Last revelations

I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen, the day’s work is done. I return like a mole to my home, the ground. Not because I am tired and cannot work. I am not tired. But the sun has set. So begins Report to Greco, the final narrative catharsis of Nikos Kazantzakis, in writing which, he wanted to ‘empty himself’ so that death could come and take only a sackful of bones. Having chased the mysteries of human heart - the conflict between the journey to resurrection and carnal temptations – and given vent to the restlessness through his writings, Kazantzakis takes stock of the journey he had embarked on in this autobiographical novel. Through The Last Temptation, Freedom or Death and Zorba the Greek, he had sought to resolve the struggle in his conscience that fettered  his ‘ascent’ to the highest point possible for human soul. In ‘Report’, which he barely manages to finish before his death, he tries to reconcile with the fact that he has run out of time to finish his work, to reach his destination. “This book convinced me of the spectacular beauty residing in the fact that the destination of the journey one embarks on is a myth. It filled with a copious spiritual richness the untold vacuum in my heart’s recesses,” says V G Thampi. The poet, who often dwells on the travails of the spiritual seeker, says Kazantzakis’s autobiography had allowed him to live the life of many a pilgrim on journeys that demanded resilience of the most inexhaustible kind. “This is a fictional representation of his life, listing his memories, journeys and tales of endurance. It  fueled my own survival instincts in the cultural space that I occupy as a human being and writer,” he says. Kazantzakis calls his spiritual journey as ‘ascent’ and says that the decisive steps in his ascent were four – Christ, Buddha, Lenin, Odysseus. While the first two are religious figures, the second marks his obsession with Communism in his youth and Odysseus, his literary battleground. He considered The Odyssey, the 33,333 lines long epic poem, completed in 1938, to be his most important work. In his philosophical quest, he had studied Buddhism in a monastery in Vienna and later belonged to a group of radical intellects in Berlin before beginning the epic which sought to record his spiritual experiences. He writes in the introduction to ‘Report’ - In these pages, you will find the red track made by drops of my blood, the track which marks my journey among men, passions, and ideas. “It is, at the same time, a compelling dialogue between his soul and the organic vitality of the world around him. Through the most intimate of experiences, he ponders on the quest of human beings ever since they inhabited this wondrous universe. I have never come across such a powerful depiction of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit,” says Thampi. Kazantzakis had traveled widely beginning from  his middle age to different parts of the world and  penned some of the finest travel writings based on these odysseys. To Thampi, these journeys, recollected again in the autobiography, are nothing less than a humbling view of the horizon of human civilization. “These relentless travels executed a seamless fusion of Marxian ideology with the religious tenets of Buddha and Christ, a revelation that dawns on the writer in the process of writing his last book.”He adds that Report to Greco is perhaps a testimony to the cult status that Kazantzakis has enjoyed even half a decade after his passing away. “His writing is among the noblest representations of the human yearning for liberation. The words, “I Struggle, I struggle,” resonate of mortal experiences similar to the crucifixion of Christ, representing the most anguishing pilgrimages undertaken in human lives.”