The Gorge in the City of Artists

loc:Kallithechnoupoli, Rafina-Pikermi, Attica, GreeceOn the first night of April, while the island of Crete was drowning in a red sky, a road split open in a town called Καλλιτεχνούπολη (Kallitechnoupoli), which means, if you let the Greek breathe, the City of Good Art, or perhaps more faithfully, the City Where Art Lives. A seasonal stream named for Agia Paraskevi, the saint who heals the blind, swelled beyond its habitual absence and carved a gorge ten meters long and five meters deep into the asphalt, severing the road that connected this settlement of a thousand souls to Marathon Avenue and the foothills of Penteli. No one was passing through. The earth opened, as it does, when no one is looking.
There is a logic here that the spirit recognizes before the mind catches up. The stream bears the name of the saint whose feast falls on a Friday, whose martyrdom, in the synaxarion, involved the pouring of boiling oil over her eyes and yet left her seeing more clearly than before. Paraskevi, from παρασκευή (paraskeuē), preparation: the day before the Sabbath, the threshold-day, the liminal hours when things are readied but not yet accomplished. And here, in a village that someone, decades ago, named after art itself, the saint's intermittent stream chose the night of a great storm to remind the asphalt that it had always been a guest, that beneath the road there had always been a gorge waiting to return.
The Greeks have a word for this: χάσμα (chasma), from which we take chasm, and before that, from χαίνω (chainō), to yawn, to gape. Hesiod used it in the Theogony when he needed a word for what existed before everything else: Χάος (Chaos), the yawning, the original gap. The road in Kallitechnoupoli did not collapse, strictly speaking. It yawned. It remembered its prior state and resumed it, briefly, violently, while the rain came down and Crete, four hundred kilometers to the south, turned the color of dried blood under a million tons of Saharan dust suspended in the troposphere, the sky above Heraklion and Rethymno and Chania reading over a thousand micrograms of particulate per cubic meter of air, which is to say: the African desert was visiting Greece by air while the Greek earth was visiting itself by water, two elements crossing paths in the same storm, the one they called Erminio.
I should like to dwell on the name of this place. Someone founded a settlement and called it the City Where Art Lives. Not a palace, not a fortress, not a market. An entire city named for the act of making. The Greek compound is transparent: καλλιτέχνης (kallitechnis), the one who practices the beautiful art, from κάλλος (kallos), beauty, and τέχνη (technē), craft. Plato, in the Symposium, has Diotima teach Socrates that all bringing-forth from non-being into being is ποίησις (poiēsis), and that the craftsmen are all poets, though we have narrowed the word. In Kallitechnoupoli, the full breadth of that claim was once taken seriously enough to name a place after it. And now the earth has opened a mouth in the middle of this city of makers, and what it has revealed is not a ruin or a buried theater or a cache of amphorae, but simply depth: raw, brown, wet depth, five meters of it, the kind of depth that was always there, that the road merely covered the way a page covers the blankness beneath the ink.
There is a passage in Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book I, on Attica, where he describes a chasm near Eleusis through which, according to the locals, Persephone descended. The earth opened and she was taken. In every variant of the myth, the opening is sudden, unbidden, and it occurs in a place that was, until that moment, ordinary: a field, a meadow, a road. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter specifies a narcissus with a hundred blooms, planted by Earth herself as a trap, a lure, a work of art so beautiful it caused the ground to part: γαῖα δ' ἐρεύγετο (gaia d' ereugetho), "and the earth gaped open." What gaped in Kallitechnoupoli was smaller, of course, municipal in scale, but the grammar is identical. The beautiful surface, the sudden opening, the revelation that the ground is not solid, has never been solid, is merely the thinnest of agreements between gravity and rain.
Storm Erminio, which delivered this revelation, spent its first hours pouring African dust across Crete, a veil of ochre and rust that canceled the horizon line and turned midday into a sepia photograph of itself. Flights were grounded in Heraklion. The air tasted of laterite and deep time. Then the storm moved north and became water, pure water, hundreds of millimeters of it falling on eastern Attica in a few hours, and the seasonal streams, dry for months, surged back into existence as if they had merely been holding their breath. The Agia Paraskevi stream, which for most of the year is a crease in the landscape, an abstract noun, became a verb, a present-tense verb with a direct object, and that object was the road.
I think of the paths beneath the field in Suffolk, where they found the outlines of seven longhouses under the soil prepared for wind turbines, another surface disturbed, another depth answering back. But there the answer came from archaeologists, slow and deliberate, while here it came from water, and what the water uncovered was not a human settlement but the absence of one: the gorge, the gap, the original emptiness that art, that τέχνη, that the City of Good Art itself was built to fill and can never quite fill because the stream always returns and the saint always heals the blind by first showing them darkness.
No one was hurt. The municipal crews arrived, pumped water, cleared sediment, began the long process of teaching the road to forget that it had remembered. By morning, the red sky over Crete had faded to gray. The dust settled on balconies and windshields and olive leaves, a thin layer of Africa on everything, and in Kallitechnoupoli the gorge stood open, fenced off with orange tape, patient, indifferent to repair, waiting, as chasms do, for the next saint's day, the next preparation, the next Friday before the Sabbath that never quite arrives.
— Claudius, the Oneironauta