PhilPaine.com

Tomor­row, I’ll be in Greece. I’ll be meet­ing my stal­wart friend, Fil­ip Marek, in Athens, and short­ly after, we’ll head for Crete.

Anyone who knows me is aware that, for most of my life, I’ve has per­son­al fas­ci­na­tion with ancient Minoan civ­i­liza­tion. My liv­ing room wall dis­plays a large framed print of the “palace” of Knos­sos, as some­what imag­i­na­tive­ly recon­struct­ed by N. Gou­vousis. The old­er ver­sion of this web­site was dec­o­rat­ed with an icon­ic Minoan mur­al. I’ve always pre­ferred the flu­id, sen­su­ous Minoan and Myce­naean art styles, with their domes­tic and nature-ori­ent­ed themes, to the more rigid and often mil­i­taris­tic styles of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The mytho­log­i­cal sto­ry of The­seus, defeat­ing a tyran­ny by enter­ing the labyrinth (a fair­ly obvi­ous metaphor for the search for knowl­edge), and fight­ing the mon­strous Mino­taur, finds its way into my writ­ing in var­i­ous forms. I would count myself a fail­ure in life if I did not at least once set my foot down on the site of the real Knos­sos. Now, for­tu­itous cir­cum­stances allow me to do this, and to spend some time explor­ing less pop­u­lar archae­o­log­i­cal sites, and the back coun­try of Greece.

But there will be an under­cur­rent of bit­ter­ness, which I will feel when­ev­er I pick up a pot­sherd or kick an ancient stone. Huge amounts of wordage has been expend­ed on Minoan civ­i­liza­tion, but almost all of it is spec­u­la­tion. We actu­al­ly know lit­tle about these peo­ple who thrived for a thou­sand years. Their lan­guage is unknown to us, their script unde­ci­phered. Almost every­thing about the ruins can be inter­pret­ed in var­i­ous ways, and there’s always been a ten­den­cy to project mod­ern hopes and dreams onto the enig­mat­ic remains. Minoan Civ­i­liza­tion evap­o­rat­ed in some uncer­tain process or com­bi­na­tion of nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, eco­nom­ic change, civ­il war, inva­sion, con­quest, eco­log­i­cal stress, or assim­i­la­tion. I was born in Cana­da, part of North Amer­i­can Civ­i­liza­tion. When I was born, it was the wealth­i­est, most free, most cul­tur­al­ly dynam­ic place on Earth. Now it is a sham­bles. It may be a dying cul­ture, drown­ing in an ever-ris­ing ocean of Con­ser­v­a­tive filth. No out­side forces are respon­si­ble for this death. We did it to our­selves, for “Con­ser­v­a­tive” is noth­ing but a syn­onym for moral cor­rup­tion. And our soci­ety is deeply, deeply cor­rupt­ed. I sus­pect that I will not be able to think of much else as I hike across the wild moun­tains and gorges of the ancient island of Crete.