is called ‘a pig rooting among garbage’. Dostoyevsky is hounded by the dogs of poverty. Gandhi is assassinated. Wilhelm Reich dies in prison for his harmless Orgone box. D.H. Lawrence’s most beautiful books are banned.”
“I know that problem very well, Thoreau,” said Kosmos. “There is one solution.”
I looked at him to make certain he was being serious, and his eyes said clearly it was so.
“Kosmos, I can’t even imagine what that solution could be.”
He looked up and smiled at the Greek light.
“A place.”
“A place? ... What kind of place, Kosmos, are you thinking of?”
“A place of complete freedom for the flourishing of sex and love.”
“You’ve seen a paradise like that?” I asked.
“Let me tell you all about it, my boy. If you want to know, if you’ll open your mind for a moment, then I’ll open up my heart and sing.”
27
The Dream of Sextopias
“Love and sex are the answers, whatever the questions are! Is it Happiness we desire? Health? Freedom? ... Then our personal relations, our politics, our economics, our arts, our education — every facet of our lives must turn around the twin suns of Sex and Love.”
As Kosmos uttered these words we sauntered past a pole sticking in the sand, holding a wooden sign inscribed in English which warned:
The Nudism And The Bathing Is Forbidding.
Smiling at the near-perfect translation, I questioned Kosmos about the stupendous difference between his thrilling theory and the world’s priggish practice.
“But where, Kosmos, where in this great galaxy could a woman or a man live the way you have envisioned? Where could a human being enjoy perfect freedom to explore and experience her-and-his powerful impulses, sexual and compassionate?”
Those questions were the very questions that Kosmos had been waiting for.
“Answer me this, Thoreau. Do you believe the proven fact that lightning can strike more than once in the same place? And the old maxim of old geologists: ‘What happened once could happen again?’”
“I believe that, Kosmos. Lightning hits the Empire State Building more than one thousand times each year. History repeats itself in recurring cycles. Every year, the same trashy books litter the best-seller lists. Bad habits formed in youth haunt a man throughout his lifetime.”
Kosmos nodded.
“Sex and love join two bodies into one being — so let me combine your questions and ask: ‘Where can men and women live as if life and love were one?’ ... Assuming I can prove that places like this have existed in the past, would you then agree that Utopias are not impossible?”
I nodded.
“The love of truth, Kosmocrates, would force me to agree to that.”
Briefly, I told Kosmos what I knew about the dark and bright Utopias in literature and myth. Dreamers have been inspired and lullabied to sleep by Plato’s Timaeus and Republic; More’s Utopia; Bacon’s New Atlantis; Campanella’s The City of The Sun; Rabelais’ tale The Abbey of Theleme; Fénelon’s Voyage en Solente; Cabot’s Voyage to Icaria; Lytton’s The Coming Race; Hawthorne’s Blythdale Romance; Melville’s Typee, Omoo, and Mardi; Bellamy’s Looking Backward; Morris’s News From Nowhere; Butler’s Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited; Graves’s Seven Days in New Crete; Huxley’s Brave New World and Island.
But none of these fictions were what he had in mind. Kosmos looked up with great appreciation at the sky’s good light. He waved his arms at me.
“This is all very important, Thoreau. You know how much great literature means to me. We need these magnificent visions, the best that has been thought and said. But great ideas are just the first small step. ‘Give me the bagels, darling, and you can keep the holes.’”
His homespun philosophy made me laugh and think.
“And you insist, Kosmos, that this polluted planet Earth — in every age, it seems, about to burst from too-much suffering — has at times known carefree paradises in-the-flesh?”
Kosmos clapped his hands together.
“Of course!” he said. “In the glorious history of Greece we can find five recorded Utopias. I’ll call them Utopias, but what I mean, simply, is advanced cities or cultures or places where creative men and women could live freely and thrive.
“Fifty-five hundred years ago — who knows when for sure? — here on Kreetee, we find the beginnings of the Minoan civilization, named for the legendary King Minos, the divine son of Europa and Zeus. The son grew up to imitate his philandering father: Minos slept around so much that his wife — foolish woman! — misused her magic powers, which caused Minos to ejaculate serpents, scorpions, and deadly insects instead of sperm. Crete flourished, nonetheless. Women maintained at least as much equality as men: Cretan women proudly bare their breasts, the snake goddesses dominate the hen-pecked bull-gods, nude priestesses shake down the fruits from the trees, and Nature is worshiped everywhere. Games are glamorized instead of war. At the taurokatharpsia — the bull-games — graceful gymnasts grasped the bull by the horns, and after the bull threw these athletes into the air, the youths somersaulted toward the sky, then landed on their feet on the bull’s back, or on the ground beyond. During these games no bull is ever killed. Pluck, prosperity and peace pervaded the island’s ninety cities, and made Crete into our first paradise.
“Then came the Age of Heroes, when Homer humanized the goddesses and gods. Here we find stories that signify the best that human beings can attain: Passionate and faithful love between one woman and one man; tender affection between the father and the son; the loyalest friendships; the most remarkable acts of courage and ingenuity. It wasn’t all honey and cakes: there was treachery, jealousy, murder in those times, too. But a sense of justice and goodness prevailed. And the Greeks were not cursed with a mania for introspection: they looked outward and they lived like children — energetic, playful, good-humored and sincere.
“The third great place in Hellenic history was the island of Lesbos, where Sappho came to birth around 612 b.c.e. Socrates called her ‘the Beautiful’. Plato crowned her immortally as ‘the Tenth Muse’. Plutarch described her words as being ‘mingled with flames’. For criticizing tyranny she was banished by a tyrant; when she returned to her native Lesbos she established a school for girls which taught poetry, music, and dance. Most of her fiery poems were burned sixteen hundred years later by the Church; only fragments remain. Her style was radiantly natural, and her subject was the passionate, breathtaking, body-trembling love she felt for her female friends.
