A nation of sea-farers.
My mother's grand-father had boats on the Black Sea. They spoke Bulgarian,
Russian, Greek and French. My father's father was a land-locked islander
high in the hills of Paphos he had vines growing above precipitous drops,
olives, goats. He was the village president. He had been a barber in Cairo.
When?
I must find out.
We do not choose our place of birth but we acquire other nations along
the way - culture, language, personal affinities.
Is Greek-ness defined by language, by religion, by where you live, by
a decision to be Greek?
Am I more English because I read "The Sixth Form at Malory Towers"
when I was seven and can explain to my son what a gymslip is?
One friend was educated in English schools in Turkey and Hungary and then
boarded with the Jesuits in Sussex, but there is nothing English about
him other than his accent. Another was brought up by her thoroughly English
mother in Paris and London but is distanced from English life and has
chosen to identify with French culture. An identity is also affected by
what we choose to embrace.Voices. Spirits.
You have so many voices inside you - that in the end you have to write,
to eject them to give yourself space.My mother's family, from bourgeois
Greek merchant families in Bulgaria and Russia, was exchanged, "repatriated"
- decisions between nations, exchanges of land and peoples, movements
of borders and ideas of nationhood.
Unconsulted.
They were given vines and some land around Volos in Central Greece.
But their Balkan wealth was lost.
(Where does the word "Balkan" come from?)
For my mother, London - England was always "xenitia" a sojourn
abroad in a strange land, an interlude, something to be got through -
an alien place, culture, language where she tried to keep the Greek flag
flying....
For my father it was an "arrival" - he was there and he was
"staying put".
Despite his love of intrigue, his "Ottoman" mind, he admired
all things British - its statesmen, order, discipline, hotels, opportunities,
but stuck to Greek-Turkish coffee.
He knew the seduction of the Latin lands but also that "real life"
was here not there.
In any case, the sun, the sea, held no attraction for him: he was a "mental"
person, oblivious to his physical surroundings.
For my mother, now that she is back in "her beloved Greece",
she feels a void where her London life had been - no longer a country,
a house, a family that she can identify with it, just her memories of
forty years and her husband's grave.......
Entry for 5 July 2003 - Lefkatha/ Zakynthos Sketchbook
Travelling to Ithaca: the meaning - "i ousia" - is in the journey.
Kavafis, another Greek of the diaspora - "i Polis" - the City
- we are all the same - which is our homeland? - somewhere in the heart
- obsessed with journeys, with belonging, with memories and nostalgia
- the inability to be "there" (or anywhere) - where? Greece?
the "mother country"? Anywhere / Nowhere? the inability to fully
be, elsewhere: so out of this perpetual dissociation, journeys, physical
and of the mind - Kazantzakis, Kavafis, Kounellis, - Kounellis - rails,
the railways of our Western guilt, the bad conscience, - but that is all
too heavy - there is the memory of the possibility of an existence that
is absolute simplicity: the sea breeze on your skin, a peach tree growing
out of the sand, the effortless blue of sky and sea, golden islands on
the horizon, a cafe table in the shade, intimate conversations with strangers.
(Extract from artist’s book “Dance, Dreams and Journeys
– fragments of a life”)
Monty Don (gardener): "I like paths and corridors. They are often
more interesting than the places they lead from or to. They also seem
to me to be a good symbol of gardening itself, where the point is the
journey - or the gardening - rather than the arrival."
Boboli is like that: each path is also a corridor, between avenues of
cypresses, tall hedges, there are the rooms you reach, or the vistas,
the belvederi - but the very fact of something stretching before you is
an invitation to a journey, to speculate - the fact that you cannot see
everything all at once is an invitation to explore, to find private corners.....
"God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest
of human pleasures;"
Francis Bacon "Of Gardens", 1625 (He planted the walks at Gray's
Inn)Angels among the roses - pomegranates in flower and medlars with golden
fruit against dark foliage and blue - the blue of infinity pale to lapis
lazuli: Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes revisited after wandering through the
Botanical Garden in Florence, 26 May 2003.
(Extract from artist’s book “Dance, Dreams and Journeys
– fragments of a life”)
silver
reflected
shapes
in slithers
of beach
stranded
water
a magic shimmering world
reflected in shivering water
stranded on a breeze blown beach
imagine
rather than
paint
in the mirage
dragging back of the current
(Extract from artist’s book “Dance, Dreams and Journeys
– fragments of a life”)
A field of dry grass burnt gold by the sun, and studded with white/ pale
green thorns parched and bleached...the sight of them, the intense blue
of the sea and a mass of waving olive trees makes me feel safe, a sense
of satisfaction and completeness, impossible to feel sad with these colours
- bare, spare, essential but lighthearted.
(Extract from artist’s book “Dance, Dreams and Journeys
– fragments of a life”)