Parkos) is Cavafy's own distaste for mythologizing; also, perhaps, the realization on the reader's part that every choice is essentially a flight from freedom.
Another possible explanation for Cavafy's decision to stay is that he did not like himself enough to think that he deserved better. Whatever his reason, his imagined Alexandria exists as vividly as the literal city. Art is an alternate form of existence, though the emphasis in this statement falls on the word "existence," the creative process being neither an escape from reality nor a sublimation of it. At any rate, Cavafy's was not a case of sublimation, and his treatment of the entire sensual city in his work is proof of that.
He was a homosexual, and his frank treatment of this theme was advanced not only by the standards of his time, as Keeley suggests, but by present standards as well. Relating his thought to attitudes traditionally found in the east- em Mediterranean is of little or no help; the difference between the Hellenic world and the actual society in which the poet lived was too great. If the moral climate of the actual city suggested techniques of camouflage, recollections of Ptolemaic grandeur should have required some sort of boastful exaggeration. Neither strategy was acceptable to Cavafy because he was, first and foremost, a poet of contemplation and because both attitudes are more or less equally incompatible with the very sentiment of love.
Ninety percent of the best lyric poetry is written post- coitum, as was Cavafy's. Whatever the subject of his poems, they are always written in retrospect. Homosexuality as such enforces self-analysis more than heterosexuality does. I believe that the homosexual concept of sin is much more elaborate than the heterosexual concept: heterosexuals are, to say the least, provided with the possibility of instant redemption through marriage or other fonns of socially acceptable constancy. Homosexual psychology, like the psychology of any minority, is overtly one of nuance and ambivalence: it capitalizes on one's vulnerability to the extent of producing a mental U-turn after which the offensive can be launched. In a way, homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which absorbs and consumes both the rational and the emotional faculties of a person so completely that T. S. Eliot's old friend, "felt thought," is likely to be the result. The homosexual's notion of life might, in the end, have more facets than that of his heterosexual counterpart. Such a notion, theoretically speaking, provides one with the ideal motive for writing poetry, though in Cavafy's case this motive is no more than a pretext.
What matter in art are not one's sexual affiliations, of course, but what is made of them. Only a superficial or partisan critic would label Cavafy's poems simply "homosexual," or reduce them to examples of his 'hedonistic bias." Cavafy's love poems were undertaken in the same spirit as his historical poems. Because of his retrospective nature, one even gets the feeling that the "pleasures"— one of the words Cavafy uses most frequently to refer to the sexual encounters he is recalling—were "poor" almost in the same way that the literal Alexandria, as Keeley describes it, was a poor leftover of something grandiose. More often than not, the protagonist of these lyric poems is a solitary, aging person who despises his own features, which have been disfigured by that very time which has altered so many other things that were central to his existence.
The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy's poems, in dealing with that Hellenic "special love," and touching en passant upon conventional broodings and longings, are attempts^^r rather recognized failures—to resurrect once-loved shadows. Or: photographs.
Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his hopelessness for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy's love poetry is not "tragic" but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the fait accompli, terror is the product of the imagination (no matter where it is directed, toward the future or toward the past). His sense of loss is much more acute than his sense of gain simply because separation is a more lasting experience than being together. It almost looks as though Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like "Before Time Altered Them" or "Hidden Things" represent a complete reversal of Susan Sontag's formula "Life is a movie; death is a photograph." To put it another way, Cavafy's hedonistic bias, if such it is, is biased itself by his historical sense, since history, among other things, implies irreversibility. Alternatively, if Cavafy's historical poems had not been hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes.
One of the best examples of the way this dual technique works is the poem about Kaisarion, Cleopatra's fifteen- year-old son, nominally the last king of the Ptolemaic line, who was executed by the Romans in "conquered Alexandria" by the order of the Emperor Octavian. After finding Kaisarion's name in some history book one evening, the narrator plunges into fantasies of this young boy and "fashions him freely" in his mind, "so completely" that, by the end of the poem, when Kaisarion is put to death, we perceive his execution almost as a rape. And then the words "conquered Alexandria" acquire an extra dimension: the torturing recognition of personal loss.
Not so much by combining as by equating sensuality and history, Cavafy tells his readers (and himself) the classic Greek story of Eros, ruler of the world. In Cavafy's mouth it sounds convincing, all the more so because his historical poems are preoccupied with the decline of the Hellenic world, the situation which he, as an individual, reflects in miniature, or in mirrors. As if unable to be precise in his handling of the miniature, Cavafy builds us a large- scale model of Alexandria and the adjacent Hellenic world. It is a fresco, and if it seems fragmentary, this is partly because it reflects its creator, but largely because the Hellenic world at its nadir was fragmented both politically and culturally. With the death of Alexander the Great it began to crumble, and wars, skirmishes, and the like kept tearing it apart for centuries after, the way contradictions tear one's mind. The only force which held these motley, cosmopolitan pieces together was mama.gna lingua Grecae; Cavafy could say the same about his own life. Perhaps the most uninhibited voice we hear in Cavafy's poetry is when in a tone of heightened, intense fascination he lists the beauties of the Hellenic way of life—Hedonism, Art, Sophistic philosophy, and "especially our great Greek language."
3
It was not the Roman conquest that brought an end to the Hellenic world; it was the day Rome itself fell to Christianity. The interplay between the pagan and Christian worlds in Cavafy's poetry is the only one of his themes that is not sufficiently covered in Keeley's book. It is easy to understand why, however, since this theme deserves a book to itself. To reduce Cavafy to a who felt
uneasy about Christianity would be simplistic. For that matter, he felt no cozier with paganism. He was perceptive enough to know that he had been born with the mixture of both in his veins—born, too, into this mixture. If he felt the tension, it was not the fault of either one but of both: his was not a question of split loyalty. Ostensibly, at least, he was a Christian; he always wore a cross, attended church on Good Friday, and received the last rites. Profoundly, too, he was perhaps a Christian: his most vigorous ironies were directed against one of the main vices of Christianity —pious intolerance. But what matters to us as readers, of course, is not Cavafy's church affiliation but the way in which he handled the mixture of two religions—and Cavafy's way was neither Christian nor pagan.