Greek-speaking Pool

Last year I spent a good portion of time dedicating myself to Greek in translation: Greek poets, Greek dramatists, Greek philosophers and Greek historians, naturally with gaps in-between, which other reading material filled in, because too much of that would make your mind at first swell then burst or spin. Even so I wafted around in this Greek bubble. My mind expanding as well as revelling in the betrayals, the abductions, the incest, the infants abandoned on hilltops and mountainous slopes, the slaughter, the prophecies of the oracles and the petitioning of kings and gods.

This wasn't the first time I had dipped a toe in and then plunged my whole body, but on this second baptism I was going deeper, under, even. On occasion I spluttered and then later came up gasping for air. So good. So juicy. So political. So rich and powerful, in images and words.

I wondered if these Greek waters were an escape from Brexit? Or had I paved the way to them the year before; in other words, had Homer opened up a door, which I was now being led through and into the passage beyond it, and down some steps into deeper waters, until only my head was above them?

I don't think it was more one or the other. I was just ready: to make up lost time and in the same breath - when I permitted myself to breathe - worry that time would run out before I'd read all I wanted to read. The age of my eyes played on my mind, too, but now is not the moment to explain this. I don't know if I could put it in terms that would be understood, anyway. It just seemed, to me, then, a factor that needed to be factored in. So many books...which at moments was a scary and an awesome thought, particularly when I kept finding more....then more, classic and contemporary, and which all said: read me.

But it was to the Greek I kept returning: verse, prose, tragedies, comedies, dramatic monologues, philosophical dialogues, histories and political themes and biographies, as well as the myths, retold or explained. Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Apollonius of Rhodes, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Alexander the Great. Natalie Haynes, Edith Hall, Tom Holland, Stephen Fry, and some renowned translators. But you can't really do ancient Greece without getting pulled a little, or a lot, into ancient Rome, which launches you into waters that are not too unfamiliar but just unfamiliar enough to set you off on a whole new course of reading.

Words have long been my drug of choice, but this Greek-speaking pool, though willingly re-entered, was intoxicating and impregnating, and all-consuming as if, like Orestes, I was being pursued by the furies, although I knew not of what wrong I had committed. There was no blood on my hands, only book-print and ink from the notes made with a leaky pen. And oh, maybe some beetroot stains because I was in a beetroot phase then.

All family members that were alive at that time were, when I checked, still very much alive, so if they were indeed after me (which the high incidence of storm clouds and insects in my local area seemed to testify to), then it was, unusually for them, for something other than murder but which still, in their view, demanded vengeance or justice.

I came to the conclusion that the prime driving force in this pursuit was Megaera, one of the three sisters as recognised, I think, by Virgil, the Roman poet, for the madness seemed to descend whenever I took a breath, a break from Greek and took up non-Greek reading matter. Megaera, as her name implies, obviously then flew into a jealous rage and with her sisters, Allecto and Tisiphone, hounded me until I once again plunged into the Greek-speaking pool. Although that's not to say these furies then left me; they were soothed that was all.

Ultimately, they're always with me, as are their demands that everything should have a link, even a tenuous one, to ancient or modern Greece; and if not Greece then Rome. They go so far as to put books in my path and send heralds with messages of new verse translations and retelling of myths. Their current behaviour is, you could say, more kindly than angry, but only as long as I comply will these waters through which I steer remain calm. 

Picture credit: The Return of Ulysses, 1968, Giorgio  de Chirico.

This post was penned in 2019.

Putting One's Fingers on the Keys

For ten years and one day I've been putting one's fingers on the keys and writing these - what would you call them: articles, pieces? I generally refer to them as blogs since that's what this site is designed to host but really they're too long to be termed as such. As well as too diverse in subject matter. Essays?

This isn't the place to debate it. Or maybe it is...? But I don't feel like getting myself into that tangle. Perhaps they don't need a label...

Anyway, as I was saying it was ten years yesterday. And yes, I'm going to say it: it doesn't seem possible. I never thought that when I signed myself up to this that ten years on I'd still be going. Though it's true, I sometimes have that thought in regards to life too: still here then. I'll no doubt be thinking that later on in the year when I turn 40.

But ten years of doing one thing is a different milestone to that of existing.

A decade of doing anything, as opposed to doing nothing i.e. just simply being, with no cares in the world beyond your own, can be a slog, if input from you – mental or physical - is required. Even the things you choose to do you can reach an impasse on.

But ten years is pretty good going when you consider my usual bail-out is, at the most, eight, and moreover because in this instance there's been very few misgivings. I was tempted to say none but I'm sure there must have been some, though I've never, even if it's proved a struggle, been lost for words. How I put them down is my problem. Because often what I want and how they actually come out is very different. What works in my head doesn't always work on computer-generated paper. The end product is rarely my original design. Even this isn't...

I want to rip this up and start again, but though it might be different, would it be better? And well, it's not paper in the nineteenth and twentieth century sense, and tearing, ripping is so much more satisfying.

It's just typical that I'm experiencing writer's problems on my ten-year anniversary. You, however, wouldn't know if I weren't. If I were just saying it for effect, if it were part of what I had in mind all along, when in reality I'm sailing through. This sea, well, okay a small rock-pool, of words is pouring out of me. They know exactly where I'm headed and are taking me there, not in the most direct route, but there all the same.

Ah me, I wish that were true.

Crabs keep pinching my fingers so that I frequently have to stop to blow on them, which lessens the pain but interrupts the flow (is there one?) and induces stumbles i.e. more hits of the delete key.

Perhaps I should do as writers do and start from the beginning. I would, but I don't know what the beginning was or why there was one. Greek mythology had chaos and I had, well, nothing; no epiphany of anything, no light-bulb moment, just this desire to write that like a crazy fool I followed, not that in these ten years I've profited by it.

Can you die by the pen? I guess it's more feasible than by keys of letters. I mean, how lethal would they be if they were thrown at you for example? Well, if it were the full keyboard and a screen were attached, then it would, I imagine, do some damage, as would being made to swallow the keys individually. Swallow the alphabet literally. Poison letters, poisonous letters, poisoned by letter, take your pick. Okay, so I was wrong. I don't think I just write, and as I write I think.

No, you're right, it's not the best method. The results are too varied. But planning in advance also works against me. What to do in those kind of circumstances? Close your eyes and hope for the best. Open sesame! Ooh, that's a new thought. And ooh, there's a new word.

If I told you I was a serious writer I'd be kidding you. I'd doubt you'd fall for it anyway. I read lots of serious writing, quite boring stuff actually. Histories and tragedies, as well as all the notes at the back. Stuff that nobody under or over a certain age much bothers with, unless it's on a reading list or they've developed a late-onset interest. Grandiose ideas that my mind can entertain but my fingers, with their hopping nature, can't.

Picture credit: The Letters, 2007, Arsen Savador (source: Wikiart).

Spring Butterflies

The tourist season for me started roughly a month to six weeks ago, though I know strictly speaking that's early, extremely early for some; for them it won't start until much, much later, when the weather in most places in Europe is turning from mild and sunny to boiling hot, unless of course you're into skiing; I'm not. Generally speaking, March to May is just iffy, too iffy to guarantee an inclement climate.

My travelling tends to really get going with meteorological Spring; sometimes before if the daffodils and blossom are already out, or when I get an itchy foot. When the top of my right foot starts to itch something chronic then I know my mind needs more, it needs to explore further afield.

I don't go far, in body, that is, but oh, in spirit, I'm right there, wherever the book in my hand has taken me to. That land (and its peoples) may not still exist, be even known by the same name or follow the same customs. The capital, too, might have been moved; moved to higher ground, or established where it was easier to rule and dominate if an empire was in the process of being built.

The world I want to tour is not the world we live in, so I know if I did indeed go to these places as they are now I'd be dissatisfied. Yes, I could go and see for myself Keats' resting place, and antiquities that have been preserved, but would I find Goethe's Italy or Antal Szerb's, Homer's Greece and Virgil's Rome? Or Hemingway's Paris, van Gogh's Arles, Elizabeth von Arnim's Rügen, Pearl Buck's imperial China, and Rumer Godden's East Bengal or Kashmir? Of course not! An essence of, certainly – some staged, some conserved, some sense of in the foundations – but my mind would be decades, even millenniums, behind; modernisms would just interfere and wreck whatever enthusiasm or romanticism I feel about that period. It would, I'm fairly sure, spoil it for me.

And if it does give me some new feeling, then seeing may dilute, if not remove, my enjoyment of the book or liking for the writer. Of course it could enhance those erstwhile impressions too, but I've not yet had that experience. Although you could say I've chosen not to, knowing this might well be the outcome, and so not wishing to diminish either the book or the writer in my estimation I've evaded such travel altogether.

Kernels of truth are hard to admit to, in voice or print, and even harder to read with your own eyes, though I have no qualms in admitting that I'm not a relaxed traveller. The conveyance itself has never bothered me – train, plane, boat, coach, car etc. - but the procedures that comes with these does: the terminal, the check-in, the security measures, the boarding gate, the responsibility of luggage and documentation, and other unavoidable travellers, just like yourself, trying to get to and from somewhere, to the same or different destination, or even to the buffet car. And that's just the start!

For other holiday makers are inescapable, even if you manage to give the ones you're travelling with the slip, because certain spots will attract them from all over. And if there's a constant itinerary which isn't constant at all but is frequently amended and where you're all herded like heifers to places, then if you're anything like me it's not very pleasurable. Though I can also feel this way if I visit a museum. Here, in Britain.

I'm just not great with crowds of people. I don't mind being among them, preferably one of a modest size where's still space in which to move quite freely and in which to breathe, but I dislike being pressed up against or having to push to the front or fight to get to where everyone else also wants to be.

As for seeing the local attractions, or what's left of them, then personally I just can't get close enough. I get this urge to jump over or duck under roped areas. I don't, of course. If I went to China, for instance, I'd want to walk amongst the terracotta warriors and pet the horses. Like a child, I need to touch.

Books, then, on their own, give me greater freedom as a tourist.

Spring butterflies is a term used for tourists by William Golding.

Picture credit: Memories of Travel, 1911, Gino Severini (source: WikiArt).

This post was penned in 2019.

A Considerable Crowd

A procession of people passes down the street; those part of it, accompanying the floats and the horse-drawn carriages, dance and cheer, while those looking on politely clap and snap pictures, their camera phones held aloft on sticks, like sceptres. There's more of them – onlookers and cameras – than they are in the entire procession; a vast sea of them swims around the market's clock tower, or stretches back and pushes itself against shop fronts and then spills out onto the roads. Unusually there's no police in attendance policing the gathering crowds. No off-duty officers in the carnival spirit and none on police business and deadly serious in going about it. Law and the enforcement of it has been abandoned, unless the powers that be are watching from a 'High Castle': from a basement bunker with a bank of screens fed by CCTV images.

Most of the onlookers have not given a thought to that however – the lack of police or the possibility of being policed from afar - their energies are concentrated on the sights passing before their very eyes and the sounds penetrating their very ears, in spite of the fact that this procession could not be described as fantastical. Nor does it have pomp or ceremony or any religiosity of a definable nature.

Nobody in the crowd seems to have any idea what this procession signifies - the procession itself gives little away – and yet a lot of them turn to their neighbours and exclaim 'What luck!' as if it's some rare event that only happens after so many cycles of the moon, and which when it occurs never passes through here, not through this market town, the smallest in the borough.

It's a drab affair in terms of colour. The costumes are of the commonest kind from a bygone era. Those on foot are mostly in sack and cloth, while those in carriages have powdered wigs, powdered faces and beauty spots, and either shrink back into the shadows away from the gaze of the crowd or wave dainty handkerchiefs at them with an expression of delight or bemusement on their faces: what are those devices being held towards them?

Men with brooms and women with baskets containing fruit dance alongside; the men make a show of sweeping the road though it's not what they're used to as these roads produce little dust and the woman hand fruit, past-its-best, out. The crowd cheer the exaggerated pantomime of the sweeper but are unsure what to do with the accepted fruit: Is it to be thrown? Are they meant to splatter the ragged unfortunates or a coach? Perhaps, given more time, a signal will come and a fight, all in good fun, will break out.

The British have grown unused to rushing in and playing fools, unless a genuine fool, dressed clearly as a fool, beseeches them to, or a person playing Cupid with make-believe wings fires a make-believe arrow from a make-believe bow into the air or at another performer. As of yet no fool or Cupid has appeared. So, the crowd, collectively, holds its breath, waiting, clutching their overripe apples and pears, and then releases it, distracted, as a group of rambling men come into view, who are wearing birdcages under their boaters, in which, when brought closer can be seen either a pair of live songbirds, hopping about on perches and too overcome to sing, or clockwork doves in hand-stitched habits – the male, a priest, and the female, a nun- conversing with each other.

Next come the floats though they're really dust-sheeted carts on rickety wheels and so don't really float along at all and are somewhat perilous for those also draped with sheets riding atop them due to their tendency to tilt when pulled by a team of men and not oxen. These sheet-clad and wreath-headed actors then struggle to hold their postures, one seeming to praise the sky, one seeming to be making a speech, one doing something dramatic with his hands and another kneeling, almost pleading, beside him. It's not very edifying. And none have any weapons or props of any description.

They rattle on, through and out of town. The crowd disperses, with their apples and pears, with nobody any the wiser.

Picture credit: The Therapeutist, 1937, Rene Magritte (source: WikiArt).

Inspired by Goethe's Italian Journey (1786-1788).

This post was penned in 2019.

The Golden Lion

Walking into the jaws of a lion is unlike that of being swallowed whole by a whale.

Geppetto and Pinocchio, if they could be consulted, would confer and agree with that statement. For they have had one experience and I have had the other, or a version of it, in that their occupancy in the whale's belly was by accident, whereas mine, in the lion's, was an impulse I obeyed.

Had it been a real lion whose jaws I was about to enter who knows how I would have behaved? I like to think the human instinct to slowly back away or run would have overpowered my trance-like state, but maybe not...surely though the sight of sharp teeth would have done it, broken the spell I didn't know I was under...

In this instance, however, there were no fierce teeth to provoke fear, just two double doors, which before I even raised a fist to knock at were opened. Silently, with no protesting creaks from the hinges, and as if pulled on a cord tied to the handle of another unseen door or pulled back by an invisible hand. Ahead there stood a desk with nobody behind it; I advanced towards it. Weary from my journeying, I jabbed impatiently at the brass bell on its counter. A little man in a suit with a top hat and tails appeared from a room at the back and bowed with a much-practised and well-executed flourish, 'What can we do for you, sir?'

Amazed at the question, thinking that by entering such an establishment it would be obvious, and by his apparel I was blunt in my answer: 'A room, Man!' I said.

'Certainly, if you'll just follow me, sir.' This he uttered with some authority though no diary was consulted or key selected from any of those hanging up behind him, and in a clipped though not unfriendly tone. He was all efficiency and smiles as he led me up a winding staircase and down and around countless corridors which were strangely devoid of doors, and asked me this and that. Where I'd come from, where I'd been, what was I doing in this part of the world etc. I don't now recall my responses, just the sense that I didn't think he was listening and knew all I was telling him anyway.

Tired, and in spite of my unease, my defences were down. I was almost asleep on my feet by the time we came to a halt by a four-poster bed, set all by itself, on an open landing, with wooden beams overhead and a dormer window overlooking resplendent gardens. When had it got so light outside, it wasn't when I arrived; it was approaching dusk, but no sooner had this puzzling thought occurred, it left, as had the man in the top hat and tails who just a moment ago had been beside me. I remember mumbling to myself: 'too many corridors' as I begun to unbutton my shirt and then I must have fallen, in a dead swoon, for I woke up later, lying face-and-body-down across the counterpane, still clothed and with my booted feet hanging off the side of the bed.

The first view when I lifted my head was of a breakfast tray set on a dressing table, which when I went to look only had on it a cup of tea and a folded piece of paper. I'd been summoned to lunch in the gardens and instructed to wear the clothes laid out on the chair. I tapped my watch, it was indeed a quarter to midday. The blue frock-coat and buff waistcoat fitted perfectly, but how to get to these gardens?

It was then that I saw the dormer window from before had turned into French doors, leading onto a terrace where stone steps took you into the gardens; and there under a tree with many trunks a table had been set, ready for its guests. I positioned myself in a high-backed chair with a red velvet seat because the other had craved in its back the monogram L which I presumed was the initial of my host.

In truth, I was half-expecting the little man from yesterday, but barely a minute had passed when a lion appeared. A real golden lion with a beautiful shaggy mane who nonchalantly stretched himself out underneath and curled his tail round a leg of my chair.

It seems by accepting their hospitality I had sealed my fate: allowed the other man to escape and made myself the new keeper of the Lion.

Picture credit: Lion Afternoon, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).

Inspired by Goethe's Italian Journey (1786-1788).

This post was penned in 2019.