Mouths of Gold

All winter, for half an hour after sunrise on any clear morning, a stalk of sun burns along the edge of my blind on to the wardrobe door. It spreads a tall flame across the matchstick blind, like a church candle. Then the whole blind is fire and shadow, cast by the tree outside. A print, a lion face.

A slice of blood orange is a wheel of fire. The skin surrounds a smudged pith and ten radiating white veins sodden with dark red: ten segmented translucencies of red gold like a dragonfly wing, and filaments like combed hair. A segment of blood orange is a red gold mouth pressed thick on the mouth, bitter as pomegranate.

Low tide and a waveline of jellyfish like ice on the thaw, clearer than water, so clear the sand is alight.

Ship smoke hangs over the garden of this house of the edge of journeys. Some of the older houses on the bay have a widow tower where women whose menfolk were at sea would watch for a ship coming and going through the Rip. All of them have a tin roof and narrow windows in their wooden walls, hooded to keep the summer out. The rooms have tall sash windows that run on ropes and the boxed panes are made of thin flawed glass that moves along with you like a sheet of water. The boxes of window are six feet by three, the dimensions of a single bed, Grania says, or a casket. A street of caskets with glass lids.

This story in the making: more and more self-effaced, lapped in the folds of itself, as water is, and reflections on water, developing in loops rather than along a story line, and therefore devoid – or free – of narrative tension. The surface tension of water. It involves Grania and her daughter Rosalie on the day and night that the family sustains, at a remove, a violent death. To be true to its organic form, any tension there is can only be that between the current of lived time and the reverberating rings of wave made by the stone that has broken through.

Attention to what is. Because whatever is added to the image hoard of one mind is an addition to the world. Not a permanent one, needless to say. What is permanent about a grain of fire in space?

We believe in anything rather than accept that a whole world emblazoned inside the eggshell of the skull is fated for extinction. We must be more than sparks of matter, atoms of finite being. We bind ourselves to others and to the world in the three dimensions of time with silken threads of soul stuff, extrusions of the self into the void, webs of meaning which we anchor where we can and hang there. The hope of the soul is tenacious. It is inborn, in our bones.

White wings, rags, moths flapping out in the garden are irises, for the first time in years, winter irises on the cusp of spring, self-sown in a blue-flickering darkness of rosemary.

Grania squats down with a fork grubbing up weeds, old bones, chicken drumsticks knotted at both ends and baked a wooden brown, a fish spine like a white fern, washed up with stones and roots and covered again, tides of the soil and rain. The place is a midden, year after year laid down and now coming to light, a lifetime of summers, of winters closing in like nightfall, other lives, compost spread out as mulch, black potatoes, some sprouting, avocado pits and their leather skins – fork the soil over anywhere along the dunes of the coast – ashes, knucklebones, eggshells, cuttle bones, a seabird’s head all beak and eyehole, oyster and mussel shells, the antiquities of untold generations of a light-footed race, all the dark dead, their bones and blood and flow of hair.

Facing the two men the woman in the dream room shakes the water off her hands, but it spots the floor at their feet, dark blood, bad blood.

Flapping at her back all afternoon, the sheets on the lines as they fill out with wind and sun, four sheets like square sails airing for the family, two double for the parents, two single for the boy. Time now to haul them down and bring them in, pulling the French window shut behind her, seeing how the sun catches her through the trees as a blur on the glass, a fleece of hair hung on branches, one arm stretched out as if to cast a spell while the other hugs her bundle. Four sheets to untangle and fold, thin old cotton sheets, warm now, and yellow in the creases, like sheets off a sick bed – but no, the yellow goes away once the cloth is hung out flat, it was only the late light pooled in them. Arms stretched and lifted, she takes it slowly, matching the hems and selvedges in the dance that mothers used to take their partners for when she was a girl, a step forward, a step back, bringing up their hands in slow pat-a-cake unison. If a corner drags on the floor and is trodden on, never mind, it soon rubs off. They fill the room with the summer breath of salt and hay.

A stored image can broadcast itself when conditions are favourable, taking form in words, in ink and paint, film, clay, stone. Images are seeds. They have latency and the power to endure. They are like stored shadows burnt on to film for a fraction of a second, decades ago, the lost negative in the family Bible of a child with the sun in her eyes, seen for the first time in the child’s old age. She sits squinting white-eyed in the pram. Her eyes are crescents in a jelly of dark flesh, albuminous, as if candlelit from inside. O, let me not be blind, not blind.

The brass lamp on the mantelpiece has no shade and the globe casts a yellow wash on the pair of photos she has propped against the wall at its back, two photos already in the key of yellow. In the first, the sun through the darkness of a cavernous ruin strikes a brass candle as tall as a man and melts it; on either side of it stand her daughter and grandson, each posed half in shadow, half light. In the other, two stocky men are smiling out of the haze. The one dusty with sunlight, his mane of hair alight, is older and heavier than the other at his side, in his shade: Tomo with his brother Theo from Australia, so close in age they might be twins. Chrysostomo, he of the golden mouth, whose speech is golden. Theodoro, gift of God.

