By Stuart Mitchner

The peace of the heart is positive and invincible, demanding no conditions, requiring no protection. It just is.

—Henry Miller, from The Colossus of Maroussi

If nothing else, Greece’s last-ditch stand against austerity has led me to the poetry of George Seferis, given me a reason to reread Henry Miller’s Colossus of Maroussi (1941), and reminded me of three “it just is” evenings of peace on the Acropolis, each on the same day in the first week of August, all in the space of six years.

Miller writes of arriving in Greece on the eve of World War II: “I had entered a new realm as a free man … for the first time in my life I was happy with the full consciousness of being happy,” because “to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how … and still be happy … in the being and knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it.”

That’s vintage Henry Miller — never go halfway, take it to the rhetorical limit, damn the torpedoes! full speed ahead! If there’s any writer anywhere who embodies the antithesis of austerity it’s Henry Miller. And in Miller’s Colossus, Greece is “the antithesis of America”: “Economically it may seem unimportant [those were the days], but spiritually Greece is still the mother of nations, the fountain-head of wisdom and inspiration.” At the moment mother Athens is under siege. While the front page of Monday’s online edition of the New York Times says the European moneylenders have reached an agreement on the Greek debt crisis, the story comes with a photo worth a thousand words showing a street person holding an empty glass, crumpled as if dead on the pavement in front of an Alpha Bank ATM where people are waiting in line.

Celebrating the “No” Vote

On July 5 Athens answered Frankfurt on the grand scale as the crowds came out in support of the “No” vote. You can witness the spectacle online (“Drone captures thousands of ‘NO’ protestors”), but as you hover above the seething masses on Syntagma Square, the Sound and Light show below is accompanied by ack-ack sounds on the RT video that make it seem as if you’re taking part in a bombing mission out of Austerity Central, unloading a wealth of munitions on the demonstrators. As you stare down at the scene, the cypress trees begin to resemble plumes of smoke from the explosions, and people appear to be running for cover. As the wheels of austerity grind on and on ten days later, such may unfortunately be the case, witness the scene in front of the ATM.

All Sing Seferis

Also online, you can hear Irene Pappas singing “Arnisi” (“Denial”), a poem by Nobel laureate George Seferis set to music by Mikis Theodorakis. Whether she recorded the song in 1969 or 1972 or later still, she’s giving glorious voice to the crowds on Syntagma Square in July 2015 and to the spirit of the amazing moment in September 1971 when multitudes of mourners at Seferis’s funeral spontaneously sang “Arnisi” in honor of the poet who had had the courage to speak out during the Regime of the Colonels. So it happened that the death of the man who, in Henry Miller’s words, caught the “spirit of eternality which is everywhere in Greece” and “is destined to transmit the flame” inspired the first openly defiant public demonstration against the junta.

Readers hoping to find a passionate anthem of resistance in “Denial,” which first appeared in the 1931 collection Turning Point, will be disappointed, however, or at best confused. The closest the words in the English translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard come to conveying the emotional richness of the song as sung by Pappas is in the last stanza: “With what spirit, what heart,/what desire and passion/we lived our life — a mistake!” The way Pappas sings it, the spirit and passion transcend the dead end of the last two words and the uninspiring turn of the closing line, “So we changed our life.” But then Seferis was writing about the conundrums of a relationship; he didn’t set out to write a national anthem for the Greek soul. According to Artemis Leontis in Culture and Customs of Greece, Seferis “was probably unsatisfied with the loss of ambivalence in the popular interpretation,” with its “more upbeat message.” Nevertheless the music of Theodorakis gave the poem the “remarkable afterlife” that began when the “hundreds of thousands of mourners” sang it “under the watchful eye of the dictatorship’s police.”

Seferis in Princeton

Longtime Princeton resident, professor, novelist, and translator Edmund Keeley interviewed Seferis for The Paris Review in December 1968 after the poet’s completion of a three-month term at the Institute for Advanced Study. As Keeley observes in his prefatory note, Seferis was in “particularly good spirits because he felt that his visit had served for a kind of rejuvenation: an interlude free from the political tensions that had been building up for some months in Athens.” During a discussion period following a reading in New York, Seferis refused to comment on the political situation at home because he “didn’t consider it proper to criticize his government while a guest on foreign soil, safely outside the boundaries of the government’s displeasure.” It was on his return to Greece that he released the “uncompromising statement against the dictatorship” that made him a hero.

Keeley’s note offers a glimpse of Seferis’s home life in an “unpretentious second-floor apartment” overlooking the grounds of the Institute, “the bookcase almost empty, none of the modern Greek paintings and classical treasures that set the style of the Seferis home in Athens. Yet the poet was delighted with the place because it gave him access to a number of exotic things: changing trees, and squirrels, and children crossing the lawn from school.”

Redskins in Argos

According to Keeley, whenever Seferis began to reminisce about Henry Miller and other friends from that period like George Katsimbalis, the titular Colossus, he would “relax into his natural style and talk easily until the tape died out on him.”

Seferis obviously appreciated the way Miller responded to Greece: “Of course it’s a great thing to have an understanding of the ancient authors; but the first man I admired for not having any classical preparation on going to Greece is Miller. There is such a freshness in him.” Seferis recalls giving Miller “a text of Aeschylus, when he decided to go to Mycenae. But of course he doesn’t see anything from Aeschylus; he sees, in the plain of Argos, redskins while he hears a jazz trumpeter. That is spontaneous behavior. And I admire it.”

On the Acropolis

“Peace is not the opposite of war,” Henry Miller writes in The Colossus, “any more than death is the opposite of life.” What he found in the Peloponnesus was “sheer perfection, as in Mozart’s music.” He goes on to say that “there is more of Mozart here than anywhere in the world. The road to Epidaurus is like the road to creation. One stops searching. One grows silent, stilled by the hush of mysterious beginnings. If one could speak one would become melodious.”

I found something melodious and mysterious and wholly unexpected on the Acropolis during three trips to Greece in my twenties. If I wasn’t thinking of Mozart in relation to Miller’s hushed, silent “peace of the heart,” it was only because I had yet to hear the slow movements of the Sinfonia Concertante and Symphony No. 40. Up where I was, resting on a slab of stone still warm from the heat of the day, all was silence and solitude, except for the sounds faintly rising from the city below, distant laughter, a car shifting gears, the clink of glasses and the sound of bouzouki music from tavernas in the Plaka. Taking it all in at nightfall, everything from the focal point of the Parthenon to Mount Lycabettus and beyond, I was sure that this was the most significant place on the planet. I kept thinking of the wellworn phrase when something “means the world” to you. That’s how I felt. It meant the world to be there and so it seemed each of the three times I came to that spot and looked out over the lights of the city. It wasn’t until the third visit that I realized that each of these special moments, these epitomes of peace and contentment and connectedness, had fallen on the sixth day of August.

Ablaze with Light

Toward the end of The Colossus of Maroussi Miller observes that the Greek “is just as enamoured of electric light as he is of sunlight. No soft shades, as in Paris or New York, but every window ablaze with light, as if the inhabitants had just discovered the marvels of electricity.” In 1940, on the eve of sailing home to America, he has a last look at the lights of Athens, “an electrical display … without parallel among the cities of the world …. Athens sparkles like a chandelier …. But what gives it its unique quality, despite the excessive illumination, is the softness which it retains in the midst of the glare. It is as if the sky, becoming more liquescent, more tangible, had lowered itself to fill every crevice with a magnetic fluid …. On any slight eminence one can stand in the very heart of Athens and feel the very real connection man has with the other worlds of light.” As always the enemy of understatement, Miller suggests “that in Athens the miraculous light of day never entirely vanishes,” that “in some mysterious way,” the city “never wholly lets the sun out of its grasp, never quite believes that day is done.”

The quote from “Denial” is from George Seferis “Collected Poems 1924-1955” (Princeton University Press), translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Keeley’s Paris Review conversation with Seferis appears as The Art of Poetry No. 13 in the Fall 1970 issue.