Odyssey. Eden?

What follows after this introduction really seems to digress from the notion I had had for this diary. However, since I found this writing in printed out pages about 5 weeks ago, three things strike me about it. First, reading it brought back the powerful memory of an extraordinary morning in a week unlike any other of mine, that culminated in a tumultuous event in world history.
Second, finding it in print represents a kind of antithesis to what happened with the post I wrote and lost a few weeks ago. My computer had suddenly died, taking with it a huge amount of folders in the autumn of 2003. Until I found these forgotten pages, I had assumed that the record of my thoughts of that day, written immediately after my solitary wandering on an early September morning, were lost forever.
Third, I want it here, as it feels both fresh and an honest representation of me, at least as I was 6 years ago. It feels somehow linked to now. It was a fundamental, landmark experience, though it would be impossible today. The French have the word ‘charnière’; I just can’t think of an English equivalent, but that is what it was.
Today, it is uncanny to look back on the experience and see it not as an epiphany, but rather as my very own personal version of the book and film by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick, released 33 years earlier. So, a trite sub-title: “2001: Stewart’s Space Odyssey”. Maybe I starred as my own Star Child. I would like that. After all, that is about the best way I can think of describing myself in the context of everything that has happened across nearly 57 years until today. Still looking for the way home………

To set the scene, that August had been domestically fraught, bitter, too often highly charged with conflict in a house over-crowded with visitors who were not there for my benefit and who had made me feel an outsider in my own home. However, there had also been a lot touring around the country, which was better.
I had resolved, after they had all gone, to do something that I had last done 30 years before: go away alone for one week with the car, go and see what I pleased and where, before the big return to work in the city rendered that impossible. I wanted the kind of rest – i.e. change – that would recharge the batteries and at least partly repair the cracks in what was becoming an increasingly difficult relationship. Difficulties that were inevitably to prove irreparable, as has to be the outcome when one half refuses to listen to the other and resorts only to judgmentalism, blindness, intolerance, prejudice and malice because he or she cannot have their own way. I will say no more about all that, other than it was a magical, beautiful, powerful love unnecessarily undone. It is another tragedy, the way it went wrong and how long it took before it finally ended. How stupid we can all be. Why? Why can’t we just live and let live, listen and accept each other the way we are? It seems like what attracts a person to another sometimes turns into the very thing that repels. I wish I understood. But, as ever, I still refuse to regret anything, because that would mean denying all of the good that there undoubtedly was.

The first night, just outside Évora, we were both there. For the last two nights, she came back to join me in a favourite hotel near Elvas, also in the central Alentejo, but deeper into the interior, less than 10 miles from the Spanish border.
On that particular Monday morning, we drove out of the wonderful farmhouse-hotel in convoy, through Évora and 6 miles on, as planned, we hooted our goodbyes as I turned left into the wooded, gently hilly countryside and she continued on to Lisbon. What followed was one of the strongest experiences of my entire life. The word ‘awesome’ is, for once, accurate and appropriate.
In this writing, you will encounter certain crucial words in Portuguese. I make no apologies for this; you can easily find out what they mean on Google, or Wikipedia, as the places associated with them.
One last note: I have just checked and confirmed that I have none of the photos available that I took that morning, that week, or indeed, one year later on a repeat visit for an afternoon trip from Lisbon. A great pity. I didn’t start digitalising my films until early 2003, though strangely I ordered digitalisations of some beauties in both hotels taken that week. Therefore, I will have to “borrow” some that I have found on the internet. I urge anyone to go find them too, particularly the Anta Grande de Zambujeiro.

Before I start this transcription, I am feeling that it really merits its inclusion in this place; it records a moment of immense realisation for me personally. Its whole context, as it was to transpire just a few days later, was dramatic, almost incredible. What follows comprises two parts, written 15 days apart. The first is a transcription from what I wrote long-hand in an Évora garden. The second was written at home in my office in Lisbon. Neither of them was written with any intention to make it public, if that is what this is.

