For Iphigenia (the Bacchus at Phelloe)

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The house was built in Appalachian style,

No foundation or frame,

But windows cut from walls nailed to the sill,

On crude upright sandstone.

I thought of it in Aiges, ancient Aegira, which Homer called Hyperesia,

Where, in sight of Parnassus, realm of Apollo,

And of landslides from erosion, an old woman in living memory kept gardens

Behind a cottage built on Mycenaean walls.

It became Aegira, the city of goats, when the Hyperesians, facing war, drove

“Together all the goats that were in their land, and binding torches on their horns,

Enkindled them when the night was far advanced.”

The invaders fled before the river of lights.

That is Pausanias, travel writer for Roman tourists.

He goes on,  “where the most beautiful goat,

The leader of the rest, laid himself down,

They raised a temple of Diana, the Huntress.”

Pausanias notes fine statues of Jupiter and Apollo,
Serapis and Isis,

And an old statue in Diana’s temple, which the locals said

Was Iphigenia, Agamemnon's daughter,
Trades to the gods for a fair wind.

He reports a straight road from Aegira to Phelloe,

“An obscure little town, not constantly inhabited,”

With oak-trees, stags, and wild boars.

I scrambled uphill an hour through pasture, sometimes running,

To the base of Phelloe's acropolis, now just stone on stone,

And apple trees in the agora.

There were goats on the lower slopes, passing to the north.

A huge mastiff kept me back from them.  Their bells mapped them for miles.

The theater at Aegira was cut into stone, fronting Parnassus.

Today its bleacher seats are gulley-washes. 

The front rows hold, and the flagstone of the stage.

Carrying even a pebble from these places is a crime, heavy as drug-smuggling.

The Austrian School excavates a few weeks every summer.

Andreas the goat-herd, who helped them out for cash,

Reports the work is very slow, and not at all like digging.

I smuggled back a ram’s horn from his pastures,

Half-twisted and very dark.

The Bacchus at Phelloe was covered in vermilion.

Strange, Familiar Landscapes: Where the Gods and Spirits (might) Live

            A week in Greece, much of it in the Peloponnesian countryside, showed me something about what landscapes do to the mind.  I thought all the time of the gods and spirits that were supposed to have animated the peaks, forests, and streams.  Their presence was much easier to accept than where I spend most of my time.  I don’t think it was just the stories.  It was also the shape of the place.

            The instinct that gods live in high places seems intuitive in a terrain with steep, treacherous, almost unscaleable slopes that open up into broad terraces and generous mountaintops, level meadows shaped for revels.  Almost like an apartment building, the land has many stories, some hard to reach from others.  Above the village where we stayed was a sheer cliff, which I would estimate at a thousand feet high.  Why would there not be a life up there, inaccessible but imaginable, as there was a life on the hilltop acropolis of each ancient city of women and men?

            And the spirits?  I have never seen a place with such intense microclimates – not even coastal California, which comes close.  A slot canyon rips a cool, dusky, lush line into an arid and barbed mountainside.  Surrounded by dry pines, backed that thousand-foot cliff, a tumbling vertical stream throws out a fan of hanging grasses, then comes to ground at the roots of big, gnarled figs and planetrees (also called sycamore maples).

            It reminded me of the Banias, so named by Roman occupiers for Pan, a river cleft at the base of the Golan Heights in northern Israel.  In the spring, cold, blue-tinted meltwater races through a green, heavily shadowed rent in a near-desert baked in gold Mediterranean light.  Where a blade of that gold slices between wood and leaves and strikes the water, two worlds meet.

            This kind of anomaly is a place for spirits.  It’s a product of a place vitally unlike itself, always generating its own exceptions.   It’s a home for something of the place yet not entirely of the world – a dryad, say, or river spirit.

            In the modern west, the aesthetics of nature generally comes down to two categories.  One is beauty, the quality of a restful and regular place – a lovely farming landscape, for instance.  The other is sublimity, the half-frightening, half-elevating power of huge, alien nature: a volcano, a whirlpool, the ocean in a storm, lightning in the Sierra Nevada.

            It occurs to me that sublimity, in particular, is a monotheist idea: that there is one vast, brooding spirit in the world, whose unknowable power we glimpse in its display.  Sublimity is the Book of Job.  Most American parks, uninhabited sites of pilgrimage to vast and impersonal places, are terrains of monotheistic awe.

            The animated landscapes I’ve been thinking of fall into a third aesthetic category: the uncanny, the place we aren’t sure what to make of, which may or may be looking back at us with eyes like, but also unlike, ours.  With a mind like, but also unlike, ours. 

These are the landscapes of the strange familiar, where we recognize ourselves but are also frightened and baffled.  They are inhabited, personal, vital, and alien, all at once.  Animist, pagan places, they have a variegated vitality that fills me as I race and stumble across them, trying to reach the next strange grove.