ON THE SHORES OF INNER CARTOGRAPHY: PIERENRICO GOTTERO'S: THE STRENGTH OF FRAGILE DAYS

 

In The Strength of Fragile Days, Pierenrico Gottero offers us not simply a novel but a contemplative elegy, an inward odyssey of subtle psychological depth, lyrical grace, and spiritual inquiry. At first glance, it may appear to chart a familiar course: a man adrift, a geographical escape, a redemptive Mediterranean backdrop. But this is a narrative that resists clichés, deftly deconstructing the seductive myth of escape, revealing instead a deeper truth: that no external paradise can substitute for the inner labour of becoming. Greece, the ostensible destination, is not salvation. Rather, it is the mirror that compels the protagonist to confront himself, and Corfu, that mythopoetic island bathed in myth and light, becomes the symbolic threshold where the self is stripped, examined, and remade.

 

At the heart of this reflective narrative is Marco Lentini, a young man burdened by the invisible scaffolding of expectations, disenchanted with a life dictated by convention. As Gottero frames it in the novel’s opening conceit, Marco's departure to Greece is never truly about fleeing from the world. Rather, it is about “moving toward himself.” The novel interrogates the very notion of escape. In an implicit response to Henri Laborit’s famed dictum: “In times like these, escape is the only way to stay alive and keep dreaming,” Gottero proposes the opposite: that escape, seductive though it may seem, is not a solution, but a postponement. The work of transformation is not external but internal, and it requires, above all, vulnerability, the courage to live through fragile days.

 

This ethos is encapsulated in the epigraph Gottero borrows from Ovid: Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt: “They change their sky, not their soul, who cross the sea.” The entire novel unfolds as a meditation on this ancient truth. Marco's journey to Greece, and especially to Corfu, functions not as a physical voyage but as a psychospiritual crucible. Like the lobster of Panaghiotis' myth, revealed at the humble taverna “O Astakos,” Marco must shed his shell, retreat into silence and softness, and allow the painful process of regrowth to occur. Corfu, then, is not a utopia—it is The Great Rock, the metaphorical refuge where one undergoes inner recalibration before emerging again into the world.

 

Gottero draws upon a symbolic economy rich with classical and Christian resonance. In Marco’s journey, there are subtle echoes of the monastic retreat, of the desert fathers who fled not to abandon the world but to wrestle with the self in the crucible of solitude. Greece, and particularly its Ionian manifestation in Corfu, is not exoticised; it is contemplative, quiet, and unyielding. It does not offer Marco comfort but reflection, not solutions but space. In this, Gottero constructs an ethical geography: the Aegean is not a tourist fantasy but a landscape of reckoning.

 

The characters who populate Marco's journey are not dramatis personae in the usual sense, but interlocutors—bearers of insight who reveal, by contrast or compassion, the shape of the protagonist’s internal landscape. The Tuscan widower, who has forged his own form of resilience after the death of his wife, offers Marco a model of sorrow dignified by acceptance. The restaurateur, with his broken English and rich metaphors about shedding one’s shell, serves as a rustic philosopher whose hard-earned wisdom contains more theology than the pages of any manual. Then there is young Dimitri, “The Sponge,” whose gift is his quiet attentiveness, a child who sees the world through others’ eyes, representing the uncorrupted potential that Marco once had and perhaps might recover.

 

These characters contribute to what Mikhail Bakhtin would call a “polyphonic” narrative space. The novel does not impose a singular ideological voice; instead, it allows voices, experiences, and philosophies to co-exist, contributing to the slow sedimentation of Marco’s self-understanding. The novel is dialogical in its very structure, echoing also the classical model of the katabasis, the descent into an inner underworld from which the hero does not emerge unscathed, but reborn.

 

Gottero’s prose is spare yet saturated with affect, at times almost liturgical in cadence. He constructs a rhythmic movement between stillness and speech, inner thought and outward observation. There are no grand plot twists; the drama is internal, psychological, spiritual. It unfolds in silence, in encounters, in the flicker of thought at twilight. This restraint serves the story's deeper themes. Fragility, as the title makes clear, is not a defect but a crucible. Days that are “fragile” are those when the protective casing of routine is cracked open and the raw matter of the self is exposed. It is in these days, Gottero suggests, that transformation is possible, rather than in strength, in the willingness to be undone.

 

This is nowhere more powerfully articulated than in the novel’s final passages, when Marco reflects:

 

“I think you can only truly experience that sense of absolute freedom—that feeling that makes you feel completely alive—at two points in life: in the unbridled recklessness of youth, or in the wise awareness of maturity… The more you’ve experienced that freedom in your youth, the more you’ll do anything to find it again as an adult. It’s a natural calling, a primal need, something you feel in your bones and in your skin. But precisely for that reason, it’s not for everyone. It takes courage.”

 

Here, Gottero traces the contours of what Viktor Frankl might call “the search for meaning,” a yearning that cannot be satisfied by distraction or escape, but only through the courage to live consciously. Between the impetuosity of youth and the serenity of maturity, lies the middle terrain of suffering, failure, repetition, and reflection. Marco’s return from this middle terrain, this inward desert, is the quiet arc of the novel. He is not triumphant but tempered. And that is the whole point.

