Dawn at Delphi. Goat bells clustering in
the air like fruit and the whir of doves in flight
were as loud as bees’ buzz in the dried-out shrubs.
So much sensation, sans revelation.
Two days later in Naupoli arak
drew me through antic night and into day.
Penitent, I threaded the sun’s eye at noon,
staggering dazzled up eight hundred worn
steps through the shrill of cidada, squinting
at light warped into waves broken over
bleached stone slabs. Nausea unparalleled!
Yet I clutched at the notion I might strew
my tidings, which would flourish like the clumps
of weeds whose seeds have fallen into cracks.
***
Summer of 1966, touring for the first time with my college buddy and erstwhile room-mate Howard, we made it with Eurorail passes through Italy and on down to Greece. We left the hostel early one morning to visit the oracular site at Delphi, full of beauty but sadly absent of mystery. It was only a couple of days later, after a bout of frenetic drinking, that I had something of a vision, one wrqpped in an awful hangover for which I paid due penitence by ascending under a July sun to the old Ottoman citadel at Naupoli. Let me quote a passage from an older blog on the psychedelic powers of alcohol:
Alcohol is a toxin, as professional busybodies remind us everytime they have a chance, as if anyone with a smattering of self-consciousness were not fully aware of this, and from an early age ….
What the puritans do not want us to understand and then say aloud is that the dislocation of experiences and values alcohol wreaks is also sacred in impact, wine and the gods having been linked from ancient times.
Alcohol etches into memory simulacra of the sacramental and nepenthic gestures humans seek in their most vaulted religious and communal rituals, but this potion is readily available on a daily basis, and in portable containers. Though we seek out and pay for alcohol, we do so gratuitously, for no good reason, not because a doctor says it is good for us, as we do compulsively, addictively with the copious output of the pharmaceutical industry, but because we just don’t care about what makes sense, nor what might be the right thing to do.