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Some of these photos are courtesy of The Hellenic Tourism Organisation, and the rest come from the website of Jo Simoens, who is not even a photographer by profession... All the photos fed my nostalgia about my country, flattering all the illusions that a native has: mine is the most beautiful country in the world, the language the most admirable, the nature, the light, the buildings, the most remarkable. Then I read Dylan Thomas refusing Lawrence Durrell's invitation to Greece, saying he needed the mud of the British landscape to mix his colours from. And I understood that Greece is the most beautiful country in the world for me. My fiction for now, having stayed away for too long, is that Greece has no faults. Dylan Thomas's fiction was that only out of the 'faults' of Wales he could make all the faultless lines of his poetry. Pirandello says Nothing is more real than fiction. |
This is one of Jo Simoens's, and I'm not quite sure it's Greece - but it looks like it. There is this saying that Greece is a mother that eats its children, a sad and bitter saying because of the relevant anarchy that a century of World wars, and Civil wars, and dictatorships imposed, an anarchy that could swallow you if you stood still. Just one wrong step, and you could fall and be punished for having climbed this high... Jo Simoens beatifully quotes the temptation of empty space in Kundera. Doing a PhD in Wales has taken care of child temptations of falling, just to sense the suspension and the wind, just for those long seconds. Emptiness swallowed me for the years of reading and writing, and teaching was not a great consolation. Now I'm climbing back on the rock. There's wonderful winds there too. |
When I was little my father would take us to Delphi, again and again and again. It was a little bit as though Delphi was the garden of our house, where I would go out to play. |
This stands for my first pretences to adult life, as a student. It's Plaka, the old part of Athens. I would wander alone in-between classes, eating ice-cream and happy that the University meant I was no longer attached to my parents. Freud would say a lot but he's dead. In the meantime, the abundance of rocks made sure one could climb closer and closer to the sunlight. |
When I was little I couldn't make out what the fuss was about it, I had a feeling that these 'rocks' belonged to the whole world, not just the Greeks, and I was happy for the whole world - I know now I was right. Then I saw in the kitchen of someone I loved, in another country, a little marble hand he had taken from Acropolis when he was younger. He claimed, completely calm, that it was lying around, not guarded. I hated him for it, and it never went away. This was one time when the ancient Greek saying, Anyone not Greek is a barbarian, felt more tempting than ever. I still love that country (I am no longer with him, though not because of that), but I feel as though I'm betraying what's right some times by doing so. It makes me infinately sad and hurt to think about that hand, as though I could draw with it or do something I 'can't', and it's been cut off. A friend from a different, third country took something like that when we visited Turkey. She was and is a great person. She kept saying that she had taken that beautiful piece of marble (amazingly, I think it was a hand once more), to all of us, and I was upset that she didn't hide it... That way I couldn't try to forget it you see. Shame for the person, shame for the hand. The ancient place could be giving a hand in reconciliation. I discussed it with a man I was with at the time, and he said I shouldn't judge people, I got those little rocks from the beach myself. I shouldn't judge people, I got those rocks from the beach myself. |
They are clapping for me, because some day I may win the Nobel Prize for literature. We're all entitled to crazy dreams and I'm still too young to be liable for not making them true... Or, that's my excuse. |
Some years ago my father took us through snake-like roads, climbing up mountains, to a monastery. We were traveling by car, but the way looked like this. I will some day ask him to tell me which monastery it was but for now it remains a mystical memory, like traveling and waiting for an abundance of light at the turn of the road. The light I was offered then was this: There was a newly-build church, encompassing a little chapel build more than a century ago. It was tiny, just a little room, only lit by one lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The walls were painted with Saints. Apparently, the Turks had entered it during the War of Independence in the 1820s. They had carved innumerable little holes one the walls, on the saints, to show their dissapproval of Orthodoxy. And now, in the light of just one bulb, all the holes seemed like little pieces of shiny gold. |
This church reminds me of all the ones we've visited with Elli and Antonis and one in particular, in Sifnos I think. Antonis had stayed to say hallo to friends in the square below, and we clibmed up the little streets to the church. It was night, and there was a view of all the houses and cafes and bars, of lights and of voices and laughs and summer. We sat in the court of the church and talked about winters and silences and fears. I also think I brought up my favourite subject: how Asterix would crush all nasty enemies, all multiple-headed fears of having no job and not enough money. I love Asterix and if I could be as sweet and strong as Ovelix I wouldn't mind that much putting on weight. But I'm a woman, so I guess I'm allowed to be vain. |
Other People's Photos or What to do when you don't yet have a scanner... |
'I know that I am at home again because I feel just as I felt when I was not at home, only more so'. From 'Living in Wales' a broadcast by Dylan Thomas on 23rd June, 1949 (in Sinclair, 1975, Dylan Thomas, No Man More Magical, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York) |
