Copyright: Jordi Rodríguez-Amat

This text has been registered in the Register of the Intellectual Property of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia.

 

REFLECTTIONS AFTER AN IMAGINARY

CONVERSATION WITH NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

(Νίκος Καζαντζάκης).

 

Epitaph in the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis in Heraklion (Crete).

I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.

„Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβʊμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος“

Jordi Rodríguez-Amat

 

I discovered the work of Kazantzakis in the sixties when, under the advice of a friend, I bought the book Zorba the Greek from the writer. It was translated into French, since I did not know Greek, the language in which the book is written. At that time, when I was reading the book, the writer had been dead for ten years. He died in 1957. Since then I have been and continue to be a passionate reader of his work.

In my mind I can still see the images of the visit to the island of Crete where, in the city of Heraklion, Kazantzakis was born. In this island we can find the Lassithi plateau with the Dikteon cave. According to legend, it is the birthplace of Zeus, the greatest of all Greek gods.

Let me to remember one of my experiences in Heraklion at dusk; walking distracted, I roamed through the streets without much benefit. Finally, I reach a place where the road climbed up to the wall. There, at the top, open to the four cardinal points emerged a powerful tomb: Nikos Kazantzakis. The emotion inflated my chest in front of his tomb, which has a single epitaph: I do not expect anything, I fear nothing, I am free.

I, seated there, on an angle of the tomb, the great Mediterranean sky of Crete on the summit, felt that his writing resonated like a deep rage that emerged from the bottom of its spirit. Kazantzakis's work is a cry: Every man must shout before dying. When the writer feels an inner cry to the individual, he does not want to suffocate himself to please the deaf, mute and stutterers. The cry is freedom against others: I do not want to be a disciple of anyone, nor do I want to have disciples. His wandering in this world is a simple instant, the right time to cry: My soul is a cry and my work is the interpretation of this cry. Crying allows the spirit to be appeased and frees the individual from his inner anxiety.

Man is a beast. If you are cruel, you will be respected and feared, if you are kind, they will take your eyes. Shout! shout! Do not stop shouting! Shout loudly! Scare all of them out!

The conversation allows Kazantzakis to express himself with maxims that show his thoughts. Art, love, beauty, purity and passion, among many others, are words that the writer puts in the mouth of his characters such as Zorba the Greek. The clarity of the mind gives the individual the freedom of thought and help, even, to escape the fear of death. I am Zorba, like him I have sensitivity and like him I teach justice exactly as the man rooted in the land does. Zorba and dreams have shaped his inner struggle and shaped his work.

As soon as we began the conversation, I reflected on the relativity of the human existence: the dialectic of reasoning allows us to configure our essence as individuals, shaped through lived experiences and through the capacity of personal self-reflection. At times, however, we must make efforts if we want to keep ourselves free of our flesh and spirit and so to free ourselves from what life experience has taught us and that unavoidably submits us. I have tried to find, says the writer, the creativity of beauty in the human spirit. Kazantzakis has been subjected to his own flesh and without fear, the reflection about death accompanied him throughout his entire career.

Let me die to enter darkness. His training at a young age was with the French Franciscans on the island of Naxos. It was here when the character of Francis of Assisi captivated him so much that he decided to melt with the Holy. Kazantzakis identified with the suffering and the inner struggle of the Holy. Francis was full of divine love, of love and mystery lacking from intellectuality but intoxicated with irrational mysticism. Kazantzakis himself, despite abandoning his orthodox Christianity, never rejected God who will keep him seeking a sense of his own human life.

Towards the end of his life, Kazantzakis declared that dreams, along with Bergson, Nietzsche, Homer, Buddha and Zorba were the characters that helped him in his human struggle. Zorba was a real character, a worker, a miner who influenced the life, the thoughts and, of course, the work of the writer. Zorba the Greek is one of the literary works that remains and will remain forever in my memory. A work published in 1946 under the title Life and customs of Zorba the Greek. This work, in the form of a novel, is a song about life. Here, soul and spirit integrated and the aesthetic and moral values combine in an attempt to move the individual away from social mercantilism and so to achieve the highest levels of spirituality. Kazantzakis confesses to me sotto voce, that despite being extracted from real life, he himself metamorphosed in to Zorba.

In 1915 Zorba (Georges Zorba) decided to become a monk and to go to Mount Athos, a sacred peninsula in the northeast of Greece, an orthodox monastic centre with more than twenty monasteries, the entrance to which is absolutely prohibited to women. Kazantzakis met Georges Zorba in 1917 when he himself spent forty days in one of the monasteries of the place. They became friends and Zorba's personal characteristics were so powerful that they influenced the sensibility and the thoughts of the writer.

In the novel, Zorba is a living spirit, stubborn and also a perplex being. Kazantzakis shows the image of a character who, despite having respect for others, presents himself without free concessions. Zorba is a being who loves and strikes with the great power of the worker, the miner who, in addition, thanks to Anthony Quinn, knows how to dance the sirtaki, created by Giorgios Provias.

Kazantzakis defines the novel as a dialogue; the dialogue between the writer and the people's man, that is, the dialogue between the pen and the great soul of the people. Zorba the Greek is, without a doubt, one of the novels that remains latent in my memory. There, we find the essence of Crete, the synthesis between East and West. The writer has a vision of present and future with the gaze always placed in the world, here and there, halfway between the two civilizations. Zorba the Greek is not a God, nor a demi-god, nor is he a hero, he is a simple human, a soul that is moving in search of pleasure, an individual in constant struggle to maintain freedom against social oppression.

The novel maintains in my spirit the essence of a free, resolute person, who knows what he wants, an individual who lives to live and not to submit to the vulgarity of social materialisms, that is to transform daily existence into constant spiritual values in the words of Kazantzakis himself.

Trusting my memory, I remember that in the book Report to Greco, which I also read in French, just after my stay in Crete, Kazantzakis talks about the real character. A character with whom he could share six months in Crete. At this very moment, writing these words, I have not been able to free myself from the desire to rediscover the pages of the book where Kazantzakis describes his encounter with the man. It stirred me to read about the five characters that had a strong influence on Kazantzakis life: Homer, Buddha, Nietzsche, Bergson and, obviously Zorba.

From reading a book, the sensations generated by the work survive in our memory but many of the details that, without a doubt, the book contains, cannot survive and eventually disappear over time. It is so that from the reading of this novel, many of the characters, places and other unique circumstances that structure their argument have disappeared from my mind, although their memories can be confused with those of the images of the film. The memory is always selective, it dissipates many of the peculiarities and other content and remains the sensations experienced at the time of reading. Many times, when the images have been part of oblivion, there nothing remains, sometimes not even the pleasure that could have been aroused from its reading.

The writer's sensitivity and thinking finds its force in his homeland. He himself becomes an advocate for justice and charity. I am the son of a merchant and landowner and I have met the low people, the worker and witnessed the misery of time in others.

It’s up to us, of course, to decide our aesthetic, ethical and moral behaviour. Do we have awareness of what we are looking for? Do we want to satisfy our desires on a material level? Are we more interested in the pleasure of money? What about artistic creation? Or just doing good for others? Throughout one’s life there are always different stages in which the person ephemerally suffers mutable states, although their own personality remains almost constant throughout the entire course. The last values that we intend to achieve direct our life. At a certain time in history, human beings began to reflect on the values that delimit their own behaviour and that of others and decided to create laws that regulate the behaviour of the group and that of the individual: the Hammurabi stele, the tables of Moses, the laws of Justinian, among others.

The conversation with Kazantzakis allows me to enjoy his spiritual thinking. I understood what it means to achieve full happiness: A glass of wine, cooked chestnuts, a simple brazier, the sound of the sea ... To feel this happiness, it’s just necessary a simple and frugal heart. And Kazantzakis continued: The highest peak that human beings can achieve is not knowledge, virtue, kindness or victory; There is something more sublime, more heroic and even more desperate: sacred fear.

Kazantzakis's thinking is always human, but with a high degree of deep sensitivity. The constant struggle between his human and divine thinking manifested openly when the writer lived in Assisi and identified himself with Francis; The martyr that I loved so much. His struggle between man and God, between matter and spirit, became the Leitmotiv of his life and his work, although he, sometimes, renounced the hope of encountering God one day, despite having manifested: Life is nothing more than a crusade in the service of God. Kazantzakis felt the need to match the real life of the Saint with the myth to fully relate this life to his own identity. Art has the right, and not only the right, but the obligation to submit matter to the essence.

Was Saint Francis, the novel that made him tear down the manuscript and led Kazantzakis to his own failure or to the great personal triumph?

Life-long experiences and especially training under the order of the Franciscans during childhood determined, along with the Cretan and Greek heritage, his character and personality. The later training, achieved through trips, the influence of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nietzsche and Buddhism, among others, conformed the depth of the body of his literary and intellectual work. In the Collège de France, Henri Bergson provoked Kazantzakis to experiences things rather than logic and introduced him to Friedrich Nietzsche. It was one of the many thoughts of Nietzsche, the internal struggle inherent in the individual, which throughout my life determined many aspects of my work. The study of Freud and Buddhism also influenced Kazantzakis. In addition, the trips were beneficial for my constant internal struggle.

I read his book Sant Francis in English and I have commented to Nikos Kazantzakis that the one that most impressed me was the fact of opposing the faith and the vocation of poverty to the ideology of the Vatican. Francis of Assisi renounced a life of pleasure and preferred to share the gospels with living things and, at the same time, undergo personal poverty to influence Christian ways of worship. One of the images that remains in my memory are the frescoes of the Basilica of Assisi painted by the brilliant Giotto, who introduce “Three-dimensional perspective space” breaking away from the flat painting, typical of the medieval period.

Kazantzakis was an Orthodox Christian. God is without being and in the Gospels, the writer found the essence of his beliefs. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis, in an intimate dialogue with himself, strives not to renounce the idea that man, even Jesus himself, is subject to the duality determined through good and evil. The human being is by nature diabolical and divine at the same time.

The novel, described “satanic” by the Vatican, has its sources in the Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, historian and philosopher rejected by the Church, and in the theories of Sigmund Freud and also in historical materialism, the philosophical doctrine in which Karl Marx considers to be the engine of history. In the novel, Kazantzakis tries to revive the values of primitive Christianity, such as love, brotherhood, humility and personal resignation.

Did Jesus exist? Here is the dilemma between his existence or nonexistence. Is there any historian from the time of Jesus speaking of him or of the miracles that the Gospels tell? Despite the doubt, Kazantzakis has two hypotheses regarding Jesus; Does God become man or does man become God? The thesis of the book submits Jesus to the human being who constantly doubts, to the man who is afraid of death, has depression and suddenly presents himself as wildly sensual and luxurious. Jesus accepts Mary Magdalene despite her possible immoral personality. At the end of the book he dreams of a life far from any messianic idea. Jesus fights God's own desire to make him become the Messiah and constantly succumbs to the temptation of the flesh. Without the cross, what would have been the meaning of his existence? Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? Did they have children? The dialectic between the idea of the prostitute and the honest faithful female companion of Jesus has been constant throughout the history of Christianity. Kazantzakis's reflections on the God man or the man God are constant in his life and are reflected in the book. Every moment of Jesus' life was conflict and victory at the same time. Jesus conquered the invisible charm of the pleasures of human beings; He surpassed the continuous temptations of the flesh that he transformed in spirit to finally ascend to Golgotha.

One day, while I was walking around Heraklion, I saw a bust; Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco, great painter and, like Kazantzakis, born in Heraklion. Knowing about its existence without having read it, I decided to read the book Report to Greco. I read it in French. It is, without a doubt, one of the books of Kazantzakis that most impressed me. The book presents the spiritual testament of the writer. A book in which the writer reflects his thought, expressed in his literary work. Report to Greco is my confession. In the introduction of the book, Kazantzakis himself states: Every man worthy of being called the son of man loads his cross on his shoulders and goes up to Golgotha.

The book begins: I pick up my tools: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, spirit. The afternoon falls, the work day is over and I'm back home.

His love for life and nature has at all times confronted his work with the need for spiritual asceticism, always with the gaze fixed on death.

The work of Kazantzakis has been my companion and spiritual friend in many moments of my life.

Jordi Rodríguez-Amat

September 2017

December 2018

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