Palimpsest: A Novel. Chapter 7.

Welcome to Palimpsest: A Novel. This is a subsection of my personal newsletter, Metanoia Road. Every Thursday, I share a chapter of this novel (first published in 2010), and I invite you to read along with me. If you’d prefer not to receive these chapters, follow the instructions here to unsubscribe from this section only. This way, you can continue to receive other letters & writing from me, and we can stay in touch. If you’ll be reading - thank you - you can catch up on previous chapters here. 💙

Dear You —

Welcome back to Palimpsest: A Novel. Here is Chapter 7.

Previously: Our protagonist Kally Palamas has travelled to Zelopolis village in Greece with her mother, Anastasia, after her father - Akindynos Palamas - was found dead on Zelopolis beach. We’ve learned a little more about her - she’s a philosopher who is no longer working as one - and we’ve met her parents who are separated. Her father Akindynos, an autodidact, left the marriage to return to Greece where he established a philosophy school. We’ve met her mother, Anastasia, and grandmother, Kallisto, and her father’s funeral has happened.

Catch up on previous chapters here. Or download chapters 1-6 as a PDF here.

In this chapter, we’re with Kally, and her mother, grandmother and Akindynos’s sisters in the days after the funeral. On the television, commentators debate issues around Akindynos’s death - was it a natural death or murder or suicide? - and the broader concerns of Greece, Greek identity and Akindynos’s fanaticism which may be implicated.

A death, whether ordinary or remarkable, will stir up the most galvanic curiosity. For nine days after Akindynos’s death family and friends continued to meet in the house, gathering around the same dining table that had previously supported the coffined Akindynos. Everyone had a theory, and everyone expressed it either out loud or softly behind hands and coffee cups. Each theory included a dead body. There was no denying its existence.

‘The philosophy was to blame,’ said Anastasia.

‘Yes,’ said Argyro, ‘the philosophy made him think too much.’

‘He took simple things and he made them complicated,’ said Calliope.

‘Complicated things can make a man mad,’ said Stamatia.

‘When a man thinks about such things,’ said Maria, ‘he is not happy in his own bed.’

‘Akindynos,’ said Thomas, ‘was not happy in any bed, that’s why he’ll sleep in the ground from now on.’

‘Hush, Thomas!’ Stamatia held her hand in front of Thomas’s mouth and looked at Grandmother Kallisto who sat at the far end of the room in a chair next to me. Together we watched the television broadcast the news about Akindynos.

It was the second time he’d appeared on the national news. The first time was ten years ago when he began his philosophical activities and called for a return to the past, for the complete reconstruction of all archaeological sites, and for the restoration of life in those ancient cities with his slogan: One People. One Land. One History. Akindynos had now made the news again with the curious details of his demise. “Murder or suicide?” was what the headlines rhetorically reported. The television stations had prepared special features with invited guests. Grandmother Kallisto had tuned into Vergina Star News. The screen was divided into nine little boxes to accommodate the politician, the journalist, the psychologist, the theologian, the school teacher, the sociologist, the novelist, the playwright and the breakfast-show host, who had all been invited to share their cross-disciplinary insight into the death and life of the man who called himself Philosopher.

The psychologist, a middle-aged woman with hair styled in arcs around her cheeks, and with earlobes dragged down toward her jaw by the weight of her earrings, analysed Akindynos’s crisis of identity.

‘As an economic migrant to Australia,’ she said, ‘Mr Palamas fell victim to a double rejection. First, the rejection by his mother country who could not, and would not, care for him. Could not feed him, and could not clothe him. And second, the rejection by his new country, his adoptive mother, who never embraced him as her own.

‘His beloved Hellas sent him off to fend for himself in a foreign land. Sent him to the barbarians. Do you understand this? Sent him to the barbarians with a foreign name so that the barbarians, forgetting who they were, called him a barbarian! And then Hellas, well, she forgot about him so that when he returned, he returned as a barbarian. But he never forgot Hellas, despite the slow death of his language and the severed connection to his land and ancestors due to the sheer distance of the separation. Our fellow Greeks who went as far as Germany, or even America, did not suffer like Akindynos, who travelled to the very bottom of the world, so far, so far away.’

The psychologist had been given her own large box on the screen and looked intently at me and spoke to me — as I battled sleep brought on by jet lag — about this strange new world. A world I had, up until now, only known existed in the distant realm of Greece, which had always been on the other side of the world, in an entirely different continent called Europe. I closed my eyes and in the darkness visualised the world map and only then, by tracing my journey from Coober Pedy, to Adelaide, to Sydney, to Singapore, to Bahrain, to Athens and finally to Zelopolis, did I begin to understand that I was on very different ground.

