searches for roots of own genius

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Kazantzakis-Bilan-dune-vie-lettre-au-greco/344095
> BAnQ (Basile J., Le devoir, 10 juin 1961) : https://collections.banq.qc.ca/ark:/52327/2778234

> LETTRE AU GRECO, de Nikos Kazantzaki. — Le testament autobiographique de l'auteur de Alexis Zorba et du Christ recrucifié : “le désir anxieux qu'a la chenille de devenir papillon a toujours été à mes yeux le devoir le plus impérieux, et en même temps le plus légitime, de la chenille et de l'homme. Que Dieu vous crée chenille et vous-même, par votre lutte, vous deveniez papillon.”. Presses pocket. (Albert SARALLIER)
—Nouvelles Clés, (12), Juillet/Août 1990, (p. 45)

> …il faut lire son récit autobiographique, Lettre au Greco. On y comprend de quelle semence est sorti l'arbre de sa vie. Son enfance, à la fin des années 1880 et 1890, a respiré l'air féroce des combats qui déchiraient Grecs et Turcs, forgeant l'âme trempée des Crétois.
—Le devoir, 17 août 2002

> BILAN D'UN GREC. L'auteur désormais fameux d'ALEXIS ZOBA a écrit au cours de sa vieillesse une Lettre au Gréco qui était de nature autobiographique. Les Editions Plon ont publié cet ouvrage sous le titre de BILAN D'UNE VIE. En S56 pages, nous découvrons un Nikos Kazantzakis intime. Il nous communique son pan théisme dépouillé de tous les fastes littéraires, un pan théisme qui est toute simplicité, toute amitié avec le monde
—Le devoir, 29 janvier ( )

“The truth is that we all are one, that all of us together create god, that god is not man's ancestor, but his descendant.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

Now create your own magic...

Report to Greco is a poet’s view of his life, a life that in his imagination rises forth with the mystic clods of Cretan earth he carries in spirit and body across the globe. Nikos Kazantzakis mixes reminiscence, fictional re-telling and re-imagining, and intimate confessions.

His father was a hard-minded fighter in the war for Crete’s liberation from Turkey. That man’s autobiography, if such could possibly exist, would be literal in word and spirit. The son was a different sort of man. As an example, on Sparta NK finds himself descending a mountain in a thunderstorm. For most of us, an experience involving fear or exhilaration and also an exercise in safe conduct. NK, instead, describes it as the “violent descent of the Holy Ghost.” In this we see the sensibility with which his “life story” is told.

There is hardly a page that does not immerse the reader in a reality or personal history heightened or even altered by imagination. Olive groves, convents, gargoyles, temples, puddles, stone, surf, orange trees, saints, martyrs, parents, children, art, political slaughter, a woman’s body, a woman’s soul, the wind, philosophy—in his memory NK sustains what he has seen and whom he has known so that, he believes, as long as he lives these people and these places, events, and days will continue to live. That is his book’s ambition. It’s quite a personality to accompany through his world and time.

NK can be wonderful when evoking that world, with nature as an active personality:
“I began to go for strolls in the fields. The world had become a paradise; the snows of Olympus sparkled in the sunlight while the fields below shone bright green and the returning swallows, like shuttles of a loom, wove spring into the air. Small white and yellow wildflowers, pushing up the soil with their tiny heads, began to emerge into the sunlight to see the world above. Someone must have rolled back the earthen tombstones above them: they were being resurrected.”

And yet he describes himself as taciturn—the last word one would use after reading his Report. Even in NK’s most ascetic moods the exuberance of living is always ready to whirl forth in mimicry of the dervishes he visits who believe that dance is one of the archangels come to ready us to appear before God.

The past (not any past, the Greek past) is seen by him as a parade of dramas rather than as a document of sober history. At times NK composes history in terms that do not apply. He imagines that by means of their struggles the Greeks sanctified each region, subordinated each to an exalted meaning that formed from each region’s physical nature something metaphysical. The more bitter truth: Greece was torn by jealousies, hatreds, civil wars. Democracies, aristocracies, and tyrannies exterminated one another.

This is part of his method. By such contrasts NK invokes his own peculiar romantic process to explain how such an event as the ancient Olympics, such an idea, could arise. His conclusion is “Civilization begins at the moment sport begins.” Remember that next time you watch the Super Bowl or World Cup! But remember also this caution: “When Greece began to decline, the athlete’s body began at the same time to hypertrophy and kill his mind. Euripides was among the first to protest: he proclaimed what risks the spirit was running at the hands of athleticism.”

A serious life but sometimes silly too, as when NK buys shoes that are too narrow in order to cause himself pain as penance for so enjoying Italy.

Matters of the spirit, and of religion, are more prominent than anything else in the Report. NK is restless, relentlessly curious, with a drive that creates personal drama in all his encounters with holy places and the persons who live in them. He spends a lot of time visiting monasteries but as much as he likes their “anachronistic life” none seem to him satisfactory or address his needs. He recalls Francis of Assisi asking “How can I enjoy heaven, Lord, when I know hell exists.” But given the fictional aspects of his memoir, it’s possible the quote is NK’s rather than the Saint’s.

His visits, if anything, inspire combative reactions. On one page he writes, “The world is a trap laid by Satan, laid by God,” and on another comes the thought that “God is not man’s ancestor but his descendent.” His concern is always with spiritual and intellectual freedom: “the man who either hopes for heaven or fears hell cannot be free.” Words such as these remind us that NK’s destiny was to be anathematized by the Church, in line with the notion that only a man gravely concerned with God, Satan, and salvation of the soul shall end as saint or outcast.

Even NK’s study of Buddha spurs a kind of combativeness: “…this is my form of freedom. I have been saved from salvation…every other form of freedom is a form of slavery…If I were to be born again, I would fight for this great freedom, for salvation from salvation…Salvation means deliverance from all saviors...the perfect savior…is the Savior who shall deliver mankind from salvation.”

Take that in.

A big issue in evaluating the book is its semi-fictional nature. How are we to assess the stories related by Kazantzakis? How much can we trust what he tells us about others? He writes that “The great artist considers realistic representation a disfigurement and caricature of the eternal” and that all great artists relocate history “in the elevated and symbolic atmosphere of myth.”

Nikos, I have my doubts. But you seem, if we can believe your Report, to have shown greatness in the intensity of your quest. ( )

Kazantzakis really gets mythic in this, I think. ( )