We know when someone out of our range of vision is staring at us. We sense the gaze, we turn to meet it: but how do we, using what sense? The orb spider poised in the web sees me watching: what is her idea of me, and how does it compare to mine of her? The horse as it takes the apple off my palm in a whiskery kiss, the octopus writhing its fiery skin in rage at the glass of its prison, perceive me – in what form do they?

Our eyes live in a head they never see on a body always more or less out of sight. What drives us all more than half blind through this world of invisibilities, and how do we find our way? The wayfarer’s way of attention, observation, navigation by signs, by memory, by experience.

We know, from experience, how experience has its meaning beyond the moment, a meaning which is only ever gradually revealed and grows with the revelation. The process is always incomplete. The meaning goes on growing, like desire, like memory, in the dark. The fullness of the meaning is only to be known by its weight, its power of displacement. It is at once intimately and exclusively ours and universal; as unknowable as the dark side of the moon or, for that matter, of the brain.

Mick watching his Nan bow to the oven with a tray is always reminded of his other grandmother on baking day, how the lumps of dough swelled up, with air, she said, sliding them swollen into the oven, and the air was baked in with the flour and water and yeast. He wonders again what made the difference between heavy bread and the bread that was a honeycomb of mostly air. And whether the air stayed trapped inside a loaf as if in so many bubbles of crust, or flowed in and out, a warm wind, then cooling, the breath of the bread.

No narrative, so no current of lived time, not so much as an undercurrent. The moment itself, stopped, as in the camera, isolated, shuffled, strung – beads on a rosary.

Someone calling out in the caravan park, Are you by yourself? – the strangeness of this double exposure. I know by inference that another self does inhabit me, live side by side with me, as ever-present as the skeleton and no less hidden. It is this other who keeps the flame of my life as flesh, in a dimension outside the mind’s reach where it is at home, silent and unerring, a smooth animal. I and my self, the invisible twin: shade and water to each other in a dry land.

A presence accompanies him, keeping pace, moving where he moves, reflecting his every movement, not his brother. It shrinks from the light and is himself alone, his body, transparent, all its complexities of flesh woven on bone, the image and intensification of his dread. It looks like his brother, the image, and is not him at all, nor is it the soul of one or the other of them wrenched or shocked out of the body, an emanation with a seeming life of its own. It is a self-image. What he sees is his undeniable self flayed and infused with light.

Low tide this afternoon again, and there is such a sense of access, plenitude, now that the reef – a stone reef here, not coral – is exposed again and we can walk out over the seabed, the lips of pools studded with limpets and grapeweed, so often hidden and for a time laid bare. A hot northerly is starting up. Sunsodden, the sand spreads. Its creases gather and run under the rocks, like a sheet going thin and yellow, translucent with age, weighed down with stones, sand caking and feathering, drying itself.

Dinner over, they are on the last of the Naoussa wine and Mick is in bed when the phone rings, late, a call out of a Greek day for Theo, the first of many. There has been an accident. A car crash. On the mountain, and his brother Tomo is in hospital. And the boys? Just cuts and bruises, shock. Their mother is in a coma. Then Tomo is dead. He died in the arms of his son Michali, died, yes, instantly – it was just that no one could say it straight out. The funeral is tomorrow, according to custom. Theo asks them to wait, he’ll fly over. It’s up to the son as next of kin, after his mother, and he says no, tomorrow. Where? Thessaloniki. No, shrieks Theo, in the village of his birth! My father lived here in Thessaloniki, Michali says, with us, and hangs up. A quarrel ignites and burns on into the night across the world, the family taking sides: fighting, her daughter tells Grania, like jackals over the body.

What we know about anything is what the mind knows. Our death, for example: we pay lip service to the impending fact. As for the wisdom of the body by which we live, it keeps its own counsel, which amounts to a working disbelief in death. Let the mind know what it knows, the dreamer in the flesh will turn a blind eye.

Ποίησηwas ‘making’ to the Greeks, not our ‘poetry’ but the plain act of making. As in honey, as in web – imparting form to whatever a given self may yield. All metaphor is ποίηση. μεταφορά. One is transported, taken beyond. Where? All gods are metaphors, all religions. We grasp at meaning, for an insecure foothold on truth. Dream is metaphoric. Metamorphic. Visitants, spirits and the occult, the near-death experience, angels, devils, are flickers in the cave of the skull, brain events as real as the fiery after-images of contrary colour – negative colour – that visit the eye are real. Perception itself comes down to metaphor.

For in Homeric days a restlessness seems to have possessed the Mediterranean basin, and ancient races began shaking ships like seeds over the sea.

D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places

There are scraps of paper all over the hearthstone that Theo must have torn up, a head, a speck of candle flame, the photos from Agia Anastasia. Rosalie is stooping to pick them up when he utters a hoarse cry at her back and swings the empty bottle. It smashes on the hearthstone in a spray of light – she has sprung back just in time, and terror invades her. She watches, still throbbing all over with it, as at a great distance he throws himself face-down on the floor, blood in the black hairs of his arm, and on the hearth, no, red ochre and drops of glass. No. Grania has gone for a walk. If Mick wakes up and comes in – what’s happened? – it’s all right, only the lamp, she will say, it fell and broke, now go back to sleep. Listening in to the silent house.

Relics, memorials, the tide’s leavings and ours, humanity’s, so few, bones and driftwood, shells, crab casts and scrawls on the sand that were wave traces and the broader ones that ended in a limpet or a periwinkle, threads each with a knot at one end. Standing stones and rune stones, crosses, middens, ruins, shards and shreds as haphazard and rifted with meaning as the elements of a dream.

Magic began it, resurrection magic to thwart death: hence the gods. Death is the secret name of God. Religion, science, art, love, as one they body forth the eternal human longing to go on being. What has made us human, homo sapiens, if not this most ancient dream of all? So, the rebellion against death – this is our sapientia? Such as it is, I think so. What sort of wisdom is that! The wisdom of folly. Paradox.

Something has woken him, a wind, hoarse and steady, which is not the wind, or not only the wind, more the sea and he is at his Nan’s place at the beach, the pitchdark sleepout. He lies with his hands folded in the heat of his armpits, not daring to pull on the cord over the head of his bed and flood the walls with the salvation of yellow light. Not for anything will he open his eyes or push a hand up out of the blankets to grope in the dark for the cord.

He still has the last traces of a dream in his head. They were all back at the monastery, all of them, even his Nan. It was old and crumbling, like a giant loaf of bread with a cracked red crust, and inside it was more like a cave than a church. A saint’s bones were in there. Not all her bones. There was a queue to kiss the glass case and make the cross, all old women in black monks’ hoods who looked like they’d seen a ghost, like his other grandmother, but when it was his turn all he saw was himself as if underwater, afloat over a little skull the size of a monkey’s, in a silver helmet, until it moved its eyes, he saw it, and then his breath hid it.

The instant of the death, the thunderbolt. And the crux, comprehension. At the snowline halfway up the mountain on a Sunday morning in the late winter of his seventeenth year Michali in the front seat of the car sees out of the corner of his eye a truck veer into their path and grind through the windscreen. There follows a long moment like flight, of freedom from any sensation, before he can free an arm, a leg, another, his own and his father’s, and drag them both out of the creaking wreckage that may explode at any moment, and over on to the gravel. The head against his shoulder is stove in. It wants to speak. He leans close but no words come out. He presses a frantic kiss on the wry mouth. When he lifts his head away the jaws fall open. A mask of blood crackles on his face. A screaming in the air, his little brother, alive, and now boots crunch and voices call out but he is too cold to respond, cold and heavy in the snow with the burden in his arms crushing down with the weight of rock. Then he is afloat in clammy air. Cold, dim. Printed in blood on his white shirt, a rough head of hair.

These are the tall white irises, fleurs-de-lis, white and gold. They have an elaborate structure of six long outer petals, three of which stand up, alternating with three that fold down, pouting bottom lips each with a beard, a yellow brush that runs from the root to the rounded tip. The effect is of three caterpillars with their heads thrust down the throat – where these three outer petals, and only these, are overlaid with an inner petal. The light pools in it as in a shaded white room, in a breath of vanilla sugar. The six outer petals rise from a pod enclosing a green-gold throat, freckled, mackerel-skinned, to become broad and filmy white with a fan of glassy veins. The inner petals are pure white with a seam down the middle, along which they are humped and thick, but pointed at the tip; after a time the tip may split into two horns. From underneath, this hump of the inner petal is divided along the seam into two lobes, overlapped by a flange at the edge of the horned tip, as if two thicknesses of skin have fused. The hood thus formed shelters the strip of beard where it begins in the depths as the rich gold of egg yolk; out in the open, where the petal spreads, the beard fades to a pale lemon, almost white, and tails off. The hood has a name, calyptra, from the Greek Καλύπτρα, veil. What does it veil? Nothing, it seems, until you pinch open one or other of the hooded inner petals, like a snapdragon’s jaws, and there it is: a little needle, with an eye and a fuzzy skin, quivering out over the bristle of beard, a stamen, otherwise so shielded and screened in folds of white as to be invisible. The outer folds are translucent, long-veined under a silky glaze, with a fine sprinkling of moisture, like mica in marble, that is not dew or rain but their own drenched flesh. They cast shapes of shadow on and through their own translucencies.

The petals spill from a green pod, itself translucent, which is one of two at the top of the stalk. The other, lost in the folds of its open twin, remains a closely packed bud, but frilled and already white, while those further down are still the faint indigo of the skin around an underslept eye. In two or three days the twin opens up, just a chink, like a cockle shell, and then wide; the lower, smaller ones follow. Each one as it withers turns cobwebby and shrinks down to a ball in a green fist.

A child crying has woken me. I listen into the silence. I have been dreaming. No, a wail on the wind, sobbing, a child – whose? Mine, mine, the unborn.

A photograph of the iris – white on black, a sea creature, a fat tongue with a ridge of bristles, white caverns, a bonnet and mantle, shadowy membranes. Underneath is a naked woman with her back turned, a tuft of soft hair in a blur where the head should be – a shoulder and breast half in shadow, a long flank and beyond, against the darkness, a white flounce crinkled at the edge like a dancer’s fan, a jellyfish mantle. Or it is her front, the second breast in shadow, and she is bent back like a ship’s figurehead, a mermaid, the flesh grainy like scales on one haunch: fused thighs and an open fantail. And rising out of her is the white hood, a split tongue of white flame, nose of a white whale. Blurred pale convolutions of flesh, they drift at the edge of vision in dark water as fathomless as sleep. They look like nothing so much as the deep sea creatures that live around fissures in the seabed that vent volcanic gases – the fire drake, the kraken – white, blind, gathered at the hearth fire on the ocean floor.

It has never seemed to me that ‘agnostic’ need be a negative, except grammatically. The concept of αγνωσία posits a lack, a limitation and not, or not necessarily, a void. Unlike ‘ignorance’, whose Greek root it shares, it is a stance. A judicious suspension of belief is implied, a verdict of not proven. There has to be an element of defiance in any wilful embrace of limitation. It is like the absence of perspective in so-called ‘primitive’ art, which is a dynamic absence, not simply a lack, as of something missing. The art is in the distortion, disproportion; the flat figures cast no shadow and seem barely to touch the ground, bodies and robes twisted in an airy fluidity of motion set hard in gold: monumentally still. Gestures in this world are timeless, not natural, not caught in passing, not static either, however: in the stillness there is the illusion, the glimpse out of the corner of the eye, of movement on the point of coming to life.

Like the absence of perspective, the absence of colour – the refusal, the defiance of colour – is a freedom. Monochrome is the beauty of the bare bones stripped of flesh. The Greek word for ‘beauty’, for that matter, ομορφιά, stems from ‘form’, μoρφη – not so the English.

Grania on the jetty sees: two torches moving, one near the shore and one on the outer edge of the rockshelf, and shifting in a wide flare or candling underneath or awash for a moment in a pale swill; every line of light in the sea underneath is a fold over lines of shadow drawn in the sand and water, all running the same way; the moon is high and white, already half-full, like the slow lantern spinning in the lighthouse, on off, on off. There is a word for that, its own strange word. What word? – occult. An occulting lighthouse. Light, dark, and red gold, the heave and loud flaking over a wave.

She turns her face towards home, her cloak wrapped around her like wings, and picks her way through the limestone ledges that throw their shadows on the sand and the pools, dragging her feet more the closer she comes. The house is under occupation. Light and noise and turmoil, the shock of a near death, burst out at her through its skin of silvery wood. She shrinks from going back in. And they are her own people, all she has in the world, dear to her. Wishing them away all the same, anywhere but here, she stares across the winking black bay.

Thessaloniki is built on layers of itself. In its buried heart not long ago a temple was unearthed and found to be a Serapion containing a marble statue of the goddess Isis, now in the Museum, as the mother holding the child Horus. Isis, Au Set of Egypt, was the Blessed Queen of Heaven, the all-holy of her day, the παναγία, all the goddesses of the world in one – and foremost, in antiquity, in that part of the world, Demeter who was death’s door into the earth and out again. Before there were settlements, let alone temples, a goddess had her shrines in caves and farmhouses and tombs and at the crossroads, much as the Panagia Maria today has her wayside chapels and blue shrine-cabinets like bee boxes with glass doors, containing an ikon, candles and matches and a glass of water with a wick like a toy wheel afloat in dark oil. The plains were sown with graves first, and goddesses, any number of holy mothers, their names lost, and those from the time before they had human names, the great black and grey and sandy golden stones that are still standing, the mother stones, their skin weathered and raddled with oil and wine, milk and honey and blood; and a multitude of little stone or clay ones, fat with child, broken or whole, often just the head, formed in baked clay or stone and left in graves to be turned up one day under the plough. A little face looking up, almost smiling – the ploughman halts the horse and stoops over the clods, his shadow slithering at his feet in a silence like water and in the hollow of his hand a stored heat, crusty out of the oven of summer.

On the floor under the lamp Theo stirs and groans. He is shiny and cold, bathed in a smell of whisky. Blood is smeared on one arm and Rosalie lifts it anxiously, but there is only the one slit, shallow, it has already stopped bleeding. She sponges it and then his breathing face, taking care not to wake him, squeezing the sponge into the bowl of darkening water and softly wiping him dry. Ελα, she says, έλα να ξαπλώσεις, come on, lie down. Παιδίμου, έλα, and at that he props himself in his sleep and lets himself be rolled up on to the futon and tucked in, it was her saying παιδί μου like that, my child, she knows, my son, my darling. She gathers up the bowl and the towel, the broken glass, the shredded photos, and leaves him to sleep it off.

The dead were in the keeping of the goddess, in token of which trust, corn was sown on graves. The dead were the Δημήτρειοι. To this day the autumn festivals of the Δημήτρια

are held in Thessaloniki, in honour of the murdered patron saint and martyr known as Demetrios. The grain crops were, and are, δημητριακά. The river-flat country north of Thessaloniki is one of the rare granaries in a land of dry rock. Here as in Attica, Demeter, Δήμητρα, was providence incarnate in arable land, the ample motherly home of corn and barley and sesame. She gave mankind the plough and the threshing floor, and to all who kept the rites she granted in the flesh the fruits of the field and beyond the flesh, immortal life.

Blood of the womb fed the cornfields, as ritual coupling sowed them, and a girdle of spilt blood safeguarded them. These Mysteries were in the keeping of women. The Mysteries, μυστηρια, are simply the rites and sacraments that make a door open into the godhead: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, are ancient μυστήρια. The initiates are μυστες, as they were when they walked to Demeter’s shrine with a winnowing basket of the fruits of the earth, a lighted candle, a phallus; and the candidates for initiation carried a piglet to Eleusis at harvest time, purified along with themselves in the sea in slippery squealing masses of flesh, to be sacrificed to the goddess, as the sow who eats her farrow. Once, beyond memory, the victim was human, as was still the case until much longer in the cold north, Denmark, Ireland, where they would feed a man his ritual meal of all the grains that wanted blessing, throttle him or cut his throat and thrust him into her lap of bog. At Eleusis pigs were thrown into snakepits and what was left, well-rotted carrion, bone and ordure, was mixed with the seed corn for laying on the altar. Earth magic, birth magic.

The snake was always holy to the mother of earth in whose dark places he lives and on whom he flings himself winding belly-to-belly. He whose sting is death is also the master of death, sliding out of his old skin ablaze with new life not once, like the bee or the butterfly, but over and over. Under the skin, besides, the snake is doubleness itself from the forks of the tongue to the genitals; and, like earth, a store of seed, in that the female lays fertile eggs months, and sometimes years, after mating. And the snake is the shelter of the household that gives it shelter and feeds it bowls of milk.

The bee was also holy to the goddess, whose priestesses were called Melissai, bees. She was always offered honey, as were the dead and also the newborn, who, once their lips were sealed with honey, were human under the law and not to be exposed or killed. The pomegranate was hers, and the fig, those blood-red seedy fruits; her flower was the tall and golden-tongued, late-winter-flowering purple iris. But, like children, and cities, new gods grow by feeding off the old, and she went to earth, the goddess, earth to earth, biding her time.

Νυκτιπόλοις, μάγοις, βάκχοις, λήναις, μύσταις

– nightwalking magicians, bacchantes, revellers, initiates in the mysteries…

The widow is a Greek of different stock. Her village is not inland in the plains but due east of the city, on the top of the dark mountain that crowns the peninsula. Her village is goats, stone walls and mud streets, icicles, deep in fog the one hot eye of an oven, a smithy. On the way there Tomo always pulled up at the old monastery, its wooden bones exposed – sooty cupolas and the sun thrusting in, great fallen rafters of smoky sun. Everyone went in and lit candles to poke in plates of sand. In a glass casket was displayed, set in silver, the skull of the saint, brought here reverently from the fallen Constantinople, tiny in a lace bonnet of silver like muddy melting ice.

It sat in the bowl all winter, a durable pomegranate with its red skin fading like the paint on an old boat, no stain though, no black spots, intact – only that it felt too light when I picked it up idly one day in spring, as light as a shell, and when I cut it in half there was only here and there a glow of red, no more than three seeds left alive in what was otherwise earth, soft, acrid, brown, full of clots the size of sheep droppings, a dusting of pale green mould.

The rites of the Mysteries were held underground bathed in fire. The initiates took an oath of secrecy, which was kept. Only a chink or two of light has ever come down to us.

I approached the very gates of death and set one foot on Proserpine’s threshold yet was permitted to return, borne through all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining as if it were noon: I entered the presence of the gods of the underworld and the gods of the upper world, stood near and worshipped them.

Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass

Rosalie knocks and pushes her mother’s door open. The bed is empty in the dark. She undresses and slips in under the covers on the far side, her father’s old side. Her mother’s side is as cold. Where is she? A widow and her double bed. No one is saying a word about the widow who is their sister-in-law, the widow who doesn’t know she is – who will wake out of a coma to be told her man is dead and in his grave. And the boys? she will cry out and, reassured, will undergo the first spasm, as in labour, of her bereavement. How will she bear it? Much as all the village women who have always gone on keeping house and planting, hoeing all week and on Saturdays tending the graves. Their heads are shaded under a white cloth, a τσεμπέρι; and under the hot fabric and the glaze of sweat their faces take on an intense frail pallor, a transparency in the sunlight reflected off the dry soil, as if by candlelight. Frail, and yet even the oldest, the ones whose τσεμπέρι is brown or full black, for widowhood, burn with a naked strength. A black strength in a white body. A sisterhood of the bereaved.

The eclipsed moon in its totality, its scabs and burnish clear against an inner coppery light, as in a hand held open, filling with sun, over the eye. In a deepening silence, dimmed, it made its way over the stars in a flush of blood.

The brother of the dead man lies torpid as shapes of light swim up under his eyelids, red shot with blue. The bed smells of hay and something acrid and sweet, wine in the basin. Two women are hovering over the doughy mass on the bed, one a darkness, his mother, and the other in a rim of yellow. One lifts the scrubby grey head in both hands while the other fastens a bandage under the chin, knotting it at the nape. He hears the soft lick and slop of the sponge as they lift one limp arm and then the other, one leg and the other, a line of drips as yellow as oil strung out shimmering. He is as cold as the sea. The strokes of the sponge leave a varnish of water scribbled with black hairs.

Demeter’s lost child was Kore, image of her mother. Greek names take the article – the Maria, the Thessaloniki – the same as common nouns. Κόρη is the common word for daughter, as well as the mirroring pupil – apple – of the eye. It used to encompass girl, virgin, doll, so that the κοροπλάστης was the maker of κόρες, figurines for the grave, dolls of clay or wax that came fully formed out of the plaster shell. Spoken of by name, Kore is just ‘the daughter’, any daughter, at the same time as she is the Kore whose womb is yet to shed blood in the moon’s good time and, on her resurrection, the Persephone whose bleeding has run cold.

One wild scream and she was gone. When no one could tell the mother where her Kore was, she robed herself in black and, starving, searched the land for nine days and nights by the flare of two fennel brands held high, until she came to Eleusis, ‘advent’: and so the pilgrims fasted and carried burning brands to the temple. The priestess of Demeter played both parts, Kore and Demeter, the daughter raped by Death, and the mater dolorosa. She played all three parts, it might be truer to say, since Kore as a girl torn from the sunlit fields was a world away from her later Persephone-self – Proserpina to the Romans, Persipnei to the Etruscans – the bride of Hades. The figures of Kore and Persephone stand as the two halves of the matrix split apart, two shells and in their clasp the moulded figure of the mother, Demeter – a plaster negative and its mirror twin, Day-in-Night and Night-in-Death, the one white as snow and the other white as bone, enclosing the red gold clay of Birth, Life. Or – since Persephone replaces Kore, they are never both present at once – she was the sliver of cusp, first on one side then the other, that clasps the dark ball of the moon. She was to the figure of the Mother what the glow is to a source of light, the equivalent of the penumbra around the shadow, umbra: she was its fullness. All three were the one goddess, as the full moon and the two halves are the one moon; and each of the three was all three, fusing and splitting like flames over water.

As long as they live, cults grow in layers of themselves, augmented by influxes, grafts, fusions. The holy ones of old Europe and the Mediterranean basin – which has no tides, or only human ones – the goddesses first, and then the gods spreading war, all migrated, divided and coalesced, shifting shape through story after story. In an oral culture they are presences as immanent as breath, having their whole being in the lived ceremony, the sacrifice, the oracle and the old wives’ tale by the hearth fire. They can live on in the word, but only when given breath. Art turns them to stone. Writing is the death of them.

We, on the contrary, say: In the beginning was the Word! – and deny the physical universe true existence. We exist only in the Word, which is beaten out thin to cover, gild, and hide all things.

D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places

Rather than bring myself to eat the three red seeds I had potted them in their skinful of earth. Now one was in leaf. I was digging a hole in the garden for it when the spade found a lump, two water drops that were slit, were eyes, alive, in a muddy little frog. I carried it caged in my fingers to the safety of the long grass and knelt, hands open. It sat in my palm staring out for a time, pulsing, spun jelly fingers strung out wide, before it could make its leap. Then I set my pomegranate tree in its well of earth.

Unseen horses, a chariot, the pale god of the Dead, had burst out of the earth and seized Kore. Ruthless in her despair, Demeter let the land fall into waste until at last she was told that her daughter could come back, as long as she had not eaten in the land of the dead. But Kore had. She had eaten a single seed, or three, or seven seeds, of a pomegranate, and so she belonged there in part, and must spend part of every year forever after with Hades. In the summer of her absence the land would lie bare under the sun as if dead. At the time of the autumn sowing of the stored seed corn – the old crop, and the new – it would come back to green life.

In Attica her absence was the furnace of summer after the harvest. Further north, it changed to the winter of ice and snow.

In the myth she has nothing to say. One scream rings out through the earth and sea and then silence. The silence of Persephone is the silence of the grave. Why did she eat? Did the serpent beguile her? Did Hades force her? The lily maid pure as the snow, and the apple of venom, meaning death – was it for the glow of red in it, a far sun? There in the underworld gloom she finds a tree hung with faded carapaces, little clay pots left out in the rain. One has a gap in the bottom, a red darkness. She pulls it in half and lying in her hands are two white lobes of honeycomb, packed with beads of shining red. She picks one out, bites down with a shudder. What has she done? She stares at the red ball. A thread of blood runs down her arm.

The skin of a face quaking like milk on the boil, before collapsing, and on its mouth the blood drop of a pomegranate seed. And this is what it takes to prove the right of Hades to his bride, his seal of ownership? Yes, if it stands for the show of blood between her thighs.

