Mermaids and Ikons Read online

  Other books by Gwendolyn MacEwen

  poetry

  Selah 1961

  The Drunken Clock 1961

  The Rising Fire 1963

  Terror and Erebus 1965

  A Breakfast for Barbarians 1966

  The Shadow Maker 1969

  The Armies of the Moon 1972

  Magic Animals 1975

  The Fire-Eaters 1976

  The T.E. Lawrence Poems 1982

  Afterworlds 1987

  novels

  Julian the Magician 1963

  King of Egypt, King of Dreams 1971

  short stories

  Noman 1972

  Noman’s Land 1985

  MERMAIDS AND IKONS

  A Greek Summer

  Gwendolyn MacEwen

  Copyright © 1978 Gwendolyn MacEwen

  Introduction © 2017 Rosemary Sullivan

  First published in 1978 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  This edition published in Canada in 2017 and the USA in 2017

  by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1941–1987, author

  Mermaids and ikons : a Greek summer / Gwendolyn MacEwen.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0263-3 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0264-0 (EPUB).—

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0265-7 (Kindle)

  1. MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1941–1987—Travel—Greece. 2. Greece—

  Description and travel. 3. Greece—Social life and customs—20th century.

  I. Title.

  DF727.M33 2017 914.9504’7 C2017-901312-2

  C2017-901313-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933806

  Series design: Brian Morgan

  Cover illustration: Aaron Manczyk

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the

  Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Rosemary Sullivan

  Part travelogue, part narrative, part diary, Mermaids and Ikons offers a portrait of a poet’s imagination at work. Unlike most travelogues, it is not a guide to what to see, but rather how to see. It is a map that invites you into the mind of the remarkable Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen.

  MacEwen was an autodidact. Whatever fascinated her had to be investigated thoroughly. Drawn to Middle Eastern cultures, she studied Hebrew in order to read Jewish esoteric texts and visited Israel when she was twenty-one, writing a novel set during the Arab–Israeli war of 1948. Later, she learned Arabic, visited Egypt, and wrote her remarkable novel King of Egypt, King of Dreams, about the monotheistic heretic, the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Finally, she learned Greek. According to Greek friends in Toronto, she spoke the language fluently and elegantly, indeed better than the man with whom she had fallen in love and who was her motive for learning it.

  In the summer of 1971, Gwendolyn MacEwen and the Greek musician Nikos Tsingos travelled to Greece to get married. It was during the three months they spent there that MacEwen wrote the notes for her travelogue, only completing the book on a return trip to Greece with Tsingos in 1976.

  As soon as she arrived in Greece, its astonishing light, its green translucent sea, and its exquisite landscapes consumed her. But she was not a tourist; she was an initiate into its complex mysteries, already deeply familiar with its art and history. She saw Greece as the place where East meets West, where light and dark conflict; she saw it as a cartography of the human psyche.

  MacEwen must be the only traveller to Greece to begin an account of a trip to the Acropolis with a knitting party of women sitting in an Athenian kitchen, wielding their weapons of domesticity (she inadequately), while the Acropolis and its temples hover in the high wind beyond the window. She asks, “What is history when you live in it, when you are not time’s tourists?” MacEwen loved what she felt was the Greeks’ fervent and ferocious involvement in the present moment, so different from the Western tradition of self-control and the repression of emotion. It was evident in their language, with its impossible declensions and accompanying gesticulations, and in their passionate and possessive devotion to family. But such exuberance overlaid a dark and terrifying history, which even in modern times, let alone historically, included the brutal occupation by German fascists in World War II, the Civil War that began in 1946 and lasted three years, and the military dictatorship (1967 to 1974) that was in full swing when MacEwen visited.

  In the pounding rain, MacEwen and Tsingos visited the ruins of the Byzantine fortress complex of Mystras, where she felt “soaked to the soul,” “the rain of war falling,” the “mud-slide” of History. She even had a vision of the great Byzantine emperor Constantine being crowned at Mystras in 1449. He looked like a little playing-card king set against all the sieges, the assassinations, and the slaughters of empire building. This is the dark shadow side of Greece. But then they visit Olympia, a world of pure sunlight, golden and seductive, with its temple of Zeus and its archaeological museum, in which they view Praxiteles’ great statue of Hermes, so exquisite, with muscles, sinews, and veins almost visible beneath the skin, that it seems to exist in another dimension of reality. For MacEwen, the statue is an embodiment of “the purest form of man rejoicing in itself.” These, then — the dark and the light — are the extremes of the human psyche.

  For MacEwen, the past was not the past but human and utterly familiar. What is two thousand years in evolutionary time? To demonstrate, she translates the inscription on the sarcophagus of a Greek grandmother and child in the ancient necropolis of Kerameikos in Athens: “When I lived we beheld the light, now I hold her dead, being dead myself.”

