Xenophon, Cyropaedia 5.1.24-25
Father is dying, this much is true. His life has been one of constant departures, chasing after orange blossoms mapped in advance: Lamia, Locri, Istiaia, Atalanti. All the way to the other end of the map, fragments of Ithaca may make up a whole. A final migration then, southwards.
Father has always kept bees like his father and his father before him. There were many beekeepers in this town until they started shrinking. Last year there were ten, now there is five hunched around the heater. They all declare themselves tired. Father is also tired but he doesn’t like to talk about it. And in any case, you can always tell because he scratches his forehead with the back of his thumb when he’d rather remain silent.
God is also silent because God is History and History is tired like the beekeepers. Father met the mask of God in Makronisos when they were both mute and had to tap poems on the shared wall of their prison cell. Father was not always a patriarch, he was Orestes and his Tutor first. A school teacher and a partisan, he used to speak French, recite Lapathiotis, and discuss Poulantzas’ critique of Marxism. But Lapathiotis shot himself with a revolver and Poulantzas jumped off the 13th floor last October. Father can still remember the poems when they are tapped onto a nightstand.
But, as the case now stands, since, as we claim, no king is produced in our states who is, like the ruler of the bees in their hives, by birth pre-eminently fitted from the beginning in body and mind, we are obliged, as it seems, to follow in the track of the perfect and true form of government by coming together and making written laws.
Plato, Statesman 301d-e
Father was not always a patriarch but one cannot know if Agamemnon became a tyrant before or after Troy. There are conditions of the self that simply cannot be told. Not in the cradling affection, the shared wine, or the embrace of a loved one. Not in the gaze of a daughter and a lover, digressions and repetitions, nonsensical in their inconstancy. There is an emptying of the self so brutal, that all speech collapses.
Death feels like the silence that bashes over one’s head in a run-down bedroom. A semi-detached supermarket will soon be built next to the gas station, part of a greater effort to expand our empty spaces in order to incorporate more emptiness. The movie theatre where no films are playing is as futile as the sterile patriarch sleeping in it. His aged body is the only remaining archive of an unwanted memory. Now and again a train passes, maybe it is going somewhere—some place, some time. Against the soft rumbling the self begins to disappear; he is not needed any more.
When the beekeeper started killing them, other bees came out to attack him.
Aristotle, Histories of Animals 623b15
The rain glides over; his right-hand taps the soil with a poem. Father is dying, this much is true.
Ο Μελισσοκόμος
Theo Angelopoulos
1986
Theo Angelopoulos
1986