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1 - Stone and Time

Monday 3rd September, 2001


Less and less am I, or do I feel, qualified or inclined to speak for anyone else in this world. I can only speak for myself, which feels perfectly correct, in any case.

It is now 1.45 pm, only just a little over 4 hours since P. continued on the road towards Lisbon and I turned left and left the present day of which we are all prisoners behind for two priceless hours of time, spent in the midst of something so ancient as to be virtually timeless.
Alone with pre-history and entered deeply into the neolithic age, alive for whatever eternity means in an intense, somehow friendly (and familiar?) natural landscape, under a uniformly perfect blue Alentejo summer sky and a sun of an equally ancient burning, though still early enough to be some way short of the day’s maximum temperature, which is now, which is 37ºC.
Alone with the cromeleque, named ‘dos Almendres’. A clearing under the trees, 3 miles from the road; 94 upright, sculpted, rounded stones of various heights, seemingly gazing at Evora in the distance.

Alone with the menhir, next to an old olive tree in another clearing 400 yards away, over three times as wide as me, and 4 feet taller, with markings and symbols. A huge, smooth, phallic stone. Fertility? I was struck by the scene early in “2001 – A Space Odyssey” when the monolith first appears.

Alone driving again, 4 more kilometers – an interregnum – briefly through the modern-day incongruous farm and agricultural college, then along another kilometer on a dirt track. I had added this search to the itinerary as I became infected with what I was witnessing. I had never heard of my third stop before, but I felt that I had been taken over by some phenomenon that I cannot describe, and that I was being guided to this place by a force with an urgent message for me. Unaware that I had saved the strongest till last, it only felt that by the time I was approaching the Anta Grande do Zambujeiro, to the spot near an old bridge where I would have to leave the car under the trees and have to continue on foot, it was becoming increasingly a profoundly religious experience; in the truest sense of that word in the name of which so much wrong and evil has been committed.
From the transcendental music in the car, selected by chance in all innocence – Bach’s St Matthew Passion – to the atmosphere emanating into the air of this entire region from stones placed impossibly long ago by human hands, so conspicuous under the olive and cork trees, I was living moments of religiosity the like of which I can never have known in all my life. This went far further than what happened on those afternoons after work long ago in Galilee, when we would dig up pieces of ancient Roman and pre-Roman pottery and coins. No, this was religiosity, not history.
I sat in the air-conditioned cool of the car, summoning up my strength for something that I only sensed was coming, drawing on Bach’s inspiration until it was all done. Loud, clear, in a field out of time, by a stone bridge, this was my greeting to what awaited me, across the old bridge and out of sight, beyond the trees and up an incline.

Alone as I walked towards the Anta, it was striking that not even the presence of the 20th-century corrugated sheet-iron protective roofing structure could diminish, or even detract from, the putatively breathing power of what it protects – the largest Neolithic burial site in Europe, if not the world.


Alone just as I arrived in front of the Anta, the 21s century made a sudden, shrill, unexpected intrusion in the form of my mobile phone ringing in my pocket. An irreverent, impious vulgarity in this Court of the Sacred in a tinder-dry field? The synchronic fusion of everything in collision? It was simultaneously both timely and untimely.
So intensely had I been drawn into the this place and time that I was shocked and confused for brief seconds by what was weirdly, wonderfully, an instant connection with, from and through civilisation, so that every moment ever known to the species, all human time, was bound together in a visible, audible, invisible and inaudible tapestry, for me alone there, but transcending all of us and all of this, from everything that was, through everything that has been to everything that is.

In this place and moment of utter unity, is it not possible to see and hear what WILL be, somewhere out there in the deep darkness we call “Future”?
Of course, one day the Anta Grande de Zambujeiro will collapse, or wear away to dust, as will all that has, or has had, physical substance, whether natural or artificial; but when it is no longer “ANTA”, then what will “MAN” – “I”, “WE”, “YOU”, “THEY” – have become?
What will have been achieved and destroyed?
What will have been discovered, learned, lost, forgotten?
Where will have been reached?
How much further forward?
And how far back?
Of footprints in the sands of time, I will certainly have left none. Dust in a moving wind, with no home to return to…..

What I was completely incapable of doing this morning, in my state of grateful solitude and out of sheer, pure humility and awe, was enter the Anta. I shot photos, but could not climb on any of its stones, out of a fully conscious respect and reverence for the monument.
After all these millennia of standing in this place, it was too great, too strong, too awesome, too spiritual, too alive, too knowing, while I was too small, too insignificant, too frail, too ignorant. Too nothing.
Maybe it was just the wrong day, the wrong, absurd, false moment.
Maybe it was just the total rightness of the day and the absurd, real moment.
Whatever else it was, the day and its moment was called 11.05 a.m. on Monday 3rd September in the year 2001, in a place called Zambujeiro, near a city called Évora in a region called Alentejo, in the central plains of a country called Portugal, which is tucked into the south-western corner of a continent we call Europe, whatever all that means……….

However, I can tentatively remark just this, some 4 hours later, alone in a different, more recognisable place: this solemn, unprecedented and uniquely religious experience could serve as a pointed, timely gateway into trying to understand more precisely where I am on my own personal space odyssey, at almost 51 years since embarkation, in this time we call 2001…………………..

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2 – Glass, Concrete, Flesh, Blood and Time

18th September, 2001

8 days after the Anta, 2 days after returning refreshed from a week that accomplished everything I had hoped for, and much more, the most massive fissure was forced open in the edifice of homo sapiens’ presence on this planet.
Immediately, it was possible for billions of the species to observe through the flames and dust – if they chose to see it - that nothing would ever be the same again. Of course, it never is. But this time was different, because the new basis beneath this widespread feeling was not cynicism, or resignation or nostalgia for the old century and millennium, and its apparent certainties. For the first time, the utterance was catapulted from public to private consciousness by the jet-fuel of fear, panic, despair.
We had decades of the “harmless fun” of the Hollywood disaster blockbuster version of Armageddon, in which just as in every good morality fairytale, the cavalry arrives just in time, the good guy wins and gets the girl to send the audience home excited, drained but relieved to remember that the real world isn’t like that. On 9th September 2001, the real world, brutally, horrifically, barbarically, invaded the safety and security of the home, with none spared right down to the littlest living the smallest, most inconsequential of lives in every last corner of World One. A new reality for a new century, piercing the superstructure and infrastructure, delivering the worst of all possible messages: the pitiful defencelessness of such blatantly supreme symbols of what and who constitutes power in this new 21st century world is echoed times 10 in the vulnerability and fragility of everything that the “folks” have been coaxed and coerced to build their little existences upon.
Those little folks all learned the nightmare truth on 9/11. The WTC – as indestructible in the event as the Titanic – and the Pentagon – that citadel as Orwellian as the Ministry of Peace – representing every detail of Western civilisation, right down to the most mundane and commonplace. If cornerstones could be reduced to smoking rubble so agonisingly easily, without nuclear weapons, then just what can the voting, consuming masses place their trust and confidence in?
Watching the ease and rapidity with which those buildings, along with their symbolism, collapsed, Mr and Mrs Nobody, along with their parents and kids, saw and learned live on TV that the dependability of everything that glued their own existences together – a few hundred million single, twin and multiple towers in faceless microcosm…family, career, home, investments, car, school, religion, photos, holidays, qualifications, insurance policies, sports, pension, concerts, pets, mortgage, memories, politics, sex, DVD, healthcare, parties, internet, funerals, cellphone, illusions, contempt, games, greed, protection, hypermarkets, competition, eating, drugs, envy, laptops, opinions, charity, alcohol, prejudice, gossip, fantasy, egocentricity, indifference, love, posturing, spite, care, soap-operas, neurosis, lies, desires, growth, pretences, pretentiousness, admiration, vanity, decency, defences, judgementalism, tolerance, intolerance, hatred, self-hatred, tattoos, Madonna, dignity, arrogance, modesty, mediocrity, crying, sincerity, culture, Mandela, shopping malls, surfing, need, struggle, Einstein, fraternity, humility, self-help, community, monarchy, celebration, Shakespeare, pettiness, joy, misanthropy, vicariousness, caressing and on and on and on – was equally at risk of melt-down.
Ignorance is bliss; knowledge is potent enough to destroy our well-being, security and illusions. Pandora’s children cannot just put everything back in the box, lock it and un-know. Pandora’s children can only simulate ignorance, a posteriori, with the passing of time.
The ‘Leader’ talks about the “evil-doers” – language plucked from his own Koran of imbecilic inanity – about perpetual war on terrorism, tells us that we are either on his “side”, or we are on the “side” of the terrorists. I hear, chillingly, Orwell again, though I don’t believe the fuck-witted ‘Leader’ could ever have known anything about the contents of that book.
He calls his “side” civilisation, I call it good old imperialism in 21st - century clothes. He talks of “morally right”, I hear short-sighted, hypocritical self-interest – the ‘Leader’s own and that of his even more powerful, smarter friends in the oil and energy industries, the military, the fundamentalist Christians. He speaks of “Al-Queda” and I hear “Enron” and “Halliburton”. Worst of all, he keeps saying: “We are a peaceful nation…….” and I keep hearing: “We are the world’s greatest manufacturers of terror and terrorists”.
Plainly, simply, sincerely, I do not believe what I am hearing. But then again, he isn’t talking to me, or for me. I am not the one he needs to ensure gets back into his car tomorrow morning, drives to the station and takes the subway into the city to work to earn the money to pay the mortgage and empty the hypermarket shelves and save for another trip of a lifetime.
I do not believe in anything anymore, at least not right now. There is nothing to believe in, speaking only for myself; other than our increasingly wearisome, crass, empty stupidity.

The impact of those jetliners hit me harder than anybody around me here. That is down to common culture, language, my own experiences of the places and people, my sense of alienation here whenever anything extreme happens outside, and my long-established custom of watching and marvelling at the planes arriving into Lisbon airport (which is actually so close to the city centre) flying low behind the tallest buildings and out again the other side. I am traumatised now every time I see that.
It is also down to the fact that the family I first stayed with outside Évora September 2nd to 5th were about to go on a big trip. On September 4th , I spent the afternoon by the pool talking to the younger son, whose 21st birthday it was that day. He told me how his present was going to be a week with his parents and brother in a 5-star hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where they were flying to on the afternoon of the following Monday, 10th September. We spent a long time discussing cities that we both knew – Lisbon, Paris, Rome, London, Madrid. NYC was a first for him, so he wanted to know what I thought about it, and why. It impressed me how he had already formed the conviction, based on his growing up in ancient, peaceful, beautiful Évora, with its Roman remains, its old university, its medieval streets, in the heart of the gentle rolling Alentejo hills and plains, that large cities weren’t for him. He couldn’t take the impersonality, the noise, the traffic. Lisbon was as large as he could ever manage. A good, thoughtful young Portuguese man who wanted to be just like his Dad.
Since I watched the tragedy unfolding on a TV in a café in Caparica from 2.50 pm (9.50 am, NY time), I can’t get the family out of my head, knowing that they would have stepped out from their hotel into that inferno on their first morning there. I am desperate to receive a reply to my e-mail to the boy’s mother.

And what did those hours lost alone on September 3rd in pre-history, with cromeleques, menhirs and above all, the Anta Grande de Zambujeiro have to do with all that happened a week later? It is enough to say that nothing, neither in my world, nor that birthday boys, nor in the space and time that all 6 billion of us inhabit, will ever be the same as it was before those 8 days in early September, 2001 – whether we know it or not.

Except for all the cromeleques, menhirs and antas.
Some THING must know far more than I/you/we/they can ever know about all of this and much more. And is that such a bad thing, after all?

At the end of it all, what is it that really matters?

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Today, 4th September 2007. Most days are Groundhog Day now. Not today, not quite. Leonor died a year ago this afternoon. I am still here, whoever I am now.