To an ancestor, dearly…

To: Mr. Publius Ovidius Naso.
From: A descendant of the Getae, Sauromatae, Greeks, Romans and many others.

Sir Ovid (for this is how people call you in the West. I think the “ius” is too hard for them to pronounce. It could also be that they shortened your name due to that tendency they have to abbreviate everything in order to be efficient. You see, Mr. Naso, efficiency is crucial in my world, more so than it was during your beloved Roman Empire),

Although your exile poems deepened my winter depression, I still consider them to be the best stuff you ever wrote. I understand the tears of an exile. I’m an immigrant, not an exile, but my troubles are similar to yours. I know that “home” is a notion that cannot be packed in a luggage and taken out in the new place, especially when the weather in that new place is severe, for weather plays a most important role in the life of fragile people like us. However, dear ancestor, I would like to know how you would have liked it to be sent to Canada instead of Tomis! You complain about the long winter in Tomis? You exaggerate every bit when saying that “the snow lies continuously, and once fallen, neither sun nor rain may melt it“(Tr. III. 10. 13). You would be surprised to find a place colder and more sad than old Tomis, colony of Miletus. You would be grateful that you were granted such a place for your exile, on the shores of Scythia Minor (Black Sea), where the Hister (Danube) flows into the sea. In Canada, somehow, the sky is always very low. One has a feeling he’s carrying clouds with him all day and the sky scrapers with shiny windows reflecting the opaque nebulae don’t help at all. You complain that you don’t feel safe, that the savage Getae are always at war and poisonous arrows are flying through the air, searching for victims. How would you like it, I wonder, if instead of the the sound of sea and birds in the morning, you heard the constant humming, vrruuumming, beep-beeping, uiiuuuiiuuing and occasionally the bang-paffing of the highway. What if this noise went on forever, non-stop, 24/7???
I fail to understand how you couldn’t see the beauty in the things you describe. Let’s look at this image:

“(…) I have seen the vast sea stiff with ice, a slippery shell
holding the water motionless. And seeing is not enough; I
have trodden the frozen sea, and the surface lay beneath
an unwetted foot. (…) At such times the curving dolphins
cannot launch themselves into the air; if they try, stern winter
checks them; and though Boreas may roar and toss his wings,
there will be no wave on the beleaguered flood. (…) I have seen
fish clinging fast bound in the ice, yet some even then still lived.”(Tr. III. 10. 37-50)

How cool is that??? I already see the dolphins trying to jump but banging their head against the surface ice (ouch!) and the cartoonish image of the frozen fish blinking in bewilderment and thinking “Wtf, I wan’t expecting this, man!!”. I know how the cold can make one bitter and pissed off with life but c’mon, we all know you came to Tomis with slaves. I’m sure that after taking a walk on the frozen sea, covered in the warmest bear skins (you describe the local clothing yourself!) you come back to your warm cottage, for your slaves have taken care to keep the fire going and even cooked some hearty soup for you. Your desk is ready and you can just start writing, without worrying, like my contemporaries often do, that you haven’t paid the mortgage on your house, that your car insurance is going higher by the day or that the very food you’re eating has so many genetically modified substances that it doesn’t even resemble what it once was.

The locals you hate so much seem to me much more genuine than those Romans of yours, the ones who kicked you out of Rome for a book you wrote ten years prior to your exile! You complain about the Tomitans endlessly:

“With skins and stitched breeches they keep out of the evils of the
cold; of the whole body only the face is exposed. Often their hair
tinkles with hanging ice and their beards glisten white with the mantle
of frost. Exposed wine stands upright, retaining the shape of the jar,
and they drink, not droughts of wine, but fragments served them!” (Tr. III. 10. 19-24)

The Santa-like faces must have seemed so strange to a Mediterranean poet who spent his whole life in gardens, drinking wine any other way but frozen. However, the images are frame worthy! Later, when exaggeration didn’t serve you anymore, for you gave up all hopes of being excused and called back to Rome, you put things differently:

“Your gentle harboring of my fate, Tomitae, shows how kindly are
men of Grecian stock. My own people, the Paeligni, my home country
of Sulmo could not have been gentler to my woes.(…) Wherefore dear
as is to Latona the land of Delos, which alone offered her a safe place in
her wandering, so dear is Tomis to me; to me exiled from my native abode
it remains hospitable and loyal to the present time.” (Epistulae ex Ponto. IV. 14. 47-60)

Well, not all men at Tomis were “of Grecian stock” but it’s good enough. I’ll take these verses as proof that you were less bitter after seven or eight years of life in Tomis. Moreover, you started a huge trend, the autobiographical, confessional style of writing which I greatly appreciate. Therefore, exile has good aspects. I’m sure immigrations does too, I just can’t see them at the moment.

With regards,

A student of letters.

* * *

Nine years have passed since, following my family, I set foot on North American land. Ovid himself spent nine years as a “relegatio” (a milder form of exile, where the convict could keep his property and communicate with friends and family through letters) before he died at Tomis.  I am as much of a stranger as I was nine years ago. My unadaptability justifies my affinity with works such as Ovid’s Tristia and Ex Ponto . Reading these works, however, was quite hard and, sometimes, puzzling. Ovid is exiled at Tomis, today’s Constanta, a city I love. While I can relate to his feelings of alienation, I recognize my native scenery in his depictions and I get irritated at his constant disdain towards Tomis and it’s people. I just wish Ovid was more of an explorer, more versatile and inquisitive. I wish he was, unlike me, an adaptable man, for life is short and there’s no time for endless whining. That way, we could have seen more of those beautiful images through Ovid’s eyes.

The Black Sea, as Ovid saw it, exasperated, every winter:

Pictures from: Vapoare, English Russia, Goobix, Haioase.

All quotes from: Ovid. Tristia. Ex Ponto. Trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler. London: Harvard University Press, 1988

Aliki Vougiouklaki – “Thalassa platia”

English translation here

pass over

I didn’t leave him, as everyone thought,  because I got bored. It is, however, true that he was the most tedious, dull person I’ve ever met but that’s something I could have lived with. As a matter of fact, I’ve gotten to think of lameness as a positive trait of character and Gigi used to take me directly to the bottom of boredom, to it’s wonderfully grey roots where we would sit in absolute silence and despair and enjoy a cup of chlorine tap water.

Let me tell you, then, why I did leave him!

I know, you see, that on my deathbed I won’t be able to carry out full arguments like Plato’s Socrates in Phaedo. And, to the disappointment of my traditionalist friends, I’m also not going to have some priest whispering last minute prayers in my already deaf ear and asking me to confess my sins because I simply don’t want to remember the lot of them right there and then.  Plus, priests have a mechanical way of pronouncing words which freaks me out. Unless there will be a group of priests who chant something Byzantine style, doesn’t matter what, could be one of Neruda’s poems, the “Communist Manifesto” or the ingredients list on the cream cake we bought last night (an awful long list, believe me!). In that case, I can spoil some time and tell their piousnesses things that will make them not blush but grow purple, beyond purple, cyclamen!!!  Moreover, I would even kiss that cross they take from house to house, the one that everyone kisses, even the guy on the first floor who has Hepatitis A and the old woman who died yesterday due to complications of tuberculosis!  All this for a little Byzantine chanting…

I also know that dieing in meditation and reaching satori at the end of my last breath is close to impossible (although I’m still hoping that will happen but don’t tell anyone, ok?).

I do know, however, what I will do in order to make my passing away a very pleasant one! For example, I know for sure that the walls of the room in which I’ll roll my eyes towards whatever expects me on the other side are going to be yellow, although I didn’t decide yet if it’ll be a mustard yellow or a brighter, colder, lime yellow. I would, of course, prefer to die during summer but I’m afraid I’ll get carried away with gardening or with lying in the sun close to the sea and I won’t remember to make the world one soul lighter until October or so.

The other walls, the walls inside, will have to be painted too. The color…well, it’s more of an atmosphere than a color. I’ll describe it but if you didn’t spend a lot of time in between, if you’re as solid as a rock, more, as a tree, you won’t get it. You have to loose your balance to see this color. You have to be a bit of a fuck up…

It’s the atmosphere of the airports and train stations. Not any airports and certainly not any stations but only those you love deeply. The airports that you thought of slitting your wrists on because you left someone behind. The train stations you spent many hours on in the company of good friends waiting for trains that were never on time. The passing points where it doesn’t really matter who you are but where you’re going. And that you’re going. The other walls will be painted in this color, the color of the hiatus. I love that word. It does make a lot of sense because death is just like another passing point…hopefully.

October it will be, then! October, like the last time I stepped on that airport, my airport, where I come every time I screw up every single little segment of my life.  Which happens a lot. Every two years or so.You get the picture, I hope. Me – immigrant from small Eastern European country, chasing the  American dream which is not my dream at all (since I didn’t even immigrate to America but to Canada and it’s goddamn cold here even for chasing the bus in the morning), obsessed about odd things like Byzantine music, yellow walls, Plato and an airport. Gigi – Eastern European very boring boyfriend who waits for me at that airport. Me – happy to be there, I want to kiss the floor of the airport and the stinky sweaty cleaning lady in the dirty washroom. Gigi, looking at the watch with that look on his face, the “I bore myself to death” look. Did I tell you how boring he was?

Then, as  I step out of the wonderful place where I pick up my luggage from the rolling band and struggle to push it on the cart, which never stays put, and I enter the unventilated waiting room where sweaty and tired arriving immigrants embrace their sweatier and cigarette-smoke-plus-a-lot-of-deodorant smelling relatives, Gigi does something unexpected. He grins. A horrible, happy grin, something he probably rehearsed at home thinking it gives him a romantic look. You know that grin, I’m sure, Hollywood abuses it. The “I’m lost without you” grin, the grotesque “I’ve been dreaming of you for the last two years” grin, the idiotic “I could die for you right now” grin…

It wasn’t the nightmarish rictus of his letter-box mouth itself that worried me but the fear that this memory which, in fact, will always hunt me, could destroy my love for in-betweens and those interior walls would be stripped down and left bare, just like the walls of Bubulina’s house in “Zorba” after she dies. I thought then and I still think that one boring Gigi is not worth that much. Especially when the same grinning face was pressing hard against my best friend’s hair just two months before it almost wrecked my death plans.

Earthlings

I’ve watched Earthlings more than a year ago and a lot of the scenes still pop up in my head sometimes, especially when I pass the meat section in the food store and when I attend Christmas at my parents’ house. I think it’s the movie that had the most impact on me, even though I’ve been a vegetarian (well, almost vegan) for many years. I only recommended it to one person and he is now almost a vegetarian. 
I don’t think that someone who is a hardcore meat eater could ever watch this movie. I also don’t believe in convincing people to change their way of life. That’s why I didn’t tell many people about this movie. I think that there is a lot of information out there and that if someone is interested, they’ll just do the research themselves. The most I can ever dream to do is make some of those who come my way question their ideas.    

That said, I think Earthlings backs up an argument I’ve had in my mind for a long time - we are going out of our way to get these animals and use them for different stuff when we don’t really need them at all. We can live a comfortable life without all this stuff we get from them. Is that so? Well, I know that other people would argue otherwise. My parents, for example, don’t go at all out of their way to get meat. On the contrary, I am the one who has to go out of her way to avoid meat. Meat and animal products have become part of our lives and it’s very hard to remember where all these things come from. As a reductionist, however, I think that the origin of things is very important. If you have reductionist tendencies or you’re just wondering what’s behind that beef tenderloin you had last night, Earthlings will show you. And much more.

I found a very nice review and comments on the movie here, on VeganDad’s blog, including a comment by Shaun Monson, the director of Earthlings in the comments section.

ad absurdum

 

I can’t remember how and when it all started. Maybe it started during that one night, a long time ago, when I was in grade one or two and I felt like school was the worst thing that could ever happen to a kid who loved walnut trees and pigs and dirt roads. I remember looking at the sky then and thinking “If I lived on one of those stars and I looked at the sky just as I do now I would see none of these things – the school, the evil teacher, even the walnut trees. I would just see some white stuff. So the teacher is just some white stuff.” This cheered me up a lot and I didn’t hate school so much after that night. Consequently, I’m still waking up every morning and going to school and I’ll probably do so for the rest of my life.

 

It might have also started when I was a teenager and I loved punk music and punk boys. I was hanging out with some of these punk friends who were jumping violently while some other punk guys were calling on a god none of us believed in to save a certain queen. I was very happy to be there but I kept seeing all my friends as jumping pieces of flesh so I left all of them and tried very hard to believe in god. No, it didn’t start then either…

 

Ok, now I remember! It was perhaps during my yogic tantric experimentations when I felt that all is one and the one is the shaft of Shiva. No. It certainly wasn’t then!

 

Maybe the seeds were always in my head, somewhere, but they only started to sprout when I immigrated and the new country seemed to me like a big…nothing. You see, there were no people on the street. For me, no people, just street  = nothing. So, new country Canada = nothing. However, I grew out of it as soon as I had places to go to. After all, the street is for going somewhere not for people to hang out on it.  

 

Could it be that it started just lately, when I became obsessed with cleaning and throwing out things I didn’t find absolutely necessary? Or is it that I was doing this all along, since…well, since I can remember?

