Zorba’s Poems

Who changes, us or poetry? One of the most profound answers to this age-old question was offered by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek. The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé was his favorite poet, but one day he began reading Mallarmé as he usually did, only to be startled by what he felt.

He wrote:

“I read slowly and without direction. I closed the book, then opened it again, and finally tossed it aside. For the first time in my life, everything in it seemed bloodless, odorless, devoid of any human substance. Pale blue words, hollow, suspended in the void. Pure distilled water, perfectly sterile, without a single germ—but without any nutrients either, without life.

I opened the book again and began to read. Why had these poems captivated me for so many years? Poetry in its purest form! Life had been transformed into a pure, transparent game, unburdened by even a single drop of blood.

All the things that had enchanted me before now seemed, that morning, to be nothing more than intellectual acrobatics and mental chatter. This is what always happens when a civilization declines. This is how human anxiety comes to an end: through the skillful invocation of pure poetry, pure music, and pure thought.

The last human being has emptied himself. No more seeds, no more ecstasy, no more blood. Everything has been reduced to words, and every collection of words to musical games. The last human being goes even further: he sits in his absolute isolation and transforms music into silent mathematical equations.

I felt a profound joy. This is how visionaries and poets see everything, I thought—as if they were seeing it for the first time. Every morning, they see a new world before their eyes.”

For Zorba, the universe was what it had been for the first human beings on Earth: a vast, overwhelming vision. The stars streamed above him, while the waves of the sea crashed against his temples. He experienced earth, water, and animals without the interference and distortion of the intellect.

It is Sunday today, and I have nothing to do. I am at my country estate, thinking of you. The sun is like a furnace. Not a drop of rain. Here, when it rains in April, May, and June, it is an absolute deluge.

I am alone. And I like it. There are a great many wretched Greeks here—and is there any place where these insects do not exist?—but I do not want to mix with them. They disgust me.

Worse still, they are tavern and café owners—may the devil take them! You have sent us your leprosy, your miserable chatter. This is what is destroying Greece: politics! There is card-playing too, of course, as well as ignorance and the sins of the flesh.

Source: Asharq Al-Awsat.