 

The novel’s philosophical undertow also draws from the existential tradition. One senses the influence of Albert Camus, not in tone but in tension. Like Camus’ The Fall or A Happy Death, The Strength of Fragile Days confronts the paradox of human longing: the desire to remake one’s life entirely, yet being bound to the self that one cannot outrun. And yet, unlike Camus, Gottero does not leave the reader in absurdism. His novel is suffused with a redemptive humanism, a belief, quiet but firm, that it is possible to become whole again, but only by descending into brokenness.

 

What is particularly striking is Gottero’s refusal to romanticise either place or person. Greece is not idealised; its role is that of a catalyst, not a cure. As the author notes in his own reflection, “Greece—and especially Corfu—is not a paradise to be reached; that paradise can only be found within ourselves.” In this sense, Corfu becomes a “topos” of metanoia, the Greek word for repentance, which literally means to change one’s mind, or more deeply, to reverse one’s gaze. It is in Corfu that Marco turns inward, sees himself not as a failed escapee, but as a man learning how to inhabit his own life with sincerity.

 

The novel’s structure mirrors the process it describes. It begins with distance: Athens, disorientation, the impulse to abandon everything. It moves through encounters, memories, digressions. And it ends not with arrival but with return—not to a former place, but to a deeper self. In this, Gottero’s work shares spiritual affinities with the Orthodox understanding of the prodigal son, not as a morality tale, but as a movement from estrangement to homecoming.

 

Ultimately, The Strength of Fragile Days is a profoundly humane and quietly radical book. In a culture that idolises productivity, novelty, and hardened identity, Gottero offers us a counter-narrative: that the soul’s most important work often takes place in stillness, in smallness, in the fragile in-between. That identity is not discovered through conquest but shaped through encounters. That Greece—ancient, luminous, and unresolved—can function not as a romantic elsewhere but as a place that invites interiority, reverence, and silence.

 

This is a novel for those who have grown weary of movement without meaning. For those who suspect that selfhood is something not constructed but uncovered. For those who understand that sometimes, the only way forward is the courage to stop and sit with oneself beneath the olive tree, to listen to the sea, and to wait until a new shell grows.

 

In The Strength of Fragile Days, Gottero offers not escape, but encounter, not solution, but surrender. And in so doing, he reminds us that the truest strength often lies precisely in our willingness to be fragile.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 12 July 2024

WAIT FOR ME: ORIENTALISM AND THE HOLLOWING OF HELLENISM IN HADES

 

Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, lauded for its musical ingenuity and socially conscious storytelling, has captivated audiences with its reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a postapocalyptic, Depression era setting. Yet beneath the acclaim lies a set of aesthetic and ideological concerns that merit further examination: specifically, the production’s orientalist and tokenistic engagement with Greek culture. This is not a question of bad faith or deliberate misrepresentation, but rather of how cultural frameworks are repurposed in ways that, however unintentionally, risk flattening the traditions from which they originate.

Edward Said’s foundational framework in Orientalism, describes the tendency of Western discourse to appropriate, stylise, and commodify non-Western cultures in ways that reinforce dominant cultural hierarchies. While his focus was primarily the Middle East, his framework also serves to illuminate how ancient Mediterranean cultures, Greek in particular, are often exoticised and selectively appropriated in modern Western media. Paradoxically, though Greece is credited as a cornerstone of Western thought, it is also depicted as an archaic or mystical Other, a kind of lost world used to lend timelessness and gravitas to contemporary narratives.

In Hadestown, this process of exoticisation manifests in two significant ways: abstraction and deracination. Importantly, these dynamics appear to be largely subconscious. There is no overt intention to misrepresent or diminish Greek culture. Rather, Hadestown exemplifies a recurring tendency in Western artistic production to treat classical antiquity as a symbolic archive from which motifs can be drawn and repurposed, often without sustained engagement with the philosophical or metaphysical structures that gave those motifs their original significance. In this sense, the orientalism at play is not a deliberate caricature, but a habitual narrative pattern.

The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, for instance, is transposed from its religious and philosophical roots into a stylised American context. Gone are the Orphic rituals, the eschatological themes, the metaphysical resonances of descent and return. Instead, we encounter a Depression era industrial dystopia in which Hades is a tyrannical capitalist, Eurydice is a woman driven by hunger, and Orpheus is an idealistic singer songwriter. These transformations are not inherently flawed; creative adaptation is essential to myth’s survival, but they raise questions about what is lost in the process. When the myth is lifted wholesale into a modern idiom, how much of its original symbolic architecture is retained?

The answer, it seems, is possibly relatively little. Hadestown makes extensive use of mythological names and themes, but rarely delves into the cultural and cosmological systems from which they arise. In this, it echoes what bell hooks describes in Black Looks: Race and Representation as “eating the Other,” an aesthetic consumption of cultural difference that enriches the dominant culture without engaging the worldview of the marginalised one. Greece, within Hadestown, is less a place or history than a poetic atmosphere. The mythological figures operate largely within a Western narrative logic, detached from the ritual, linguistic, and ethical frameworks that once sustained them.

