A Flower in Space

N. went out to the garden today and took some pictures. She took one of a rose, and as soon as I saw it, it reminded me of some kind of nebula, so I blackened the background. I love looking at it.

Goldberg: Variations

Back in January (was it really that long ago?!) I blogged about Gabriel Josipovici’s Everything Passes. I had prepared another post, but in the end decided I didn’t want to say anything more about. I had also ordered Goldberg: Variations, which came about month later for some reason.

Everything Passes is apparently simple, but remains elusive in its complexity (and this is its greatest charm, I think). Goldberg: Variations, when viewed one chapter at a time, is easier to “understand”, but the various settings and characters of the book, when viewed as a whole, pose the greatest challenge. They are connected by various metaphors and concerns.

I filled several pages in my notebooks about Everything Passes, but I didn’t find as much that interested me in Goldberg: Variations, despite the fact that it was a fuller book. There is, however, one small detail I’d like to concentrate on, because it represents what I think was an interesting missed opportunity.

There is a story that Count Kaiserling, a Russian ambassador to Saxony, suffered from insomnia and had the musician Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who lived with him, play music to soothe him at night. Kaiserling mentioned to Bach that he wished he had some soothing but lively music for such occasions, and Bach is said to have given him the piece of music which has come to be known as the Goldberg Variations.

Josipovici’s book is about a writer named Goldberg who is hired to read to an insomniac named Mr Hammond. Logically, a recurrent theme throughout the book, in addition to literature and writing, is sleep. There is a thread in the book that particularly struck me, and it deals with Odysseus.

In chapter 8 (pp 56-61) Hammond asks Goldberg, “What is the reason, do you think, that makes Homer depict Odysseus as an inveterate liar?” (p 56)

Goldberg describes one of the significant differences between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Achilles, he says,

knows that if he kills Hector he himself is doomed to die young, but kill Hector he must, to avenge his beloved Patroclus. If it had been possible it would have happened, as someone has said. If the alternative had been possible he would have chosen it. It was not possible. … It is different with the Odyssey. Odysseus is ready to use all his wiles and all his powers of endurance, even if it means humiliation, in order to ensure his safe return and, once he is home, the routing of the suitors and the cleansing of his house. [...] But for Odysseus humiliation is temporary; the end always justifies the means.

Goldberg later adds:

As the Iliad ends with the burial of Hector’s body, so the Odyssey ends with Odysseus and Penelope finding each other through the riddle of the bed, which is an integral part of the house itself. Only then does Odysseus sleep soundly. Until that moment his fate is to lie awake, making plans while all the creatures of the earth sleep the sleep of the just.

Goldberg’s answer to the initial question does not really concern us here, so I’ll pass over it for now. I want to stress the part about sleep, and move on to chapter 24 (pp 165-170). Goldberg is writing to his wife.

We spend a third of our lives asleep, if we are among the lucky ones, and yet, curiously, very little has been made of sleep in the literature of the past. For obvious reasons. It is not interesting. Nothing happens. Only dreams, or the inability to sleep, are interesting. But does that not tell us something about art? It purports to speak of man and all his doings, but in effect it speaks only of those things most amenable to speech. Homer, of course, is the exception in this as in everything else. Indeed sleep could be said to be the secret theme, perhaps even the secret goal, of both his Iliad and Odyssey. In the former Achilles will not sleep until he has been avenged first on his own comrades who, he feels, have inflicted shame upon him, and then on Hector, who has killed dear friend Patroclus. [...] And is not the climax of the Odyssey the return of Odysseus to his beloved wife and to his own secret bed? Then at last both he and the poem can fall asleep.

What does this suggest? Why, simply this, that sleep is the goal of art as it is of man. And it can only be the sleep that truly ends if it has in some way been earned by the protagonist and earned by the writer. In that sense it is also the goal of the reader. But only a true work will allow him to sleep well when he has closed the book.

There is a curious part in the middle of the book, beginning on p 107, in the 15th chapter, written by Mrs Goldberg. She is writing of their children, Annabel and Danny. She writes about their son’s shiftiness in argument, and his desire to emulate and impress his father. She gives the following example. In the 19th book of the Odyssey,

where the disguised Odysseus recounts to Penelope that he has seen Odysseus and welcomed him as a guest in his home in Crete, [Danny] pointed out the contiguity of the words Odysseus and I in the line: “There Odysseus I saw and gifts to him gave”, suggesting that for a moment the reader or listener imagines the disguise is about to drop and Odysseus to reveal himself. When you pointed out that this was far-fetched he triumphantly showed that in the that line in the Greek, Odyseia [sic] and ego were followed by the caesura, and that this was an extremely rare example of such a thing, there being only eight examples, he said, of such an “illicit” hiatus in the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey. The implication was thus that one would have to pause after ego and the line would momentarily read “And there I, Odysseus”, before concluding “saw and gave guest gifts to”. Even you had to admit that he had a point there.

But he doesn’t. Nowhere near, in fact. There is, of course, the possibility that Danny is twisting things to convince his father, but I want to point out a significant error in his argument. And to do this I have to say a few things about how the Greek language works.

Greek, like Latin, is an inflected language. What this basically means is that nouns and adjectives have endings which clearly show what grammatical role they are playing in the sentence. Take the word for man, or human, anthropos. When it has the -os ending, it means that the word is the subject of the verb. If the word ends with -on, then it is the direct object of the verb. If it ends with -ou, then it is showing possession, like ’s in English. These are called cases. The three I’ve mentioned are called nominative, accusative, and genitive. There is another one, the dative (which exists in German too), and the vocative, which is used when addressing the thing or person the noun represents.

The result of all this is that Greek syntax is a great deal more flexible than English. A simple sentence like Dog bites man could be written

Dog bites man.
Man bites dog.
Bites man dog.
Bites dog man.
Man dog bites.
Dog man bites.

and the meaning would not change. Only the emphasis would be different. Names, like all other nouns, follow this rule, so there is no way a Greek would have read or heard the name Odysea in the line Danny discusses and even momentarily think what he says they might be tempted to think. They would know right away that Odysseus was the object of the verb saw, just as they would know that I was the subject of it. This possibility exists only in English, because it is not an inflected language.

There is only one such case of ambiguous contiguity that I can think of in English, (I’m sure there are many) but it comes later than Goldberg’s visit to Hammond — although readers of the book will know that this would not have been a problem for Josipovici. It is the last line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “No worst, there is none.” Hopkins writes “all life death does end”. The contiguity of life and death makes it possible to read it as “death ends all life” or “all life ends death”. It would have been an appropriate choice. The full last line is

all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Words, words, words

Ten years ago, I calculated that if I could read a book a week, I would need thirty years to read all the books in my library. And when I thought about how long it actually takes me to read one, I realised how absurd the situation was. I already had more books than I could possibly read in the rest of my life, and I was still buying more.

What did I want them all for?

I brought most of them to Greece with me, thinking that it would be difficult and expensive to get them here. I sold or traded in the ones I didn’t want any more, and bought a lot of others that I thought I’d want or need here. In some cases it was a bit of a gamble; some of the books ended up not interesting me enough.

(I once contacted an acquaintance from a Toronto, a novelist and poet, and he mentioned in his email that he had once been browsing in a used bookstore and had found all the books of his that he’d inscribed to me. I had a bit of explaining to do.)

When I came to Greece I started working full time, and the number of books I read declined. I didn’t have as much time, and when I did, I didn’t have as much energy. Over the past year, I’ve been horrified to find myself drowsing after I start reading. My eyes close and my mind wanders. I’m awake, but my eyes are closed and I’m holding a book in front of my face. I have become something which a few years ago I would have mocked.

I should start getting rid of my books, I tell myself. I look at their spines and I think I hear them laughing at me. “You think you can write one of us?” they say. “You can barely read one of us!”

When we leaving Athens to come to Crete, I got rid of a few hundred of them, to make the move a little bit easier, and because we had agreed that they would stay in one room, here in my office.

(This was taken shortly after I filled the shelves. There are others, too.)

It was difficult, almost painful, getting rid of the ones I gave away to friend, and I know I didn’t give away enough. N. says I should put shelves up on the wall across from these two bookcases, but I don’t know.

And yet, I still want to read. I feel restless if I’m not reading something. I dip into them a lot, and sometimes read several books at the same time. This invariably means I won’t finish any of them. I cannot sleep at night if I don’t open a book and read at least a paragraph. I’ve even come home late at night, so drunk I can’t walk straight, and still tried to read a bit before I turned out the light. It feels like an act of self-assertion: one last attempt, after all the demands that were made on me that day, to claim my time as my own.

So why is it so hard for me to stay interested in a book? What has happened to me that I fail to enjoy all that I know a book offers me, that I fail to enjoy what I so much want to enjoy?

It’s not laziness, because when I look back at the books that I’ve enjoyed most over the past few years, I see that they have all been relatively challenging — not escapist stuff. They are books I found compelling and something of whose composition remained a mystery to me. I read all the Coetzee I could find and grappled with the question of how he achieved his complexity. Sebald was a revelation, and yet an impenetrable mystery. I loved DeLillo’s Underworld, and White Noise and The Faces, although I soon went off him completely. Roth’s American Pastoral was gripping, but when I finished The Human Stain, I’d had enough. Vollmann’s Europe Central. Chatwin. Herzog. All of which had some sort of authority of voice, which I wanted to master.

