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I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant strings, now sang with each note, and my head, cleared of thought by dark-glass images, was full of flowering fireworks. I had become an instrument.
At my centre the six-point sacral chakra whirled red, and through the spinning pineal gland I saw, was getting it, got it, yes.

Immersed in the maelstrom of hot, packed, dancing bodies, in water waving, lava bubbling, bodies bobbing, shining with sweat and coloured and made protean by stroboscope and light show, were those I’d leaped the bull with; this pretty dark girl, that handsome blond man, smiles and eyes touching and hands touching and bodies pressing, who are you, who am I, who are we, we are, we is, collectively this, no other, I melts into I, shared thoughts and haptic connection and synaptic detonation, togetherness and blessed letting go and dance and ride the wave, on the beat, beat, being.

Written on the bass drum, “The Morbid Symptoms.” Above the stage: “This crisis is exactly that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interlude a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”
The drummer pinned at his centre, flailing limbs and flying hair. Bassist rooted as a tree, white hands like scurrying animals. Guitarist, now wrapped round his guitar as if muffling an explosion, now throwing the red sunburst at us, showering us with red-hot notes. And the singer, thin and skinny-ribbed, stripped to the waist, dripping sweat, now holding his mic stand like Merlin’s staff, invoking, commanding, now Eros’ bow, shooting arrows of desire, cries as they hit.

Around me men roared like lions, butted like buffalo, women howled like cats, wrapped snakelike around each other. Distorted figures scrambled onto the stage and threw themselves off, were tossed and bounced across the room. Circles of dancers formed and a champion leaped in and showing off danced to exhaustion, was pushed aside by a new champion, driven on by shouts.
The music got louder, more intense, the mood rising towards hysteria as the singer, master of it all, now shaking as if possessed, now glancing with hooded eyes, smiling, driving the band harder, the mood higher. Now clothes were torn off and bodies rolled around the floor, alone or coupled, and couples stood glued together, eyes closed or locked into each other pouring back and forth, danced ever wilder, throwing each other around in marvellous synchrony and mortal combat. Others dance alone, experiencing their own smiling epiphanies, beatitudes, on the beat, beat. A girl in a scrap of silver dress threw her arms round my neck, pressed her slippery body against me, hot smell of sweat and sex, we danced, enjoyed every bit of each other in naked intimacy, took everything, moved on. A handsome, muscular man offered himself, intrigued, I declined. A slide projected: “Fais ce que tu voudras,” that rule, again, a shiver at the memory, do what you want – but want as desire, or want as lack? My life driven by lack, grabbing what’s available when I can, in case it never comes again; acquisition rather than transformation – What, now, full of so much, What, Now, do I want?
I stopped, seized up, in the middle of all the motion, unable to answer, unable to act. Jacks appeared in front of me, smiling, said, ‘let’s dance.’

We danced, energetically and gently, violently and lovingly, expressing, experiencing all that had happened, processing it into our body memories, working through what was and was not between us, arriving at a resolution, so we knew what would happen, accepted its inevitability, at last. Eyes open, with her, and others, in the moment, now. Eyes closed, scrolling through my life.

And then she was on stage. And I was looking up at her, in the spotlight, as she sang “Lilac Wine”, ‘lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love’ …, and realizing, as the blade twisted and hot tears flowed, that love is a gift, and that the pain of lost love is not to be got over, or healed (become sentimentality). But to be felt and lived with, really real.

And then I was on stage with her, blinded in the spotlight but her face illuminated, close, singing ‘we used to say, that come the day …’ “Meet On The Ledge”. A song I’d sung alone in my room, and at the folk club, thinking of Sandy Denny, another avatar of Melanie; and Jacks and I were singing it face to face, at one microphone, alternating lines then singing the chorus over and over as expression after expression passed across her face like the film of her life, and I’m sure mine, going through it, approaching the present – a Denny cry as she arrived at now, and everyone singing, over and over, “if you really mean it, it all comes round again,” the band played quieter and quieter, stopped, the singing grew softer, we kissed, long, soft, full-lipped, our first kiss, the singing stopped, the spotlight went off, in the dark she whispered, ‘come with me.’

