was made. I loved the shape of the room and the throne itself.
I loved the colors, as I remember them now mostly red and
blue but very pure, the true colors painted on stone. I don’t
think it is possible to go back to a place that has such a grip
on one’s heart; or I can’t. When I die, though, I’m going back,
as ash, dust unto dust - not to the stone walls or throne of
Knossos but to a high hill overlooking Heraklion. I belong to
the place even if the place does not belong to me.
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Kazantzakis
In the early morning I would walk from my balcony near the
water to the market. I’d buy olives. There had to be dozens
of different kinds. Of al the food for sale, olives were the
cheapest, and I’d buy the cheapest of those - about an eighth
of an ounce - and then I’d find a cafe and order a cof ee. I’d
keep fil ing the cup with milk, each time changing the ratio of
cof ee to milk. I’d have the waiter bring more and more milk.
As long as there was stil some cof ee in the cup I couldn’t be
refused. This was a rule I made up in my mind, but it seemed
to hold true. Early on I stole a salt shaker so that I could clean
my teeth. Salt is abrasive, but it works.
I had read about the square where I took my coffee in
Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Freedom or Death, a book I carried
with me almost everywhere once I discovered it (and I stil
have that paperback copy, brown and brittle). A novelist who
captures the soul of a country or a people writes fiction and
history and mythology, and Freedom or Death is such a work.
It is the story of the 1889 revolt of the Cretans against the
Turks. It is epic and at the same time it is the story of
Heraklion, Crete’s largest city and where I was living. Inside
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Kazantzakis
the epic there are love stories, stories of fraternal affection and
conflict, sickening details of war and occupation. In the square
- the square where I was sitting - the Turks would hang rebels,
the solitary body often more terrifying than any baker’s
dozen. Only a writer can show that precise thing, bring the
disfigured humanity of the dead individual into one’s own
viscera. One forgets the eloquence of the single person who
wanted freedom and got death. I could always see the body
hanging.
In those days political women did a kind of inner translating so that al the heroes, almost always men except for the occasional valiant female prostitute, were persons, ungendered, and one could aspire to be such a person. The point for the writer and other readers might well be masculinity itself,
but the political female read in a different pitch - the body
shaking the trees with its weight, obstructing both wind and
light, would be more lyrical, with the timbre in Bil ie Holiday’s
voice. Freedom or Death set the terms for fighting oppression;
later, feminism brought those terms to a new maturity with
the idea that one had to be willing to die for freedom, yes, but
also willing to live for it. Each day over my prolonged cup of
coffee I would watch the body hanging in the square and
think about it, why the body was displayed in torment as if
the torture, the killing continued after death. I would feel the
fear it created in those who saw it. I would feel the necessity
of another incursion against the oppressor - to show that he
75
Heartbreak
had not won, nor had he created a paralyzing fear, nor had he
stopped one from risking one’s life for freedom.
I haven’t read Kazantzakis since I lived on Crete in 1965. I
have never read Zorba the Greek, his most famous novel
because of the movie made from the book, a movie I saw
maybe a decade or two later on television. Freedom or death
was how I felt about segregation back home, the Vietnam
War, stopping the bomb, writing, making love, going where
I wanted when I wanted. Freedom or death was how I felt
about the Nazis, the fascists, the tyrants, the sadists, the cold
kil ers. Freedom or death was how I felt about the world
created by the compromisers, the mediocrities, the apathetic.
Freedom or death encapsulated my philosophy. So I wrote a
series of poems cal ed (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose
poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a
novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on
Burning Boyfriend; and poems and dialogues I later handprinted
using movable type in a book cal ed Morning Hair. The burning boyfriend was Norman Morrison, the pacifist who had set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War.
76
Discipline
I learned how to write on Crete. I learned to write every day
I learned to work on a typewriter that I had rented in
Heraklion. I had thin, light blue paper. I’d carve out hours for
myself, the same every day, and no mat er what was going on
in the rest of my writer’s life I used those hours for writing.
I learned to throw away what was no good. One asks, How
does a writer write? And one asks, How does a writer live?
At first one imitates. I imitated in those years Lorca, Genet,
Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller. I read both Miller
and Lawrence Durrel on being a writer in Greece. It seemed
from them as if words could stream down with the light. I did
not find that to be the case, and so I thought that perhaps I
was not a writer. Then one wants to know about the one great
book: can someone young write only one book and have it be
great - or was there only one Rimbaud for al eternity and the
gift is al used up? Then one needs to know if what one wrote
yesterday and the day before has the aura of greatness so that
the whole thing, eventually, would be the one great book even
though that might have to be fol owed by a second great
book. Then one wants to know if the greatness shows in one’s
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Heartbreak
face or manner or being so that people would draw back a little on confronting the bearer of the greatness. Then one wants to know if being a writer is like being Sisyphus or perhaps
Prometheus. One wants to know if writers are a little band of
gods created in each generation, cursed or blessed with the
task of finding themselves - finding that they are writers. One
wants to know if one wil write something important enough
to die for; or if fascists wil kil one for what one writes; or if
one can write prose or poetry so strong that nothing can break
its back. One wonders if one will be able to stand up to or
against dictators or police power. One wonders if one has the
illusion of a vocation or if one has the vocation. One wonders
about how to be what one wants to be - that genius of a