  She and Tsingos travelled to the island of Paros, beloved by the great poet George Seferis — the island whose “streets and squares aspired to the condition of music,” as he put it — and to its sister island, Antiparos, where Tsingos was born. It was almost déjà vu for MacEwen, as if she had been there before, and its message was simple. “You let it all hang out — birth, death, everything. If necessary, you overplay emotions; you do not understate, you do not conceal. It is the only way.” And everything demands attention!

  Why does she call her travelogue Mermaids and Ikons? They are the polarities of her imaginative universe. Mermaids are not those safe little creatures in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, but instead the terrifyingly beautiful seductresses that draw humans into the black underdepths of the sea, and into our own subconscious. And icons are the projections of the gods for whom we are willing to die, but also to kill. The question is not one of belief, but rather, what are the roots of these myths in the human mind?

  MacEwen could write: “All our so called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary upon an unknown text.” The Dutch composer Rudi van Dijk, who set poems from her book Shadow Maker to music, claimed that MacEwen had “something in common with Strindberg an
d D. H. Lawrence as an explorer of these dark corners of the soul that most of us shut out conveniently, in order to create a safe but illusory reality.”

  The painter Charles Pachter suggested that she could draw you into her fascinations and find a way to make you change your thinking. “Everything was a sensual treat. There was an otherworldliness, an enormous sensitivity and vulnerability to Gwen.” There was also a playfulness. Margaret Atwood would say that MacEwen, with her exquisite, porcelain psyche, loved the intersection of the banal and the numinous. “She would come up with the idea that the universe was shaped like a donut and then come up with the name of the brand.” A knitting party against the backdrop of the Acropolis is certainly such a juxtaposition.

  MacEwen concludes her travelogue with the comment: “In this country you are drawn like a bow between heaven and earth, and you may come to know life and death as one blinding, fluid reality. The soul is the arrow shot from that bow, only once.”

  Her poem “The White Horse” was written in Greece:

  This is the first time you have ever seen

  your hand, as it is also

  The first time you have smelled the blue fire

  Within a stone, or tasted blue air, or

  Heard what the sea says when it talks in its sleep.

  How can we be destroying the world when it is so beautiful! Perhaps we must learn to absorb it imaginatively, as MacEwen did.

  Contents

  Athens

  THE KNITTING PARTY

  7

  Mycenae

  THE GIANTS

  23

  Mystras

  THE SEARCH FOR THE GREAT WHITE HORSE

  33

  Olympia

  THE RUNNERS

  49

  The Island

  A DIARY

  61

  Stones and Angels

  A RETURN TO ATHENS

  95

  Athens

  THE KNITTING PARTY

  I remember the day we all sat in Christina’s living room, knitting ourselves into oblivion, the needles sounding to me like insect noises or the strange little chirps of birds. The shoes we had flung off lay there on the floor the way shoes do — gaping open, gasping, staring. There were five of us (or was it six?) all knitting up a storm in the August heat, stopping now and then to mop our brows and sip limonadha. Through the slits in the casement window the Acropolis and its temples of sanity hovered in the white, completely non-distorted distance, and a high white wind assailed the stones.

  Sophia was knitting a shawl; Irini was doing something I couldn’t make out, and the two (or was it three?) others were whipping up baby dresses. I, on the other hand, was not really knitting, for I can’t, but I went through the motions and told myself that the results would be a submarine, or possibly a bungalow, or something of that nature. At any rate it would be effective. Never having knitted (knat?) in my life, I attempted to hide the fact by clicking crazily and twisting my wrists like a contortionist. I stuffed the results in my handbag the moment they wiggled from the needles, and smiled even when I stabbed myself in the ribs with one of my weapons of domesticity.

  Television programs in Greece are quite overwhelming, and I was tempted to stop my work and concentrate on the French tightrope walker who was just then balanced on one foot in the middle of the rope and simultaneously playing The Saints Go Marching In on a trombone. God, how we work for our moments of glory. Then a lion-tamer came on and tamed five great beasts who’d probably been doped up especially for the show. Dina let out a whoop of admiration for the lion-tamer’s superhuman courage and skill. ‘Epeitheno!’ she cried, dropping several stitches in the baby dress. ‘Wonderful!’

  I meanwhile was more concerned about the lions, poor things, having to trot around the cage and jump over tinsel-papered boxes and roll about on the ground like fools. In dismay, I stabbed myself in my left palm with my knitting needle and felt horrible. Then a bare-chested black man came on and let out spine-chilling and soul-destroying whoops and yells, after which he proceeded to lift a large chair with his bare teeth, and swing it about thirty times around his head — higher, a little higher each time. We made the obvious comments and jokes, such as who his dentist might be, and so forth, but really we were enthralled. I’d seen a chair-lifting stunt in a Greek taverna — (a lot of things happen in Greek tavernas) — but nothing to rival that.

  The circus show went off the air, followed by a terrific soccer game with the Piraeus team battling the Slays and losing, magnificently. What a fight the Greeks put up when all is lost! Those marvellous agile legs in the long white socks running through all the fields and bloody stadiums of history and winning somehow, even when they lose.

  I recalled with half a mind the girl I’d seen some time before, a German tourist, who had jumped into the fountain in Omonia Square in the true tourist tradition. The main idea, of course, being to stop traffic, to be outrageous, to be Greek, whatever she had thought that meant. Non-Greeks tend to have the ridiculous opinion that inspiration is a matter of planned departure from the norm, whatever that is — refusing to understand that real energy, real effervescence springs up spontaneously from the self. So Greece is crowded every summer with eager visitors all trying to play Zorba, and making themselves foolish in the effort. She (the German girl) no doubt had fancied herself as a modern Aphrodite rising from the foam of the Omonia fountain, clogging the traffic in downtown Athens for a full half-hour. Wonderful! With all the coloured lights being turned off, the jetting gush of the water itself, the police fishing her out safely from the murky shallows. And all the Athenians laughing and watching.

  The fountain in Omonia Square is pretty shallow, and I confess I thought myself more adventurous than the German Aphrodite, as I sank into the fathomless depths of the knitting party and of my thoughts.

  What was it Seferis had written?

  A little further

  We will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves

  a little further

  let us rise a little higher

  Greece presents a very real challenge to whoever goes there — a challenge to do more, to be more, to better the present moment in whatever way is possible, to improvise, to expand. To get things off the ground.

  An incredible spaghetti of strands kept issuing from the needles, most of which I managed to stuff into my bag to avoid detection by the other women. But I knat, I knat like a fiend, and thought of the bitter daphnes blossoming at the edges of the ancient agora, rampant and wild with scent as always. Afternoon was leaning on the shoulders of evening, and the man downstairs came in to give us a big bunch of what he called ‘night flowers’ — a plant which seems to go berserk with fragrance in the darkness and then becomes contrite and bland at dawn. We all inserted our noses into the pungent leaves and sighed. Our visitor stayed for about twenty minutes, chatting about this and that, about nothing and everything. He didn’t have to explain his presence or invent an occasion for a visit, the way one so often has to do in the West. In Greece, as in most Mediterranean countries, one drops in on one’s neighbours and thus creates an occasion. Family members, on the whole, are in very close touch with one another. (Your telephone bill in Greece is based on the number of calls you make; there is no such thing as a flat monthly rate.)

  One is never really ‘alone’ here, I thought. It can be painfully difficult at times to explain one’s desire for an hour or so of ‘aloneness’; such desires are considered to be essentially anti-social. It is futile to insist that one’s work — i.e. painting, writing, studying, etc. — requires concentration, because concentration is also anti-social.

  Strands of multi-coloured thoughts and memories kept emerging from my head as I knat and knat. I fancied myself as a kind of Zeus giving birth to Athena from my split skull. Somehow I would have to make order out of my experiences in Greece
, even if I couldn’t whip up a shawl or a dress with my bare hands. Should I begin, then, with the little Byzantine church on Hermes Street with an entire office building thrown up around it, and say that this is the only true meaning of history — mad convergences of cultures and times? Or should I start with the chaos of downtown Athens where kids from Europe and the States wearing Greek village clothes jostle with genuine Greeks wearing the latest things from Europe and the States? (You spot the tourists in Athens by how superficially Greek they try to look.) Or the hundreds of little souvlaki stands dispensing deliciously spiced chunks of lamb and veal on sticks with hunks of bread to soak up the juice? Or Monasteraki, much like an oriental bazaar in Cairo or Damascus, where they sell copperware and antique jewellery and rabbit rugs and tapestries and figurines and miniature copies of famous statues and Turkish swords and handmade clothes and silver filigree and paintings and blown-up photos of the Parthenon?

  (I’d been lucky in Monasteraki, for I’d been able to haggle in Greek — and no other language is so suited to nagging and haggling — while drinking the gazoza generously supplied by the management. I managed nine times out of ten to lower the price of an article by almost half. I used to explain to those delightful shop-owners that my rather odd accent was due to the fact that, though of Greek descent, I was born in Canada and hence had lost touch with my mother tongue. I suspected, though, that we were playing double games — which, by the way, is not at all unethical in the East; in fact it is a social requirement — for although it was plain to me that my story was not believed, it was nevertheless honoured, and I got an A for effort every time.)

  I shall have to get above all this, I thought, as my bag began to bulge with the hysterical results of my non-knitting. When and if I ever write about Greece I shall begin with something incredible, like the tale of Karaiskakis, the bastard son of a nun from Thessaly who became a hero in 1821 in the war of independence from the Turks. The Acropolis, that bashed-up pinnacle of man’s aspirations, had been once destroyed by the Persians, once accidentally blown up by gunpowder, and further bombed by the Turks. But on learning that the Turks were dismantling the columns of Athena’s temple to obtain lead for shot from the rods inside, Karaiskakis saw red and dispatched two horses laden with lead up the mountain to supply the enemy so that they would leave the columns alone!