As we drove down the winding coastal road, I could hear the ghost of innocent Ti Jean in my ear, whispering of that “holy white line in the middle of the road hugging our front left tire”. I could see the ghosts of Buddha and Jesus walking merrily arm in arm, with a pleasant calmness, across the mythical hills and down into a Cezanne-esque valley, to sit under a tree, by an ancient lake of joyous tears and meditate and pray and talk in low humming voices of eternity and the path into the light never actually arriving anywhere but going on and on forever just getting brighter and brighter. I could also sense the ghost of peculiar and exalted Ginsberg and Whitman sitting peacefully next to me in the back of the car, as we rolled on past the awe and wonder of the great sea beside us, weeping with joy and ecstasy at the beautiful and heavenly nature of existence itself, as they serenely recalled the words of odd genius Van Gough – “rejoice in suffering” – who I sensed was, at that precise moment, sitting somewhere within the vast cosmic void, probably alone at the peak of the cosmos smiling and crying and giggling, whilst serenading all the poor lost souls of the universe with stunning soul-images of sunflowers and night skies. I could feel myself fading through multiple dimensions and personalities, as if I were drifting through the alternate realities of Salvador Dali paintings, which had been brought to life by a future time-traveller on a mysterious pilgrimage – who became trapped in the dark ages in a dingy straw-thatched hut, brooding over his cauldron of mystical potions and chanting ancient incantations to the spirit lords of the laws of the universe – beckoning great tidal waves of cosmic dark energy, to beam him back through time, to his own reality, where his lover weeps for him in their sad and abandoned loft.
We intended to have dinner at the villa we were staying in, but the supermarkets were closed, so we drove down to the port and – sitting by the boats, listening to the gentle waves and the soft buzz of harbour-front life – we ate a traditional Greek meal in a picturesque and slightly withered family-run restaurant, which had a tender, rustic atmosphere and was run by a middle-aged couple who were incidentally teaching their young son all the jobs he would soon grow to know so well. That night, after a walk along the harbourside and the short but sweet drive back to the house we were staying in for the week, I stripped off all my clothes and, as the midnight moon shone down on me, illuminating my figure in the hollow darkness, I wandered into the cold pool. I floated on my back and looked up at the stars. The fabled night sky was as clear as a pure crystal ball or emerald or shiny new diamond and it felt like I was a disembodied spirit in the centre of an enormous snow-globe; but instead of snow, each glimmering white dot in the sky was a sacred star. Then, when I unfocused my eyes, it seemed as if I were looking up at an unutterably large black dome, in which there had been poked, by some strange ethereal cosmic fairies, a vast ranging series of holes through which angelic light streamed, beaming the glory of eternity, in all its blinding terror and brilliance, into my humble eyes to penetrate my fragile skull – like a hook – and pull my ego out of its crooked shell, to bask in its own meaninglessness and insignificance in the face of the ultimate universe beyond.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou