(Image: Isamu Noguchi, Ala Moana Park, Hawaii, 1940.) It's been a little while since I've indulged a list of things post, so thought I'd share what has been circulating the mind during recent months. Sentiments that came up post lockdown that I've found to be helpful anchor points, resolutions, regulation since... Alive to sensation: relinquish facts, figures, invisible mandate. Walking. It is solved by walking: Solvitur ambulando. Collaboration over competition. Remain curious, engage in wider conversations: "be 'I' afraid." Motivations for learning: tend to transformation over self bolstering. Appearance: remember the root of the word - 'mere show.' Don't morph, magnetise. Of screens: master not slave. Just say it. Not recoiling from involvement, faster paced productivity - you can hold both in equipoise. Efficacious resolutions being free and of the natural earth - look there first.
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(Image: Buckminster Fuller, 1963) What The Godfather might tell us of oppressive systems of power. Connie Corleone was born in New York in 1922. A female, ushered into a family - we call it the family, not the organisation - which yielded illegitimate sway and control over the many nefarious undercurrents of the city in which they were denizens. For much of her youth, Connie stayed as non-partisan as her context could allow. Enveloped in privilege and grandeur, paying no particular mind to the origin of the resources that all the while endorsed her grounds for security. With years transpired and naivety imperilled, Connie found herself conflicted, riddled and rife with unrest in the years of her adult life. The mirage was exposed. Herself less shiny, her trust now barely lent. Haunted by, and embroiled in the furtive acts committed by one’s own. It was divulgence, betrayal, a loss of one’s habitually known self. The bottom falling out from underneath. The grasping for the treat but finding the base of the cylindrical jar does not exist. Just a depthless realm with no stable solution. So she did what she deemed necessary to make reparations - she turned on herself. Dismantling and marring the very life she had known, for one no less destructive. We soon meet Connie again. Astride her fourth decade, estranged from her offspring, and confronted by death. The threat of death taking form in that of her Mother’s - her one forceful comrade amid the delusions of a family so bound but so unknown to one another. Her peace is perturbed. It’s a reckoning sent to deliver her back to herself. Like when you dream you have lost a limb and wake to see it clear and restored in your woken vision. Clarity is reinstated, and no more time shall be squandered in oblivion to the gift of it. Kneeling before her brother, Michael Corleone - now Don of the lineage - she regards his dominant, seated presence. Her cavernous eyes behind forested lashes bespattered with wet tears, wearing a relinquished repose and in one final daze of pleading with him she says, “I hated you for so many years. I think that I did things to myself, to hurt myself, so that you'd know - that I could hurt you.” Today, such a looming family dynamic still exists among us. Brothers and sisters born of an 'organisation', which can just as easy turn on itself in defence of avarice, manipulation, and power. Oppressed by the strings of a puppeteer society, hurting themselves in desperation to be noticed by it. By the Don, The Man, the one who promises protection. In 2020 the threat of death was, akin to Connie’s story, made known. Taking form in that of viruses - plural. One unfamiliar and newly contagious, one systemic and long ignored. These viruses concerned bodies. They had preference, but they also did not. They reminded the brothers and sisters how they had been sabotaging their very own. How in the act of simultaneous defiance and compliance to the organisation, turning against themselves, they denied peace. Not only theirs, but that belonging to others. They had become innocent accomplices in committing a breed of organised crime. Double crossing and robbing themselves of the peace inherent to their being as they were subjugated to the conforming, carrying out orders to be held in good regard, to be told ‘you doin’ good, Son.’ To belong, to keep up, to play the part, to get one step closer to superior, unhurt-able, infallible, inviolable, blameless. A walking, talking irony. So they were locked away, sentenced to serve time inside. Suddenly distanced from the work they had been so faithfully espoused to, the tasks once seen as noble were becoming unmasked sophistry. They witnessed that bygone limb growing back. The gift of being awake and lucid, apt to change becoming force in the reparation of their worthiness. They felt an implicit stillness return as the metronome pacified itself with a new rhythm. Now there was no immediate reward or consequence, the decisions regarding oneself were less weighty, no longer prerequisite to public exposition for praise or condemnation outright. They saw the spell they had been under - hostage to the dualism of self-sabotage as a means of eliciting a state that cannot be earned. Either believing it vice or virtue, allowing it to pervade them and holding to it until permission for parole and freedom was granted only once they were on the inside. Superficially, we see peace can be taken and peace can be given, but is ultimately inherent when we come to sit in stillness with our own selves. Alone in our room. Not before the jury, the boss, even the ones we hold in highest significance - the ones we’ve been boot-licking in attempts to be granted such rest by. Our peace is still in jeopardy until we feel it and hold it - the real evidence - and defend its cause for and within ourselves. (Image: Ricki Soma, Screentest Portraits, 1949) “In order to understand the in-total reviews and reactions of a film or script, we need to understand the public sentiment, discourse and context at the time of its release.” I’m thinking maybe same applies to our own moment of watching - the personal viewing plate, and internal reaction. What grabs now may not have in a time before x,y, or z. Where we once zeroed in on a leaf traversing the pavement we are now preferential to hold fast the unassuming, taciturn face screening witness to something big about to go down. My cult classic film studies continue this week. After months of being so averse to visual storytelling, favouring plain typography, written sentiments and books I am suddenly stirred by 1970’s cinema. Particular to New York in all it’s grimy unrest. These films are knocking the romanticism out of me. The foreseeable storylines I once felt drawn to now seem vapid and par for the course, although those featuring underground gangster deliberations and bank heists don’t seem realistic in my realm of time either. Many of the slower, dialogue-centric ones hold no soundtrack or music to accompany their scripted scenes, which makes uncomfortable realism more of a deal. Their relatability stirring a more intellectual bent in me as opposed to just touching on sensationalised hype and emotion. My mind is repeatedly returning to a story Al Pacino, bearing his old age, told in a retrospective interview. Causing me to yet again become endeared to my current state - the dynamis and pivotal thickness of it. Seeing how the assurance I have a grasp on as an adult - “finally” - is still subject to change with additional and subsequent years. He shared in candour the truth of his personal experience behind the canonised scene showing his character at Connie’s wedding, with a then also fresh-faced, salad days Dianne Keaton. How during screen-tests Coppola had wanted him for the role while the studio vetoed such an idea, how he felt so unnerved and unwanted in the rehearsal, and how Dianne came in and you see in a fuzzy old clip the flutteriness, the crushing sense of affection and comradery they had upholding their cause. Coppola asked Dianne after the run throughs with quantities of Sicilian men which one she chose for Michael and she went on to say, unflinchingly, “Al.” I can almost feel the full body response as she said it. The heat that suffuses all of you with an experience of such fascination and urgency. A wake up, while trying to keep it cool, remain dignified, detached - “But you know, whatever. Whoever. What’s it to me really..” I’m compelled into a state of inordinate giddiness on her behalf. I see De Niro’s jesting, braggadocio test. The alpha male?, young and virile, self assured, and I run for cover in an imagined, insouciant Pacino just out of view. Who, despite, is still radiating buoyancy, reliability, a goofiness. Not holding too tight. He’s got the ness only he can prepossess. What gets me is they had no idea what their lives, and that connection, would become in time. Something never promised as obvious on all our parts, but made so manifest in having the archival evidence to lean into and project the notion. Theirs is an example witnessed, and time and time revisited, by an audience. The box of their past and the state of their younger self is continually being cracked open. Their changes, naivety, and “a-ha!” “if only we knew!” moments are on display in perpetuity. We are privy to the moment before. In the interview, Pacino goes on to tell with an ageless boyishness, “Dianne and I thought we were soo baaad, that they were going to call us up and say they’d got other