Report to Grego Read Free Page A

destiny. My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.
    During my entire life one word always tormented and scourged me, the word ascent. Here, mixing truth with fancy, I should like to represent this ascent, together with the red footprints I left as I mounted. I am anxious to finish quickly, before I don the “black helmet” and return to dust, because this bloody track will be the only trace left by my passage on earth. Whatever I wrote or did was written or performed upon water, and has perished.
    I call upon my memory to remember, I assemble my life from the air, place myself soldier-like before the general, and make my Report to Greco. For Greco is kneaded from the same Cretan soil as I, and is able to understand me better than all the strivers of past or present. Did he not leave the same red track upon the stones?

THREE KINDS OF SOULS, THREE PRAYERS:
    1] I AM A BOW IN YOUR HANDS, LORD. DRAW ME, LEST I ROT.
    2] DO NOT OVERDRAW ME, LORD. I SHALL BREAK.
    3] OVERDRAW ME, LORD, AND WHO CARES IF I BREAK!

PROLOGUE
    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.
    The sun has set, the hills are dim. The mountain ranges of my mind still retain a little light at their summits, but the sacred night is bearing down; it is rising from the earth, descending from the heavens. The light has vowed not to surrender, but it knows there is no salvation. It will not surrender, but it will expire.
    I cast a final glance around me. To whom should I say farewell? To what should I say farewell? Mountains, the sea, the grape-laden trellis over my balcony? Virtue, sin? Refreshing water? . . . Futile, futile! All these will descend with me to the grave.
    To whom should I confide my joys and sorrows—youth’s quixotic, mystic yearnings, the harsh clash later with God and men, and finally the savage pride of old age, which burns but refuses until the death to turn to ashes? To whom should I relate how many times I slipped and fell as I clambered on all fours up God’s rough, unaccommodating ascent, how many times I rose, covered with blood, and began once more to ascend? Where can I find an unyielding soul of myriad wounds like my own, a soul to hear my confession?
    Compassionately, tranquilly, I squeeze a clod of Cretan soil in my palm. I have kept this soil with me always, during all my wanderings, pressing it in my palm at times of great anguish and receiving strength, great strength, as though from pressing the hand of a dearly loved friend. But now that the sun has set and the day’s work is done, what can I do with strength? I need it no longer. I hold this Cretan soil and squeeze it with ineffable joy, tenderness, and gratitude, as though in my hand I were squeezingthe breast of a woman I loved and bidding it farewell. This soil I was everlastingly; this soil I shall be everlastingly. O fierce clay of Crete, the moment when you were twirled and fashioned into a man of struggle has slipped by as though in a single flash.
    What struggle was in that handful of clay, what anguish, what pursuit of the invisible man-eating beast, what dangerous forces both celestial and satanic! It was kneaded with blood, sweat, and tears; it became mud, became a man, and began the ascent to reach—To reach what? It clambered pantingly up God’s dark bulk, extended its arms and groped, groped in an effort to find His face.
    And when in these very last years this man sensed in his desperation that the dark bulk did not have a face, what new struggle, all impudence and terror, he underwent to hew this unwrought summit and give it a face—his own!
    But now the day’s work is done; I collect my tools. Let other clods of soil come to continue the struggle. We mortals are the immortals’ work battalion. Our