WORLD
He had us under pressure, it’s true, from the first half
and we only just managed to grab
two or three corners
and to win a few fouls now and then.
At 43 we escaped the heart-attack through offside.
Then, when play resumed, it became clear
he’d bought the celestial ref,
some (imponderable) factors
– even the solar chronometer
worked on his hand only –
And so, on our home ground,
it was almost all one-way traffic:
with us running around like mad
enclosed in our penalty box
and with him hauling us like fish
methodically winding and unwinding the nets.
Till he gradually ran down the time.
And two minutes before the end
with a deadly scissors kick out of nowhere
he made sure it was all over.
Suddenly the rain came.
The suburb filled with umbrellas.
The Lion opened its mouth and yawned in the heavens
In the changing-rooms we hurriedly exchanged shirts
with the invisible players of “Acheron”.
Translated by David Connolly
THE NIGHT’S TOMORROW
1
Because you may have thought
that our world is made out of
infinite books
having then understood that books are words,
words are music, their sounds colors,
their hues reflections
and that we live in an illuminated place where everything
is Something Else and all of us
are for each other a peculiar
empty box
given to us in a dream, and we wake up
not exactly knowing what the use is
of this colorful gift
but we understand at once
that it is the entire world
– I am writing to you, simply, about a paper kiss.
2
Every time you travel to some different age
it is as if you see for the first time the layout
of the labyrinth
marking with ink and carbon
the thread and level of the ground of life.
This is the technique man uses to fool death.
Art is a way
to change inside you the paths of things.
Troy was not captured with chariots and devices
but with a wooden box in the shape of a horse
– of Greek manufacture in fact.
3
I look at you blossoming every spring
and with your glance catching up
the grass as it turns green,
waters illuminating the sea
opening up in front of you,
touching with your finger the words
because, as with matches, touching lights up
the brave sentiments.
So, the world’s mechanism
is rather simple:
To see darkness you only need to shut your eyes.
But the night’s tomorrow, Ariadne, is the light.
Translated from Greek by Yiorgos Chouliaras
Mammals Like Cloth Toys
AN ESSAY ON NIKOS HOULIARAS
I’LL COME STRAIGHT TO THE POINT. All his writings contain essentially the same Leitmotiv: someone running to escape a flying nightmare. And this is true, I think, of his paintings too, in many respects. Several years ago, on visiting an exhibition of his in Thessaloniki, it occurred to me that he paints real things in dreamy terms and dreams in realistic ways. And I was running to plunge into those static landscapes, seeking the comforting warmth of their ochres and, at the same time, trying to escape the overpowering embrace of their “inhabitable places”.
In most of his writings there is also an overriding innocence, which is pursued relentlessly by a flying shadow. Indeed, in the novel, Ιn My Enemy’s House, hunter and prey are one and the same. My enemy’s house is my own home. “The house I visit frequently is called memory. It is snowing in the rooms of the mind and the landscape within me is changing all the time”.
Do not imagine that an atmosphere of gloom prevails hereabouts. Quite the opposite. Humour, lyricism, pulsating life, action: all are combined with rapidity, by a remarkably flexible language, with sudden accelerations and hazardous over-takings. And his next book in particular, One Day before, Two Days after, appears to be bathed in sunlight and translucent.
Of course, in general in his works the place is invariably Ioannina; and indeed a specific area with a specific view over the specific lake, in a specific season and with specific bad weather. Even when he’s describing Athens or the Cyclades, he does so with the stuff of Ioannina. (I lived there for a period and I recognize its geography; even from the aspects of the dreams, now and again.) In any case, he states clearly:
Old daybreak
in my town, my mythical town
and the dogs, unleashed
are running beside me again.
The landscape is ardently wintry. In reality, “winter of the primary school with that warm smoke rising …”, is developed incessantly in his books. A Story of the Long Winter, in which clear Images at the Height of Life are discerned, that is Details of Black watered by the Inside Rain, while outside The Other Half is not a merciless Bakakok [“leech”] which time has in store for me, but simply The Snow I Knew; Thank goodness.
The Snow I Knew, The Tree I Knew, rhythmical versification and entitling of imperfect tense.
His flora aquatic. His fauna some strange animals, half mammal, half cloth toy. His landscape sleep: “the smooth uniform of sleep”, to be precise. “On the musical stave of sleep, birds often gather”. Almost all his texts are enacted in the Workshop of Sleep.
His time is night. A night with “running water”, almost bright, “a divine broad, a lorry out of control, on a muddy road”. “Where is she going all alone, I wonder, this woman in the night?” And “pain is a night-guard. It’s a little child; all alone”. Everywhere desertion prevails; especially in the crowd: “I felt, suddenly a void / as if I were only my coat”. (By the way: the coat is a potent psychoanalytical motif which recurs frequently, “with patches of snow”, in Houliaras’ writings.)
As a rule, his people are seeking themselves, inside themselves. In a “hidden room of the mind”, where innocence dwells. What is this innocence? It is the latent storm which every so often renews the world for you, flooding the triviality of the everyday.
Sometimes he adopts wise and witty aphorisms, thus giving a dimension of philosophy, not from the office desk but from the bowels of the earth. Because “life is for a lifetime”, he says. Apart from this “he often wears tight shoes”. “Life, very often, is only its habit.” And it is “a hell with interludes”. At which, of course, at some time one takes the decision: Life, the next time!
*
ONE SUMMER IN THE 1970s, in Kalymnos, we were getting onto, midnight, with a friend of mine, an old tub of a ferryboat. As we were crammed on the gangway with the noisy crowd that was getting off the ship at the same time, we crossed paths with a laughing, wide-browed, bearded man in sandals, who was brandishing a guitar above our heads; and I introduce them: Yorghos HouliAras, Nikos HouliarAs! The same name, in oxytone and paroxytone, surrounds two dear friends of mine. The scene recalls a heartfelt version of Doctor Livingstone’s meeting with Mr Stanley in Timbuktu. He told us they were coming from Antiparos. We were heading for Paros.
We arrive on the island before daybreak. It was our first visit, very little tourism then, darkness, we’d no idea where we were going, until we distinguished faintly a red illuminated sign in English: HELL. Always bent on passions, we say: “That’s it; We’ve reached Hell!” We come closer with a burning desire to burn alive, we exchange 666 wishes until we discover that it’s simply a closed petrol station of SHELL, the initial letter of which had gone out. Disappointed, somewhat, we went back to the port and ensconced ourselves in the chairs of a sad coffee shop, until dawn came and we took the first caique to the almost uninhabited isle of Antiparos, far away from the hellish world. We were reading novels by Josef Heller and poems of Shelley. But these things are known already from my Miscellaneous History.
All I can remember vaguely about the island was a steep climb on donkeys to reach a cave where there was Byron’s signature and a distant willowy Scandinavian girl with a reddish skirt riding up her legs, who went in front of us.
I went back recently to Antiparos, Nikos Houliaras’s outport through one of his books, and I rediscovered the island in the orgasm of summer, with wandering souls from all points of the globe, being kneaded by the gazes of the locals and with climax a “Descent into Hades” or spending “a season in Hell”: that is, a night in some faceless, totally immemorable bar.
But this book, which is inscribed One Day before, Two Days after is no memorial service. Only the title, perhaps, is a memorial service in an age in which we are reading books such as One Step forward, Two Steps back, even though for me it alludes more to Embiricos and to Today as Tomorrow and as Yesterday, in the sense of interfering in the compass at will. Either one day before we meet, or two days after, the reference point is the same: Today. Now.
The rest of the stories revolve around a common motif: A dazzled child. Dazzled by the senses, by the lights, the words, by everything. Nikos Houliaras writes through an infant’s mouth, not, of course, baby talk, childish moralizing of the kind that is called children’s literature – and which, quite rightly, children loathe – but with the gaze of the innocent whom the dazzle urges to discover with sweeping clarity. “I’m a little child from somewhere else, without a friend in the world”, he says in a latent fifteen-syllable line in another book of his.
Certainly, this does not apply only to the childhood of his heroes; the adults too, whom he describes, are children hiding in a body that is continuously escaping them, leading towards an adolescence that has not yet come. “Dense fog now hides the mythical slopes of my childhood garden with the dahlias [...] I am still a little child. A little child with snow-white hair, who traces with its finger the peaks of the mountain opposite and weeps”.
Lousias too, his first fully-formed hero, remaining a child inside an adult body, is the hero of a series of concentric narratives which end in him discovering – and revealing to us – his most precious secret: his name.
Most of the names of Nikos Houliaras’ figures remain in their childhood version, with shades of Papadiamantis: Vasilakis (Galazoulas), Dimitrakis (Mantzaropoulos), Costakis (Frattas), Photakis (Sevastokratoras), Asimakis (Lappas) and Thodorakis (Tsingris, the so-called “look”), are not children. Not even the wonderful two-year-old Damianos Philoloas, with his monologue of desperation, or the five-year-old Aris Panousis, who too is continually declaring his name; they are not children, they are “Magic pictures”: I’m not yet sure / whether it was ivy or lizards / the climbing plant / of my childhood”, he writes. Or, if you wish, all these are “the children who refuse”, those to whom he dedicates a recent book of his poems. Men lost in the margins of their mind. All of them juxtapose to the tender childish name in the diminutive an oxyrhynchian surname full of virtually inaccessible consonants: Sichlirimis, Babanatsas, Prentzas, Bavartzikis, Maidatsis, Gavanozis, Babasikas, Faroupos, and so on.
