[Have returned to Lesbos for a week's holiday along with parents and girlfriend; decided to revivify blog.]
Lesbos is still, initially, a land of snapshots and discrete images: pictures reflected in the glass front of a kafeneio or caught in a camera's peripheral view. The island and its civilization are so old that you can only look at them sideways, like the Medusa, herself a metaphor for nothing less than complete comprehension.
***
Lesbos is an alluring place. Molyvos town winds its way up a hillside, topped by a Byzantine castle; it's a maze of cobbled streets and low stone arches, balconies jutting out over air and motorbikes roaring their way up impossibly vertical lanes. There are trace elements of the Ottoman Empire here still: a fountain near the Municipal Cafe bears an inscription in Arabic under a roughly-carved Star of David. Turkey is visible across the bay, blue hills shading away into the mythic past. Small cats flow through the streets like water; they doze on car bonnets or stone benches. A wisteria tree is so old and so heavy that it's grown vertical and forms an overhanging canopy for a row of shop-fronts, held up at intervals with red-painted metal struts. We drink Greek coffee in mugs the size of plant-pots and gaze down at the translucent water in the bay. It's clear enough to let us number the stones just off-shore. I buy Chian mastic chewing-gum, flavoured with mandarin orange juice, which brings back last summer and the walk to Loutra.
The modern town is itself lovely and you could be forgiven for thinking that it's the 'safe' kind of historical - picturesque enough to to be 'quaint' - yet there are still mysteries in Molyvos. At the bottom of the town, where the road branches off to Eftalou, is a grassy hollow with gathered stones in it and a few sunbathing cats. The rectangular stone troughs could be water-tanks, until you see that one still has a shallowly-pitched lid. These are tombs, in all probability belonging to the ancestors of modern Molyvos' residents; they might be from the classical period (5th century BCE onwards), given the Turkish/Lydian influence on eastern Greek communities at that time, but they may be later. There is no indication of who was buried there. The empty graves and the living town co-exist, telescoping the three millennia between in less than an acre of ground.
***
We walked to Petra from Molyvos today, nine miles across goat-tracks and hills and the coastal highway. Greek attitudes to health and safety regulations being what they are, most of the journey was along steep drops and gravelled paths, treacherous underfoot. We passed endless flocks of local sheep, the small, long-haired variety common here. They had bells around their necks which produced a constant babbling, like a rushing river, each peal blending into the surrounding noise. A few farms had sheeps' skulls on prominent display, their twisting horns looking like any medieval priest's ideal of the Devil. The fields were full of gorse, olives, wild poppies; it was tempting to think that very little had changed since the time of Sappho. The continuities are striking, when they occur: the word for 'wine' in Modern Greek is exactly the same word as when Achilles calls Agamemnon οινοβαρης, 'wine-heavy', in Iliad 1, while 'pharmacy' was first used on the Linear B tablets 3700 years ago.
What point am I making with this? That the past is lost to us? That the continuity of island life bears examination in the same way as hypnopompic visions, seen out of the corner of the eye? Surely we know that. The mystery, I think, is not what has been lost and what we half-percieve: it is that we grieve its loss and crave the half-perception anyway.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Friday, 3 September 2010
Letter to my father
In modern English, the word ‘eulogy’ is inextricably associated with funerals. In Ancient Greek, though, the word simply means ‘praise speech’, usually directed towards someone still living. It’s my father’s birthday today. This is my εὐ λογος for him.
Dear Tousan,
It’s your birthday, several hours away across the Cyclades and the snow-capped Alps. We’re apart: I can’t remember the last time that happened on your birthday, not even the year we didn’t give you any presents except the origami elephant.
You still have that elephant in your desk.
Here I am in Mytilini, listening to the old man at the next table click his worry-beads, chasing the ghosts of dead historians and vanished female poets. I have you and Okaasan to thank for that: you raised me not to be a smart girl and marry an academic, but to be a smart girl and be an academic. You also raised me to question authority and do unfamiliar (read: stupid) things with gusto, which I’ve tried to do during my sojourn here. (Although I haven’t inherited your ability to catch the waiter’s eye.) I’m looking out over the fishing boats in the harbour, drinking my coffee, and my mind is drawn back to being a little kid and going fishing with you. You taught me how to bait the hook with bread or worms, flick it out and reel it in.
Years later, you instilled in me that it was wrong to kill another living thing for fun.
There are books piled on the table next to me, some in Greek, one in German, one a battered phrasebook. You’ve given me the most wicked education I could ever need, in books which have been banned in libraries across the world, in books which people claim ‘aren’t for girls’, or when I was six, ‘are too subtle for children.’ You gave me The Onion Eaters and Bored of the Rings and Stranger in a Strange Land. You serialized the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy when we came home to England from Misawa, reading a chapter every night to a rapt audience of two small children and a dog (funny voices and improvised dialogue along the lines of ‘Go snort nettles, you old fart!’ a must). You and Okaasan read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats so many times that the pages are firmly sellotaped in. Now at twenty I talk grandly of Eliot’s presentation of the Other, Eliot’s postwar arriviste reading of the Aeneid, Eliot as classicist, Eliot as anti-Semite, Eliot as problematic queer writer – but when I’m alone and bored, to pass the time I still recite Macavity’s a Mystery Cat / he’s called the Hidden Paw / for he’s the master criminal / who can defy the law... It was your gift for rhyming and teasing that convinced me, until I was fourteen, that Shakespeare really did write Like fire and powder / which as they kiss, go boom!
Looking for the Baroque Cycle, I found instead on a study shelf your copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It has your highlighting in it, fresh from the year you bought it, the kind of thing you lived on at Santa Cruz. I read it now and it's as if I have a line directly into your mind as it was thirty years ago, one part of it, when you were still the young man who wasn't yet my father.
I got my musical taste from you; I got respect from my schoolteachers and complete incomprehension from my classmates for liking Smokey Robinson and the Eagles and Fairport Convention. 'Who's that singing?' you asked me once, and when I didn't know, you looked at me incredulously and said 'That's Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul!' Except, due to an amusing combination of your intonation and my partial deafness, I heard the last three words as one word and spent the next few years thinking that Franklin was her middle name: Aretha Franklin Queenasoul.
You let me futz about with your twelve-string guitar, a constant in my life since I was three years old, when my memory more-or-less begins, and I used to curl up inside the guitar case with its gold plush lining and your pink pick. (You’re my counter-example for anyone who says ‘real men don’t wear pink’.) ‘Sing the song about the white room with the black curtains!’ I demanded, every time you played, and you would oblige. I grew up with that song and had no idea at all about the men who wrote it, about their band’s intense and insane heyday, sixties counterculture, acid trips and the mad sprawling chic of the London of your adolescence.You played duets with me, drums and electric guitar.
You pulled me and my brother out of school to go see the Cream reunion concert in London. I keep my entry ticket in my desk drawer to this day, five years later. You ruined me for all other concerts and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
You told me important things. People who sell drugs don’t have your best interests at heart. It’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission. Clare Bloom was a babe in the sixties. God is female if They’re anything. I love you, you little shit.
I love you too, daddy. Happy birthday.
With love,
Your daughter. xx
Dear Tousan,
It’s your birthday, several hours away across the Cyclades and the snow-capped Alps. We’re apart: I can’t remember the last time that happened on your birthday, not even the year we didn’t give you any presents except the origami elephant.
You still have that elephant in your desk.
Here I am in Mytilini, listening to the old man at the next table click his worry-beads, chasing the ghosts of dead historians and vanished female poets. I have you and Okaasan to thank for that: you raised me not to be a smart girl and marry an academic, but to be a smart girl and be an academic. You also raised me to question authority and do unfamiliar (read: stupid) things with gusto, which I’ve tried to do during my sojourn here. (Although I haven’t inherited your ability to catch the waiter’s eye.) I’m looking out over the fishing boats in the harbour, drinking my coffee, and my mind is drawn back to being a little kid and going fishing with you. You taught me how to bait the hook with bread or worms, flick it out and reel it in.
Years later, you instilled in me that it was wrong to kill another living thing for fun.
There are books piled on the table next to me, some in Greek, one in German, one a battered phrasebook. You’ve given me the most wicked education I could ever need, in books which have been banned in libraries across the world, in books which people claim ‘aren’t for girls’, or when I was six, ‘are too subtle for children.’ You gave me The Onion Eaters and Bored of the Rings and Stranger in a Strange Land. You serialized the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy when we came home to England from Misawa, reading a chapter every night to a rapt audience of two small children and a dog (funny voices and improvised dialogue along the lines of ‘Go snort nettles, you old fart!’ a must). You and Okaasan read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats so many times that the pages are firmly sellotaped in. Now at twenty I talk grandly of Eliot’s presentation of the Other, Eliot’s postwar arriviste reading of the Aeneid, Eliot as classicist, Eliot as anti-Semite, Eliot as problematic queer writer – but when I’m alone and bored, to pass the time I still recite Macavity’s a Mystery Cat / he’s called the Hidden Paw / for he’s the master criminal / who can defy the law... It was your gift for rhyming and teasing that convinced me, until I was fourteen, that Shakespeare really did write Like fire and powder / which as they kiss, go boom!
Looking for the Baroque Cycle, I found instead on a study shelf your copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. It has your highlighting in it, fresh from the year you bought it, the kind of thing you lived on at Santa Cruz. I read it now and it's as if I have a line directly into your mind as it was thirty years ago, one part of it, when you were still the young man who wasn't yet my father.
I got my musical taste from you; I got respect from my schoolteachers and complete incomprehension from my classmates for liking Smokey Robinson and the Eagles and Fairport Convention. 'Who's that singing?' you asked me once, and when I didn't know, you looked at me incredulously and said 'That's Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul!' Except, due to an amusing combination of your intonation and my partial deafness, I heard the last three words as one word and spent the next few years thinking that Franklin was her middle name: Aretha Franklin Queenasoul.
You let me futz about with your twelve-string guitar, a constant in my life since I was three years old, when my memory more-or-less begins, and I used to curl up inside the guitar case with its gold plush lining and your pink pick. (You’re my counter-example for anyone who says ‘real men don’t wear pink’.) ‘Sing the song about the white room with the black curtains!’ I demanded, every time you played, and you would oblige. I grew up with that song and had no idea at all about the men who wrote it, about their band’s intense and insane heyday, sixties counterculture, acid trips and the mad sprawling chic of the London of your adolescence.You played duets with me, drums and electric guitar.
You pulled me and my brother out of school to go see the Cream reunion concert in London. I keep my entry ticket in my desk drawer to this day, five years later. You ruined me for all other concerts and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
You told me important things. People who sell drugs don’t have your best interests at heart. It’s always better to ask forgiveness than permission. Clare Bloom was a babe in the sixties. God is female if They’re anything. I love you, you little shit.
I love you too, daddy. Happy birthday.
With love,
Your daughter. xx
Dancing over the gender border in Mytilini
It’s amazing how you learn to walk as a woman on this island: face downcast. Not in central Mytilini, a city which, if anthropormorphized, would be barefoot and wearing a hemp anklet – not there, but in the villages, where the kafeneia are still the exclusive preserve of old men on the hot afternoons. It would be rude to look them in the eye. The general Lesbian attitude to these men is one of reverence; they are the ones who went away to war, and during peacetime, slipped out of the houses before dawn and came back late at night, bringing with them the smell of salt and kelp. There is much to admire in them. There is a kind of exaggerated – but, I have no doubt, heartfelt – chivalry here: a woman will find it hard to step off a sidewalk in the villages without help. The concept of filoxenia is vital here, a concept pulled straight from the Iliad to sprawl across the landscape of modern Greek life: literally ‘hospitality’, it is taken much further than northern European hospitality. The very worst insult you can ever levy at a Greek person is that they are afilotimos/e: they are ‘inhospitable’ or ‘dishonorable.’
Greek culture in general seems to be more gender-segregated than English culture. People sharing motorbikes zip recklessly across lanes of traffic in Mytilini, but it’s unusual to see a mixed-gender pair on the same bike: usually teenaged boys, or a pair of girls, or a grandfather with a grandson. This isn’t Saudi Arabia – there are the usual straight couples or mixed-sex groups of friends you’d see everywhere in Europe – but single-sex groups, usually of men, are slightly more common. I always twist my mouth wryly at the assumed heterosexuality in gender-divided societies - especially so in Greece, where the physical expression of friendship is much more accepted than in England or the States (kissing twice on the cheeks in greeting, rubbing people’s back or shoulders with your palm, linking arms). Fantastic for queer people: in close and very touchy-feely quarters with the people you’re really attracted to, saved from having to display any interest in the other gender, yet punished strictly if you’re caught.
I was going to say that I can’t imagine living like that, but I did go to a girls’ school...
This is in my thoughts because a lot of our ‘cultural activities’ – and general conversation – have touched on courtship or dating in some way, from the wedding crowns at the Museum of the Refugees to the traditional dances we learned (‘This one is danced at weddings’, my tutor said, ‘and this one we dance opposite each other’, hips swinging towards each other, clearly one of the few old sanctioned opportunities for young people on the island to flirt. Catch your husband during the dances at your sister’s wedding.) ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ was one of the basic-conversation phrases we practiced in Modern Greek. ‘Are you looking so pretty for a Greek boyfriend? You must be hiding a nice Greek boy in Mytilini, you’re dressed up all nice!’ one of the women told me. I certainly appreciated the compliment – she was a lovely and well-meaning lady – but I couldn’t exactly say ‘No, I’ve put on lipstick for A. at the kafeneio’...
(Is it so unthinkable that when Atthis danced, her neat ankles flashing beneath her skirt as she backed and advanced, she was trying to catch the eye of Anaktoria instead of Alcmaeus?)
Greek culture in general seems to be more gender-segregated than English culture. People sharing motorbikes zip recklessly across lanes of traffic in Mytilini, but it’s unusual to see a mixed-gender pair on the same bike: usually teenaged boys, or a pair of girls, or a grandfather with a grandson. This isn’t Saudi Arabia – there are the usual straight couples or mixed-sex groups of friends you’d see everywhere in Europe – but single-sex groups, usually of men, are slightly more common. I always twist my mouth wryly at the assumed heterosexuality in gender-divided societies - especially so in Greece, where the physical expression of friendship is much more accepted than in England or the States (kissing twice on the cheeks in greeting, rubbing people’s back or shoulders with your palm, linking arms). Fantastic for queer people: in close and very touchy-feely quarters with the people you’re really attracted to, saved from having to display any interest in the other gender, yet punished strictly if you’re caught.
I was going to say that I can’t imagine living like that, but I did go to a girls’ school...
This is in my thoughts because a lot of our ‘cultural activities’ – and general conversation – have touched on courtship or dating in some way, from the wedding crowns at the Museum of the Refugees to the traditional dances we learned (‘This one is danced at weddings’, my tutor said, ‘and this one we dance opposite each other’, hips swinging towards each other, clearly one of the few old sanctioned opportunities for young people on the island to flirt. Catch your husband during the dances at your sister’s wedding.) ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ was one of the basic-conversation phrases we practiced in Modern Greek. ‘Are you looking so pretty for a Greek boyfriend? You must be hiding a nice Greek boy in Mytilini, you’re dressed up all nice!’ one of the women told me. I certainly appreciated the compliment – she was a lovely and well-meaning lady – but I couldn’t exactly say ‘No, I’ve put on lipstick for A. at the kafeneio’...
(Is it so unthinkable that when Atthis danced, her neat ankles flashing beneath her skirt as she backed and advanced, she was trying to catch the eye of Anaktoria instead of Alcmaeus?)
Dinner at Eight
[Note: the internet at the hotel's been out for three days following a rainstorm. I'm posting the three latest entries all at once.]
We went out to dinner at the taverna two nights ago, me and one of the other students, a delightful Danish lady in her late seventies. Contrary to stereotype, her English is patchy; we communicate in a mixture of English, Greek, and a little German.
We sit out on the terrace at the back. The church of Panagia Ipsili, a tiny chapel on the mountainside, glows like a diamond in its floodlights. I climbed up there earlier that day to look out over the bay and see if I could spot Mytilini. (I couldn’t. It’s hidden behind the fold of a large hill.) There were bundles of flowers still tied to the bright blue railings there, dried perfectly golden and crackly by the Greek sun. I thought they might have been from last week’s wedding; no, the Danish lady says, they were from Ascension Day back on the 13th, which makes more sense. (‘Panagia’ is the Greek word for the Blessed Virgin Mary, after all.)
Praise Allah and the BVM, our waitress is the lovely red-haired girl I mentioned in the first entry, whom I will call ‘A.’ She shimmers out from the recesses of the taverna and pins a paper tablecloth to our table. There are thin leather bracelets around her right wrist. The local legend of Lesbos’ origins is that the two main towns, Mytilini and Mithymnia, were named after the king’s two daughters, and Lesbos was Mytilini’s husband, who came from Turkey. If there is any truth in that at all, I imagine that Mytilini looked very much like A.
I want to kiss the light residue of sea-salt off your delicate ankles, I tell her. Thankfully, I’m employing a highly specialized form of encryption which no-one, with the possible exception of Wittgenstein, could decipher*, and in this code, the above message sounds identical to the phrase I would like a slice of feta dressed with olive oil and some fried calamari, please.
‘Ah! You are a jolly good fellow! We will have a nice time’, the Danish lady says when I agree to her proposition of retsina. (We’ll have made it though two bottles by the end of dinner – she can certainly hold her drink...) She and A. engage in some rapid-fire menu discussion, of which I can follow little except A’s firm corrections and the Danish lady’s careful repetition. At the end of this toing and froing, A. turns to me, winks, and says ‘Μια μαθητρια!’ (‘A lesson!’)
Is it a surprise to anyone that I’m smitten?
The food when it arrives is customarily delicious. A bevy of small cats materializes and stares at us meaningfully. My dinner companion tosses a sardine to one of the cats, who devours it, and fussily leaves the fish’s head on the floor in favour of pursuing my calamari. The conversation meanders like the goat-tracks in the hills around Loutra. It turns out that the Danish lady has been here four times before this. ‘This village is declining’, she tells me. ‘The ruined houses next to the hotel were built for the refugees in 1922, but the government doesn’t have any money to give for their upkeep.’ I think of the people I’ve met, chance encounters in a lonesome place, and it isn’t the cold which makes me hug myself. The newest building in Skala Loutron is the one I’ve mentioned frequently on this blog, the Museum of the 1922 Refugees – all the money funnelled to keeping the past alive.
That would be the kind of thing I’d hesitate to put in a novel for fear of reaching too hard for symbolism.
Did you know that if Sappho was alive today, you’d make her snap her pen in half? I ask A, when we’ve exhausted the retsina reserves and it’s too dark to tell the mountains from the sky. Thankfully, she can’t decipher this plaintext, and she hears it as the encryption We would like the bill, please.
Cicadas are rattling in the dark like they've been doing since Plato wrote the Phaedrus. There is a tremendous sense of permanency in this lonely, proud pot, its waters aching with the beauty of the liquid setting sun.
* He’d probably be on my side in this, anyway. *dons Team Wittgenstein T-shirt*
We went out to dinner at the taverna two nights ago, me and one of the other students, a delightful Danish lady in her late seventies. Contrary to stereotype, her English is patchy; we communicate in a mixture of English, Greek, and a little German.
We sit out on the terrace at the back. The church of Panagia Ipsili, a tiny chapel on the mountainside, glows like a diamond in its floodlights. I climbed up there earlier that day to look out over the bay and see if I could spot Mytilini. (I couldn’t. It’s hidden behind the fold of a large hill.) There were bundles of flowers still tied to the bright blue railings there, dried perfectly golden and crackly by the Greek sun. I thought they might have been from last week’s wedding; no, the Danish lady says, they were from Ascension Day back on the 13th, which makes more sense. (‘Panagia’ is the Greek word for the Blessed Virgin Mary, after all.)
Praise Allah and the BVM, our waitress is the lovely red-haired girl I mentioned in the first entry, whom I will call ‘A.’ She shimmers out from the recesses of the taverna and pins a paper tablecloth to our table. There are thin leather bracelets around her right wrist. The local legend of Lesbos’ origins is that the two main towns, Mytilini and Mithymnia, were named after the king’s two daughters, and Lesbos was Mytilini’s husband, who came from Turkey. If there is any truth in that at all, I imagine that Mytilini looked very much like A.
I want to kiss the light residue of sea-salt off your delicate ankles, I tell her. Thankfully, I’m employing a highly specialized form of encryption which no-one, with the possible exception of Wittgenstein, could decipher*, and in this code, the above message sounds identical to the phrase I would like a slice of feta dressed with olive oil and some fried calamari, please.
‘Ah! You are a jolly good fellow! We will have a nice time’, the Danish lady says when I agree to her proposition of retsina. (We’ll have made it though two bottles by the end of dinner – she can certainly hold her drink...) She and A. engage in some rapid-fire menu discussion, of which I can follow little except A’s firm corrections and the Danish lady’s careful repetition. At the end of this toing and froing, A. turns to me, winks, and says ‘Μια μαθητρια!’ (‘A lesson!’)
Is it a surprise to anyone that I’m smitten?
The food when it arrives is customarily delicious. A bevy of small cats materializes and stares at us meaningfully. My dinner companion tosses a sardine to one of the cats, who devours it, and fussily leaves the fish’s head on the floor in favour of pursuing my calamari. The conversation meanders like the goat-tracks in the hills around Loutra. It turns out that the Danish lady has been here four times before this. ‘This village is declining’, she tells me. ‘The ruined houses next to the hotel were built for the refugees in 1922, but the government doesn’t have any money to give for their upkeep.’ I think of the people I’ve met, chance encounters in a lonesome place, and it isn’t the cold which makes me hug myself. The newest building in Skala Loutron is the one I’ve mentioned frequently on this blog, the Museum of the 1922 Refugees – all the money funnelled to keeping the past alive.
That would be the kind of thing I’d hesitate to put in a novel for fear of reaching too hard for symbolism.
Did you know that if Sappho was alive today, you’d make her snap her pen in half? I ask A, when we’ve exhausted the retsina reserves and it’s too dark to tell the mountains from the sky. Thankfully, she can’t decipher this plaintext, and she hears it as the encryption We would like the bill, please.
Cicadas are rattling in the dark like they've been doing since Plato wrote the Phaedrus. There is a tremendous sense of permanency in this lonely, proud pot, its waters aching with the beauty of the liquid setting sun.
* He’d probably be on my side in this, anyway. *dons Team Wittgenstein T-shirt*
Monday, 30 August 2010
O women of Troezen / who live on the eastern edge of Peloponnese...
Saturday was occupied with a drive around the east side of Lesvos, from Skala Loutron to Petra, thence to Molyvos, and back home (with a few detours).
The first detour was off the road in the middle of a valley, far from any of the villages, with Mt. Olympus - the other one - glooming in the distance. There is a Roman aqueduct in this lonely place, seventy feet high if it's an inch. When it was built, it stretched from Olympus all the way to Mytilini, a distance which takes two hours to cover by car. There are only parts of it left now, but what survives is amazing; it seems fragile, like one good earthquake would send its arches crashing to the ground, but it is in fact hollow. The original engineers were able to climb inside it and clean limescale out of the water's pathways. Like the Aqua Augusta in Rome, the aqueduct on Lesbos slopes downwards with a regular decline of two inches per mile - a feat which modern engineers are almost unable to reproduce with stone arches.
***
Lesbos has been a bastion of left-wing sympathy for decades. The Greek Communists are the most popular political party on the island, and collectivist living reaches down to the bone in these far-scattered villages and townships. (Perhaps the net result of millenia of subsistence living - Lesbos, like most of Greece, has the kind of arid landscape where the only things which flourish are goats and olive trees.)
The Petra Women's Labour Collective was set up in the Seventies with the passage of the Greek Equal Rights Act, in order to give the island's women more opportunities to work outside the home. Greek culture being what it was (and to an extent still is), any man who worked in Lesbos' olive factories was an eligible catch, while any woman who did the same was assumed to be damaged goods. The Collective still runs most of the businesses in Petra: in one taverna, where we stopped for lunch on the upper deck, (canvas awning full-bellied with the sun above us, stone walls and tentacles twirling like flypaper as they dried) the menu had a brief explanation of the Collective's history and some photos of the members from the 80s and 90s. They looked like a cross between a hippy commune and a very relaxed order of nuns, heavy pullovers and turtlenecks the order of the day. The Collective seems like a romantic gesture, a hangover of Communist practicality, but the work the Petra women undertook then and still do today is dauntingly, ferociously hard: olive pressing, timber clearing, beekeeping, rug-weaving, hand-crafting ceramics, cooking for forty or fifty people at a go.
My Greek is nowhere good enough to ask, but I wondered how the original Collective members - many of whom must still be active now - viewed their work when they first began. Did they see it as radical, as I would describe it from my third-wave feminist viewpoint, or as an extension of the work that Lesbian women had always done, just taken to a bigger sphere? Should that even be phrased as an either/or question?
Petra isn't the only place with a collective; in Molyvos, an old town with a medieval fortress and cobble-streets winding up the mountainside, we stopped for coffee on the back balcony of a kafeneio. It was the Kafeneio of the Municipality of Molyvos: rather than being a private business, every person in the town has a stake in it. It was a cheerful place, with dark red and butter-yellow walls, window-boxes full of morning glories, and clusters of old men playing checkers in the back room. Fug of cigarette smoke and bouzouki music on the radio (everybody here smokes with gleeful abandon).
***
It would appear to be part of local law that all tavernas on this island must be staffed by extraordinarily attractive Greek girls in their early twenties.
***
On the way home from Molyvos we stopped at some salt flats, glassy and still under the setting sun. There were birds on the flats, which we quickly recognized as flamingoes. Ridiculous birds - masses of pink fluff balanced on pipe-cleaner legs - they had a kind of elegance to them as they dipped their beaks into the water, taking the blessing of salt and weeds on their tongues. The sun set in a haze over mount Olympus (there is no road to high Olympus, Sappho whispers out of time) and we bowled home past the roadside shrines and the fields of gnarled trees, windows rolled down, Melina Merkouri on the CD player.
Pace Sappho: I would indeed think to touch the sky with two arms.
The first detour was off the road in the middle of a valley, far from any of the villages, with Mt. Olympus - the other one - glooming in the distance. There is a Roman aqueduct in this lonely place, seventy feet high if it's an inch. When it was built, it stretched from Olympus all the way to Mytilini, a distance which takes two hours to cover by car. There are only parts of it left now, but what survives is amazing; it seems fragile, like one good earthquake would send its arches crashing to the ground, but it is in fact hollow. The original engineers were able to climb inside it and clean limescale out of the water's pathways. Like the Aqua Augusta in Rome, the aqueduct on Lesbos slopes downwards with a regular decline of two inches per mile - a feat which modern engineers are almost unable to reproduce with stone arches.
***
Lesbos has been a bastion of left-wing sympathy for decades. The Greek Communists are the most popular political party on the island, and collectivist living reaches down to the bone in these far-scattered villages and townships. (Perhaps the net result of millenia of subsistence living - Lesbos, like most of Greece, has the kind of arid landscape where the only things which flourish are goats and olive trees.)
The Petra Women's Labour Collective was set up in the Seventies with the passage of the Greek Equal Rights Act, in order to give the island's women more opportunities to work outside the home. Greek culture being what it was (and to an extent still is), any man who worked in Lesbos' olive factories was an eligible catch, while any woman who did the same was assumed to be damaged goods. The Collective still runs most of the businesses in Petra: in one taverna, where we stopped for lunch on the upper deck, (canvas awning full-bellied with the sun above us, stone walls and tentacles twirling like flypaper as they dried) the menu had a brief explanation of the Collective's history and some photos of the members from the 80s and 90s. They looked like a cross between a hippy commune and a very relaxed order of nuns, heavy pullovers and turtlenecks the order of the day. The Collective seems like a romantic gesture, a hangover of Communist practicality, but the work the Petra women undertook then and still do today is dauntingly, ferociously hard: olive pressing, timber clearing, beekeeping, rug-weaving, hand-crafting ceramics, cooking for forty or fifty people at a go.
