Truth Lies at the Bottom of a Well
She was right to be angry. She was right to be angry at the machine for grinding her down until she could be made to fit into the fearsome hole at the center of the world. She was right to be angry at Arpa for his selfish, monomaniacal protectionism. She was right to be angry at being told how to bear the burden that nobody but she would have to bear. His heart was more broken than the rest of his body after the dream encounter. It all felt so real that he was certain, ‘If only I had reached out, and held on to her, I could have stayed with her forever’. But now he was awake, and alone again, and he really didn’t know what was real. Maybe Orpheus never had a chance. Grab ahold, or don’t. Eurydice was lost.
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It was time to consider his own circumstances. Getting up took him more than an hour, and when he finally rose to his feet he stood for some time in the midday sun, unsteady, warming his bruised limbs, and slowly moving his jaw to reassure himself that he could depend on it should he ever need its services again.
He surveyed the boundaries of his perch: he was able to see his position more clearly now and was not encouraged. A brief anxiety drove a frenetic attempt to spy out an escape (he still valued his freedom!). Some evidence of a path down to the water remained in spite of the damage done by his avalanche. Even before the slide, the descent would have terrified him. There were no visible steps, but a stream of loose earth and rocks along the fall-line, spilled first over the north lip of the ledge where he had been deposited, then descended rapidly to a stony cove with a chaos of broken planks and pulleys once capable of lifting a small boat out of the water. There was no boat today, nor was there access. He could not trust the way down, and even if there had been stairs, all possibilities were governed now by new rules that said that cliffs are not stable. He also saw no way up. It seemed he really would have to find a path through the underworld, if he was to ever return to the land of the living, such as it was.
When he finally turned toward the darkness and risked the narrow passage, the news was better than he could have hoped for, at least on the lesser point of whether he would be starving anytime soon. Where the cave opened up, he was not surprised to see evidence of habitation; he was surprised to see evidence that monks and pirates each had taken their turn in the cell, though it was hard to know who was resident last. In many ways it boasted finer ecclesiastical trimmings than his little church up above. But, more importantly, the furnishings included a case of liquor and other boxes with cans of fruit, jars of olives, and tins of fish. There was honey from Kalamata. Several unopened boxes of crackers may have been old, but were worth the risk. He tore into one, opened a jar of olives, took as deep a breath as possible, and broke his fast.
After an intense (and careful) meal, during which he was forced to stop more than once so that he could let out a groan of tearful joy (and a few tears associated with the sharp pain of loose and missing teeth on his wounded side), he finally allowed himself to take a break; he turned with a mad grin and oily chin to the alcohol. Here he was not so lucky. The case was filled with tsipouro, a Cretan moonshine made from grape mash left over after all the good is wrung out of it. He chose gratitude, and drank in several deep swallows, grimacing as the medicinal spirits washed over his wounds.
When his belly was full and warmed, he began to survey the room.
It was lived-in, and rich with byzantine details. There were colorful woven rugs laid across the floor, and another hung from the ceiling to drape over a low, rough shelf on the north wall. There were brass candle-holders, censers, and other accessories. Toward the back of the cave was a wooden box with faded beer slogans on the outside (“Το Υπέροχο Ποτό!”) and old prayer books on the inside (υπέροχες λέξεις). Two icons centered the altar: the Lord, and the Theotokos, the tender one, Ἐλεούσα.
Shame returned to him: his last interaction with a holy icon had ended in violence. But he felt reassured by these two that the windows into heaven were still open – he smiled weakly and made a mental note, this time, not to touch the art. This Christ was a surprise: there was a kind of charming innocence to it. As an icon, it was rougher, but the image was more playful. It was painted by an artist who was clearly no master of the form, but who also, clearly, had something to say.
The icons sat on iron easels along the carpet-lined shelf. Brass incense burners bookended the altar and a small six-sided wooden box held a stash of resinous olibanum. Though there were no frescoes on the walls, it was a colorful room, with the feel of life in it, especially when the sun was in the west. Apart from the pirate’s stash, there were baskets with some old bread. Salted fish hung near the entrance.
In an alcove past the tiny library, the floor was worn in ways that suggested a long history of reclining men. Who were they? At one end of the blanketed bedchamber a marble box held a tarnished metal cross, crusty amber beads from an unstrung kompologia, and bones – the collection indicating the presence of at least one priest, this one long gone.
As for the other tenant? It was only relatively recently – a matter of a few hundred years – that the pirates of Mani began to hide out in caves along the western cliffs, and there were signs of their chaotic hermitage everywhere. The pirate who’d climbed to this cave had the respect to keep the place clean, and the altar organized for worship. But, how could it be that this scoundrel served the spiritual needs of the parish, while pillaging the yachts of tourists on the open water? How did the man reconcile these two parts of himself?
Or was it in fact two men? Arpaxos considered the surprising possibility that the priest and pirate lived side-by-side. Could they have shared this room, the holy man and the villain? He smiled and took another drink. The Mani conundrum. One thing he knew: the pirate would have been the only parishioner to the old monk. Who else could find their way to this retreat? You either climbed from the hidden cove below or were cast from above like Satan.
A week passed in the hole. Arpaxos made some enthusiastic attempts at finding a way up the slope. Climbing along the runout, which was still active with a drizzle of little stones and dirt, was really out of the question. That there used to be a way down started to make a little more sense when he pictured the descent spanned by a series of ladders, several of which he could now pick out dashed on the rocks below.