The psychologist was replaced by the novelist, best known, Thomas said from the dining table, for his book entitled The Misfortune of Being Zeus’s Children. He said, ‘The Greece that Mr Palamas inhabited in his heart and mind was not the Greece that we Greeks were living in or have lived in for a very, very long time. Mr Palamas composed the most extravagant ideas about Greece, reflecting the romantic thought of the European philhellenes — the Byrons and the Shelleys. Mr Palamas may never have read them but he certainly shared the same hopeful nostalgia of the philhellenes — that the Modern Greek could certainly carry the burden of the past, despite its extraordinary weight.

‘But when Mr Palamas returned to Zelopolis he would have been very shocked to see his poor little home. Zelopolis was not what he had hoped for. It had not changed at all, of course, but he had forgotten his village. During his exile in the Antipodes the true memories of what Zelopolis was had been replaced with false memories, memories that a great Zelopolis — a Zelopolis where an unearthly amount of intellectual, moral, artistic, and athletic activity took place — actually existed. But this Zelopolis is now buried in history. This Hellas that Mr Palamas hoped to find vanished long before he ever knew it, its language is a dead language, and his ancestors were exterminated long ago. The Church had seen to that.’

The television screen had been reorganised again: the novelist’s face was featured in a large box on the left of the screen, while to the right were two vertical rows of smaller boxes, six in all, which interchanged one face for another.

In the bottom right box was a man in black who was gesticulating, opening and closing his mouth, frowning and raising his eyebrows, but he was given no sound. It was the psychologist in the big box again.

‘Nostalgia,’ she said, ‘if not treated, can ruin a man. This is finally an opportunity to address what we, in the business of saving hearts and minds, call remigration wrath. Mr Palamas returned to Greece with a single desire rooted in the sickness called nostalgia: he wanted to regain what he had lost because of the self-imposed exile we happily call migration. When he didn’t find it in present-day Greece, he knew he would find it in the past, the past from which he was spawned, from which every Greek hopes he was spawned. Every attempt to resurrect the past is rooted in the feeling of enthusiasm, etymologically, inspiration from God.’

‘But enthusiasm,’ said the journalist ‘is not the friend of truth. Mr Palamas was looking for a clean, pure and continuous connection with the past. But he did not find it. Instead, when he turned back towards the past and began to resurrect it he found that he would also have to resurrect the Turk, the Venetian, the Albanian, the Roman, and every other barbarian that has ever set foot on this land. It’s a bastard past, this Hellenic past, and the enthusiast, like Mr Palamas, finds the truth so alarming that he loses his enthusiasm for it. But he secretly continues looking back, turning a blind eye to the facts that shock or disgust or disappoint him. He renames things, tells segments of history differently, or lays blame for his fall on some other race, the Jews usually, or on religion, the Orthodox faith in this case, and so he capitulates to that terrible human flaw. He becomes a fanatic.’

‘Yes,’ said the novelist. ‘By calling for the restoration of the ancient glory of Zelopolis Akindynos was a modern Plethon, a Di Rienzo. These were men with a utopian vision that yearned for the resurrection of our ancestors. This was Akindynos’s vision too. The vision of pure Hellenism, that which existed before the Church severed him from his true roots. This is why he declared: ‘Philosophy will resurrect the Hellene as surely as Jesus crucified him!’ Akindynos could not endure—’

‘—the Modern Greek has evolved, Sir!’ The novelist was suddenly replaced with the theologian, a fat man in a black robe with a harsh black beard and charcoal shadows in the creases between his cheeks and eyes. He leaned forward so that he was all eyes and mouth across the television screen and he hollered over the other guests. ‘The Greek has evolved. He is an Orthodox Christian. Greece means Orthodoxy and the philosophers must know their place.’

The theologian kept repeating the same mantra, ‘Greece means Orthodoxy, Greece means Orthodoxy,’ while the guests in the smaller boxes to the right all flamed up in response:

‘Why did the state ignore the Zelopolis suicides?’ said the sociologist, one of the academic glitterati, a star student of Panteion University, whose PhD thesis became a best-seller when sold in paperback as Jesus Killed the Greek. ‘Weren’t they symbolic of the desperation of the periphery? Wasn’t this the melancholy behind the very first suicide, the poet’s suicide?’

‘We have injected funds into the periphery,’ said the politician. ‘Take a few steps out of your university, young man, and go inhale the fresh new air in the periphery you say is dying. Ghost towns? These are your words, not mine. Zelopolis is alive and well thanks to this government’s belief in its ancient heritage, thanks to this government’s belief—’

‘—Akindynos was a true hero,’ shouted the breakfast-show host, ‘a true Hellene!’

Thank you for reading with me. See you next Thursday for Chapter 8.

Hey, thanks for reading. Over the course of this serialisation, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story, the writing, the themes, as well as your own obsessions and explorations into forms and genres that hold your stories.

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