New Work

Athens_Acropolis
 

partenon-title

 

When finally, on the afternoon of our arrival I stood on the Acropolis and cast my eyes upon the landscape, a surprising thought suddenly entered my mind: “So all this really does exist, just as we learnt it at school!”

–Sigmund Freud, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis

 

For the past few years I’ve been working on a book that explores the way the art and the places of antiquity get under your skin, unwrapping the long and compelling emotional life of the classical world. Called The Real Life of the Parthenon, it asks why we argue so passionately over the broken fragments of the ancient world, and what indeed makes the past itself more fruitful and lively in one place than in another. It differs from other books about ownership of cultural artifacts because what it wishes to reclaim is immediate response (“this really does exist”) to the classical world’s remains and losses.

That is, I’m not trying to justify or condemn the motives of collectors, nor to make a case for or against the claims of modern states to the classical realm. Instead, the book engages with the inevitable contradictions of argument, desire, and personal encounter, allowing my own encounters with monuments and artifacts from the ancient past to be guided by a wide interest in the experiences of others, both past and current. Working on the book has taken me to the Acropolis, and to museums in Athens, Naples, New York, and Los Angeles, to the broken temples, archaeological sites, and landscapes of Sicily, and the centuries-long excavations at Pompeii and Paestum and Herculaneum.

My travels have nudged me up against plunder and empire, earlier travelers’ stories, and the immediate surprises of my own dislocation. Past and present have folded their stories over each other, and art becomes a way of holding inevitable losses. We keep retelling those stories in order to become part of them, and then we talk to each other around the art and its stories. Now my own fertile and unstable encounters have become site and scaffolding for this ongoing life of the Parthenon, in which the moving viewpoint has become the story.

At the New Acropolis Museum with Dimitrios Pandermalis and Helena Smith, 2009
At the New Acropolis Museum in Athens during construction in 2006, with the museum’s president and curator, Dimitrios Pandermalis, and journalist Helena Smith.

 

Parts of the book have been published in Kenyon Review [download pdf] and Southwest Review [download pdf]

 
 

excerpt-title

 

May Heaven grant that, on my return, the moral effect of having lived in a larger world will be noticeable, for I am convinced that my moral sense is undergoing as great a transformation as my aesthetic.

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

 

The morning after our arrival in a drenching rainstorm to the salt flats on Sicily’s west coast, I woke to a dazzling view of water and sky, unearthly reflected light. Below the window a level sweep of grasses shone a brilliant watery green, studded with bright yellow and orange wildflowers. It was not at all what I had expected of Sicily, this Dutch landscape with windmills and the rectangular cuts of salt pans like canals beside the sea. To the east clouds drifted behind the steep rise of Erice–Eryx, reaching for the stars, says Virgil–where Aeneas founded a temple to Venus and buried his father Anchises, and where, having abandoned Dido to her unfortunate emotions, he later returned to hold Anchises’s funeral games.

What I wanted to see first was the never-finished temple at Segesta, mysterious and isolated on a slope of nearby Mount Barbaro. Rather than a ruin, it seemed almost an abstraction of Doric style: limestone against blue sky, thirty-six unfluted columns surrounding an empty interior space, triangular, undecorated pediments at either end. One of my guidebooks suggested that the temple had been “just a charade,” a dissimulation built to impress the Athenian envoys who had been invoked to help defend fifth-century BC Egesta against nearby Selinus, and then abandoned once the Greeks, defeated by Syracuse, had become useless as allies.

Sicily’s history is full of such border disputes, alliances forged and broken, sacked cities, little local narratives running side by side while in the larger story the island became steadily more Greek. The temple stands so clearly in its landscape–a turbulent landscape like a stormy sea, says the architectural historian Vincent Scully–attesting quite firmly to its particular history, which no one actually knows. A temple built to no particular deity, but whose unroofed elements, Scully suggests, combine to create an effect of ponderous, uncivilized power.

No one knows if it had been intended to house a god, to offer sacrifices, to be part of a community, or if it was an elaborate trick, a beautifully located simulacrum of religious practice and architectural character. It hardly mattered now, I thought. It certainly evoked the idea of ancient worship with as much authority as anyone could wish. As Scully notes, with his unflagging sense of antiquity’s drama, from the approach up the slope the temple’s pediments seem to echo the shape of the mountain behind it; as one walks inside it from east to west, he says, the distance between natural and manmade seems further diminished. Stepping through the columns on the western side, however, suddenly the terrible and unexpected occurs, he says. The ground drops precipitously away before one’s feet, and a gulf, tremendous in depth and width, opens between the temple and the mountain. For Scully, all the elements combined to make the temple’s structure and positioning appropriate for rites intended to celebrate some insatiable goddess of the earth.

The week before our visit, however, a chunk of stone had fallen from the architrave, and it was no longer permissible to come upon the terrible and unexpected by walking through the temple. The solidity and shock of its ancient presence had been distanced by a low wooden fence, and the great gulf was no longer linked to the architectural experience. A walk around the temple now reveals the wide valley below as an apparently fertile bowl of fields and a few farmhouses. All around it that day were distracting tangles of waving yellow blossoms, olive trees, agave plants.

Scully describes the effect at Segesta as not wholly of the Greek gods. Its columns crown the hill with solemn grandeur, he says, but, rearing up at the edge of the abyss, it is the only Greek temple that screams. All the details of the scream are still there–the heavy unfluted columns, the bare, undecorated metopes, the swift and tensile arc of the foundation–but the overwhelming experience of the sudden abyss has been mitigated by the nervous gods of safety.

I stopped wandering the periphery, trying to photograph the interior from between the columns and the explosions of vegetation toward the top of the entablature, and sat with my traveling companion on a bench in the shade where he was sketching the facade. We watched birds settling on the capitals or under the pediment until a group of schoolchildren surrounded us, and a boy sat down between us, bold and curious about the sketch, a young member of the local culture distracted from the unchanging object he’d been brought to look at by the little spectacle of the moving pencil.

After a while we left the children to the exploration of their heritage and went higher up the hill to see the Greek amphitheater, its stone seating now warm in the midday sun, the center of its stage area still somewhat muddy from yesterday’s downpour. Added now to the outlook of its endless vista was the highway curving like a river far below, lifted on its cement pylons past the woodlands and fields. It seemed at once a technical feat like an aqueduct and a natural waterway snaking its way toward the sea in the distance. Signs that had once explained the layout and history here were faded or washed away entirely, relics themselves of a doomed effort to create captions for the unfolding of time in this place.

The countryside broods in melancholy fertility, says Goethe, admiring the site but struck by its isolation. He directed his attention to the butterflies on the thistle, the profusion of last year’s fennel, the howling wind through the temple’s columns. As we descended the hill, the temple appeared below us, a deliberate element in the landscape, a shapely geometrical testament to human presence in this place. From here it did not seem like a military or diplomatic ruse, nor did it seem to scream, nor the wind to howl through it. Its sturdy roofless architecture was a long steady note of endurance through linear time, while all around us were poppies, bugloss, fennel, yellow broom, and wild grasses, the happiness and careless cyclical display of spring.

The temple at Segesta from above.
The temple at Segesta from above.