The Names

People sit on the steps of the Propylaea as if in a classroom, fifty of them, listening to their guide. The faces are intent, arranged in rows on the marble heights among the common encumbrances and gear, the handbags, cameras, sun hats.Amid the scaffolding above them a workman slips the bit of a power drill into a block of dressed stone. The shank of the drill is a full meter long and produces a noise of rotating abrasions that sings among the columns and walls.The native stone is worn smooth, worn down by treading feet, lustrous and slick. An old box camera stands on a tripod with a black cloth hanging down. It is aimed at the Parthenon.We approach hypnotically, walking on the smooth stones, not watching where we step. The west facade rears before us. It would take a wrenching effort to avert our eyes from it. I'd seen the temple a hundred times from the street, never suspecting it was this big, this scarred, broken, rough. How different from the spotlighted bijou I'd seen from the car that night, coming back from Piraeus, a year ago.The marble seems to drip with honey, the pale autumnal hue produced by iron oxide in the stone. And there are stones lying about, stones everywhere as I cross around to the south colonnade -blocks, slabs, capitals, column drums. The temple is cordoned by ropes but this mingled debris is all over the ground, specked surfaces, rough to the touch, wasting in acid rain.I stop often, listening to people read to each other, listening to the guides speak German, French, Japanese, accented English. This is the peristyle, that is the architrave, those are the triglyphs.A woman pauses to fix her sandal.Beyond the retaining wall the great city spreads, ringed by mountains, heat struck, steeped in calamity. The smoke of small fires hangs on the hills, motionless, fixed there. The breathless rim, cinders falling from the sky. Paralysis. Nothing will disperse but powers of sound, rising from the traffic arcs, the jittery cars locked in concrete. Bombings will become commonplace, car bombings, firebombings of offices and department stores. A blind might will seem to shake things, to course headlong through that entire year. No one claims credit for the worst of the terror.I walk to the east face of the temple, so much space and openness, lost walls, pediments, roof, a grief for what has escaped containment. And this is what I mainly learned up there, that the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel. It wasn't aloof, rational, timeless, pure. I couldn't locate the serenity of the place, the logic and steady sense. It wasn't a relic species of dead Greece but part of the living city below it. This was a surprise. I'd thought it was a separate thing, the sacred height, intact in its Doric order. I hadn't expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embodied in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice we know as our own.Old people sit among upright fragments along the north facade, old women in white socks and heavy shoes, men with lapel badges, a guard in his gray cap, smoking, carrying with him the official aura, the glaze of vacant hours. The old box camera remains untended on its tripod, the black hood lifted in a breeze. Where is the photographer, the old man in the battered gray jacket with sagging pockets, the man with the sunken face, dirt in his fingernails? I feel I know him or can invent him. It isn't necessary for him to appear, eating pistachio nuts out of a white bag. The camera is enough.People come through the gateway, people in streams and clusters, in mass assemblies. No one seems to be alone. This is a place to enter in crowds, seek company and talk. Everyone is talking. I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.

The Prairie 14