actors for the job,” laughing into each other's shoulders the whole day to get through, “then we just went out that night and got really drunk.” Any other time this piece of information would have seemed trivial. But now, catching me at a nearing age, and with moments of ineptitude and connection of my own filling the gaps to bulk out such a picture, it bowls me over. I have that to look forward to. That. The freewheel of young love, and the hit of re-uptake as my mind is washed by its recall in old age. But simultaneously I see vignettes already belonging to my script flash and play back. Almost missing days of disinhibiting two-ship. That bodiless blurring but defining of self that morphs and transfigures into form complimented by a friend. An overwhelming safety. Coming in from the cold. Insurance - full paid. Walking on air, tracking the enshrouding infinite. It seems the romantic in me is again coming to…. Galvanised by the rouse. The tactics of the aforementioned ‘knockout’ are just imagined defeat. Ready for round two. (Image: Saul Steinberg, Masquerade series) The ironic value in my week of Audrey Hepburn movie binging. To be cultured. 'A modern woman.’ A feminist. Why are these picks masked as sustenance? Merely because of their vintage. As if it makes me edgy to recite a line and resurrect a scene from a 1960’s movie in a present context.... Even when the movie holds no moral relevance, or significance for today. Or does it? Not revolutionary now, but then quite wild and antithetical to the contemporary codes of female domestic propriety at the time, and thus transcends the (ostensibly) ‘happily-aproned stay-at-home wife.’ Isn’t this in a way it’s own manner of conforming to a stereotype without questioning it though? The plot of funny face got me. Every quarrel, reprehensible act, degradation of character, kink in the line, cured with a kiss or a song. ~ Twenty-four hours spent reading Durga Chew-Bose’s ‘Heart Museum’ essay was a joyride, a heady disappearing act into pages that conjured a buzzing of energy in my body and a restlessness in my mind - a ‘maybe I can write like this’ and a simultaneous ‘I’ll never write as good as this.’ An exactitude of feeling gumption and the handbrake engage all at once. A bind even articulated ad rem within her exorbitant pages as I thought it: “There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturisation. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance the momentum gained from reading a great book. Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious.” Too Much & Not the Mood - it’s consuming, and elaborate. In parts so profoundly validating and recognisable. I found it prodigious, miraculous, impossible to climb out of once I’d gone in. Like you’ve quite literally walked inside the museum of her heart and mind and it’s stirred up all the extravagant memories and twinging lost cries of your own. 14 May, Thursday - I sense mono no aware walking in the dark skin of night - on the day before everything changed again. I notice teddies being dethroned from their windowsills, Utes filled with tired and hungry tradesmen speed home along the peninsular for dinner, and I feel the steady hold we had on collective modest living loosen. I’m entirely quixotic, knowing this town is facing mass depreciation economically and a restart is the most humane and necessary intervention, but I can't not think of the lockdown now as similar to the months we looked back on weeks prior and said ‘there’s a time / world / moment we will never know again.’ And how much more is this time of great global sheltering one we will never in our lifetimes know (or revisit what was witnessed) again. Even if it does come with a negative valance it still takes form as somewhat sentimental for all involved. Regardless, it’s still part of our story. (Image: @isabellakilloran) What an anomalous time for the world as COVID-19 becomes very real, proliferating throughout with unprecedented concern and consequence for modern life as we knew it. We are onto day 8 of our nation-wide lock down here in New Zealand, and I want to be writing voraciously about this present time on earth, to keep record and documentation of the collective mindset and state, but I just can’t really figure out where to begin most days. The enormity of the shared experience is mind blowing. To know that every country in the world is right now facing the same reality is quite extraordinary, filling me with a newfound solidarity. Never in our ever mind did we foresee the government slogan ‘stay home, save lives’ becoming a thing. Here we are sitting in weird PJ/track-pant combos, eating modest meals, sans makeup, sans pretence, trying our best to tackle the tasks we’ve so long