Part of my problem is impatience. Anna Karenina was one of the best examples of what I want in a book, but at some point I put it down too. I think its length daunts me: in the amount of time it would take me to finish it, I could read two or three of the other books that call out to me, and which in the end I don’t read either. I want that satisfying feeling of finishing a book — a feeling so enjoyable that I always feel I have to start immediately on another. I want to swallow the book, and often don’t have the patience to chew through it page by page.

Is it the feeling that so few books seem to live up to their promise? I don’t want to impute to books my own shortcomings as a reader. I know not to expect from a book something it can’t give me.

I keep buying books, although I buy almost as few as I manage to read. I have learned to resist the temptation. I don’t buy books if I feel they belong to a type that’s already well enough represented in my library. I bought Josipovici because I knew the two books I ordered were unlike any other I had. Next I will buy Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. I’ve been thinking of making a separate shelf for all the strange authors whose work sets them apart for me somehow: Zweig, Bernhard, Kadare, Gombrowicz, Svevo.

I have been putting off buying the Pessoa as I had put off buying the Josipovici books. It had ceased to be a desire and become a necessity. I bought them to rid myself of the nagging desire to get them.

I don’t know how to answer the questions I’ve raised here. Please comment, and share your thoughts, insights and experiences.

Everything Passes

For some time now I’ve been finding it hard to read. I glance over my bookshelves and the books that lie there, which I know I’d enjoy if I read them, seem to repel me. I pick one up, leaf through it, and I either can’t get started, or lose interest after a few pages. I wonder if this is connected to frustration as a writer (although the writing has actually picked up somewhat). There are so many books in so many styles, there must be something there I’ll like.

For the past few years, I’ve been reading a lot about Gabriel Josipovici on various blogs, and on Spurious and This Space in particular. I’d only ever read Josipovici’s story “Mobius the Stripper” and a short story on his website. I was intrigued by everything I read about his most recent novel, Everything Passes, and by the brief excerpt I saw everywhere:

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes.

The passages are very short, and some of them are repeated, like a refrain. When you begin reading it, you’re uncertain about what it is you’re actually reading. It’s like a play, or a poem.

He turns from the window.
He begins to pace.
The empty room. The bare boards.
The sound of his footsteps on the bare boards.
He stops at the window.
He stands.
Greyness. Silence.
He stands at the window.
Silence.

The white space on the page also makes an impression. It reminds me of the bare walls and floor of the room the man is standing in. It reminds me of the glass of water in the Chardin painting Josipovici wrote about in the story on his site. (The story, I was surprised to discover when I went back to look at it again, has a lot in common with Everything Passes. The phrase itself even appears at the end of the story.)

Three pages into the novel, and I thought, “This is a breath of fresh air through my library.”

The man is in a room. We know he is suffering. A voice is trying to console him. (Whose voice it is, we’re not told, but I imagine it coming to him from the past.) He is grieving. Perhaps he has had a breakdown of sorts. His son and daughter come to visit him. He is a writer or a professor, or both. We visit scenes from his past, scenes with women he has known, friends to whom he has been a mentor, and a cousin with whom he has had a complex relationship.

We often think of vividness as a wealth of detail, but Josipovici shows here how vividness is created by a sparseness of detail. The scenes are starkly, bleakly vivid because he has erased or blocked out everything else.

He stands at the window.
Cracked pane.
His face at the window.
Greyness. Silence.

I don’t want to say too much about the book. The pleasure is largely that of allowing the pieces to come together in your mind. But I would like to give a couple of examples of how much Josipovici can accomplish with so very little.

When the son first comes to visit. The dialogue reveals the awkwardness and discomfort.

And again the room.
The window.
He stands at the window.
A knock at the door.
He turns.
The knock is repeated.
He waits.
Facing the door, he waits.
The door opens. It opens slowly.
It is is his son.
He stands in the doorway.
He says: –So.
He closes the door behind him, stands with his back to the door, looking around.
He whistles. –So, he says again.
–Have a seat.
His son laughs.
–You like it?
–Like? his son says. Like?
The window. Cracked pane. Grey light.

“Do you like it?” asks the father. What is it? So far, we have only been aware of the man and the room, so he must be referring to the room. It must be a new room, then. The man has recently moved into it, although maybe he’s been here before. (Or maybe that was another window.) The son seems reluctant to enter, stands near the door. He’s surprised or amazed by what he sees. He whistles when he sees the room. He can’t think of anything to say.

Most revealingly, he seems bothered by the question. It’s not the room which is an issue. He seems bothered by the word like. He repeats it as if to say, “How can one like something at such a time?” It strikes us that the father has a sense of irony that the son lacks, in addition to a sense of humour. The son laughs when his father offers him a seat. Perhaps he laughs sardonically. One gets the sense that there’s no chair.

We don’t know, but it’s there, hiding beneath the surface.

I feel the need to apologise for quoting extensively from such a book, but I can’t resist. One more excerpt to show again how vividly and economically Josipovici creates a scene.

In another time, the man, who we learn is called Felix, is playing draughts with his cousin. They are discussing the game, the rules, his mistakes while playing. She surprises him while he is in the middle of making a move by changing the subject:

She moves her queen swiftly over the board, collecting his pieces on the way and piling them up at the side.
–I saw you, she says.
–What?
–I saw you at the bedroom window.
–What do you mean? he says.
–You were looking at me sunbathing, she says. You were looking at my naked breasts.
The board. His hand.
–I don’t mind, she says. It’s perfectly natural. We’re cousins, after all, aren’t we?
The board. His hand.
–Aren’t we? she says.

Josipovici seems to use repetition as a way of showing stillness and silence. We can see Felix freeze, go silent, stare at his hand while it’s hovering over the board.

Writers often like to tell you that their characters are looking at things. It’s a lazy way to direct the reader’s attention to things. They also like to tell you when a character doesn’t speak. “He gazed across the room at her and said nothing.” “She glanced out the window and saw dark clouds coming over the hills.” It’s much better to direct the reader’s attention immediately to the thing the character sees, without mentioning the seeing. (Felix spends much of the present time at the window, looking out, but Josipovici never tells us what he’s looking at or what he sees.) Instead of saying that a character is silent, it’s better to give a sense of time passing and let the reader realise that nothing has been said. We can do this by filling the silence with other things: the protagonist’s thoughts, some minor event on the periphery of the scene: what many call a “beat”.

Josipovici, however, does not fill the silence. He comes closer than any other writer I’ve ever read to actually creating the silence.

–I don’t mind, she says. It’s perfectly natural. We’re cousins, after all, aren’t we?
The board. His hand.
–Aren’t we? she says.

Green Apple Moleskine

The moleskine phenomenon has been very strange. They’re an extremely popular notebook, often for very silly reasons. I won’t go into the company’s largely bogus claims that its product is the same kind of notebook that Chatwin, Hemingway and a bunch of Left Bank poets used. The very clever marketing of Modo & Modo, the company that brought the notebook (or something very similar to it) back in 1998 after a 12-year hiatus and — most importantly — bought the rights to the name moleskine, has given people the impression that if they get one, they’re tapping into some tradition of creativity.

They are, however, good notebooks, and anything that is a pleasure to write in increases creativity. But there are a number of very common complaints. They are that the covers are not durable enough, especially at the top and bottom of the spine. Another is that the paper is not very good for fountain pens. Flexible pen nibs will result in feathering and will bleed through to the other side of the page. Another complaint is the price. Here in Greece, the small one goes for about 12€ and the large one for 16€.

There are a lot of imitation moleskines by companies trying to cash in on the craze, but they almost always fail to capture all the advantages that moleskines have.

But yesterday I found one that’s even better than the “original”. It’s by GREENAPPLE. More on that later.

It has everything the moleskine has: the elastic band, the pocket at the back, the bookmark; the only thing it doesn’t have is the form on the inside cover to write your name and address, which is hardly necessary anyway. The cover is much more durable, since it’s not oilcloth, but a sort of fake leather, and the binding is much stronger. Even the elastic band is better. If it has any disadvantage it’s that it opens up only slightly less flat than molelskines do. But only very slightly less.

The paper is the same cream colour, and is perhaps a little thicker. Unfortunately, it’s not any better for fountain pens. I inked up my old Waterman Ideal, which has a very flexible nib and a very wet line, and it feathered and bled through. I used my Lamy AL-star, which is an ideal fountain pen for moleskine paper, and it was fine. In the picture it seems to have bled through, but it really hasn’t.

Now, here’s the best part: the price. The small notebook was a mere 3.80€ and the large one only 6.80€. They come in different colours, too. There’s a blue one, a dark brown-nearly black one, and a nice burgundy coloured one.

And here’s the worst part: I can’t find them online anywhere. I’ve been able to find a company that produces Green Apple notebooks, but they don’t seem to have this particular notebook. I’m not even sure if it’s the same one. The logo doesn’t seem to be the same.

If anyone knows anything about this company or this notebook, please let me know. They produce a very good product for a very good price, and deserve to be more widely known.

The imaginative space

In my experience, the single question most often asked during question-and-answer periods in university auditoriums and classrooms is: “Do you write with a pen, a typewriter, or what?” I suspect the question is more important than it seems on the surface. It brings up magical considerations — the kinds of things compulsive gamblers are said to worry about: When one plays roulette, should one wear a hat or not, and if one should, should one cock it to the left or to the right? What colour is the luckiest? The question about writing equipment also implies questions about that ancient daemon Writer’s Block, about vision and revision, and, at its deepest level, asks whether or not there is really, for the young writer, any hope.

As any writer knows — both the experienced and in the inexperienced — there is something mysterious about the writer’s ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is “hot,” an invisible wall seems to fall reality into another. In his noninspired state, the writer feels all the world to be mechanical, made up of numbered separate parts: he does not see wholes but particulars, not spirit but matter; or to put it another way, in this state the writer keeps looking at the words he’s written on the page and seeing only words on a page, not the living dream they’re meant to trigger. In the writing state — the state of inspiration — the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again. This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things — sees them clearly — and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead. This is the process he must learn to set off at will and to guard against hostile mental forces.

John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist, pp 119-120 (Gardner’s italics)

Writers are often asked: “How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?” But the essential question is: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas - inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”

Doris Lessing,  Nobel Lecture, 2007

Mitar’s Childhood

In my early years in Athens, the best thing about my job was that students had lessons twice a week — Mondays and Wednesdays, or Tuesdays and Thursdays — which meant that Fridays were free. All we had to do was go in for a half-hour meeting at 1.00. Raymond, the director of studies, would write the syllabus for the following week on the board and we would copy it down. Then we would all go to a nearby cafe-bar for a few beers.

(The cafe-bar, photo taken at a much later time, after we had stopped being regulars.)

Sometimes I would bring a magnetic chess set and Raymond and I would play a game or two. I always had the advantage in the opening but Raymond almost always managed to turn things around late in the middle game and win. This frustrated me so much that I took to recording the moves as we played so I could analyse them afterwards with the help of my Fritz program and see exactly where and how I had gone wrong.

One Friday the group broke up earlier than usual and I stayed behind to look over the chess game on my own. While I moved the pieces around over and over at the crucial point where I had lost the upper hand, I had the unmistakable feeling that someone was watching me.

A boy of about seven or eight years, whom I’d often seen selling little packs of tissues, was leaning against a nearby table. He often came into this cafe-bar. He had large blue eyes, and a few freckles scattered across his cheeks and his round, slightly wide nose. His short blond hair had cowlicks, and would probably be curly if he grew it long enough.

Once I looked up I thought he would ask if I wanted to buy some, but he was too busy looking at the chessboard. He approached slowly to get a closer look at the board. Did he know the game? Or was he interested simply because he knew it was a game?

In Canada I’d seen a lot of homeless people, and many of them teenagers. They came from all over the country to find work in the big city. They would sit on the sidewalk with their belongings in bags and with dogs curled up next to them. Many were kids who had probably fallen out with their parents. I often had the feeling they chose to live like this, and would some day soon enough find their way back into the world of houses and warm rooms, go back to school, or get a job.

But in Athens, things were different. There were a lot of beggars, but they didn’t seem to be homeless. At night they always went off somewhere and disappeared. The main difference, however, was the kind of person on the street. They almost always came from some other Balkan state. If they were Serbs they would hold up a paper icon to appeal to our Christian sense of charity, and to remind us that, unlike our other neighbours, they were our Orthodox brothers and sisters. They would also hold up a piece of cardboard on which they had written I AM SERBIAN in misspelled Greek. Or they would say how many children they had and needed to feed.

And there were the children, playing the same songs on the accordion or harmonica or looking at you sadly as they held out their packs of tissues, lighters, or key chains. People said they didn’t get to keep the money you gave them, that they worked for somebody who took everything they made. Some people had even told me they’d seen the person, waiting up the street, take the money afterwards.

(This sort of thing seems to have become a big business here in Greece. Organised business. Here in Heraklion, amputees started showing up this summer, waiting at traffic lights to come out on their crutches and ask for change. Sometimes within a kilometre you would see four or five of them, sometimes a couple at one intersection. Then, on another day, they’d all be gone. I’m not suspicious by nature, but I can’t help but feel that someone’s actually shipping them in and picking them up again afterwards.)

“I feel so sorry for the kids,” people would say. “But I don’t give them any money any more. If I could be sure they would keep it or it would go to their family, I would give it to them. What’s 50 or 100 drachmas, after all?”

I had seen this blond boy many times around Pangrati, my old neighbourhood in Athens, often with other kids. A lot of immigrant children would hang around Mesolongi Square, usually playing football. I thought of him as belonging to the area.

He came and stood next to my table and leaned on the wooden armrest. I moved the pint glass away into the centre of the table and pushed the chessboard closer to him.

“Do you know how to play?” I said.

He shrugged. Did he understand the question? The shrug made me think that the question was somehow naive.

“What would you do next?” I said.

He laughed, very quietly. Just a breath of a laugh, little more than a smile and another shrug. Perhaps he laughed at the fact that I had asked him. He picked up the bishop. Almost embarrassed, though, he put it back down, careful to set it on the same square.

“Do you know what it’s called?” I said, but then I thought he might not know it in Greek. “Do you know how it moves?” Again he shrugged. He looked up at the door suddenly, as if remembering something. I had the sense that he was going to walk away.

Sometimes you see a dog or cat that are so hungry that they’re willing, despite their fear, to approach you. That’s what it felt like with this kid.

He pointed to the board and moved his finger back forth diagonally.

“Right,” I said. “And how about this?” I showed him the knight. He frowned. Was it because he couldn’t remember it or because he couldn’t explain it? (Try explaining how a knight moves. It’s not easy. I know of some concise descriptions, but I’ve picked them up from good chess writers.) At last he pointed again and finally spoke.

“Like this,” he said. “A seven.”

I asked him if he wanted to play, but this time I lost him. He remembered the other tables, and the bar, and slowly went off to sell his tissues. Then he was gone.

The following Friday I took my chessboard with me even though Raymond and I were not going to play. I stayed behind when everyone had left and set up the pieces. I had taken a book with me, Alekhine’s games, and played out the some of the annotation. But my mind wasn’t really on it. The truth is that I wasn’t good enough at chess to understand his annotations.

Soon enough, the boy came. I thought I saw him look for me when he came in. Or maybe it was the look of recognition when he saw me. I nodded to him. This time he made his round of the cafe. The Argentinian woman who worked there often gave coke or even a sandwich to these kids, which made the place popular with them. He came to the table, unwrapped his sandwich and started eating. He was intrigued by the book, especially by the tiny chess fonts. I set up the pieces to the initial position and turned the board so that the white pieces were in front of him.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Let’s play.”

He frowned. Was he thinking of his first move, or was he trying to decide if he should play or not? He seemed to have reservations. I waited. Finally, he picked up the King’s pawn and moved it forward two squares.

We only played part of a game. About ten to fifteen moves into it, he got restless and left. I don’t remember if he said why he was leaving so suddenly, or if we spoke at all. I wrote down the position so that we could continue the game from where left off the next time I saw him. But he didn’t come back.

I didn’t see him again until about a year later. M. and I went for a walk down to Zappeio and there was a photography exhibit there. We walked around looking at the large black and white photos, and there he was in a group of portraits, with the same serious, guarded expression. I asked M. if she remembered him, since she often came to the cafe-bar with us, but she had no recollection of him. I looked around at all the people strolling about looking at the photos. I wanted someone there to recognise him, to know who he was, so I could tell them that I used to see him often, and had even played a little bit of chess with him.

This was all about ten years ago.

* * * * *

One day I read in the newspaper that hundreds of children had disappeared from the streets of Athens, most likely sold by the child trafficking rings that had brought them down in the first place. Did it happen all at once, or slowly, child by child? Had anyone been paying attention? “Yeah, you’re right!” people said. “I hadn’t noticed it at first, but it’s true: you don’t see them around any more.”

According to Terre des Hommes and other organisations, up to 150,000 children of immigrants have been forced into child labour in Greece, usually selling tissues and trinkets. After years of pressure, the Greek government finally started doing something about the problem, but you still see a lot of children on the street, children even younger than the blond boy whose name I never learned.

Over the years, I tried to write a story about him. I made him Serbian and called him Mitar, a name I picked up from a friend years ago in Canada. I filled pages in notebooks about him, about his story. In all of the notes, he is at an intersection, at a crossroads; a change is coming, and it’s the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him next because I’ve never written beyond that point. I don’t know how the story ends. Everything is frozen, like the image of him that I saw at Zappeio long after he had disappeared.

All I have is my own image of him, of his interest in the game of chess and desire to play, but his hesitation, his fear of opening up, or perhaps his sense that, despite his youth, the desire to play was pointless, as if he had already learned that what the rest of us call childhood was nothing more than a delicate myth, which for him had long since shattered into a thousand little pieces.

Working For Happiness

Work has been difficult. In Athens I used to teach one level only, to university students. They were three-hour classes, the same lesson Monday and Tuesday, and another one Wednesday and Thursday. That meant that over a two-day period, I might do the same lesson four to six times, for a total of 12 to 18 hours. It could be boring at times, and voice often grew hoarse, but I had reached the point where I could do it in my sleep, and I liked knowing I could still do it well.

But now, I do four or five one-hour lessons a day, and very few of them are repeated. Out of my 25 hours a week, I do at least 18 different lessons, and they’re mostly with young children. I have so little experience at this that I have to do tons of planning and preparation and marking. For the first time since I came to Greece ten years ago, I hate my job.

Since the summer I’ve got married and our life has improved considerably, and we’re still only getting settled. But in one particular foul mood I told N. that I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up having happier memories of the year I was unemployed. “This is our first year of being married and I don’t have time to enjoy it,” I told her.

