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

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?)

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*