wanted to do but felt we didn’t have the social permission or time for because we believed ‘staying in’ is a waste of a life. [*] Experiencing it in unison we see no one is lagging or advancing - not even those of elite status who we deemed invincible to the inner conflicts of being a human. We are all in fact just as contradictory, weird and codependent as each other, and perhaps not of such disparate thought after all. In Kahlil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’ he muses that the we we see is not all there is. For us now, that even in lockdown we can roam and soak in the immensities of living: And it is with this belief and knowledge I say, you are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind. It is not a thing that crawls into the sun for warmth or digs holes into darkness for safety, But a thing free, a spirit that envelops the earth and moves in the ether. In the retreat I am seeing the ways I have long sought the approval of man - only should this approval finally be obtained and I surely realise the allegiance was fickle and the finish line takes on a further shift. It’s an unattainable and exhausting disservice to humanity and my reason for living. Amidst the now fading norms of duplicity, the dualistic categories, the old ‘us and them’ paradigm I ask: Can I still be a conduit of grace, peace, justice and empathy and exist in the midst of a division of viewpoints, and in this case a division of quarters? Where does one’s true community reside then? Can we find community in all corners? This pandemic is making me think perhaps that’s so. Social distancing: Before the internet deemed it a movement, or an active way to live in service of respecting the wellbeing of others, I think I too often used it for the self. Self protection. Shutting the borders, enforcing the boundaries, but not for the sake of the other, for the sake of myself. Deciding who could cross into my realm and when, deciding which hurts of others I would expend my preserved energy and a genuine generosity towards and when. A backwards effort in calling for support. I’m observing and I’m realising: we are not really meant to keep ourselves unscathed when the collective is battling. That’s not success if the end of war comes and you walk out alone. The connectivity of the globe and the general sense of amicability circling online is humbling me this month - an oxymoron in midst a time of enforced disconnection and avoidance. Because there is no one to blame. No one is exempt from a public health crisis. No colour, class, religion or gender. So perhaps what we are experiencing is real community inside chaos. Seeing that the habit of distancing at the best of times may for some seem natural and ideal, but for many this proves to be a daunting feat. And just like the introvert and the extrovert we do need both, retreat and return. But to use the withdrawal space as a position for judging, for looking on and for picking and choosing in a strategy of cynicism kind of gets us nowhere. I often declare my love of independence, my desire for solitude, wearing it like a badge of honour. But this very real and visceral example that is playing out on the streets of towns and cities has me feel what a lonely world it would be to live in if we abandoned our interpersonal vulnerability - our tactility and need for affection. We don’t have to reach perfect standard to integrate and indulge in the lives around us. In the case of Rapunzel if we self protect until we believe we are worthy or fit to give to another we will be waiting in the ivory tower for far too long, and what a waste. All in fear of nothing else but our own messy, curious brokenness - the very thing that mends us together as a whole. [*] Disclaimer: Not all. Thank you to the health care workers, and those working in ceaseless effort to get others through this without the luxury of contemplating solitude & rest right now. Sending peace. (Graphic: Nathaniel Russell) I once heard Rupert Everett render himself as ‘electric with thrilldom’ during a BBC interview, and given my affection for his iconic British cadence, and the trap doors into the English language his way of speaking tends to create, the little ditty has stayed with me. While I’m fairly tentative when it comes to exercising such distinct forms of speech in my own day to day life (still trying to eradicate the over enthused use of cool and interesting from my conversational repertoire - to no avail..) I’m currently finding this expression one I can turn to most aptly to describe the current ritual of a morning swim. Lake Wakatipu, the body of water into which I have been plunging at 7:30am each morning this month, is to many a treatment in torture and