small request

To whoever it may concern:

I have checked the date. more than five times. I want to make sure that none turned the calendar backwards. It is confirmed: it is not the 28th of February or March but of May. This means that in three days, June and ‘summer’ will be here. Great! But .. why what I see outside my window reminds me of gloomy, miserable winter? That’s why I am writing to you (dear weather, God, Gods), like I used to do as a child- it is urgent and very important you see: Can you please bring the sun back? Because in order for me to grow, I need love, water and sunshine…

Yours sincerely,
Andromeda

A la maniere de Marcel Proust..

This is not an interview- I am just playing the game that Mia started; or that it started from Marcel Proust and lately is becoming fashionable in Greek newspapers. I am writing in English though, since I know that some of my favourite people would not be able to read it if I were to write in Greek. So, here we go:

What is absolute happiness for you?
The moment that you don’t register as absolute happiness
What makes you wake up in the morning?
A cup of strong coffee
When was the last time that you burst into laughter?
A couple of hours ago
What is the defining feature of your character?
I don’t really know
And your defining flaw?
Stubbornness, lack of patience and anger
Which mistakes can you forgive?
Those that I could have also made
With which person in history do you identify yourself?
History is not about identifying..
Who are your favourite heroes today?
Those who have no name
Which is your favourite trip?
The one that hasn’t started yet
Your favourite writers?
Dostoyevski, Kane, Τσίρκας, Σεφέρης (to name a few)
What qualities do you prefer for a man?
I’d rather be surprised but definitely I need to see a sparkle in his eye
What qualities do you prefer for a woman?
Same as above
Who is your favourite composer?
By now Χατζηδάκης
Which song do you whistle when you shower?
I never whistle- I’m terrible
A book you cannot forget?
The Idiot, Ακυβέρνητες Πολιτείες
A film you cannot forget?
Ulysses’ Gaze
Your favourite painter?
Magritte and Cezanne
Your favourite colour?
Purple of course, and these days blue
What do you think is your greatest achievement?
Everything and nothing really
Your favourite drink?
Gin n’ tonic and Guiness
What have you regretted the most?
The times I was not honest to myself
What do you despise the most?
Arrogant stupidity, lack of awareness, ungratefulness
When you don’t write which is your favourite pastime activity?
Walking around and making up stories or hanging out with my friends
Which is your biggest fear?
‘That the sky will fall on my head!’- I rarely know my fears, apart from darkness
In which cases would you rather not tell the truth?
When it’s not worth it
What is your motto?
These days, ‘let it be’
How would you like to die?
Fighting for what I believe
If you were to meet God what would you like him to tell you?
What difference would it make?
What is your mental condition these days?
As usual- hard to define.

Breath

Σ’ αυτό το πολύ βιαστικό μας πέρασμα από τη γη καθένας μας αφήνει μια ανάσα,
μια πνοή κι όλα μετά τα σβήνει. ..

what is the colour of human breath?

a little bit of everything

a little bit of everything- beat by beat-rain with sunny intervals, cold again -everyday, more young faces in silence- don’t have the memory of how it felt -getting sick of watching them but didn’t know all these places, such a great chance at the very end-a little bit of everything-rhythmic changes, but not always- lists of things to be done, more to be added, some to be postponed, some never to be done- the bag with the carnival stuff, where is it?- the voices from upstairs getting louder, not letting sleep- went off the train at the wrong stop and then was trying to find a taxi but being unable to- it was midnight but, I swear, it was plain daylight- ‘you’re going North, apparently’- a little bit of everything- gin n’ tonic and guiness, very good company-but I’d rather sit outside- plans for travelling, more travelling- ‘what are we going to do next?’- a toast, happy smiles- a little bit of everything- a new interesting book, thank you- throwing apples, efficient once- a little bit of everything- The blue beast grows despite all- structure clear or rather satisfactory- everything will end in Greenwich-then, the story is not to be read but narrated and his name will be revealed- still don’t know his name, it’s strange but understand him, or rather begin to understand him- feel guilty when don’t write- but cannot all the time- a little bit of everything- ‘small girls love pink; when they grow up, they paint their dreams either in red or in purple’; ‘this cannot be the answer; it’s too easy’- a little bit of everything- a card and a box with chocolates- café mocha, not espresso- «Μαμά γερνάω» as background music- missing, finding anew- a little bit of everything- rain with brief sunny breaks- no, today, only rain, feels like winter- please, let the sun come back; whisper a song for the sun or for a little bit of everything..

there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done/
there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung/
nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game/
it’s easy.
nothing you can make that can’t be made/
no one you can save that can’t be saved/
nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time./
it’s easy.
nothing you can know that isn’t known/
nothing you can see that isn’t shown/
nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be./
it’s easy.
all you need is love

Questions for the audience

Why are Danish called Danish?
Can someone love someone else 179%?
Why 0 divided by 5 equals 0 and not 0,0005?
What happens to the wisdom that we have as children when we grow up?
Why the train station of the town I am living has not changed at all, even though more than a century has gone by?
Where is the lovely drawing I made, wrapped in red, travelling now?

τις Κυριακές από παιδί τις σιχαινόμουνα…

An awkward combination

what happens if you mix lime and cinnamon?

May finally

wishes are not to be said
they are supposed to come true

first day of May
once more, it smells like white roses

Neeext

The perfect recipe: take a train to London, have a coffee and enjoy the feeling of a relationship that has grown so much in the last four years and be assured that this person will stay in your life.
then skip the ‘serious’ performance you were supposed to go, take the tube, let a great friend lead you somewhere you’ve never been before, find a river in the middle of nowhere- sit on a fish bench and be jealous of the man in the construction site who learnt so much about you in half an hour..
then mingle with people outside a pub, then choose another beautiful bar, have some tasty margaritas (we are going back to tequilas after all these years-still tastes great after all), laughing, and remember some of your good, old witchcraft-just a lovely day.
Result? a new motto: what’s next? (a job? a new home? a new country? a new friend?? who knows…anything, anyone, anywhere.)
Life is beautiful- not necessarily because it is, but because it happens every moment.
‘that night the blue radiance covered the city, and for the first time he fell asleep’

Radio stories

I love listening to the radio- when I was younger, I thought I could always have a radio-show. Not so much for the music but for the random things that radio producers often say in order to fill in air time, including easy tips for better living, or what I call the ‘wise thoughts of the day’.
Here is today’s example. The radio producer said, quoting some ‘philosopher’: ‘it appears that the average person abandons their efforts the moment that they are closer to success. The people who succeed are those who have the patience and perseverance to carry on even if it seems that every hope is gone; because that’s the moment they are closer to the achievement of their goals.’ No comments.. if that’s what they call philosophy, who am I to contest it? I love radio-stories; they always make me laugh.

Sonata for a Good Man

He puts on the headphones, listens, takes notes. For days and nights, years in files later on. He is living the lives of Others, he is a Stagy spy in East Germany in the 1980s. He spies a writer and his actress-girlfriend.. and he keeps his eyes open. He is not watching, he is only listening..keeping his blue eyes wide-open, in an image of fixation of the life he would never have. He goes back home, to his empty flat, some rice and ketchup for dinner, and on the TV the propaganda of the ‘actually existing socialism’, where the state ‘must know everything’.
In the German film The Life of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen), the story fluctuates between the one who cannot live and the others who do not want to live. Yes, the film is indeed a strong political statement about the violation of civil rights and constant surveillance of artists and intellectuals, everyone in Socialist Germany, which somehow reminds of the present and our surveillance. But for me, the film is more about how even those who are supposed to live, cannot actually live- the writer and his girlfriend are never free to live, and this is not only because of the oppression and the ways in which the state dictates their actions. Both of them are incapable of living; she is ready to betray him or has already betrayed him from the start; he, a typical leftist intellectual (in a cynical way he reminds me of people in other countries in other times) is constantly undecided, whether he wants to act or not, whether he can live or not- none of the two actually lives. I felt no sympathy for either of the two characters tonight, while watching the film in an almost empty suburban movie theatre.
I did not feel sympathy for the one who is constantly watching them either; but I understood him. ‘The Sonata for a Good Man’ at the end of the film is an act of guilt I think- guilt of those who supposedly lived their lives, but ultimately were never ready to do so.
Definitely a good film but I would have preferred it if it was a novel- and the sounds and the images were only in the brain, as usually happens for anyone who is living the lives of others or (as someone I am starting to find out about) has no story of his own.

