I arrived in Athens on Tuesday, June 9. As we landed, I just started crying, and the New York Greeks near me politely stared for a second. It was twenty-four years since I'd last landed there, and that time I was fifteen: when you come back suddenly to a place like this, after so long, you can see yourself, like in a video. And that time, as a fifteen-year old, I was in the throes of that teenage time, where the thoughts in your head about actual reality are much less important to you than your thoughts about what other people are thinking about you.
But now, this time, I come just to be- with Greece, with my sister, and my oldest friend, Iris. When I saw the sea, the brown and green hills, the little vineyards and olive groves, I knew why I'd loved Santa Barbara- there was something there of Greece. As I walked through the joi de vivre energy of the airport, and got my tickets for the bus and felt the humidity, I knew why I'd liked New York; there was something of the people there which reminded me of Greece.
But here, I noticed, as we traveled through Athens toward Syntgma (Constitution) Square, there was that energy of New York, but also a real understanding of leisure; of being. I saw men sitting on benches or cafe tables, and my American instinct thought, "what are they doing just sitting there by themselves?" and then my Greek instinct remembered leisure.
As a child, my sight was much more like my sight now- I am too old to care about what other people think of the way I look, and no one's looking anyway- good thing in a Mediterrenean country; and besides, there's way too much for Greek studs to look at these days- and so, like a child, I bound along, suitcase in tow, delighting in the lucid air, the curry smell, the soft dang of a little church bell, the little shops, rowed one after another down the little, narrow winding streets. I hear my mother telling me to stay on the sidewalk at all costs, as she, amused, watched the little old ladies navigating a jay walking journey with inches to spare. On my own steam now, though, I can trundle down some steps in a small, quiet square and enter an ancient Orthodox church. Now, I know, as I didn't as a child, that I can venerate the icons of Christo Pantocrator, or the Annunciation. The religious landscape of the land of my childhood has become more accessible to me now, and the simple joy this gives me can't really be expressed- it is like a soft breeze of love, coming from the past.
I reach the hotel and my sister is there. How long we've been trying to do something together- and God, in His gifts, gave me this one- to be here in Greece with her! And the cornucopia opens further, when Iris, whom I haven't seen for twenty years, comes to the door the next morning. We spend three hours talking in a taverna next to the ancient Agora, and I imagine Socrates sitting in something like this, quite near, 2300 years or so ago, agitating and educating the populace- with a little wine and olives. We have "cappucino freddo" with the thickest, coldest milk I've ever seen.
We go then to Marylynne's gallery, where twenty-two people, mostly young twenties, are putting up art work, creating art work...the gallery is located in an old apartment building, due for condemnation after the show. There are old, beautiful old doors and shutters; the place has an elegance, and the marble floors, that particular Greek pattern of mottled marble, reminds me of my childhood- I would lay on these floors in the heat of summer, and just think.
A girl from Holland is doing cardboard towers, to be installed on the rooftop; a Japanese girl is creating hundreds of fishwire strings with resin dripped down them; a delightful Englishman from Manchester is putting videos on the wall, and the air of nebulinity, the aura created by a lot of artists together, is thick. Margarita, the curator, a Greek woman closer to our ages, is bustling around in a Greek way- last minute (made time for leisure, see) everything. Marylynne gets down to measuring and working through problems with a plinth. Iris and I, with a futile offer of help, break out into the clear air of simple reality again. I think about how Aristotle wrote about poetry, art, as a teacher, an imitative teacher, for the soul- art as a doctor of sorts; and how so much art has become more a vehicle of expression for the radically individual. And I think about how this can be good, too, although we humans always seem to default into imbalance. Marylynne's work is the most tied to reality, to beauty, as a teacher of order.
We walk through this condemned area, and we begin to understand the riots of a few months past. Hordes of young immigrant men, and Greeks, hang out listlessly( nothing to do with leisure) on the corners, many of them skin on wasted frames, with the occasional desperate face. This is a drug area, and the storekeepers, many of them immgrants, look tired and worn, as if the very air were poison. I feel sad, so sad.
We make our way to the Plaka, the oldest neighborhood, just below the towering figure of the Acropolis. The Acropolis still seems like a beacon of beauty and order, rising like a king above the sprawl of white houses, a sprawl which reaches for twenty miles or so all round. The ancient Agora, below the Acropolis, was a marketplace- but also much more. Here Socrates walked, Aristotle came to the "thinkery" - a civic building set aside for thinking- and Pericles probably had an office here.
To be continued.....when I can get on a computer again!