delusion, even on the sunniest of days. But, I find, the more I face its unfavourable hostility with a casual disinterest - even a gratitude - the more I come to know it as a plausible mode or method for experiencing deep joy. Introducing the new routine of meeting icy water before breakfast, or tending to any other task at hand, has the overly-conscientious and obsessive part of my brain thriving in the act of forming habit. Something I seem to dispel loyalty to when travelling - more concerned with impetuously following novelty, story and potential for humour. However, times like these when I take rest in the hermitage of the hometown, my propensity for regaining order seems to make itself manifest in the most curious of ways. A friend came over for dinner this week, and as we finished our meal and continued to shoot the breeze I absentmindedly, and unbeknownst to me, displayed some aberrant gesture of perfectionism as I folded the navy napkins - bring the right in a third, left in a third over top of the left, dust crumbs, stack. With a bemused and slight grin on her face she said, “You’re quite OCD aren’t you…?” That night I wondered if all the daily dutiful compulsions I perceive as normal, even admirable, may in fact be off-putting and even a little sad to onlookers. Whether this persnicketiness is in direct association with my nature or just a symptom of too much spare time / self employment I’m not sure. Notes on self employment - In this and the below, I’m asking: how to fight the war on resistance. The monkey in your mind telling you that to be at peace in an unassuming, healthy place means you are too comfortable and not exploiting your apparently dormant potential for greatness. But then, how much of this is just glorifying the struggle? Commitment / allegiance to imaginary unease. Self sabotage. Go to any supermarket and you’re likely presented with grounds for arguing the case that systems of proposed efficiency can in actual fact hinder our freedom - all with comic value assured. The following observation noted in a journal from 2018 may serve as evidence: “Unexpected item in the bagging area…” *Lady swipes employee ID.* *Man attempts to reprocess his goods.* “Unexpected item in the bagging area. Please remove the item.” “Oh fuck off…!" - Tired guy at self check out in Pak n Save. (I too share this inner longing to retort as passionately to that lady inside the machine.) And such is the irony of “progressive automation improving the speed of our lives…” We all know sometimes too much arrangement / system can just make us bitter. I sort of landed in this free wheeling career without needing the structure of institutional scaffolding so to speak. The threat in this however is that there is no formulaic building plan for what steps are next, or exactly when it’s going to become a comfortable space to live in. Some weeks I feel like the framework is just out there getting rained on, kind of half finished and rotting. But just as lengthy cold swims are the propulsion for my daylight hours seeming more easy and satisfying after facing the dawn in a slightly unorthodox way, this discomfort and unpredictability that fills times of waiting for more work projects is the fodder I tend to fuel my writing with. The indelible fascination with questioning life, the self, and what’s underneath it. Rachel Cusk put it right in Outline, with one character musing “and if there’s one thing I know it’s that writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and outside. Surface tension.” This neighbourhood has been home base since I was 7 years old. Confident I could list every perennial aspect of life that plays out year after year on these streets, I do sometimes question whether or not I’m committing sacrilege to the sacredness that is the nature cove across the road as I roll out of bed, don my dressing gown and meander the path into the water sans swimwear, blasé and privileged. I even leave a bar of soap down there. Last week I shaved my legs sitting on a rock. (*sorry Barb and Brian if you have been unwittingly observing the early morning bushwoman spectacle from your breakfast table.) But perhaps this anecdotal evidence is good proof in my point: maybe in familiarity we learn to exist in bigger, more common spaces with a greater freedom. In coming back to something that feels too significant for us or isn’t fully ours, and trying to befriend it repeatedly, we start to feel comfortable almost anywhere. In relation to my career - right now there’s no immediate overflow in which my mind gets to bathe (just that metaphorically soaked skeleton of aborted wet timber and plywood) but I think, at least, if I keep coming to the waters edge ready to strip off and be challenged, little bits of thrilldom might have a chance to keep riding on in. (Image: Edmund Kesting, 1929) On a temperate afternoon in January I drove a new friend out to the secret river. We sat in its flow and talked under a canopy of green, the current deluging and rushing to escape the miniature dams made of our rounded torsos. Flushing in collective white rapids, enlarging and distorting our thighs. Her green eyes, freckled forearms and auburn hair hanging wet at the tips. My skin taut and bronzed, and gaze soft after a day in the water – a scene locked in mind of mid 20s women. I’ve been thinking about this age, my age, a lot. What constitutes a meaningful experience of life at 26. A time when tags of designation as to who and where one should be by now can run counter to a peaceful way of seeing all that is. Following prompts from Leigh Patterson’s monthly ‘Moon Lists’ I’m attempting to turn my thoughts away from age group obsession. Things like generation blaming. Truisms of mass assumption that given ones age they must feel as the rest of them do, one for all. My aunty Deb tells me John Reynolds calls himself a generational traitor – a boomer with a mind more akin to the Greta Thunberg’s of this world. I’m so grateful for these ones, and so keep asking myself: why are we so often sat waiting for permission to break from what feels wrong to us? Embroiling ourselves in grossly identified traits devised without any sensitivity to the empirical aspects of our own personal story. Some days I truly feel geriatric – aged and weary, but full of good spirited nostalgia, more taken by the sentiment of decades long before my time. Others have me convinced I am leaning closer to 6 - more unqualified, persuaded by naivety and utopian hopes alone. But which is a better lens, who’s to say. One notion that pressed on me as the new year came in was to find and heed intuitive reason, beyond the branded experience. That is to say, reaching the place beneath labelling to instead favour and feel how my body responds to certain people and ideas. In virtue of this I have been penning more words in the voice of my experiential self, not as occupied with how and where they fit in the storyline, or what they might mean to me further down the track. But more a practice in percolation – allowing thoughts and emotions to appear, be acknowledged, and then liberated. I’m taking a rest from the Greece Stains posts for a bit, and navigating a slightly unforeseen break from the tedium of constant work at the moment. So thought rather than pass the time with my head locked in rewind I would get more up to date, posting what’s been on the mind ad rem. Happy 2020 to you, whoever you are. May it be a year of great feeling whether you’re old or new, and thank you for being the stalwarts to my never-ceasing cause in finding and sharing le mot juste, or the raison d'etre, or whatever it is I'm doing on here. On the mind: Picnic scouting. Crunch point career moves. A ‘not quite’ summer: secretly relishing the freshness. More breathing space, not so demanding. The difference between passivity & patience. Acknowledging my penchant for simplicity. It’s usefulness in times of transition and fullness. Pointless identities or imposed ideas of the self: wary of internet use and structuring the online performance (Jia Tolentino ‘trick mirror’ induced!) What is instinctual and what has become habitual. (If the habit was changed would the motive be revealed..) Single tasking. Sundown deck dinners – welcoming others. Earning none spending none: a limbo of peace, suspended between chapters. Discomfort is never not useful. Wind in the big plane tree at 7am. Ladybird on my sleeve. 12 avos in the back seat. Mattress topper heaven: guiltless napping. Early morning jubilation wave - long & easy ride. Me and 3 middle aged men in sun bonnets with Hart St to ourselves. (02/02/2020) A revisitation of ongoing journal pages written during a summer spent in Greece. Week Three: Skopelos Island June 26: I’m settled into a two storied traditional dwelling, amongst shops and tavernas in the centre of old town Skopelos. Not even 24 hours have passed in this village and my mind is already conspiring ways of returning here annually. Coming to an island set within the established skeleton of the Mamma Mia franchise I’d naturally assumed there would be an endless string of of tourists and advantageous locals milking it for commercial gain, but it’s quite the contrary. Washing hangs from neighbourhood rooftops, church bells toll every hour, swallows circle the sky overhead, and the surrounding hilltops are neatly parcelled little sugar cube houses with terra cotta roof tiles. Everything is rather gentle and unassuming – fishing boats set in a row, locals still living out age old tradition, the wind in the curtains; it’s so simple it’s genius. My fantasies of returning to the 60’s and feeling like Francoise Hardy or Leonard Cohen on Hydra don’t now seem a stretch too far under the light of a European summer. I found it very hard to practice camera restraint in the hours following my arrival yesterday, and it got me into trouble. Following a trail through the houses after visiting Panagitsa of Pyrgos I happened upon a hilltop restaurant just as dusk set in. An elderly man was fortuitously placed amidst colourful chairs and flowers in pots, so I began to capture the scene…excessively perhaps. Busted, he promptly offered honest comment: “That’s enough ok! Enough now! No more photos!” in a very stern, Greek tone. My gut sank in the familiar way it seems to when I am doing something I perceive to be innocent and a Greek tells me off (Acropolis museum woman, ‘don’t smell the shampoo’ woman.) I apologised, and exited via the nearest corner path, but turned around to take one more shot of the view. Meanwhile he had risen from his seat to follow me, keen to see if I had respected his order – fervid I had not. Conviction rose up in me the rest of the evening. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps I am not being respectful enough here? A little entitled. Stuck in my own cultures ways? I forget that just because we speak different languages it doesn’t make these people any less human. A fair bit dismayed and feeling sorry for myself I go for a lone volta along the promenade after dark, reaching a beach with daybeds and retired sun umbrellas, so I sit. Within seconds I am approached by a 13 (?) year old boy sipping from a fizzy can. He says hello and stares. I return pleasantries, a simple “hi,” assuming he is of the totally innocent kind. From here the scene escalates to him commanding, “common…” He gestures to the isolated and ill-lit end of the beach and repeats some indistinct action with his two hands. “You and me. Let’s go, common. Why not.” I reject and ignore, finding refuge in the cool technical glow of my cellphone. He doesn’t move. In fact, he inches closer, his face staring directly into mine and mutters the words: “kess me.” (I do not oblige.) June 27: Today has been spent at Agnodas (still there…) Catching a bus through the country I arrived at the cove around 11am, perched myself on a rocky crop at the end of the beach and wrote. After a lengthy swim alone equanimity returned. All the tension complied in the city now gone. Stood on a sea urchin on the way out, lodging multiple spikes into the ball of my left foot and toes. Hobbling with best efforts past the taverna shortly after, three local waiter boys came to help. They sat me in a blue painted rattan chair in the shade and diligently bathed my foot in vinegar, dabbing its residue with a paper napkin. After this I made friends with a tiny Italian woman named Amalia. 84 years old, from Turin (Torh-RRREE-noh!), visits Skopelos with her husband each year. She used to teach Italian language, history and geography to intermediate aged students and was rather witty. We swam together, bobbing around in the deep for quite some time. As we made our reemergence to dry land she wobbled and laughed, “my equilibrium has gone with the years.” She also said cute things like ‘oup’ and ‘scuza.’ We ate lunch with her husband, who spoke zero English but had kind eyes and loved to smile and laugh whenever we attempted to converse. I learned of how they met and fell in love – him a friend of her brother, arriving on the doorstep to teach him maths, her opening the door and feeling an instant pang of desire. He was 16, she was 19. They paid for my meal, and once again I am struck by the generosity of beautiful strangers. Soon after I see the German woman who is staying in the same pansion as me, Ilsa. We’d met in the kitchen earlier that day after she emerged from one of the rooms sans pants and underwear. I’ve since learned much about her, and gathering the pieces I can tell she is a free-spirited wanderer who has never quite felt ready to stop. We swim and sunbathe until the evening bus back to town. Floating about 100m from shore she tells me that if she ever writes an autobiography her years and times in Greece would heavily feature. I ask what specifically and she replies, “the Greek light. and the music…and the romance.” “Greek lovers?” I ask. “Oh yes, many.” We eat dinner at a local taverna where, turns out, eager boy from the night before plays bouzouki in the corner with his dad. I avert my eyes for a time, but am sure to make him regret his little untoward episode. A revisitation of ongoing journal pages written during a summer spent