 

One of my first memories is this: I’m sitting with my grandfather somewhere on top of the hill, in the countryside. We’re waiting for the goat to eat oak leaves until its belly is big like a huge watermelon. I can hear the goat’s teeth crunching the leaves. I like the goat a lot. I realize that this goat will die just like the goat we had the year before died. I think that if the goat died I will die too one day. I ask my grandpa what happens when we all die. He doesn’t deny the dying which scares the hell out of me. This means that we’re really going to die! After a short pause he says: “Nothing happens. We die, the worms eat us and that’s that.” I ask further, almost crying: “So nothing is left?” He looks at the goat for a moment to make sure it won’t eat the neighbors’ crop. “Well, the bones are left for a while but they also disintegrate eventually. They become one with dirt. Let’s go now, look, the goat’s belly is hanging hehehe.” That’s how my grandpa laughs: “he he he”. Cube of “he”.

 

Reductionism is something I do instinctively. I do hope, however, that it all amounts to something more than just dirt.

 

 

 

On Elections

As Obama is taking percent after percent, as the news reporters are running out of saliva, as people around the world start drinking, using the American elections as a pretext, I can’t forget what those old Greeks (or, actually, ONE old and wise Greek) were saying about the rule of the majority. The idea was something like this: it is not a good idea to let the majority of people decide. Rather, the advice of a person (or a grup) educated in that particular domain is more valuable and certainly more trustworthy when making decisions (idea mentioned in Laches, Crito and in a few other dialogues).

Aaaand, just now the news reporters started to scream and trillions of people are marching inside my tv which makes me very scared. I think it means that Obama won. For a second, though, I imagined how it would have been if that old (rather ancient!) Greek guy would have been elected today instead. I think, however, that a mass of people could never elect him. They would, instead, vote for his death. Today, just as back then.

No more

…”art” about cancer, AIDS, lice, sexual abuse, schizophrenia, people who smoke weed, divorce, hokey and vaginas!! I’ve had it with contemporary crap theatre! I grew up with theatre and I still love it but every time I’m looking for a play to go to it’s something like the aforementioned or an “adapted” Shakespeare play meaning that some “trained” actors get on stage and they show you how wide their mouths can be, how much they can “project” their voices and how hard they can slap their thighs (very hard, believe me!) Oh, you can also go to slapstick shows or to improv (which, I’m sorry, doesn’t qualify as theatre) and, occasionally, I’ve seen some very intricate physical theatre plays where the actors are always running around, changing roles and costumes very quickly, singing and saying stuff that I can’t remember, the same way I don’t remember their faces or the name of the play because it didn’t really mean anything and there’s a lot of other stuff that I need to spend my time memorizing.

Theatre MUST be intellectually driven! Something has to be real behind the illusion so that when the curtain falls, you’re not left empty handed, you have that something to bring home with you. Like the light of the burning candle on Easter night, the one that you take home after everyone left the church, Jesus included (in the Greek Orthodox Easter tradition, on Holy Saturday, everyone who went to church has to light their candle from the Holy Light given by the priest during Resurrection and, after the whole ordeal..um..I mean the Mass is over, they have to bring the candle home still burning. Light, the opposite of darkness, is the symbol of the divine, knowledge, spirit and other bright stuff like that.)

I miss those times when, after the applauses, spectators would quietly leave their seats, without looking at each other, hiding the tears from their eyes. Those are different kinds of tears, not tears because poor little Susan was abused by her uncle.

Please, theatre people, don’t bring your dirty underwear on stage. There are lots of places where you can turn yourself inside out, your psychologist’s cabinet is a good example…

PS: I’ve noticed a trend in Canada – the college trend. People don’t go to university anymore. Writing essays and reading books is not really that cool. Instead, there are all kinds of professional schools, some of them are colleges, some are private studios (they’re all, really, just businesses that offer very little training in exchange for a lot of money), that promise to give students the perfect super intense training they need in order to become professional actors. I made the mistake to waste some time and money in such a place. The one thing that bothers me the most is that young people who go to these places are being taught that it’s ok to be an instrument, a piece of voiced meat on stage that is moved around by the director. After a few generations of actors “trained” like this it’s not surprising that most plays are about abuse of some kind.

I’d like to vote but…

I grew up in a country where political change was happily embraced by everyone. After over forty years of communism, it was refreshing to see people having at least the illusion of choice. I grew up listening to everyone around me argue about political stuff. This guy is better that this one, that one is a thief but that other one is schooled in the USSR…The fights got really heated around election time. Two months before elections my whole family did nothing but talk politics. I was happy because they weren’t preoccupied about my math homework anymore.

A few years later, in my early teens, as the Romanian political scene got even more exciting, I caught the hysteria too. I even joined a party! But I won’t tell you which one:)

 

I guess I’m writing this because somehow I miss that election atmosphere. I have no clue what’s happening on the political field of my new country (it’s not so new anymore but I still feel like a FOB – fresh-off-the-boat). All these Canuck candidates look the same to me. And talk the same. Very polite. Calm. Clean. Confident. But they don’t really have a point. I think I understand the Pakistani politics better than the Canadian ones which worries me a bit.

I like watching the political drama, the debates especially. It’s because those guys give their best, they present us with a concentrated extract of their highest selves. They are as sharp as they can ever be. It’s as if they were all on coke (not cola) for a few weeks. Are people out of coke in Canada? 

 

However, the other issue is that I don’t like being on coke. Or on any other drug, including mass political hysteria. After all, it really doesn’t matter that much who wins. Like my grandpa says: “they’re all thieves, these bastards.” So maybe the Canadian political stage is healthy for my poor soul since it doesn’t feed the political telenovelista who lives inside of it and grows like a tumor whenever it’s election time.

Still, the problem remains. Whom does the confused FOB vote for?

“Where Is the Friend’s House?”

I don’t agree with people who say that children have a very happy, easy life, free of troubles and worries. I think that they all completely forgot what their life was like when they were shorter than the leg of the kitchen table. I do remember what I used to think about and, watching other kids, I realize that they also have similar thoughts. I remember, for example, getting upset quite often because I couldn’t reach this or that thing (the TV buttons for example, since I grew up in the 80’s and we didn’t have remote controls yet) and also being looked at, talked to and about as “just a kid”…I remember the frustration of having to ask permission for everything, even the most common things, like going out to play, wearing a skirt or pants, eating soup or fries, hanging out with this kid or with the other one…it was a never ending struggle! I didn’t dream, like other girls, to be a ballerina, a bride or a Disney princess. I just dreamed that one day I would be a grown up, like all of them, my parents, my teachers, people on the street, who didn’t have any of the troubles I had, although, for some strange reason that I couldn’t figure out, they seemed terribly unhappy with their life and kept adding that they wish they were in my place. Bollocks! I still think the same. I’m very happy that I can decide for myself, especially the eating part. I decided that I’m going to be a vegetarian when I was three but I couldn’t put it into practice until I turned eighteen. I never wish I was a kid again!

Actually, this post was supposed to be about a movie.

The strange thing about me is that I’m not moved by overly dramatic scenes (in movies). Heroes who declare their love while dying for a righteous cause, crying, love and death and blood and war and love again…all these things slightly amuse me but that’s about it. I am moved to tears, though, by apparently common things – like a man who has been building doors for a whole life, a woman doing housework, rain, the face of a kid and the way he walks and talks, people eating. All of the above and a lot more I found in the most brilliant movie I have seen in the last few years, by an Iranian director, naturally. I only recently discovered this culture and I’m amazed by its very talented artists.

“Khane-ye doust kodjast?” (“Where Is the Friend’s Home?”) is one of the older movies (1987) of Abbas Kiarostami. For those who don’t remember how it really felt like to be a kid – this movie brings it all back. For those people who think that life is too boring to be on screen, this movie is a slap in the face. For those who believe that you need a budget of a few million dollars in order to make a good movie…this movie proves you wrong!

I found this little fragment of the movie, but it’s not translated. The main story is very simple – this kid is trying very hard to find his friend’s house in a village over the hill from his in order to give the friend back a notebook. He’s asking everyone where his friend lives but nobody is paying attention and he’s running out of time (his parents are going to give him a beating if he’s late coming home). If he fails to deliver the notebook, the friend will be in big trouble at school the next day.

 

This is an interview with the director (with subtitles, yeey!). I liked it because what he says can be applied to all arts and to life in general, not only to movies.

And this is a short from the same director, from 1982, which I was really happy to find (with subtitles). I think this movie plays on some political ideas (or maybe just one such idea) but I’m not too sure of it and I don’t want to get into that now. Enjoy “Hamsarayan” (“The Chorus”), part one and part two! 

Dedication

My thoughts these days fly towards a man who, even though has great responsibilities in his life, manages to keep a blog, thus staying in touch with the masses. This man, Almightly God bless his pure soul, brings us great delight when he sweetly walks on our North American soil and laughingly tells mister Bush things that make everyone blush.

I can only hope that dear Ahmadi has time for some entertainment too, the kind that he fights so vehemently against. God forgive me, Sir Mahmoud, but I think no man alive can whole heartedly say that he doesn’t enjoy such jewels.

From the Iran of Mohammad Reza, May God grant him a place in Heaven and many, many virgins, a dedication for Ahmadi: