In Search of My Father (Part 1)

Prologue: The Glory that was Greece

The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of war and peace,

Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!

Eternal summer gilds them yet,

But all, except their sun, is set.

(Lord Byron - The Isles of Greece)

‘Well?’ asked my mother, for the second time. ‘How do you feel about a Mediterranean holiday this summer?’

It still took me a few moments to register what Mum had been saying. I was inclined to be distracted at the best of times. These were not the best of times. It was April 20th 1987, Easter Monday: just a few days before my twenty-first birthday. But neither the arrival of Easter, nor my impending ‘second celebration’ of manhood brought me any sense of elation. My father’s three-month-long battle with stomach cancer had come to an end four weeks before. He was just forty-eight years old.

My university had been very understanding, and I’d spent the last few weeks of the spring term, as my father’s life drew towards its close, at home. I’d supported my mother, and sister, in their grief, as best I could. My own feelings? I’d tried to bury them. Deep. As deep as the collieries where Dad had toiled throughout his entire working life, since the age of fifteen.

Still waters run deep. They don’t come stiller than the waters that gather in the deepest places of the earth. Yet my father was someone who had always been so full of joie de vivre. He had been larger-than-life, a lovable rogue, with more than a little bit of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses about him; popular, and well-known within our community; but it was I, his son, who now felt that I’d squandered every opportunity I’d ever had to truly get to know him. To know and understand the real man, behind the jovial comic mask that he so easily and customarily wore.

I looked at Mum. She was barely into her forties, and certainly didn’t give the appearance of it; yet now the possibility of a long life of widowhood beckoned. She was bearing up remarkably well, considering.

‘Sorry, Mum. I was miles away. Where were you thinking of?’

For several years now, Mum and Dad had holidayed abroad, taking my younger sister with them. The kind of places, in the south of France and along the Spanish coast, that had become popular with Brits over the past couple of decades, as cheap flights had led to the boom in the overseas tourism industry. Not the kind of resorts that held much appeal to me - I hadn’t believed I’d missed out, at the time. Yet more lost opportunities to spend time with my father, I now thought to myself, wistfully.

‘Well, I wondered about somewhere different from where your Dad and I holidayed,’ said Mum, eyeing me carefully. ‘I was thinking, perhaps…Greece? One of the islands, perhaps?’

Greece!

I wasn’t expecting that. What was it that someone had said…? Something about ‘The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome,’ wasn’t it?

I’d always wanted to visit Greece. Ever since I had read Roger Lancelyn Green’s retelling of The Tale of Troy as a nine-year-old boy, I’d been captivated by the heroic deeds of the Greeks. My love of astronomy had ran parallel with my fascination with the Greek myths; and few things afforded me greater pleasure than to gaze up into the night sky, and to recall the heroic deeds of Perseus and Hercules, locked in eternal combat with the sea-monster Cetus and the many-headed Hydra in the heavens above, just as they had once battled those creatures on the earth below.

Greece! The islands and the mountains that had birthed legends: Achilles and Alexander, Herodotus and Homer, Pericles and Plato, Socrates and Sophocles. I knew the names of more dead Greeks than living Englishmen. Or Welshmen, come to that.

‘One of the islands?’ I said. ‘Which one?’

There were so many to choose from. Corfu, I knew, was popular. Most of what I knew about Corfu came from reading the naturalist Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, describing his idiosyncratic boyhood on the island during the 1930s. His mother had also been widowed at a young age, I reflected.

Then, of course, there was Rhodes, once home to one of the seven great wonders of the world; the mighty Colossus, standing more than 30 metres high at the entrance to the harbour, making it the tallest statue in the ancient world. A shame it had only stood for little over half a century.

Like Dad, its life had been cut short.

‘Rhodes? Corfu? Paxos?’ I looked at Mum, and smiled to myself. Would she blush and look away if I suggested Lesbos - Where burning Sappho loved and sung?

Mum shook her head.

‘No, none of those. I was thinking of Crete.’

Day One (August 8th): Beware the Bull

Pasiphaë gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human; and Minos, in compliance with certain oracles, shut him up and guarded him in the Labyrinth. (Apollodorus - Bibliotheca)

Three-and-a-half months later, Mum, Sis and I boarded the flight to Heraklion airport. It wasn’t my first time overseas, but it was my first time alongside my family. I was worried that we would have wildly different expectations of our vacation. Mum and Sis would be happiest on a beach, or sunning themselves besides the hotel pool. But, for me, here was a chance to try out my Greek, to immerse myself in the local culture, and to visit the archaeological sites of Europe’s oldest civilisation, the Minoans.

The highlight for me, I was certain, would be the excursion we had planned for our first full day on the island: a visit to the Palace of Knossos, the largest Bronze Age site on Crete. Since its discovery in 1878, and its excavation by English archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 onward, the sprawling complex had come to be associated, at least in popular presentations, with the myth of King Minos; and the great maze, the Labyrinth, he had ordered to be built by the foremost architect of the ancient world, Daedalus.

According to the tale, this wonder was the home of the half-man/half-bull beast named after the King, the Minotaur. Such was the ingenuity of the Labyrinth that no man could hope to navigate the complexity of its halls and corridors. Only with the help of Princess Ariadne’s ball of twine was Prince Theseus of Athens able to find his way into the Labyrinth, and then out again once he had slain the Minotaur.

Not that I believed in it, of course - but I did sometimes think it was odd that I was the one whose astrological star-sign was Taurus, the bull, and not my father. After all, he could be unsubtle at times; a veritable bull in the china shop. And I had certainly learnt, in adolescence, exactly how to push his buttons - to be the red rag to his bull. Then again, my inclination towards stubbornness and my own prideful predisposition were both far greater than his. Hallmarks of a true Taurean: as also was said to be a certain complexity, and deviousness, of the mind. Labyrinthine, one might say.

Some believe that the name Labyrinth was actually derived from the Greek word λαβρυς (labrys) - the name given to the distinctive double-headed axe, at least according to Plutarch, the design of which was found adorning the walls throughout the Palace of Knossos. The ruins of the enormous complex could certainly be described as ‘labyrinthine’. Was this, then, the site of the famed lair of the great bull-headed beast?

Hardly. But then, as I made my way from one hall to the next, it seemed to me that it wasn’t very much like a palace either. What was this place? What had been its function? Why had people gathered here, in the heyday of Minoan splendour, almost four thousand years before? Had it been a storehouse, a crossroads of trade, a centre for administration? A gathering point for entertaining and celebrating, for music-making, bull-leaping and wine-quaffing? Or a court for proclaiming the wealth and power of a clan, a family or a king?

I wandered into what Evans had believed to be the throne room of Knossos - home to the oldest stone throne in the Aegean world. The ‘throne’ itself - if indeed it was a throne - was an alabaster seat set against the north wall, with two griffins on either side, staring at it. Gypsum benches - seats for the king’s counsellors, perhaps? - fanned out from the throne, running along three walls of the chamber. Here, in the centre of the palatial complex, was the very seat of power of Europe’s first civilisation.

***

My father’s seat of power was more modest - and certainly more comfortable. Our ‘front room’ wasn’t as lavishly decorated as the throne room of Knossos. No frescoes of griffins, no palm fronds and altars painted on the walls. Instead of a lustral basin set before the throne, Dad’s armchair faced the television. If the basin in the king’s chamber was used for religious ceremonial purposes, as had been supposed, then the television of my father’s chamber perhaps served a comparable function, i.e. to transmit the images that amounted to his religion; the sports, the comedies, the war movies and the Westerns, that provided him with ease and relaxation after a hard shift underground, or an afternoon labouring in the garden.

When my father was at home, taking his repose, there was no question that this seat was his. Yes, of course, I, or my sister, were allowed to sit in it ourselves; but the clear understanding was that we were to yield it to him, without challenge or fuss, should he come into the room and wish to sit down.

My grandmother had a similar arrangement in the chamber that doubled up for her as both kitchen and living room. A widow from before I was born, she would surrender the principal armchair, the one nearest the hearth, to her bachelor brother whenever he came to visit. It was her home; she paid the rent upon it from her modest widow’s pension. Yet whenever my great-uncle visited, he would silently and wordlessly ‘take the throne.’ This was the unquestioned social order with which I grew up.

The only time, at home, when my father would humour me, and allow me unfettered access to his high seat, was when Doctor Who was being broadcast. For twenty-five minutes on a Saturday afternoon, I was allowed to sit, undisturbed, and enthralled, to the latest adventures of the Time Lord from Gallifrey, whose erratic wanderings through time and space mesmerised me, no doubt, in much the same way as Homer’s retelling of the peregrinations of the Greek hero Odysseus had once held his first audience spellbound.

My sister had still been young enough, just about, to continue to delight in the memory of sitting on Dad’s lap, or bouncing on his leg, while he sang some nonsense-rhyme to her. I’d long since grown out of doing that; or even of watching the Friday night horror movie with him. Perhaps that shared experience between father and son was the one that I would miss most of all.

My mother and sister would have gone to bed. I would be looking up at the occasionally flickering screen, in the darkened room, while watching one of the classic Universal monster movies; sitting on the floor by Dad’s feet, while he dozed in his armchair. Whenever there was a particularly effective ‘jump scare’, I would grab my father’s leg, awakening him from his slumber. Some mild oath might form upon his lips; but he would invariably look down, to see if I was okay. It’s not just the mother hen who looks after her chicks.

Mum never rested in my father’s seat of power. She was always too busy in the kitchen - her domain - for such idleness. Wives and mothers had more subtle ways of maintaining their influence within the household.

For weeks after his passing, I couldn’t bring myself to sit where Dad had once sat. If we had had griffins on the wallpaper, on either side of that armchair, perhaps they would have wept the silent tears that I refused to shed.

***

The palaces of Knossos, Phaistos, Hagia Triada, Mallia, and Kato Zakro were not the gay residences of peaceful and artistic rulers, as the imaginations of Sir Arthur Evans and his successors have made them. In reality they were highly involved cult structures built for the veneration and burial of the dead.

So wrote German scholar Hans Wurderlich in 1972. And who can say? Was Knossos built for the living, or the dead? A great teeming agora, a melting pot of humanity, reeking of sweat and heady sensuality, brimming with colour and life; or a solemn necropolis, a painted mausoleum of the departed, filled with the stench of putrefaction and decay?

Evans discovered three thousand clay tablets, inscribed with two distinctly different scripts, which he named Linear A and Linear B. Linear B, the later script, turned out to be Greek. Linear A continues to defy all attempts to translate it. The puzzle remains undeciphered: the mysteries of the Labyrinth remain intact.

So much is hidden, so much is lost. What were the Minoans really like? Did they love as we love, laugh as we laugh, cry as we cry, dance as we dance, hate and make war as so many people have hated and made war in the ages before or since?

I wandered the halls of Minos, and I felt that these people were strangers to me, separated by this vast expanse of time.

But are we not all strangers to one another? Who can know what it is like to inhabit another’s skin? Truly, had I known my father, in life, any better than I knew the silent ghosts that haunted the halls of Knossos four thousand years after they had once loved, and laughed, and cried, and danced, and hated, and, perhaps, made war, from this place?

***

One day - a few weeks after Dad’s funeral - I’d wandered into the front room at home. I glanced across the room. And there he was. Sitting in his armchair. Just for a moment. And then he was gone.

I had experienced something similar the previous year, shortly following my grandfather’s death. Only on that occasion, it had happened in church. I’d glanced across the aisle, to the Sabbath seat which my grandfather used to occupy during the final few years before he succumbed to dementia, then death. And there he was - unwrapping a sweet, as was his want, before the beginning of a long and possibly tedious sermon.

***

An unfilled pew; an empty armchair; and a vacant throne. A chapel, a home, and a palace, replete with silent ghosts. Imaginings and phantasms of my labyrinthine, Taurean mind.

But what hope now for a relationship when the golden thread of life is broken? Not even Ariadne’s ball of twine would suffice, to help me traverse a Labyrinth littered with lost opportunities and bitter regret.

I left Knossos, disappointed. Somehow, I felt even more lost than before.

Day Two (August 9th): Iconostasis

One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, the Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith. (St Paul’s Epistle to Titus)

Clearly, the apostle to the Gentiles had had a low opinion of the inhabitants of Crete. Yet by the end of my time on the island, my impression was that - like so many Mediterranean peoples - their 20th century descendants were a good deal more devout than the dour Protestants of northern Europe.

The second day of our holiday was a Sunday. I decided to go to church in the village close to our hotel. I’d never attended an Orthodox service before. In my time at university, most of the evangelical prejudices of my formative teenage years had gradually been chipped away. I wasn’t quite the same little bigot who had visited Liverpool with his parents, and scoffed at their suggestion that he might want to visit ‘Paddy’s wigwam’ - the local nickname for the modernist 20th century Catholic cathedral of Christ the King. The Anglican Cathedral was just about tolerable - but a Catholic place of worship? No way in hell! How shocked my sixteen-year-old self would have been to see me, just five years later, attending a service whose rituals and ceremonies would have made those observed within Frederick Gibberd’s architecturally far more majestic metropolitan cathedral of Liverpool look positively Puritan by comparison…

What really surprised me was how prolonged the service was. Clocking in at three hours, this was worship of a length which would have felt dragged out interminably back home. Admittedly, I’d been to a few Charismatic services that were almost as long - but nothing as arresting or as colourful as this celebration in an unprepossessing Cretan village.

I sat and I watched, fascinated, at each twist and turn in the elaborate liturgy. The old women, dressed in deepest, dusty black, were the most devout - crossing themselves repeatedly, and getting up from time to time, moving around the main body of the church, lighting candles, and offering murmured orisons before the gloriously painted representations of the saints fixed upon each pillar and wall. The first half of the service looked so strange, and sounded so chaotic, to Western eyes and ears - a peculiar hubhub mixture of personal prayer, and public devotion.

At this point in the worship, there were very few men in sight, apart from the priest. He was stern and austere in his bearded magnificence, bedecked in sumptuous vestments, and swinging a magnificent gilded thurible. By turns he would appear and disappear behind the iconostasis - the icon-covered screen that hid the altar from the view of the people. However, there was also a trio of cantors, humbly dressed, who would take turns to wrestle with a peculiar revolving stand, upon which rested the liturgical books from which they sang a capella in a manner that was somehow both bewitching and disconcerting. It felt as if they were undertaking some great endeavour. Somehow, it was almost as if they were labouring with blood, sweat and tears; as if engaged in an atavistic struggle to shape something ineffable in the echoing space between the printed page on the stand, and their far from dulcet voices. Their peasant hands, rough and coarse, spinning the stand, perfectly matched their strenuous tones - yet, after a fashion, from their dogged exertions, something glorious and transcendent was being created. I sat, and I listened, utterly transfixed.

***

The hymns that night were familiar Christmas carols, exulting in the triumph of light over darkness. I’d never as yet attended a service of ‘Midnight Mass’ in person - it was somewhat antithetical to the simpler liturgical practices of my Methodist upbringing. But just as I’d gotten into the habit over the previous few years of listening to the Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge on the radio, so I’d also begun watching the first Communion of Christmas on television. It was usually broadcast live from some cathedral church or another, sometimes Anglican, sometimes Catholic. In 1986 it was the turn of Clifton Cathedral, Bristol.

O magnum mysterium,

et admirabile sacramentum,

ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,

iacentem in praesepio!

I listened to the words, but my heart was numb. What did this ‘great mystery’ matter to me, who just an hour before had learnt from my mother that our worst fears were certain to come to pass? The surgeons had opened up my father, and discovered that his stomach was riddled with cancer. There was nothing more they could do for him, other than offer some palliative care. They gave him six months, at most. This would be our last Christmas with him.

The responsorial chant continued:

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera

meruerunt portare

Dominum Iesum Christum.

Alleluia!

Beata Virgo. How blessed was it, really, to bear a child you would watch die an agonising death on a cross, thirty-three years later?

And how blessed was it, truly, to be wed to a man who had only just, after the bitter year-long strike, been released from three decades of toil underground with his modest redundancy package, in the hope and expectation of many more years of marriage yet to come; only for that natural presumption of growing older together to be extirpated by this wretched and unseasonably-timed revelation?

My mother had retired to her bedchamber, alone, to contemplate her impending widowhood; my sister remained, for now, unaware, sleeping in blissful ignorance; and silently, how silently, I considered the wondrous gift given, as I watched the celebrant in Bristol elevate the consecrated elements above the high altar, 40 kilometres away - it might as well have been the almost 4,000 kilometres distance between my home and the Little Town itself, for all the ability of this act to give me any solace that night.

And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall…

And is it true…

…that God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine?

And was it true? That night, I went to my bed hungry, my soul thirsting, unsatisfied, with Betjeman’s timely question ringing in my head.

***

Almost nine months later, the language was different - Greek rather than Latin - but the underlying sentiments were surely the same. Words of adoration had left me unmoved and empty on Christmas Eve, the bleakest midwinter night of my life. But now the flame of faith had quickened again in my heart; and, like Parry, I was glad.

Halfway through the service, to my surprise, the congregation almost doubled in size as a troop of men came in. They had missed the proclamation of the Word, and the priest’s exposition of the Scriptures. I realised, later, that this was perfectly normal. The men, by and large, were perfectly content to appear, unabashed, for what was deemed the high point of the service, the liturgy of communion. Before that, they had gathered in the square outside the church, playing chess, or backgammon, drinking strong coffee and ouzo, and exchanging news and gossip with one another. That was their ‘proclamation of the word.’

I was well-aware of the prohibitions that existed in the Catholic church, and which were practised with particular rigour in Britain, regarding Protestants receiving the Eucharistic sacrament. After three years of moving steadily beyond my sheltered Methodist upbringing, I had become used to receiving the blessed bread and wine at the services of half-a-dozen different denominations. It rankled, somewhat, that I should be denied communion within a Catholic church - ironic, considering my younger self’s avowed hatred of all things ‘Roman’. I assumed that similar restrictions would apply here in Cyprus: for Orthodoxy, after all, was stranger and more exotic still than Catholicism, to your average Protestant believer.

And I was also somewhat self-conscious, knowing that my dress and pale skin-tone gave me away as a tourist, and as an outsider to this little village’s most sacred ceremonies. Their customs were so different, in so many ways, from any form of Christian observance I’d observed previously; even the women crossed themselves in a dissimilar way - right to left - from what I had seen previously amongst Catholics. I clumsily attempted to copy them, in what I hoped would been seen as respect.

How strange, too, this disappearing and reappearing of the priest behind the iconostasis! Hidden from sight, he performed the precise act of consecration: as inscrutable as the life imperceptibly forming in the womb; as veiled as the final corruption of the grave; and as unfathomable, of course, as the pivotal moment of Christianity itself. We forget, so readily, that there were actually no witnesses to the Resurrection of Christ - merely observers of the aftermath.

As I watched the priest, it felt almost as if I was present at the Eleusinian Mysteries, those most famous of the secret religious rituals of classical Greece. At least I had the confidence to believe that my fate would not be that of King Pentheus of Thebes - torn limb from limb by Dionysus’ followers when he had had the temerity to spy upon the Bacchic rites.

Yet, to my surprise, I found myself wordlessly beckoned forward by the priest himself; first to kiss the Book of the Gospels, and then later to receive communion, a fragment of wine-soaked bread on a golden spoon. Here was grace - extended to a stranger - of a kind that I had not expected. And after the service, I had also received a portion of the blessed loaf, the sign of fellowship.

I reflected on my father - who had so often driven me to and from church. Who had never belittled or dismissed my beliefs - even when I had felt too embarrassed to talk about them to him. I thought about the prejudiced, impressionable teenager I had been not so long ago, who would have been horrified to see my present self lining up, with the faithful, to kiss a jewel-encrusted book - Gospel or not - in an act which he would have condemned as detestable idolatry.

I wished I could go back in time, to shake that insufferable, self-righteous prick, and box his ears. I didn’t know how my father had resisted the temptation to do so. I really didn’t.

St Paul - and myself. What did we have in common, one with the other? Arrogance and big-headedness in the extreme, that’s what. Perhaps in time the apostle had grown out of it. Then again - assuming it was authentically Pauline - the letter to Titus condemning the Cretans was supposed to be a rather late composition. So perhaps not. Well, never mind St Paul: I knew I had to learn to put aside such crass intolerance. I just wished my father was still around to see me do so.

Day Three (August 10th): Deus ex machina

Because we’ve smashed their statues,

because we’ve run them from their temples

does not mean that all the gods are dead.

O land of Ionia, they love you still,

it is you their souls remember.

When an August dawn breaks over you

your air pulses with their life,

and sometime the shape of an ethereal youth,

invisible, in rapid flight,

sprints across your hills.

(Constantine Peter Cavafy - Ionic)

The wisdom of holidaying in Crete in August - and an exceptionally hot August, at that - was something I had questioned from the moment we walked off our plane, straight into a hot dry wind that had the feel of a blast furnace. The air was certainly pulsing as we disembarked - the temperature barely dipped below 35 degrees Celsius during the day throughout the span of our vacation, was often above 40 degrees, and remained above 30 degrees even at night. Later, I was to read that Greece that summer had experienced her deadliest heatwave in modern times, with a thousand people dead in Attica alone.

I had planned to visit the archaeological museum in Heraklion on the third day of our holiday. Unfortunately, all the museums and historical sites were closed that day because of a strike. I looked in my guidebook, and noted the nearby ruins of a small amphitheatre where there was no admission fee for tourists. I reasoned that this site, perhaps, would have no attendant staff. Ergo, perhaps I could visit it without hindrance.

My assessment turned out to be a little optimistic. There was a tall wire fence surrounding the site, and the entrance gates were firmly closed. Undaunted, I made my way around the perimeter. Eventually, I found a place where the latticework in the fencing was torn, where it was possible to squeeze underneath.

Beyond the barrier, I faced a steep uphill climb - and was thankful I had brought a sunhat, and an ample supply of water. The ground was dry and withered beneath my feet, but at least Crete had been spared the scrub fires now raging out of control across Rhodes. From the crest of the hill, I was able to gaze down on the far side, surveying the semicircular remains of the amphitheatre.

I began to descend, picking my way slowly and cautiously. I wondered: How many people could this amphitheatre once have held? Many hundreds, perhaps a few thousand. How often, in its heyday, had the crowds gathered here? And what kind of performances had they witnessed?

As a teenager, I’d already read many of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes. The first Greek play I’d ever read was Agamemnon, the opening act of the Oresteia - the only complete Greek trilogy of plays that had survived from antiquity. But my favourites were the Theban plays of Sophocles - Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Although not a true trilogy, like the Oresteia - having been written at different times, for different occasions - their commonality of theme, dealing with successive events in the history of Oedipus and his family, meant they were often printed and performed together. The previous year, the BBC had broadcast a wonderful new version of the plays, translated by Don Taylor. My VHS recording was already showing wear and tear from being played many times since.

Of all the tragic heroes of ancient Greece, there were none I identified with as much as poor Oedipus. No - not literally - I had never killed my father, nor married my mother. But the idea of a man, who believes himself good, just and wise, and who takes pride in his virtue, gradually learning that he is a victim of a terrible, ineluctable fate; that, for me, held an immensely powerful, and frightening, attraction. Oedipus proclaims: ‘Born thus, I ask to be no other man than that I am.’ A boastful claim? Or the assertion of a man desiring simply to live up to the famous injunction of the Delphic oracle γνωθι σεαυτον (gnothi seauton) - ‘know thyself’?

A third of the way down, I parked myself on the uneven steps of the ancient amphitheatre, lounging beneath the noonday sun. Had the audiences who had gathered here in centuries long past done so in order to remind themselves of the immutable power of nature’s eternal laws? In each retelling of these familiar tales of gods and heroes, of monsters and men, had they seen the patterns of their own lives reflected, replicated and redrawn? As the drama unfolded, did they ponder the universal truths of justice, honour and vengeance, the inevitable pathways of hubris and nemesis? Did they behold the actors playing the parts of Achilles and Iphigenia, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Jason and Medea, Creon and Antigone, and think to themselves: yes, these men and women are not so very different from us?

But if so - then why the need for masks?

In practical terms, the masks of Greek actors, usually made of wood or leather, served to amplify the voice so that those wearing them could better be heard across the vastness of the amphitheatre; whilst their exaggerated expressions helped to define the characters they played, and made them more discernible even to audience members in the more distant seats. They also allowed the actors to play different roles, even different genders, with greater ease. Each mask, a different persona, with which to face the world.

Most of the time, my father chose to wear the comic mask. He would have been well-suited as a character within one of the humorous, earthy plays of Aristophanes; whereas I, without a doubt, would have found my place within one of the darker dramas of Aeschylus and his fellow tragedians.

But what about the man, and the boy, without the mask - that device that exaggerates and amplifies the persona which we choose to show to those around us? Surely, the real visage hidden beneath is a mix of both comic and tragic, light and dark. The complexities thus concealed are aspects of the true self that we show but to a few: perhaps not even, always, to ourselves. For the temptation to give the lie to the Delphic oracle’s wise injunction remains a strong one.

But in death, the mask is finally frozen, immutable at the very end.

***

Like many of the customs surrounding death which were once routinely observed - the closed curtains, the black armbands, the doffing of caps as the cortege passes by - the ‘viewing’ of the corpse, lying in state, probably seems puzzling to many people these days. We cling to the old customs more than most in the Valleys. The day before Dad’s burial, I visited the funeral parlour. I had done it for my father’s father a year before. Now I did it for him.

The waxy skin of death, with its strange sheen, and bloodless pallor, is hard to describe, to those who have never seen it up close for themselves. One feels as if one is looking at an empty vessel - which, of course, is true, I suppose. The spirit has already departed, and what remains is something that only partially resembles the person you once hugged, with whom you once walked hand in hand, and upon whose shoulders you once delighted to ride; the father who could make you laugh, or cry, just with a look, lying motionless now within his casket, his eyes closed forevermore.

It was odd to see how, in death, the image of my father resembled that of his father more than I had ever noted before. Will that be how it will be for me? Will I, in death, finally look like the man whom I have loved - and yet felt estranged from - more so than any other in my life?

I take a final glance, and whisper my last words of farewell. And now, it’s too late for looks, or for speech. Too late to penetrate beneath the mask of death. Too late, for the son, to perceive the father. Too late, for the father, to truly know the son. The heavy curtain remains in place; and the veil that was not penetrated in life remains impassible in the face of death.

Unless, perhaps, the Deus ex machina can find a way.

***

Euripides, of all the great Greek tragedians, was the master of this dramatic trick, so-called because it involved the literal cranking onto the stage of a machine whereby the actors playing the gods could enter the action. The sun god sends a golden chariot to rescue Medea from Jason in the play that bears her name; and in Alcestis, Heracles appears in similar fashion to save the heroine when she offers her life in exchange for that of her husband Admetus.

Indeed, so often does Euripides resort to this familiar plot device, that Aristophanes was able to parody his fellow thespian’s overuse of it. Aristophanes elevates Euripides on-stage, ‘machina-like’, as a character in his own comic play Women at the Thesmophoria. The tragedian finds himself hoisted by his own dramatic petard, quite literally!

Do we really want a Deus ex machina to save us from ourselves? To tear away the lies, the deceptions, the conventions and the habits, with which we are surrounded? Or does ignorance - of ourselves, and of others - remain bliss? Beyond death, perhaps, ‘God out of the box’ will finally reveal all. Or is that just another form of wishful thinking?

The theatre has fallen silent, and the play is done. The statues in the temple have fallen. Does that mean that the gods are dead too - the new God just as much as the old?

Across the vastness of the amphitheatre, a bellowing voice rang out. I looked down and saw, far below, a security guard. My intrusion into the closed-off archaeological site had been detected.

Suddenly unmasked, I jumped up and hastened back the way I came. Oh, to have the wings and sandals of Hermes to speed my flight! But perhaps, to the guard below, straining his gaze upwards, squinting against the sunlight, it’s as if the shape of an ethereal youth, invisible, in rapid flight, sprints across your hills.