in Greece. Week Two: June 18: * Approaching my writing / documentation with reserve - self inflicted pressure to make this count for the future. * Confronted with how much I rely on slang. How slack and unclear my communication can be at times. Eloquence is my latest quest. Met Julianne, Conor and Theano for coffee and food at a bistro cafe near Kolonaki square this morning. We discussed magazine plans and decided our next meeting will be on the beach in two days time. Julianne carried a canvas bag with cylindrical wooden handles that was screen-printed by hand for $4 in a textiles workshop they had visited in Uzbekistan. After we parted ways I found myself seated at a central restaurant with uniformed rows of outdoor tables where the streets Adrianou and Eolou intersect. Here I tried taramasalata and was given a small shot of mastika on the house for dessert, which I drank only because the waiter was cute and wouldn't let me leave until I'd played my part in this apparent tradition. What was left of the afternoon saw me walk; lost in the national gardens under old cordia myxa and thunder. My phone has been dying most days, so I've made my way home through inventive memory recall and broken conversation attempts. Rania had dinner waiting when I arrived back at her house - fish soup, courgettes, and green beans with lemon. 'Picasso and Antiquity' opening at the Cycladic museum tomorrow night, and more thunderstorms forecast for the day - secretly pleased to have a break from the heat. * Azurite: dark blue *Conichalcite: dark green *Drachma: ancient Athenian coin *1100-700BC: Geometric period June 22: I’m slowly gathering the pieces to make a bigger picture of this culture as week two rolls around. Yesterday I had a meaningful encounter with a lady in a shop without a name. Sauntering down a narrow cobbled alley in Plaka after seeing a book of Cavafy poems placed on a window bench. Her collection was artistic and thoughtful - part gallery part antique store, curated in a way that visually questioned the intersect between contemporary and vintage or past and present. As we spoke I gathered she was someone as struck by the passage of time and its sentiment as I am. Exchanging musings on the topic she shared a thought I have been processing ever since: “People think Greece and the history and the offerings are all based around the ancient, but it is not ancient - it is present. In the air that you breathe. When you go up the Acropolis, take your time. Feel it. No need to share anything or take photographs because there is nothing really there anymore, but the holy rock is still there. Just sit, feel it, think of what it means then and also now. And the theatre of Dionysos just below - it was a teaching place when Greece was in a time of being the most advanced civilisation. It was a place to teach people about feelings, through theatre and art.” I spent the evening inside the Acropolis museum doing what she said - taking my time. Learning of the Parthenon’s funny history, observing salvaged ruins from the 5th Century BC Persian destruction, and having my mind completely bathed in the antiquities of well crafted marble and bronze. June 23: Here I sit, atop the sacred Acropolis perched on a stone at the foot of the Parthenon’s East pillars. I experience a hint of underwhelm as the obnoxious drones of westernised accents seem to kill any poetic sentiment the site once carried. It’s a zoo up here - people coming for the selfie and not a whole lot more. Watching them (heeding to stranger’s instruction from yesterday and not partaking in the photo taking for once) my mind is cast to an irony: Once a place of sanctity, worship and the highest honour, now one us humans seek to conquer only for self interest. Perhaps I’m too cynical, or perhaps it’s the heat, but once again I’m being reminded of the temporary glory of our man made pursuits. Legacy gets passed on and fragments remain, but with time the original value and intent are forgotten. I squint my eyes and try imagine I am the only one up here, the curves in the marble catching the softness of the sun as it prepares to set, and I feel it more. The structure deeply impresses. Almost so much that the mind can hardly fathom the laborious toiling of the ancient makers, and as I look out over the creamy rendered cityscape I can’t help from feeling it’s familiar…genetic memory perhaps? I wonder who stood here, looking up as I do in this very same position: what they thought and felt. Their political position, relationships, religious views. And I wonder who will stand on this patch of earth another 2587 years from now and wonder the same of the person that is me. These pillars are enormous, and the concept of time even more so. |