“If you haven’t built a house, dug a well, and married off a son or daughter, you haven’t lived.”--Greek proverb
As part of her dowry, Eleni was given about a hundred olive trees in a grove in the middle of nowhere about 9 kilometers due west of Meligalas; the only way you could get there in 1981 was to park your car a kilometer away and go on foot uphill for about 20 minutes. Every winter, my mother-in-law and her late husband would walk down from Revmatia to this olive grove during olive harvesting time (a two-and-a-half- hour walk) with a donkey ladened with provisions, all six children, the goats and anywhere from 15 to 20 sheep. Once there, they would stay in a tiny 3x3 sq.m stone hut for as long as it took them to harvest the olives-- usually a week, but longer if it was a good year. In 1981, Eleni and I decided to tear down the hut, together with the nearby sheep enclosure and use the stones to have a new house built in the grove, but first we had to find enough cornerstones for its construction; using our Fiat 127, we immediately set out rummaging through the countless heaps of dumped stones and piles of rubble scattered all over Messenias to find the pieces we needed.
For this small 4 x 6 sq.m house, we only required about 50 cornerstones and fortunately for us but not for traditional Greek village architecture, at this time people were still demolishing traditional stone houses in fits of modernist frenzy and building new monstrosities out of reinforced concrete and brick and calling it “progress,” so it was fairly easy finding cornerstones. And that’s just what Eleni and I did in the ten years between the building of the little house in the grove and the construction in 1991 of the much, much larger two-storey stone residence our family now lives in. By then we had amassed approximately 1,200 cornerstones—more than enough for the house and the stone wall in front—and were known throughout Upper Messenias as that “somewhat batty couple in a battered Fiat 127 who were gathering, of all things, cornerstones.” [NB: It might interest readers to know that cornerstones from old demolished houses are now selling at 30 € a piece and up.]
But back to the grove. During Fall, Winter and Spring and when the two children were still too young for school, we would leave Meligalas every other Friday night after I had finished with my English lessons, drive the car (filled with enough food and other provisions to last us until Monday morning) to where the dirt road morphed into a rut, and then haul the kids and provisions up to the house—no electricity, no phone, no running water, no other people, owls hooting, jackals crying at night, millions of stars—for a weekend in Paradise. As strange as it might seem, when we came back down to idyllic Meligalas on Monday, it felt as if we were returning to Hell aka Civilization.
Do not cast the first stone, pilgrim—
Though wide-eyed urchins throw
Sheep shit at the poet transfixed
Before the babbling brook,
There is no sin
In their misdoings,
Only wonder.
(First published in NO/ON #7: journal of the short poem, Spring 2009)
One of my favorite watering holes right on the seafront in Kalamata is the Navarino mezedopoleio (literally, a place that specializes in hors d'oeuvres but may also serve larger entrees)--the perfect setting for savoring a large variety of traditional Greek dishes--
great service, delicious food, good spirits(!) and a menu catering to all tasteful imaginations. But before you get carried away by the prospect of tasting some of these mouth-watering tidbits, take a good look at the third dish on the menu. Can anyone in their right mind imagine being served an entire village of chickens?
From out of nowhere,
Smart lizard darts
Onto hot deadly stretch
Of killer asphalt,
Grabs stupid grass-
Hopper's ass before
Coolly high-
Tailing it back
To nowhere.
Though I can't see him on my blogsite due to a continual Blogger anomaly, I welcome Gerry Boyd as Definitely Not Lemmings #11; thanks Gerry!
An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984, selected, translated, and presented by David Ball, University of California Press, 1997, 340 pp.
From the Introduction: "Henri Michaux died in 1984 at the age of eighty-five. He was the author of more than thirty books of poems, prose poems, narratives, essays, journals, and drawings; his writings were translated into more than half a dozen languages, his paintings amply displayed in the major art centers of Europe and the United States. His place in world literature and art was secure, but difficult to define. Michaux stood alone.
When people who know his work try to relate Michaux to some movement or tradition, they don't come up with schools of poets, but with a range of great individual figures in literature and art: Kafka, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Swift, Paul Klee, Rabalais....His strangeness has occasionally led him to be classified with the Surrealists (some critics feel they have to put him somewhere), but he never used their techniques: no cadavre exquis, no free associations, no abstractly formulated attempt to destroy tradition and logic. A sentence like Breton's 'The color of fabulous salvations darkens even the slightest death-rattle: a calm of relative sighs' could never have been written by Michaux, who tries to render his dangerous, magical world as clearly and concretely as possible. Whether in poetry, prose, India ink, or paint, his weird visions are not the result of some theory about the nature of art: they are messages from his inner space. In a sense he inhabits the realm the Surrealists merely longed for.
No group, no label for him. John Ashbery defined him as 'hardly a painter, hardly even a writer, but a conscience--the most sensitive substance yet discovered for registering the fluctuating anguish of day-to-day, minute-to-minute living.' Wild and druggy enough to be venerated in the sixties by a poet like Allen Ginsberg (he called Michaux "master" and "genius"), and by the French rap star M.C. Solaar in the nineties, an inventor of fictions brilliant enough to be admired by Jorge Luis Borges ("his work is without equal in the literature of our time"), who was Henri Michaux?"
This fascinating anthology is the perfect place to start looking for an answer.
NB: George Seferis also admired Michaux; in a 1970 Paris Review interview, in answer to Edmund Keeley's question about lack of a sufficient audience for his poetry, Seferis had this to say: . . . ."this situation of not having a very large audience has something good in it, too. I mean, that it educates you in a certain way: not to consider that great audiences are the most important reward on this earth. I consider that even if I have three people who read me, I mean really read me, it is enough. That reminds me of a conversation I had once upon a time during the only glimpse I ever had of Henri Michaux. It was when he had a stopover in Athens, coming from Egypt, I think. He came ashore while his ship was in Piraeus, just in order to have a look at the Acropolis. And he told me on that occasion: 'You know, my dear, a man who has only one reader is not a writer. A man who has two readers is not a writer, either. But a man who has three readers'--and he pronounced "three readers" as though they were three million--'that man is really a writer'."
Morning: Lorine Niedecker,
American Poet (1903-1970)
Lorine,
in our thickly
twinned cy-
presses,
the ooh-ah-
ooh of mating
mourning doves
call your
You
ah you
here.
(First published in Poetry Salzburg Review #2, Autumn 2002.)
