ΘΕΙΑ

There as many wrinkles in her face as there are furrows in her garden. Once, not so long ago in fact, her front yard was smooth, cropped with a luxurious, emerald green lawn as horizontal as a spirit level. All around, fragrant bushes and flower trees, tended with the exacting science of a microsurgeon embellished the finite walls of an earthly paradise with the grace, precision and potential decadence of a Persian miniature in close parallel to the intricately embroidered tapestry that adorned her wall, proclaiming in cursive thread: «Το πεπρωμένον φυγείν αδύνατον.»
Beyond, behind the modest mustard brick home, the paradise paradigm continued. Here were all the trees of the original creation, bursting into fruit when and where the creative hand directed them; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil deemed unnecessary and relegated to behind the shed - after all, we have all supped and grown weary in our cognition - the only tree to cast its long shadow of doubt into this glowing Nuristan of light was the gnarled crap-apple of futility.
That garden is still there, though it has aged and grayed in sympathy with its tender. This bed of earth has been left unmade for too long. The crumples of its blankets have hardened and become calloused, frozen into an uneasy median point between wakefulness and sleep. There are no flowers now. Those bushes that remain are skeletons, existing only to startle the passers-by in the half-light and cause them, while looking at the hastily sinking sun, to rush home in search of reassurance in the form of an electric light and a meal of flesh. Everything is cropped and brittle, like the severe haircut of an erstwhile beauty who has faded and can no longer be bothered. The ground, parched from lack and moisture and care, has opened up and though the cracks are miniscule, they lie in wait insidiously, exactly underneath the tangled vine, lovingly imported from a long lost village whose name can now not even be remembered. Just as the nails and hair of a corpse continue to grow, as if to belie, at least for a short moment the finality of the end, so has this vine continued to thrive, knot and caress its way out of its endoskeleton, branching off aimlessly in all directions, until its nether extremities, exhausted by their exponential expansion, lie sickly and languidly before the hole that sustains them and which shall receive them.
One cannot see into the house from the street. No legible pupil exists from which to ascertain the existence of any kind of soul within. Instead, the windows are denuded of the faculty of sight; their whites, caused by the rusting nineteen sixties Venetian blinds that contain vestiges of dead moths, bumblebees and a myriad of other bruised insects whose fate it was to bang against a wall of sheer light to the end of their days, gaze back mutely and without comprehension at a life that has passed them by.
Inside, the ammoniac stench of urine is unmistakable. Where once freshly cut flowers and the aroma of freshly cut fruit tantalized the nostrils, everything has now been reduced to its lowest common denominator, the fundamental ritual of transition and passing. This then is the circular fate of all. Where eaves and cornices gleamed, cobwebs so frayed and nebulous that their provenance cannot even be remembered hang mustily, in sympathy too with the softly ever-growing darkness of her own mind.
She sits in the velvet armchair. Once, in her heyday, it could barely fit her. She was young, strong, newly arrived upon these shores and possessed of the energy and the presumption that she could create her world anew. Her forearms were equal in size to her husband's legs and it was she who placed one brick of hope, fired in the stern kiln of certainty upon the other, joined them with dystopian confidence of the disposed until the house was built.
Children ran in the hall of this house, grandchildren played in it. Yet their passing has left as much mark as the baked lamb dishes, the multitude of chops or the sticky-sweet syrupy cakes that emerged from her oven. The 1998 church calendar hangs dustily alongside the cracked terracotta plate that depicts a 1960's Parthenon - a desperate attempt to retain a memory never experienced. The date of the calendar is 6 July and the little poem at the back also reads: «το πεπρωμένον φυγείν αδύνατον.» Ironically enough, the clock still works, gnawing away, stroke after stroke at the diminishing sands in the hour-glass.
No photos adorn these walls. There was never any time to develop such memories as existed. The children had to be fed and clothed, there were grandchildren to be looked after and the garden, the envy of the entire neighbourhood to be tended. The fruit of this garden, whether delivered to one's door in a plastic bag, in the form of a pie or cake traveled from one side of Melbourne to the other and there was much praise for its formidable sender, so much an archetype that she was always referred to as «η Θεία.»
It was she who grew the vast pumpkin, so large as to rival that of Jonah's and then laughing at the attempts of her adolescent nephews to lift it, laughingly picked it up and placed it on her shoulder. This pumpkin was of course, totally useless and a gaping exception to her utilitarian demeanour. It was as if finally the creator, looking back and seeing that the creation was good, decided to sit back and apply the generative powers to no purpose at all rather than pleasure and amusement, a thing hitherto unheard of and a luxury never to be repeated. lemons were not to be cut in order to be used as cricket balls and woe betide anyone who strode into the realm of the snake beans.
Conversations were brief and to the point. There were gemista in the oven and cucumber plants that needed tending. There was no time for gossip and at night, when the garden receded into its own and would accept no interference, she would squeeze into the velvet armchair, pick up a bobbin in her coarse, thick fingers and proceed to weave a lace as complicated and convoluted though always fiercely symmetrical as the ramblings of her sister-in-law on the telephone. The drawers, covered in dust, still conceal the fruits of her labour. Immured in tissue paper, the lace moulders away in silence. When the naphthalene balls finally lost their potency, the microscopic moths and the silverfish emerged to slowly unravel the logic of the predestined strands. Now fifty or so years of work come apart in one's hands and each unintelligible gossamer-like thread floats, irrelevantly and detachedly, onto the dark carpet below.
It was around about the same time that her own mind also began to unravel. There was a fall - her knees that once were possessed with the strength of a bullock - were not what they were and then, as her strength increasingly failed her, the unraveling began. She was too weak to reach up and dust the cobwebs from the cornices and these began to accumulate until finally they grew into her mind. She began to forget faces, words even, to the extent where countenancing the beloved image of a favourite grandchild became a strange, frightening experience.
She lost her sense of smell and taste. The oven remained empty and barren, disenfranchising the aspirations of a multitude of culinary dependants and rendering them orphans. Left too long as a fruit upon the boughs of the world, she began to shrivel, the moisture and lust for life imperceptibly draining away from her skin. Yet she remained there occupying now but slight space on the same old velvet armchair, hanging precariously and alone from the same bough as she had for the previous nine decades of her life, a hardened, lifeless parody of creation, skeletal, mute and to all appearances lifeless.
Like Tithonus, the Ethiopian prince who dared to love the immortal Eos and asked for immortality, only to be granted relief from death but not decay until he shriveled and transformed into a grasshopper, she refuses to die. Instead, she remains in her corner, staring blankly at the darkness within and without, comprehending nothing. Her visitors are few. No one likes to see imperfection, devastation and no amount of irrigation, weed pulling or inspection can restore the garden of her mind to its former glory.
Immured in a tomb of life, her children sit by her, maintaining a mournful wake as she slumbers, oblivious to them and everything else. Every so often, they wash her and clip her nails. Her skin cracks and they attempt to rub her face with moisturizer. And the grass grows as long as the days do, the ground opens up and the little house is the only one in the street that never has its lights turned on or a car in the driveway. And we, the recipients of her charity, whoever she is, relegate her to the darkest corners of our disposition in our busy lives, to ignore and to forget. There shall she remain, granting us not even the ability to light a votive lamp for the illumination of our own darkened and atrophied memories.

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 18 December 2006

THEODORE STEPHANIDES: HOMO UNIVERSALIS

"A part of us remains and that half-self
still wanders through those well-remembered ways;
Until sometimes we feel as if we were
a shade that alternates between two lives
A ghostinhabiting two worlds, and yet
Not fully fleshed…" (Theodore Stephanides, ‘City of the Mind.’)

You all know the type. The eccentric polymath that is possessed of knowledge so broad in scope as to astound his peers and make them secretly speculate that such breadth of cognition can only be the consequence of the making of a pact with the infernal powers. Polymaths in particular abound in the realm of English literature, creating some of fiction’s most enduring and beloved characters, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s all-knowing, all seeing detective Sherlock Homes and of course P. J Wodehouse’s perspicacious and sagacious butler, Jeeves.
In the Hellenic discourse, especially within its more nationalistic variations, the polymath marks the apogee of the development of the ultimate Greek, to fit the stereotypical ideal. That is, if we as a race are supposed to have invented everything worth inventing and learnt everything worth knowing by virtue of our intrinsic superiority before variously passing it on to the rest of the world or having it stolen from us as our ancestor Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the Olympian Gods, whose representatives we are upon this earth, then we are by nature polymaths and are entitled to that appellation by right.
Polymaths abounded in ancient times, the most notable being Aristotle who wrote on subjects as diverse as logic, metaphysics, biology, psychology, ethics and literary criticism and Archimedes whose interests lay in mechanics, hydraulics, geometry and Sicilian steam baths. That polymathy endured into Byzantine times is evidenced by the works of such scholars as Psellus and the Patriarch Photios. Indeed, one could venture to say that the apogee of polymathy was marked by the compilation of the book that purported to enclose within in every single strand of knowledge that existed in the world: the Suda, arguably the world’s first encyclopaedia.
It is for this reason that the works and deeds of scientists and scholars that are kinsmen inspire and excite us. For they are bright angelic guides to the primeaval enlightenment that was our right and natural state before our intellectual and physical fall at the hands of the east, west or anyone else one cares to blame. In modern Greek times, there are a great many contenders to the title of polymath, but few to whom the title actually applies. One of these, is the humble Dr Theodore Stephanides.
I first came across Theodore Stephanides in the pages of British naturalist and fervent philhellene Gerald Durrell’s magical depiction of his childhood growing up in Corfu. In that book, ‘My Family and other Animals,’ he is introduced to us as the oracle extraodinaire on all matters botanical pertaining to the island and a whole lot more besides:
“It was small wonder that we treated him like an oracle. The phrase 'Theo says' set the seal of authenticity on whatever item of information the person was going to vouchsafe; it was the touchstone for getting Mother's agreement to anything from the advisability of living entirely on fruit to the innocuousness of keeping scorpions in one's bedroom. Theodore was everything to everyone. With Mother he could discuss plants, particularly herbs and recipes, while keeping her supplied with reading matter from his capacious library of detective novels. With Margo he could talk of diets, exercises and the various unguents supposed to have a miraculous effect on spots, pimples and acne. He could keep pace effortlessly with any idea that entered the mercurial mind of my brother Larry, from Freud to peasant belief in vampires; while Leslie he could enlighten on the history of firearms in Greece or the winter habits of the hare. As far as I was concerned, with a hungry, questing and ignorant mind, Theodore represented a fountain of knowledge on every subject from which I drank greedily.”
Indeed, it is a wonder that Dr Theodore Stephanides’ legacy is not widely appreciated, given that his life was truly remarkable. Born to Thessalian parents in Bombay, his first language was English and he only began to learn Greek when his parents moved to Corfu when he was eleven. Stephanides served as a gunner in the Greek Army in World War I on the Macedonian front, and again in the Asia Minor War. His anecdote, related to Gerald Durrell about how he was chosen to lead the triumphal entry into Smyrna only to have his horse gallop out of control as it was sprayed by eau de Cologne by an ecstatic Smyrniot is side-splittingly funny, implausible, yet remarkably true.
He published two works of translated poetry between 1925-1926 but pursuing an alternative career path, went to study Medicine in Paris in 1929. Returining to Corfu in 1930, he established the island's first X-ray unit unit. His selfless dedication to Corfiot public health placed him in dire financial straits as he insitied upon treating most of his patients free of charge. Beloved by all Corfiotes, he was commissioned in 1933 by the Corfu health authority to prepare a report on the principal localities where anti-malarial measures would be necessary. It was around this time, in 1936, that he was introduced to the Durrell family, including writer and naturalist Gerald Durrell, then a boy and the author Lawrence Durrell, both of whom would remain life-long friends. Stephanides would later send Lawrence Durrell medicines for the British Embassy in Cyprus and continuing to dabble in literary circles, would make a cameo appearance in Lawrence Durrell’s novel “Prospero’s Cell” as well as Henry Miller’s famous “The Colossus of Maroussi.”
Just before leaving Corfu in 1938 to take up residence in Thessaloniki in order to take up appointment at the anti-malarial unit founded there by the Rockerfeller Foundation, Stephanidies discovered a number of microscopic aquatic organisms two of which would be named in his honour, namely: Thermocyclops stephanidesi, and Schizopera stephanidesi. Possessed of as brilliant sense of humour, he would later write deprecatingly of his scientific books: “I have never heard of it becoming a best seller in spite of the fact that it contains, among other things, a suggestive account of the sexual aberrations of the water flea Cyclops Bicuspidatus ..."
During the Second World War, Stephanides served as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Greece, Crete, Sicily and the Sahara. His account of the Battle of Crete, “Climax in Crete” blames the Allies for mismanaging the defence of that island and is a valuable chronicle of that period. As for his own personal wartime experiences, Gerald Durrell, who wrote a biography of Stephanides, writes: "Theodore, the most unwarlike of men, was bombed and machine-gunned with the rest by the Germans. Yet who but Theodore would relate how, when the Stukas dived and machine-gunned the road, he flung himself face downwards in a ditch and was 'interested to note' two species of mosquito larvae he had not previously noted."
Stephanides moved to London after the War , working as an Assistant Radiologist between 1945-1961. It was during this period that he published his two noted works in science: The Microscope and the Practical Principles of Observation and the seminal A Survey of the Freshwater Biology of Corfu and of Certain Other Regions of Greece.
Stephanides also gained much praise and good standing as a poet after the back to back publications of poetry collections The Golden Face (1965) and The Cities of the Mind (1969) He went on to publish the personal collection of poems Worlds in a Crucible in 1973 and also published a substantial body of translated poetry based on the works of the famous Greek poet Kostos Palamas ending with the posthumous publication of Kostis Palamas: A Portrait and an Appreciation including Iambs and Anapaests. His other widely-praised translation, that of the famous Cretan epic poem Erotocritos was also published posthumously in 1984. All in all, Theodore Stephanides published some twenty books during his lifetime on diverse subjects and his cosmopolitan background facilitated Britons of the pre-war and immediate post-war period obtaining an appreciation and love for Greece. Both Durrell brothers dedicated their books dealing with Greece to him and Gerald in particular would write a most fitting description of Greece’s obscure modern day sage: "Theodore had and has all the best qualities of the Victorian Naturalists: insatiable interest in the world he inhabits, and that ability to illuminate any topic with his own observations and thoughts. This, coupled with a puckish sense of humour, a prodigious memory and an ability to pack forty-eight hours into twenty-four, makes up a very extraordinary man."
Interestingly enough and in fitting with his all embracing intellect, there is a Crater on the moon unofficially named Stephanides (Romer-A). It is in the South Eastern highlands of the Sea of Serenity close to the landing site of Apollo 17 the last, and appropriately, most scientific of all the 1960's U.S. moon landings. When Dr Theodore Stephanides finally died in 1983 at the ripe old age of 87, having made such a great mark in Greek science and letters, he had already penned his own eloquent epitaph in English, one with which we will leave you this week to ponder and appreciate the works and deeds of our last true polymath:
“Let something of me still remain behind;
A verse a cadence, to outlive the clay;
Let some reflect, some glimmer of my mind
Recall the passage of my little day.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU
kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 11 December 2006

ΑΙ ΕΚΛΟΓΑΙ

“ You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” Mario Cuomo.

The word «Εκλογή» exists in a romanised form in the English language as “Eclogue.” As such, it refers to a poem penned in the classical style on a pastoral subject. The word was deliberately employed for this purpose, as in its Greek form, it signifies a choice or selection and it was originally used to refer to short poems of any genre or selections from poetry books, that is before Virgil mastered the art of bucolic poetry and had his poems named Eclogues by his admirers.
Candidates for elections of any sort tend to discover a hitherto unknown connection with Virgil during their campaigns. Even the most bucolic of citizens desperate to be favoured with your choice will learn that at election time, their saliva glands secrete a unique form of honey that lubricates their tongue into such Scandinavian contortions as to put the most dexterous of Romanian gymnasts to shame. All of a sudden, they are possessed of the remarkable capacity to wax lyrical and mellifluous on a vast array of subjects, quite often, in iambic pentameters of such precision as to render even the most jaded classical scholar, redundant. Add to this a theatrical waving of arms, decisive hand-gestures and tremulous voice-modulations, to the arpeggio of B flat minor and you get my picture. Of course for slight, indistinguishable policy modulations, chromatic scales are preferred. Take this gem from the recent campaign speech of an upstanding member of the Greek community with aspirations to leading his suitably bucolic in motif flock through the green pastures of renewal signified by the Grand SAE Corral: "My fellow compatriots, (starey eyes, sweaty palms, receding hairline,) the time is now. (arched eyebrow, uniting the community in times of crisis hand-gesture.) You can either sink in the mud of the past, (ambiguous glottal trill, equivocal nose twitch) or float into a glorious future... where the rivers will flow with milk and honey (ambiguous wave, beatific smile.) Of course what he really meant to say was: “Slack-jawed simpletons of the community cowshed who hate me, this is your Supreme Overlord,” but he didn’t and that in itself is sublime poetry. As Mario Cuomo points out, once elected into the desired position, the poetic seduction stops. Instead, the shepherd’s bovine herd is urged into the corral for milking to the dictates of rather emphatic prose.
In keeping with Gerald Barzan’s maxim that: “You don’t have to fool the people all of the time, you just have to fool them enough to get elected,” the promises made during election time are often quite imaginative. That is why the conduct of the campaigns of the various warring factions vying for election to the board of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria lately, are reprehensible. For in formulating their ‘policies,’ (an Anglo-Jutic synonym for promise), they are merely aping the tactics of their role models in State Parliament and are displaying an acute lack of inventiveness in doing so. For example, one particular faction’s promise of building what was reported as a ‘Parthenon’ has obviously blatantly been lifted from the Labor Party’s pledge to revitalize Lonsdale Street. Are we to assume that having enmeshed itself or rather entrapped itself in matters ecclesiastical for most of its existence, members of the community now wish to divest themselves of the stigma of their failure, turn pagan and regulate the worship of the Olympian Gods by the building of Grecian stereotypes around their periphery in the hope that white clad pagan priests will prove more pliable than their black-robed Orthodox counterparts? It would have been much simpler for one or other of the warring factions to refer to the sign that currently adorns the façade of the GOCMV building, which reads: “Parthenon Marbles: It was time they were returned home,” and promise that if elected, they will facilitate the return of the Marbles to their homeland, that is the foyer of the GOCMV building, which, with the help of big business, will be converted into a Parthenon museum. Indeed, in order to further enhance the motif, in the budget forecast, ample provision could be made for the hiring of young nymphs to dress themselves as Caryatids and be used as load bearers for the cumulative weight of the hot air they would inevitably have to support if the whole august edifice of credibility is not to come crashing down, upon their assumption of power.
One is also incensed at the wholesale adoption and parody of purely Labor-inspired electoral promises as this implies a gross under-appreciation of the potential utilisation of the Liberal approach, thus ensuring our community’s electoral marginalisation. Take for example if you will, Ted Baillieu’s pre-election promise of free public transport to students. Surely an adept factional apparatchik could take that promise and re-forge it in a Hellenised fashion that would be in keeping with the election’s bucolic motif. Try this for size: Free donkey rides down Lonsdale Street. This would be a boon for tourism, especially given frequent stops at all Greek shops, the by-products of their ruminations could be a revenue raiser, permitting the more green-thumbed to grow fabulous ornamental creepers and super-annuated beasts no longer able to bear their burden could be either made into honorary presidents or given over to the purveyors of skewered meat, gratis. Who says that under the nouveau regime, the GOCMV will not be able to give back to the community?