One of his father’s sisters and her husband are looking after the details of the funeral and his mother’s hospital for him. They are paying because there was no money anywhere at home, only small change. Another aunt is nursing his brother. She and the others urge on Michali the anguish of his old grandmother, who can visit the grave any time if it’s in the village, in his own native soil, but Thessaloniki is too far. Again he says to leave him alone, he is the next of kin and it’s up to him when and where his father gets buried. Next of kin – what about the mother who brought him into the world? And remember, in the village he will be buried once and for all and not dug up after three years. What if the bones need more time, what if the earth has not finished eating the flesh, as can happen? Think of it! Michali does. He cracks. He yells that they can have the bones when the three years are up and do what they like, eat them for all he cares, burn them, bury them. For the first time since the mountain he sobs out loud. The aunts pet and comfort him and he throws them off, burning. My mother, he prays, wake up.

I pull the lid off the compost bin and recoil from an animal nestled inside, a ball of spun white fur, long and spangled with dew, the size of a kitten. It does not move and its body, as I peer into the silvery pelt, is a raw wound. I lift it on a stick only to see it fall mushily apart, sending a sharp smell up – of course, now I remember – of rotten figs.

Almost morning when a body sinks on the bed and she gasps, but this is her mother saying go back to sleep, and she does, they both do, in the quiet bed breathing in her blood smell. The shuffle of the sea in their sleep and now and then a thud, hollow, on ribs of dark water.

The spun fur, faintly incandescent, of mould on the figs, a smell, an exhalation, of alcohol – the veil that spins itself around death is what art is.

Three years after this day of the funeral the whole family will gather on the lip of the grave, all hostilities suspended for the time being, the women shrilling around the young widow, the old mother, and the priest intoning, all eyes on the shroud of dark flesh on the bones. The head on its hinge will be a broken shell too heavy for its stem of neck, like a baby’s. The sexton will put aside the spade and step in to lift out the skull, greeting it by name and wrapping it in a cloth. Head first he came into the world: now the mother, not the widow, will open her hands for it and they will watch while she stands dazed turning it this way and that, as if it were a lost schoolcap and she looking for the name, who until this day of the ξεχωματα, ‘unearthing’, will have been hoping for a miracle, a new Lazarus, a smile as he opens his eyes to the light.

In a recurrent dream she is at a crowded beach on a hot night, a child, when an apron of water, having hollowed out a lap between knees of lifted sand, surges high up over the wave line to where she is lying, alone, she must have fallen asleep, and wakes up to find a black wave breathing in her ear, in the nick of time.

The Archaeological Museum is down the road from the graveyard of the Evangelistria, another title of the Holy Mother. On a day of baking heat, dimness, footsteps echoing in room after room, a glow on a blade of glass narrows down to fine leaves, goldfish, on a shelf, mouth-masks of pure gold – gravegoods of a kind unknown elsewhere, in an abundance so far only found in the Archaic stone tombs in and around Thessaloniki. They were only ever worn once, in death, tied on with threads passed through two small holes and knotted at the back of the head, and how they call up even in here the silence of the deathbed, the shadows of women moving around the corpse, the head lifted briefly up, as if for feeding, while the knot is tied, two working together, or else one working alone with the head held at her breasts. What were they for, these mouths? They swim in the heat and gloom with the dense liquidity of honey, but they are finely detailed, made out of hammered sheets of a soft red gold, plain or embossed with rosettes, waves, an eye, a ship with sails surrounded by dolphins, most crumpled under the weight of earth, some with an impression of the teeth. No lid for the eyes, except one woman’s, and only a few full masks where the face was embedded in the gold: just this mouth of gold closed on the mouth of flesh. Was it that the dead needed to see – they had oil lamps – but not speak? All the same, food and drink were offered, as they are to this day at the funeral and all the memorial days. Maybe it was the coin for Charo that they wore on the mouth rather than in it, οι χρυσοστομοι οι νεκροι, the golden-mouthed dead, each a plumb-weight of silence at the grave-mouth, gagged under this kiss.

The mourners had left them figurines of a smiling seated goddess and such keepsakes as birds in the shape of luminous globes of sea blue glass, beads and rings and amber, phials of perfume; black iron miniatures of household goods, pans, cauldrons and tripods, sieves and copper lanterns pricked like sieves, green as mould, wine cups for the dark wines of memory. The children had clay toys, barnyard animals as plain as the dough ones of baking days, with an odd, blind life still in them, a dog, a pigeon, a craning tortoise small enough to close a fist on, worn smooth as river stones. Soldiers had their rusty armour and weapons.

More lamps burned on the pride of the Museum, the relics of a murdered king, and on his ivory and gold shield that they found in flakes like fish scales, and on his gold wreaths. He was found in a casket of gold: a jumble of bones, brown blotched with indigo, and a crushed wreath of oak leaves and acorns, pure gold, on the skull. One eye socket was stove in. The corpse had been burnt, then the bones washed in wine and wrapped in a purple cloth that had evaporated like smoke to leave only a blue shadow on the bone. They laid the bundle in the casket in a marble tomb, in a mound. Now he lay at full length in a glass case, cracked spindles of bone, a grin in a brown shell. It was a day of blinding heat and in the marine sombreness of the hall the objects shone through the glass in drops and pools of irregular brightness like the sun through vents in a cave and along one wall swam speckled fish with gold-ringed eyes.

Unless – what if they had another meaning altogether? That speech, not silence, is golden? In which case the mouth, being the organ of the soul’s truth, turns to gold; and the mouth-mask is more like the warrior’s bronze armour in a tomb in Etruria that looked to Lawrence to be beautiful and sensitive as if it had grown in life for the living body, sunk on his dust.

Some say the body is in its soul. Yes, if its life, its being-alive, the quality of being animate – where soul, anima, is implicit in the word, enfolded and enfolding – is the soul. This mantle of livingness we move in, whose tissue is pulse, breath.

My friend with cancer has visitations. Struck down in the bathroom one night she stared up into the light to see her own mother lean out of the mirror mouthing words of encouragement.

Honey is on tap at the bulk store, in a steel drum mounted over a base like a ship’s lantern where a globe is burning, loosening the flow with its warmth and at the same time candling it, like a fresh egg, so that it unwinds in a rope, every speck visible, dust motes, pollen, a white trail of bubbles, a galaxy. Here is the truth of honey laid bare in liquid fire. Grania closes the lever and a last wisp hangs like blond hairs down a little boy’s nape. When it shrinks up into a neb she wipes it off with her finger and sucks a sweetness that chokes, of winter honey. Iris honey, for all she knows, though not everyone has irises this time of the year. In Greece they grow wild, ίριδες, or simply κρίνα, lilies, the death flower, and αγριοκρίνα, wild lilies. Winter-flowering icy efflorescences. Essence of fleurs-de-lis.

So that the Nectar or liquid hony is of two sorts: one hard and white even like unto sugar, which is therfore called stone-hony, or corne-hony: the other so soft that it will runne, which therefore is called live-hony.

Charles Butler,The Feminine Monarchie

Here and there all over Europe the ruins of graves left over from the Stone Age lie in the long grass or snow. On a day between winter and spring, after the thaw, in a meadow like matted tobacco from the months under snow, I came across two such graves in a mound inside a ring of rocks overlooking a bright sea. In the belly of the mound they were two gashes lipped with stones and lined with splintering snow, and in the shadow of the tall rocks were huddled clumps and shreds, the only snow in sight, as if where stone was, winter still was. A low tomb lay out on its own further inland on the edge of the bare beechwood. This was in Denmark once, not far from where the Tollund Man had lain two thousand years in the peat, his nose squashed like a baby’s at the breast. The tomb had legs of stone edging a rough lintel blotched with lichen. The pillow in its lap was the last snowdrift, blue with deep shadow. A dark hole, a breath of ice.

The cave was the first temple, the cavity with a tight entrance, the stone beehive with its mouth to the sunrise, an oven, a belly: magic in the grave raised in the shape of the mother’s womb, stone-smooth or furry with grass. Then as now, the bereaved set up the wail at the graveside that we all made as babies for our mother. The dead were folded in the foetal position, hollowed out and tarred, cured, pickled, reduced to ash or jugged in the honey of immortality, set adrift in a ship of death at sea or in the earth, or in between, in bogs that were earth-and-water wombs of the goddess. They were bathed in red ochre, the blood of rebirth, for nurture and for safeguard, so she would know them for her own. They were given oil, grain and wine, milk and honey, kitchen tools, armour and gold; sometimes a slaughtered dog to lead the way, and, for a king, a slave woman to share the dark with; a siren to ferry the blessed to the islands; brightly frescoed scenes on the inner walls of sarcophagi, paradises for the soul’s habitation.

A gap over the lintel of the megalithic long barrow of Newgrange in Ireland was so angled that the sun rising on the winter solstice would penetrate in a lightning thrust, a blade of gold, a glaze like candlelight along the stone walls, the reanimating fire.

Heavy lips, articulating words of honey, in the dream, the golden flow of words I understand without hearing and wake up having forgotten. I am at a window watching snowflakes, slow and heavy, rising, blurring, a flight of white bees, some so close and slow I see the glaze of their wings. Now I am pacing along a cloister, a caged quadrangle under snow, a vault of silence. The snow is unmarked except for folds of shadow and a few dry stems poking up, each in its hollow of melt. The columns of the cloister shimmer and then fade like the skin of a caught fish. My eyes open on a sword of light emblazoned on a door.

Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass, translated by Robert Graves, revised with an introduction by Michael Grant (Penguin: London, 1990), 194.

D H Lawrence, Etruscan Places, edited by Giovanni Kezich and Marco Lorenzini (The Olive Press: London, 1986), 46, 50, 102.

Charles Butler, The Feminine Monarchie (Da Capo Press, New York: 1969), facsimile of the first edition, Oxford, 1609.