And the writing has ground to a halt. I write so little now that clichés like “ground to a halt” creep into my writing. I think about the ultimatum I made and I wonder if I should just take out that old dream and put it out of its misery.

Yesterday I learned that my boss has calculated my monthly salary at four weeks. October was closer to five weeks, though, and I got paid 20 hours less than I was expecting. This actually works in my favour over the whole year, especially at Christmas and Easter, when I only work two weeks a month, but I was quite angry and started thinking about finding work elsewhere. I decided I would do only the bare minimum of work from now on, and even cut corners. If I’m still teaching next year, I’ll take fewer hours, so I can concentrate on private lessons.

I ran a couple of errands in the centre yesterday while I waited for N. to finish work. I like the centre and had really begun to miss it. I had a coffee in the square next to St. Minas church. Then N. and I went shopping and on our way home we bought a couple of lavender plants to put in the garden. Later I went outside to wash the car before it got dark. I stopped for a moment. I looked at the light coming through the leaves of the almond and apricot trees and could smell the spearmint growing to my right. On the ground to my left was a crawling plant that is full of flower buds — buds I was surprised to learn this summer could be picked and pickled as capers. Beyond were some olive orchards and the distant mountains.

And then, without warning, I felt, despite everything, that I was happy. This moment, made up of so many seemingly insignificant things, had been enough to save everything. I thought of telling N. when I went inside and I imagined her laughing with a touch of cynicism and saying, “Well, you’re easy to please!”

And I thought, Am I? I’d love to have enough money so that I’d never have to work another day, but who wouldn’t be happy with that? That would be easy. But the stretch of road that had brought me to stand in the garden at that particular moment had been a difficult one. Happiness, even a moment of it, can be hard work sometimes.

Insurance

Last Saturday I went to pick up N. from work and was parked on one of the busier streets in the centre of Heraklion. I found a place to park in front of a church, by a square. Across from the square a couple of streets emptied out into the one where I was parked.

It was two o’clock. A girl was on her moped next to the car in front of us, which made it very difficult for me to get out. When N. arrived I started the car and lightly honked at the girl to move. She was talking on her phone and gestured to me to move around her. I honked again, and she gestured again. I honked a third time, and she gestured a third time. By now, I was pretty angry. I should have reversed a bit to cut the angle — I’m sure I had enough room. If I had done so, I would have avoided what happened next.

I had signalled that I was going to turn right (it was a one-way street) and had looked ahead and back and there were no cars coming. But I didn’t look to my immediate right. I turned and then went on a head. A couple of seconds later — I think — I heard a bang and N. gasped. Two girls on their moped were up against the right-hand door. I had hit them.

They wobbled along for a bit, maybe hitting a few cars that were parked on the right side of the road, trying to keep their balance. Then they crashed into a parked car and fell to the ground.

The next thing I remember is that we were outside and the girls were trying to get up. They made it to the sidewalk and sat down on the steps of a shop. I remember seeing oil running out of the motor of the moped. My car was in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. N. was asking them if they were OK. I was trying to say something, but couldn’t speak. Anything that came to mind seem feeble, even pointless. What can you say? “I’m really sorry about that! Are you OK?” All you can think of is, is there anything you can do?

I ran to the car and parked it further up the street, in front of church driveway. Once again I had the girl with the phone in front of me, but this time she was sitting behind and her boyfriend or husband was getting ready to drive off. It didn’t occur to me to take down their number.

Someone had brought a stool out for one of the girls to sit on. They were checking themselves for injuries. The driver, who had been wearing a helmet, had scraped herself near her elbow, and that’s all, it seemed. Their legs were sore, there would doubtless be bruises, but nothing seemed broken. The passenger had not been wearing a helmet, but had been lucky not to have hit her head anywhere.

I ran to a nearby pharmacy to see if I could get something to tend to their scrapes, but it was closed.

The woman whose car they had crashed into had just turned up. Her light was broken, but that’s all. The moped, however, was in bad shape. It looked like a write-off.

“I just got it a week ago!” the girl said.

A man standing nearby took control of the situation. “You need to call your insurance company and the traffic police to report the accident.”

I took my phone out of my pocket and looked at it.

“Relax,” the man said. “Everything’ll be fine.”

I started dialling when the girl told me to hold on a minute. It turned out she had no license plates, no insurance, and hadn’t even got her license yet. She may have passed her exams and the license simply hadn’t been issued yet. I don’t know. I called my insurance company instead. Within a few minutes, someone came to assess the situation.

N. had called her brother and brother-in-law, who both know a lot about such situations. They were on the scene very soon. Every once in a while somebody would honk from where I had parked the car and I’d have to go and let them out.

I took a look at our car. It had a small scratch under the mirror. We had hit them only once, and not very hard. It wasn’t even anything worth troubling the insurance company about.

The assessment guy inevitably started lecturing the girl about driving without any papers. “If we call the police, you’ll get fined over 6,000 euros,” he told her. She was already quite shaken up, and this did not make her feel any better.

Her boyfriend had shown up by now, and so had the passenger’s boyfriend. They took off for the hospital and left the girl with the moped behind.

The assessment guy said that we wouldn’t need to call the police if they signed a paper promising not to attempt to ask for damages for injuries. He seemed to be saying that if the traffic police didn’t show up and take down a report of what had happened, they could turn around later and claim that they were hurt much worse than they really had been.

When I was telling him what had happened, I looked back. We were quite some ways from where I had been parked, further than I was expecting. Where had I actually hit them? Had they perhaps actually come up from behind and hit me? Had they come out from one of the side streets that emptied out onto the main street? I realised I didn’t really know what had happened. I was just willing to accept responsibility because I had knocked a couple of girls off their bike.

The driver’s boyfriend started saying that there was no need to call anyone, and was trying to get us to promise to pay for the bike, which had cost 2,500 euros. N’s brother-in-law got angry when he heard this. “How can you ask for that when you’re driving around without a license or insurance? Don’t you know that that’s illegal?”

It seemed tempers might flare up. I had no real idea what was going on. As a new driver who had never had an accident before, I didn’t know what to expect from my insurance company. I knew I had blanket insurance, so we were all covered, but I knew there could always be loop-holes for the company. The assessment guy took out a form. “Do you accept responsibility?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was afraid of committing myself until I understood the situation better.

“Oh, come on!” the girl said. “You came up from behind. Just admit it.” I said nothing. I waited. Everyone kept talking, trying to sort things out. Eventually, her boyfriend took her to the hospital too.

The assessment guy and I went to look at my car. “That’s nothing,” he said, and took pictures of the small scratch.

“What should I do?” I asked him. “Get them to sign what I said, and forget about them,” he said. “If you ask me, they’re trouble. You’re trying to make things easier for them, and keep them out of trouble, and they’re trying to get you to pay for the bike.”

“Do you think it was my fault?” I said.

“Definitely. But you have to decide for yourself whether you’re going to admit it.”

I admitted it then. I wrote out a description of what happened and accepted responsibility. Then we went to the hospital to see how the girls were doing. It was now 3 o’clock.

When we got there, they had done some tests, but were waiting to get them looked at. X-rays, blood tests, things like that. The passenger was very cheerful about the whole thing. She was in Crete for two or three days only, and thought it was funny that she should manage to find time for an accident. She lived in Santorini. The driver was still shaken up. We asked her if she’d sign the paper, and she said, “Write it up and I’ll sign.” Then she went off for more tests.

Her family started showing up. Her mother, and two brothers. They had spoken to a lawyer, who had said that she wouldn’t have to pay a fine if we went to the traffic police. Somehow the situation had altered: they seemed to think that we didn’t want them to go the traffic police to report the accident. We kept telling them that we didn’t mind either way, it was for their good that we weren’t going.

I also realised that they didn’t know that I had accepted responsibility for the accident. When I told them, they didn’t really believe me. Her brother, a rather aggressive guy, said he wanted proof. I took out a pink slip the assessment guy had given me and handed it to him, but it didn’t have the description of the accident. It wasn’t the paper I had signed.

“Where does it say you accepted responsibility?” he said. I looked at it. “I don’t have that paper,” I said.

“Why does it say here there aren’t any injuries?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m photocopying this,” he said, and was gone.

I remembered that the assessment guy had given the girl his cell number. “Why don’t you call him,” I told her, “and ask him yourself.”

When the brother came back with my pink slip, he called the assessment guy. He made the call down the hall. After a couple of minutes we heard him yelling so loud that doctors and nurses came running. “You bums! Where do you get off talking to me like that?”

He came back furious and told us, everyone in the waiting area, that when he asked the assessment guy why he had put no injuries on the form, he had answered with “Listen here, pal…”

“Who does he think he is, calling me ‘pal’ like that? Bunch of god-damned bums! And then they want you to sign forms saying you’re not going to ask for anything!”

It was clear now that we would have to go to the traffic police and report the accident. No agreement would be reached.

A few minutes later, my phone rang. It was the assessment guy.

“Listen,” he said. “I told the girl that if she had any injuries, she should call me and I’d make the changes on the form. Then her brother gets on the phone and starts insulting me. I’ve never been insulted in all my years on this job. My own father doesn’t insult me like that! Tell him I’m going to sue him! I’m coming on Monday to the traffic police with you guys and I’m going to file a complaint. And you’re my witness. Tell him! I’ll call you back, and you tell me what he said.”

Well, there was no way I was going to tell the angry brother that the insurance guy wanted to sue him, so I kept my mouth shut.

It was after 8 o’clock when we left the hospital. The doctors told both girls not to sign anything, which we didn’t care about any more. Now they wanted me to sign a paper stating that I had accepted responsibility.

“But I’ve already done that!” I said. It was too surreal a thread to follow, and we let it drop.

I looked at my policy when I got home, and realised I had even better coverage than I’d thought. I was even insured against people with no insurance. I also had legal coverage, so if they tried to sue me for something, they’d have to tackle the insurance company.

N.’s brother came home with us, and we ordered a huge pizza. We hadn’t eaten all day, and hadn’t done our usual Saturday shopping. We opened a few cans of beer. A wave of relief washed over me. I understood the situation now, knew where I stood, and knew that nothing could happen to me. I wasn’t going to get in trouble.

And it occurred to me that there was something insidious about the situation. I could rest easy tonight. I could relax and enjoy myself now, even have a little party. Two girls had been hurt and would be very bruised and sore tomorrow, unable to get out of bed, and yet I had the sense that I had just escaped blame. I had done nothing wrong, because I didn’t have to pay. Someone else would take care of it. I had insurance.

Sketchy Stuff

I was drawing in my sketchbook today, something I do in fits and starts, and N. took a few pictures of me:

Then she came up with an idea: I should post the sketches on the blog. I don’t have a scanner, so I had to use a camera, which sometimes casts shadows on the page.

Allen: behind the mirror

Lately I’ve been thinking about Allen, my friend for 15 years before we lost touch. I’ve been thinking about much he changed over those 15 years, till he became something I could no longer relate to, and I’ve been thinking about how little I ever really knew him.

I met Allen in 1982, when we were both twelve. He was in my class in grade seven, which for me was the happiest year of all my public schooling. We both belonged to a small circle of friends, but I was better friends with a couple of other guys than I was with Allen. I don’t think he had very much patience for me; I probably struck him as a wide-eyed naive kid. He was more sophisticated than me. You could tell as soon as you saw him that he was different.

He was chubby and had longish hair. He wore a green jacket, much like an army jacket, somewhat in the mod style, and it had a greasy stain in one pocket where he’d put his pack of fish and chips. (They were still wrapped in newspaper in those days.) And he always wore t-shirts with the Beatles or the Sex Pistols or Marilyn Monroe or the cast of Leave It To Beaver on it. He was, as I’ve written elsewhere, precocious. He read adult literature and underground comics and wrote poetry and could speak intelligently about such things. That was the year Glenn Gould died. Gould had grown up just around the corner from our school, and when our teacher told us about him, he asked if any of us knew who he was. Only Allen did. He even had some of his records.

But he was odd, as well. He would wobble his one knee back and forth when he stood so that his whole body seemed to jiggle, and when he spoke, his sentences trailed off into a cross between an indolent mirthless laugh and a nervous mumble, even if there wasn’t anything even remotely funny in what he’d said. His vocabulary was advanced and often formal, especially with scatological humour. When asked about the grease stain on his jacket, he’d say it was a urine stain. He found proper words like “urine” and “excrement” much funnier than “piss” and “shit”, when most 12-year-olds didn’t even know what excrement was. It was as if by using these words he was deflating the dignity of the adult world and exposing the pathetic farcical nature that lay beneath the surface of it. I think he found the word “buttocks” the funniest word of all.

His strangeness could have an edge to it. The year before I met him, while he was still in grade six, he had belonged to the recorder club at school. (I still can’t picture Allen playing the recorder.) The club was supposed to perform for parents one night, and Allen didn’t want to. His teachers and his mother forced him to. So he got his revenge. When they were finished performing, he opened up his shirt and displayed a swastika that he had painted on the t-shirt underneath. His mother, understandably mortified, ran up and pulled him off the stage, trying also to pull the t-shirt off him.

Many of his friends were grown-ups. That doesn’t seem so strange now, but it did at the time, although I admired him for it, and liked the adults he knew. Allen was mature enough to hold interesting conversations with them, although I now suspect they were humouring him a little. The two friends that I’d met owned used bookshops, and one of these men, I later learned, was the son of one of Canada’s most famous poets.

The details escape me now, but gradually we became friends. In those years, I was a Beatles fan to the point of obsession, so when I saw the various Beatles t-shirts he wore I must have looked upon him as a kindred spirit. But as I said, that first year, we weren’t that close. I always felt he was mocking me a little. He was simply older than me in intellectual development.

I wanted to be a comic book artist at the time, and that was our first joint interest. He introduced me to good artists. Although I could draw quite well, it had never occurred to me to think of one artist as better than another. Allen collected artists though, not just superheroes. Through him I discovered the work of artists like Neil Adams, Frank Franzetta, Frank Miller, Robert Crumb, and Chester Brown (an Ontario artist whose self-published comics Allen collected). He read Zippy comics, Cerebus, Raw, The Freak Brothers. He had the Maus series in the original installments.

His record collection was interesting, too. If I try to remember randomly some of them, Miles Davis’s Round About Midnight comes to mind, or a couple of Richard and Mimi Farina records, or a red see-through record of Ginsberg reading “Howl” and other poems on the Fantasy label. He had a couple of Lenny Bruce records from the same label.

The first time I went to visit him at his house, I went to look at his comics, which he kept in mylar envelopes in acid-free boxes. (That was the first time I’d heard of acid-free paper, or even that normal paper had acid in it.) We sat around in his large spacious room and listened to music and talked while I also looked at the books on his shelves. His bed was just a mattress on the floor. He burned incense on a brick. He had a good stereo, too, and put on All Things Must Pass, an album I liked and wanted to get, although I never got round to hearing it again for another 23 years.

Some time towards the end of grade seven, I was riding the Queen Street streetcar with Allen and I — arbitrarily, it seems — decided to start collecting books like him. It seems strange to think that it was the object itself that drew me first, and not its content. (The desire to write came soon afterwards.) I announced the sudden decision to him and asked him to give me some recommendations to get me started. This was later in the day, leaning on a fence across the street from my house. I wrote down a list of authors he came up with on the spot: Kerouac, Burroughs, Orwell, Huxley, Joyce, Camus — a seemingly random selection of 20th century literature. And slowly I started spending my allowance on used books. And what’s strange, now that I think back on it, for a long time I would call him and tell him what I’d bought, reporting how my shelves were slowly filling up. It was as if I were an apprentice reporting to his master. Years later, when I was in university and my collection had long since surpassed his, whenever he’d come to my house, he’d casually look over my books, and if he saw something he hadn’t seen before, he’d take it out and leaf through it, often even asking, “When you did you get this?”

I must stress — and this is no exaggeration — that in those early years, Allen was my mentor, even though he was several months younger than me.

In grade eight (1983-1984), the small group of friends broke up a little in that we were in different classes. Only Allen was in my class, and this is how we became better friends. Grade eight was a very different year, at least for me. It was the beginning of a series of unhappy years at school. Peer pressure is always a problem when you’re a teenager, but I think those years, the Ralph Lauren years, were particularly conformist, not to mention expensive for our parents. (It’s no wonder that the image of Alex P. Keaton or the girls from Heathers come to mind as icons of that time.) For me those years were a tight-rope walk: I didn’t really want to be a part of it, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself; I wanted to belong and be popular, but I didn’t want to jump through hoops to be so. Allen did even less to belong, and paid for it dearly.

I don’t know why someone who never made any effort to belong should have suffered because his peers were not accepting him. Maybe something else was happening, which I never understood or even caught a glimpse of. At any rate, Allen became stranger and stranger as the year wore on. I don’t want to go into detail, but I’ll say that I was often embarrassed, sometimes even disgusted by his behaviour. One thing I will mention, which is not so strange, is that he refused to cut his hair. In the end I think he waited a year and a half before he got it cut. Although it wasn’t dirty, it just hung down. He could have tied it back or something, as so many men do now, but the way he did nothing with it made it seem like an act of rebellion, a deliberate act of negligence.

At this point, just as we were becoming better friends, I grew alienated from him, which no doubt must have made things worse.

In September 1984 we entered high school, which turned out to be a bigger, more intense version of the junior high school we’d just attended for two years. Whatever problems we’d had there also became bigger and more intense. I kept up my balancing act for the next couple of years, eventually leaving to go to another high school for the last two years when I could take it no more. Allen did not last even the first term of grade nine. He dropped out and refused to go back. His mother, a teacher, with whom he lived, was understanding and willing to wait till he found his way. His father, with whom he spent most weekends, had less patience and insisted he see a psychologist. He also wouldn’t let Allen see Rumble Fish, one of his favourite films at the time, because he was convinced that it had encouraged him to be rebellious.

When the second term started Allen found his way. He enrolled in an alternative school with students who hadn’t fit into mainstream schools. It was at this time that we really began to be best friends; now that we weren’t in the same school together, no amount of strangeness on his part could embarrass me socially. The school he went to had a lot of interesting, eccentric and charismatic teachers and students, and I wanted very much to join him. My parents, however, wouldn’t let me because they didn’t trust it academically. In a few short years, a lot of the interesting characters who went to the school graduated or just left and it began to fill up with spoiled rich kids, probably because the school had become fashionable.

Allen cut his hair and started to dress differently, in a way more in tune with the times. (The way he dressed in when he was twelve would become fashionable over a decade later.) In many ways, the people who had mocked him and found him odd two or three years earlier had caught up to him and could relate to him now. He became popular, started going to parties and clubs.

I had always kept a certain distance from everyone, seeing most of them only during school. But in 1987, the year I visited Greece, the year I found the Rimbaud pictures and my life changed, I withdrew completely from the circle on whose periphery I’d always been, and changed high schools. I never told Allen that he had to choose between me and the others, and never thought of things in those terms, but somehow he started to get tired of them too.

After 1987, something strange began to happen, although it took me some time to realise it.

I began to discover Greek music and literature and wanted to move to Greece. Allen shared these interests with me and also planned to move to Greece. I think he craved a feeling of rootedness, of tradition. Then he started to dress like me. The reason I didn’t notice this at first was because it was so gradual. For example, I remember looking at some photos of James Dean and thinking that I’d like an overcoat like the one he was wearing. We went down to the vintage clothing stores in Kensington Market and I found one that was a bit too big for me. Allen saw one and bought it too, even though he hadn’t been planning to. When we left, we put them on. My mother saw us coming up the street, dressed in these long black coats. “You look like a couple of pallbearers,” she said.

In the summer of 1988, Allen went to Greece too. Then, in September, when he got back, he transferred to the high school I had changed to, and it was only then, when someone pointed it out to me, that I realised that he was becoming me. I didn’t dress unusually, but I did dress somewhat unlike people my age. I dressed like an older person then (nowadays I look younger than I really am), in a tweed jacket. And so did Allen. My mother, amused by all this, would often say, “If you shit purple, so will he.”

I suddenly got embarrassed by him at school again, and kept my distance from him for a while. I remember the day this girl I knew was commenting on all of this as we were walking down the hall. “I’ve created a monster,” I said as we turned the corner. Just then Allen was standing in front of me. I don’t know if he understood what I had been talking about.

He must have realised the transfer had not been a good idea, and soon he changed schools again. After that things were all right again. He slowly started at least to dress less like me.

Allen had been with me during those feverishly formative years between 1987 and 1990, during the Rimbaud fascination, the discovery of Greece and Greek culture, and he shared in all my enthusiasms. He took them on too. I had become the writer, not he. I was now introducing books to him. Slowly, our roles had reversed. I had become the mentor.

I wonder if my passions were too much for him. Something happened to him during those years. He lost something, his brilliance and his originality. A flame went out.

I graduated from high school with mediocre marks, but spent a year upgrading them, and just managed to get into university. Allen, who had always and effortlessly done well in school, also got admitted to university. We both started at the same time.

Whereas I flourished and enjoyed myself, Allen drifted with no sense of purpose and dropped out in the first term, early enough to get a partial refund from his tuition fees. He decided to try again the following year, 1991-1992, but the same thing happened, only more quickly. And that was the beginning of the end for him.

University had a powerful effect on me. It matured me intellectually. Allen and I were still best friends, listening to music together or watching films, but I couldn’t share what I was experiencing in university. He lost interest in books and could barely read any more. He’d start books and abandon them. He wasn’t interested in getting a good job; he worked in a teleresearch firm, and would save up enough money to float through periods of chosen unemployment. If I remember correctly, somewhere around 1992 or 1993 he went to Greece again. Although he never said so, I think he may have been disappointed somehow. His passion may have cooled, but he had nothing to replace it with, nothing to move on to. He still listened to Greek music, read Greek poetry, but somewhat half-heartedly.

He became lazy, without any direction or ambition or motivation. He’d sprawl out on the couch and watch TV all day. He got fatter. And he developed the annoying habit of yawning loudly at least once or twice a minute.

His mother sold their house around this time, and he had to move out. He rented a room from one of the adult friends he’d had back when he was twelve. Eventually, his mother agreed to let him move back in with her in her new house.

At some point in 1996 I found I couldn’t relate to him any more. I saw less and less of him. He depressed me and the yawning got on my nerves. In January 1997, on the night before I left to come to Greece, I called him to say goodbye. It had been weeks, perhaps even months, since we had last spoken.

I wrote to him when I got here, but he would barely respond. His letters were short notes written in block letters. When they stopped coming, I wrote to him and said that if he didn’t write to me as well, I doubted our friendship would be able to survive. (This was still two or three years before I went online, and I don’t think Allen has ever done so.) I decided that as his friend for all these years, I would be honest with him and tell him it was time he’d got his act together. His reply was brief:

DEAR TOM

I’M SORRY BUT I AM UNABLE TO RESPOND TO YOUR LETTER AT THIS TIME.

And that was it. He did actually try to write once more, a few months later, saying that he would now “BE ABLE” to write more often, though he didn’t explain why he was able to now, or what had prevented him before. The rest of the short letter was nothing more than brief notes about impersonal news and inconsequential information. The only thing I remember is his mentioning that John Fowles had recently visited Canada and was depressed by its lack of wildflowers.

I never heard from him again. I probably only wrote back once myself. In December 2000, when I returned to Canada for the first time since I’d left, I didn’t even call him. I didn’t have his mother’s new number. I ran into his younger brother one day and he told me nothing had changed: Allen just lay around on the couch “collecting static”. He gave me their number, and said, “You’ll probably have to leave a message first. He’s developed a habit of not answering. He just looks at the call display and waits to hear the message.” Hearing that put me off the idea completely. I visited again in 2003 and 2004, and still couldn’t call. By that time, too much time had passed.

Although Allen and I spent a lot of time together, we weren’t really close. We were the kind of friends who could sit around for long periods of time in silence, each doing his own thing, and I really enjoyed that. We were comfortable with that. But we never really confided in each other. As a result, I often wonder now, was something bothering him all those years? Something that had caused problems for him when he had dropped out and wouldn’t get his hair cut? I can only guess now. After all these years, Allen is a mystery to me.

* * * * *

Last year, I began exchanging emails with Paul, another friend from those early years in the eighties. We were reminiscing and I mentioned Allen. Paul started to tell me his view of Allen from the years 1987-1988, and how he had decided to keep his distance from Allen too.

A get-together at my house with A.S. and his girlfriend. Allen was so drunk, walking around my street in the middle of the night spinning his underwear over his head - that terrible naked appearance only a man can have - shirt on, socks on and nothing else.

Another time, it was New Year’s Eve. After this incident I wasn’t hanging around him much anymore. It felt like a dividing line for some reason. That could be because I am looking back at it. I have not thought about these things in years.

Anyway, it was a New Years party at Matt’s house and I invited Allen to it. I had just begun to hang out with a new group of people in the dramatic arts program, and was getting involved in that program more and more. Allen had this huge glass jug of either homemade wine or the very cheap stuff. The glass jug was huge. Like a jug from a hillbilly band…

Anyway, Allen was being his usual anti-social self and was drinking and spewing off things that I’m sure he thought were cryptic and Morrisonesque. They weren’t. I remember trying to get him involved in conversations - trying to get him talking to girls etc. At a certain point he became so loaded that he started pouring this cheap red wine over all of the girls’ heads. Not the boys. I found that strange at the time, but now I tend to think that he wasn’t so loaded that he couldn’t figure out that he would have gotten his ass kicked if he had. There were all different types of people at this party - dramies, jocks, M.J. and all of her friends, older, big jocks.

He was stumbling around leaning on girls and trying to pour wine over their heads. They were all dressed up as well, seeing that it was New Years. He was wrecking their clothes. I look back on this and see that some of these kids had summer jobs and weekend jobs and bought their clothes - you know, worked for them. I think Matt kicked him out… but I can’t be sure of that. I am pretty sure that I got him home or he stayed at my place.

That was it, really. But I was trying to make a good impression and he fucked it up. People would ask me about it for months after. What’s wrong with your loser friend etc. I always felt a little sorry for Allen, but that was it for me. Allen had a way of really annoying the hell out of me. You know, pushing things too far. And after that - I may have hung around with him, but I was pretty much through.

Then the next year - we totally lost touch.

Did Allen experience any trauma in his childhood? I don’t want to speculate - maybe not. But if this whole double way of behaving and his ultimate 15-year couch-nap tells me that there is more going on than just a lazy poet.

I do think he had an aura of something different around him - but I really just think he was sick. And he never wrote anything from what I remember and he never really did anything. Never had girlfriends, etc. Just very sad. Very little living experience.

When I expressed amazement at how differently he acted around Paul, Paul wrote back:

It makes more sense in light of what has come to pass - that the real Allen was the drunk, incoherent, attention-seeking guy and maybe the fake Allen was the one you knew. Who the hell knows. See that was the last Allen I knew and then I hear what ends up happening to him and I am not at all surprised.

* * * * *

I met Allen twenty-five years ago. I last saw him ten or eleven years ago. In my mind, though, he lives in a place frozen in time, a place of arrested development. I want to break the silence, find his mother’s latest address and send a letter, or call, but it would be awkward. If I was in Toronto I’d be scared to see him. How has the past decade been to him? How obese will he be? How much will he have aged? If Allen had become nothing more than a reflection of those around him, what would I behold now? Would I recognise him at all?

The Book of Faces

I had been planning a post about Facebook, and wrote some thoughts down, but then a few weeks ago, somebody I knew in high school posted nearly 200 photographs he’d taken of people in the halls and in classrooms, and a second post emerged. I’ve divided them up, because they represent two different ways of looking at it.

1.

I find the faces of people I knew when I was a child or a teenagers. Sometimes the person I knew is hiding behind behind the skin, peering out from the eyes. We are all approaching 40, and all, to varying degrees, showing the signs of age.

I wonder what they think when they see me. I’ve put on a little weight, which shows in my face more than anywhere else. There’s a freshness gone from my skin, but generally I don’t think I’ve aged much in the past twenty years. I look at pictures of myself back then, and I just seem thinner.

But there are some people there I can barely recognise. And it’s not because their present faces don’t conform with the faces that had been frozen in eternal youth in my mind. In most cases I can’t remember how they looked back then. The only moment of recognition is when when I see their names. The faces are strange, someone else, barely the shadow of who they once were.

And yet others remain very much as they were when I knew them, as if they have only changed their haircuts. I wonder why some have aged more quickly than others. Have they not treated themselves well, or even abused themselves? Has luck been not as kind to some? Too much stress and worry can make them look old and tired and can lead to being overweight.

Have some of us refused to age emotionally too? I still feel as I felt 20 years ago. (I feel more confident and less anxious than I did then, so perhaps I even feel younger. Only my body feels older, more sore in the morning when I get out of bed. And there’s a bit of grey in my hair.)

I began to imagine a real face book, a sort of atlas of a person’s life, built up over time, where you could turn the pages and see on each one how a person’s face progressed and aged and decayed. Before I got my digital camera, I planned to take one picture of myself every day, to record those changes, the fluctuations in weight, or how my skin grew dark or pale through the seasons. But I never did. Or at least not yet.

I think I’m more interested in seeing change after it has passed unnoticed, in being surprised by it. I want the process removed, with only the results to show. A.W.’s father, a photographer, had come up with the idea of having all the residents of a street stand out in the front of their houses as someone drove down and filmed them all. The idea was to put the film away and see how many people were still there ten or 20 years later.

2.

There are faces of those I haven’t even thought about in years, faces I’d forgotten until I saw them again, but they are different now. It can’t be a trick of memory because my memory hasn’t been exercising itself on them all these years. They’re younger and fresher and more alive. Why would I expect them to be otherwise? Did I expect them to be pictures of Dorian Gray? Did I expect their faces to grow older on film as mine has in reality, in life, since then? I must have. Why else would I be so surprised to see them now?

Or is it because I felt so much wearier and older then (I’m sure we all did) that I’m surprised to see what fresh children we actually were on the outside? I look as deep into the eyes as I can now for signs of the corruption I was so sure was eating us up inside, but it’s not there. Just sweet lovely youth.

If those faces could see us now, if those children could see the 40-year-olds we’ve become, would they also be fooled, see age and weariness in our faces and think them a reflection of our souls?

It occurs to me though that it was all in my head; I had projected that sense of corruption on others. They would all say to me now, “What are you talking about? You’ve got it all backwards. We always felt young and free and fresh.” It makes me sad. I want to go back and get it right, to open the windows of my poor misspent youth and let in the light and fresh air, the light that I later followed here and which has come to fill my life. My face is not among those I see, but if it was, I would apologise to it. For years I had blamed my youth and said it was black. But wasn’t my youth — it was me all along. I was green and didn’t know it. I don’t want to go back, but I want to give myself happier memories. I want to put myself in those pictures among all those faces I wish I had known better.

You, the universe

I’ve never published a book (there were a couple of chapbooks back when I was too young to know any better) but I’ve been able to imagine the sense, which published writers often describe, of letting their book go into the world, of it not belonging to them any more, but to the public. You don’t know who’s reading it, or if anyone is really reading it at all. Maybe you hear from a reader or two, or are approached by someone at a reading or book signing.

Writing in a blog is similar in this respect, although there is greater opportunity for readers to leave comments, and stats trackers can give you even more information if you’re interested. WordPress doesn’t give very thorough statistics, which is for the best, really. When I was on Blogger I had a better stats service, and like many people I often spent too much time looking at them. I knew that there was someone in Toronto who read my blog often and they got to it by googling my full name, and that they did this from a public library computer. I sued to wonder who this could be. Was it someone I’d lost touch with? If they read the blog, they could easily get in touch with me again. Was it someone who knew of me, but didn’t know me well enough to contact me? This was a particularly intriguing thought. Recently somebody linked to my Meteora post on a travel discussion board and said, “Here’s some pictures a guy I know took last year.” But I can’t tell from this person’s name who she is, and where I know her from. Perhaps I don’t really know her, or perhaps I know her and she’s not using her real name.

It doesn’t pay to think about these things too much. You’ll waste your time and probably driver yourself crazy. I remember one blogger actually putting an end to his blog because of all the time he was spending on this kind of stuff.

For a number of reasons, I don’t write here as often as I used to. But whenever I get a new link, I get a short-lived urge to start writing more regularly again, to keep up the numbers (i.e. the interest). But I don’t act on it.

The best reader is an imaginary one, one you have in mind as you write, as if you are writing that person a letter. (Of course, this reader need not be imaginary. You can write to someone you actually know, someone you feel understands you.)

A couple of nights ago I was listening to the latest album by Thanasis Papakonstantinou (Θανάσης Παπακωνσταντίνου) and when I got to the tenth track, “You, the universe”, I heard the sound of a dial-up modem, then the beginning of the music, and then a voice reciting words and phrases:

A Casa d’Irene
Academia Nervosa
Accidental Kitty
Anatomy of Melancholy

It was a list of Greek blogs. When I heard mine, and others that I’ve read since I started keeping one, I felt very strange. I can’t help associating those blogs, and even mine, with the front room of the apartment in Athens where I wrote and read them. It struck me that this act of posting things and reading others’ posts, leaving and receiving comments and sometimes even emails, activities which were essentially acts of communication, all along had felt like a private activity. Suddenly, hearing those names in a piece of music I felt as if something that belonged to me had been flung out into some brightly lit public place where people would be hearing of them for the first time. (Never mind that most people, unless they know the blogs already, won’t know what they are.)

And then I thought, does this mean that Papakonstantinou, of whom I am a fan, has read my blog? What about his occasional singer, Socratis Malamas (Σωκράτης Μάλαμας), whose music I love so much? Who knows? Something even more unusual and unthinkable has already taken place.

Reading Jealousy (6)

When I finally finished Jealousy a few months ago, I wrote some notes but never got round to posting anything. I got more interested in it towards the end, but it still it didn’t leave me with much. Here are some of the notes I made. They are basically my thoughts straight onto the paper. Some of it is very obvious, because I like to spell out what’s obvious and make sure it’s understood. Strange ideas are usually hiding underneath somewhere. Sometimes I can’t really remember what I was going on about, but I type them up nonetheless.

*****

When we read a work of fiction, we know the characters do not really exist. We don’t quite pretend to believe that they exist, because we don’t intend to fool anyone, not even ourselves, that we actually do believe this. Perhaps we pretend to have momentarily forgotten that the characters are not real, but again we don’t intend to fool anyone believing that we have forgotten. I am sure, however, that we are imaginatively hypothesising about the characters and the events: If this were true, how would he feel? What would she do next?

Can the reader or even the writer know the thoughts and intentions of a character in a fiction? This may seem like an odd question. How can thoughts and motives be off-limits to us if the person who has them doesn’t even exist? If the person doesn’t exist, then surely the thoughts and motives don’t exist.

And yet, sometimes the thoughts and motives of a character, who doesn’t even exist, are not revealed to us and cannot be known, but only when the writer has decided to draw a veil or curtain over them and to say, “This is character, which doesn’t exist, had thoughts which don’t exist, and I’m not going to tell you what they are.” Or he might say, “I’m going to pretend I don’t know what they are.” He could if he wanted to, and if he did we would have to believe him because there would no way he could be wrong. To say that he was wrong would be to believe that the characters had a reality outside the fiction, that they really existed. And we know this is not so.

(I am, of course, talking about the third person narrative voice, where the voice telling you the story is not one of the characters in it. Otherwise we would have a narrator we know did not exist, telling us a story we know is not true.)

In fact, there are only two options. A writer will either pretend to know everything, or he will pretend not to know everything. Except that we cannot talk about pretending to know or really knowing when there is really nothing to know. You cannot pretend to know something that doesn’t exist any more than you can pretend not to know it. There is nothing to know or not to know. So a writer’s two choices are really to give us details or not to give us details.

A writer must still try to create the illusion of reality. Or maybe I should say “a story-teller”. He must create this even though no one will believe it — although they may momentarily forget that they don’t believe it. And this is often easier to do when he withholds information. When he says, “I know almost as little about this character as I do about you, reader,” then that suggests that the character is real outside and beyond the confines of the story and the writer’s mind, and that the character is almost as real as you and I, the readers.

In the greatest works of fiction, the narrator who claims not to know something is observant enough to quietly and accidentally give you the details you need so you can see for yourself what the narrator doesn’t or can’t see or understand.

How far can a writer take all this? How do we take Robbe-Grillet’s apparent point of nothing being knowable in his fiction when our first assumption, our premise, is that there is nothing to know anyway? We have only a writer who agrees or refuses to create details.

Is there any point in claiming not to know everything about something you yourself have invented? The point that that’s how life is is too obvious to need making. Besides, art is not life, and this sounds like art that is trying to preach or teach a lesson.