Forms Forms Forms

Was it Hamlet that said ‘Words, words, words..’? Or Macbeth? (I am confused even though I am supposed to be almost a doctor in theatre.. ah!) Anyway- this is not the point.. whoever was saying ‘words, words, words’ was right, but these days I keep on sighing, muttering ‘forms, forms, forms’ (that have to be completed with words, words, words)!!!
The story of my life is full with forms- applications for Masters, PhDs, funding etc etc (and I am sure I am a typical example of my generation). But 6 applications for jobs on a week (let alone those I have already done in the past months) is a bit too much. And of course, it is reasonable to say- well, copy and paste the same thing to all required boxes- easy to be said, hard to be done. Because every form has a logic of its own, different boxes for the same thing- first give a number of publications you have in box 6 and in box 11 write the full name, where it was published, even how many pages it was! First write in abbreviated form your titles, then write the dates, courses etc etc and the titles again. (luckily they don’t ask to write first your name and then whether you are the first in the family to have this name or if not, to list all your grandparents who had this name before you!) List your teaching aspirations and then explain how you achieve it and then attach a separate document with your teaching profile. And finally, attach a CV, which supposedly includes all the above unless you have led a double life! Really, these people have nothing better to do with their lives—the question is: do I? (I hope I do!)
PS. Luckily my friends have a great sense of humour and leave me with some great things to keep me company when I get sick of all this form-filling obsession. Thanks to Dr Gonzo and Mia Wallace for giving me The Life of Brian. I have no right to complain, thinking about what poor Brian is going through in this brilliant film—and the ending is wise, to say the least.. let’s sing all together:‘always look at the bright side of life’ (regardless of forms! now let’s get back to business..)

The Other Beast

The first entry in Jorge Luis Borges’ dictionary of Imaginary Beings reads:
“on the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow…when someone starts up the spiralling stairs, the beast is brought to consciousness.. at each level, its colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish light it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. otherwise, the beast hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralyzed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant.”

I came across this entry this morning and smiled. So different from his blue beast, but the blue radiance is common - sparkling at night, in the alley with the three doors.

Deja-vu,the uncanny strikes back

Could it be that we invite things and people in our lives? Could it be that what can be experienced at the present moment as an actuality was before a past imagination? Was I here before ever knowing the sensation of actually being here?
Randomly browsing a ‘no-name’ document that remained unread and incomplete for a while, I came across the fallen angel again- and now she has not only the aura of gold and purple around her but also a name. Her face is becoming more and more clear, she is definitely the youngest of all. The day she painted the walls of her room blue, she wrote down a sentence. She didn’t know that someone else would write the same line many months later, trying to breathe or trying to forget that what they were actually experiencing had actually happened before.
‘our stories are children of the same father’, you have said once- I hate to admit it but you were right.

The Belarus Free Theatre, or when politics meet theatre

In a small black-box theatre of a university campus somewhere in the North of England, last Friday, I had one of the most intense and most probably unforgettable theatrical experiences ever. I have never heard of them before but there they were in front of me, three women and four men, the members of the Belarus Free Theatre performing Being Harold Pinter, a collage of Harold Pinter’s recent political plays and his Nobel Prize Speech.
On a bare stage, with very few props but very intense performances from all seven actors, the linguistic, sexual, mental, physical and psychological violence and oppression that characterise plays such as One for the Road, Ashes to Ashes, Mountain Language, The New World Order combined with the playwright’s angry outcry for ‘human dignity’ in his October 2005 Nobel speech, came alive and left us all, academics, theatre scholars and members of the audience dumb-founded. What started as a piece about how Pinter’s characters come to life, how they dictate their actions and the playwright can do nothing else but obey them, turned into an almost autobiographical piece of the performers about their lost freedoms and constantly violated civil rights in Belarus. The piece finished with some of the true stories/letters of prisoners in Belarus at the moment, people who are not able to talk in their own Mountain Language.
The actors, director and producers of the piece talked to Harold Pinter and all of us after the end of the show; they explained how they are constantly chased by the regime, how they have to perform in small clubs and private spaces- apparently in order to rehearse the piece we saw, they had to change 20 flats because they were constantly on the run to escape the regime. The actors have lost their jobs in the 25(!) State Theatres of Belarus, some of them have been put in prison once or twice, a friend of theirs has been kidnapped and still missing. But what was extraordinary about these people, true dissidents, was that they did not show any self-pity even when one of the two producers started crying, remembering of their missing friend; there they were standing, determined individuals and artists, explaining to us how things are in Belarus and what they do about it.
And I kept thinking, going back to the discussions in another conference I had attended some months ago in Helsinki: The theatre is local; what Harold Pinter’s plays mean to these actors cannot be the same to what they mean to me or the British audience. And that is what makes theatre contextual and deeply political, after all. But that is also what makes theatre global- the travelling plays in different contexts, in different moments, with different resonances.
As I was leaving the theatre, deeply moved and unable to speak, I stopped and looked at the stage once more: the only thing that was left in the front was a crushed apple- Pinter had asked some moments before ‘What is this?’ and the performers replied ‘freedom-crushed’.

Επιστροφή

After some days in a Mediterranean background, here I am again, somewhere close to London but not in London. And apparently it’s been warm and nice and sunny. Well, I think, it’s only natural, almost mid-April, things can only get better. Il cammello solo says that it just needs a sense of humour. Another friend quoted the wisdom that an old teacher used to say: ‘life is like the sea; after the tempest, you will always find calm and nice waters..’ It is hard to say what is home at this moment, but perhaps if we stop worrying too much about it, home will reveal itself to us.
One thing for sure though: things will be different from today (add some dramatic music here to really grasp the essence of my words and open your mind…)

Ερινύες

like a fairy-tale castle

and the dragon outside

guarding the door- you can't break free even if you want

like poison

spending days wishing for the taste to go away- but no..

how can I forgive, if I cannot forget?

sadly enough, some questions remain without an answer..

in time

Απρίλη ψεύτη

I am spending more and more time with them
they reveal themselves to me whenever they want
the way they like
already four of them
two balancing between fiction and disappointment
between blue and mauve
and the old couple
who never goes to sleep..

but the I will be a man
the traveller- he who has no story
and only tries to find the fallen angel…

when I get back,
have to go to Hampstead; something waits there- I know now…

ode to traitors

it is because of these days
I am thinking what betrayal means
what makes one a traitor
the one leaving
the one letting down
last thing to do:a kiss

Judas, Ελένη, Eφιάλτης, Αλκιβιάδης
random names
there are so many more
what makes one betray?
is it lack of faith? or is it that otherwise things would never change?
perhaps the traitors are the most loyal ever..
perhaps..they know that they have to change the order of things
and carry the burden of a false kiss

Bouche ferme

only silence..for once

27

tonight

with the company or memory of those who love me

tonight

with the bitter-sweet taste of the last six months

tonight instead of wishing happy birthday to me..

a picture of the universe

an appropriate ending to the 27th year of my life

an appropriate post in a blog that is about planets that drift

a blog that is all about the smallness of our lives in this big universe

about the small, the minor, the non-important but important at the same time

about what makes one smile,cry,fall in love,get angry,excited or thoughtful

in this constant motion of our lives or the universe

tonight

I close my eyes and try to imagine the universe

I don't thınk that the picture is actually real and even if it is, I don't think it is enough

I close my eyes and imagine the universe

I remind myself of how small I am in this constant movement of energy and time

never before so many conflicting feelings inside

never before feeling so young and so small

never before so scared but willing to say goodbye to this old world

and let myself be enfolded by this greatest power..

the blue beast is somewhere around,because it is not only what we are aware of that exists...

and let this be the thought that will keep me company while I continue my journey