Where Three Roads Meet

by Salley Vickers

  — What we call a “screen memory”: a partial recall of other traumatic events relating to your sudden dislocation.

  — If you say so, Doctor.

  — And Daulis? Did you ever go there?

  — I found other asylums. The pinewoods which enclosed the sanctuary were filled with birds and became a haven in which to hide. But later, when I had a better grasp of the lie of the land, I did walk the steep mountain paths down to Daulis. There were trees, I remember, pear and apple in bloom. And a field of white pigs. And a slow river and a bridge. I stood on the bridge and watched the wine-dark swallows, with their streaming forks of tails and their red smudged foreheads, wheel and shriek after insects in the air, thinking (if thinking is the word) of my mother. Daulis, by the way, was one of your Athena’s sanctuaries.

  — My little goddess. And your mother … ah, I am sorry, this will be my daughter with the tray and the best china. The Viennese vagrants have transmogrified into bourgeois English already. Will you stay and take tea?

  — I have talked enough, Dr Freud. But I’ll return.

  6

  20 Maresfield Gardens, 29 September 1938

  — I thought it must be you: Jumbo’s pricked his ears. Back home, in Vienna, my old chow Jo-fi used to vet the patients. If she didn’t like the smell of them I didn’t take them on.

  — I’m not interrupting, Doctor?

  — By no means, my dear fellow. I left the French windows open for you. And for Jumbo. He’s company while Lün is away, but I shan’t be content till she and I are reunited. There’s no dog as intelligent as a chow.

  — Where should I sit? I don’t wish to dislodge you and Jumbo from your couch.

  — My daughter decrees that I take a nap at this hour. Women! Gorgons in petticoats. A mere man freezes into submission.

  — Shall I sit by the desk?

  — Please, take the armchair by me. I hear better from there. I must say, I was awaiting the resumption of our conversation with an eagerness unusual for me these days. If it won’t bother you, while you talk to me I’ll smoke one of these delightful little devils. I’m afraid today I have to force open my jaw with this peg here. Not a pretty sight.

  — No sight bothers me any more, Dr Freud.

  — You are lucky, my friend!

  — Maybe.

  — You were speaking yesterday of your mother. I dreaded the loss of my own mother, despite my advanced years. But more than that, I dreaded she would lose me first. When she finally left us it took a long time to grasp that I should never see her again.

  — How do you know you won’t?

  — Common sense.

  — Common sense? I see. Shall I go on, Dr Freud?

  — Please do.

  — You’ve visited the sanctuary at Delphi?

  — Regrettably, I never made it further than Athens and the Acropolis. You know what impressed me most? That it existed. I stood on the Acropolis, side by side with my brother – my young brother and I always took a small annual trip together – with my little goddess’s great temple at my back and looked out across at Mount Pendeli, bathed in that violet light which always appears older than our northern light. And the thought that sprang to mind was: So it is real after all. A displacement, of course, of the child’s belief that I would never live to see Athena’s city with my own eyes. The mind plays tricks.

  — No doubt about that. But I wonder if you are right. Whenever I returned to Delphi I had the same thought: This is real. Maybe such places are more real than what is commonly taken for “real”?

  — Ah, then, but what is “real”, my friend? A very thorny question.

  — Nothing on earth is more real to me than Delphi. In all weathers, in all lights, in all minds, it is a place of peculiar power, of natural grace. Of astonishing brilliance and darkness. A fearsome yet remediate place, of measureless quiet and fathomless awe. Delphi’s impress never leaves me: the deep-shadowed dells, the steep gorges which refract far-shooting Apollo’s light and the ravines where his ravens nest and cry and a body might fall and perish and the bones never be found; the fierce springs which run ice cold under the earth and emerge as fountains, sharp as crystal; the pale mornings, misty as narcissi under snow, for the snow can lie heavy on the heights well into spring. The remorseless summer noons, when the sun carves shadows stern as stone and marble and the only balm is the smell of wild thyme perfusing the still air; the indigo twilight, hymned by the high-voiced bats, and the star-fretted nights made mournful by the plaintive owls; and always below, in all seasons, the old green plain of Pleistos, whose river runs silver to the curving bay where the sailors in the Cretan ship were steered by gleaming-skinned dolphin-shaped Apollo to be his first priests. The dusky-leafed laurels, the sky-piercing cypresses, the gummy pines, the ancient olive groves, shredding and reweaving the light, and the perpetual churr of cicadas and droning bees criss-crossing the song of hidden birds – it haunts my mind always.

  — You fill me with regret that I shall never see it with my own eyes.

  — It is a sight for sore eyes and ears, more so still for sore minds. But at any rate I needn’t explain to a man of your learning, Doctor, that the point of Delphi was Apollo’s oracle, chief among all oracles. Many have called it the earth’s womb, and the Omphalos, the sacred stone which lay at the sanctuary centre, marked the earth’s navel, decreed so when Zeus set two eagles to fly in opposite directions to meet and designate the very centre of the earth.

  — I seem to recollect the story.

  — You may have heard, too, that within Apollo’s temple, above the area where the snakish offspring of the earth goddess Gaia once had its lair, a tall bronze tripod stood. On this was seated an elderly celibate, the Pythia, the sole priestess of Apollo who acted as his mouthpiece and whom petitioners came to consult. The ancient creature’s den lay over a chasm in the earth, which exuded vaporous fumes inducing intoxication. The Pythia, chewing bay leaves, sacred to Apollo, imbibed these fumes and in a delirious frenzy delivered up the god’s response in a weird wordless chant. An officiating priest then translated the divine response into poetry, delivering the written verdict to the questioner.

  — I believe I’ve read something to that effect.

  — You would have done. Someone cooks up a story and they all repeat it. The reality wasn’t quite like that. It never is, is it?

  — Not as we wish it to be, that’s certain.

  — I can only speak from my own experience but in my day the Pythias started young. It was only as time went on that older women were chosen. My hunch is that the young girls acted up and the priests couldn’t handle them. Got hysterical, another term I hear you’ve made your reputation with.

  — I’ve certainly accounted for a few hysterics in my time.

  — And the tripod the Priestess sat on was nothing lofty. It was based on a simple cooking tripod.

  — The English have a saying, “As right as a trivet” because three legs are stable, like your tripod.

  — Exactly. It was designed for placing over the hearth, quite homely.

  — You know, in German “homely” is the opposite of uncanny?

  — In many ways, Doctor, Delphi was uncannily homely. In any case, it was home to me. I never saw a Pythia chew leaves. Lord knows where that notion came from. The holy of holies, where she sat to pronounce, lay below the level of the rest of the temple, and in the floor, which was left earthen, an ancient bay tree grew. The Pythia, when she pronounced, cut a branch from this shrub and at the god’s approach the leaves trembled, which was no great trouble to fudge, if need be, with a discreet shake of the hand. As for her so-called delirium, it was ecstasy not frenzy: she was out of her self, not out of her mind; though I grant you the sounds that came from her were unworldly.

  — And you had some hand in all this?

  — Much of a priest’s work was very prosaic. Even in my day, Delphi was a complex financial enterprise. The cost of a consultation was considerable. On top of various civic contrib
utions, each individual petitioner was made to pay a high price, first for the cake burned on the sacred fire, then again for the preparatory sacrifices – a death for the deathless ones – of which the lion’s share went to the priests. Only after these procedures was a petitioner permitted into the holy of holies, and the god could safely be approached. But you charge fees yourself.

  — An entirely different matter. Psychoanalysis is an exact science evolved from close and systematic observation of the complexities of the human psyche, not a series of superstitious rituals designed to hoodwink the credulous.

  — Whatever you say, Dr Freud. I was going to add that many priests were corrupt, and with the right bribes answers could always be fixed, which…

  — One can hardly bribe an analyst. What could an analyst possibly do or say that would be different if you slipped him a few notes on the side?

  — The comparison was idle, Doctor. Let us say there are parallels. As with your profession, to become a priest at Delphi was to acquire enormous power. Many of the “holy ones” made their pensions out of the bribes they received to put a question on the list. As for the high priests, they could rake in huge benefits through strategic bending of the Pythic utterances. Most verdicts, when you analysed them, could be swung either way. But if I may say so without giving further offence, ambiguity is your bread and butter too.

  — My aim is to disinter and unravel the ambiguous and bring it into the light of reason. The ambiguity of religious pronouncement merely encourages a mystification designed to bolster the authority of those who make the pronouncements.

  — No need to get on your high horse, Dr Freud. Even you will grant, I hope, that not all men, even priests, are corrupt, and not all verdicts twisted. And there were those who for whatever reason – a pride in their work or a passionate conviction – believed that just as the moon reflects the sun’s light so Phoebus Apollo himself spoke through the Pythia. And those few translated, to the best of their ability, the truth of her cryptic sounds.

  — Truth? That’s a very dark horse.

  — But there are those, Doctor, who ride dark horses, and who may see truth from a perspective other than that of those whose feet stick fast in the mud of reason.

  — In my view, our best hope of survival is that reason will establish a dictatorship, finally, over the human psyche.

  — “Dictatorship”, Dr Freud? I see. Might not your little corporal agree with you there? Setting the fallible mortals aside, there are also places, thin places, where the membrane of the earth is stretched and the immortal forces may more strongly be felt.

  — “The immortal forces”, my good fellow, are a perennial fiction. A primitive defence against reality.

  — Or reality’s original? Even as a beardless boy I stood more than once in the holy precinct and felt a draught of peculiar freshness about my face, and a strange sweetness in my nose which was something more than the familiar scent of myrrh and bay from the ritual fire. And whatever your sceptical mind might make of it now, Dr Freud, I tell you this was the odour of sanctity, and all-seeing Lord Apollo was present.

  — My dear man, that, I must tell you, is an example of temporary psychotic inflation, common enough among the susceptible. What Jung would call sympathetic magic based on the known power of folk superstition.

  — Think what you like…

  — I assure you I shall!

