TOWARDS ARISTODIKOS
After quarrying, if the marble is
not to be worked on immediately, it is buried back into the earth: so
that it may stay fresh, retain its juices.
~
In
the foundations of the house where, years ago, we used to spend our
holidays, an ancient road had been found, with traces of a vehicle on
the rock. And, next to it, a funerary stele.
A block away, the archaeologists never so much as complained when I
slipped in amongst them while they worked. And after they abandoned
the site, I would go and hide small treasures there among the ruins:
a torchlight, a square battery, a box of matches, a couple of toy
cars. In case of emergency.
~
I was born opposite the
Archaeological Museum. Ever since I was little, every time I went in,
I would turn left and keep my head up, looking for the smile of the
Kouroi.
Were these funerary statues a
debt to the dead dictated by a higher order of things?
How did art give form to such
desires?
Almost
simultaneously, statues appeared in the
temples
of the gods as well as on graves. The funerary
statue is both a form of the objective debt to the dead and a
fulfilment of the spiritual need of the living to have before them
the dead person's likeness.
On my way out, I would slide down
the inclined marbles to the left and right of the forecourt's wide
steps. The marble, slightly concave in the middle, worn smooth from
wear, was almost soft – and invariably warm.
~
Aristodikos, the last Kouros,
isn't smiling.
The eyes of Aristodikos are
shadowed –not just literally, due to their sockets' curvature–
but also metaphorically, as if by the shadow of memory.
At the Museum, we indeed come
across him last in the sequence of Kouroi. Christos Karouzos
–Director from 1942 to 1964, formidable archaeologist, unrivaled
writer, lover of poetry– who loved and studied him, estimates that
he died at the age of twenty five, around 500BC. On precious marble
from Paros –the best for moulding the body–, his family asked for
his form to be carved in full relief. They set it by the grave next
to the road –as was the custom– at the edge of their estate in
Mesogeia, in the locality of “Phinikia”. But twenty years later,
they also laid the statue down to rest over the buried body, and
covered it with soil. To save it from the Persians, about to burn
down Attica from end to end, up to the Parthenon.
Almost intact, protected from the
sun and rain, the statue then returned to earth.
It rose again 25 centuries later.
In 1944, the property owner sends
over labourers to till his field. The plough hits on stone. Again and
again. They get hold of hoes to dig it out, they unbury a body,
whole.
Only the hands are missing. And
the feet break off at the delicate ankles.
It would be ungrateful to
complain about the degree of its preservation. Only the hands are
entirely missing. Of the lesser wounds, the most annoying is the
disfigurement of the eyes, lips and especially the nose, most
probably caused by the frequent passing over of the plough.
For years the plough passed
over the face
Over
and over the plough passed
on the face
They load the statue on a
carriage, cover it with straw, take it to the Museum in secret. To
the empty Museum: all the statues are already asleep, buried in the
soil, under the floor of the halls, since the eve of the German
invasion. (Months of secret toil, under Semni Karouzou's
supervision.)
The monuments that were saved
are “fortune's children”.
~
I still strive to see
what the hands held
Fruit
bottle, cup
weapon or bridle
Or nothing –
Open palms
full of arrival
They might have held
scales
offered
fair opposites
Except they 're missing
Back to the earth
whence they emerged
idle they have returned
As prescribed
by the order of time
Now equidistant
brokenly
they balance
~
The statue does not unfold its
world outwards but has gathered its strength in, as if meditating on
some inner stirring.
Karouzos, in his study on
Aristodikos, includes a long list of attic sculptures from 550-480
BC. There, twice he refers to Rilke:
540-530
…
Stele
of two siblings in
New
York and Berlin – incontestable seems the kinship of the girl's
head with the “Rilke” head in the Louvre.
...
Male head Louvre 695 –
which, according to Haussmann, may be the subject of Rilke's sonnet
“Fruehe Apollo”
As sometimes between the yet leafless branches
a morning looks through that is already
radiant with spring: so nothing of his head
could prevent the splendour of all poems
from striking us with almost lethal force;
for there is yet no shadow in his gaze,
his temples are yet too cool for the laurel crown,
and only later from his eyebrows' arches
will the rose garden lift up on tall stems,
from which petals, loosened, one by one
will drift down on the trembling of his mouth,
which now is yet quiet, never-used, and gleaming
and only drinking something with its smile
as though its song were being instilled in him.
Rilke
wrote this poem in Paris, on July 11, 1906. Although in May of that
year his term as Rodin's secretary had ended following a rupture
between the two men, his New
Poems
–the First Book (1907) of which opens with this sonnet– are
written under the influence of the great sculptor who seems to have
shown him anew how to see and how to reflect.
Three
years earlier, near the end of his essay, Auguste
Rodin,
Rilke had said about his sculptures: “a great gesture seems to live
and to force space to participate in its movement.”
~
Upon the pedestal, rises the
youthful form of Aristodikos, slender in its deeper conception. With
difficulty might it be said that he is standing. We would be closer
to this image of a man imperceptibly moving, were we to say that he
witholds movement. Nor is it possible to speak of a state arrived at
but, rather, of a force in action.
~
Funerary statues stop, so far
as we can see today, a little after 500BC, for sixty years or so.
Archaeological research has almost unanimously conceded Milchhoefer's
conjecture that a law that came out in Athens according to Cicero, “a
fair while” after Solon, against the lavishness of funerary
monuments, must indeed belong to this late archaic period, and
possibly to Kleisthenes, as Hirschfeld subsequently hypothesized.
Cicero's source is known to be Demetrius Phalereus and this vir
eruditissimus in turn draws information and suggestions for his own
radical restrictions on grave monuments from Plato and the preceding
attic legislation. An attractive hypothesis, though no more, is that
this law is contemporaneous and not unrelated to the law of
ostracism.
I might almost not have existed
~
ARISTODIKO: the name
of the dead in the genitive, on the statue's pedestal.
The mere name of a man is
tantamount to anonymity.
The pedestal is preserved, and
the name, and the plinth of the statue. But –a strange thing,
unexpected for a work such as this– there is no funerary epigram to
be found.
Voice
that does not reach out from the
stone
speak up
Whose face?
Distance touches it
as pain returns
to its black owner
The eyes no longer
oppose
the most beautiful thing
springing
from life renounced
Each morning
there survives a song
From dreams
Which one has dripped
on his half-parted lips
so he now sings, upright and
whole?
Threshold of song
mouth
of a lost youth
Music
breath of statues
silence of images
Space of the heart
suddenly so large
Note: This text (translated by Konstantine Matsoukas) is a fragment of a work in progress, re-contextualised for publication in NICE! Is return possible?, ed.: Salon de Vortex (Y. Grigoriadis & Y. Isidorou), 2016, together with the three pairs of my photographs that, in addition to my photograph of the statue, appear here. In italics, phrases from Ch. I. Carouzos's monograph, Aristodikos (1961). The translation of Rilke's poem is by Dylan Schenker [http://earlyapollo.blogspot.gr/2007/09/critical-analysis.html]; that of his essay, Auguste Rodin, by Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (1919).
