We flew into Athens late last night, drove past the vast pulsating electrical matrix of streetlights, that exude their fuzzy orange glow almost sensually, and crashed for the night in Yaya’s pad. I stayed up for a while, standing on the edge of the veranda, brooding over the city, and listening to the strange night-noises, that seem to rise from the mass of streets and flats and cobbled alleyways and immense tethers of frayed overhead wiring, as if it were a ghostly spirit – which feels like a great kicking force in your gut –always slightly out of reach from your eager grasp; never fully in sight, but somehow always there at the forefront of your senses, demanding your attention.
I woke at noon and after a refreshing cool shower I dressed and walked downtown to the Platia with Yaya for lunch. We talked casually about her recent travels to Jerusalem and Italy and her plans to visit more of this strange planet we find ourselves mortally stranded upon. She had an appointment to meet some friends in a café uptown, so we said goodbye and parted ways. I walked through the Platia for a while in the hot sun, eased by a kindly and gentle breeze that felt cool on my skin and cheeks and through my hair, it was just enough to feel warm but cool, without evoking in me a sudden chill. After my short stroll I returned to the shady restaurant to have another drink, read, write to you and watch the world go by.
At present I’m sitting at our clean and rustic table, in the corner of the outside seating area, by a hedge that isn’t covered by the shade. Its leaves are subtly fragrant and seem to fade between varying shades of yellow and green. The bright sunlight falls on them with a subtle grace that makes me wonder whether the holy, tortured, genius Van Gough – had he lived to see old age and the scars of time wither away at the corners of his eyes, so deep one feels if they look too close they might fall into them and down into the at once sombre and radiant cavern of his glorious, shining mind – if perhaps he would have travelled further on his pilgrimage for earthly divinity and eventually found his way to Greece in his old age to brood over the mythical landscape and ethereal light and let us glimpse the quivering and sacred wonder of his graceful soul through his other-worldly paintings and written expressions, his fascinating letters.
As my mind slowly awakes from this bittersweet reverie and my senses are reborn into the world I had – for a brief moment of transcendent peace – forgotten existed, I look out upon the living and breathing organism of matter that pulsates and writhes before my transfixed gaze and watch with awe as people pass by, all consumed by their own personal realities and this moment being nothing more than a dot in the grand swirling tapestry of their lives which I am blessed to observe, all of them immersed in their own private lives and struggles, full of agonising love and bittersweet sorrow and sensuous suffering and mortal joy and a myriad of hopeful fluttering’s of the heart, as the great cosmic wave of time rolls steadily on, through fantastical unknown dimensions of space, and the infinite universe expands, on and on, and I fade slowly into the abyss, painfully realising there are an eternity of eternities, all to the enormous and utterly incomprehensible extent that all I can really do, as a strange sentient lifeform sculpted from a colossal cauldron of atoms, is sit in silence and smile.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou