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.
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