78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Athens again
2003-07-06   10:39 p.m.

Athens is washed in yellows and peaches at night - something about the density of the air and the types of floodlights that illuminate the acropolis and the agora. It spreads all over the city, the light, blocking out the stars and clear sky but washing over your skin, enlarging your pupils and surrounding you with the sensual and exotic.

We are sitting outside Monastiraki on a saturday night. We've exhausted our card games, and had too many nescafe frappes. Walking through the market, there is a mix of classes - both Greek and tourist - running along side each other in crowds. Since the temp's been regularly reaching 40 C each day, the slowly fading Greek Siesta has suddenly come back into full swing, with even resistant shops closing up or at least slowing down, with owners, chefs, old men and young women sitting, slumping, smoking and sipping lazily. After the siesta, a surge of people again, crowding the very market place we now tried to shuffle through with our packs.

Fine jewelry stores stack next to cheap and tacky souvenir stores, chic restaurants lie ahead around the corner from the cheap but risky Gyros take away stand.

There are well dressed, carefully made up women and men with linen suits, plowing down the steep and narrow paths on scooters - no helmets, no slowing down, women riding side saddle, fixing hair with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other.

Next to them, or backing up as they pass, are teenagers, University students, in Che Guevara t-shirts and shredded fatigues. They smile a lot, particularly at us, as they sit outside on the steps of the metro station, watching their streets come alive as the moon grows stronger.

They hold hands and gossip with techno teens or fashionistas - girls and boys so unbelievably attractive that you start to wonder how you might look in a mesh shirt with your muscles rippling out or what might happen if you mixed an assessment of antique looking jewelry with a patchy, faded denim outfit.

I have century's old dust on my sandals and in my hair, leaning back on blocks from an excavation site that have simply been stacked on the street. It's too hot but I let him kiss me all over. I worry but then get excited - the same kind of excited I get when I'm with him and we realize we have to hitch hike to get back into town from whatever crazy cliff or monastery we took the only bus out to see. The same kind of excited I get when I'm with him and we realize we don't really have a place to stay, but will figure things out as we go - a youth hostel, the Hilton, the spare room of a person we happen to meet; we'll see when we get there.

He was raised with old European values. He was the oldest son. He was taught to trust people more than I. He has surges of vulnerability and precaution, but I realize more and more that they strike most when it's most appropriate for them to. He wasn't told, like me, never to talk to strangers, accept anything from them - a ride, let's say, or a place to stay for the night, perhaps.I am grateful now for those kinds of parents - many people I knew who didn't have those kinds of parents are all kinds of fucked up now in their adult life. I wish my family could have existed though in that other kind of culture, where instead of instilling fear, it's ok to instill choice, precaution, critical thinking, and intuition.

I grew up with a certain hesitation - about crowds, about people, about anyone ready and willing to "help" - appropriate for where I live, and where I teach; not appropriate for the kind of travel I now find myself immersed in. Not appropriate in a very different culture where not everyone follows the same kinds of paranoid/selfish mottos that Americans have been taught to.

I see that it interferes, here, there - my sense of hesitation, however slight, does seem to trip me up. I feel good that I can recognize it; I've been known to stop talking to people all together because I got poisoned with their paranoia - I'd let their fear of the world seep into my brain, have a sudden realization of this fact, and then vow to have nothing to do with such a destructive person ever again. I realize, now, one of my biggest challenges in life will be to learn to trust - my instincts about people, and people, in general. Wouldn't you know, i've found the best mentor possible. I must have done something very right in the course of my decisions and my paths - they've led me to Steve.

We must leave Monastiraki, leave the heat, the dust, the colors, the sensuality; the numerous shades of Greek and Turkish skin, the varying degrees of sun-darkened tourists. We must head deep, deep underground to catch a train to Syntagma.

It gets cooler and cooler as we descend three, four, even maybe five flights of stairs to where the train comes in. I stare at the walls and wonder what's behind - a Dionycian temple? Mycenaean ruins? I wonder what was found when they blasted through this marble to create this very line of the metro system, connecting this one very unusual and at times ironic part of the city to the more central areas. I watched people collect as Steve flipped through a book about a Times reporter's journeys through Iran and Syria.

I wondered if the Greeks were amused or resentful of visitor's questions and fascinations. I wondered what they could possibly think of a country like ours, who is so new at doing what they do and yet wants everyone at the dinner table to pay the most attention to them. Men with briefcases and newspapers lean back and look philosophical as they wait for the train. Older Greek and Turkish women carrying grandchildren or groceries fan themselves and gossip, blissfully fitting in with the immensity of their surroundings. They have an air of blasé and "malesh" - Arabic for "never mind" or the proverbial shrugging of shoulders in the face of frustration and getting back to what makes one happy. I deeply want to possess this. I see that Steve has a touch of it, but hate that living in the NE of the US can tease it out of him and snuff it temporarily. It's hard to be around people who insist that the world is ending because of the traffic jam they're in, the class they failed, or the dress they can't afford - especially if they make you feel shameful that you don't obsess as they do over things or insignificant details.

Travel is the antidote. I feel stationary yet mobile in Athens - a calming, luxurious state of mind. The train will take us to Syntagma, the bus after that will take us to Spata, the plane after that will take us to Frankfurt. Eventually, another plane back to New York and the battle begins again.

I'm somehow more optimistic this time around, though; I think I've found the best cure for the paralysis I feel once home again - Steve's imagination and passion, and what he's helped me develop myself - a sense of peace, of coping, and desire.