CHAPTER 12.  Patmos.

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As we enter the harbor, deep cut from the east into the long island of Patmos, I see stringed arcs of sparkling lights stretched along the dark pier. We dock at the town of Skala (Ska’la, harbor, port). Patmos, only thirteen kilometers long, is shaped like a sea horse facing the coast of Turkey. The belt round its middle is cinched tight and the deepest indentation is Port Skalas, the isthmus only 300 meters across. Few people get off the ferry with me. The town is right on the water, and I’m hopeful finding a room won’t be difficult. Two dogs come to meet me, one black, sturdy; the other white, feisty. I ignore them, but they follow along behind. I walk toward an equally dark plateia with a couple of closed hotels. The town has shutdown for the night. I walk along the edge of the plateia but can find no pension. Perhaps I’ve made a mistake coming to Patmos this late in the season, this late at night.

One thing I’ve learned since I’ve been in Greece is to have confidence something will occur to solve any problem, to have patience. I walk past the first row of buildings and turn down a dark alley. For the first time I see people, a few men milling about. I wonder if I'll get mugged. As I walk past a man trying to start a motorbike, he shouts at me, asks if I’m looking for a room. I tell him yes, and he says he knows of one up the hill. “Not far,” he says. “Four thousand drackmes.”

“Too much,” I say and walk on, amazed at my audacity.

“Three thousand five hundred,” he says. I walk on. But he won’t let me go. “How much you pay?”

“Three thousand, no more.”

“Three thousand. Up the hill. Three thousand drackmes.”

Secretly, I’m smiling at myself for negotiating so well in spite of being desperate. He pats the seat on the back of his motorbike, but I tell him my pack is too heavy, too unstable for the motorbike. “It is not far,” he says. But negotiating with him seemed too easy. Skala is very dark. I feel like I did on Ithaca when the little old lady commandeered me up the mountain to her home, only this time it’s a man. Am I really going to follow him up the mountain in the dark? But a woman with a little girl walks out of the darkness from down the alleyway. The man speaks to her in Greek and tells me to follow her. She’s his wife and the girl is their daughter. The two of them walk with me up a gentle slope away from dock and through an alleyway to Hotel Effie. The woman’s name is also Effie.

Hotel Effie is a large white structure and stands out brilliant in the darkness, lit by a streetlight. The small lobby is empty, but the hotel is brand-new. She flips a light switch. When she shows the room to me, she says the price is four thousand. “No,” I tell her. “The man said three thousand.” “Three thousand five hundred,” she says, obviously irritated. “Room very nice.” And she’s right. The room is nice. But I heard her husband tell her we agreed on three thousand. “Tria,” he said to her, “tria.”

I stoop to hoist my backpack that I’ve thrown on the floor, but she stops me. I can tell she’s really concerned I might leave. “Three thousand,” she says, patting my arm. “But please, don’t tell other guests. They pay four thousand. Room very nice, three thousand.” I’m still pissed but feel fortunate because the room is very nice, white walls with light pine trim, a private bath.

Before unpacking, I step out on my patio. Dark buildings block my view of the bay, but I see the distant hillside speckled with lights. I bask in a certain sense of completeness. I’ve reached a milestone on my journey. I told myself from the beginning, if I made Patmos, my journey would be a success. It’s a little strange that I’ve hinged my success on fulfilling my mother’s wish. She wants a picture of the cave where St. John wrote Revelations.

I go back out into the dark to get a better look at Patmos, but this episode with Effie still bothers me. I can’t get over the fact that she knew her husband told me three thousand and still tried to charge four. I walk the dock wanting to punch her in the mouth. It wasn’t really much of a confrontation. The argument gradually evolves, and an argument with my mother emerges from behind it. And perhaps this is the reason my confrontation with Effie bothers me so much. My mother and I had the worst argument of my life just before I came to Greece. It was over a novel I’m writing. She read part of it and threw a fit over the bad language, called me from California to tell me. I blew my stack at her. The next morning, I called to apologize. We both cried. And we said something we’ve never said before, not in my entire life. We said we love each other. And now it's the first issue I have to deal with on this island.