  — …but don’t go away with the impression that Phoebus Apollo was a namby-pamby, airy-fairy figure. Believe me, the training for his priesthood was a punishing, often brutal, regime. We were dealt short rations; made to rise, often in freezing conditions, before dawn; bitten by lice and fleas, the more so if our skin was fair, as mine was; and worked till we dropped, learning, until it became second nature, to translate free speech into poetic hexameters. We were beaten for inattention, and often for less respectable reasons. The older priests were hard taskmasters, and some were sadists and more besides. I was a pretty boy and my mother’s colouring marked me out as unusual. I learned soon that I could attain special favours by offering favours of my own. And believe me, I did so to protect my skin. There has grown a rumour that I spent seven years as a woman. Well, in a manner of speaking I did. Make what you like of that!

  — Bisexuality is an entirely natural phenomenon. I spent years analysing my own homosexual tendencies.

  — Each to his own madness, Dr Freud. Whatever the reason, I was a loner. In the novice school I was respected for my talents. But there was an air about me that kept my peers at a distance.

  — You made no friends?

  — I got on better with women, but there were few enough at Delphi. Though there was one, a rather important one, the Pythia.

  — The laurel-leaf woman who spoke in tongues?

  — She was no moonshine peddler, my Pythia. A hefty girl, wide-hipped – I remember we had some problem once fitting her into the tripod bowl – with a tongue that could take the skin off your ear. She used it to get her own back on the priests when they fussed and got on her nerves. To look at her, solid as Parnassus, or hear her laugh, like a jay’s screech, you would never guess she had the power of divination. There was nothing otherworldly about my Pythia. But when she was seated on that tripod and had drunk from the cup of sacred water, you witnessed a person transported. And her voice at those times was clear as a bell with the ring of inspiration. Don’t ask me what that is. You know it when you hear it.

  — Even with my Eustachian tube unimpaired my ear would be deaf to it.

  — You’ve never met a mantic, then.

  — I’ve met a few in my time who believed they heard voices. Dementia praecox.

  — Or dementia sancta? Take it from me, Doctor, unbeliever as you may be you would recognise a true mantic. There’s honour among thieves but there’s honour among mantics too. It is a gift; but a lonely one.

  — There I am with you. A gift can make one lonely.

  — And loneliness – you would agree? – leads to our seeking allies.

  — I admit that I have shared that impulse, often to my cost.

  — Well the gods alone know what would have happened to me without my Pythia.

  — A boy who has lost his mother. It stands to reason there will be a transference to an older woman.

  — She was a friend.

  — Without my friends, as my dear wife daily reminds me, I would be in a Gestapo prison now rather than talking to you. Perhaps she is right. I have been thinking lately, she is often right.

  — Let’s face it, Doctor, women see what’s what better than men. My Pythia saw something in me that before her only my grandmother had seen. I had an aptitude for translating into hexameters, and one day the priest I was studying with had a pain in his belly from drinking bad wine and the Pythia said to him, “Why don’t you knock off and get yourself to bed? Young Tiri here can do the translation for us”. She’d divined, you see, that we were in tune. After that she often contrived for us to work together. It made it easier for her. A gift works better where others are gifted too, wouldn’t you say?

  — You may be right. I’ve not thought about it.

  — Then one time a petitioner approached and, without my referring the question to the Pythia, suddenly an alien voice was answering through me. A voice which left my lips numb and my whole body trembling. The pilgrims had no sight of us in the holy of holies. A curtain hung across the threshold and only the Pythia and the priest were permitted inside. The Pythia said nothing at my unwonted intervention but at the end of the day she took me back with her to her house, which was forbidden to any man. And from that time I found, occasionally, I was acting as the mouthpiece of the oracular words.

  — These “words”, what were they precisely?

  — Nothing “precise” about them, Doctor. When I say “words” please understand they weren’t words as they reached me. The divine “word” was light – a flash, a blaze or sometimes just a gradual illumining. But always first a shock, and afterwards a draining a
nd a daze – a numbness of the face and I needed a draught of wine and a day and a half to recover. The experience was not an easy one, though I grew used to it. We get used to things.

  — Sadly, I fear humankind can adapt to most situations. Good and bad.

  — I put it to you, Doctor, that our gods are what “good” and “bad” once were before they became categories in human reasoning.

  — My dear good fellow, what you call a “god” is a projection occasioned by the desire to revert to a state of infantile dependency.

  — Or the discrete forms that the Real takes before the human mind distorts it?

  — Not my reality. We must agree to differ!

  — But I was describing mine, Dr Freud. As the light began to work in me, words were constellated. An illuminating process, you might say, but for me with words there is always some darkening.

  — That I would also question.

  — You set too great a store by language; words are fabrications, a reflection of things as they are. At the same time – I’m sure we will agree on this – words can shape our future, which is why the judgements of the oracle were ambiguous, riddling; though not, as some have concluded, intended to confound. The immortals may be malicious but they don’t play games. Playful, yes – but that is not the same thing at all. When the Lord Apollo gave ambiguous voice he was indicating the essence of right understanding. We who come into the world of being seem one; but in potential we are many. So the words in which the divine truth was revealed had to embrace, as best they could, the diverse possibilities coiled into any one moment. Choices which might point different ways.

  I hear Jumbo snuffling. Your daughter will be arriving soon with the sacred tray.