Εύπλους

Ας είναι καλά οι παροτρύνσεις φίλων, βακτηρία με βυσσινί βελουδένιο κάλυμμα, ας είναι καλά και η δουλειά αυτής της μέλισσας της Γλώσσας μας, της Λούμας, που μ'έκανε να απολαύσω όσο πολύ σπανίως το παιχνίδι με το σπασμένο τηλέφωνο, που καλά και σώνει είπαμε να το κολλήσουμε και να το ακεραιώσουμε. Εγώ στα αγγλικά, έπειτα εκείνη στα αραβικά. Στο ενδιάμεσο, ακούμε με προσοχή εκείνη το ελληνικό κι ελόγου μου το αραβικό, να πιάσουμε την αίσθηση, τη μελωδία που είναι πιο εύθριπτη κι από τις καλές μαρέγκες. Δειγματοληψία, έλεγχος, κι έπειτα οι εθελοντές αναγνώστες.
Στο μεταξύ, ανάμεσα στις λέξεις, μας βρήκε και η βροχή, χτες και σήμερα. Πάντα μου συμβαίνει αυτό, όποτε με γλυκαίνει η γλώσσα. Είμαι βροχοποιός εκ γενετής, αλλά υπό συγκεκριμένες προϋποθέσεις. Πρέπει να επιμείνουμε λοιπόν, να γεμίσουν οι ταμιευτήρες στη γλυκιά κοιλάδα του Τζάρας, να πιουν και οι πέτρες το μερτικό τους. Το όλο πράγμα της εκδήλωσης στο Πανεπιστήμιο είναι ο αστείος κυκεώνας που πάντα ανακύπτει σαν έχουμε να μοιράσουμε δυο γαϊδάρων άχυρα. Δεν πειράζει. Νά ένα τέλος που κάποτε ονειρεύομαι να μου χαριστεί, αλλά άπιστος και θρασύς δεν έχω ελπίδα.


Αλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης, Ο νεκρός ταξιδιώτης (1910)


Και ήτον καλής ψυχής άνθρωπος, ο συχωρεμένος ο Κώστας του Σταματάκη. Φαίνεται, είχε τάξει εις την Παναγίαν την Κ'νιστριώτισσαν, να τον αξιώση να ταφή εις το χώμα της μικράς νήσου του - εκεί επάνω εις τον θαλασσόπληκτον βράχον, όπου τα κύματα φαίνονται να τραγουδούν μυστηριώδες νανούρισμα εις τους νεκρούς - και η Παναγία η Κ'νιστριώτισσα του παρεχώρησε το ταπεινόν αίτημα, αφού από την στιγμήν που έπλευσε ναυαγός εις το κύμα, και απέδωκε την απλοϊκήν ψυχήν του πελαγωμένος εις την πάλην με τον Χάρον τον θαλάσσιον, δεν έπαυσε να αντικρύζει τον έρημον ναΐσκον της πέραν, εις το δυτικόν πλάγι του χαριτωμένου νησιού. Εκεί λοιπόν αγνάντευε, κι εκεί ήτον προσκολλημένος ο πόθος του, μέχρι της τελευταίας στιγμής του.
...

Ο άνθρωπος αφήκε την τελευταίαν πνοήν υπό το κύμα, όπου εβυθίσθη κατ' αρχάς, είτα το νεκρόν σώμα ανέδυ εις την επιφάνειαν, κι έβαλε πλώρην, καθώς είπεν ο αδελφός του, φερόμενον υπό των κυμάτων, κατά την νοτιάν· και αρμένισεν, αρμένισε πολλά μίλια εωσότου έφθασεν εις το θαλάσσιον τρίστρατον... Εκεί εταλαντεύθη πολύ, συρόμενον πότε από τα ρεύματα, πότε ωθούμενον από τα απόγεια της ξηράς και από τας θαλασσίας αύρας, τέλος έβαλε πλώρην κατά τον λεβάντην και τον σορόκον. Διαπόντιος νεκρός, χωρίς ποτέ να γίνει υποβρύχιος. Τα κύματα ως να ώκτειρον τόν ποτε ναύτην, μαλακά μαλακά τον προέπεμπτον εις τον πένθιμον δρόμον του. Τα ψάρια του αφρού επήδων τριγύρω του, εδοκίμαζον να τον πλησιάσουν, και πάλιν, ως να ηλαύνοντο από αόρατον δύναμιν, έφευγον μακράν του. Τα δελφίνια τον παρέκαμπτον ευλαβώς, αι φώκαι εκρύπτοντο εις τα υποβρύχια άντρα των, τα σκυλόψαρα απεχώρουν εις την διάβασίν του. Ο θαλασσοπόρος νεκρός, ως να είχεν ακόμη πυξίδα και πηδάλιον εις αυτό το σκέλεθρόν του, δεν έχασε ποτέ την κατεύθυνσίν του. Διέπλευσεν ακόμη οκτώ ή δέκα μίλια, όλον το νότιον πλάτος της μικράς νήσου του, και είτα εστράφη πάλιν. Έβαλε πλώρην κατά τον βορράν, και ήρχισε να εισπλέει τον λιμένα της πατρίδος του...






المسافر الميّت ..

لقد كان "كوستاس" المتوفّي, ابن "ستمتاكيس", رجلاً صالحاً.
ومن الواضح أنه كان قد قطع عهداً لمعبد مريم العذراء على أن تسمح له بأن يُدفن في تراب جزيرته الصغيرة في الأعلى, على قمة تلك الصخرة المنهزمة أمام مياه البحر, حيث ارتطام الأمواج يصدر تهويدات عذبة غامضة للموتى. وفعلاَ, لقد قامت مريم العذراء بتلبية طلبه المتواضع, حيث أنّه منذ الّلحظة التي نجا فيها من غرق السّفينة, ولاحقا عندما غادرت روحه البسيطة جسده في صراعها مع ملك الموت, لم يتوقّف عن تصوّر المعبد المهجور على الشاطىء.. على السّاحل الغربي من تلك الجزيرة الفاتنة.
كان يحدّق دوماً في ذاك الصّوْب, حيث تعلّقت رغباته كلّها...حتى آخر رمق.


ترك الرجل أنفاسه الأخيرة في مكان ما تحت أمواج البحر. غرق جسده الميت في البداية, إلّا أنه سرعان ما بدأ يطفو على السطح, ومن ثمّ بدأ بشقّ طريقه نحو الجنوب...تحمله الأمواج, كما قال أخيه! وقد أبحر جسده لعدة أميال قبل وصوله لمفترق طرق بحرية.
هناك, ترنّح لوقت طويل: تسحبه التيّارات البحرية تارةً, وتدفعه نسائم البرّ والبحر تارّةً أخرى. وبعدها, دخل في نطاق الرياح الشرقية وجنوب الشرقية.
ذاك المسافر...أبى جسده الميّت أن يكون غواصّاً...بل كان بحّاراً أيضاً!


بدت الأمواج وكأنّها في حِدادٍ على البحّار الكبير, حيث أنّها رافقته برفقٍ في طريقه البحريّ المظلم...
كانت الأسماك تثب على السطح محاولةً الاقتراب من جثّته, إلّا أنّ قوّة غامضة كانت تجبرهم بالابتعاد... أمّا الدّلافين, فقد كانت تمرّ بقربه بكلّ خشوع وتقوى... الفقمات كانت تستمرّ بالإختباء في البحر...وأسماك القرش كانت تفسح الطّريق له بالمرور...
ذاك البحّار الميت...كأنّه ما زال متمسّكا ببوصلته وقبّعته, لم يغيّر وجهته أبدا. سافر لثمانية ربما عشرة أميال أخرى على طول الشاطئ الجنوبي لجزيرته الصغيرة, ثمّ همّ بالعودة مرّة أخرى... شقّ طريقه إلى الشمال, وبدأ بالدخول إلى ميناء وطنه....

(Μετάφραση στα αραβικά , Λούμα Καλάτζι)

Everyman

I am not surprised by my silent passage through April but by my relative eloquence in March. I watch the few bloggers I really follow going through parallel ways, using different techniques: some retreat to self-referential speech ("why I love myself"), some play the drama of departure (Nikos Dimou is an almost global master in that- opening, closing, restructuring his blog, substituting it with other web pages, referring to numerous e-mails he gets and point at the direction of a glorious come-back to his posts). Anyway, for me, I just prefer reading or reviewing these days. Which text would I consider telling for the sense of these days? I look at the small pile of books next to my bed, waiting for a summary, or some last note (before the first-reading will be considered accomplished). I pick Philip Roth's Everyman, in its nice translation in Greek by Achilleas Kyriakides. Based on the title of an English allegoric drama (late 15th cent.) Everyman or The Summoning of Everyman, in which the main figure is asked by Death to present his deeds and acts on this futile world. Roth's Everyman, present his long encounter with the sense of mortality. The successive events that take place in his life (marriages, alienated children, perishing friends and relatives) and gradually are encoded with rising frequency in the operations he is obliged to go through in full or partial anaesthesia. Everyman is so damn close to death, Everyman is so damn eager to forget it every time, Everyman's life seems tidy and well arranged, rectangular, geometrical; in reality there is a Chaos realm, under the precise map. The scene with the geometry of the grave digger is a very telling one. A good book really.

the capital Y

Oh Youth, oh people who deserve its capital Y.
Today I thought of this passage of Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1389a-b) for a good reason.
A reason that made me feel proud for having been around. The term "man" here indicates the human being. And it normally belongs to women, mostly, from what I have seen and understood.
And I searched quite a lot to find it.
Here is Lee Honeycutt's translation.