If anything, this diatribe should pay homage to the Corporations Act and the Incorporated Associations Act, the two acts that between them define how most Greek-Australian community organizations and indeed elections are to be run. Unfortunately, given our glorious history, we often feel that we can take poetic license with the provisions of those heavenly-inspired tomes of legislation and disregarding them as our main point of legal reference, instead hearken back to our ancient past for clues as to how to conduct ourselves. Thus we learn with alacrity that one of the contending GOCMV factions is announcing that it will institute the ‘double-kingship’ of ancient Sparta into the running of its affairs. They are silent as to how this conforms with the provisions of Anglo-Celtic law that recognises only one monarch of the glen and the astute GOCMV member and potential voter would be well advised to research as to whether the throwing of weaker members from the peak of Mount Taygetos, or at least from the third floor of the GOCMV building is also on the cards, along with the institution of compulsory military service, the subjugation of the Messenians and really bad taste in sculpture. In making such an extravagant though elegantly inspired promise, that particular faction has played into the hands of their chief rivals, who they accuse of being possessed of oligarchic tendencies. For in response, those rivals can now throw their words back at them, stating that they are inspired by the tyrants of Athens or the kings of Macedonia, which is as decent a historical precedent as could ever be found and that oligarchy as is Hellenic as the ubiquitous frappotsigaro. Come to think of it, a publicity stunt in Oakleigh and Lonsdale Street involving apparatchiks handing out free frappotsigara (these being the form of cigarette employed only to accompany the drinking of an endless frappe) along with instructions as to their safe use may make all the difference. As for those who would reform the GOCMV Committee along the lines of the reforms suggested by Comrade Stalin at the third plenary session of the Council of the Supreme Soviet in 1932, we suggest you make up your own minds.
Perhaps the various factions that are so eager to dethrone the incumbents should heed the wise words of Robert C Byrd: “Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.” The making of extravagant promises and their publication can only cause a point of reference that may prove embarrassing in the future and may also imply that which is commonly suspected among more jaded members of the GOCMV, that such honeyed words merely serve to mask a steely disposition among the hitherto dispossessed to assume the reigns of power, no matter the cost. In this regard, it is gravely disquieting that the incumbents have as yet made no promises of their own. Are we finally seeing an end to bucolic democracy?
In an increasingly fragmented and decentralized Greek-Melbournian community, interest in the GOCMV’s elections will be limited only to those misguided few who have an interest in reforming and conserving an important historical institution and to the malevolent comrades whose purpose it is to use it as a vehicle for the acting out of their own personal frustrations and applying their antiquated political viewpoints to Chairman Mao-like experiments we can ill afford. The problem is that the rhetoric employed by all sides is so guilefully similar that it is difficult to distinguish the wolves among the sheep. Indeed, it would require divine guidance to separate the goats from the said sheep and thus save our community from perdition.
As the drought continues in our paddock and the parched sheep sidle trustingly up to shepherds holding buckets in which there is promise of water and eternal life, I pray that my bucolic brethren will accept my bleating of advice, for what it is worth, as to the criteria to be employed in voting for any faction whatsoever, as received from perennial US presidential candidate Ross Perot: “Which one of the three candidates (here read factions) would you want your daughter to marry?”
As we wish all GOCMV voting members "καλή κάλπη", we leave you all with the final epilogue in the form of an eclogue by the master Virgil himself who is already privy to the GOCMV’s bucolic electoral plight: “I grudge you not the boon, but marvel more, Such wide confusion fills the country-side. See, sick at heart I drive my she-goats on…”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on 4 December 2006