Three Steps from Truth

The Editors

These notes and photos were found among the books and papers in Matt’s travel bag and are published here without any editing or alteration. We, the editors, have only included sections that fill in the gaps to Matt’s writings.

At the time, Matt was on a class trip to Greece as part of his core philosophy class. We have reason to suspect that the title that appears on the front most sheet of Matt’s notebook is a reference to Plato’s Republic, in which Plato argued that poets and artists seek to represent the true forms of things but are the least adequate in understanding Truth. The rest of the notes and pictures were compiled in the order we believe they were written.

Monday, 4:00

The morning sky is grey and dismal. Water droplets fall sparingly onto my face as I roll my suitcase through the streets of Copenhagen. It clumps along the sidewalk and splashes through the early morning puddles like a beat horse stumbling over its hooves at the verge of collapsing. I put my free hand into the pocket of this blue raincoat to keep it warm while squinting my eyes from the falling moisture.

The streets are mostly empty with the exception of a few lonely cars that huddle together at the red lights reminding me of a coupling of smokers around a lighter. I follow these dark roads that fall endlessly into the rain. They are faintly lit with the murky yellow luminescence of lethargic lamps that hang over the streets like the tarnished bodies of executed angels. All is grim, and then, like a dandelion poking through the course concrete of industry, a single advertisement sign stands out from the darkened world. On a television screen Tom Hanks is depicted running while a pretty woman walks briskly behind him. They aren’t really running though, it’s a still frame. The rest of the advertisement is white with the exception of read letters that run vertically down the center of the screen: Inferno. I would like to pretend this is a divine comedy rather than a detective and action film.

I rode the Metro and am at the airport, sitting the waiting area of terminal seven. My classmates are busy posting their obituaries on Facebook as we wait for our pilot, Charon, to boat us to the next world. The only sign of life among us comes from a dark older man who’s covering his receding hairline with a fresh fedora. He entertains two younger women with a big smile, large hand gestures and the fantastic tails of his adventures. His thick Greek accent fills the room with life and energy but as he looks about himself with that wide smile I catch a fleeing gimps of exhaustion behind his thick-framed glasses.

14:30

“There is no way this is all Athens?” Caleigh questions while looking out the bus window. The city of white houses stretches to the four corners of a massive valley. The thing you need to know about Greece is its geography, I remember my sixth grade social-studies teacher telling me, the geography is very important because the Greeks lived in what is called city-states that were separated from each other because of the sea and mountains. Yes, Athens fits that description pretty well. The mountains around the city are monstrous and even the modern Athenians have only managed to build homes at the base of their slopes.

The Editors

There is a gap here in Matt’s writing, but from reviewing his travel itinerary and interviewing his classmates we can say with certainty that he first checked into the Philippos hotel, a very nice hotel a short walk away from the acropolis. He then went into the streets of Athens with two of his friends, Jordan and Peter, and ate a gyro and gelato before returning to class. Here are his photographs from his first walk:

16:00

I’m not tiered, no, very awake, excited! I’m walking with this group of young philosophers following two professors – two philosophy professors in Athens! We are following them down this walking rode to the old city, following them like sheep no, like puppies. Some of us are puppies learning from our mothers, two stock dogs. The rest of us are sheep.

And now we are at the bottom of the hill in which the city was built upon! “So, err, if you would all look straight ahead,” says Jakob turning my excitement of the potential to the awe of reality, “that is the Acropolis with the Parthenon on top of it and we are actually going to be climbing up there.” He continues to give a lecture on the history and importance of the acropolis before we make the climb.

“We are going to go up on that rock right now,” says Brian while we are about halfway up. “Does anyone know what rock we are standing on? Yeah, well, we are standing on The Areopagus, or as the Romans called it, Mars Hill. Does anyone know what else happened here? No? Well, I’ll tell ya,” he jests with a playful smile. “St. Paul, actually. When he came to Athens this is where the philosophers invited him to deliver some of his messages that later became parts of the Acts of the Apostles.” Brian transitions his speech into a brief lecture and then reads the biblical passages originally spoken at the place we call “here.”

I listen to my professor read the verses I became so familiar with as a boy, all the while wondering if it matters. Does it matter that he is saying this here? At this spot? “He was so greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols,” my professor begins. And there he was, I look down to the ruins that once made up the marketplace Paul became so concerned about. “And then Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: ‘People of Athens! I see in every way you are very religious.’” This is it, this is the place, we are the people, and Brian is Paul. Does it matter? Huizenga would go on about the boundaries of ritual and say that they work as far as they are played within the framework, Gadamer would say that the speech is not a copy but a reproduction and argue the importance of the distinction, and Heidegger would say that we will never understand the works of art intended for those before us as the original listeners did. Perhaps that is the answer. And yet, we are not in a museum, the reading is in context. It must matter. Please matter.

I am at the steps of the Parthenon. We are sitting by the sidewall of the Acropolis looking at the ancient Parthenon while Brian reads us a passage from Heidegger. In Sojourns, the German philosopher recounts his travels to Greece as he pondered one central question. He was quite certain that the temples of ancient Greece that were once holy would not feel sacred to him. However, he pondered if he could experience the sense that the gods were once there. Could he experience the flight of sacredness, the flight of the gods? This was Heidegger’s question and now ours as well as we walk around the place that was once called holy.

These are the pillars I dwelled on. But as I tried, all I felt were cold stones that now only stand for the gods of entertainment.

A Greek flag at the top of the acropolis.

One of the many cats there.

Here is the gift from Athena that granted her patronage of the city. It is supposedly immortal. What follows is a temple dedicated to her.

What we are looking at here is the view from the Parthenon. Here I was able to feel a greater presence of the gods. The sky was filled with majesty and the rays of the sun reached down from the clouds like the fingers of God. They sparkled off of the Aegean Sea. There was Zeus, there was Poseidon, and out side of the shot are the powerful mountains that cradle the city. This made sense and, perhaps if the old pillars were covered in paint rather than tourists, the temple would too.

20:00

I take my seat at the head of a long table at the Manimani. Brian sits to my right while our other professor, Jakob, is seated at the other table. Brian orders a soda and I have a glass of red wine. A well-dressed waiter in his early thirties places bread, olive oil, and olives on the table, which are taken up and passed around.

“Don’t eat too much bread,” forewarns the professor, “we are going to be having a lot here.”

“How many courses are there?” I inquire while pouring oil on my dipping tray.

“Including this one, maybe ten or eleven. And they are really worth being hungry for.”

I let my soft brown bread soak up the oil before biting into it. It’s good bread; its what I expected it to be. I then bite softly into an olive. It’s a green olive with a hint of salt mixed in with the oil it was bathing in. I spit out the pit as the waiter drops off a fava bean hummus and a doughier version of pita bread. These two are passed around, each friend scooping hummus from the same bowl and passing along the same basket. “So Brian, have the gods fled?”

Brian leans in a bit, “What’s that? Oh yeah!” he starts while giving a small chuckle, “Yeah that’s what Heidegger’s trying to figure out. It’s if he can experience that they have fled and I think actually, he ends up saying that he can. He ends up experiencing that something was and no longer is.”

“Yeah, yeah, I guess what I’m wondering now is, if the gods have fled, where did they flee to?” I dip the bread into my hummus and take a bite, “This is really good by the way.”

“Yeah, this really is great isn’t it? And, yeah, I mean, Heidegger was really taking this question and trying to answer it with phenomenology. If it’s true than you know its true.”

I sip my wine while I continue to wonder where the gods went. I suspect the sacredness has transcended into other aspects of life, maybe art, or nature. But it has gone somewhere, underwent some conversion, transformation, but I don’t want to force this idea too strongly. “When I was on the Acropolis I was really trying to make a connection with the temple ruins but I couldn’t,” I begin wondering if he will recognize my intent to save sacredness, “but when I looked over the mountains, across the city and over the sea, the idea of the gods, that worked for me. I recognized the power there. Zeus made sense out there. I could see why someone would make a temple for a thing like that.”

“Yeah, and that may be all there is for us. The temple may be in context but we aren’t. We aren’t ancient Greeks, we have different laws, traditions, customs, and habits.” The waiter comes by again, this time I notice his complexion. He is tan like I am in the summer and carries a well-kept black beard around his face. His eyes are dark and wet. “Oh, this will be nice,” says Brian picking up the Greek salad our Greek hero left for us, “Greek salad in Greece, this is context.”

The salad is presented as a cylinder with a round circle of feta cheese on top of it. I’m very critical of feta cheese and can say confidently that this cheese was the best I have ever tasted. After the salad the waiter returned with this filo paper raviolis stuffed with cheese and tomatoes. The shift in conversation began with a new expression on Brian’s face. He looked deeply at the art on his plate while chewing slowly. I knew his words before he spoke them. “There is something here,” he says, “there’s something about this piece.”

“Does it express a condition of the human soul?”

“I think that it does. There is something about it that puts something on the line.”

“Could you say that this works?”

“Oh yeah, this works,” says the professor before taking another bite. I start paying more attention to my food, it’s flavor, texture. What does this mean for me existentially? Other than great tasting food, I don’t get much out of it.

I try again with the next dish, homemade ravioli with a cheese and vegetable filling. I take one and taste it slowly while one of the girls next to me takes a third to heap down. I wonder if the three of us are having the same meal. “Is this one working for you?” Brian asks.

“I love the flavor and they are all giving me something, but I will find my dish as the courses continue.” The next plate is of veal meatballs on pita bread. “Start us off, Matt,” Brian gestures toward the plate. I pick it up, choose one of the balls carefully, and place it on my plate before handing the platter to Brian.

I make a small cut in the meat and raise it to my lips. “This one works.”

“Oh yeah, does it? This one’s for you then?”

“You can tell that some type of spices were mixed into the meet, not just sprinkled on top of it. Yet it doesn’t have that compressed feeling meatballs often have. It’s light; there is air in it. And then, some type of, it’s not a sour cream. Yogurt? And also this eggplant between the meet and the bread, it comes together but I think it’s mostly the meet.”

“But does it work for you?”

“Yes, this one definitely works.”

“It’s hard to articulate though?”

I laugh a bit, “yeah, it’s usually the most important things that are the most difficult for me to give words to. Things like meatballs and gods.” The voice of an old mentor plays in my head as I say this, and it is of these things that we dare not be silent.

“Well, there’s one left. I think it has to be yours.”

I pick up the plate again and once more jump into the experience of the grounded veal. “Yup, this still works.”

A mushroom orzo replaces the veal on center stage. I take two spoonfulls before passing and enter through the portal of the artwork. I am placed into the world of an old cottage shaking in the winter of the French countryside. Here, a mother puts the last of Sunday leftovers into a broth and adds some salt before serving it to her children. The scene is close to that one in the movie with the cooking rat – the one where the critic takes the first bite of ratatouille. “It’s the sauce here that does it.”

“Hmm, and there seems to be some hidden peppers in here too. Something that resonates.” The professor and I continue eating slowly to regain our state of being lost. “No, you’re right,” he says breaking the silence, “it’s the broth.”

Chicken pasta ensues. At this point I feel myself filling but am still thoroughly enjoying the flavors. Brian looks at me as if he has just found God and is about to whisper about Him for the first time. He strokes his grey beard and his dark eyes seem to be looking through the fabric of existence. He is beautiful like a seer of beauty, a Greek lover ready to pronounce the wisest truth. I prepare myself, ready for the telos of humanity to be revealed. He raises his hand to the height of his eyes and touches his thumb to his middle finger as if holding onto a speck of salt with which the universe can be made known. There is a pause, and then he speaks. “Cherry tomatoes,” he says without a waver in his voice. He says this as if his existence depends upon it, “There is something about cherry tomatoes. They are so small and they explode with so much flavor.”

“Cherry tomatoes,” I say, letting the word exist and then disappear like a spray of perfume in the open air. I have no idea what Brian is talking about.

Pork belly with potatoes, the last real dish. I think we are all pushing ourselves through this one and the girls who insisted on larger early portions have folded their napkins in defeat. To us filled bodies the purpose of this pork was to be eaten, nothing more. Its actualization was its death and as its corps lay on the table being slowly picked at Brian began testing his memory trying to recall dessert. “It was something orange,” he says from his thoughts, “not like a real orange, that would be gross. But a good orangey flavor.”

And sure enough, there it was, flaky and sweet like baklava but much less dense and with a distinct flavor of orange. An ice-cream yogurt lay on top of the crisp pastry-pie adding a cool and soothing taste. As I cut down into the pie an orange honey squeezed out like the sap of a pine. It is sweet, crisp, warm, smooth, cool, and everything one could hope from a dessert. I lament over my last bite.

“It makes me a bit sad,” I say as the remaining flavors dilute on my tong and inner cheeks, “that was so good and now it is gone, ended, and I will never be able to share it with anyone, not even myself. By tomorrow the last flavor of its existence won’t even be a memory.”

“Maybe that is what makes it art?”

Tuesday, 10:00

It is raining at The Ancient Agora of Athens. I am sitting propped up against the wall of the second floor (first floor for you Europeans) of some museum while raindrops strike the roof with sweet melancholy. Marble heads line the charge room in which I stay but I don’t give them much attention. I am reading through the final pages of Phaedo and wondering if Socrates is a humanist after all. I find two of his actions before he dies worthy of contemplating.

The first is his argument for an afterlife. I suppose the argument itself doesn’t stir me but what he does after. After he has his logical discourse he basically throws it out the window and narrates his own myth about afterlife for his friends. I’m beginning to notice Plato’s habit of saying something logical, recognizing that it’s insufficient, and then providing a myth to get his point across. But now I’m thinking about the good life. Is that it? To create myths one might not necessarily believe in but find meaning with all the same?

The second action I find worthy of thought is Socrates’ last – paying a debt to an old friend. Should I have predicted Socrates to do this, or was Plato again trying to add an almost mythological element to his mentor’s life as he did with his arguments? I put the book down and figure I just won’t know.

I stretch and look out across the ruins of the Agora. Through the rain a nearby temple offers shelter to other tourists, to my left I can still see up the Acropolis, and directly in front of me are the ruins of the old town where our old friends once caused such uproar. There is the courthouse Socrates was tried in and beside it the prison where he was held. It’s all still there in ruins about a foot above the ground. Soon we will walk out to them and listen to Brian or Jakob lecture as we sit on the wet gravestones of a city that once was.

Agora, Brian lecturing by the Socrates' prison (in rain)

The Editors

There are no more entries until the afternoon, but we have been told by other sources that during his lunch break Matt wandered into a family sandal shop where his feet were fitted by a third generation sandal maker who called himself The Poet Sandal Maker. He then is most likely to have found a place downtown to eat with his friends and finally had a series of lectures on the Phaedrus at the place where the speeches of love took place. It has also been mentioned that Matt took long walks through Athens at night although we can’t be sure which day(s) in particular Matt enjoyed such strolls or who he was with during them. When the next entry begins Matt is already back with his class.

Cups of hemlock (empty, unfortunately). Socrates may have drunk from one of these.

Tokens used to vote officials out of the city. (Alcibiades’ name is written on one of them).

Ruins near Phaedrus' love speeches.

17:30

I’ll be heading to a museum and then out to dinner in a bit but right now I’m at the Kallimimaro or Panathianikon Stadium (not sure of official name or spelling, could be Panathenaic). Now, this stadium is cool for many reasons: (1) It was built a long time ago like in 330 BC or something like that, (2) it’s made completely out of marble and holds 50,000 people, (3) it hosted the opening and closing ceremonies of the first modern Olympics in 1896, (4) it was the finish point for the marathon in the 2004 games and the place where the torch was handed over, and (5) apparently people play handball on it and very vocal games of tug-of-war. Anyways, that’s what's going on right now.

Another really neat thing about this stadium is there is no one really supervising its visitors, not that there are many visitors anyways. With the exception of the practices on the turf, the class had the stadium practically to itself. We climbed to the top of it, walked around, and I even got to take a lap on the Olympic track. But here is the really cool part…

“Hey Terah, race me down this really dark and creepy tunnel that literally no one would ever feel comfortable going in!” Somehow, that got the two of us running down this dimly lit corridor that twisted further and further from the light. We halt. There is a staircase with a torch at either side. These torches were in spotlights. Terah and I look at each other, neither of us knowing what to say. These are Olympic torches. We climb the stairs. Here is a room filled with torches and posters of the games. A security guard watches from the corner, but there is no glass, just sensors. This isn’t my history, this isn’t your history, this, this is the history of man. These torches… I’m speechless.

Stadium

Tunnel Entrance

Torches and Stuff

Remember Rio?

20:30

I’m at The Restaurant Thissio View at one long table that holds the entire class in a private room. Three well-dressed waiters stand just out of view, ready to refill waters and replace fallen silverware. A separate team is constantly entering and exiting through the back door, delivering food and wine. I am sitting at the center of the table and facing one of the open doors that lead to a quiet balcony overlooking the city of antiquity. Beyond the ruins, downtown Athens begins. The real beauty, however, is the dark mountains that contrast the city lights, the monastery on top of a central Athenian mountain, and of course, the Parthenon, which is lit like a god proudly overlooking her city.

“What would you like to drink my lady?”

“I’ll have a white please.” I look over at Ari, sensing her tension.

“And you, my lady?”

“I’ll have a red.” Ari looks like a kid at the doctor’s office who’s just been told she’s getting a booster shot and realizes there is no escaping it.

The waiter looks at her, “What would you like?” I sigh in relief.

“Red.”

“Sir?”

“I’ll have a red as well, thanks.” For a moment I thought the conversation wouldn’t take place, but then the unmistakable augmentation of the trigger begins in the middle of a friendly story.

“There was this girl in my apartment watching me and my friends make hamburgers,” Anita begins, drawing in our attention, “and this girl literally goes, ‘Oh look at all of you eating that man food!’ and I am like so pissed off, like, how can you add a gender to a hamburger!” she wails her hands as if trying to add a visual to this girls commentary, “It’s just so not okay!”

“No, I feel you,” says Ari with support, “there’s just no reason to do that. Like I get pissed whenever that stuff happens, like with the waiter just assuming everyone’s gender.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Anita recollects, “I was so worried about how you would react if he gendered you.”

“Yeah, thankfully he didn’t, but like, I hate it when people do shit like that. Like, why would you refer to someone as a gender? Like, I am not a woman and I don’t know how I would have reacted if he called me one. It just pisses me off.”

“Assuming someone’s gender isn’t okay. Like assuming anything is just not necessary.” I stop listening for a bit. The waiter has just delivered the first plate. Honestly, I really do enjoy listening to these grievances under the right circumstances. I wouldn’t want to go into psychotherapy if complaints of injustices bothered me. But the context here just isn’t right. These two girls will talk back and forth about their oppression without ever learning anything about their human conditions. They will solidify their right to feel oppressed and encourage one another’s belief that they are victims. At the end of the day they will walk away happy, thinking that they have found an ally to their cause without experiencing any personal growth or improvement. They will only touch the surface levels of their anxiety; they will only discuss what will bring them sympathy. They are addicted to sympathy.

I’m not saying this as a critique to those fighting oppression and or ignoring the validity of their struggle, but I also realize that they are hurting each other more than helping. If this were a therapy session, I would try to help the client cope with being mislabeled. I would try to guide the client away from the anxiety of judgment so that the next time she heard someone labeling a hamburger as masculine she wouldn’t become so emotionally disturbed. But then again, therapist’s main focus is helping people, not society, so maybe I’m overstepping my education.

“I’m from New York, Okay?” I’m forced to listen once again to Anita’s narrative along with half the table who at this point can no longer ignore her growing voice, “like if your from New York you see shit and people don’t understand that.” Now I’m wondering what type of validation she gives to people who have “seen shit” but because we are at a dinner I don’t ask. “And people assume that because I go to Georgetown I have lots of money, like no, I do not wear those Vineyard Vines sweaters. And the thing is, ya know, I know so many wealthy people and they always say things like, ‘oh I’m not rich because I have this friend who’s more rich than I am,’ and then they get sad over it. I don’t have boatloads of money okay? That’s not me. I go to Georgetown but I’m not like everyone else there. I’m from New York.”

I’m sitting here listening and trying to view the situation with a therapeutic mind and wondering, how would this girl feel if she did have a lot of money? As she continues her discourse, it becomes more and more evident that she has this need to separate herself from wealth. This is taken to the point where she uses a windup-throwaway camera from CVS to take photos of this trip despite ownership of an IPhone 5 or 6 (unless specified, all the pictures on this blog have been taken with an iPhone 5s, which has a much better camera than the CVS throwaway, for reference). I don’t know the financial status of this girl, but from prior discussion I know she isn’t the one paying for Georgetown. What I’m curious about, however, is if this girl has associated gold with guilt. As conversation continues she speaks very negatively of people she knows who have money and does everything she can to deny the fact that she is wealthy enough to be having a dinner in Greece with a class from one of the most expensive study abroad programs. I am fully convinced that if I gave this woman gold she would turn it into an ash distaste of shame. The more troubling thing is, this woman could be an easy substitute for probably the majority of people I know, including myself at times, and I wonder if our society is regressing as a whole to a medieval mentality in which wealth and dishonor were synonymous among the masses.

The conversation of encouraging depression continues and I wish I were at a therapy session rather than a dinner table. The motives and reasoning behind these statements would be worth exploring but that can’t happen here. I quietly excuse myself and walk out onto the balcony. The dimly lit houses in the distend darkness are like stars in the night. Thousands of them are called home and each seems like home to me. I feel the need to jump from the balcony; I wanted to fall and keep on falling as if my salvation depended upon it – to let my spirit run like Artemis up the Acropolis and then the monastery, through the darkness to those lit houses in the far, and then up the mountains that cradle Athena’s city. I feel so free.

Wednesday, 9:30

Jesse and I are walking along the ruins of Plato’s Academy. These crumbling rocks are now a part of a dog park and left unnoted on any tourist’s map. We just finished class readings and discourses or Eros and Beauty and are taking our time to appreciate the first university as students of Plato’s art. I wonder how my professors must have felt teaching here.

“I’m underwhelmed,” Jesse says breaking the silence.

“Underwhelmed by what? How simple learning is?”

“All of it, the temples, I think the point is to be underwhelmed. Like, what do I get out of seeing 40% of a building? The views I understand, I get why the temples are where they are. Maybe I’m supposed to look at the view and then turn to the temple and say ‘thank you.’ But I don’t think that’s the point. I think I’m supposed to ask myself where my Parthenon is, where do I go for answers or feelings. It’s not the temples, why would it be? But the temples give me that question.”

The Editors

Matt left little notation on the next activity, although he did provide us with some photos. After Plato’s Academy, the class climbed the Hill of the Muses. Because no one could tell us of Matt’s experience there we are assuming he spent most of this time by himself and in reflection, as was customary for him on this trip.

Sometime in the afternoon

Waves crash around my, throwing their bodies at the unwavering cliff edge as I slip my foot between rocks and sea urchins. The black orbs of spikes are everywhere, no wonder the water is fenced off. I nod at Jordan and launch myself away from the rocks and into the Aegean Sea. I quickly swim as far away from he rocks as possible before looking back to watch Jordan make his jump. We tread water for a bit, laughing at our accomplishment and hoping we will be able to undo our error. Most of the sea is fenced off with barbed wire but one cliff was to steep to attach fencing to, this is the one Jordan and I used to get here. Was scaling the cliff to the Temple of Poseidon in my sandals a good idea? Absolutely.

Only moments earlier Jakob read to us the myth of Theseus, an Athenian hero who sailed away to slay the Minotaur. He was asked to raise white sails upon his safe return but forgot to do so. His father, King Aegeus, assuming his son had died, throws himself from the Temple of Poseidon and into the sea that now bears his name.

Standing at the cliff edge, the place of the suicide, and looking at the temple and the sea, here, the Heideggerian question made sense. Here I could feel the old power of Poseidon coming from the waves that crashed against the cliff and the wind that spewed off of them. Now, being in the water, Poseidon was a full body experience.

The strong current of the god pushes us inland to where some of the girls of our class beckon us on and snap pictures. Jordan and I wave heroically.

Temple of Poseidon and Landscape

Thanks for the shots Courtney!

View from the bus while driving back into the city:

23:30

“I guess my religious journey has certain parallels to yours,” I tell my professor as I sip on my beer. We are at the 6 Dogs, a popular bar in Athens even on a Wednesday night. The place of spirits is in a courtyard well hidden by four buildings. A tarp that resembles a linin cloth covers the bar itself but the siting area is left roofless and the entire square is lit by candles that hang from strings that attached to the sides of the buildings like a spider web of fireflies.

My professor has just told me about his two-year mission to Denmark where he preached Mormonism to a disinterested crowd. He discussed how the critical look of the other and supplementary factors brought him away from his faith and how he lost contact with it for 25 years. But now he has come full circle and is drinking soda instead of beer. I guess there really aren’t that many parallels between our religious narratives.

“I found my religion when I lost it, in a way.” I begin, trying to set a premise for my story, “I was raised Catholic and was really involved with the faith. There was a time when Jesus was everything to me and I got a certain pleasure in telling my mom that I loved God more than I loved her,” I say this as a small joke. “There was a time when I would support the Church on anything, I even thought about being a priest a few times! Ya know, I was a Eucharistic minister when I thought that bread was the answer. But I wasn’t someone who just took answers, not even as a kid, I was a theologian and justified everything. But then I got stuck on a question, the first of many that would change everything.” I pause for a moment and play with my glass. The crowed I’m with is still listening to me. I guess professors have to listen to students when they go on these monologues; it’s an unfair power we have over them.

“I asked myself, would I give up my seat in heaven so that another person could have it? Now, you have to understand how important heaven was to me and how great of a hell complex I was indoctrinated with. This question caused me a great deal of anxiety, but eventually I decided that I would have to say yes. I chose human over god – how Christ like, right?” This last part is a joke on the incarnation, but no one gets it. It wasn’t very good.

“When I got to college, I realized two things, the first was that I could experience a sense of sacredness without Jesus and the second was that Christianity had caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. This second realization is what I really wanted to understand. I wanted to understand what it meant to suffer without God, to suffer as man completely alone and in the judgment of others – free. I don’t know if Adam was aware that taking from the tree would lead to his fall, but I knew that if I wanted to understand humanity I would have to sacrifice the garden. The fall was my choice and I made it alone. I gave up my godliness for the sake of humanity.” These last lines come easily because I have used them internally to make sense of my predicament before. But now I feel like I’ve been talking too long and try to close my speech.

“I left Christianity completely and the belief in God lost all relevance. I expected to fall into nihilism but realized that through my choices my sense of religiosity had grown. Nietzsche would say that I killed God, but I think that I found a dead God and I gave him life. I felt like I had climbed beyond the boundaries of my old religion and began to experience my new religion as what derived from my existence rather than the other way around. I felt like I could become as religious as I wanted without being restricted by faith.

Now, sometimes I say that I created my own religion. What I should say is that I create my religion everyday. It has nothing to do with the faith I grew up with and I guess you could argue that it isn’t even a religion at all. But I have a way of experiencing, articulating, and being in the world as a human person. It all came from a complete giving up of what was once most important to me.”

Thursday: 11:30

Plato picks us up from the small town of Livadea. My feet are a bit sore from my solo hike up the mountain above The Cave of Trophonius. I heard the view from the small church up there was fantastic but my poet sandals and I were the only ones willing to make the climb.

“Courtney what are you listening to?” I ask the girl in front of me after an hour into the ride.

“You’re gonna laugh at me!”

“Well, I didn’t go in the cave so it’s definitely a possibility.”

She laughs, one of the few noises on the sleeping bus. We left Athens at 8:00 this morning and have been driving to Delphi ever since. The short stop at Livadea was relieving and I think we will be stopping again for lunch soon. “I’m listening to my church music,” she says with a shy smile.

“Oh God Courtney, your such a Mormon!” I say with a tease. Courtney doesn’t know this, but the truth is I’ve been listening to my church music too.

(Continued...)

Plato steers the bus onto a forgotten dust road that brings us to a valley between three dominant mountain ranges. “Alright, so we’ve arrived at the place for our pick nick,” Brian announces on the loudspeaker.

We get off the bus and walk a bit on the sooty road, and then go off road to where a small clearing is. Nearby there is a plaque with Greek writing on it and a lot of rough shrubbery. We sit down and pass around the sandwiches, olives, and wine. After a while Brian stands up, “Alright, so does anyone know where we are?” he asks without expecting an answer. To me it seems we are in the middle of nowhere, don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice place for a picnic but if anyone were to pass by they would probably assume our bus broke down at the most inconvenient place in all of Greece. “Alright, I’ll give you a geographical hint. If you look behind you through that mountain range,” he says pointing, “that’s the old road to Delphi. To my right is Thebes and left is Corinth. One could say we are at a crossroads.” He and Jakob are laughing to themselves and taking joy as we one by one grow smiles across our faces and realize where we are. “That’s right, we are eating on the spot where Oedipus killed King Laius, his father!”

(Continued...)

After eating and venturing around for a while we are back on the bus and driving alongside the mountains. Greece is beautiful. Water is always reflecting sunlight at the far edges of the landscape and olive trees are growing up the hills that lead to the steep mountains. I watch the earth develop as we climb higher above the sea and put my headphones in for more of the gospel.

The two Sting albums downloaded on my phone are the soundtracks to my journey of antiquity. Among the ruins of a lost religion and broken state, I traverse through the dust of the old roads that still hold magic around my soul. There, in the mountains, there is my father with a sink full of water, a towel around his waist, and the smell of shaving cream lingering on his face. He sings along with Sting on these dusty Greek trails and kicks up some of the soot when he dances to this heartbeat in a small living room with my mother. This is going so far back I don’t even know if they are myths or memories, but all the same he is twirling her and then bringing her in close. These are the songs that he carried from the rap tapping of the snare that sits by the piano to the steering weal of a green Honda minivan. In the background of the music I hear the hard knocking of his gold ring as he adds rhythm and vocals to accompany the artist.

I repeat the albums. The holy land is in distance; it’s insight now.

14:00

I unscrew the cap of my water bottle and splash the remaining drops on the ground. “I need to empty this bottle of impurity just like I must empty of myself on this pilgrimage before taking from the holy well.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jakob agrees, “it’s preforming the act of kenosis, really.” We are walking by the road there the earth drastically drops and then recovers into a grove of olive trees.

“Just like the whole act of the fall too,” Brian adds in.

“You just connected the fall to kenosis? Wow, my mind is blown right now. I’ve would not have thought of that!”

“Well, yeah,” the professor explains, “the fall is all about emptying yourself of everything. The question then becomes how to fill yourself back up.”

“No, it makes sense, I just haven’t thought of it in terms of kenosis. But okay, you said kenosis; maybe we could link this to baptism too? Maybe in the way Kierkegaard would interpret it? Not the way it’s preformed; most Christians ask for rebirth without ever dying. I’m talking about the first existence and from Camus it seems that the real free first existence begins at the recognition of the fall. But anyways, here is the holy water.”

17:00ish

Vicki, our tour guide, led us for three hours through the Delphi museum and city ruins. Three hours with Vicki and I think we all knew Delphi pretty well and had gathered a surplus of fun facts about the sight. What surprised me most, however, wasn’t the really high girl the ancient Greeks referred to as oracle, but the political power Delphi held over the Greek world and, as a consequence, the entirety of western civilization. Prophesies from Apollo were given to the high girl at the back of his temple, but the only one who could interpret these messages was a political elite priest. This priest would give divine guidance to every city in Greece (and regular people who wanted to know information about their sheep as well). So, this upper elite priestly society had immense power and probably some type of agenda, right?

These were well-educated people (probably because they had spies everywhere) who wanted to protect Greece and help her prosper as a whole. But besides providing advice on how to defend Greece against Persia, this priestly society seemed to be trying to change the way the world works. Its speculated that they wanted to bring freedom to slaves, brotherhood to warring city-states, unity between Greeks and really all people, community at large, harmony in difference, and basically everything that has later been associated with Jesus. The entire message is demonstrated beautifully by the presence of Dionysus in Apollo’s temple, which is spread to the greater concept of Europe as well – wide eyes. The priests at Delphi had a pretty weird gig going from my contemporary perspective, but they had a good message.

I look around at my class, which has now broken off into its clicks. This is a very clicky class. We have team wolf, team hipster, team blackout, team snail, and a few other groups that really only socialize with themselves. It’s a bit upsetting to see these clicks form from my classmates. They crawl all over each other, pecking and scratching at one another’s skin, trying to scavenge out their mates while flocking and squawking like a dark and starving fucking murder of crows. And this civilization remains supposedly on a Hegelian linear inclination of progress? We disappoint the Greeks.

From and around Delphi

Found the Great Valley

The Editors

The next text is undated and may not have been intended for publication. We have put it here, assuming it was written on the short bus ride from the ancient city to the hotel. It is short and seemingly out of context so was difficult to place. We know that on the last day Matt walked around the ruins of Corinth while giving speeches on love and Eros for two hours with some friends. We think his speeches may have drawn from this text here:

I would like to be naïve enough to love again. But Eros is a baby and mine left me

the demons of last this summer past. All children must leave their parents to live

and their parents must die for it.

The text ends here but at the bottom of the page is the name, Alcibiades.

The next passage occurs after the class checked into the hotel and had dinner at the Symposium restaurant. Here Matt records the events that take place at a nightclub referred to as “Club Delphi” by the students.

22:30

“I’m 16,” says this peppy girl from Amsterdam, “this is my class; we are studying the classics. And that’s my teacher over there,” she points to an older man dancing by himself.

“So, your teacher brought you to a club in Delphi and told you all to have as many cigarettes as you’d like, but that you just can’t drink?”

“I mean, we all drank before coming here anyways, but yeah, I don’t get it. Have you tried ouzo? That’s what we all had and it’s so good!”

“No,” I reply sipping on my whisky sour, “but I still can’t get over that you’re here with a teacher who’s not letting you drink, like why bring you? I’m gonna ask him.” The young girl dances away and I greet this older man doing something in between a Cotton Eyed Joe and a display of exotic body contortions. “Are these all you’re students?”

“Yes, this is my class, I’m there biology teacher. That guy over there is the history guy, I gust came because I wanted to go to Greece!”

“I get that. I’m on a class trip too from Denmark although I’m from The States. My professors probably aren’t out dancing right now though.”

“Well, I have to have a good time! We brought all these students here so they wouldn’t drink.”

I wonder if the real reason all the students are here is so this guy can drink. “You brought your students to a club so that they won’t drink? How’s that going to work out?”

“They know we have ways of finding out if they’ve drank,” says the professor as he pulled out a few moves from the Macarena dance, “We have to head out in an hour, heading home tomorrow.”

“Alright then, I’ll let you get back to your Dancing.” I leave this professor to himself and look for my friends. Alexa is at the bar working on our next round of free drinks. She speaks with exaggerated facial expressions and leans in to whisper in the bartender’s ear. As she does so her hand reaches across his neck and when he goes to pull away she pulls him back and pecks him on the cheek. With a crinkled nosed smile she releases him and out pops another shot. I feel a little bad for this guy but as she seduces this man she begins to seduce herself, sipping on the milk of his profession.

I look around for my other two friends and find them upstairs on a classy black leather couch making out with each other. I head back downstairs to see Alexa walking out of the bathroom with the bartender. She isn’t intoxicated and still seems to have him under her control, which I guess is relieving. I’ll here a detailed story about all of this when she is wearing her oversized sunglasses and sobering up tomorrow.

The 16-yearold comes up to me to say goodbye. I’m still a bit uncomfortable with the whole situation but I guess that’s part of being abroad. I move to the other side of the bar and am surprised by a familiar face. “Hey Plato!” I say smiling while making my way over to the bus driver. He does not look that happy to see me and continues to drink his whisky. Plato is with some friend who must be a local here and seems content with it just being the two of them. I start a conversation with him anyways.

The Editors

We can assume that Matt woke up early the next morning for the ride to Nafplio. The next entry comes from one of the temples attributed to Hercules that the class stopped at along the way. The entry begins with a quote from Heidegger that may have been read on the spot.

Friday, 11:00

“The wide floor of the valley, where the lone village of Nemea is nestled,

is surrounded by terraced slopes; flocks of sheep stroll leisurely through its

pastures. The entire region itself appears as a single Stadium that invites festive

games. Only three columns are left standing that still speak of the temple that once

was: in the breath of the landscape they are like three strings of an invisible lyre on

which perhaps the winds play songs of morning, inaudible to mortals – echoes of

the flight of the gods.” – Heidegger

“Jakob, does it make you proud to see your students dwelling on the temple the way they are right now?”

“Yes it does, it’s the best feeling for a teacher.”

14:00

Jordan and I walk down the cave at Agamemnon’s keep. Outside tourists take pictures of his castle and explore the tombs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthrus but here the stone steps bring us further and further into the darkness that turns many travelers away.

Here, at the bottom of the stairwell I stand with Jordan and we turn off our cellular lights. I try to look at my hand but it is gone. I try to remember how big my body is but can’t. All that is here is the rough coldness of the stones and the heaviness of the air. I step away from the wall and feel suffocating nothingness.

My blind eyes see nothing but then, from nowhere, the shape of a cloaked demon appears right behind where Jordan must be standing. These are tricksters of nothingness. At first the fear rushes through me and chokes me at the heart, but then I let the fear run through my body and lower the gates to the fortress of my soul. Come demon, come, I hear my inner voice beckon.

All to soon light and chatter emerges from the top of the staircase as a collective failure of humanity. I am so disappointed, enraged; in this moment I realize that it was neither darkness nor death that had caused me such anxiety, but the sight of the light and sound of the living, the never-ending footsteps of life, that cause me my torment.

Tomb of Clytemnestra

Stairway

The area

The Editors

There is nothing written about the first evening in Nafplio, but from pictures and interviews with other students we know that Matt stayed at the Marianna hotel, went swimming at the local beach, dinned with a few of his friends, and returned to the beach that night. This part of the trip would have been very leisurely and probably felt like more of a luxurious vacation than a study tour.

Saturday, 7:30

In a weird way, I’m glad my phone isn’t working. I’m suppose to meet some friends in a half hour but now know it wont end up happening. I leave the hotel alone and explore the rocky peninsula that overlooks the sea. I can’t describe the sea; I can’t take a justifying photo of it either. I’m up on top of the old wall where I’m not supposed to be. Below me is a steep drop, only broken up by cacti, and then there it is, the water. A few boats are out, the small personal kind that exist for the sake of existence. They aren’t moving, the sails are down and motors are off. It’s just a few of them, these little toy boats that dot the water like the final stars in a morning sky. They are still and I am still with them.

The sun hasn’t quite bloomed over the surrounding mountains yet I find enough light as I walk to the edge of the peninsula and back again. The sky is blue of its youngest shade. I’ve returned inland to where the first steps to the end of my journey are and I climb.

The path is long but beautiful and I climb higher and higher over the red roved housed peninsula of Nafplio, all the while racing the sun on my shade-covered ascent. After 25 minutes I reach the outer walls of Palamidi, a fortress of a castle. The sun is still hidden behind the nearby mountain ranges when I walk through the opening gate and get a ticket for the castle.

I am alone up here with the exception of two workers and a friendly dog I meet at the first courtyard. “Hey there buddy, you the dragon of this keep?” He looks at me, then goes to the edge of the wall and looks out to the city like a romantic guardian, a lone survivor of an age of glory.

I walk all around the courtyard as to not leave a stone untouched by my epistemophilic eyes. I’ve become quite the autodidact on this trip.

As I move to the next complex of towers, walls, and viewpoints the dog follows me. “You’re gonna need a name if you wanna follow me around. What’s that tri-headed monster in the underworld called? I can’t remember, but you don’t look like that anyways.” I watch him as he climbs the castle steps three paces behind me, “I’mma call you Pupper, that cool?” The sun is now just peeking over the green mountains and throwing its rays like javelins over the castle walls. I run from one wall to the other to behold the shimmering light bounce off the water. The boats are all still there but much smaller now and if I listen very closely I can just make out the slow putting of the religious devout.

Towards the center of the castle, down a long corridor, is a dwarf size door leading to the dungeon. “Pupper, you afraid to get any closer?” I can just see his head peering from around the corridor entrance as if to afraid of the dark passageway. “Suit yourself, just don’t close the door on me, if I get stuck here there is no one who would find me.” And that is true; I realize how vulnerable I am. If something did happen to me Pupper would be the only one to know. Regardless, I crawl through the small door into the dungeon. The cells look like tombs and, although lighting has been added, the dread of darkness remains in the shadows of the scattered rocks about the floor. I don’t have the emotional capacity to empathize with the painful souls who were forced to live here, but their tremors are still felt on the walls of stones.

