CHAPTER 3. Delphi.

I’ve hitched only once in my entire life, when our car broke down thirty miles outside of Rawlins, Wyoming, and I hitched back into town leaving my wife and two kids in the car sitting at the side of the road. The hour and a half I was gone were some of the most agonizing moments of my life, but when I returned with a family in a mobile home, my family was safe.

So here I am suffering from one of the worst bouts of insecurity ever, and suddenly a young man asks if I'd like to risk my life for a lift to Delphi. What do I do? I throw my pack in the back of his dirty white pickup and climb aboard. The pickup is full of paint cans, shovels, plastic tubing, cardboard boxes. He scrapes some junk off the seat beside him, and we take off down the road. He drinks coffee from a plastic cup. I would like to know his name and take a chance on my Greek. “Ti einai to onoma sou;” I ask. “Dimitri (Dimitri),” he answers, and I tell him mine which he repeats several times to get the pronunciation correct. But my memorized sentence has given him a false impression. Dimitri comes out with the awfullest mess of Greek I’ve ever heard. I just throw up my hands. “Den katalabeno,” I say, realizing how little Greek I actually know. Thereafter, we use the point and grunt technique highlighted with single words.

I’m pleased to be on my way to Delphi and should be there in an hour and a half. After we get through town, I see the agricultural plane I’ve been watching at a distance for the past four days. I’m still struck by how it resembles the San Joaquin Valley in California where I grew up. The two-lane blacktop road through cotton fields is lined with eucalyptus trees. Cotton has blown from the trucks while hauling it to gins, and white locks lace weeds along the shoulder. Cotton pickers roam the fields, their huge baskets bulging with white fluffiness. Small shops and grocery stores drift past. This would look like home except for the Greek signs.

The sun is bright through the rear window, and off to the right, I watch the sunlit Mountain of the Sphinx drift slowly past on the far side of the plane. To the left, Mt. Helicon bathes in its own morning shadow. Mt. Helicon is the location of the “Fountain of the Horse”, where the goddess Athena once bathed with the nymph Chariclo, Teiresias’ mother. Unfortunate Teiresias chanced upon them and saw Athena naked, her breasts, her bare body:

Those two were bathing and it was the noontide hour and a great quiet held that hill. Only Teiresias, on whose cheek the down was just darkening, still ranged with his hounds the holy place. And, athirst beyond telling, he came unto the flowing fountain, wretched man! and unwillingly saw that which is not lawful to be seen. And Athena was angered, yet said to him: “What god, O son of Everes, led thee on this grievous way? hence shalt thou never more take back thine eyes!”[1]

Teiresias was blinded by the glorious sight of a naked goddess. His mother chastised Athena, and she in recompense washed Teiresias’ ears with water from the spring, so he could understand the language of birds and, therefore, could tell the future. She also gave him a staff of cornel wood, and he walked as well as any man.[2]

The Muses also resided on the slopes of Mt. Helicon where they gave Hesiod, who lived in the 8th century BC, much of what the world knows of Greek mythology and religion and where they taught him “the mastery of flowing song.”[3] From the Muses, he received the story of the origin of the universe and the birth of the gods who rule it. He saw them at night veiled in a glowing mist as they set out for the far reaches of Greece. [ Map_Boeotia ]

Suddenly Dimitri slows, stops at a turnoff going north. He motions for me to get out because he must travel the off-road. We’re at the edge of Aliartos, a small town only halfway to Lavadia, one quarter of the way to Delphi. He tells me to catch the bus on down the road. “To Lewforeion,” he says, pointing toward Aliartos. I’m in a panic wondering how far I have to walk with my fifty pound pack. “Stasi. Einai makria;” I ask. “Oci, den einai makria apo edw,” he says.

Teiresias was buried in Aliartos. He died here after drinking from the Telphusian spring nearby while being brought to Delphi by his captors after the siege of Thebes. He was very old, having lived for seven generations. Manto was taken on to Delphi where she became a priestess of Apollo. The armies of Argos had promised Apollo they would present him with Manto, the fairest of the spoils, if he would allow them to successfully siege Thebes.

To the north is flat country with farm houses scattered among grape vineyards and cotton fields, rolling hills and mountains beyond. Laios and Oedipus both trudged this road 3300 years ago.

Laios’ father, Labdacus the king of Thebes, died when Laios was a child.  Until he was old enough to be king, Laios was sent away to the Peloponnese to be raised. As a young man, Laios became infatuated with his guardian’s son, Chrysippus, kidnapped him and took him to Thebes where Laios then assumed the throne. Chrysippus committed suicide from the shame of being homosexually raped. Laios was credited with inventing homosexuality.[4]

Following Chrysippus’ suicide, Laios married Jocasta. As time went by, Laios and Jocasta remained childless, and he came to Delphi to determine the reason. The oracle told him if he had a child by Jocasta, the child would one day kill him. Laios didn’t like Apollo’s answer and returned twice more to get confirmation. Laios was being punished for the kidnap and homosexual rape of Chrysippus. The curse lasted three generations, thus bringing all the ills on his family which ultimately resulted in the destruction of Thebes.

The part I played in the events leading to my father loading the deer rifle to kill himself is difficult to resurrect through thirty-two years of forgetfulness and memory suppression. I do know that when I mentioned the incident to my mother a couple of years ago, she reminded me, and did so rather heatedly, that my father and I had argued over me bringing a friend home, someone of whom my father strongly disapproved.

I do remember the day. It was warm, perhaps warmer than today here in Aliartos. We had just argued in the kitchen, and I walked out into the living room and turned to look back at him. The sun shone in through the kitchen window on the linoleum floor, and I saw the bright blotch of sunlight behind him. My mother approached through the kitchen doorway, her feet planted in that bright sunlight. It was late July, maybe early August. We were irrigating that day, and through the kitchen window I saw up into the sand patch where glistening mirrors of water striped the cotton field between rows of green plants which were full of red, white and gold blooms. The windows were open, and I heard the whine of a tractor off in the distance as I spoke my words of anger.

Our argument was full of shouting and ill will. I had brought a friend from college home with me, an Englishman, and my father disliked him intensely, wouldn’t allow him in our home. This time he was firm, violent in his opposition to this man who was a few years older than me. My father didn’t say why he didn’t want this man around. He just tried to bully me. I said, if my friend couldn’t stay there, neither would I. “Well, get the hell out,” he said. I walked down the hall to my bedroom, fell on the cool sheets and listened to him clicking the bolt action deer rifle in the next room.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my father suspected something about my friend soon shown to be true. Something soon to cause more trouble in our household.

Finally, the bus to Lavadia.

---

I sit at the side of the street in Lavadia trying to shade my face from the hot sun, which peeks through the sparse leaves of a small maple tree, waiting for the bus. A woman in the kiosk next to where I sit just provided me with the information. “Leoforio, DelfoV. Ti wra;” I asked. She wrote the time on her hand with a ball-point pen. It looked like 72, so I thanked her and walked over here under the maple tree, and now I’m trying to bridge this latest communication gulf.

Europeans write the number 1 with a long line forward at the top so it looks like a 7. After thinking about it, I believe she told me twelve o’clock, noon, forty-five minutes from now. Hopefully I’m at the right spot, but nothing indicates this is a bus stop and no other people are waiting. The traffic on the street is horrendously noisy. Every type of motor vehicle in existence comes through. A two-row John Deere cotton picker just passed blowing hot air and slinging dirt from its huge tire tread, passed right in front of me with a backhoe trailing close behind.

Since I’ve got a few minutes, I drag my pack across the street to a restaurant crowded with cheap tables and folding chairs. I buy a greasy cheese pie at a small bakery at the far end of the room, quickly chase it down with a Sprite and return to street-side to await the bus to Delphi.

In the hills above Lavadia, water from the spring Kryo runs a double stream. One contains the water of Memory and the other, water from the river Lethe. The Lethe runs through the Underworld, where all souls go after death. Lethe means “forgetfulness,” and all those who drink from it forget their past.

The water flowing through fields on our farm came from deep within the earth, pulled to the surface by powerful pumps. Many times I’ve dropped to my stomach, blown foam aside, and drunk a cold draft of flowing ditch water, as if drinking the from river Lethe. We, as a family, never talked about bad things that happened between us, and I lost the connection between the events and the way I felt, particularly those of that fatal summer. After my confrontation with my father, we just forgot about it.

Suddenly a hot-air belching bus stops before me, its loud brakes screeching. A horde of passengers exit, and as the driver unloads luggage, I ask if he’s going to Delphi. “Next bus,” he says and climbs back inside. But just as it starts to move, it stops again and he gets out, grabs my pack without a word, stows it in the hold and motions for me to board. I hope he’s going to Delphi. The bus is almost empty, only one other passenger, an old man.

The bus zips through the agricultural valley of Boiotia and enters another county, Phocis Nome. Off to the right, I see a sign for the road to Daulia. We pass the Cleft Way, where Oedipus killed Laios, at 80 kph. I rise from my seat, my eyes anxiously following the side road as it disappears into a fold between hills. Just a half kilometer up that country road is where Oedipus and Laios met their destiny. I hope to rent a car in Delphi and return to the Cleft Way. For now I’m excited to have passed this close to such a famous site.  

The bus loses steam as it crawls up the southern slope of Mt. Parnassos. To the left across a rapidly expanding ravine, I see Mt. Cirphis, a green-speckled rock of a mountain standing in thick haze. 

To the right, the giant sandstone cliffs of Mt. Parnassos rise rapidly from the edge of the road to tower above us.  The bus slows to a crawl as it snakes through the narrow streets of Arachova, then quickens its pace as we exit.

As the bus negotiates the winding road along the edge of the cliff, I anxiously await my first glimpse of Delphi, the most famous religious site in ancient Greece. I expect a small but sprawling town on the mountainside, a bustling little metropolis inundated with tourists.

We enter a tiny village precariously clinging to the steep slope. The bus zips on through and makes a U-turn at a wide spot in the road, stops at the edge of the cliff. The driver exits the bus. I’m confused. Am I supposed to change buses here? The other passenger, the old man, notices my uncertainty. “DelfoV,” he says. 

This wide spot in the road, a few buildings nailed to the side of the cliff, is Delphi. As the bus driver retrieves my backpack, I look around. Delphi is deserted. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake by planning to get a hotel here? Delphi only has two streets, the one we came in on and the one the bus will return on. Just beyond where the bus stopped, the road continues on to the Gulf of Itea which I can see in the distance.

I shoulder my pack and walk up the deserted street lined with two-story buildings. On the right, the cliff side of the road, I see Hotel Athena. It appears to be much nicer than I can afford, but I enter anyway. The entry way is quiet, unlit and vacant. I wonder if the hotel is closed, but a woman in an apron appears from a hall off to the right. She doesn’t speak English but understands that I want a room, or at least I believe she does, and she’s so glad to see me, I wonder if she thinks I’m a long lost friend.

She disappears and returns with another woman, who runs this place. She’s small, mid thirties, dusty-brown hair and a light complexion, round figured, very professional. She wares a white button-blouse and brown skirt which comes just to the top of her knees exposing her fleshy calves. She tells me a single room is 3000 drackmes ($13). Must not be as nice as it looks, I think.

I follow her down the hall to where she unlocks the door to a sparkling-clean room. I enter and cross the French doors. No one could have prepared me for the view. I take a step back because I immediately sense a little vertigo. The patio is quite small, only enough room for a couple of chairs, has a wrought-iron railing that is the only barrier to keep me from falling off the cliff. I’m confronted with a vast expanse of nothingness. A kilometer away, across the deep ravine, looms Mt. Cirphis. The sound of a great expanse greets me. The valley to the west ends at the Gulf of Itea, its mirror surface glistening in the afternoon sun.

The religious significance of Delphi predates Apollo’s oracle. According to mythology, the site has been revered since primordial times. The stories of Greek heroes like Theseus and Oedipus are not true mythologies but legends occurring in historical times. True mythology is about the gods and comes to us out of primordial time during which the cosmos had its origin.[5]

Zeus, wishing to find the center, the navel, of the world released two eagles, one at the eastern edge of the earth, the other at the western edge. They flew toward each other and met at Delphi where their descendants circle to this day. And an even more familiar myth, that of the flood, has a connection to Delphi. In Greek mythology Zeus destroyed the world by flood, but the famous shipbuilder was not Noah. He was Deukalion, the primordial man. His ship landed not at Mt. Ararat but here on Mt. Parnassos.[6]

In the beginning, the site was the oracle of the Earth Goddess, Gaia, the mother of all things. The priestess of Apollo at Delphi, tells of the matrilineal succession of oracles at the site:

First of all Gods I worship in this prayer  
Earth [Gaia], the primeval prophet; after her
Themis the Wise, who on her mother’s throne--
So runs the tale--sat second; by those own
Accepted will, with never strife nor stress,
Third reigned another earth-born Titaness,
Phoebe; from whom (for that he bears her name)
To Phoebus [Apollo] as a birthtide gift it came.[7]

Themis was Gaia’s daughter and her double. Phoebe was another of Gaia’s daughters and therefore Apollo’s grandmother.

The temple, at the time Apollo acquired it, was guarded by a she-dragon. Apollo, who was still a babe in his mother’s arms, slew the dragon and claimed the site for his oracle:

... the lord far-shooting Apollon shot her  
with a mighty arrow; rent with insufferable pains,
she lay panting fiercely and writhing on the ground.
The din was ineffably awesome, and throughout the forest
she was rapidly thrusting her coils hither and thither; with a gasp
she breathed out her gory soul, while Phoibos Apollon boasted:
"Rot now right here on the man-nourshing earth..."[8]

Apollo was frequently referred to by the masculine form of his grandmother’s name, Phoebus meaning “the Bright One.” The ancient Greek word “puqw” (pytho), from which python comes, means “to rot.”  The priestess who spoke Apollo’s words to pilgrims who came to the site was called the “Pythia”. Apollo’s wish was “to hold dear the lyre and the curved bow and to prophesy for men the unerring will of Zeus.”[9] Thus Apollo didn’t speak his own thoughts but Zeus’ secret council, just as did Jesus for His Father in heaven. Apollo was the divine being who brought light, understanding. Belief in Apollo was a belief in clarity, purity, order and harmony.[10] But Mother Earth, Gaia, never lost her influence. She provided a background for all ancient Greek religion[11] which had its origin in the divine force from which all life flowed.

---

I sit in an ice cream shop at the side of the street supplementing the cheese pita I had for lunch in Lavadia with a cup of chocolate and vanilla ice cream and contemplating the uneasy equilibrium which existed between me and my father following his near suicide following the confrontation over my friend.

I had known Fred for two years at College. He was an athlete as was I. Even though he was in his mid twenties, he seemed to fit in with our post-adolescent crowd. He talked sports and was a long distance runner. He had come to the States from England along with another athlete, a young man about twenty, whom I roomed with in a professor’s home. To cut expenses, the three of us pooled our food money, and though Fred had his own apartment close by, he came to the professor’s home, fixed dinner for the three of us, and we washed the dishes afterward.

After our confrontation, my father backed off about Fred coming to our home. And Fred started coming on his own. Fred had grown quite fond of one of my younger brothers and wanted to take him to Disneyland, a two day trip from my hometown. They would have to stay overnight. My brother was excited about a trip away from home. Fred came to my father and asked for permission. Later, my father said it was like a guy asking if he could take your daughter to a dance. Shortly, my father and I would again stand together in the living room, another life weighing in the balance of my actions. This time it would be Fred’s.

---

For dinner, I have a Greek pizza at a little taverna down the street from the hotel. The crust is flaky and delicious but I swear, the meat is lamb or possibly goat. I’ve been afraid of getting a piece of goat meat ever since I got to Greece. I don’t much care for the smell of goats. But tonight I rather perversely enjoy the thin slices of meat on my pizza while sitting in the dark out on the patio suspended over nothingness watching the sparkling lights of the small towns, Itea, Galaxidion and Pendeoria in the Gulf just south of here. Stars circle overhead while a Greek soap opera blares from the taverna kitchen.

---

During the night, I wake and lie in the dark listening to street noises lofting from below my patio. I feel more displaced here in Greece than ever. Even though I'm doing well with the buses now, an uneasiness about the length of my journey has come over me. The creeping insecurity I felt in Athens and Thebes has returned with new force. My dreams are bothering me. When I woke just now, I was crying and I don’t know why. I’m afraid.

 

12 Oct, Tuesday

I wake early as the rosy fingertips of dawn stretch above Mt. Parnassos, preceded by a pale slice of silvery moon. My dreams have turned violent. Early this morning, I was fighting someone, I don't know whom. He humiliated me, called me “queer.” I waded into him pounding my left jab into his face and absorbing his blows with ease. I belted him with lefts and rights until the blood flowed.

---

While having breakfast in the hotel, I meet two Americans, a woman, Pat, my age and her daughter, Marlene, who is a Manhattan playwright. Pat works for a large hospital in Boston. She has a round pixie-like face with curly brown hair. Both are brunettes, thin, forever smiling. I would like to see the site with them but at the last minute, I lose my courage and back out of asking them to accompany me.

The museum lies to the left of the entrance to the site, and now I know why so few tourists are in the town of Delphi. The site is a hive of buses. Huge tourists buses line the parking lot and zip along the road to and from Athens. None visit the little town.  

I enter by the Sacred Way, the same footpath pilgrims have used for 3300 years. The entire site, though sprinkled with olive and pine trees, is a dry, desolate piece of parched earth. In antiquity, both sides of the Sacred Way were lined with monuments from various city states, of which little now remains. I pass the ruins of a dedication of the Athenians commemorating their victory at Marathon, followed by two others from Argos. 

 All the statues once residing in these stone-lined enclaves have either been destroyed or removed to museums. None of this would have been here when Oedipus and Laios visit the temple, however. They came centuries before.

Where the path curves to the right to ascend the sloping terrace, I pass the remains of stone buildings, which contained treasuries from the Sikyoniands, Siphnians, Megarians, Syracusans, Knidians, Aiolians. 

The path curves to the left, and before me lie the ruins of the temple of Apollo, the heart of the sanctuary.

In antiquity a huge building lined with columns stood here with the inscriptions “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess” which were brought here by seven Wise Men assembled from all over Greece.[12]  

Oedipus came to the Oracle years before Manto became priestess here, and I can well imagine him leaving disillusioned. He'd asked Apollo if the king and queen of Corinth were his real parents, but Apollo ignored his question and instead told him he was destined to kill his father and defile his mother’s bed. Oedipus took heed and instead of returning to Corinth, went to Thebes. Apollo was also called LaxiaV, Laxias, the Oblique One.

Laios had been here three times before[13] and was on his way for the fourth try when Oedipus killed him. Laios wanted to know if the son he had exposed on Mt. Kitheron was still alive, and still sweating his homosexual rape of Chrysippus that had started all his problems. Every time he came, Apollo tightened his grip.

The oracular character of the site was first discovered by an old goatherd, who received the mantic enthusiasm when he happened upon it. His goats also received the spirit, skipping playfully about and uttering strange bleats.[14] The temple smelled unusual:

The site has been occupied since the Bronze Age, though those early inhabitants lived under primitive, Neolithic-like conditions.[16] Mycenaean artifacts were found in the eastern part of the sanctuary.[17] The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, the ruins presently visible are from the 4th century BC. No one knows what it was like in the days of Laios and Oedipus.

Delphi was the oracle of Apollo, not his residence. He resided on Mt. Olympus with the rest of the Greek gods. Originally Apollo only came here on his birthday, the 7th of Bysios (February-March) each year, which was called “the day of Many Utterances.”[18] But during the golden age of the oracle, it functioned whenever Apollo’s attention was detected by pouring water on a sacrificial goat. If the goat shivered, Apollo was listening. If the goat was not consumed in shudders, every limb trembling and the goat emitting quaking noises, the god’s attention was assumed to be elsewhere and questioning the Pythia, useless.

Teiresias’ daughter, Manto, was a priestess, the Pythia. According to Diodorus Siculus, she was a potent force here:

This maiden [Manto] possessed no less knowledge of prophecy than her father, and in the course of her stay at Delphi she developed her skill to a far greater degree; moreover, by virtue of the employment of a marvellous natural gift, she also wrote oracular responses of every sort, excelling in their composition ...[19]

She served as the Pythia 1200 years before Christ. Apollo’s oracle was the most highly regarded in all antiquity. Barbarian monarchs came from as far as Asia Minor and Egypt. Since the gods appeared in person throughout ancient Greek literature, I always thought the Greeks talked directly to Apollo. Such was hardly the case. His word had to be conjured from the elements just as the word of God does today.

Anyone could receive the mantic enthusiasm, but only a perfectly pure person would be “a well-tuned and resonant instrument”[20] for Apollo to “give her soul light to view the future.” [21] The god used the Pythia “in the world of hearing as the sun uses the moon in the world of sight.”[22] The Pythia was an old, pious, peasant woman over fifty, a nobody who was thus beyond reproach. According to some, she was dressed in the attire of a young virgin as she mounted the golden tripod of Apollo that spanned a fissure in the mountain. She would breathe fumes from the fissure, chew laurel leaves, become entranced, convulsed, then mumble incoherently. The male priests interpreted her ravings and provided the answer to the pilgrim in hexameter verse.[23]

 

At her very first remarks it became evident from the roughness of her voice that she was not in control of herself, but like a foundering ship, filled with an inarticulate and evil spirit. Finally, becoming totally hysterical, she raised an unintelligible and fearful shout and rushed for the door...[26]

She suffered a seizure, collapsed short of the exit and died a few days later.

I leave my seat on the hot stone and walk up a flight of steps to the theatre, a symbol that Dionysus was also worshipped here. Dionysus was Apollo’s brother and a welcome presence at his oracle. As a matter of fact, Dionysus was the presiding deity during the winter months. None of the Greek gods or goddesses tried to suppress worship of their compatriots. Apollo was not jealous of his little brother, and this theatre, so close to Apollo’s temple is evidence of their goodwill toward one another.

Beyond the ancient stone ruins of the theatre and temple, the Valley of the Pleistos drops into a dark hazy gorge before rising up as the shadow-shrouded surface of Mt. Cirphis. To the east, the black ribbon of asphalt winds around the mountain toward Thebes. The wind plays with tourists' voices and light traffic on the road far below, turning them into an amorphous whisper, which seems to come from the far mountain. To the west, the mountain falls away to the valley where Itea sits at the edge of the sea. I watch for the eagles that according to legend have circled overhead since Zeus established Delphi as the navel of the Earth, but see nothing.

Apollo was also a healer, and he found the dismembered, suffering and mad Dionysus, and put his pieces in a leather sack. Delphians once believed the dismembered remains of Dionysus were buried here at the temple.[29] Dionysus was not simply tolerated by Apollo. Apollo with his order, logic, and stability needed Dionysus, the god of madness whose realm was eternally appearing and vanishing. Together the two gods signified the whole truth.[30]

I’m surprised to see Pat and Marlene enter the theatre. Marlene walks on stage and after a tentative start, sings a beautiful song from a Broadway play, her resonant voice filling the theatre. The tourists are spellbound. After scattered applause, she leaves the stage and another woman with an operatic voice performs.  

I leave the theatre to ascend further up Mt. Parnassos along a set of switchbacks and sit in the shade of pine trees overlooking the stadium high above the ancient theatre and temple.

The stadium was the site of the Pythian Games which occurred every four years, in the middle of the four year span between games at Olympia. 

The sun gets hotter as I ascend the mountain, but the coolness here in the shade is refreshing. I’ve located a reference to Apollo’s’ other brother who was also a significance presence at Delphi, Hermes. Hermes was Zeus’ herald, scurrying about from place to place on errands for his divine father. But he was also the protector of athletes, and ruled over games and other duly-ordered contests. [31] This stadium is as closely connected with him as the theatre is to Dionysus. 

I ascended through dead yellow grass, past many cracks and fissures where the mountain has crumbled away, and sit the retaining wall of an ancient fortress in shadows a few meters from the base of a shear rock cliff.

A dirt path trails off to my left, leading to a narrows along the face of another cliff where a small bird sits on a rock chirping. Below, the mountain falls away through tall pine trees to the stadium. I hear voices of tourists but can barely see them for the forest. If I tripped and fell here, I would roll forever.

A swarm of ants and a blow-fly keep me company. Ants are eating away the mountainside. A huge bumble bee circles, colored deep black and gold and heavily laden with pollen. Another, then another. I turn my face up to the clear blue sky searching for Zeus’ circling eagles. Suddenly a deafening scream comes out of the east as a jet thunders from behind Mt. Parnassos and streaks out into the Gulf of Itea. My solitude, shattered by a 20th century war machine.

I meet Pat and Marlene again on the street out front of the hotel at early evening and congratulate Marlene on her performance at the theatre today. They already have dinner plans, so I eat dinner by myself at an empty restaurant, just me and the old crone who runs the place, thinking about my ex-wife and daughter. My meal, goaty spinach pie and Greek salad, doesn’t go down well.  

During the evening, I write on my patio sitting in the dark, looking out over the valley at the lights of Itea and the reflection of Galaxidia at the edge of the Gulf. I hear crickets in the grapevine terrace on the level below me, dogs barking down the street and voices of kids as they bounce a soccer ball on blacktop. The couple on the patio next to mine argue behind the partition, reminding me of my wife and me arguing shortly before we separated. I only hear his side of the argument because her voice is so meek. He’s Greek, arrogant and keeps explaining the importance of his heritage, his mission in life, the reason she doesn’t fit him.

I’m anxious to leave Delphi. Day after tomorrow, I’ll take the bus to Patras on the north of the Peloponnese, take a ferry to Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, the world’s most famous traveler, do a swipe across the land mass, ending in Corinth. Then the Aegean islands.

---

During the night, I wake from a strange dream about a TV show, one of the detective dramas. A black man's face fills the screen. He talks to someone not visible, speaks about a suitcase and me losing my job, some matter of life and death. As I watch the screen, a man sneaks up behind me, and I wake with a start.

Hermes was also the bringer of dreams and guide of souls in the Underworld. Today we know him as the guide into the unconscious. The ancient Greeks projected much of their own subconscious motivations onto their gods. This perception allowed them to visualize their own hidden nature and deal with it in ways we of the modern world have lost. When we learn about the Greek gods, we learn about the structure and processes of our own subconscious, how it orders our lives. Hermes is central to that process. He has truly been overactive with my dreams. I wish he would bring something a little less disturbing.

Delphi is too quiet. No sounds enter my room from the outside world. I think I hear a cricket, but even it’s hypothetical. I feel so lonely.

---

A couple of weeks after my brother went to Disneyland with Fred, Fred came to see us again for the weekend. The house was crowded this time. One of my cousins, a young man just a couple of years older than me, was staying with us, he and his new wife. He had fought a lot during his days working in the potash mines of Carlsbad, New Mexico. We had a shortage of beds, so my parents did what they had always done. They had Fred sleep with me.

We also had another cousin at our home that night. He was the same age as my younger brother. His parents where there too, but they lived only thirty miles away and left for home at bedtime. That evening before I went to bed with Fred and before my youngest cousin and his parents went home, I heard a commotion down the hall. Fred was in my bedroom, and my brother and our young cousin were going in and out laughing and cutting up with him. No one thought much about the ruckus or Fred playing with those two youngsters. Turns out, Fred was passing out blowjobs down there where I was to soon join him.

I stayed up late that night talking to my older cousin’s young wife after everyone else had gone to bed. At midnight, she and I took the old pickup down the dark lane to the far side of the cotton field and turned off the pump. When we got back, I tiptoed into my bedroom, pulled off my clothes and slipped between the sheets next to Fred who had been asleep for sometime, or so I thought.

 

13 Oct, Wednesday

Dawn pushes back the darkness at the foot Mt. Parnassos and chases away the scattering of stars in the west. Switchbacks of ancient trails zigzag up the slopes across the abyss in front of me. In the bay, Itea lies in heavy shadow. A bulldozer of a bee flies retrograde into the morning sun. The street below, visible through the moist leaves of grape vines, is quiet and crowded with parked cars. That’s the last level of land before it takes a precipitous plunge to the valley floor. The sea in the distance is glassy and shrouded in haze.

I sit in a wood chair on my little patio at the cliff’s edge watching the flight of a crow against the background of the looming mountain and listening to his repeated caws as he shoots through the cool air toward the Gulf. Every insect in Delphi knows my room. They come through the French doors like bullets, circle frantically and streak out. Hornets, bees, blowflies, horseflies, gnats. I feel crawly things on me and I itch.

Here comes the sun just over my shoulder casting my dark silhouette on the pure-white patio partition before me, a black figure against eye-blinding whiteness. I look young, full haired and brilliant in that bespectacled shadow. As the harsh cries of birds and the pounding of construction workers overtakes the softer murmurings of morning, the sun takes Itea.

At breakfast, I talk to Pat and Marlene about writing, publishing, medical insurance, mental illness. A sense of excitement fills the breakfast room. Afterward, I talk Pat and Marlene into coming to my room. We sit on the edge of my bed while I pullout my map and show them where Oedipus killed Laios in Phocis Nome, the place where three roads meet. Then we go out into the street and talk for a while. I’m having trouble letting go of them. Pat invites me to Boston, and Marlene invites me to Manhattan. We say our good-byes, and I take their picture. They are on their way to Patras where day after tomorrow I’ll follow.

I watch longingly as they walk away, then scurry off to find a rental car. I must be off to the Cleft Way. But while walking the streets, I run into Marlene and Pat again, one at a time, first the daughter then the mother. It’s a little embarrassing. “We’ve been talking about you,” Pat says with a smile. "Come with us," she suggests, "let us take you to Patras." Here it is again. This time it isn't my fantasy. I really have an opportunity to end my loneliness, spend a few hours with these delightful women. I'll save days of travel in a few hours. I feel the purpose of my journey fading into the background. It's as if my whole life, the confrontation with my father, has shrunk to insignificance compared to a few hours with this mother and daughter.

"I would love to," I tell her, "but I'm headed in the opposite direction. I really do have to find the Cleft Way."

We say our good-byes again. As they walk away, I already miss them terribly. I can’t believe I've passed up an opportunity to travel with them. It all seems so demoralizing.

I still have difficulty finding a rental car. I finally stop at a grocery store and ask where I can rent one. “Patras,” she answers. I’m taken aback. Patras is where Pat and Marlene are going, across the Gulf of Itea. “No Delphi,” she says. I’ve turned down Pat when I could have spent the day with her and Marlene, rented a car in Patras tomorrow morning, crossed the gulf on the ferry and driven to the Cleft Way. Instead, I’m all alone again, wallowing in problems thirty-two years old.

After lunch, I hurry back to my hotel and ask the proprietor, the full-busted woman’s husband, about a rental car. He’s dark complexioned, well built and has a tuft of black chest hair sticking out the top of his shirt. I talk to him in the gift shop just off the entryway. We stand among replicas of ancient vases, their black figures contoured into scenes from Homer’s epics. “Lavadia,” he says. “Closest car rental.” He checks the time. “Too late today. Bus already left. You take bus tomorrow morning. Not long to Lavadia.” I know. I came from there. I could have saved two days of my journey if I had rented one when I was in Lavadia two days ago.

---

In Delphi, evening precedes sunset, the rays of light blocked by thick haze. Shadows are deep and diffuse. I sit on the edge of the cliff just east of town overlooking the valley of the Pleistos through which the torrent runs in the winter but is now bone dry. Fifteen young travelers sit with me. They sit perilously close to the edge, a macho disregard for their own safety. I get a frightening feeling when someone passes behind me. We’re all writing in our journals, but the bumble bees seem to have taken a special interest in me. They buzz at my feet as if closing the days business and then dart off into the abyss.

An ocean of haze fills the valley and provides a mystical quality to the far mountain, a looming giant against the setting sun. It looks so close, I could reach out and touch it. I hear echoes from its face. Trees cut stark human-like figures along its ridge, Oedipus trudging the slope, his back bent to the task. The sun’s rays stretch long across the landscape turning brown grass into the burning glow of gold. The green of trees is neon in the sun’s fading light. Darkness creeps up the side of the mountain. I watch the moon and evening star, watch planets grind on the axle of the solar system.

All things must pass, decay into ruin, and that is true of the Delphic Oracle also. The last word from Delphi came during the 4th century AD. The Roman emperor Julian consulted the Pythia and received what was to be the epitaph of the ancient oracle:

Tell ye the King: the carven hall is fallen into decay;
Apollo hath no chapel left, no prophesying bay,
No talking spring. The stream is dry and had so much to say.[36]

---

During the night, I wake again from a dream in which an angry man at work threatens people with an electric hand saw. One man is not intimidated, so the angry man puts the saw to the guy's shoulder. Flesh flies like sawdust and the man writhes in agony. Then in a show of machismo, the angry man turns the saw on himself and then goes into shock, pale and disabled.

My dreams are taking their toll. During the day I’m okay, but in the quietness at night, Delphi seems like the end of the world. I feel like an exile, the problems of my past dictating this journey as punishment. Why am I not off on some sunny island shore skinny dipping with some gorgeous lady? From Delphi, I’ve planned to go to Ithaca, home of Odysseus, the world’s most famous traveler. But I no longer feel so certain about this whole journey. I still can't believe I turned down Pat's generous offer. Something bad is happening to me. Perhaps in Athens, JoAnn was right. The loneliness is making me crazy.

 

14 Oct, Thursday

Mid morning, I leave for Lavadia. The bus negotiates the hairpin turns and squeezes past construction equipment on the shoulder-width streets of Arachova where the bus driver has to stop and honk for someone to move a van, then descends the mountain, past the turn off to Daulia where Oedipus killed Laios, and stops at a little roadside gas station and cafe in what must be Tsoukalades. Everyone but me debuses and has coffee or something to eat. I feel irritable, impatient. I hoped to get to Lavadia early, get a car and make a day of it in Daulia. I’ll be lucky to do much of anything if we don’t get going.

---

In Lavadia, I step off the bus looking for a rental car agency. Let’s Go says nothing about renting a car in Lavadia. I ask at the kiosk by the bus stop again, but the old man buried within the confines of cigarette packs and candy bars doesn’t speak English and my Greek just doesn’t cut it. Across the street at the restaurant, I get another greasy goat-cheese pastry and ask the young woman who waits on me. She turns to a man in the next room, and I hear him shout, “Oci! oci!” as if he’s mad I even asked. She tells me all the agencies are closed. I ask her about Thebes. She turns to the man in the next room again, and I hear more shouting then the man walks out to see who this moron is who’s asking all the questions. He’s middle-aged, his back hair sprinkled with gray. He’s obviously upset. He shouts at the woman again then turns on me, shouts at me a for few minutes. She relays the bad news, “Athens,” she says.

I walk back to the bus stop with my head down, feeling like a just took a beating. Another man shouts at me and motions to get off the sidewalk. What is it with these people? Why is everyone mad at me?

Finally the bus back to Delphi. Hordes of people pile off. Just as I put my foot on the first step to board, the bus driver shouts and closes the door in my face. What’s wrong this time?

After a few minutes, the driver lets me on. Once more the bus climbs the rolling hills then descends into the green sun-painted valley before making the climb up Mt. Parnassos. Once more, I zip past where Oedipus killed Laios. I take a snapshot out the bus window. Hope this is isn't all I get. But seeing the Cleft Way is not negotiable. When I get to Corinth I’ll try again to rent a car.

In the evening, I lie in bed listening to the mournful warble of dogs. I’ve never felt so alone as I did on the road today. I was afraid. My dreams must be bleeding into my perceptions of the external world. And the dogs of Delphi bother me. They start moaning in the early morning and continue until late at night. What’s most troubling is that they sound so much like a human in agony, tortured.

My uneasiness has escalated the last few days, and my fear while on the road today has completely unnerved me. I have a growing feeling this trip is ill-conceived and emotionally damaging. I’m not looking forward to two more months of this. I’m considering returning to the States.

---

I wake in the middle of the night feeling even more lost. I talk to myself and realize something important. I’m lonely at home too. I have no job, live alone in a small apartment, rarely visit friends. Perhaps that’s what JoAnn didn’t know about me, what I didn't even realize about myself. I’m alone even at home. How different is it being on the road? I’m buried inside myself so much at home, being on the road alone is simply a normal state. My home is on the road.

This realization has a profound effect on me. I am at home on the road. I even regain a little courage. Perhaps I should leave for Ithaca tomorrow, the kingdom of Odysseus. How can I not visit the kingdom of the most famous traveler of all time? But I’ve got to quit pushing myself so hard. I’ve got two months left to see Greece. Not seeing the Cleft Way today really upset me. Not everything is going to happen according to plan. And get off this personal mythology business for a while. You'll drive yourself nuts!

 

15 Oct, Friday

Following a light breakfast at the hotel, I walk to the bus station at the edge of town and ask the man when the next bus leaves for Patras. “Good morning,” is his reply, then kindly informs me that the bus comes after lunch. I realize how rude I’ve become, so preoccupied with myself.

So I have a little time. I walk east along the blacktop past the Castilian Spring where pilgrims coming to Delphi cleansed themselves before visiting the temple. The spring is boarded up with a huge wood structure enclosing not only the spring but pine trees surrounding it as well.

I drop off the road to a trail leading to  the ruins of the gymnasium used by the athletes during the Pythian games, and a little further east follow the winding path through old gnarled olive trees to the temple of Athena Pronaia (Athena who stands before the temple of Apollo). This was the Bronze Age settlement of Delphi.[37]

The sun approaches the zenith but is still dimmed by haze and not so blistering hot. Before me stand the stacked stones of Athena’s temple and beyond it, the dramatic circular foundation and three marble columns of the thalos, which at one time was the temple of the Earth Goddess, Gaia. Athena was ever a patron of Odysseus, delighting in his many tricks and schemes. I've felt that I had to visit her temple before leaving for Ithaca. In many ways Odysseus was a despicable character. In his dealings with those he perceived to be his enemies, he was a ruthless murderer.

I don’t know quite what to think of Athena, championing such a shady character. She would come to Odysseus from time to time, take his hand in hers talking of bravery and expressing her desire to hear the clash of arms, urging him into battle.

When I was growing up, I tried to not pattern myself after my father’s violent nature and assumed my mother didn’t approve of him either. But now I realize she has been married to that man for over fifty years.

She chose to live her entire life with him. Perhaps it’s simply jealousy that has given me such a negative perception. 

The spring before the confrontation with my father, I dated a girl I cared for a great deal. Not only was she beautiful, she was intellectual, liked to talk politics and philosophy. After going with her for a couple of months, I learned she was dating another guy at the same time. When I dropped her, she was furious. “Why didn’t you fight for me,” she screamed. “Why wouldn’t you fight for us?” And she meant it. She wanted a fist fight.

---

I sit across from the bus stop at the edge of the cliff amongst the sounds of crowing roosters and the mournful quarreling of dogs. The sun has difficulty breaking through the hazy sky, and the distant Aroania Mountains of the Peloponnese to the south are barely visible. Trees in small rowed patches blanket the valley below Delphi.

Hermes was born a precocious child, and his first act, accomplished the first day of his life, was to steal his older brother’s cattle, committing a murder in the process.[38]  When Apollo questioned Hermes about it, Hermes lied, saying, “... the claim is preposterous! I was born yesterday”.