The Last Appearance of Judas Iscariot

In the mid-20th century, while Europe was reeling from the physical and moral debris of World War II, a Greek painter and poet named Nikos Engonopoulos was busy stitching the world back together using a needle made of dreams and history.

Engonopoulos stood out in the Greek Surrealist movement, and to use his words, he was a painter first and a poet second. To understand his work, one must first shed the idea that Surrealism is merely about melting clocks. Surrealism uses dreamlike imagery, unexpected juxtapositions, and distorted realities. It serves to tap into the unconscious mind and go beyond rational thought.

In 1950 when Engonopoulos wrote the following prose poem, The Last Appearance of Judas Iscariot, Greece had survived the Nazi Occupation only to plunge immediately into a fratricidal Civil War. The air was thick with the language of betrayal and whispered accusations of ‘Judas.’ While his contemporaries often wrote literal, political accounts of the strife (and very good ones), Engonopoulos reached for the mythic. He dressed his figures in the regal robes of Byzantine icons and then gave them the fragmented, anxious souls of modern men.

In this poem, he wasn’t writing about Judas as a disciple. He was writing about exile as a universal condition. Engonopoulos presents him as a weary, recurring figure, a man who has done his deed and is now forced to wander through the labyrinth of human memory. Engonopoulos is writing about solitude and inevitability or perhaps the inability to escape one’s role in history.

We cannot kill our ghosts. We meet them again and again. They linger in the twilight of our thoughts.

As you read the following poem, consider that history is never a closed chapter. It is a living narrative in which the roles of hero and traitor are often assigned by the winners, and the burden of the designation is carried forward in time by the individual alone.

Our world continues to demand that we choose sides. But life urges deeper, more nuanced considerations. What does this poem ask of us? To consider the various characters of history and what they did as if we can cleanly position ourselves? Or something else?

Engonopoulos is presenting us with a mixture of imagery and context. He is asking us to look Abraham Lincoln and Judas Iscariot in the eye. He is asking us to give thought to what agitates us about their mark in history. He is sly about how he mixes roles. He is tapping into our unconscious. He leaves it to us.

Here is Engonopoulos:

The Last Appearance of Judas the Iscariot
The small American town, buried in the vast expanses of the Ayrton plains, lost that deep peace to which it had been accustomed since the days, not too long before — around 1867 — of its founding. Regularly at around midnight, a man, both strange and sombre, entered into even the most well-bolted homes, disturbing the sleep of the inhabitants, stirring their untroubled consciences, mortally embittering their hearts, and with a tin flute that he played to perfection, he awoke in them all a deep sense of nostalgia, at once vague and oppressive. Needless to say that with the break of day no one remembered anything of the horrible nightmare. Yet throughout the day it was as though a great weight lay upon their hearts. A certain nighttime stroller solved this baffling mystery. One night when, quite fortuitously, his uncertain steps led him to a hill overlooking the town, he noticed that the bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln that had been erected there was missing, and the marble pedestal appeared desolate and abandoned in the glare of the floodlights. So the “President,” that bronze Abraham Lincoln, was then the strange and sombre nocturnal visitor! The informer was rewarded with a sum of dollars. He answered to the name of Judas. his surname, Iscariot.

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Painting by Engonopoulos. Poem from Cafes and Comets After Midnight.