So, in the end, it’s a question of simply creating the illusion that there is something real beyond what we behold in the book. Writers who use this technique never actually say, “I am going to create an incomplete picture and thus make comments about how you perceive it.”

*****

On page 96 of the Grove edition a centipede is killed in the bedroom, and not in the dining room. It is not stated who kills it — a sign so far of the narrator’s actions. Then the wall is cleaned with a hard eraser. It is not clearly stated that it has been crushed against the wall — only that “it is nothing more than a reddish pulp” on the floor — since it falls first to the tiles.

But then, on page 113, after the narrator has been describing the calendar and walls in the bedroom, the narrator seems to confuse the two scenes. Franck stands up with his napkin and kills it in the bedroom.

Does the second centipede remind the narrator of the first one, seen in the dining room? If he is confused, can we be sure there are even two of them?

There is yet another possibility. As the day progresses (the time is given at the beginning of each chapter, with the movement of the column’s shadow on the balcony) we are given descriptions of the same events over and over again. These events are, of course, not repeated, but remembered repeatedly during A…’s and Franck’s absence. Most of the events seem to have occurred the previous day, but since among this jumble of memories are both memories of their absence and their return, the remembering must be happening afterwards.

The other possibility: The narrator is in the house alone. (”A… should have been back long since.”) He is concentrating on the calendar and the walls of the bedroom. Perhaps there is a centipede on one of them, perhaps not. (The description is identical to the one in the dining room.) The narrator remembers the scene, which like a film, is projected onto the wall. He sees the memory of Franck killing the centipede, but in the bedroom where he is remembering it, not in the dining room where it happened.

If the narration occurs when the narrator is alone in the house (since he cannot be sitting on the balcony with them and remembering events which come later, after they have left) and since he also remembers their absence and return, it is quite likely that the narrator goes over all the events during a later absence.

But then on pages 113-114 the narrator describes the accident that presumably kills A… and Franck. But how has he seen it? Only what he actually sees is described, and not what he “knows”.

After this, he returns to his usual circling around the same scenes: the centipede, the balcony, the dinner, the conversations. In retrospect, it seems the crash was described once and so unexpectedly for its shock value. Why would this obsessive narrator forget or neglect to mention it through the rest of the book? If he’s trying to forget it, why mention it even once?

Another detail. Two or three times, the narrator mentions a man, perhaps a worker, bent over some water (a river?), looking into it, as if at something underwater. (In the calendar photo or painting, someone is looking at something in the water, some flotsam. It is mentioned twice.) I thought perhaps there is evidence of a crime, something the narrator has thrown in the water and is afraid the worker will find. But nothing comes of it.

In A…’s bedroom the narrator finds the leather writing case, from which she took paper to write a letter. (The narrator has described watching her write it.) He opens the case and tries to read from the indentations in the paper, from the ink blottings, but can’t. Is he simply trying to learn what the letter said, or is he looking to see if A… wrote something that incriminates him?

Then it settles back into the same repetition and ends. I’m left with the feeling that there must be some clue to the narrator’s state, even his actions, some suggestion or possibility about what he has done, if indeed he has done anything. But I read it rather carelessly, and probably missed a lot. The question of whether A.. was having an affair with Franck does not concern me, and I’m sure that it shouldn’t. The narrator himself probably doesn’t know. In that sense, when we read the book we are in the same position as the narrator is, looking and searching and suspecting and never finding an answer.

And there is the problem of Franck’s wife Christiane, who never appears. Is that because her relationship with Franck has spoiled, as the narrator’s and A…’s has? Why does the narrator give us her name, but never his own or his wife’s? Is there some secret history between her and the narrator? Does the undercurrent of guilt come from that?

Moving Home 2

We found a mover who wanted to take us down this weekend. He said it was better for him than the next one. That meant that we’ve spent our last week in Athens not going to the Cycladic Museum, for example, which is a short walk from here, and which I’ve been telling myself for the past ten years that I absolutely must visit, but locked up in the house trying to get everything in boxes by the weekend. Nothing to blog about.

So this is it.

Moving Home

Kieslowski explained that when the Double Life of Veronique was shown in the US, viewers were confused when Veronique returns to her father’s house. They didn’t understand who he was, and whose house it was. Europeans understood immediately, but for Americans he had to add a shot of her addressing him as her father.

He tells a story of when he found himself sitting next to a Polish ex-pat millionaire on a flight to the US. The ex-pat had opened a factory that made windows. He was very proud of their quality. They were the best on the market, and he guaranteed them for 50 years. Nevertheless, business wasn’t good. So he tried reducing the guarantee to 25 years. Suddenly, business improved. He lowered the guarantee to twelve years, and sales started to boom. The more he reduced the guarantee, the more windows he sold. Now they were guaranteed for a mere five years, and he could hardly produce them fast enough.

“You see,” the man told Kieslowski, “Americans like to move. No American wants to think of himself as living in the same house for 25 to 50 years.”

The European family home, Kieslowski explained, is a concept North Americans find difficult to relate to. I had friends in Canada who thought it strange that I was in my twenties and still living in the house we’d moved into when I was two, the house my parents still live in. My sister and brother-in-law are saving up to buy a house, and are living there too, so that my little niece is living in the same house her mother has spent her whole life in.

I moved out much later than any of the people I knew. I was 27. I was in university till I was 25, and I wasn’t the kind of student who could hold down a job and go to university at the same time, so earning enough money for rent in Toronto was out of the question. But when I finally did move, I crossed an entire ocean.

I still call the house in Toronto “home”, even though I know I’ll never go back to stay. I guess I call it that because my family’s there, and by force of habit. There’s a sign on the door to my old bedroom that says “Tom’s Room”. It won’t come off. My sister has her computer in there, and they all still call it my room.

I’ve lived in this apartment for the past ten years, and in a week or two I’ll be moving again. This will be the first time I’m moving lots of furniture — at least lots for me — and I get anxious about it sometimes. I keep worrying that something will go wrong and I’ll be stuck between places with all my furniture and books and things out on the street somewhere. I’m worried about the expense, which is mainly due to all my books. I’m going to try to get rid of as many as I can, but it’s difficult. I already got rid of a couple hundred of them last year when N. moved in. I’ll probably have less time than ever to read them, but it’s still hard to part with them, even painful. I’ve always liked having them around because it offered me choice. It’s hard to tell yourself there’s not enough time left in your life for some things.

So, this month I’ll be going to Wuthering Heights, only the third house I’ll ever have lived in, not counting the apartment my parents had until I was two. I’ve been to it several times, have cleaned it after builders did some work on it, and have chosen furniture for it with N., so it already feels like home. And because I tend to stay in one place, I know I’ll stay there too. I look forward to our being happy there. It will be our house; our rent-paying days are over.

Lots of other things are uncertain, though, like how easily we’ll find work, and what we’ll do when we eventually try to start our own business.

I’ve never been a very regular blog-keeper, and I’m sure to be even less so for the next few months. The house doesn’t even have a phone line yet, and we won’t actually be living in the house till after the wedding at the end of July. (I think it’s supposed to be bad luck when the house is new. Things would be a lot easier if we could, but what can you do.)

I’ll try to write a few more posts by the time we leave, most likely about how N. and I are managing to find boxes, and how we’re running around trying to savour our last few days in this city we’ve loved so much.

Seeing Savina Yannatou

Last Friday we went to see Savina Yannatou, who I’ve blogged about before. She and her band Primavera en Salonico played for two nights in a small club in Nea Smyrni, and we were lucky enough to get the centre front table, right under her while she sang. When she came out for an encore at the end of the night, M., who had seen her perform before, asked her to sing a particular Greek folk song (Γιάννη μου το μαντήλι σου) that she does in Chinese style. Yannatou looked around at the band and said they didn’t have the violin they need for the song, as well as some percussion instrument whose name I didn’t catch. M. told her she had the only instrument she, or any of us, needed: her voice. So she sang it.

She did it in a high-pitch nasally voice, and the band also gave it a Chinese sound. Two things that struck me, and continue to strike me:

1. My first reaction, although there was nothing funny or humorous about the performance, was to laugh. Rather, I wanted to laugh, but managed to control it. I have read that an essential element of humour is the unexpected, and I think sometimes we laugh once this prerequisite is satisfied, even if it’s not funny. We laugh out of shock.

(I remember once, when we were 14, G. and I were singing “A Day in the Life” in the music room at school. He was at the piano, I was on the guitar, and we were taping it. After the words “Somebody spoke and I went into a dream” he and I sang the melody differently, by accident, and the result was a harmony so surprisingly good that every time we played the tape back, I would burst out laughing at the sound of it.)

2. The lyrics and fundamental melody of the Yannatou performance were familiar enough that they had all the usual evocations of time and place, all the things that could make a song — especially a familiar one — moving. But at the same time, it was foreign, a kind of music I cannot really relate to. I don’t have nearly as many of those associations, but there were just enough for me to feel that a window had opened up onto another culture, even another life. I could imagine being Chinese, that the lyrics were Chinese, and that the melody was Chinese. It was as if I were being moved by the familiarity of something which is, in fact, utterly foreign to me.

Fear

When I was a young child I savoured the chill and pounding heart in that disorienting moment right after I woke and realised that whatever had been threatening me was nothing but a fading receding nightmare. I enjoyed describing it and trying to recreate the feeling for others, as if I were telling a ghost story.

My mother claims to have seen a possessed woman on Cephalonia in 1966 and to have witnessed her exorc