Light Traces

4. Poseidon

4 Poseidon 29 Its place is other, utterly so. Its remoteness is so unyielding that any attempt to measure its distance from anything familiar could only have the effect of setting it still more insistently apart. Yet precisely as a place of such alterity, this site is most impressive to behold in its sheer presence. Perfectly framed by sea and sky, as if raised by the earth itself up out of the intensely blue surface of the Aegean, the site belongs uniquely to these elements. Even in antiquity, indeed even before the magnificent temple was erected there, travelers of many sorts were attracted. Today, in still greater numbers, tourists come with cameras in hand to have a look at this remarkable site and to capture its image. Yet the distraction is no more than momentary. As soon as one is again alone in what remains of the sacred precinct, from the moment when solitude returns and there is left only these stones shining there amidst the elements, the utter strangeness of the site is again announced in the silence that surrounds. Sounion Attica May 30 LIGHT TR ACES What remains at this site comes from another world, from what we call–already beginning to mediate, to break down the difference –Greek antiquity. Yet, precisely in its otherness, this world is the origin of origins, the absolutely archaic. It first released all that was to come: the course of what came to constitute the West, and now the global figure into which those lines have extended. It is an origin that, from the beginning, continued to animate what it had released, coming, to this extent, always from the future. Thus its remoteness is irreducible to mere pastness; and even now, in the wake of closure, it summons from beyond. It is an origin thus withdrawn into both past and future, hence doubly remote from the present, so that the remains of it that are now still to be seen–as in the stones preserved at this site–cannot but appear utterly strange. The place is, at once, displaced, almost as into a void, and yet it is set firmly on the earth, shining before our eyes in the brilliant Greek sunlight. Its conjunction of consummate presence and staunch remoteness, of stark manifestness and utter strangeness, is cast in the light itself, in the almost blinding intensity of its illumination. A portion of the wall that once surrounded the sacred precinct is still to be seen. Little remains, however, of the marble-covered propylaea through which one would have entered the enclosure. The location is marked by an inscription–recent, no doubt–on a slab of marble; but the remains are meager, merely three sections of a column and a few other slabs. An inscription also marks the location of the large stoa that extended laterally from the propylaea; but here, too, very little remains, only the stylobates or bases of five columns. Even as one is present at the very spot where the propylaea and the stoa once stood, the visible 31 POSEIDON traces that remain can sustain only a vague image of how these would have looked: that the propylaea, as the opening to the temple, would have been especially magnificent and that the marble surfaces of both structures would have shined luminously. At such a site where one is faced with ruins, what is called forth is never just pure phantasy, not even just phantasy sustained by memory of images previously seen or of familiar descriptions. Rather, if one is intent on envisaging, to the extent possible, what once stood at this site, then the imagining called for will be such as to circulate between the visibly present ruins and an image of the ancient structure, hovering between these, letting each inform the other. But it is in face of the ruins of the temple itself that imagination is sustained and hence soars. These ruins are extensive enough and sufficiently well preserved that from them alone many features of the temple are evident. The columns display its Doric order, and their configuration indicates that the temple was peripteral. The majority of the columns along the longer sides of the temple are still standing: nine on the more seaward, southern side, five (along with a couple of sections of another) on the other side. The marble, which came from nearby quarries , is more purely white than that of many other such edifices (such as the Pentelic marble used for the...