Ah, there we are,’ he said finally. ‘See what you think’.
On one stone he had drawn the face of what might have been a Zeus or a Poseidon with a thoughtful, gentle expression and waves of curly, bubbly hair. On the other, the angelic faces of a young man and woman gazed at one another in quiet adoration. We sat for a while in silence as the smoke from his cigarette made lyrical rings in the air, and then we took our leave, realizing with a start that it was four in the morning.
I carried the stones in a turquoise scarf, and we walked the whole way home.
The next day I wrote this poem for him — Stones and Angels.
I tried to find a stone for you to paint on, Yannis, but I found that
Stones are lost sheep in golden dust
Stones are the blind eyes of lost gods
Stones are the stars that failed and fell here
Stones are the faces of watches without hands
Stones are the masters of time.
And we would become masters of time, Yannis,
In the great loneliness which is God
In the mad, dynamic silence poems and icons adore.
We would paint the universe the colours of our minds
and flirt with death, but
Whether we dance or faint or kneel, we fall
On stones.
Stones are old money with which we rent the world
Forgetting that this landscape borrows us
For its own time and its own reason.
The way is open. It is paved with stones.
They are the fallen eyes of angels.
Sometimes I see Greek history in terms of a huge frieze of centaurs and humans — like the one from the temple of Zeus with its writhing, tangled group of figures fighting their way out of the stone. Great lusty bearded faces, hooves and hair and fullblown female breasts are arranged in a kind of controlled chaos as man struggles with horse-man, his powerful, inner self. In a way, Greek passion is an endless battle with the centaur — a convoluted, internal war, a war declared upon time and mortality. Penises and phalli were often stolen from ancient statues and used as fertility charms; it’s almost as though history, in its wickedness, wished to castrate the mighty and mock all human endeavour.
The struggle is externalized when the centaur is an outside enemy power — and then the Greeks hurl a great NO at the face of defeat or submission. On October 28, 1940, Italy declared war on Greece, first offering the chance of a fast and painless surrender. Greece said No. Okhi. And that was that.
When the struggle against the Fascists ended six years later, civil war broke out, and once again the Greeks, after dealing with an outside evil, had to turn and face the evils within. History is ruthless, and nowhere more ruthless then here in Elladha.
It is late afternoon and the fabulous Greek light is fading. The old man who takes pictures for the tourists on the Acropolis and develops them on the spot will be packing up his tripod, his fifty year old camera and his photographic plates, and heading for home. The last slanting rays of the setting sun will lengthen his shadow on the marble stairs, and project their own dark images of the pillars of the Parthenon upon the smooth trodden stones.
‘Ah, it’s getting late; says Dina, and begins to pack her knitting in a large red bag. ‘Good, good,’ she nods, examining my work of the last hour. ‘You’re improving. What is it?’
I laugh, because I’m not sure how to answer her. Then everyone laughs. The birds in their cages in the kitchen burst into crazy song, and the lemon trees in the garden quiver with some secret mirth. It is time to go.
Outside, the streets are very quiet — not like this morning, which now seems far away, when we fought our way through the crowds to reach the airline office and confirm our reservations for the flight back to Canada. It was the 28th of October, the national celebration of the day when Greece said No to the Fascist invaders. Everyone was surging downtown to see the parades. The school children in their bright blue uniforms were waving thousands of little flags; everyone was shouting and laughing, and the city was a gay pandemonium. At one point a large crowd parted down the middle like the waves of the Red Sea to allow an old general to pass. I wondered why his gait was strange, until I looked down and saw that he was walking on two wooden pegs below his knees with no crutches or support of any kind.
Later we sat in a place called, yes, The Sixth Fleet Café, and I glanced at the menu which featured strange things like Amerikan Cheese and Meet Sauce. My mind travelled back to all the places we’d been and I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, chuckle or scream. This is no easy country to write about; you don’t really travel to it; you’re either here or not here. To go among the Greeks you must be just a little mad. Mad enough to singe your wings like Icarus, to dive into the sun and fall, feathers and all, into the Aegean. You must be prepared to experience a flight of pure relentless consciousness, for something in the Greek nature demands that energy and will be constantly stretched to their limits, and that the flight be ever higher and more perilous. In this country you are drawn like a bow between heaven and earth, and you may come to know life and death as one blinding, fluid reality. The soul is the arrow shot from that bow, once only.
If then, you go among the Greeks (and you are just a little mad) — remember that everything will be demanded of you, and everything returned. Greece is a ravenous country; its hunger is a glorious, golden hunger for light, for freedom, for the pure worlds of spirit and of matter. It is a land that devours time, rushing ahead to keep a rendezvous with some unknown and miraculous destiny. It is also a land that encompasses the dark night of the soul, for the price of its kind of yearning, its kind of passion, is high. Ecstacy is never complete without the corresponding element of tragedy; if no tragedy is apparent in a situation, it often becomes necessary to invent one. The masks worn by actors in ancient Greek drama were not meant to disguise, but to reveal the inner man.
Greece holds up a mirror which — if we care to look — contains a reflection of the truest features of our humanity, and the predicament of our mortality. The mirror might be like the deep well in the ancient agora in Athens where one looks down into the darkness and almost finds oneself. Or it might be deeper and darker still, like the terrifying water reservoir at Mycenae. Or it might be clear and glittering with a thousand particles of light, like the face of the Aegean on a summer morning.
Whatever it is, it does not lie.
Greece insists that one know oneself, even if that means a lifetime of the most strenuous soul-searching, examining, questioning, and re-examining. The Greeks will not easily let things be, for existence is a multi-faceted crystal which must be turned over and over and experienced from every possible angle. Given much, they will despair that it is not enough; given nothing, they will insist that it is too much. They consume time in a desperate attempt to take hold of time. Few truths are satisfactory without corresponding half-truths to make them more palatable, more impressive. They are a people of paradox, victims of their own brilliant and contradictory awareness. Because there is no tomorrow, it is necessary to improvise it by clever intellectual manoeuvers and complicated dreams. Nothing can really be planned; only the gods make plans and very often even they botch things up terribly.
Revelling in the intensity of the moment, one despairs of the passing of the moment. Ultimately the gods are to blame for the human predicament. Man is not to blame; man is hungry, man is ambivalent, man must circle, spin, fly and dive in order to survive. There is no time, there must be no time to consider what it all means, because then everything would stop, and that must not happen. Suffice it to comprehend Alpha and Omega, pure worlds of spirit and of matter, and leave the letters in between to assemble their own alphabet.
As we left the Sixth Fleet Café, many people with their heads bent way back were studying the sky. A sky-writer was describing three Greek letters high above the city.
O X I — it
wrote in the stark blue air. Okhi, which in Greek means No — the ‘No’ which was hurled at the Italian Fascists in 1940, the ‘No’ which sums up the attitude of Greece throughout history towards the Invader, whatever his face or his name. The ‘No’ which is the refusal of the Greeks to endure anything which is inhuman, demoralizing, cruel, shallow or unreal.
The word hung there and took a long, long time to vanish, first growing fuzzy the way a memory does, then breaking into particles of light.
Did I really have the ticket for home? I opened my handbag to check, and a butterfly flew out.
Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Shadow Maker and Afterworlds, which both won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. She also published novels, plays, travel memoirs, and children’s books. MacEwen died in 1987.
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
The A List
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada Mark Satin
Passing Ceremony Helen Weinzweig
The Bush Garden Northrop Frye
Made for Happiness Jean Vanier
Hard Core Logo Nick Craine
The Big Why Michael Winter
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches Gaetan Soucy
Death Goes Better with Coca-Cola Dave Godfrey
Basic Black with Pearls Helen Weinzweig
Ticknor Sheila Heti
This All Happened Michael Winter
Kamouraska Anne Hebert
The Circle Game Margaret Atwood
De Niro’s Game Rawi Hage
Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson
Like This Leo McKay Jr.
The Honeyman Festival Marian Engel
La Guerre Trilogy Roch Carrier
Selected Poems Alden Nowlan
No Pain Like This Body Harold Sonny Ladoo
Poems for all the Annettes Al Purdy
Five Legs Graeme Gibson
Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore
Survival Margaret Atwood
Queen Rat Lynn Crosbie
Ana Historic Daphne Mariatt
Civil Elegies Dennis Lee
The Outlander Gil Adamson
The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories Roch Carrier
Mermaids and Ikons Page 9