The tiny flow of water, which first alerted him to the opening in the side of the mountain, ran along the south wall of the cave via a roughly carved channel in the floor. At the rear of the cell, closer to the source, water pooled into a round basin that reminded him of the stone hollow at the rear of the cave on Patmos, believed to have cradled the head of St. John. The pocket before him now contained no obvious prophetic treasures, only distracted the current briefly, until it spilled over the rim and continued its journey to the sea below.
He himself became distracted by the stream, it being the only dynamic feature in the place. He dug his way back toward the source and cleaned the basin of a decade’s accumulation of silt. He spent hours contemplating the long journey taken by the river through the dark before it escaped the mysteries of the underworld to pass through his cave. He fell into a reverie. The water was an object-lesson, a map, a timeline of life on the planet: it was the story of humanity, hidden for ages in the dark recesses of time, invisible, pre-historic, until ... as the water gurgled its way into the dim light of this chamber, he saw the beginnings of human self-awareness – a flurry of activity following what had been an extended prologue. The carved basin, which slowed the stream for a spin before releasing it, was like our first efforts to capture a history, to shape a narrative, to help us remember how we got here. But any attempt to resist the now quickening passage of time could only be momentarily successful, before the living flow of history breaks free to spill into a narrowing channel and race toward the brightening light, unconstrained, authoring new and more fleeting stories until finally we escape the dimness of the cave to bask in the enlightenment of the present moment, under the open sky. Arpaxos recognized, with little emotion, that the stream, like humanity, was doomed after only a short time under the sun to pour over the edge of the cliff and disappear into the endless sea.
Nobody who knew him would have been surprised at this obsession with wringing philosophical meaning out of the simplest things, nor that the results of his explorations tended to be depressing. On the other hand, there would have been some surprise to learn the number of hours he spent launching tiny leaf-boats downstream for an epic series of races, during which he served in the dual roles of competitor-champion and exuberant announcer.
Some of the mystery of the previous tenants was solved with the discovery of a burial mound concealed behind some bushes and small trees to the south where his ledge narrowed. The site was covered by soil and rocks, not very long ago by the look of it. Atop the mound lay a charcoal portrait made on a plank of wood. Arpa guessed that the monk, whose face it was, had been buried by his roommate. But where had that one gone to die? Why did he not stay? Probably this was not his only home: maybe he’d returned to a family who believed he caught fish for a living. Arpaxos wanted to believe the man got his reunion, and hoped he’d found peace after all. The thought of a good end brought his attention back to the portrait. There was great love in it, the face obviously well-known to the artist in life. Unique features were detailed with care – the delicately sketched lines a map of one man’s ministry; it was no caricature. The overall impression was of a vitality and connection, revealing much about the last secular assignment of the priest, who must have thought he was meant to live out the final years of his life in solitary, isolated prayer. The portrait, made by the pirate, said that the monk did not hesitate to meet the need at his threshold.
Arpaxos had been able to stretch his provisions, but now as the boxes emptied he was forced to contemplate the end of the food, and this had the predictable effect of making him thoughtful. This was challenging. He found himself thinking about the wider world and he was tempted to imagine how others might be facing their final days. Arpa had not been very impressed with humanity in the end. His perspective was colored by memories of the troubled journey from Athens through Corinth and into Mani and of being threatened, beaten, and regarded with mistrust (was it easier or harder, knowing that he deserved it all?). The tone of these memories became darker still if he reached further back to recall years that included the revealed doom of the species, the death of his father and sister, and the loss of Eva. This final loss was the most complicated. She had been taken, but was not gone, really. Everyone had losses to grieve at the end. But how many people in the world faced this uncanny grief? ... That their greatest love be taken from them, that they would face their last days alone not knowing where their love had gone, unable to truly grieve because that one had been selected by some mad lottery to live forever in a hidden place, away from everything and everyone. There was simply no way to share that burden. If she had only died, he could lean on his neighbor and weep. But how do you share the story that you also suffered loss ... but that your beloved had not died, would not die, and would probably one day bear witness as the last of the great temples of humankind finally become dust. There could be no sympathy for Arpaxos.
He did not know where she was, but if his dream was any indication, she was currently out there, somewhere, making the lives of the Men in White Coats miserable. That was some consolation. But his secret pleasure was short-lived. Eva’s face appeared in his imagination and, with a familiar sideways look, rebuked him for his cynicism, and for his reductive judgement of her and the rest of it. She always demanded more from him. More thought. More care. More of his humanity. He couldn’t help but soften.
And it was at this moment that the world closed the final distance, confronted him, ready to make its rebuttal against all his dismissive judgements. Now, his great catalogue of antagonisms was crowded by other memories, long suppressed, of frightened faces looking to him for understanding, for comfort, or for hope. He recalled a boy, about Evie’s age, behind the church in Gytheion. The boy – he remembered him clearly – was broken, lost, and searching for something in Arpaxos, but would have been disappointed. At the time, Arpa felt anger at the solicitation. And if he was angry, it was because he was the wounded dog who would not permit himself to be moved, but growled at any hand, however harmless; he acknowledged this with something like remorse, but he wasn’t sure he was quite ready to rewrite his history: he tried to push the thought out of his mind, before he’d have to consider what this boy would have seen in his eyes.
But here at the honest end of things, these thoughts would not be pushed out. He felt the least he could do was offer a prayer for those who had been made to face the slammed and locked door of his spirit. But he wasn’t able, after all – he felt too great a burden; what could he say? Again, he tried to retreat from the pain. But if he truly had nothing to offer out of his own broken spirit, a secret part of himself resolved to permit some prayer, from outside, to come to him. He could only allow it after turning away ... as if the keeper of the castle drew all the bridges up, but left a small gate unguarded, so that only the invader need ever know that the king wanted nothing more than to be overcome.
