INTO THE MOONLIT VILLAGE – THE BATTLE OF CRETE

Austrian historian Robert Musil has observed that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” Despite their intended purpose to commemorate, memorial artworks and monuments often have a brief period of relevance before their explicit significance fades, leaving them as mere landmarks, decorations or conceits. Art of this nature is designed to prompt viewers to remember; however, it frequently becomes forgettable or even invisible. This tendency for commemorative art to lose its impact over time can be attributed to various factors, such as conflicting agendas, collective decision-making, and compromised artistic vision. It is also plausible that the act of forgetting is an inherent aspect of commemorative art, serving as a form of built-in obsolescence.

Commemorative art aims to ensure that we remember an important event or person by depicting an element of that person or event through artistic representation. However, this goal of perpetual remembrance contradicts the natural functions of the human mind. Freud suggested that forgetting is a crucial part of the mourning process, where it is necessary to endure the painful act of remembering, store memories consciously, and ultimately reach a point where forgetting is possible. Forgetting is not a failure of memory but a characteristic that allows people to move forward with their lives. As a physical embodiment of memory, a memorial can support this gradual process by providing a way to revisit the experience of loss in a controlled and manageable manner, with the memorial serving as a container for the memory.

This is how I see the book “Into the Moonlight Village- the Battle of Crete.” It is a piece of commemorative art, in the form of poetry, in English and in Greek translation and visual art, causing us to remember a most important event in our combined Greek and Australian histories, the Battle of Crete.

The poet, Poli Tataraki in seeking inspiration from this epic event, is partaking of a culture of memory that stretches right back to the beginning of the genre, right back when a blind bard sought the help of the Muses to commemorate another epic battle, requesting: “The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, that destructive wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes, and made them themselves spoil for dogs and every bird;”

This is thus a very Greek practice and the poet consciously or subconsciously overlays and or positions her poetry within the framework of the classical tradition. The very title itself suggests this: “Into the Moonlit Village,” suggesting a process, a movement into somewhere (whereas the Greek translation «Στο Φεγγαρόλουστο Χωριό» is more ambiguous, στο meaning towards, into but also at – so that connotations of position exist on many levels simultaneously), reminds us that the queen of Crete, Pasiphae (whose name means “Eater of All,” a fitting title for War if there ever was one), wife of the bloodthirsty King Minos, was worshipped on Crete as a Moon Goddess. Consequently, from the outset the poet is connoting that there is something particular primal about war. It is an element, like the titans, which unfortunately is inextricably attached to the Cretan world. The lunar element is one that the poet will return to repeatedly throughout the work. In the poem “In Rethymno” for example, the soldier seeking to evade the “enemy” which “prowls” the earth” is described as lucent, in Greek: «διάφεγγος».

These mythological links exist throughout the work which is interesting because if one reads the poetic and literary responses to the Battle of Crete emanating from the Greek world, references to mythology are few and far between. These works will be in dialogue with the Holocaust of Arkadi, they will reference the continuous and bloody battles for Cretan independence, which as we know came quite late, but they are distinctly light on mythology. It could be argued that the poet’s heavy drawing on Greek mythology reflects a uniquely Australian, or Greek-Australian approach to the Battle of Crete. We know that Greek mythology forms an important component of Western culture and that it is via the complex process of western appropriation of elements of Greek classical culture that support was given for Greece’s aspirations of emancipation and statehood. In the diaspora, the process by which Greek culture is appreciated by the West is also subconsciously absorbed and replicated, replacing other traditional perspectives, or critiqued by, or otherwise informs the writing of Greek Australians.

Manifestly, the poet is very conscious of this process. Evidently, the poet is very conscious of the fact that the event she is trying to commemorate involved not only Cretans in the narrow sense, but also Australians, British and New Zealaders and we can thus conclude that in making use of symbolism derived from Greek mythology, she is consciously endeavouring to find and to utilise a common vocabulary that can be employed as a means of inclusion within her discourse,  reflecting an immensely generous vision.

Thus, Daedalus makes his  appearance in “Daedalus Wept” where the poet contrasts the “long walk down the gangway,” with the tortuous twists and turns of the great inventor’s labyrinth, fraught with danger at every turn, a fitting metaphor for war if there ever was one, but hinting always at the possibility of escape and liberation. Daedalus, of course, the legendary inventor of man-made fight, would have sufficient cause to regret his decision in the light of the Nazi airborne invasion of Crete.

In the poem “In Iraklio,” recourse to mythology is made in order to examine the futility of war and the hubris which characterises those who deign to wage it as aggressors: “As antiquity joins the din….. How many times must Icarus die?” Like the hapless hero of Greek mythology, when the warnings of the wise are not heeded,  tragedy will ensue again and again. Thus the mythologic motif allows the reader to regard the Battle of Crete in a broader anthropological context. The poem is also interesting in the manner in which some of its terms can have different connotations in Greek rather than English. Her use of the term of the “Bull’s eye,” for example, is masterfully ambiguous since we can choose to interpret this as a target or rather as the gaze of the Minotaur, a symbol of the horror of war in popular culture, as evidenced in such paintings as Picasso’s Guernica, also has the same effect, whereas in Greek it also connotes a type of stone.

In “At Phaleron,” a poem inspired by the experience of Melbourne-born Dimitri Zampelis who was killed in action outside Mournies in 1941, it is Minoan history that is employed as a motif to juxtapose the bounty and life-abounding nature of Crete as embodied by “blue dolphins cavorting with fish,” a common decorative motif in the palace of Knossos against the prospect of Hitler assuming the alabaster throne of Minos, a long-gone king of an extinct civilisation. The poignancy here is in the reflection of how many have, as a result, become: “forever lost to the soil of Crete.”

The Angel of Nuremberg on the other hand conflates motifs from the early history of the Greek world with the Old Testament juxtaposing the gender-ambivalent but convivial Lily Prince, being absolutely gorgeous while immured and perpetually parading “in a diadem of peacock feathers” against an Australian who utters his own adopted ceremonial, the haka, before being forced to wrestle with the angel of Death.

“Stragglers in Imvros Gorge,” continues this dextrous and ambiguous historical perspective, describing a Homeric katabasis, via which “soldiers retreating march with ghosts of martyrs…defeated souls in the twilight, following the masses down a canyon,” descend as psychopomps into a labyrinthine psychological Underworld. This is not Elysium, nor is it Paradise but rather an emotional Tartarus from where no escape is apparent and: “hearts will sink.”

The accompanying linocut images by artist Michael Winter may predate the poems by fifteen years but they too, are a product of the artist’s response to his trip to the island and his discussions with its local inhabitants about the wounds left by the Battle of Crete. Nightmarish figures and dismembered shapes in monochrome exist in conversation with Tataraki’s poems, forming visual poetic mediations of their own about the horror, inhumanity but also endemic nature of mankind’s insistence on destroying itself. These are highly emotive works that seek not to portray those involved in conflict as valiant or indeed to dehumanise them unilaterally, as the enemy. For example, the illustration to the poem “Churchill’s Salamander” does not depict the wartime leader as redoubtable “British Bulldog” with his characteristic and by now clichéd Victory Salute. Instead, a dark, faceless figure looms over a group of helmets which, strangely illumined in the moonlight, resemble a heap of skulls such as those depicted in Vasily Vereschagin’s famous anti-war painting: “The Apotheosis of War.”

In the accompanying illustration to the poem “Life Cycle of a Paratrooper,” a spectral, wraith-like soldier looms over a counterpart whose face is transfixed in horror. Although the paratrooper has wings, he is still fixed via ropes, to his parachute which appears to be stuck in a tree, suggesting that for all his fearsomeness, he is merely a marionette, manipulated at the behest of higher, darker, nefarious powers, of which he himself is a victim.

The most absorbing image in the collection in my view, is the companion to “The Angel of Nuremberg.” Two soldiers with distorted faces hold each other. They are mirror images of each other, both white and black, save that the soldier with black wings looms over the prone soldier with the white wings. We cannot tell if he is trying to choke him, cradle him in his arms or both. There is no right or wrong here, enemy or friend. In the topography of Death which Michael Winter’s depicts so starkly, there is no room for Manichaean dualism, for nationalism or ideology. Instead, there is only an omnipresent chiaroscuro Thanatos that saturates the eye until it hurts.

For those seeking further information about the particular events informing the writing of the poems, there is a useful and rather extensive appendix which provides historical information and which augments the reader’s appreciation of both the poet and the artist’s art.

“Where smoke will rise one day, from slaughtered partisans, doused in petrol/ Remember the villages of Kedros/ Remember Gerakari,” the poet enjoins us as Michael Winter’s emaciated and care-worn Promethean phantoms look down upon a landscape as rugged and as long-suffering as there are.

We can do aught else.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

Dean Kalimniou will launch “The Moonlit Village: Into the Battle of Crete” an artistic collaboration between Poli Tataraki and Michael Winters, on behalf of the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne, the Cretan Brotherhood of Melbourne and the Greek Australian Cultural League on Sunday, 9 June 2024, at 2:30pm at the Greek Centre.

First published in NKEE on Saturday 1 June 2024