This tendency is reinforced by the musical language of the production. While the score’s fusion of folk, blues, jazz, and gospel is musically innovative and thematically resonant within an American context, it makes no reference to the musical traditions of Greece, whether ancient modes, Byzantine chant, or regional folk idioms. The choice to anchor the sonic world entirely in Americana underscores the show’s recontextualisation of the myth as a story of modern hardship and hope. Again, this is not a failure of artistry, but it does mark an identifiable shift away from any engagement with Hellenic musical or spiritual expression.

Consider, for instance, the ritual function of music in Orphic tradition. In ancient Greece, Orpheus was not merely a poetic figure but a hierophant, a mediator between worlds, whose music was a form of divine utterance. His lyre had cosmological resonance, not simply emotional appeal. His myth’s potency lay not in personal sentiment, but in its evocation of a sacred cosmology, an ordered vision of life, death, and the soul’s journey. In Hadestown, music is powerful, but it is largely metaphorical. It uplifts, consoles, and persuades, but it no longer speaks across ontological thresholds. The audience is moved, but not transformed.

Treated thus, Greek mythology becomes a set of suggestive signs, familiar names, archetypes, and tropes, that decorate rather than define the work. Roland Barthes notes in Mythologies, that myth can function as “a type of speech” that naturalises cultural constructions. In Hadestown, the myth of Orpheus becomes a vessel for universalised messages about love, loss, and resistance, valuable themes, certainly, but ones that are unmoored from their specific historical and cultural contexts.

This aesthetic approach extends into the show’s visual and performative language. While the characters bear Greek names, they are costumed and staged in idioms that owe little to Greek tradition. The Fates echo vocal trios of a past era, Hermes appears as a narrator in the blues tradition, and Hades’s domain is imagined as a factory town. These inspired choices successfully serve the narrative’s political themes, however they also may subconsciously contribute to a broader tokenism in which cultural symbols are retained primarily for their exotic appeal.  In “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’,” Stuart Hall indicates how gestures of this nature may often reduce cultural difference to aesthetic surface, stylised, decontextualised, and comfortably assimilated into dominant narratives.

This is the paradox at the heart of Hadestown: it seeks to critique capitalist systems while borrowing a mythic framework in ways that risk reinforcing the very patterns of cultural dominance it critiques. In reframing Greek myth through a Western industrial lens, ingenious as that undertaking may be, the production inadvertently may be reproducing a colonial logic in which non-Western cultural forms are adapted to suit Western moral and aesthetic frameworks. The myth becomes a vehicle for broadly humanist themes, but its Hellenic specificity fades.

Postcolonial theory further serves to illumines\ this phenomenon. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, describes colonial discourse as producing subjects who are “almost the same, but not quite.” Hadestown echoes this dynamic by rendering Greek myth recognisable enough to be accessible, but not so specific as to challenge dominant cultural assumptions. The result is a kind of cultural palatability: the myth becomes familiar, marketable, and while undeniably emotionally potent, distanced from its origins.

Moreover, one might consider how this dynamic parallels similar trends in the representation of other cultures within the canon of musical theatre. From the orientalist spectacle of The King and I to the appropriation of African diasporic spirituality in The Lion King, Broadway has long relied on the incorporation of non-Western mythologies and aesthetics to enrich its narratives. What distinguishes Hadestown is its presentation as politically progressive, which may obscure the structural conservatism embedded in its approach to myth. In this context, its artistic achievements undoubtedly deserve celebration, but also critique.

In this regard, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of “epistemic violence,” articulated in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and referring to the erasure of marginalised forms of knowledge through processes of representation that impose dominant frameworks, also assumes relevance. Hadestown, by translating Greek myth into a largely Western idiom, enacts a soft form of this violence, not by silencing outright, but by rearticulating cultural material in ways that obscure its indigenous logic. It does not provide Greek myth with an opportunity to speak on its own terms, but rather within paradigms that are already familiar to a Western audience.

None of this is to suggest that adaptation is inappropriate or undesirable or that the work itself is not remarkable. On the contrary, reimagining myths is one of the ways cultures remain alive. But adaptation carries responsibilities. When a myth is lifted from one context and placed into another, the process should ideally involve an awareness of what is being displaced, and a sensitivity to the symbolic systems at play.

One might ask: what would a more dialogic approach to adaptation look like? It might begin with a deeper engagement with the source culture’s own articulations of myth. It could include collaborations with scholars, artists, and musicians from within that tradition. It would involve not only borrowing, but listening. And it would acknowledge the specificity of the mythic voice, resisting the impulse to universalise what is, at its core, culturally rooted. Assuming of course, that there is a particularly Hellenic way of viewing such myths…

Hadestown succeeds in many of its ambitions. It is musically rich, emotionally compelling, and thematically urgent. Nonetheless, its use of Greek mythology deserves critical reflection. It demonstrates how even the most progressive art can carry within it unexamined habits of cultural appropriation, and how easily cultural depth can be replaced by aesthetic resonance. Perhaps it is not enough to speak the names of gods; we must also ask what worlds those names once sustained.

In this sense, Hadestown offers an opportunity to reflect on the ways myth, while powerful and resonant across cultures, carries meanings that are intimately tied to place, tradition, and cosmology. Its reimagining of Orpheus and Eurydice illustrates how ancient narratives continue to inspire new expressions, even as they change shape. In tracing these metamorphoses, we are reminded of the importance of cultural specificity, not as a constraint, but as a source of richness that deepens our engagement with the stories we retell.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 5 July 2025

LEKATSAS AND THE POLITICS OF NAMING IN POSTCOLONIAL MELBOURNE

 

In contemporary multicultural democracies, the naming of public space constitutes a potent semiotic act, one that not only honours individuals or events but also inscribes hegemonic narratives into the very spatial and mnemonic fabric of the city. Far from being neutral, the selection of whose names are affixed to streets, laneways, and public infrastructure is a profoundly ideological process, mediating between memory, identity, and power. Within this framework, the Victorian State Government’s "Name a Place in Victoria" initiative may be viewed as a critical opportunity to redress historical imbalances and silences by elevating those whose contributions have been systemically overlooked. Among the most compelling candidates for such recognition is Antonios Ioannis Gerasimos Lekatsas (1862–1946), a foundational figure in Melbourne's Greek-Australian community and an exemplar of diasporic civic agency.

Lekatsas’s biography, while resonant in its own right, assumes even greater significance when contextualised within the theoretical paradigms of race theory, postcolonialism, and critical onomastics. As scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak have emphasised, the colonial and settler-colonial project functions through the erasure or marginalisation of the Other, whether by denying spatial visibility, restricting access to symbolic capital, or delegitimising alternative epistemologies. In settler societies such as Australia, these dynamics are refracted not only through the disempowerment of Indigenous peoples but also through the uneven integration of migrant populations. Thus, the naming of streets becomes a cartography of power: an inscription of belonging for some, and exclusion for others.

Antonios Lekatsas, born in1862 in the impoverished mountain village of Exoghi, Ithaca, Greece, represents a paradigmatic case of subaltern ascent through diasporic initiative. Having migrated to Melbourne in 1886 after years of itinerant labour and military service, he established a series of pioneering hospitality ventures that transformed the commercial landscape of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Melbourne. His marriage in 1893 to Margaret Wilson, a department head at Foy & Gibson, catalysed the opening of the Town Hall Café on Swanston Street, a venue that employed seventy workers (primarily of Greek descent) and served 650 patrons. His subsequent establishments, the Paris Café and the Vienna Café (later Cafe Australia, redesigned by Walter Burley Griffin), signified not merely business expansion, but the transposition of European urban modernity into the antipodean colonial city.

The architectural ambitions of Lekatsas, epitomised by his commissioning of Griffin for the Capitol Building and for his private residence, Yamala, in Frankston, should not be interpreted as the self-indulgence of an affluent restaurateur. Rather, they must be read, following the work of Homi Bhabha and Lefebvre, as a spatial assertion of hybridity: a claim to visibility and permanence in a landscape that structurally privileged Anglo norms and aesthetics. The disruption of monocultural architectural hegemony through diasporic design thus forms part of what Arjun Appadurai terms the "production of locality" under globalised and postcolonial conditions.

Yet Lekatsas’s contributions extended far beyond the commercial. In 1897, he played a central role in founding the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria, subsequently serving multiple terms as president. His leadership in religious and cultural institutionalisation coincided with and facilitated the growth of Melbourne’s Greek population into a coherent and politically influential diaspora. As Greek Consul-General (1921–25) and Consul in Melbourne (1931–46), he also functioned as a transnational broker between Greece and Australia, an intermediary position that Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have theorised as constitutive of diasporic identity formation.

Importantly, Lekatsas also cultivated an ethos of civic responsibility. During the Second World War, he orchestrated a community-wide campaign whereby Melbourne’s Greeks would donate one day’s pay to the Hellenic war effort; he himself contributed £10,000 for the welfare of Greek and British child victims. He also donated annually to the Lord Mayor’s Hospital Appeal and funded a hospital for the indigent on Ithaca. In recognition of his service to both his homeland and adopted country, he was awarded the Golden Cross of the Order of the Phoenix in 1939, a distinction not merely honorary, but indicative of his dual embeddedness in overlapping spheres of cultural citizenship.

And yet, despite such extraordinary achievements, Antonios Lekatsas has been largely effaced from Melbourne’s commemorative landscape. This silence is emblematic of what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms "the production of historical silences" and what David Lowenthal describes as the "heritage deficit" of migrant communities. Within the Greek-Australian diaspora itself, there exists a pervasive historical amnesia—a tendency to revere Hellenism in mythic terms while neglecting the very individuals who constituted its diasporic reality. Such erasure, voluntary or otherwise, constitutes a rupture in the chain of postmemory, as theorised by Marianne Hirsch, and forestalls the consolidation of a cohesive intergenerational identity.

The politics of naming is particularly salient here. As critical onomastics makes clear, the names we assign to places are not mere labels; they are sites of ideological contestation. They determine whose stories are told, whose histories are remembered, and whose contributions are legitimised. In Melbourne, where public space remains overwhelmingly coded by Anglo-European nomenclature, the insertion of a name such as Lekatsas would function as a powerful discursive intervention. It would not only recognise a diasporic pioneer but also unsettle the coloniality of urban commemoration. Scholars such as Sara Ahmed have illustrated how whiteness operates as an orientation in space, privileging certain bodies and histories while rendering others marginal. A Lekatsas Street or Lane would act as a counter-hegemonic marker, a toponymic act that both affirms Greek-Australian presence and reconfigures the semiotics of belonging.

In this context, the Victorian Government’s "Name a Place in Victoria" program assumes both symbolic and material significance. By opening the process of toponymic recognition to community nomination, it implicitly acknowledges that historical memory is contested terrain. Yet without a critical framework that prioritises equity, the initiative risks reproducing existing exclusions under the guise of diversity. It is therefore imperative that such programs engage seriously with the demands of postcolonial justice, racial equity, and epistemic restitution. The naming of a street after Antonios Lekatsas would represent a concrete manifestation of these principles.

Such a naming would also provide a salient opportunity to interrogate the foundational myths of Greek-Australian prosperity. It would compel us to ask not only who is honoured in public space, but on what basis. The story of Lekatsas invites reflection on the realities of migrant labour and the forms of wage exploitation that accompanied the ascent of early Greek businesses in Melbourne. As scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Lisa Lowe have noted, racial capitalism operates through differentiated regimes of labour discipline and unfree labour. The success of enterprises like those founded by Lekatsas was predicated on the intensive labour of Greek migrants, many of whom worked in conditions that contemporary analysis might characterise as wage slavery. Commemorating Lekatsas need not obscure these facts; rather, it should catalyse a discussion about how exploitation, sacrifice, and aspiration coalesced to produce community affluence. In this sense, a street bearing his name can function not only as a marker of honour but as a discursive threshold: an entry point for sustained public engagement with the contradictions at the heart of migrant histories.

This is not to suggest that naming alone suffices as redress. As Foucault has observed, power operates not only through visibility but through the conditions of legibility. For a name to be efficacious, it must be accompanied by a pedagogy of memory, one that explicates the reasons for commemoration and embeds the name within broader curricular, cultural, and civic discourses. The toponym must serve as a portal to inquiry, compelling citizens to confront the complexities of Melbourne’s migrant history and to reckon with the asymmetries of historical recognition.

In proposing that Antonios Lekatsas be memorialised in this way, we are not simply advocating for an individual. We are challenging the modalities of public memory, the exclusions of the historical archive, and the racialised hierarchies of spatial honour. We are insisting that diasporic contributions be rendered visible, that foundational figures be re-inscribed into the city’s symbolic order, and that the act of naming be recognised as a terrain of justice.

To inscribe the name Lekatsas onto the civic map of Melbourne is to affirm a counter-narrative—one that acknowledges the agency, resilience, and civic contributions of those who arrived from the peripheries of empire and reshaped the metropolis from within. It is to signal that memory, like space, is not given, but made—contested, plural, and subject to ongoing negotiation. Such an act would not merely honour the past. It would equip us, theoretically and politically, to envision a more inclusive urban future.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 28 June 2025

ALEXANDER'S JOURNEY

 

In the annals of our diasporic cultural production, few works attain the intellectual gravitas, aesthetic cohesion, and spiritual resonance exhibited by Alexander’s Journey, a compelling dramatic oratorio that transcends mere theatrical performance to assume the dimensions of an ontological meditation on identity, destiny, and the communion of civilisations. Conceived with lyrical profundity and historical acuity, and brought to life under the aegis of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, this work constitutes not only a homage to the great Macedonian exemplar par excellence, but an articulation of the Hellenic soul refracted through the prism of its greatest and most paradoxical emissary.

The production, initiated through the cultural foresight of Peter Stefanidis, President of the Association, is at once reverent and interrogative. It neither succumbs to triumphalism nor reduction, but rather situates Alexander within the rich tapestry of civilisational memory: a locus where myth, historiography, and existential inquiry converge. Structured as a sequential procession of monologues delivered by historical actors and diverse witnesses to the Hellenistic efflorescence, be they Babylonian scribes, Armenian sages, Greek elders, Indian monarchs, and the sovereign mother Olympias herself, the play constructs a palimpsest of perspectives, each inscribing upon the other the imprint of encounter, transformation, and enduring legacy.

From its inception, the play adopts a tonal register of solemn invocation. The prologue, uttered amid the ruins of ancient Pella by a figure that allegorically personifies Macedonia, assumes the quality of a threnody: a lamentation against the erasure of a people’s Hellenic lineage by the caprice of contemporary narratives. “Macedonia does not beg for its place in Greek memory—it is Greek memory,” proclaims the speaker, a refrain that constitutes the ideological keystone of the entire work. This is not a provincial cry for inclusion, but a juridical assertion of cultural continuity, anchored in dialect, ritual, art, and the consciousness of a shared heritage.

The dramaturgical edifice of the play may be composed of fragments, but these fragments cohere through a deeper metaphysical unity. Each monologue is an artefact of memory, suspended in time and space, yet suffused with a common yearning: to comprehend the phenomenon of Alexander, not merely the conqueror or legislator, but the man who strove to collapse the dichotomy between East and West, self and Other, Greek and Barbarian. His is a journey not only through geography, but through the interior realms of vision, loss, and transcendence.

The dramatis personae, carefully selected, serve as vessels of historical consciousness. The Babylonian scribe does not simply recount Alexander’s entrance into the sacred precincts of Marduk; he testifies to the ethical revolution implicit in that act. When Alexander dismounted at the Gate of Ishtar and bowed before the ziggurat of Esagila, he enacted a liturgy of reverence. His conquest, the play suggests, was sacramental and not iconoclastic. Likewise, in the Armenian highlands, the figure of the historian speaks of Alexander not as an invader, but as a figure who offered syncretism in place of subjugation, and whose presence, or at least the legend of that purported presence, sanctified, rather than profaned.

The play depictions demand a more nuanced interpretive framework. Theoretically, the play may be situated within a counterpostcolonial discourse, wherein the hegemonic paradigms of cultural imperialism are overturned by a model of dialogic encounter. Unlike the Orientalist typologies critiqued by Edward Said, Alexander’s engagement with the cultures he encountered is rendered not as a voyeuristic exercise in domination, but as a sincere and generative act of translation, between rituals, cosmologies, and ontologies. Accordingly, Alexander’s Journey, is not the harbinger of decline, but the midwife of hybridity.

The philosophical undercurrent of the play is nowhere more powerfully conveyed than in the monologue of Alexander himself, delivered on the eve of his traversal of the Hellespont. It is in these lines that the internal architecture of his psyche is most luminously unveiled. He declares: “What is a king if not a servant to vision?” This formulation reconfigures kingship from the coercive to the sacrificial. It elevates Alexander from a figure of martial prowess to one of metaphysical vocation. His campaign, the text intimates, was not against Persia, but against limitation: the boundary of the known, the parochialism of tribe and polis, the sclerosis of tradition untempered by encounter.

The choreographic interludes that punctuate the monologues, comprising dances performed by the Pontian, Macedonian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Indian communities of Melbourne, serve not as ornamentation, but as kinetic exegesis. Each movement, each rhythm, becomes a corporeal mnemonic, a non-verbal continuation of the dialogue Alexander initiated with the world. Here, the play calls upon the semiotics of the repertoire, in Diana Taylor’s formulation, where embodied performance carries meanings inaccessible to the written archive. Through dance, the communities represented are not merely echoing Alexander’s legacy. Instead, they are actively inscribing themselves within it.

The monologue of Porus, the Indian king vanquished at Hydaspes, exemplifies the ethical dialectic the play seeks to construct. In a moment of arresting sobriety, Porus recounts his defeat, subsuming his bitterness with his overarching admiration for his erstwhile adversary. Alexander, he affirms, did not humiliate his adversary but honoured him instead. “He admired strength not only in himself—but in others,” Porus reflects, suggesting a nobility that transcends both victor and vanquished. It is in this moment that the Hellenistic vision, conceived not as the domination of the world, but its reconciliation through a common ethos, is most fully realised.

The character of Olympias, so often relegated to the margins of historiography as either a shadowy manipulator or a footnote to the deeds of men, is here retrieved from historical silence and granted a voice of profound agency. In Alexander’s Journey, she emerges not merely as the bereaved mother of a fallen hero, but as a sovereign in her own right, a priestess, a queen, and the formative influence behind the man who would be called Great. Her monologue functions both as a personal lament and a political testament, articulating grief not as passive suffering, but as an act of defiance against the historical structures that have silenced women and elided their contributions to civilisational development. Through the dramaturgical space afforded to her, Olympias is emancipated from the distortions of classical misogyny and male-centred imperial narratives. Her voice, unflinching and oracular, proclaims: “Let history do its worst… Macedonia is the soul of Hellas. Alexander was not its end. He was its beginning.” In granting her the final word, the play enacts a feminist intervention into the canon, reclaiming a woman whose influence was foundational and whose pain, too long muted, is rendered audible, so that mourning becomes not only memory, but power.

Consequently, the production evokes a tragic aesthetic, akin to that found in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, wherein greatness is always entwined with sacrifice. Alexander’s ambition may have been luminous, but it consumed him. His desire to unify the oikoumene, to bring all peoples under the aegis of a singular civilisation, rendered him both a builder and a destroyer. It is this duality, of creation through conquest, of elevation through erasure, that the play interrogates with rare moral intelligence.

One may draw from Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian as a lens through which to interpret Alexander’s existential orientation. Like the Dionysian archetype, Alexander is driven by a will to transcend the Apollonian bounds of order and containment. Yet unlike the ecstatic chaos of Dionysus, his project is rationalised, ordered, radiant. In this, he embodies the synthesis of both archetypes, bringing to the world a cosmology wherein multiplicity is not abolished, but subsumed within a higher harmony.

In an age increasingly defined by insularity and the reification of national boundaries, Alexander’s Journey thus emerges as a timely and necessary intervention. It posits that identity is not a zero-sum construct, but a palimpsest, with each layer enriching, rather than erasing, the one beneath. The multiculturalism of the play is not superficial tokenism. It is an ontological statement: that the Hellenic spirit has never been static, but always already open to the world, capable of transformation and interrogation, without dissolution.

The Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, in staging this ambitious and spiritually resonant work, has accomplished more than a celebration of ancestral memory. It has facilitated a reclamation of civilisational purpose. Peter Stefanidis and his collaborators have demonstrated that cultural stewardship is not a passive act of preservation, but an active engagement with the legacies that define us.

In its totality, Alexander’s Journey transcends the confines of historical dramatization to become a profound meditation upon the nature of sovereignty, the transmission of legacy, and the transformative potential inherent in the convergence of civilisations. It interrogates the ethical dimensions of conquest, probing whether domination, when tempered by vision and reverence, may be transmuted into communion; whether alterity can be not merely tolerated but integrated; and whether a solitary figure, possessed not of hubris but of transcendent purpose, might indeed reconfigure the trajectory of the world. This is no simple chronicle of martial exploits; rather, it is an exploration of civilisational synthesis as sacral vocation.

For Alexander, as the drama solemnly proclaims, “did not march to punish Darius alone. He marched to rewrite the world.” Thus, the figure of the conqueror is elevated to that of a mythopoeic agent, one who channels the metaphysical aspirations of an epoch, collapsing the binaries of this time. In this capacity, Alexander’s Journey, through the luminous stewardship of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, becomes not merely an act of remembrance but a summons. It calls upon the contemporary viewer not only to recollect, but to transcend; not only to witness, but to participate in the ever-unfolding dialectic of Hellenism. For through Alexander, we do not merely encounter the historical; we confront the numinous—and are compelled, in turn, to aspire.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

Alexander’s Journey will be performed at the Clocktower Centre, Moonee Ponds on 29 June 2025 at 2:30pm. For tickets visit: https://clocktowercentre.com.au/alexanders-journey

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 June 2025

ASHPOEMS

 

It is only when the fire burns to ashes, when the embers are glowing, that cooking, and warmth is possible. Similarly, in George Vassilacopoulos’ latest poetry collection: Ashpoems, we are presented with the smouldering verses of a poetry that having been consigned to the flames of fervour emerges as a philosophical and sensuous meditation on existence, shaped by a Platonist framework that privileges the erotic, not as divine ecstasy nor as political passion, but as an immanent condition of being. His verse, or at least its “ashmemories” contemplates the cosmos not as a transcendent or hierarchical order, but as the felt, relational field of human presence—a shared reality that is loved through the loving of others. As he says: “I gather/ The elsewhere in you/ Around my neck/ Into a charm/ For the Bad Omens/ Of the next poem.”

At the core of Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is a unique articulation of eros—not as sexual desire or celestial yearning, but rather, as a form of ontological attunement. His poems do not speak of eros as aspiration toward a separate realm of perfection, as in some classical readings of Plato’s Symposium, but instead, as a resonant, inner force that draws beings toward one another within the temporal unfolding of existence. This is an eroticism grounded in mutual recognition, in the silent but potent gestures that constitute relational being.

His notion of “erotic minimalism”—a term he has invoked in relation to his poetic practice—evokes a phenomenology of love that recalls Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of the face-to-face encounter. For Levinas, the Other’s presence is not reducible to comprehension or assimilation, but calls forth an ethical response prior to cognition. In a similar vein, Vassilacopoulos’s sparse but affectively charged lines gesture toward this immediate openness: the erotic is the presence that disarms, the nearness that transcends domination. As he writes in: I Welcomed You, language is not an assertion of authority but “a whisper to the visitor from the visionary future”—a mode of receptivity, not control. In the Ashpoems, language is that which emerges from the conflagration of words being conscripted to evoke that which defies articulation: “You stutter/ Sighs of broken words/ Out of this world.”

Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos is not the grand rational architecture of Neoplatonic metaphysics. Instead, his poetry returns us to the world—sensuous, fractured, temporal—but imbued with meaning through our loving relation to it. Here, his Platonism deviates from the ladder of the Symposium, where love ascends from bodies to souls to forms to the Good. Consequently, his work resonates more with a Platonic immanence, one echoed in the work of contemporary philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who reimagine Platonic eros not as a disembodied striving, but as a poiesis of being-in-relation: “You keep coming back to the warmth/ Of my darkness/ To my words of consonants/ They tell the story of the world again.”

Consequently, in the ashpoems where the cosmos appears, it does so not as a background but as a beloved—at times fragmented, melancholic, or in exile: “I sprinkle your abyss/ With poems/ Redeeming us with surprises.” Vassilacopoulos thus breaks from classical metaphysical aspirations to describe a world not perfected, but lived. The stars are not ideal markers of eternal truths, but participants in the dance of longing and recognition. As Irigaray writes in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, “We are always already in the cosmos, even if we have forgotten it.” Vassilacopoulos’s poetry invites us to remember—not by ascending but by opening ourselves to the presence of others and the “silent messages” they bring: “How can I recite you a poem/ Made from ashes?/,,, I curved my palm to give a place/ To their dark tiny crystals/ Words magically appeared/ Little ashmemories.”

Though steeped in Platonic thought, Vassilacopoulos’s poetic logic often moves dialectically, recalling Hegel’s formulation of love as unity in difference. For Hegel, love is the synthesis of individual selves into a shared spirit—not through erasure, but through mutual recognition. In this way, love becomes a dialectical process, a movement that preserves contradiction as it unfolds into reconciliation.

Vassilacopoulos’s poems mirror this dialectical rhythm: they often begin in the solitude of exile or the sorrow of absence, but gesture toward the promise of relation. The lover in these poems does not master the world; instead, they attend to its openings. As the poet writes in The Pleasure of Exile, “there is no home but the arrival of the guest.” The very condition of exile becomes a poetic ontological stance—one of receptivity, vulnerability, and openness to the unexpected presence of the Other: “My words roll/ …You wait for them/ Open mouth in the void/ As they land/ They recite us/ Into stalactites.”

Such ideas resonate with Hegel’s insight in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where spirit comes to know itself not in self-possession, but through the struggle and reconciliation with the Other. Vassilacopoulos poeticises this in existential rather than political terms: the cosmos becomes intelligible not through mastery, but through a tender dwelling-with, in which the erotic is the site of recognition, the unfolding of “you” in the space of “we:” “We float/ In the vertigo/ Hollowed by the poets.”

A hallmark of Vassilacopoulos’s poetics is his attention to silence—not as absence, but as the space where meaning gathers. In many of his poems, it is the unsaid, the pause, the breath between words that carries the deepest charge. This practice echoes Heidegger’s belief in the “saying of the unsaid” (das Sagen des Ungesagten)—that poetry opens the clearing in which Being can show itself. Yet unlike Heidegger, whose concern remains with Being in the abstract, Vassilacopoulos roots this opening in the erotic relation, in the space between persons: “Baptised/ In the mist/ Of your silence/ I am ready to be named by you.”

In the Ashpoems, silence becomes a kind of ontological gesture, a touch that does not grasp. The erotic here is not the frantic desire to possess, but the capacity to be-with, to bear witness, to offer one’s presence without domination. This echoes Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of love in The Inoperative Community: “It is not a fusion of souls but a spacing, a sharing, a withdrawal that allows for being-together.” In Vassilacopoulos’s cosmos, love is the distance that binds, the silence that listens, the χώρα in which everything indwells, whether this is where: “With the ancient silence of my hands/ I wash your face,” or in the process in which: “We sway/ In each other’s breathing/ Fathoming their silence.”

Rather than being linear, Time in Vassilacopoulos’s poetry is recursive, melancholic, and oozing with memory. The presence of the past is never far: loss, exile, and return haunt his verses: “Carrying/ he dead of the tribe/ Into aethereal heights.” Nonetheless he refrains from romanticising nostalgia. Instead, he reclaims the erotic force of the now, the “minimal” moment in which love discloses itself not as totality, but as trace, gesture, echo: “Recite me/ And listen to the ancient echo/ Of your breathing.”

This temporality finds kinship in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, particularly his notion of kairos—the “opportune moment,” where potential becomes presence. Vassilacopoulos’ poetics in the Ashpoems embraces such temporal ruptures, where ordinary time is suspended and a new intimacy with existence is made possible, “carrying the heaviness of worlds/ From one to the other.” The cosmos is not behind us or above us, but here, in the hush before the word, in the gaze that holds, in the quiet arrival of the other, “In the mornings of sorrows/ Over a cup of coffee.”

George Vassilacopoulos’ Ashpoems constitutes a philosophical inquiry through verse: a poetics that situates eros at the heart of existence, not as escape from the world but as devotion to its fragile beauty. In dialogue with Plato and those who have transformed his legacy, from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas, Irigaray, and Nancy, his work insists that the cosmos is something we love into being through the simple, radical act of welcoming another: “I breath you in/ I breath me out.”

In place of divine ascent or political mastery, Vassilacopoulos offers a human cosmos—erotic, relational, temporal—where the soul does not seek to transcend the world, but to belong in it. And in the whisper of his lines, in their minimalism, we find an invitation: not to conquer truth, but to accompany it, as one accompanies a beloved across the trembling silence of a shared world, “as drops of the world/ Sweating.” It is for us then to decipher these ashes, written by “the bell/ Of all sounds,” in order, in silence, to “Return our Tribe/ To the beginning.”

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 14 June 2025