Almost all his heroes are children, or masquerade as children: Panousis, Giannas the wise guy (“a child in front of the miracle”), the Irish kid who leaves dignifiedly soliloquizing ‘Esther, Old mother Esther! Your little Dave, fifty-three years standing in this shitty life, he’s tired”. And the late husband of Antigoni Seirli “was nothing more than a child: a child imprisoned by her, who managed”, by dying, “to escape”. Even Avram “is not an old man of eighty-two years; but a young man of much greater age”.
Further on, Houliaras describes “an indoor feast with open sunsets, like those we had dreamed of when we were children …”. And further on still, “the five-year-old Giannakis Papangelis appears, who “hasn’t yet managed to say “r” and “always says “l””, transforming Antiparos into “antipalos” (= rival). One other character, a devotee of the trivial, “was not yet a radiologist, because he was only seventeen, and he hadn’t had the by-pass either. But until he was sixteen he did his turds in the potty, because each time his father, who too was a doctor, inspected them”. And Damianos Karantzas, “even though he’s only nine years old, knows everything on this pitch …”, where he imposes on himself the ultimate punishment – a penalty – which he wins immediately. This is the same person who, on growing up, develops into the so-called “bastard” and appears on the exquisite road that passes through Paradise, where mysteriously protagonist of old is Damis, whose story we learn, at last, here.
Concurrently, sprinkled throughout the book are specks of the sad tale of Silona, a little Romanian girl who carries around – from short story to short story – an invisible nightmare.
I hinted above at a certain Nekyas, a descent, shall we say, into a multinational Underworld: This is a bar which is the setting for the most prolix narrative in this book. Its habitués are various rhythm-’n-blues veterans, conscious pensioners of light, merchants of the nations which washed them ashore here, an uncontrolled wave. “The sound of the waves breaking against the rocks on the shore reached as far as here and backed old-man Hook: John Lee-Hooker, the murderer who brought up from his guts his black hoarse vowels and spewed them out, like an electric current that shocked those who were hurting”. Everything here, the music, the age, the intoxication, the invisible boredom, the insufferable eroticism, comes from another world, from an earlier temperature. Like memories of the blessed era when the mirror did not show simply the reverse side of the dream, but the Paintings of [its] Nocturnal Map, resplendent.
This book (on which I have spent longer because it is exemplary of his recent work as a writer), closes One Day before, Two Days after with a contrapuntal detail; one man who feels happy for one moment, reliving a gesture from his childhood. “No, I’m not going to tell you it” because, as he writes somewhere, “I’m sure that this is the only version of the mystery which you are ready to believe”.
This book was perhaps a novel in the type of short stories, whereas the next one is clearly short stories in the form of a novel.
The idea that life is a dream is a commonplace of literature from Antiquity. Even the version that the world is a dream of a dream (Kazantzakis); or, in the end, that we are the dream seen by someone else (Borges). Houliaras sets his Workshop of Sleep, as always, in Ioannina, and on the pretext of a dream web unfolds twenty one narrative areas between dreamy realism and sleep-walking fantasy.
He unfolds an ongoing dream in which happy or bitter incidents take place and compress, step by step, the narrator-author into the reversal of his age, until they disseminae him in a very old fairytale.
The concluding text of the book is called “The Ocean Road” and is the channel between the language of writing, which the author serves, and the meta-language of the dream, which the painter handles.
*
THE POET AND PAINTER Nikos Engonopoulos said in jest: “poets consider me a painter and painters a poet”. Nikos Houliaras has long surpassed the dilemma faced by several dualistic artists, such as Photis Kontoglou, Costas Lachas and some others, by adding, on an equal footing, to his activity as painter and author, music.
To confine ourselves, temporarily, to his role as a writer (which, too, is dualistic, since it branches into both prose and poetry), I believe that Nikos Houliaras is one of the few contemporary Greek authors who is worth reading if one is interested in following the thread of a poet who winds in the colours of our soul his angry breeze.
Within his night he carries alive the language of our history. “For years and years”, he says, “I’m torturing myself to find a way to serve life and death in the same tone”. Because “time [may] blow on us the same as it blew on us of old”, but “a collapsing moth flits about in the rooms of my mind each evening”.
And he can get no rest. Until he breaks out in a poem:
I know it. There exists inside me
something infinitely more precious
than all those things I wanted, but
never managed to do,
but it does not want me, as long as I live,
even though I live only for this reason.
I will agree that “Apart from my own unraveling, simultaneously, time too is digging its own burrow”, but Nikos, you should leave these things. That precious something that exists inside you is the rhythm of time; and it wants you madly. After all, time was always on your side. And my wish is that it will be so for ever.
Mammals Like Cloth Toys – Published in the periodical I Lexi, iss. 147, 1998, homage to Nikos Houliaras.
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