Chapter 7: The Gateway

What did I expect? Not this: a small room with a few people, busy and occupied, office workers, and Strawson, sat behind a small desk, indicating chairs, like a university tutor.
And yet I was so full of the energy and activity and flow of the day, and so sure of Jacks’ instinct, that I was happy to go with yet another twist in this rabbit-hole world that yet made its own, oddly-acceptable sense. And too I acknowledged Strawson’s importance in all this, the quiet, methodical, passionate, perhaps fanatical man. Rainer was sat behind him, smiling and amenable. And by him Hanse, lounging in a chair, one leg over the arm, tight denim crotch, a harsh, disdainful sneer on his handsome face. Strawson’s smile was warm and encouraging, acknowledging we’d got this far. He said:
‘This, you’ll be glad to know, is the last discourse. After this, you will go your way, whatever that might be. Let me begin with a quote:

‘“In the seventeenth century the passionate search for absolute truth stopped, so that mankind might transform the world. Something practical was done with thought. The mental became also the real. Relief from the pursuit of absolutes made life pleasant.”

‘A recapitulation. From the unconscious acceptance of the existence and presence of the gods in the Cycladic, to the slightly distanced and correspondingly enriched relationship of the Minoans. Through man’s awareness of the growing distance of the gods in the Heroic age – Odysseus complains to Athena when he finally arrives back on Ithaka, that at Troy she was always close but that since he has never known whether she was there or not. Onto the Presocratics’ treatment of the gods as personified abstractions. To the soul, that last point of direct connection to the gods and the white radiance of eternity. Through renaissance neoplatonism. To Dee’s final, desperate even crazed, attempt to make contact using the dark glass. The connection with the other, the eternal world, was lost. “The mental became also the real.”

‘In the time since, man has explored intellectually, materially, geographically, through two and half exhilarating centuries of scientific materialism and technological development. Religion remained, but having a social rather than spiritual role, and churches were now merely “the tombs and monuments of God.” The active discourse was now political, economic, social. Individuals like Blake might experience the heavenly realm in the imagination, Hölderlin feel a brief touch. Art could be taken up as a substitute religion, as an element in politics. But the revolutionary Wagner of the 1848 barricades becomes the establishment Wagner of Bayreuth.

‘Spiritual sects, from Rosicrucians through the Golden Dawn to today’s millenarian new-agers could spring up; but gone was the visceral knowing of Socrates’ daemon, of Plato’s soul. It was, and remains, in Nietzsche’s phrase, the time of the last men, the ultimate men: “They are clever and know all that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make up – otherwise indigestion would result. They have their little pleasures, but they have regard for their health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the ultimate men, and blink.”

‘It is only with Nietzsche – yes, the beginning and the end of your journey – that the death, the loss, the absence of the gods is confronted. His “mad man” asks a series of questions that, one by one, pull up the planks that had been laid over the abyss of the absolute:
“We have killed God!” cries his mad man, “– you and I!
“But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Do we not wander, as through infinite nothingness?
“The holiest and mightiest that the world possessed has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us?”
And the devastating conclusion: “shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of what we have done?”’

He stopped, looking keenly at us, allowing silence to fill the space. Around us the figures worked on, unconcerned. From the other side of the door came the residual sounds of a great party breaking up.
Do we not wander, as through infinite nothingness?
Shall we not ourselves have to become gods, merely to seem worthy of what we have done? The words resonated, with what I had brought to the island, with what had happened on the island.
Crossing a bridge in the dark, it broke ahead of me and behind, dropped spinning into the icy river and was carried over the waterfall, my wings had melted, the winged horse was gone, falling. But not, now, endlessly, in darkness: into a recognizable world, through blue sky and wispy clouds, towards a blue sea and jewel islands, and I landed in this chair, full, once more, of questions.

‘May I?’ I asked. Strawson nodded. I asked:
‘Do you believe that man invented the gods and then killed them off? Or that the gods are real and have, progressively, absented themselves from our lives?’
He smiled, recognizing a familiar, difficult question, fingers forming a steeple under his chin:
‘It has been a change in man, a progressive loss of the “divine portion,” a growing, separate, humanness. Whether gods are real or invented, we’ve no way of knowing, because we have no final way of knowing what’s real outside our heads. It becomes a matter of opinion. But I don’t believe it’s central. What is central is – how do we live without the gods?
‘Do we strive to imagine them into being, relocated deep inside ourselves? Or “out there,” in the stars? Do we seek for preserved memories, touches of the godlike, in ancient cultures, in ritual, in art? Do we say – thank goodness we’ve got rid of those pesky gods, let’s get on with living without all that supernatural stuff, as Epicurus did, as the West has, for the last two and half centuries? Living, if we are “ultimate men”, insulated, self-satisfied lives; if we have any sensitivity, with the numbing sense of loss, depending on a few suffering individuals to give us flashes, intimations of what we have lost …?

‘And if that’s right for you,’ he said, directly to me after moments of revery, ‘you can return to building your secular utopias, and being a spiritual tourist. It may be valid, but it’s not for here.
‘Or do we,’ once more addressing both of us, with a renewed fervour, ‘with Nietzsche, say that in order to fulfil himself, man must now employ the focus, ingenuity, the passion he used in inventing an entire heaven of gods (or the perceptiveness he needed to so fully experience them, if you prefer) to reclaim the godlike for himself?

‘Man as a bridge, not a goal.

‘Man as the lake that threw up a dam where it flowed out into the gods, retained what had once flowed out, and now, elevated in the rising lake, finds the faith in himself to fully realize himself, without that detour via god.

‘The overman …’ He stopped, pulled a face, said, ‘we can no longer translate Übermensch as “superman”, a word soiled by both capitalist consumerist popular culture and fascist politics. And even “overman” sounds too much like “overseer.” Take it to mean “self-overcoming man.” To continue: the overman is the one who seeks to find his true self in self-configuration and self-enhancement, who becomes the master of himself and his virtues. “I love the one who has a free spirit and a free heart,” says Zarathustra. He is free of religion because he has reclaimed for himself, embodied in himself, the sanctification of this world. It doesn’t have to be a choice between a lost, god-filled world of child-like wonder, and an actual, but prosaic, secular world. This world is full of wonder!’ He stopped, looked at me, said:

‘Yes, “This world. This small world the great!” Remember? We are full of the wonderful! We do not have to live with loss and the sense of loss. The child abdicated its ecstasy – but we can reclaim it. For, by acknowledging and accepting the absence of god, man can begin to create, in this world, this life, a way of living that incorporates the vividness of a god-filled world, that we see in, for example, the ancient art of these islands that you and I so admire. “No! Life has not deceived me! On the contrary, from year to year I find it richer, more desirable and more mysterious,” Nietzsche cries.’

His voice had risen as he tried to explain. He then fell silent, so sure of what he was saying, and so aware of the inadequacy of his words.
‘It sounds utopian,’ I try.
‘No, no, no! Utopia is an imagined state that begins from then. This is an actual process that begins in now.
‘And the process begins with the dismantling, in the self and the group, of the fixed, given, Apollonian dream-world – for art is a dream …’
‘Yes!’ Jacks, all attention, yelped, then looked embarrassed.
Strawson smiled, continued, ‘dismantling to reveal the Dionysian, then to dwell in it – the chaotic, vital, energy-filled and energy-filling root of being, that in its extravagance and excess enables one to gain power over one’s self, and realize one’s human potential.
‘To step off the fixed island of being, into the turbulent sea of becoming. To make of life an experiment “in a world of dangers and victories, in which heroic sentiments also have their arena and dancing floor.”’

His words rang out, his eyes shone as if illuminated from within.
Were these the ravings of a mad man (but if mad, maybe Nietzsche’s clear-sighted “mad man” …)?
Or the insistent words of one who knows, but has become used to having to shout to be heard, even to himself, against the chatter and noise of the twittering world, the bland, boarded-over, papered-over world that left me feeling so unfulfilled? Was he offering me a way? Maybe the way?
On Ios and Delos, and here on Naxos, hadn’t I been shown another world?
Here, in the arena and on the dancing floor, hadn’t I begun to experience it?

I wanted him to go on. I wanted to ask him how I could dismantle to reveal. I was about to speak, when there came slow, ironic clapping, and a sarcastic ‘bravo!’ from Hanse.
From sprawling languidly, he had lifted his leg back over the arm of the chair and was leaning forward:
‘James, James! How you idealize, how you romanticize! You make it sound epic, heroic – rather public school, in fact.
‘But you elide the destruction. It’s as if, for you, Dionysos’ followers didn’t really tear Pentheus to pieces, his mother didn’t actually hold up his bloody head in the triumph of the Dionysian.
‘You slide over Nietzsche’s crucial, unambiguous statements: “The remorseless destruction of all degenerate and parasitic elements will again make possible that excess of life on earth from which the Dionysian condition must awaken.”
‘“Far too many live, and for far too long they hang on the branches. If only a storm could come to shake off all this rot and worm-eaten decay from the tree!”
‘“Where you cannot be rulers and possessors, you knowing ones – be robbers and spoilers!”

‘So, as with everything else, we must fight our fathers for Nietzsche. They hijacked him for their fascist nationalism; for us he is the voice of liberation. Their “degenerates and parasites” were Jews and homosexuals; ours are bankers and politicians. We’re the storm to clear the whole Nazi-generation ruling-class from the tree.
‘“It is a terrible thing, to kill,” says Brecht, but “this murdering world can only be changed by force alone, as every living person knows.”’ He looked at me:
‘You see, while you were reading Steppenwolf as the romantic outsider, roaming alone through the night streets, past lit windows, howling your solitude then returning to your warm bourgeois room, we were in the Magic Theatre. Shooting the bourgeois. You believe there is a way through bourgeois meliorism, through art. There isn’t. For one builds the prison, while the other decorates it. One only find oneself through destruction.’

His eyes looked to the side of me. He continued: ‘As Gudrun Esslin found when she fire-bombed the department store. It released her from constraint and fear. Even her pastor father saw it. He said that she had experienced “a condition of holy, euphoric self-realization,” “a kind of freedom.” He was in awe of it. Her mother envied it. If only that generation had dared, when they had been called to dare! As we dare.
‘And Ulrike Meinhoff experienced it when she followed the others out of the prison window, out of society, into the Dionysian.
‘And when the guard was shot, it brought home to us that people who are not direct targets will be killed. “It is a terrible thing, to kill,” but …’

A silence. I could see Melanie, not now stealing from her uncle’s department store, but fire-bombing it. Maybe she was right. Maybe I should have … And then practical sense prevailed. I said:
‘But you can’t win!’
He looked astonished, then his face opened and he laughed a big, open-hearted laugh that rang round the room. He said:
‘What is “win”? Nobody wins. Nobody gets out of this world alive, as that great philosopher of the real Hank Williams tells us. Each of us dies. All you can do is live a good life, and die a good death. It is Nietzsche’s whole thing.
‘Remember Silenus: the best is not to be born, the next best to meet an early death. That is the Dionysian tragedy that underlies my life, your life. “The question is not how can man be preserved, but how can he be overcome.” “Be fearful, but master your fear.” “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”
‘We must above all avoid, as Mailer puts it, being “jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats and quiet desperation.”
You must learn, my friend, to “leap over your own shadow, into your own sunlight.”’

Another silence, in which that exhortation echoed. I wanted to stay with it. But again anxiety pushed it aside and I found myself crying out, almost in desperation:
‘But they will kill you!’
‘No,’ he said, very quietly, ‘we will choose to die. “A voluntary death that comes to me because I wish it.” “The man consummating his life dies his death triumphantly!”’

Silence. For a moment he was looking inward, and maybe forward, his face serious. Then he was back, laughing full-throatedly:

‘“And now, you higher ones (unless you are the ultimate man?) the seminar is over – leave the market-place!” “Truly Zarathustra had a goal; he threw his ball. Now, inherit my goal – I throw the golden ball to you.” Will you catch it?’

And, a magician, like Pedro in the Magic Theatre, he magicked a golden ball into his hand and threw it, hard, at me.
Would I have caught it? What would I have done if I had? I’ve no idea.

For a hand appeared in front of me and caught the ball, and Jacks, holding it aloft, stepped across to Hanse.

Of course.

All along he had seen the possibility in her. All this time he had been speaking not to me, but to her.
He took her hand and they walked away together. She did not look back.

And yet, even if this had been intended for Jacks, I had experienced it all.

They quickly faded, as if they were being absorbed into a dark mist, and were soon gone. I heard music, and singing, and wild celebration, but that also faded. I was left in the silent dark.

And I was on the Palatia, facing the marble doorway of Apollo’s temple, of Ariadne’s palace.
It was night still, with just the faintest light over the dark mass of the island behind me, where the sun would rise. I shivered. It was fresh, but refreshing, an early morning awakening, small waves breaking intermittently on the rocky shore.

I looked up into the starry sky, at the Great Bear. I remembered Jacks following its rotation around the fixed point of the pole star on her first night on Naxos. From there I located, via Arcturus, Corona Borealis, the half-circle of stars that is the golden coronet that Dionysos gave to Ariadne at their wedding. Or that he placed in the sky as a memorial after his half-sister Artemis killed her, on his orders. “There are many traditions concerning Ariadne, all mutually inconsistent.”

And then the sun was rising, striking my back with its sudden heat, illuminating the island and the sea, throwing my shadow forward. I walked towards the doorway.
And then suddenly remembered Angela’s sash at my waist. I untied it and let it fall, with a silent invocation; when I looked down it was gone.
I stepped through the marble doorway.