My Greek is nowhere good enough to ask, but I wondered how the original Collective members - many of whom must still be active now - viewed their work when they first began. Did they see it as radical, as I would describe it from my third-wave feminist viewpoint, or as an extension of the work that Lesbian women had always done, just taken to a bigger sphere? Should that even be phrased as an either/or question?
Petra isn't the only place with a collective; in Molyvos, an old town with a medieval fortress and cobble-streets winding up the mountainside, we stopped for coffee on the back balcony of a kafeneio. It was the Kafeneio of the Municipality of Molyvos: rather than being a private business, every person in the town has a stake in it. It was a cheerful place, with dark red and butter-yellow walls, window-boxes full of morning glories, and clusters of old men playing checkers in the back room. Fug of cigarette smoke and bouzouki music on the radio (everybody here smokes with gleeful abandon).
***
It would appear to be part of local law that all tavernas on this island must be staffed by extraordinarily attractive Greek girls in their early twenties.
***
On the way home from Molyvos we stopped at some salt flats, glassy and still under the setting sun. There were birds on the flats, which we quickly recognized as flamingoes. Ridiculous birds - masses of pink fluff balanced on pipe-cleaner legs - they had a kind of elegance to them as they dipped their beaks into the water, taking the blessing of salt and weeds on their tongues. The sun set in a haze over mount Olympus (there is no road to high Olympus, Sappho whispers out of time) and we bowled home past the roadside shrines and the fields of gnarled trees, windows rolled down, Melina Merkouri on the CD player.
Pace Sappho: I would indeed think to touch the sky with two arms.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Mytilini, or The Modern Mnasidika
We went swimming on Wednesday, in the sea at Charamida. I've never been entirely sure why people describe exercise, or pain, or physical endurance as 'honest', but there was something of that swimming for which I can't find a better word than 'honest' or 'clean'. Salt in my eyes and on my lips, salt stiffening my hair into peaks and ridges, the lift and burn as my body remembered that it could swim after all.
I could see the Turkish headland as I bobbed in the water. One of the tutors, Nikos, and I got to talking as we treaded water in the shallows in between bursts of movement. He was trying to describe his family, with an intricate net of nieces and nephews, and when I looked blank, he used ancient Greek words - ὁ παις, ἁι θυγατερες. Laughter mixed with the swell of waves and the wailing of seagulls. It was from Lesbos, according to Homer, that some of the thousand ships were launched to Troy; the island served as a base for the Greek army due to its advantageous location. In Iliad IX, Odysseus attempts to bribe Achilles with a catalogue of promised gifts from Agamemnon, amongst which are 'twenty slave-women of Lesbos / most beautiful amongst all the captive girls.'
Is that true? we want to say. Did the Iliad really happen? Hell if I know, but it makes great copy, and when you're neck-deep in the olive-blue sea, Ayvalik blurry like a fata morgana in front of you, it might even be a little believable.
One of the tutors took a picture of me rocking the 1920s-gayboy look in my swimming shorts, sitting and gazing out at the ocean. It reminded me of something which I couldn't place until I read a blog post about Wittgenstein last night. There is a photograph taken by him of his lover Francis Skinner on the beach at Connemara, around 1936 or so. Francis is sitting in much the same position as I was, hands around his knees, modeling the 1930s standard beach-wear - that is to say, a three-piece suit and a tie, bare feet his only concession to the setting.
Sometimes I wonder whether the definition of academia is the complete fracking inability to ever escape the demands and reminders of your intellectual obsessions, mind-strings and heart-strings tugging you back inexorably along the miles and the days.
***
Greek is anything but an intuitive language. Most western European languages are guessable - 'no' is a fairly standard constant, and in the Mediterranean, 'si' is almost universally the word for 'yes'. 'Then' for 'no', 'nay' for 'yes' and 'ohee' for 'no' - how could you guess those? Greek is tremendously rhythmic, its stress falling in such heavily-defined patterns that people sometimes cannot understand you if you put the accent on the wrong syllable. Sometimes it sounds like Spanish, sometimes more like Russian.
I managed to have my first shouting match in Greek today, although it ended amicably, with free ouzo - a shopkeeper of the 'If I shout louder in Greek and flap my hand at the calculator, the idiot foreigner will understand!' school of communication. Despite this, I had a lovely evening alone in Mytilini town, wandering the market streets and taking pictures of the city's Turkish traces. There is a hanam (old Turkish bath) which is now an art bazaar, painted delicate shades of blue and gold inside; it dates from around 1800 and still has the original stone arm-rests. There's also a crumbling mosque, roofless, its minaret long since knocked down, a haunt of stray dogs. The elegant arches and thin clay brickwork reminded me of other ruins I'd seen in Rome. Eventually night fell over the cathedral dome, and in search of mezzes, I stumbled down the backstreets until I found a pirate-themed ouzerie.
I sat outside in Plateia Sapphou, within eyesight of the statue of Sappho which gives the square its name. She is immortalized in white marble according to the taste of our own times, which prefers the ancient world to be pre-scrubbed and ghostly, rather than to the taste of her own times, when they painted their marble statues in bright primary shades. She has one leg in front of the other, her centre of gravity balanced on the ball of her left foot. She stares out over the harbour, looking for something - in vain? Anticipating her own exile, or remembering it? Staring after the unnamed, departing woman of Fragment 94? ('The truth is, I wish I was dead. / Weeping with many tears, she left me / saying, 'Oh, how badly things have turned out for us; / yes, Sappho, I swear I leave you against my will.'')
There was a live band playing in the square, young men with hard-core earnestness and electric guitars; Mytilini is a student town, with about 6,000 students attending its university. I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / then it meant that you were a protest singer; / oh I can smile about it now / but at the time it was terrible... I drank a mojito and wrote postcards as the full moon quavered up over the water, to my friends and relatives and the girl I would like to be my girlfriend. *
Afterwards I got a taxi home without using a single word of English.
Sometimes there are small triumphs.
* Of course I'm not telling you who she is. I prefer to engender a healthy paranoia amongst my friends.
I could see the Turkish headland as I bobbed in the water. One of the tutors, Nikos, and I got to talking as we treaded water in the shallows in between bursts of movement. He was trying to describe his family, with an intricate net of nieces and nephews, and when I looked blank, he used ancient Greek words - ὁ παις, ἁι θυγατερες. Laughter mixed with the swell of waves and the wailing of seagulls. It was from Lesbos, according to Homer, that some of the thousand ships were launched to Troy; the island served as a base for the Greek army due to its advantageous location. In Iliad IX, Odysseus attempts to bribe Achilles with a catalogue of promised gifts from Agamemnon, amongst which are 'twenty slave-women of Lesbos / most beautiful amongst all the captive girls.'
Is that true? we want to say. Did the Iliad really happen? Hell if I know, but it makes great copy, and when you're neck-deep in the olive-blue sea, Ayvalik blurry like a fata morgana in front of you, it might even be a little believable.
One of the tutors took a picture of me rocking the 1920s-gayboy look in my swimming shorts, sitting and gazing out at the ocean. It reminded me of something which I couldn't place until I read a blog post about Wittgenstein last night. There is a photograph taken by him of his lover Francis Skinner on the beach at Connemara, around 1936 or so. Francis is sitting in much the same position as I was, hands around his knees, modeling the 1930s standard beach-wear - that is to say, a three-piece suit and a tie, bare feet his only concession to the setting.
Sometimes I wonder whether the definition of academia is the complete fracking inability to ever escape the demands and reminders of your intellectual obsessions, mind-strings and heart-strings tugging you back inexorably along the miles and the days.
***
Greek is anything but an intuitive language. Most western European languages are guessable - 'no' is a fairly standard constant, and in the Mediterranean, 'si' is almost universally the word for 'yes'. 'Then' for 'no', 'nay' for 'yes' and 'ohee' for 'no' - how could you guess those? Greek is tremendously rhythmic, its stress falling in such heavily-defined patterns that people sometimes cannot understand you if you put the accent on the wrong syllable. Sometimes it sounds like Spanish, sometimes more like Russian.
I managed to have my first shouting match in Greek today, although it ended amicably, with free ouzo - a shopkeeper of the 'If I shout louder in Greek and flap my hand at the calculator, the idiot foreigner will understand!' school of communication. Despite this, I had a lovely evening alone in Mytilini town, wandering the market streets and taking pictures of the city's Turkish traces. There is a hanam (old Turkish bath) which is now an art bazaar, painted delicate shades of blue and gold inside; it dates from around 1800 and still has the original stone arm-rests. There's also a crumbling mosque, roofless, its minaret long since knocked down, a haunt of stray dogs. The elegant arches and thin clay brickwork reminded me of other ruins I'd seen in Rome. Eventually night fell over the cathedral dome, and in search of mezzes, I stumbled down the backstreets until I found a pirate-themed ouzerie.
I sat outside in Plateia Sapphou, within eyesight of the statue of Sappho which gives the square its name. She is immortalized in white marble according to the taste of our own times, which prefers the ancient world to be pre-scrubbed and ghostly, rather than to the taste of her own times, when they painted their marble statues in bright primary shades. She has one leg in front of the other, her centre of gravity balanced on the ball of her left foot. She stares out over the harbour, looking for something - in vain? Anticipating her own exile, or remembering it? Staring after the unnamed, departing woman of Fragment 94? ('The truth is, I wish I was dead. / Weeping with many tears, she left me / saying, 'Oh, how badly things have turned out for us; / yes, Sappho, I swear I leave you against my will.'')
There was a live band playing in the square, young men with hard-core earnestness and electric guitars; Mytilini is a student town, with about 6,000 students attending its university. I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar / then it meant that you were a protest singer; / oh I can smile about it now / but at the time it was terrible... I drank a mojito and wrote postcards as the full moon quavered up over the water, to my friends and relatives and the girl I would like to be my girlfriend. *
Afterwards I got a taxi home without using a single word of English.
Sometimes there are small triumphs.
* Of course I'm not telling you who she is. I prefer to engender a healthy paranoia amongst my friends.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Chewing gum and the Museum
I'm chewing gum which tastes like pine and honey - less sugary than American or British gum, more astringent. It proclaims on the packet that it is με Φυσικη Μαστιχα Χιου: made with real gum mastic from Chios. I associate Chios with Juno's fickle love, with rude jokes about sex culled from Martial's poetry*, with verbal puns about figs and warnings to doomed armies. Gum mastic has been used for centuries, mostly for ink-thickening and corpse-preservation; nothing indicates that the ancient Chians used it for chewing gum, though.
('Atthis, I loved you long ago / a child you seemed to me, and graceless / chewing on your gum, slouching along / with your hands shoved into the folds of your chiton'?)
*it was a hard job being That Kid at the back of the Latin class who knew all the dirty words, but somebody had to do it.
***
Last night we went to visit the Museum of the Refugees again, this time to look inside at the exhibition. It's the newest building in Skala Loutron. The things it holds look surprisingly modern. When we picture the phrase 'Anatolian refugees', I suppose we think of peasant life: faces a picture of misery under trailing headscarves, shoeless children, endless squalor. Yet some of the clothes would not have looked out of place in Edwardian London or Paris: women's silk jackets with bold ruffled necklines and diagonal-cut front flaps, or pin-tucked petticoats, or a dirndl-style cropped blouse made from latticed openwork lace.
Some of the clothing belonged to children - boys no older than five or six. Some other pieces were distinctively Turkish: there was a set of women's clothes from Smyrna, striped silk bloomers with a lace blouse and the stiff cape-style bolero made from red velvet. The shoulders were squared by the pins which held them up - I could imagine the girl for whom they were made; slight, dark, determined.
One article made me pause. It was a white petticoat with a deep flounced ruffle and a panel of intricate lace embroidery. There was an orange stain on the flounce-band, a small patch about the size of my pinky fingernail.
(The shot rang out of time, the screams, the woman standing nearby, not shot herself but close enough to catch a fleck of blood?)
(Of course, there are many ways to stain a petticoat.)
I quoted one of Sappho's poems yesterday, about the hair-band she wore, but when I went back to check my accuracy over breakfast this morning, there was part of the poem I'd forgotten: a rather sinister ending. (Translation is from 'If Not, Winter', Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments):
For my mother
In her youth it was a great
ornament if someone had hair bound with purple -
a very great ornament indeed.
But for the one who has hair yellower
than a pine-torch:
crowns of blooming flowers
and just lately a spangled head-binder
from Sardis' cities.
But for you, Cleis, I have no spangled headband -
where would I get one? -
yet the Mytilinian
These things of the Kleanaktidai
exile took with it:
memories terribly leaked away.
In the museum there are women's headbands and diadems, delicate twisted crowns, fashioned to look like ivy wreaths, made from pearls and dull gold. Sappho herself was exiled to Sicily around the year 600 CE, for reasons probably to do with her support for a failed political coup in Mytilini.
Is exile Lesvos' narrative?
***
There is a photo album in the museum, set in pride of place on a table next to the guest book. The album commemorates the visit of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to Skala Loutron, who opened the museum. Lots of happy faces, lots of ring-kissing, the Patriarch looks suitably impressed by a display of vintage Greek Bibles. Yet when I look at photographs of people, I always look at the women first: and all of the women in these photographs - from the museum director to the little girls - were veiled, their heads swathed snugly in gleaming white headscarves.
Two thousand six hundred years and the only thing that's changed about women's obligatory head-bindings is their style.
('Atthis, I loved you long ago / a child you seemed to me, and graceless / chewing on your gum, slouching along / with your hands shoved into the folds of your chiton'?)
*it was a hard job being That Kid at the back of the Latin class who knew all the dirty words, but somebody had to do it.
***
Last night we went to visit the Museum of the Refugees again, this time to look inside at the exhibition. It's the newest building in Skala Loutron. The things it holds look surprisingly modern. When we picture the phrase 'Anatolian refugees', I suppose we think of peasant life: faces a picture of misery under trailing headscarves, shoeless children, endless squalor. Yet some of the clothes would not have looked out of place in Edwardian London or Paris: women's silk jackets with bold ruffled necklines and diagonal-cut front flaps, or pin-tucked petticoats, or a dirndl-style cropped blouse made from latticed openwork lace.
Some of the clothing belonged to children - boys no older than five or six. Some other pieces were distinctively Turkish: there was a set of women's clothes from Smyrna, striped silk bloomers with a lace blouse and the stiff cape-style bolero made from red velvet. The shoulders were squared by the pins which held them up - I could imagine the girl for whom they were made; slight, dark, determined.
One article made me pause. It was a white petticoat with a deep flounced ruffle and a panel of intricate lace embroidery. There was an orange stain on the flounce-band, a small patch about the size of my pinky fingernail.
(The shot rang out of time, the screams, the woman standing nearby, not shot herself but close enough to catch a fleck of blood?)
(Of course, there are many ways to stain a petticoat.)
I quoted one of Sappho's poems yesterday, about the hair-band she wore, but when I went back to check my accuracy over breakfast this morning, there was part of the poem I'd forgotten: a rather sinister ending. (Translation is from 'If Not, Winter', Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's fragments):
For my mother
In her youth it was a great
ornament if someone had hair bound with purple -
a very great ornament indeed.
But for the one who has hair yellower
than a pine-torch:
crowns of blooming flowers
and just lately a spangled head-binder
from Sardis' cities.
But for you, Cleis, I have no spangled headband -
where would I get one? -
yet the Mytilinian
These things of the Kleanaktidai
exile took with it:
memories terribly leaked away.
In the museum there are women's headbands and diadems, delicate twisted crowns, fashioned to look like ivy wreaths, made from pearls and dull gold. Sappho herself was exiled to Sicily around the year 600 CE, for reasons probably to do with her support for a failed political coup in Mytilini.
Is exile Lesvos' narrative?
***
There is a photo album in the museum, set in pride of place on a table next to the guest book. The album commemorates the visit of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch to Skala Loutron, who opened the museum. Lots of happy faces, lots of ring-kissing, the Patriarch looks suitably impressed by a display of vintage Greek Bibles. Yet when I look at photographs of people, I always look at the women first: and all of the women in these photographs - from the museum director to the little girls - were veiled, their heads swathed snugly in gleaming white headscarves.
Two thousand six hundred years and the only thing that's changed about women's obligatory head-bindings is their style.
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