CHAPTER 10:  Crete

I’m startled by lively bouzouki music (Zorba the Greek) from the loudspeaker, accompanied by a woman’s voice welcoming us to Crete. I grab my pack and run up on deck in time to see the tiny island of Dia drift by followed by an outcropping of Crete itself. Straight ahead is the dark face of the buildings of Iraklion, deep in shadow. We dock just at sunset, but the waterfront is deserted except for taxis and those coming to pickup passengers. Iraklion is a large city, over 70,000, but the entire island has a population of only 500,000.

I consider taking a taxi but decide to walk to the center of town which looks to be only a hundred meters or so up a gentle incline. Darkness descends on the city as I enter, stooped like an old hunchback under the weight of my pack. In the center of town people are everywhere, and the small one-way streets are crowded with cars. But I sense a friendliness here I've not felt anywhere else. A couple of people actually make eye contact and return my smile. It’s a hustling-bustling city without a sign of a tourist. I try to follow the city map in my guidebook, but the maze of dark unmarked streets and alleys makes it impossible.

I look for a hotel or pension standing among the rapidly-moving pedestrians, feeling out of place with my huge pack. I’ve seen no one with a backpack since I left dock. Finally, I see a sign for the Hotel Mediterranean. A room is twice what I can afford, but my pack feels like it weighs a ton. I take the elevator to the second floor. The elevator doors in Greece don’t move back and forth laterally but swing in and out like a normal door. The elevator cannot move with the door open or it will be crushed. My room is the first I’ve stayed in which is carpeted. It’s a large room with dim lights, a bathroom with a curtain for the shower (another first), two single beds pushed close together, white sheets and pillowcases, bright green blankets.

I have a quick dinner, mousaka again, in a little restaurant just off a huge crowded market one block from the hotel. I also order French fries and watch horrified as the cook lowers the basket of already-cooked potatoes into the grease to warm them and pours them onto my plate. My food floats in grease. After the indigestion I experienced at Corinth I'm  in no mood for the grease-plate and have to pick over my food.

I crawl into bed early as a French horn blows from far off accompanied by an occasional firecracker. I hear several people practicing music instruments. My hotel must be next to a school. After an hour of badly played bits of music by several soloists, the entire orchestra plays one long song then quits. The French horn continues its lament, a stark presence superimposed on a background of street noise.

This evening when I walked the tight, labyrinthine streets, I saw evidence in the tourist shops and markets of the primary symbol of ancient Minoan society, the bull. This aspect of Greek mythology, which I’ve always disliked, may have more to say about me than I’ve cared to admit. It’s the seductiveness of this friendly city that suddenly makes the bull seem palatable. The myth of the Cretan bull goes all the way back to Europa.

In Thebes I encountered the myth of Kadmos, Europa’s brother, who left home in Phoenicia to search for his sister but was told by Apollo to found a city instead. She had been kidnapped from her home in Tyre by Zeus and brought to Crete. When Zeus appeared to Europa, who was playing in wildflowers at the edge of the Mediterranean, he came as a beautiful white bull. Ovid describes Zeus’ seduction of her:

And the king’s daughter looked at him in wonder,

So calm so beautiful, and feared to touch him,

At first, however mild, and little by little

Got over her fear, and soon was bringing flowers

To hold toward that white face, and he, the lover,

Gave kisses to the hands held out, rejoicing

In hope of later, more exciting kisses.

Is it time? Not quite. He leaps, a little playful,

On the green grass, or lays the snowy body

On the yellow sand, and gradually the princess

Loses all fear, and he lets her pat his shoulder,

Twine garlands in his horns, and she grows bolder,

Climbs on his back, of course all unsuspecting [1]

The next thing Europa knew, she was in Crete and pregnant with a child, a child who would one day rule the island as king. She named him Minos. These two branches of the Agenor line, Kadmos and Europa, unite the mythology of Crete with the Greek mainland. Europa's line of descent would lead directly to that of Agamemnon and Menelaos. A single visit to Crete by Menelaos would setup the circumstances that led to the Trojan War.

Many of my earliest childhood memories are of heifers and bulls. My father was a dairyman and an artificial inseminator. Many times I saw him in the barn with a single cow in the stanchions. He would have one arm up her rear end and with the other, slip a long glass tube into her vagina. He inserted the tube so far I wondered if it would poke out her mouth. The tube had a little rubber ball on the aft end which he squeezed to spurt semen into her.

I remember a bright sunshiny day in the middle of summer when I was eleven. I looked out over the corral into the neighbor’s pasture where his herd of heifers and a lone bull ran free. I was afraid of that bull, but sometimes I stood back from the fence and threw clods at him. He would glaring back at me, aloof and unimpressed. I remember the huge bulk of him, the rippling muscles in his neck and shoulders and his snorting as he kicked dirt over his back, the dust billowing and fogging. He was the epitome of arrogance, aggression, anger.

The bull approached a heifer, put his nose to her rear end and as she moved away, he took a few fast steps and mounted her. His front hooves hung limp at the sides of her shoulders, pawing uselessly at the air. His huge bulk engulfed her. Then I saw his blood-red shaft, long thin and pointed, emerge from the tuft of hide and hair at the bottom of his stomach. It was longer than I could have ever imagined, at least three feet it seemed and already dripping. It flashed along her side, probe her rear end, searching seemingly with a mind of its own then entered her. As his hind quarters churned to keep up with her slow trot, I wondered how hot she must be inside, how slick and pulsating. His nostrils opened, turned outward in tremendous snorts, his hips churning. He was a locomotive, a steam engine of sexual energy, thrusting deeper and deeper. He mounted her many times. It was like a mystery, his throbbing shaft solving the mystery inside that womanly presence. His huge pink testicles swung from side to side like the clapper of a bell, their ring tolling for my own awakening sexuality.

After Zeus kidnapped Europa and brought her to Crete, she had a child she named Minos. Since Minos was a mortal with a divine father, he claimed divine right to the throne of Knossos, the kingship which ruled all the kingdom’s of Crete. To illustrate his divine right, he bragged that Poseidon would do anything he requested. He prayed for the god to send him a bull which he promised to sacrifice. Immediately a beautiful bull appeared from the sea. Some say it was the same bull who brought Europa from Tyre to Crete. But Minos thought the bull was so beautiful, he couldn’t sacrifice it and substituted another. As revenge, Poseidon made Minos’ wife Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. To satisfy her passion, she had Daedalus, the consummate Cretan artisan and follower of divine Hephaestus, build a model of a cow covered with hides, and she hid inside. Minos’ bull was attracted by the artificial heifer, mounted her and thus satisfied Pasiphae’s passion. Subsequently, Pasiphae gave birth to the Minotaur (Minos’ Taurus), which had the body of a man and the head of a bull. As for the bull who had fathered this monstrosity, Minos gladly got rid of him when Herakles was ordered to bring the bull to the Peloponnese as the seventh of his ten labors.[2]

As far back as I can remember, my father had me help him milk the cows. For a cow, being milked can be an unsettling experience. First she is forced to stick her head in a stanchion which is clamped tight to keep her from moving. Then her udder is washed with a warm rag and the milking machine, that pulsating, throbbing suction machine, is attached to her four teats. Some cows are nervous, the hide on their back twitching and shimmering. My father taught me how to soothe them, to rub them on the flanks and speak softly. He also beat them with 2x4’s and shovels, but not as a part of his intended instruction. My father never got along with the cows, but when he left the barn they always calmed under my kind attention and care. They liked to be touched, and their hide was particularly soft and sensitive in their flanks. Their teats were hard and puckered at first but became soft and pliable after washing. Heifers are warm creatures. I’ve always seen them as mothers. I fed their calves with a bucket of their mother’s milk. So I can understand Pasiphae’s affection for the bull if not her literal sexual passion.

Heracles took the bull off Minos’ hands, but that wasn’t the end of Minos’ troubles with him. Minos had a son, Androgeus, who grew up at Athens. Though Heracles took the bull originally to the Peloponnese, the bull wandered across the isthmus of Corinth into Attica where he plundered and killed. Aegeus the king of Athens sent Minos’ son to Marathon to kill the wild bull. But the bull got the best of Androgeus, killing him instead. When Minos heard of his son’s death, he declared war on Athens. Crete could not subdue Athens but would not quit waging perpetual war. Aegeus wanted the war ended and asked Minos to state his demands for peace. Minos demanded a tribute of seven young men and seven virgins every nine years to feed the Minotaur.

In the meantime, young Theseus came from Troezen in the Peloponnese to Athens searching for his father, Aegeus, the king of Athens.  Aegeus didn’t recognized Theseus and fearing him, sent him to kill the wild bull of Marathon, expecting him to also be killed. But Theseus killed the bull. Aegeus then recognized Theseus’ sword as the one he left with Theseus’ mother and realized Theseus was his son.

Two tributes had been paid to Minos for the Minotaur, but when it came time to pay the third, Theseus asked his father to let him be among the seven young men because he believed he could kill the Minotaur. After all, he had killed the Minotaur’s father, the wild bull of Marathon, and now he would get his chance at the son. Theseus had already cast himself as a traditional Greek hero by following in Heracles’ footsteps. Theseus had killed beasts, monsters and outlaws when he was on his way from Troezen to Athens to find his father. But killing the Minotaur would not be easy. Minos had been so ashamed that his wife gave birth to the monstrous Minotaur, he had Daedalus build a Labyrinth to hide and imprison it. No one who entered the Labyrinth ever came out.

When Theseus came to Crete, he must have docked close to where we docked this evening because he was on his way to Knossos, just as I am. That center of the ancient Minoan civilization is just a few kilometers from here. I’ll see Knossos tomorrow. The Minoans were a peace-loving people known for sophisticated art and embellished architecture. The ruins of the Minoan civilization were discovered by a Greek merchant appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos. He interested Schliemann in his find, and Schliemann tried in 1890 to buy the land for excavation but could never consummate a deal. Sir Arthur Evans, the keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, England finally bought the land and started excavating in 1900,[3] immediately uncovering the ruins of Knossos. Until Kalokairinos’ and Evans’ finds, no one knew that the Minoan civilization actually existed. References in ancient Greek literature to Knossos, thought fictional, were once again shown to have a basis in fact. The Minoan civilization was even more ancient than the Mycenaean and may have had a paternal relationship with it. It lasted for 1500 years, from 2600-1100 BC.[4]

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I wake at midnight with the French horn still blowing, but alternating with male voices, tenors raised for only one note, another horn blast, a firecracker. A chant. The mousaka weighs on my stomach like a ball of sulfuric acid and each horn blast turns the heat up a notch. Another noise, close by, a sound like that of a giant washing machine scrubbing a giant’s clothes.

Finally, the scrubbing noise stops and so do the horns, male voices and firecrackers. I only hear the low rumble of sparse late-night city traffic and the creaks and thumps of the man in the room above moving about. Silence in a Greek city.

 

3 Nov, Wednesday

I wake at daybreak after dreaming of my older cousin who helped get rid of Fred before my father killed him. I was arguing with my cousin about his smoking. He died at the age of forty-two from cardiac arrest. Also present in this dream of dead people was my aunt (my mother’s younger sister), who died at the age of forty-five from an enlarged heart, and my uncle who had several stays in an insane asylum. My uncle also died recently. The last time I saw him, he was crawling around on all fours like a dog because of arthritic knees. My mother, who is still alive, was also in the dream and quarreling about me to my uncle. They were sitting around a table on the lawn of my great great grandfather’s plantation in the South. I was sitting nearby arguing with my cousin and somewhat bemused at all this negative attention while picking fish from nets as the fishermen had done yesterday on the main street of Fira.

Many of the ancient heroes descended to the Underworld. Orpheus, Odysseus, Theseus, Herakles. Orpheus went to retrieve his wife, whom he couldn't live without. He was unsuccessful. Odysseus went to consult blind Teiresias, who was the only mortal with an unclouded mind in the Afterlife, to find out how to get home. Theseus went to help a buddy steal Persephone from Hades. Herakles went to save Theseus. What I was doing there I'm at a loss to say. Perhaps I was just fishing for souls to comment on this journey into my own mythology. They weren't openly hostile, but I can't say they were too pleased either.

---

I catch the bus to Knossos and enter the site through a long tree-shrouded walkway with a statue of Sir Arthur Evans standing in shadows. Evans used some artistic license resurrecting the ancient ruins, consequently they are gorgeous if unrealistic. The ruins are a maze of partially- reconstructed stone buildings, walls and stone-paved courtyards surrounded by fir trees and rolling hills.

King Minos’ palace was a huge structure built on several levels with flat roofs and bright-red columns, stone walls. “Sacred horns,” a large two-pronged sculpture representing a bull’s horns, lined the roofs of many buildings. Only one of these sacred structures has been re-erected and stands at the edge of the courtyard. Many of the sculptures found here depicting Minoans are with arms upraised in salute or welcome, a rather startling resemblance to the horns. I remember the terracotta sculptures I saw in the museum in Thebes. The resemblance indicates a connection between ancient Thebes and Knossos, as one might expect from mythology.

The myth of the bull here on Crete carries special significance, one not evident. First, the bull is Zeus the kidnapper, then one sacred to Poseidon and finally, one in human form, a half-man half-beast monstrosity born of a woman's base passion for an animal. And another god of the island looms in the background rather unnoticed. It's Dionysus, with his ability to transcend the boundary separating mankind and nature. Dionysus was at one time transformed by jealous Hera into a bull. He was also at one time human, thus transcending the boundary separating mankind from the divine. 

The main Minoan god was female:

On the Greek mainland, I encountered ancient religious sites which were wrestled from the Mother Earth goddess, Gaia. At Delphi Apollo killed the Python which guarded her temple; and in Olympia, Mt. Kronion originally housed the sanctuary of Gaia and later Hera before the temple of Zeus was built. Minoan society didn’t have a heritage of war like that of the great one against the Trojans to spur an oral tradition. But the peace was shattered by the Minoans connection with the Mycenaeans. Only through Crete’s external conflict with the Mycenaeans, the war between Athens and Knossos, do we retain any of its mythology.

But who was this snake goddess? And did she have a mortal manifestation? Do the ancient myths tell us about this woman with the bare breasts?

... a contest or game involving young men and girls and a bull. It required exceptional dexterity and daring (they grasped the horns of the bull, executed a double somersault on its back and lept to the ground on the other side) and frequently became dangerous.[6]  

The games occurred in conjunction with their religious festivals, but the bull was not sacrificed. Remembering my own experience with bulls, I can’t imagine having the courage to grab a bull’s horns and propel myself up on its back.

But the association of Dionysus with the bull here on Crete might have made all the difference.

Further on, I see the throne room of King Minos. What is most striking is the throne’s modest size, that of a kitchen chair. The small armless alabaster throne is against the east wall which sports a large fresco of griffins lying among reeds. Stone benches line the walls.

At the other end of the room, or antechamber, a lustral basin rests in the center of the floor. Minos established law in Crete through a system given him by Zeus at about the same time God gave Moses the Ten Commandments. Minos was known as the most just ruler in the ancient world.

Among the archaeological finds here at Knossos is a beautiful black sculpture of a bull’s head with gilded gold horns, eyes of crystal and a muzzle of mother-of-pearl. But I see no sign of the intricate Labyrinth made by Daedalus to hide the Minotaur.

While sitting at the edge of the stone-paved central court, suddenly a group of highly agitated people enter, hurrying toward the exit. They separate a little and I see someone on a stretcher. I ask a small Englishman sporting a gray mustache and pipe what’s going on, and he tells me the old lady collapsed from the heat. It is warm today, the sun glaring from above and reflecting hotly off the courtyards.

By the time Theseus came to Knossos, around 1270 BC by my reckoning, the place had a heavy Mycenaean connection. Much of the old palaces had been destroyed.

Before Theseus entered the Labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, he knew he must have a foolproof method of finding his way out. In this, he was helped by one of Minos’ daughters, Ariadne. Ariadne had fallen in love with Theseus. She solicited the help of Daedalus, the architect of the Labyrinth, who devised a large ball of thread which she gave to Theseus, telling him to tie the end of it to the entrance and unroll it as he traversed the twisting and turning pathway. This Theseus did, and and started his descent. At the very deepest part of the Labyrinth, he found the Minotaur.

From what I’ve seen of Minoan architecture, I imagine the Labyrinth to be a formidable structure with huge stone doorways, and dark as pitch. Since it hasn’t been found, we can only speculate about its location.

I suppose Daedalus constructed it underground, the entrance in the foot of a mountain. Possibly it has been concealed by centuries of rock slides caused by earthquakes. Perhaps it still lies unfound in the side of Mt. Ida.

My own perception of the Labyrinth has been forever corrupted by my first visit, at the age of six, to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico where my grandparents lived. My grandmother, the daughter of the woman who was born of a surrogate mother, a woman who was forever gardening, sort of an earth-mother, took my hand and led me through the maze of tunnels with stalactites and stalagmites filling the echoing halls and vast stone rooms. Through almost half a century, I still feel my hand wrapped in the warmth of hers. At the bottom in the King's Room, I had a strange, uncomfortable feeling that made me want to get out of there. Little did I realize this was simply my grandmother’s guided tour of territory which would become all too familiar. Many years later, I would experience it again, but with ever increasing intensity, in the underground missile silos, in the Alps. Finally it would come to get me even in my own living room.

I imagine Theseus entering the Labyrinth with a torch and descending through the windings and twisting of the tunnel, walking through dung which increased in depth as he descended.

 As he grew close to the Minotaur, he'd heard him snorting. The Minotaur had been in the Labyrinth at least eighteen years, and though he couldn’t find his way out, he still must have known the far end of his prison very well. He would have known all the sounds of the darkness, and the footsteps of Theseus would have been distinctive, startling and perhaps frightening. In the ensuing battle, Theseus beat the Minotaur to death with his fists. Then Theseus followed Ariadne’s string back to the entrance. 

As a result of my embarrassing episode in Munich, I recognized something strange going on inside me, something not me. During the coming months with the assistance of a psychiatrist, I made a conscious effort to notice more of this hidden part of myself. I, like Theseus, had started my first few tentative steps past the entrance of my own Labyrinth.

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As I exit the site, I stop for a few minutes to watch archaeologists working in a deep trench bounded by ancient stone walls. Three men and a woman work with shovels, picks and rakes, one writing in a notebook. The trees surrounding the edge of the trench are dead and lean threateningly toward the excavation.

I sit beside the street outside Knossos awaiting the bus back to Iraklion while I soak up the beautiful day: bright sunlight, wisps of clouds, a cool refreshing breeze. I wonder about Minos’ and Pasiphae’s reactions to the Minotaur when he was born. If he was so grotesque, why didn’t they simply slit his throat and throw him in the trash? Is it possible the Minotaur wasn’t the grotesque beast he has been made out to be? Did Pasiphae, when she first saw him, fall in love with him? Perhaps even Minos had a sheepish grin of pride. If you’ve ever seen a curly-headed little bull just after birth, and I’ve never seen one that wasn’t curly headed, you’d know they’re difficult not to love and belligerently playful. I suspect he had little horn buds even then. But Minos was ashamed of the Minotaur, so he had him confined in the Labyrinth. In another version of the myth, Minos is the father, thus the name, Minos’ Taurus, Minos’ bull. This makes sense because Minos was born of Zeus who had taken the form of a bull when he seduced Europa. Thus the Minotaur constituted that part of Minos’ own animal nature of which he was ashamed.

A friend of mine once brought to my attention the precarious bond between a father and son who are both second sons. They have suffered the same remoteness from their father, the indignation at the hands of an older brother. My father and I were both second sons. Did he, had he always, equated me with himself? His base self? I’m the only one who came within seconds of being murdered by him.

Here’s the bus back to Iraklion.

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Early afternoon, I sit at the entrance to the market on a bench in the middle of the Plateia near my hotel watching traffic and Greek girls, listening to city noise, cars, motorbikes, busses, trucks.

Behind me, a compact-disk store plays music in accompaniment to the hustle-bustle of the street. A lot of women ride motorbikes, mostly young women. A beautiful woman glides by on one now: tight skirt (nice legs), white blouse and dark brown hair. Olive skin. Straight across the square staring down at me is a gigantic Pepsi sign. The gaudy tasteless ones are always American.

I walk through the market, a pedestrian street jammed with shops, jammed with shoppers. A store at the entrance to the market has vegetables and fruit in boxes all tilted forward for the consumer to get a better look.

He has boxes of lettuce, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, eggplant, green beans, cucumbers, bananas, green apples, red apples, pitiful looking oranges, lemons, passion fruit, packages of dried figs, nuts, spices, bread, herbs. This is just his outdoor display. Inside, he has carrots, turnips, potatoes .... Further on, the best leather goods in Greece hang on the walls of shops: bags, travel packs, women’s purses, men’s purses, wallets, attaché cases. The rich chocolate-brown leather, the sharp acid smell. Huge nets filled with sponges and baskets are suspended on crossbeams above the walkway.

I turn right, down a side street and follow a particularly ripe smell to open boxes of gray fish, black fish, blue fish, big, small, round, flat fish, octopus, squid, shrimp, all fresh, all out in the open air and sunshine. In the front window of a butcher shop I see the full head of a hog from the shoulders forward with all the hair removed, its skin tough and leathery. The slit of a mouth looks particularly thoughtful. And pig’s feet, from their hooves all the way to their knees. Skinned rabbits hang by the fur on their feet. They still have their heads. I see the skinned head of a bull hanging vertically by the neck, a little tuft of black hide and hair on his chin, bulging screaming eyes. Its jaw muscles and the top of its head are blood red, its fat, lard white. This could be the head of a Minotaur.

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Late afternoon, I walk to the bus station and stare up at the schedule on the wall for the bus to Phaestos. It leaves at eight in the morning. I'll have to be up early. The air feels cool and fresh with a slight breeze. The sky is overcast and I feel a few drops of rain. The voice of the athletes from a stadium close by mixes with traffic noise. On the way back to my hotel, I stop to get a spinach pie, a cream pie, four bananas and a kilo of apples. Breakfast, and perhaps lunch. I enter the hotel and take the elevator to the second floor.

When I first started on this journey, I was concerned about traveling in a foreign country alone, and my concern had its origin in an experience which occurred only a few years ago during a hike in the Austrian Alps. I hiked six days, stopping in the evenings at huts, or hüttes as Austrians call them, strategically placed throughout rugged mountains. At the beginning of the trek, a friend of mine from Texas and I stored our street clothes and suitcases at the airport in Zurich and took the train to the station in Bludenz, Austria where we were joined by a German colleague who drove us to the trailhead in Brand. Late that afternoon the three of us started our trek into the Silvretta Mountains in southwestern Austria on the Swiss border. We spent the first night in Douglass Hütte beside an ice-blue mountain lake. My first night’s sleep was uneventful.

The next day was filled with strenuous hiking, the trail going either straight up or straight down. We climbed a snow-covered peak, the Schesaplana, in sparkling sunlight. I felt an unusually strong fear of heights walking the switchbacks up cliffs. I spoke German, emptying my mind of English. And I developed an attitude. I was ill tempered, disrespectful. That night I was exhausted and thought I would sleep like a stone.

The hüttes of the Austrian Alps are huge two-story buildings with a kitchen and dining room on the first floor, a place to dry wet hiking boots close to the heater and barn-like sleeping quarters upstairs, just wood rafters and a roof. I crawled inside a my own sleeping-bag liner and spread two wool blankets over me.

At eleven-thirty I woke so suddenly and from such a deep sleep, I thought someone had shaken me. But the hütte was perfectly quiet and pitch black, and my companions were asleep. I put my head back on my folded-Levis pillow, and tried to sleep, but sensed again that something was wrong. At first I thought someone was in the room, someone evil. I listened closely but could hear nothing. I strained to see, but the ink-black darkness was impenetrable. I convinced myself no one could commit a crime in pitch darkness and settled back to sleep again, realizing quite suddenly that the problem was inside me.

I felt claustrophobic. My sleeping-bag liner felt like a coffin. I had retained a sense of falling from looking down the side of so many mountains. When I closed my eyes, I fell through space. Since I had purposely tried to purged my mind of English, I felt remote from my own language. Even my two companions seemed strangers. I was far from family, country. I heard snoring. It sounded unnatural, inhuman, monstrous.

The six hours remaining before morning were an eternity. I remembered the experience in Berkeley years before when I ran to my uncle and realized I was trapped this time. No where to run. I also realized that visual images were a distraction from what was going on inside me, the grotesque faces, skulls, wide-eyed screaming faces. If I could fill my mind with an image, they would disappear, but I couldn’t because of the absolute darkness. I flipped on my flashlight. The mental effort of forming an image brought me out of my own personal horror show. I shined the light along the wood beams, ran my hand along them for the rough tactile sensation. All was well until I flipped off the light. As I descended into sleep, I woke with a jolt. It wasn’t until five o’clock in the morning, when a pale light infiltrated the room and I heard some restless kids whispering to their mother, that my panic disappeared and I slept.

The writings of Carl Jung talk of the ego and that its two interfaces that allow it to cushion itself from the external and internal worlds. The persona protects the ego from the outside world, allows the individual to present an acceptable face outward. But internally, we face the unknown, the unconscious and its many mythological connections. A female presence stands before the unconscious, a female presence for men and a male presence for women. These are called the anima and the animus. That night, somehow, I had been stripped of my anima, or at least she turned her head, and I viewed directly into the unconscious.

That morning I had a new attitude, and at breakfast I cautiously told my companions of my problem. They were understanding but couldn't relate to the magnitude of the situation. I told them I might have to return to the States, but they smiled and brushed off the comment. As we stood outside Lindauer Hütte adjusting our packs, it started to rain. I donned my bright orange poncho, stood waiting like a Halloween goblin to start the trek, believing I was having an emotional breakdown. And there I was eight-thousand miles from home.

I'd felt trapped in the Alps, trapped in that barn-like structure, trapped in the mountains, trapped in Europe. It would take an eternity in panic-time to get out. When I was at home milking cows with my father, I was trapped in the barn, a real barn, trapped at the far end where the gate closed it off, trapped in that room where he would go into a rage and beat those cows with shovels and 2x4's, cows who were trapped with their heads in the stanchions, jerking against the restraining timbers until I'd think maybe their heads would pop off. He would shout and beat and push, curse the cows, shout orders at me. I didn't know but what at any second he'd turn on me, kill me on the spot.

But it wasn't just in the barn. Though my father was a big man, his presence was even larger. He diminished everything around him in my eyes, at home the chairs and sofa's shrunk in his presence. We had a fifty-acre farm and his persona reached into the corner of the farthest field. Nowhere, ever within myself, could I find a place to hide from him. He filled me up.

Never before, not even the night in Berkeley, had I felt so trapped. In Berkeley I was vulnerable but not trapped. That day as we hiked up the sides of mountains, down the sides of mountains, crossed back and forth over the Austrian-Swiss boarder, inside I was crossing that boundary between sanity and madness. Dionysus, that deity who has the ability to bring insanity into the sane world, was hot on my trail. I felt as though I inhabited the body of another person. I was descending into my own Labyrinth, only unlike Theseus, I didn’t have Ariadne and her golden thread to help find my way out. I had four more days and three nights in the Alps, and already a beaten man.

I’ve felt a little of that terror on this journey, particularly when I was in Delphi where I had a talk with myself. The nagging possibility the problem could return is always there. Every night as I fall a sleep, I wonder if I’ll survive, if I’ll find my way back from the terror of the Labyrinth. But at Delphi I also noticed a sense of centeredness, perhaps of home, my journal provided. It has become more than that. My journal is my traveling companion. I feel strongly that I’m writing to someone, and if anyone ever reads this mess of a narrative, they’ll have played a part in me retaining my sanity on this voyage.

 

4 Nov, Thursday

I wake early, checkout of my hotel and trudge the dark deserted streets to catch the bus to Phaestos. I’ll spend tonight in a small town called Agios Ioannis just down the hill from there. I hope to get a room in a home as I did in Ithaca. Tomorrow night I’ll spend in Matala on the southern Mediterranean coast. Crete is a long thin island, and my trip to Matala will cut it in half.

On the bus to Phaestos, I sit next to the window and a man with a black hair net over his head sits next to me.  He’s constantly moving, and I wonder if there’s something wrong with him. But I notice his movements aren’t random. He’s crossing himself. Sometimes he stops and I think he’s going to be alright but he starts again, as if he’s in a hurry, two, three times he crosses himself. I notice a woman a few seats toward the front doing the same thing. Their motions are synchronized. I try to make some sense of this religious urgency, and something must be wrong. It’s as if every few seconds a life-and-death situation occurs. Finally, I realize my two fellow passengers have religious spasms whenever we pass a church. I lean back in my seat and tell myself to relax.

The countryside becomes rougher, large mountains loom to the sides of the bus and we follow a ravine between. The earth is chalky white and covered with cultivated plots, mostly grape vineyards and vegetable patches. 

After an hour on the road during which the bus empties, it climbs switchbacks, drops me off on a mountaintop overlooking a valley. I ask the bus driver if he goes on to Matala, but he says that’s another bus.

He’s on his way back to Iraklion. I expected a small town around Phaestos, but see none, just a parking lot outside the ruins. The setting of Phaestos is more spectacular than Knossos. To the north, the mountain plunges to the valley floor. Beyond the valley is Mt. Ida where, according to some, Zeus was born in a cave.

Mt. Ida, though it’s many kilometers away, looms over Phaestos. I shoulder my pack and walk through the gate, up the asphalt ramp where I find a visitor’s center with a coffee shop.

The man behind the counter lets me stow my pack in an adjacent room but declines any responsibility for its security. I walk outside, down a ramp where the ruins of the ancient city of Phaestos are spread out in front of me and in the distance the rolling hills covered with grape vineyards and olive trees.

Minos had a brother. His name was Rhadamanthos and he was king of Phaestos, the second most important Minoan settlement in Crete. Phaestos had two palaces.

The first existed from 1900-1700 BC and was destroyed by an earthquake a few years before the volcano on Santorini erupted. The second, built to an even grander scale, existed from 1650-1400 BC.[7]

I descend ancient stone steps, wide enough to serve as theatre seats, overlooking a courtyard used for ceremonies. I walk through a series of stone walls to a second palace with another, larger stone-paved ceremonial courtyard.

Off to one side is a corridor with towering walls and doorways. These were the magazines and workshops central to the commerce of the ancient city which subsisted on agriculture.

One artifact found in these ruins from the early palatial period is most interesting. It’s a clay disk imbedded with hieroglyphic characters arranged in a spiral. The characters were impressed in the wet clay with a punch. This is the earliest form of writing developed in Greece and is called Linear A. Although Linear A has never been deciphered, some believe the disk to be an ancient hymn.[8]Many of the symbols are recognizable as geometric figures: a profile of a man’s head with a Mohawk haircut, a circle surrounding seven dots, a Gumby-like human figure, a walking man, a sunflower, a fish and a duck, among others.

The other form of writing found in ancient Greece, called Linear B, was deciphered in 1953 by a young Englishman, Michael Ventris, who was an architect, but more importantly, cryptographer during World War II. He used statistical analysis to show that Linear B is a hieroglyphic form of ancient Greek.[9]But neither of these pictographic forms of writing were used by the Greeks to record their ancient myths. According to legend, when Kadmos came from Tyre to Thebes, he brought with him the Phoenician alphabet which, centuries later, was phonetically adapted to ancient Greek to record the words of Hesiod and Homer. It’s the same alphabet used today for modern Greek.

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At midday I sit at the bus stop outside the ruins at Phaestos trying to catch a bus to Matala. I’ve talked to a German man who has been staying in the area for the past two weeks, and he says Agios Ioannis has no rooms to rent, so I’ve given up on spending the night close to Phaestos. I’ve decided to go on to Matala on the southern coast, and while I wait for the bus, I enjoy the spectacular view. In front of me the road takes a sharp left turn and descends steeply along the side of the mountain.

In the distance clouds sit in Mt. Ida’s top and puff their white thunderheads into the deep-blue sky, their shadows lying dark over the side of the mountain. I sit on a stone fence in the shade of a fir tree. A gentle breeze blows.

With the view of Mt. Ida I can't suppress thoughts of my trek through the Alps. After my miserable second night in the hütte , we hiked all day and late that afternoon arrived at the Tilizuna Hütte where we spent the night. I made my bed next to a window, hoping to get a little light. And it did help some although I woke frequently. When I looked out the window at stars circling overhead and the rocky landscape with dark patches of pines, I experienced a tremendous loneliness, a sense of abandonment. But I managed to avoid the abject terror of the previous night.

The next night, we spent in the small mountain town of Gargellen, a beautiful sparkling-clean village nestled between heavily-wooded mountain peaks with a loud river rushing through it. I had my own room in a bed-and-breakfast that night, and strangely even though I was alone, I finally got a good night’s sleep. The next day we followed muddy cow trails, stopping now and then at a dairy where a family would offer us fresh warm milk. The day was filled with the dull clank of cowbells, herds of sheep sleeping on the green mountainsides like large white wildflowers.

That night the problem returned. Even in daylight as I entered the upstairs sleeping quarters of the hütte, I felt the panic well up inside me. We stayed in a cramped room with a small window at the far end where I slept against the wall. The tiny room increased my claustrophobia as did sleeping so far from the door. I felt buried. During the night we opened the window, which swung inward pinning me to my bed. I spent another night struggling with myself.

I woke the next morning knowing I wasn’t physically well. After breakfast, we stood outside the hütte in the cold morning air with bright sunlight reflecting off snow, talking to the proprietor and watching a group of mountaineers repel into a crack in a nearby glacier. It was my birthday. I told my friends and they shook my hand and patted me on the back, and we took off for the long hike to the Silvretta Sea where we would catch the bus back to Bludenz. As the day progressed, I felt physically strong but my body seemed to glow. I wasn’t feverish. I simply felt like a neon sign, like there was an out-of-control light source within me. The fanciful reports I’d read of the spontaneous combustion of the human body no longer seemed so laughable. We hiked alongside a fast moving river, the milk-colored water flowing from the glacier dumping into a chalk-white lake. Silt from the glacier, which was grinding away the mountain, colored the water. By the time we got to Bludenz, I had developed dysentery. But my trek through the Alps was over, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Little did I realize, I was now just as vulnerable at home.

---

By mid afternoon, I’m concerned that there will not be a bus to Matala. I’ve been talking to the thin dark-haired German from Berlin and two other Germans who’ve joined us. They’re trying to get a bus south also. All the times on the bus schedule have come and gone and no bus. Gradually we realize there will be no buses from Phaestos to the southern coast of Crete this late in the tourist season. After talking it over, we decide to hitchhike.

I vowed before I left on this journey to not hitchhike. All the guide books discourage it. The young man in the truck who picked me up outside Thebes caught me by surprise, and accepting his offer was an impulse which I did not intend repeating, but here I am with a choice between a ten kilometer walk in the hot sun or accepting a ride.

After trying to flag down several cars, one finally stops. The driver is a German woman, and the man from Berlin talks to her for us. I know a little German, maybe more German than Greek, but not from a cold start and definitely not up to engaging in conversation. I stand off to the side waiting to see if she wants to give us a ride. Finally, the three Germans load their packs into the small car. Obviously I haven’t been invited. I think of catching the bus back to Iraklion. Phaestos could be the end of my visit to Crete. But suddenly the guy from Berlin says something to the woman and motions toward me. She gets out of her car and frowns at me. I’ll hold my pack in my lap, I tell him. Finally, she motions for me to get in, but she’s not pleased.

After five kilometers, the road splits, and since I’m the only one going to Matala, she drops me off, telling me it’ll be easy to catch another ride. “Danke schön,” I say, but she’s already pulling out.

The road to Matala has little traffic, and after waiting patiently for several minutes, I reluctantly shoulder my pack and start the uphill trek. I have five kilometers remaining, two hours of hard hot uphill hiking with the sun in my face. I hear a car coming up behind, so I stick out my thumb, but it whizzes on past. I trudge on. Several cars pass without even slowing at my upraised thumb. I think that the road must start downhill soon because the sea must be very close, but it doesn’t. Then I wonder what the hell’s my hurry anyway? Why am I killing myself? From the shoulders up, I’m drenched in sweat.

I stop and look around, finally realize what a treat it is to be in the absolutely gorgeous Greek countryside. Here I’ve been clumping along with my head down, feeling sorry for myself. Though my load is heavy, I’ve several hours to make it to Matala. This is my first country hike in Greece. Why not enjoy it? The sun is low on the horizon, but it’s not yet four o’clock. I throw my pack to the ground and sit on it, staring across a small meadow banked by golden rolling hills. I have to laugh at myself. Off to the west between two hills, just below a bank of clouds, I see the Mediterranean, just a slice of sea water. I'm close to my destination after all.

The meadow is decorated with sparse trees and brush. Light brown grass and patches of volunteer grapevines cover the hillsides, their yellow leaves glowing in sunlight. To the right, up the other side of the meadow, small patches of olive trees stand in the white plowed earth. Mt. Ida, with clouds resting on its  top, looms over us. In front of me is a small herd of sheep. A black-eyed ewe stands watching me, her two white lambs nursing on each side of her with their back ends pointed toward me, their tails twirling furiously like little propellers as they suck and butt her flanks. I no longer bother to stick out my thumb as the occasional car whizzes past. I’m content to remain here soaking up the view while I write in my journal.

Two thousand years ago, St. Paul passed Matala on his way to Rome where he would eventually be executed. The Alexandrian grain ship on which he sailed would not ordinarily take a route south of Crete, but sailing after the middle of September was dangerous, and it was already well into October.[12] Hoping for better weather, they sailed along the southern coast of Crete and put ashore at the harbor of Fair Havens to the east of here which turned out not to be a good place to winter and set sail again, trying for another port further west on the Cretan coast. But when they rounded the tip of Cape Matala, sailing the same black water which is in front of me now, a fierce wind blew them out to sea, and they didn’t reach land until they ran aground at a small island south of Sicily. Prior to this ill-fated voyage to Rome, Paul had visited many of the islands which are on my itinerary: Rhodes, Samos, Chios. He also spent a considerable amount of time in Ephesus and Troas, where the ancient city of Troy is located. Even though Paul knew he was sailing to his execution, he provided the strength the crew relied on when they panicked because of the bad weather. Perhaps tonight I'll spent my time in Matala, that safe haven that eluded Paul.

I do want to get to Matala before dark, so I reluctantly shoulder my pack and resume my uphill hike. By the time I round the top of the last hill, I’m again sweating profusely. The small  town of Matala lies before me at the edge of the sea. Matala is built around a horseshoe cove with chalky-tan cliffs on the left and right. I follow a shaded street off the main road to a pension. After negotiating unsuccessfully with the woman running the place, I take the room anyway and throw my pack to the floor. Then I walk outside and across the street to get a bottle of cold water.

---

I’m alone on the dark beach sitting with my legs folded on coarse sand at the edge of the Mediterranean listening to the relentless surge of waves. Before me, the cove is dressed in darkness.

I’ve brought my journal and flashlight, so I can write in the dark. This is the cove where Zeus came ashore with Europa on his back. I imagine him rising up from the black sea in front of me, first the sharp tips of horns, then the massive curly head and shoulders, a look of hatred on his face to see me sitting here when he had wanted to be alone on the beach with Europa.

A wave washes across the sand every five seconds. On each side of the cove, pale-white cliffs dimly lit by a nearby Taverna bound the sea. The cliff on my right is pocked with dark caves, which were inhabited and used as tombs five thousand years ago. Above, the Milky Way spreads across the heavens. I trace the tail of the Little Dipper to the North Star. Behind me, Sirius burns bright and that fuzzy patch of stars called the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, rises above the horizon. Only six stars in the tiny constellation are visible, the seventh Merope has paled because she blushes from the shame of marrying a mortal.

Thirty-two hundred years ago while the Greek fleet was stalled out at Aulis on the mainland awaiting favorable winds to sail to Troy, Agamemnon watched Sirius traverse the heavens as he dealt with insomnia caused by his decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. Agamemnon was no astronomer, and it was an old attendant who enlightened him:

AGAMEMNON:        What star can that be, steering his course yonder?
ATTENDANT:           Sirius, still shooting o’er the zenith on his way
                                   near the Pleiads’ sevenfold track.[10]

Just as Sirius and the Pleiades have stalked the heavens for the last three millennia, always circling overhead, so my daughter’s disappearance, and the part I played in it, ever stalks me. I hear it now in the sound of waves, like death lapping at the shore of life. Sophocles used a similar metaphor to described Oedipus’ misery after learning he had killed his father and married his mother:

Concussive waves make stream

This way and that in the gales of winter:

It is like that with him:

The wild wrack breaking over him

From head to foot, and coming on forever...[11]

I look out to sea where the world disappears in darkness and listen to the Mediterranean swashing at the shore, watch the ancient caves in the cliffs close by and the spread of sprinkled stars overhead. I sit here alone on the beach, the pale beam of my little flashlight on my page. In a grove of trees nearby, a group of people gather about a campfire. Their shiny faces reflect firelight, and I smell the smoke, hear the murmur of their voices, the occasional burst of laughter. I would like to join them but instead sit here in the coarse sand not a meter from where the waves whoosh against the shore, looking out into the blackness beyond the cove. Why do I not join them?

I spend so much time alone, so preoccupied. Following the episode in the Alps, I was afraid of what was going on inside me. Like Theseus descending into the Labyrinth, I was descending within myself and what I found was frightening. A couple of years ago, as I sat in my own living room on a sunshiny Saturday morning, minding my own business so to speak, I quite suddenly became frightened. At first I thought the stereo was too loud, but when I shut it off, the silence was even worse. My palms were dripping sweat. I was emotionally out of control again. I started to call my psychiatrist, who had become a father figure to me and with whom I had been sharing these extraordinary experiences but remembered he was out of town and would not be back for three days. I started to go to the next-door neighbors, but thought that if I told them they might have me committed. I felt more than lonely. I felt abandoned, incapable of taking care of myself. I thought that maybe I should be hospitalized. That night I dreamed I had gone to see my psychiatrist but that I got lost and couldn’t find his home. I wondered aimlessly. Finally I found his home but he had company and I couldn’t barge in. Later when I returned, he was gone. I was lost as a child gets lost, unable to find his way home. Never in my life have I felt so alone as in that dream. In the coming days even though every tick of the clock, every second was an eternity, I somehow survived until Tuesday when he returned.

For several weeks afterward, I had the feeling I was experiencing my life for the first time, as if I had been absent for years while my life had gone on without me. Walking through my home was a discovery, working as an engineer, a revelation. I was astonished at how I could simulate missile trajectories, present analysis results to a room packed with people, assign work to subordinate engineers. I was discovering myself as if I was another person.

At the same time, my dreams were regressing. Through them, I relived childhood experiences. One of the most profound was a hospital scene with newborn babies all in small beds lined against a glass wall. I was one of them. The series of dreams culminated in one where I was suspended in fluid being sucked through a small hole in a slick membrane into a dark cave. I was overwhelmed with claustrophobia and screaming. Like Theseus I had descended into a Labyrinth. In my dream, at the very end of my descent, I discovered myself in the womb.

My terrifying experiences continued in daylight hours. At times I no longer seemed to be in control of my limbs, my arms worked on their own. I remembered my uncle describing his insanity, how he seemed possessed by another being who controlled his actions. I was afraid of the knives in the kitchen, what my hands might do with them. I became hostile at work, irritable, dissatisfied, conniving, resentful, explosive.

I experienced my descent in two ways. The first was like Theseus, a hero’s descent into the Labyrinth, but in the second, my reference shifted. I was the Minotaur hearing Theseus coming. My terror was hearing the echoing footsteps of Theseus, the murderer, descending the Labyrinth to kill me. And this the truth behind the myth of the Minotaur. We descend into our own Labyrinth, Jung's unconscious, there we find our base selves. The murder we commit is our own.

When I look back on life, I see that my descent has occurred many times. The first, as my father and I descended the hall when he was to load the deer rifle to kill me. The second, when he asked me to go with him down that same hall to beat the dark beast of homosexuality to death with our fists. Another occurred during the slow descent started in the Alps which continued until that Saturday morning at home alone. And now I’ve been on another as I’ve descended to the southern tip of Crete to stare