Place V

Birthplace

“It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” Rebecca Solnit

Today’s post includes some new drawings of places accompanied by a few short texts and poems.

Extract from Yiannis Ritsos’ poem, in which he captures the image of the rock, Monemvasia, his birthplace:

«Μονοβασιά»

(Monovasia is another way of saying Monemvasia, which means one way)

“The rock. Nothing else. The wild fig tree and the ironstone.

Armored Sea. No room for kneeling.

Outside the gate of the church* (dedicated to Christ) dark red in black.

Old ladies with their cauldrons bleaching the longest hooped tapestry in history

of the forty-four Byzantine arches.

The sun relentless friend with his spear against the walls

and death an outcast in this vast illumination,

where the dead, now and then, interrupt their sleep

with cannons and rusty lampposts, going up and down

steps and steps carved into the stone….”

“He went to bring his family for a tour of the village.  “Get to know our homeplace”, he said passionately to the children. Should I say my place? he wondered. MY place? He wondered a second time and sank into thought.’ Despina Kaitatzi-Houliomi

Everyone’s birthplace is the emotional capital of their entire life. Because there one lives their foundational childhood and teenage years, usually, and there one acquires for the first time a sense of self, of the other, of the family, of the neighborhood, of the language, of the sea, of the open horizon, and all these are unprecedented experiences for the person…..” Ioanna Karystiani

“Birthplace determines the images that we are made of. Which emerge involuntarily from the unconscious and are, sometimes, intentionally deposited in the conscious as signals that delineate our path in life. Because this is the only way we can (re)synthesize our personal and collective history, build our present through the past.” Leda Kazantzaki ”

Finally, two excerpts from Petros Tatsopoulos’  most recent book  (published just this month) that I’ve just finished reading:

“The ferocity is often under the skin, it is subcutaneous. If you browse the internet. Everywhere you look, you will stumble upon pockets of bigotry / intolerance. Mισαλλοδοξία (misallodoxia) is such a beautiful Greek word to capture something so repulsive: hatred of the heterodox, hatred of another’s glory, hatred of another’s faith. The internet is currently teeming with fundamentalists of all kinds. It doesn’t matter if they are Christian, if they are Muslim or if they are Jewish. They are manipulators of anger, hate, and these people seek, in addition to building, to engineer entire slanderous accusations for groups of people with whom they do not agree, they try to find every crack in the legislative framework, so that bigotry can pass through these… … I end with a remark. The State cannot and must not participate in this game of intolerance from any side. p. 101

The descendants of the enlightenment” I wrote in the News in October 2020……  they chuckle that the movement of the European Enlightenment, which manifested itself in France in the middle of the 18th century – with its main exponents – the famous ‘Encyclopaedists’ – didn’t touch the ill-fated enslaved Greece. If we judge by the result, the descendants of the Enlightenment are right: it is enough to glance at the salacious headlines of a deplorably large part of the print and electronic Mass Media to see that in terms of the level, quality and argumentation of intellectual dialogue, little has changed since the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But if we look at historical events, we will see that the Greek exponents of the Enlightmenment did not surrender without a fight. They fought a furious battle against the obscurantists, and if they ultimately lost it, they did not lose it in the realm of ideas (in that arena no one nowadays, with his sanity rudimentarily intact, disputes their absolute supremacy). They lost it in the field of power – consequently in education and society.” p. 285