Light Traces

3. Exorbitant Points

3 Exorbitant Points 23 Near Patras Peloponnisos May Though broader than a great river, the Bay of Corinth flows gently, as if it were a vast lake with no opening onto the sea. It sets the Peloponnisos apart from the rest of Greece. Indeed, together with the Saronic Bay, it divides the entire country into two parts, bridged only by the isthmus running from Corinth across into Attica. Bordered on the east by the isthmus and the city of Corinth, it extends westward and slightly to the north until, as it approaches Patras, it reaches its narrowest point. This is the point where today an ultramodern bridge has been erected across the bay, a technical counterpart to the natural bridge at the other end of the bay. As Athenian hoplites once marched to battle across the isthmus , now on the other bridge automobiles cross swiftly from one side to the other. As the bay extends on past Patras, it broadens out again and soon heads for the open sea that separates the Peloponnisos from the islands of Kephalonia and Ithaca. Beyond the islands lies the Ionian Sea. 24 LIGHT TR ACES If one looks across the bay from the Peloponnisian side, one soon discovers that the broad sweep of the spectacle displays both lineation and punctuation. These features are allied with the attractive power by which the aquatic surface gathers around itself the entire scene, composing the landscape, while at the same time collecting, intensifying, reflecting, and spreading the sunlight that bathes the scene. Opening to the light, vision retraces the lines drawn by nature across the scene and remarks their points of intersection. The scene leaves its traces on all the senses, not just individually but in such a way that each sense crosses over to the others, effacing their difference. Vision is paired with listening; they flow together to such an extent that the sight of the water’s expansive surface becomes almost indistinguishable from the recurrent sound of the waves gently lapping onto the beach. In turn, the sound of the waves as they break along the shoreline intermingles with the sight of the occasional whitecap. The fresh scent of the sea air and the feel of the light breeze wafting from the water, perhaps even an imagined sense of the briny taste of the water–all that the senses offer is gathered as into a single, yet manifold perception, as if pointing back toward a sense anterior to the senses. Off to the left where, beyond Patras, the bay broadens out again and heads westward toward the open sea, no land can be seen. The surface of the water stretches on and on, as if it were a kind of palpable, sensuous infinite, limited only by the horizon. Though the horizon appears as a line separating, while also joining, sea and sky, its appearance could not be more paradoxical, more counter to the usual categories and oppositions by which appearances in nature are proportioned to our understanding. The appearance of the horizon is neither a mere 25 EXORBITANT POINTS illusion of something simply not there nor a revelation of something actually present in or behind the appearance. The horizon is not even present in the manner characteristic of elements such as the sea and the earth. Rather, it appears solely as a limit, indeed as a limit that never actually limits, that never sets a limit in place; for, if approached, it recedes, and it resists to the end being transformed from a mere limit into something that limits. As long as land does not come into view there in the distance so as to set a limit, the horizon lets the peculiar infinity of the sea remain intact. Yet land does come into view if one turns one’s glance back slightly to the right, still facing in the general direction of the open sea. It is a thin strip of land running along the horizon, expanding the line into a narrow band. Still farther to the right, almost directly across the bay, a mountain of bare stone protrudes abruptly from the sea, rising almost vertically to nearly half its full height before beginning to curve back in the direction of the horizontal; thus the top of the mountain is rounded off, and its outline becomes almost symmetrical. It is as if the scene had been staged, fabricated by some monstrous technology, rather than composed by nature. In the scene there is nothing more remarkable...