"...Let us now consider the various types of human character, in relation to the emotions and moral qualities, showing how they correspond to our various ages and fortunes. By emotions I mean anger, desire, and the like; these we have discussed already. By moral qualities I mean virtues and vices; these also have been discussed already, as well as the various things that various types of men tend to will and to do. By ages I mean youth, the prime of life, and old age. [1389a] By fortune I mean birth, wealth, power, and their opposites -- in fact, good fortune and ill fortune.
To begin with the Youthful type of character. Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people's attacks of hunger and thirst. They are hot-tempered, and quick-tempered, and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated. While they love honour, they love victory still more; for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this. They love both more than they love money, which indeed they love very little, not having yet learnt what it means to be without it -- this is the point of Pittacus' remark about Amphiaraus. They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not yet often been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood as though with excess of wine; and besides that, they have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it: on the first day of one's life one has nothing at all to remember, and can only look forward. They are easily cheated, owing to the sanguine disposition just mentioned. Their hot tempers and hopeful dispositions make them more courageous than older men are; the hot temper prevents fear, and the hopeful disposition creates confidence; we cannot feel fear so long as we are feeling angry, and any expectation of good makes us confident. They are shy, accepting the rules of society in which they have been trained, and not yet believing in any other standard of honour. They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, [1389b] because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon's precept by overdoing everything, they love too much and hate too much, and the same thing with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything. If they do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm. They are ready to pity others, because they think every one an honest man, or anyhow better than he is: they judge their neighbour by their own harmless natures, and so cannot think he deserves to be treated in that way. They are fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence."

Morals Rock

Appearances: Modernity and Post Modernity:
Blogging claims them both. It, being a new type of text, a still unclassified species of practice (documentation? soft quotidien philosophy? diary? a psychological indicator for silence and loneliness? a hybrid of them all?...), perhaps even a new genre in writing, where technology decides sometimes on details and inspires or undermines inspiration, seems to be offering new dynamics. Especially in societies in which news and analysis are not well trusted.
Beyond appearances: Reactionary Thinking:
People rush to express the most mainstream ideas, to enter again the stockyard of "legitimate" and pious thinking. So that in the end, they form clear-cut brotherhoods: the protectors of law and order and the pro-western from the other side. Some blog authors that just suggest tolerance and respect for personal choices, directly become the synonym for treason. The conspiracy theories are an obsession in this part of the world. If someone suggests that there is space for someone to talk about his/her emotions beyond the framework of marriage, this someone becomes directly an equivalent for necrophile, pedophile, zionist, drug-addict, pro-american and I do not know what. Many point at him/her with those long moral fingers. (Of course, I suspect that many of these people queue outside the Embassy of the Empire trying to submit their immigration papers, or outside the European smaller castles of Success and Promise).
Case Study: Please go through all what Qwaider managed to collect. A simple story in reality:
A young student who identifies himself as gay, asks Qwaider Planet to accept his blog in his blogroll. He promises that he will be talking basically about his emotions, and how he sees his life in Jordan, as member of this "minority". No pornography issues or profane talk are implied in his blog. Qwaider asks his readers to suggest their own point of view. The result is very interesting. The debate still unfolds very revealing ideas, complexes and excuses in the place of arguments. The mothers try to protect their children. The believers try to save the souls of the poor readers, the politicians ask us not to forget Zionism and the immoral West. The hygienists try to talk about diseases, mental or bodily.
When I was in high school, the teachers were avoiding to teach Cavafy's poems on the excuse of his homosexuality.If they did, they were doing it with the rapid, distant voices that we knew from the mathematician when he was presenting geometrical theoremata. The real reason was that they wanted to avoid tricky questions from the students, they did not want to do the great preparation that this poet demands, they did not want to put themselves in front of questions such as: "Why do I personally like this poetry?" or "Why this poetry is considered great and a turning point?"

Want to play? Want to be my pal?

Among other similarities, Arabs and Greeks share also this one: their perception of this complex feeling/community called friendship. And because families are small in Greece, friendship obtains even more powerful features. It becomes an extension of the family, a kind of substitute with the strength of blood bonds, but without the full-glory-headache of the practicalities that kinship implies (property issues or the fundamental drama of the relationship with parents and siblings as discribed in psychoanalysis). From what I have noticed, and despite appearences, friends there get more intimate. They do not hold hands but they share all tiny details and communicate frequently full reports concerning their most private feelings. They do not have the long kissing ceremonies that I notice almost every morning at work, while crossing the crowded alleys of our Uni, but they drive their partners (girlsfriends, boyfriends, spouses) crazy when the latter realize that the friends know much more than them about the emotional world of their "other half". Recently, I found a nice depiction of this delicate situation at the novel of Vangelis Raptopoulos, Friends. Even in terms of language the words φίλος(friend), φιλί(kiss), originate from the verb φιλώ (love, in classical greek, kiss in modern) and prove this almost erotic atmosphere.

So, the story starts early, the children of the neighborhood, boys and girls, offer the magical spell "do you want us to play together?" "let's be pals". Sometimes, in urbanized areas this may be postponed till school age, but eventually it happens. Easy to propose, but it establishes a contract indefinitely valid... Many questionable doctrines appear to safeguard the connection: "There is nothing like childhood friends", "Only in childhood we obtain true friends" and so on and so forth. Of course, the criteria for a child to choose mates are heavily conditioned: they live close, they are of the same age almost (you see, for a child two or three years of age difference make a huge big issue, and dig a deep gap) and sometimes it has to do with the social circle of parents who can facilitate this relationship or undermine it according to their own judgement.

In reality, I have noticed that early I found this framework tight for me. I did not keep my childhood friends and the very few ones out of them that are currently friends, they became connected again to me because of their objective qualities and affinities in thinking, feeling and behaving. Other than that, I avoid schoolmates, gatherings of alumni, these circumstances that they start and end with the chewing gum brand "Do you remember?". Even my college mates do not mean much to me. Especially the ones we got in fierce friendship during the first two years in college. Meanwhile, I discovered that I made my best friends later, much later even: Usually they are women (I find them clever and with deeper understanding), normally they are older than me, they are opinionated, sometimes politically active. Yesterday I found the text of Areti, a "new" friend now in Spain, on our website, and while reading her ultimate farewell to her neighbour Libertad, I knew why I love her blue eyes that they are both sharp and tender. I could hear her passionate voice breaking at some point. And through her text I saw the details of her daily world she had been talking about, but which I had not been always able to visualize.

I wonder sometimes how my life would have been without Pelagia, Voula, Ala'a, Mikhalis, Ioanna, Birgit. I think I would have jumped out the window long ago :) None of them is a childhood friend.

Because of dreams

It has been several days now that I postpone to the next time writing a small text about Joyce (not my Irish homeric idol- mock epic hero), an old lady, and mediocre pianist who proved to be a mastermind in fraud. It is just about questions of authenticity and/in art. Sometimes texts are better as floating sentences, words that sparkle in someone's mind for a minute, then the gray exhaustion of the engine of the day overshadows them, they reappear, they flicker temporarily, and again, they accumulate in the library of the unclassified, unwritten, existing and non-existent texts. And who said that the phrase "Scripta manent" had a positive meaning for the classics? Not at all: fixing is killing.

The Gray Engine:

On the other hand, I adore dreams...
"Μπροστά στην πόρτα μας είχαν φέρει τη βάρκα τους, ένα μικρό ιστιοφόρο ίσως, ξέρω κι εγώ, μες στη στοά κι εχόρευαν πατέρας και μάνα με κοντα παντελόνια και φαίνονταν οι κίτρινες κάλτσες τους. Αδιαντροπιές. Θυμάσαι, βεβαίως, που για μένα το πλοίο στη στεριά είναι θανατικό και πράγμα αφύσικο."

Βλέπω τα γυαλιά μου να σπάνε στη μέση, στο ένωμα της μύτης κι ένα κομμάτι από το μέταλλο να ξεκολλά. Τι να προοιωνίζεται καλό αυτό το μικρό ατύχημα, για εκείνον που δίχως τα ματογυάλια του δεν μπορεί να είναι σίγουρος ούτε για το τι, ούτε για το πόσο. Στα περιγράμματα και στα χρώματα.

Ακούω στις σκάλες εκείνες που απέχουν από μένα μερικές χιλιάδες χιλιόμετρα να κατεβαίνει βιαστικός ο γαμπρός μου και να ρωτά με τη βαριά φωνή του όλος πραγματική ανησυχία: "Τι συνέβη; Είστε καλά;"

Πάω να βυθιστώ στον ύπνο και πετιέμαι ψελλίζοντας ξόρκια και αλεξίκακους στίχους.

Therefore, for the time being, Joyce remains a floating subject. Behind her piano, doing what I am planning to tell you, but not playing...