I am leaping over the gaps in the teeth of the castle walls with the fall to the sea on my right and the sun directly in front of me. Pupper is trotting along behind me and I think he appreciates this aesthetic beauty as much as I do. We reach the end of the wall where a steep canyon separates the two of us from the upper keep. “Pupper, this is your place, right? How do we get over there?” Pupper wags his tail and puts his front legs on the wall to look over. The sun is now a full orbit just below the tops of the surrounding mountains. I notice now a lake or maybe it’s still part of the sea, but some body of water between the mountains. “That’s really nice, Pupper. I’m glad you’re here to look at this with me, ya know? I could stay here forever looking at that and apparently you could to. It must be something being up here every day.” Pupper takes a few more moments looking over the wall as I scale down it and try to find my way to the next part.

“Ya know, this is better than Skyrim,” I tell to my companion, “you have no idea what that is, but form me it means a lot. Yeah, this is something, isn’t it?” We circle the outside of the wall and stroll through a wild garden of cacti and other flowering plants until finding a broken stone staircase that brings us to the upper keep. Pupper already knows the best lookout spots and heads to them expecting me to follow. It’s been two hours since I got my ticket and I’ll need to hurry back to catch the bus. But I know I don’t need to worry about that just yet. The others are probably still having breakfast and will need to take some time to pack before anything gets going. No, I don’t need to rush. I can be like those still boats bobbing on the sea and I can be like that loyal dog who comes here every day to watch over them.

I stand still reflecting on trip, this moment, Heidegger, and myself; here, it makes sense. Here is Gaia, the tall mountains and land wealthy with life. She is holding Uranus, her son and husband who wraps himself over her. All the while they are in synchronization with their son, Oceanus, who compliments the stillness. I feel the majesty and power of these tightens who have chosen to be tame. Here, religion makes sense. Life makes sense. Here, Apollo still rides his chariot across the southern Greek sky. And it is at this intersection of the gods that I find myself breathing their souls in and out of my lungs like Brahman. From the executed angles in Copenhagen to the wings of Zeus that can be seen gliding above, as a bricolage of forms elevating himself through nothingness through choice for the necessity of choosing and as a creator, destroyer, unifier, and avatar of the gods, here I stand. Here stands man. I feel the need to speak some sort of truth about human existence, but perhaps truth cannot be articulated, only experienced.

Photos

The Editors

We believe Matt originally intended to end his journal here but his adventures were not over. The owner of the hotel invited the class to an orange farm. There the students walked around the trees and picked and ate oranges, lemons, and pomegranates. The farmer and hotel owner’s wife then made cookies and pancakes with the class and their son participated an a few pick-up basketball games with the students.

Afterwards, the class went to Corinth. The dialogue that took place here seems to have been added on separately from the existing journal.

Saturday afternoon

We have two hours to walk around the ruins of Corinth. Brian gave me St. Paul’s letters and a direction to walk in. Peter, Courtney, and I spend our last hours in Greece among the paths of dust when Peter turns to me and asks, “What is love?”

At this point I know Peter to well for his question to catch me off guard. “Eros is a child and love is his game,” I say drawing from Huizenga, “To love, we need remove ourselves from this reality of order, laws, and customs and enter into the playfield with a lover. To an outsider, a game like basketball is the most irrational of performances. But to those within the sacred framework of the court, each move, each ritual, is of vital significance and necessity. The game could not be played if it weren’t for the opening jump and yet the jump only exists for the game itself. Just like love, which must be played through its absurd rituals for the sake of love.”

I’m not sure if what I’m saying will make sense to anyone unaware that I’m tying love to a discourse on play, but I continue anyways, “What are just as important as the boundaries and the rituals, however, are the players. In the game of love, each player is expected to abide by the rules, preform the rituals, and play with valor. If player fails to do this then the game is halted, a judgment made, and, in order to preserve the structure of the play world, a consequence is made. Sometimes the player in question can be kicked out of the game because of conduct.

Yet, there is a worse possibility in the game of love than this rule-breaker, and that is the spoiler.” I am basically paraphrasing Huizenga here, which makes words come to me easier although I’m in a different context then Homo Ludens. “The spoiler points out the absurdity of love. He destroys the play world by saying that love is ridiculous. The magic of love is kept alive as long as its absurdity is hidden. This person reduces love to sex and hormones and discounts any ritual of courtship or what we call intimacy. For this spoiler, love can never be played and therefore never live.”

“But aren’t you saying then that love must be experienced between two people who experience it for each other?” Peter inquires, “What is love then for someone who loves an object, or, a person who does not love him back?”

“What do you think?”

“I think absolutely that is still love.”

“Love, the desire of love, or love for the desire of love?”

“Love! If someone experiences love for someone or something then it’s love. You can’t say what is or isn’t love for someone else because it’s subjective isn’t it?”

“Yes, love is subjective. But subjectivity cannot betray the human condition because it is the subject that makes the condition.”

“So you’re saying that love can only be shared between two people who both have similar affections?”

“Yes, because love cannot exist without freedom and only the human subject is free to love. What I’m saying here is, when I love someone, I desire for that person to love me back but not because she has to, but because she choose to freely. She alone must be responsible for their choice in love or it does not count. This is why there is so much tension at the beginning of relationships. I desire someone to choose something but do so freely. At the same time I must express my own freedom and not reduce myself to the vision of what my lover wants me to be. I, however, am tempted to be that vision, I am tempted to reduce myself to the object the lover may want me to be in order ensure that the person I love will not stop loving me. I guess what I’m saying is, love is tangled up in control but can only exist with freedom. I guess to love without control, to love while offering yourself and your partner total freedom, I guess that would be the goal.”

“No, it still seems possible that one could love an object and your definition just doesn’t fit that. Like, what if a mother loves her son but the son doesn’t love her back?”

“Well then, the mother is probably using theory of mind to fanaticize that the child loves her back. This would mean that her love would be as pretend as the fantasized world she created. I don’t know though. Courtney, what’s love to you?”

Courtney has been listening quietly the whole time as we walk these ruins. “I guess I’m a fan of agape love. It seems like the love we should strive for.”

“But can humans give agape?” Peter asks.

“I don’t think so, that’s just a God thing. But maybe sometimes we can get close to it.”

“Courtney,” I say interrupting her, “this is where the trial took place.” I take the letter’s I’ve been carrying around and force her to take them. “You’re reading the next Act.”