For Pikionis, the world revealed hidden things. And as he had learned from Solomos, the eye of his soul was constantly alert, as he himself put it, "to the revelation of the world of the mind concealed in nature"(The Dishonour of Gaea).
In order to perceive the world of the mind in the world and the materials of the world, which he so loved, Pikionis had to employ 'the inner eye' a term that crops up frequently in his writings. He took the phrase from a poem by Sikelianos --the lessons of Solomos recorded in abbreviated form-- and added to it intellectual hearing, touch, taste, and smell"(ibid).
Pikionis needed those senses to be spiritual, so that he would lose nothing of their incalculable, immeasurable or invisible side --in other words, those aspects of them which conveyed the spiritual or were qualitative. Once when he was brought a tray of food in hospital, he turned his head away and said to his family, "The food isn't symmetrical". He saw everywhere in the world that which we do not see: he saw the spirit shaping the world He saw qualities as we see before us "an ironclad bulldozer or a harbour quay", and as we are capable of stumbling only over corporeal or solid matter, so he stumbled over the incorporeal, the spirit of matter, that which for most people does not exist.
For example, we may smile when we read in the Gospels that the spirit in human form (Christ) walked on the water but did not sink. Pikionis smiles at our smile.
He could understand nothing in the world other than in terms of the mental power that holds the cosmos together; otherwise, the relationship did not function. And if this relationship, this exchange or correspondence between the Creator and creation, were interrupted for a moment, or if he imagined its non existence, as many of us do, the whole world would disappear for him, or it would sink forthwith into incoherence and chaos, into complete and global paranoia.
This is how he understood the venerable art of architecture, too. The real builder 'imitates' God when he builds: he breathes life into the clay. Without that bond all buildings are shallow, no matter how deep their foundations or how high their walls. Pikionis emphasised the divinely instructed relationship of the builder, or this spiritual exchange, and he often repeated the line from the song of degrees in the Psalrns "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it".
What would the meaning of such a statement have been for early man? This saying conveys a danger: to erect a building is to confine within it a sacred power. Outside insecurity rules, and space is at the mercy of powers of all kinds. To build, then, is a dangerous act and the structure needs to be erected in a suitable place, in a suitable manner, with the correct orientation and the correct sanctification (a custom continued in Greece today, with the priest's blessing on the new house).
Pikionis never forgot the spiritual and enlightened origins of the builder's craft. He knew that the force of man is irrevocably darkened when that inner spiritual light is absent -the light, which unites man not only with his Creator but also with all the other creatures and with creation itself. Pikionis was afraid that we might exchange the face for the mask, once and for all.
"Truly", he wrote, "we have placed the humble kingdom of the individual higher than the eternal kingdom of mankind" (Greek Vernacular Art and Us). In the arts in particular, the human face is transformed into a mask full of strange fancies and individual caprices (what we approvingly call 'originality') when that inner spiritual light is absent and cannot shine out over the thousands of nameless craftsmen of the great spiritual traditions - those we admire and study today - and man will never have the good fortune to become man: he will remain an individual. The craftsman never emerges from his individual confines to express, in the community, his own section of the general vision, which belongs to a universe faith. When he does so, what Pikionis calls 'the humble kingdom of the individual' takes the place of ''the eternal kingdom of mankind", the mask replaces the face, and Heraclitus' "common speech" is elbowed aside to be supplanted by the whims or individual beliefs of each of us. Faith grows numb, and the limbs of doubt stir once more. Cohesion is lost, together with difficult concord, and disintegration and facile discord begin. Our minds, rather than being 'as one; are 'divided'. Rather than advancing together and, under a shared roof, each of us being responsible for himself - a determinism which all the universes and all the great civilisations have obeyed in the monuments they left us, fixed or mobile - we each take our own course and, like dead celestial bodies, fall out of orbit and stray aimlessly through the void of individualism.
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