---

I lie in bed thinking of Hermes, the Greek god who brings sleep and dreams, he who hovers between being and non-being. He is also the god of revelation. Even though it’s only ten o’clock, as I drop off I hear a cock-a-doodle-doo, the first in many days.

 

10 Nov, Wednesday

I walk from the hotel along a path toward the center of town. The sky is clear, only an  isolated cloud that I use to hide the sun for a dramatic shot of the nearby islands beyond the cove’s glistening ripples. Skala is a small seaport town, and this morning, two commercial ships unload cargo. A crane on one of them off-loads crates of water bottles to a truck backed up against the dock. The air is perfectly still, and shouts of dock workers pierce the quiet. Close by is Passenger Transit where we docked last night, and on the east side of it, Port Authority. After rehearsing a couple of Greek phrases, I walk in to see about the schedule for ferries to Samos. 

I’ll have four days to explore Patmos.

Skala is an old town of white buildings lying on the flat part of the island forming Patmos’ midsection. The island is mountainous both north and south of Skala. Across the harbor is a gray cactus-strewn hill. I stand by a lighthouse looking south of Skala, up the pine-covered hill to the small town of Chora (Cw'ra, the Greek word for chief town or region) which is a stark whiteness below the Monastery of St. John cresting the  mountain. The monastery is a majestic, inaccessible-looking structure, a fortification with massive brown walls and a jagged tooth-like upper edge. In ancient times the town wasn't down here by the bay because the island was easy pray for pirates. The population lived at the top of the mountain. The monastery will be my first destination this morning. The Cave of the Apocalypse is also somewhere on the mountain, but so far I haven’t located it.

I stand at the bus stop in the plateia accompanied by the two dogs who met me when I stepped off the ferry. They act as if I'm a long lost friend. Eventually the bus to Chora arrives. After following the switchbacks to the edge of town, it drops us off, and I walk through blazing white buildings to the entrance of the monastery. Past the huge rust-iron door with an imbedded cross at the top, I enter a large cobblestone courtyard with a two-story portico constructed of ancient caramel-colored stones. A rope hangs from a bell on the roof. I’m the lone visitor to the monastery and only hear an echoing voice in some remote room. The courtyard is a maze of stone-lined arches leading to other parts of the monastery.

It’s an absolutely glorious sight, deep-blue sky, sparkling-white walls, a wealth of deep-red roses, and in the distance the even deeper-blue, purple sea with brown islands dotting its surface. An open freestanding bell tower at the edge of the roof has five bells, three encased in a bottom row with two above.

In 1088 AD the Byzantine emperor Alerios Comnenos issued the crysobull establishing the Monastery of St. John the Theologian on Patmos. In that same year, a papal bull was issued to build the Monastery of Cluny in France from which in 1095 the first Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II. According to Athanasios Kominis professor of Byzantine literature at Athens University, this date marks the:

The monastery was built on the ruins of the temple of Artemis erected by Orestes around 1200 BC. When I was in Mycenae, I visited the home of Agamemnon, where he was killed by his wife and where his son Orestes avenged his father’s murder by killing his mother and her lover. But his mother’s Furies, those avenging goddesses  of the Underworld, hounded Orestes as he fled throughout the Greek isles. Patmos is one of the many places he sought refuge.

The monastery has been renovated and added to many times during the 905 years of its existence and today is in marvelous condition.

I walk back downstairs and find a gift shop tucked away in a corner at the foot of the stairs. The man inside tells me if I come back tomorrow at one o’clock the monastery museum will open because a group of touistas will be coming through. I buy two small books, one titled The Revelation of Jesus Christ and the other “I was in the isle of Patmos ...” about the life of St. John.

Beside the trail lies a small ravine with rocks and brown bushes, and below it, a cultivated field bounded by a stone fence. I hear the caw of crows and the chug of a fishing boat in the harbor. The breeze is cool, a little too cool for my short-sleeved shirt, but the sun is still hot on my back. The loud boasting of a rooster.

The cave is inside a church made of a series of square box-like buildings stacked together to form one structure stair-stepping the mountainside. A lone dark door stands tall in front of the whitewashed building. 

I sit among eucalyptus trees, listening to the wind rustle leaves. During his exile here, John brought a message of which the ancient Greeks knew little, brotherly and divine love, but it didn’t take long to corrupt it. Shortly after John came to Patmos, he had a fight with Cynops, a local priest of Apollo. The confrontation ended in violence. John was soundly beaten and left for dead but was discovered to be alive by his scribe Prochorus. The next day John and Cynops had another confrontation. This one resulted in the death of Cynops. The previous day Cynops had dived into the sea and retrieved images of some local deceased citizens of Patmos and when he did it again on this day:

John raised his hands, made the sign of the Cross, and prayed in these words: “Thou who dist give to Moses through this sign to cast down Amalek, Lord Jesus Christ, cast down Cynops into the depths of the earth, that he should no longer see this sun, and no more be numbered among living men.”

While the pagans waited in vain, fasting, for three days for Cynops to rise from the waves, as the priests of Baal waited for fire to descend from heaven to consume their burnt-offerings, Cynops was turned to stone in the depths of the sea.[2]

The stone is still in the harbor. What strikes me afresh, glancing through the book about the teachings of Jesus, is the emphasis He placed on love and forgiveness. And how different that is from the Greek gods. The Greek gods contained much of the internal makeup of mankind, including many of our weakness’, and they had some crucial deficiencies:

Greek gods ... were moved by considerations of personal honour, and anything which might be construed as an affront to it, excited their anger and called for violent vengeance. Forgiveness was not in their nature, and once a man had offended them, he had no excuse and could expect no mercy.[3]  

 

Not till their civilization began to collapse did the Greeks form their first glimmerings of the brotherhood of men, and even then it was more an abstract ideal than a purposeful conviction. What we miss in Greek religion is love. ... there is nothing that can be strictly be called a love of God ...[4]

The gods represented forces at work in the world, in the human psyche most likely, and the ancient Greeks honored them whether they were admirable or not.

The only time I remember the word “love” being mentioned around our home was late one night while I was a kid when my father and older brother came in from the field. My brother passed through my bedroom to get to his. Shortly afterward, my father came through the dark, stuck his head in my brother’s room and told him he was sorry for what he had said to him. “I still love you,” he said. Hearing my father express “love” for my brother stung into me. What did “love” have to do with it? I wondered. Through the thin wall, I heard my father tell my mother, “If a man makes a mistake, he should be man enough to admit it.”

I never heard the word before that night or after. It was a single event in my childhood and followed an act of emotional violence. At the time, it was my father’s actions that bothered me. Now, what seems so strange is my reaction to what my father said. I was horrified. Admitting guilt was something new. It was as if all the ground rules had changed.

Prometheus is the only Greek god who comes close to expressing divine love for mankind. Not only did Zeus not love mortals, after he overthrew his father Kronos, he planned to annihilate wretched mankind. But Prometheus thwarted this plan. He describes how he circumvented Zeus:

I hunted out and stored in a fennel stalk the stolen source of fire that hath proved to mortals a teacher in every art and a means to mighty ends.[5]

Prometheus had bolstered mankind by giving them fire. To punish him, Zeus ordered Hephaistos the god of fire, accompanied by the daemons Kratos (Might) and Bia (Force), to chain Prometheus to a mountainside for thirty thousand years. The scene is set by Kratos as they lead the captive Prometheus to the desolate crag to bound him:

To earth’s remotest confines we are come, to the Scythian[6] tract, an untrodden solitude. And now, Hephaestus, thine is the charge to observe the mandates laid upon thee by the Father--to clamp this miscreant upon the high-beetling crags in shackles of binding adamant that cannot be broken.[7]

While chained to the mountainside, an eagle ate out Prometheus’ liver in the blinding heat of day, and it grew back during the freezing night. The image of Prometheus spread against the mountain with his side gushing blood is the ancient Greek harbinger of Christ on the cross. Prometheus had defied Zeus for the sake of mankind but was forcefully taken to the mountainside. Christ went willingly to the cross.

It’s turned cold. Great swells of wind bow the eucalyptus trees. The sun has gone behind the mountain, and a large shadow extends to the harbor. Skala is still bathed in sunlight. Out at sea, a fine speckled cloud of white gulls follows in the wake of a fishing boat. I must go. I’ve been all alone here at the site where St. John wrote the Apocalypse. I shall return tomorrow morning to visit the cave.

---

I lie in bed but sleep eludes me. I keep hearing all the bad things I’ve said about my father and worry that I’ve portrayed him unfairly. My father was a most kind and generous man, a principled family man. Since he had four boys and no girls, he always ensured one of us stayed home to help our mother. His father was an alcoholic, and as a young adult he had held their family together. He never allowed liquor in our home. He was a peace maker. Even in heated arguments with my mother, never once did he raise a hand to hit her. His brothers and sisters looked to him to solve their own family disputes. I remember one sister calling him to stop her husband from beating their kids.

On Saturday afternoons, we’d come in from working in the field, and he’d take us to the movies, sit with us to watch Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassady, and the continuing Zorro serial. He coached my little league team for two years. He never once raised his voice in anger at any of the kids. With his farming, the number of people he has clothed and fed would number in the thousands. His most formidable enemy, the man he feared the most and loaded a deer rifle to eliminate, was me.

 

11 Nov, Thursday

I wake early and dress, eager to see the Cave of the Apocalypse. I’m fidgety and nervous. I visit the local bakery for breakfast, standing before the glass display case pointing and grunting to a young woman about a chocolate pudding-filled croissant. Outside, I stand in the bright morning sunshine trying to eat the thing. The dark filling gushes on my face, hands and finally on my shirt. It’s like eating a live snake wrapped in pie crust.

The room is like a small greenhouse with huge arched windows from which fans of sunlight fall on large flat stones paving the floor. African fern trees  and a large-leafed rubber plant arch the ceiling. A long table stacked with potted ferns sits against the right wall.

I sit on a bench and load my camera with fast film, mount my flash, a wide-angle lens. A man comes out of an adjoining room, and I greet him but he passes on. Then a priest dressed in a smock, a rather large stout man with white full  beard, comes out of the same side room, and I ask him in Greek if he speaks English. He says “Oci.” I point to my camera and ask,  “Enntaksh;” (All right?). He nods. Another man,  tall and very thin, comes into the room from a side door. He’s dressed in a green jacket with high collar and rolled sleeves, Levi’s, brown shoes and white socks. The two of them share some words about me, this old tourista, and then the tall thin man taps me on the shoulder, motions to follow him. 

Through another stone arch, lies the cave sanctuary, a row of stained-glass windows on the left through which colored sunlight filters. The rooms are deathly silent and still. To the right, this larger room is shrouded in darkness. My guide takes a lighter from his pocket and puts flame to several candles in the darkened chamber, illuminating the inside of the cave, a low overhang, a looming thundercloud of rock, and below it, two long benches before the apse. When he finishes lighting candles, we stand face to face. I point to my camera again. “Nai,” he says, yes.

I lower my camera and sit on a bench before the apse, staring at the dark wall decorated with four paintings of deep red and luminescent gold. One is of Jesus standing and speaking to St. John who sleeps below him, receiving his words. In the center of the wall is a red and gold tapestry with a blazing cross.

Though I haven’t planed to, I bow my head and pray, feeling the cold air off the cave’s rock walls. I remember the words John dictated to Prohoros, his scribe, in this same cave:

When John heard the trumpeted words, he turned to see who was speaking:  

My guide’s prayer murmurings are the only sound in the cave except for my rustlings and the snap of my camera shutter. He rises, says something to me of which I can understand not a single word. I realize he’s telling me it’s time to go, but I’m not ready to leave. I feel a sadness hovering over me as I stand between the two chapels inspecting the stone ceiling and walls, trying to fix the image of this most beautiful setting. Something is building inside me, but he speaks again, and I have to give it up. Outside, we ascending the stone steps to the waiting room. Before my guide departs from me, he smiles broadly, a deep friendly smile, pats me on the shoulder. I exit the building into the bright morning sun and cold breeze which has blown since yesterday. I walk a few steps from the building and lean against the retaining wall.

Standing at the edge of the Aegean so close to the coast of Asia Minor, indeed I see it’s pale shape in the haze off in the distance, I sense a connection between the Biblical story and my father loading the deer rifle to kill me. Were my father and I reenacting an event that has echoed through the ages?  

I wonder if I should help her with the bags but notice that in spite of her withered appearance, she seems to be doing quite well. As she comes closer, I greeted her, “Geia saV,” I say. She doesn’t reply but looks as if she recognizes me, as if she’s shocked to see me. She turns toward me, arms out a little, her mouth gaping in an exclamation of surprise. I turn toward her, nod and continue on. She turns to watch as I descend the stone walkway, some strange astonishment chiseled into her face.

---

At one o’clock I catch the bus by the dock to the Monastery of St. John. It’s me, the bus driver and three monks in their gray habits. The bus drops us off at the edge of Chora, and I walk ahead of them along the stone path. Once inside, I’m told the Monastery will officially open at two o’clock, and the museum will open just before the touristas arrive. I sit waiting for them in the courtyard with the extraordinary blue sky overhead. 

A monk comes into the courtyard, takes a long thin board from the wall and pounds it rhythmically with a wooden mallet. Several monks hurry into the courtyard, then enter an adjacent room. I hear voices raised in prayer followed by singing. A monk comes out carrying a long string of bells which he shakes loudly. A few minutes later the rest come out and enter another room down a hall, the refectory which has two long stone tables end to end. The wind is most forceful on the walls of the Monastery, cold gusts tear at the sanctuary walls. I have on my long-sleeved shirt and black sweater, but still I shiver.

At three o’clock, still no touristas. I ask the man who runs the souvenir shop if he knows the weather forecast. He says a cold front is coming down from the Alps. It will be very cold for a few days. I’m sorry I left my down parka in Colorado. The Alps, my old nemesis. Nemesis is the goddess of retribution for undeserved good fortune and a harbinger of things to come. She is closely connected with the Fates.

Suddenly I hear loud voices at the entrance. Three well-dressed women enter, one black, one Mexican, the other Japanese. Two of them are dressed in slacks, an oddity on Patmos, lots of colors, bracelets, rings. They go into the chamber where the monks prayed, and I follow as I hear a crowd of touristas at the entrance. We’ve entered a small cathedral made of deep dark wood with tall vertical-backed seats built into the wall, a domed ceiling with stained-glass windows. 

After leaving the church, we walk to the museum together, view several walls of old paintings, most dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. Inside a glass case, we see glorious parchment texts with multicolored ancient Greek lettering, some with illustrations, one from the 6th century. The bindings of the scriptures are most impressive, the silver-reliefed covers fold back on hinges and close with metal lever clasps. Small intricately-detailed icons, some of molded silver, some carved from wood, sit on dark wood tables. Cloth robes, inlayed and woven with gold, line the walls.

But none of it compares to the beauty of these three women, exotic, Oriental, African. We pause at the robes, and they talk about their own clothes which they made themselves. They want me to feel the fabric, and when I do they show me how to feel it, take my fingers in theirs and mince the fine woven threads, mince the flesh of my hands. They start laughing and soon we’ve got all our fingers mixed together massaging until all I see are visions of dark pools of eyes spinning about me. Their words melting into a comforting murmur, and I find myself overcome with a sort of strange insanity that these women are my sisters and that together we’re massaging the Cloth of Life woven on the Loom of Time.

I try to concoct a scheme to hang on to them, but they’re out the door in a flurry, and I hear the echo of their footsteps in the courtyard and the silence of their absence. I’m alone again.

I descend the mountain, this time with the cold wind tearing at my clothes and mussing my hair, feeling lonelier than I’ve felt since I left Letizia in Corinth. The weather is still clear, only a renegade cloud here and there. When I get back to Skala, after buying the largest chocolate bar I can find, I decide to see if the sunset is visible from the west shore of Patmos.

As I get close to the cove, the street widens, houses end, and I quite suddenly feel despondent, as if I’ve walked into a setting I’ve witnessed before during a time of great tribulation. The wind howls, and the sea is in a rage. Two geese are the lone inhabitants of the cove, and they’re not pleased with me being here. They scold and snap at my pant legs as I pass, guardians of the gate, so to speak.

It’s as though I’ve walked into a war zone, the roar of waves crashing on shore, pounding black volcanic rock, sending geysers of sea spray spewing skyward. In the distance along the point of a small peninsula, sea waves pound the silhouetted coastline sending towering sprays up from black rocks.  

Many years ago, I had a dream that the world had been destroyed, and my wife and I with our two children were standing on a foreign shore staring out to sea at a sunset where someone in a ship was to pick us up. We were the only earthly survivors. It was a powerful dream set in a cove such as this. As we stared out into the orange glow of sunset which turned the sea to gold, the ruins of our civilization lay behind us, just as the ruins of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations I’ve seen all over Greece lie today. Just now, as I entered this cove, I had the eerie feeling that dream was set on this same shore thirty-two hundred years ago.

In my dream, we were being taken to a place where we would have a new beginning. I’m reminded of John’s description in Revelations of the second coming of Christ:

And I saw a new heaven and a  
new earth: for the first heaven
and the first earth were passed away...[10]

I didn’t see a new civilization in my dream. I just knew we were being taken to a new world. What bothers me about all this now is the recent experiences I’ve had concerning my death. They’ve only occurred since my divorce. John tells us who will be let into the new world:

And there shall in no wise en-  
ter into it any thing that defileth,
neither whatsoever worketh abomin-
nation, or maketh a lie: but they
which are written in the Lamb’s
book of life.[11]

I’ve always felt guilty over getting divorced, I had made a promise to God, but never so much as I do now. I sense a new consequence of it as foretold by my premonition of my own death. It’s as if my name has been stricken from the Book of Life.

As sunlight fades and shadows take the features from the faces of the large boulders lining the cove, I make the short walk back, past the scolding geese, past the Sunset Taverna, back to the quiet protected harbor of Skala. It’s very cold now that the sun has set. I buy a plastic container of Rwsiki Salata (some kind of salad) and go to my room to eat, taking the loaf of bread the monk gave me from my daypack. The salata (macaroni and small chunks of potato) tastes rancid even though the date on it is December 15th. It’s bound together with pure mayonnaise and could use some salt. The bread is slightly sweet and delicious. The loaf is round, flat on the bottom and dark brown, sprinkled heavily with sesame seeds.

---

I wake in the middle of the night to the many angry voices of dogs. I’ve been dreaming of trying to escape from a war-ravaged country with closed borders. I was with several people in a car. They didn’t understand the urgency of our situation and were dilly-dallying. This was my first war dream since I’ve been on this journey, but only one of many during my life.

Later, I wake again, this time crying. I don’t know why.

 

12 Nov, Friday

Morning comes with a chorus of roosters. None are very close, and they don’t go in sequence. They crowd their voices together like a flock of gobbling turkeys. The sky is emerald blue through my window. The wind brushes the bright-red nose of a rose bush back and forth against a glowing white-stucco building. The intermittent sound of a buzz saw shatters the morning quiet. I hear the voices of men, the pounding of hammers mixed with birds chirping in the trees, a dog bark, and the whine of a begging cat, a motorbike down by the harbor.

---

I’m in the northern part of the island sitting on a rock under the shade of a eucalyptus tree overlooking Agriolivadiou Bay. It’s been a cold windy walk. I count seven, eight islands, starting in the bay and going out into the Aegean to the southeast where they merge into the coast of Turkey, just a fine blue line along the horizon.

Every step of the way up here, I’ve been thinking about the three women I met at the monastery yesterday. When I was eight, my family moved into a new home, a very old plantation-like home. It had an ivy-trellised courtyard with a large dinner bell suspended from a crossbeam. Not long after we moved into the old decaying home, it burned. But two things have stayed with me all these years since: someone I found, and something I lost when the house burned.

I remember a warm afternoon the day before. I was sitting at a patio table in the courtyard with my mother nearby folding clothes as she took them from the clothesline. The sun shone through vine leaves casting a dappled shadow across the table top. Just that morning in the mail I had received a small golden ring I had ordered from a cereal box. The ring had a tiny catapult on its flat top, and within it sat a tiny gold rocket that it launched. As I sat at the table, the partially filtered rays of the sun casting both shadow and brilliant speckles of light through leaves, I repeatedly launched my rocket off the edge of the table into the void. The afternoon was leisurely: Seemingly hour after hour I launched my rocket with my mother close by, the two of us exchanging words about some fantasy of mine.

That night when I went to bed, I put my gum on one bed post and on the other, the small golden ring with the tiny golden rocket. I remember distinctly what I fantasized as a means of hurrying sleep. I conjured a girlfriend, a companion for my fantasy travels and adventures. We could fly through space, Hermes-like companions, as equals. I remember stealing shameful kisses.

Early the next morning our new, old home burned to the ground and along with it, the vine-covered trellis, the table in the courtyard, the dinner bell and my little golden ring. I’ve never lost my imaginary friend.

In the months following the confrontation with my father and after I dropped out of college, I went out consciously looking for a wife. I knew I could not face the world alone. Perhaps I had become dependent on the fantasy girlfriend I conjured years before, on the night our home burned, someone who had a strong connection with my mother. My wife became that companion. Years later when she left me, I sought out my daughter for companionship to movies, amusement parks, concerts, much as Oedipus clung to his daughters following the suicide of Jocasta, his mother and wife. In Greek mythology, the Great Mother goddess was a trinity. These three women form a trinity: mother, wife, daughter. Relative to Zeus, Rhea (his mother), Demeter (his wife), and Persephone (his daughter) are three representations of the Great Mother goddess. Zeus plus the three women form a quaternion.[12]

As an aerospace engineer, I worked with satellites in space. A satellite’s orientation, it’s reference, is mathematically described by a quaternion formed of one real and three imaginary quantities. My own orientation within my internal universe, my space, is defined by myself and three women. Even though I no longer live in the presence of my mother, my wife or my daughter, they still and always have, had an internal presence.

In Greek mythology, the Fates were the most powerful forces in existence. They came in the form of three ill-tempered old women. Even Zeus was subject to the Fates. The three fates, also among the most ancient of goddesses, were Clotho, who spun the wool of life, Lachesis who measured it, and Atropos who cut it. For the first half of my life, I felt as though my thread of life was still being spun. But with my recent sense of my own death, I believe Atropos has cut it back considerably.

---

The wind howls through the leaves of the two rows of eucalyptus trees that line the blacktop road. The hills above this northern port are covered with loose rocks and small thorny bushes. Patmos is ruggedly beautiful and desolate. Finally I turn back from Agriolivadiou Bay and return in the gorgeous midday sunshine.

In Skala, I go again to Port Authority to see about a ferry to Samos. The man confirms what he told me the other day. A ferryboat will be here Sunday morning at ten-thirty, “Deka mish,” he says. He also confirms that the ferry belongs to DRM travel agency. So I’m all set. Samos on Sunday. I walk to DRM for further confirmation, but it’s still closed.

Two of the dogs in the plateia always welcome me as if I’m an old friend. One is small, a mama dog with her teats and small udders showing, and a larger male dog, very slim, both young and active. The male likes to spar with the female in front of me. First they come to me wagging their tails and licking my hands, then they chase each other, biting and pawing, rolling on the ground.

At the dock just at dusk, I pause to watch two kids slap octopuses against the cement. I think this activity is catching on. They have four, maybe five octopi, small ones they’re busy pounding into jelly. This can not be a fun thing for the octopi. They leave dark greasy spots on the cement.

I walk to the clothing store just off the plateia. I’ve been wanting a fisherman’s cap ever since I first got to Greece. The one I buy is all blue except for a black braided band around the front just above the short bill and has a circular flat top, which is high in the front and slopes down in the back. I slip it on after I pay the man, and he smiles his approval.

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I hear the man in the next room snoring. The halls of Hotel Effie are like echo chambers. Every step down the hall is an announcement, every click of a lock an invitation. I'm seeing fewer and fewer touristas. I haven’t had a friend to pal around with since Letizia in Corinth.

I’m lazy after all that walking today and a bad night’s sleep last night. In the evenings for the last few days, I’ve been listening to Barber’s violin concerto on my walkman. It’s the only music I have heard since I left Colorado a month and a half ago, except for little snippets of Greek music from tavernas and passing cars. As I went in and out of dreams last night, the melody, that sad haunting melody, went through my head like a musical thread holding my dreams together. I’ve woken from dreams crying the last three nights but surfaced so rapidly I couldn’t remember what they were about. I have a problem, but I don’t know what it is.

And I still have lewd fantasies about the three women I met in the monastery yesterday.

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During the night I wake from the worst dream I’ve had since I’ve been in Greece. I dreamed of something too painful to remember, and I’m consumed by a devastating sadness. I try to slip back into the sleep state, try to retrieve the dream. Gradually it comes to me. I sit in the Cave of the Apocalypse talking to God about something I’ve done. God listens, but nothing can change my mistake, the terrible unspoken consequence.

Why have I dreamed of God in this form? He was not a forgiving God, not like Jesus. He was much more like the ancient Greek gods, like iron-willed Zeus. While chained to the mountainside, Prometheus prophesied that Zeus would not rule forever:  

Yea, verily, the day will come when Zeus, howbeit stubborn of soul, shall be humbled, seeing that he purposeth a marriage that shall hurl him into oblivion from his sovereignty and throne; and then shall straightway be fulfilled to the uttermost the malison his father Cronus imprecated as he fell from his ancient throne. ... Such an adversary is he [Zeus] now preparing in his own despite, a prodigy irresistible, even one that shall discover a flame mightier than the levin and a deafening crash to out-roar the thunder ...[13]

Prometheus’ prophecy is that Zeus’ own son, who will have a much different continence, will overthrow him. Perhaps Jesus represented the crumbling of the kingdom of Zeus foreseen by Prometheus, and represented by the struggle between John and Cynops, the priest of Apollo, here on Patmos.

Maybe now I’m in a position to answer the question Justin, the young missionary I met in Athens, posed to me. He asked, “Are you a Christian.” The answer that has come from my dream, the God I conjured from within me, was not a loving, forgiving God, not like Jesus. In the years and centuries following Johns exile here, Christianity replaced the Greek gods of antiquity as both Cronus and Prometheus prophesied. But evidently not for me.

 

13 Nov, Saturday

Today has started as a lazy day. I’m still in bed even though the roosters have tried to raise me since dawn. I see sunshine on the window pane and deep-blue sky through the thin drape. A gentle breeze lifts the long arms of the delicately-decorated bush of red roses to stroke the white sides of a Byzantine church. I hear sparrows in the trees, and a motorbike on the street out front. I want to keep this, my last full day on Patmos, a lazy day. The ever-present call of the chanticleers down the lane welcomes a quiet day of contemplation on the isle where St. John wrote the Apocalypse.

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I sit at dockside in the midmorning sunshine with my two canine buddies, the male stretched out in the sun at my feet licking his privates, the female up close beside me curled into a ball. I’ve just realized she’s pregnant. That’s the reason for her prominent teats. It’s still cold today, very cold, and I have on a long-sleeved shirt, my black sweater and hiking jacket. I’m also wearing my blue fisherman’s cap, feeling a little foolish in it, maybe wearing it because I feel foolish in it. The wind brings the cold in very close. I like the shadow the visor of my cap casts across my face. I like cold sunny days.

I walk out to the e