Penelope and Ulysses (2 page)

Some of her stories did not have happy endings. They were not based on ego gratification and entitlement but rather on man’s struggle to learn and evolve within the design and scheme of life. I realised at an early age that life does not have a plot and we do not control it. The only thing that we do have power over is the way we respond to the changes and conflicts life brings. Sometimes we do not get what we want, and therefore the delusionary happy ending does not come into real life. Instead, we are asked to struggle and endure with a full heart, a heart without resentment and entitlement, the most humane and compassionate lessons that are discovered only in the battle of self-ownership. Therefore, her stories were not based on ego gratification and self-importance in a love affair, rather they were based with being the servant and master of truth and compassion. While other children in different parts of the world would be tucked in bed with a fairy tale that ended with the princess being taken care of by a prince, my bedtime stories ended with lessons of struggle and endurance. Amalia continued to tell me “life will give you impossible tasks, and you will have to make decisions that go against the beliefs of others, you will have to discover life where others find death.”

Amalia allowed and encouraged me to wander into the remote wilderness of the forests and learn so many things that one does not learn in a confined classroom. She taught me in her stories about the lamb and the wolf, the hunted and the hunter, the slave and the master, to be neither of each one. She taught me a reverence and worship of life and all that lives here. “You must be careful not to break anyone when you are making decisions. Remain true to your nature. Don’t take what is not yours. Do not fear anyone.”

In those first eight years of my life I did not know what she was offering me, and now I realise that my illiterate grandmother was voicing the pre-Socratic values and way of life and she gave me the gift of undying protection and undying love.

I thank you, Amalia, for waiting for me.

I thank her for teaching me.

My other friend and intellectual mother was Eleni Kazantzakis. She entered my life at the precious time, the right time, in which I was being hunted for being a writer, in which I was mocked for my creativity, at a time that I found myself totally alone. Eleni Kazantzakis corresponded with me for over twenty years, offering me support and telling me that I would find it very difficult because I was a poet. She advised me that I was struggling in the sea of life because I was a poet, and to continue, continue, continue.

I found her writing to me like a rope that assisted me to get across the difficult bridge that I was building; she would also write and tell me how Nikos Kazantzakis would be concerned about me, as the world hurts the sensitive and our poets. I felt accepted by her, and it was important for me to be accepted and understood by someone academically trained, who had read all the authors that I had found through my love affair with searching and learning from our ancestors. Since I am a “citizen of the world,”
5
these teachers and writers lived in all parts of the world, in different generations. You can’t learn about humankind if you only focus on your own kind.

I dedicate this work to her memory: a memory that is electric and alive in me. Eleni assisted me finding my Greek origins, not because I belong to any nation, but I do belong to a group of people that have assisted me in my journey here, and these are the people that she introduced me to once again—my ancestors—for is not a poet a foreigner in his own land?

Eleni told me she would meet me in Constantinople so that I could search for my ancestors.

I never returned to Constantinople because I never left it.

We are carriers of other people; like the layers of our physical earth we also are layered in knowledge and memory. We carry in us our ancestors, those we have met and those we have not met, our teachers that do not belong to our tribe, but to all humankind, our children, both physical, and those we make from our journey and struggles, and put on paper, in music, on canvas. We carry in us all the people we have met and shared life with; we remember their challenges and lessons. Sometimes we are like large haunted houses with so many voices and images, messages, and lessons. We carry all these people in our life. Plato might be right when he says, “nothing dies,” it simply goes inward, transforms, and adds to our character. Therefore, I have not felt I needed to see a place to be with them, to have them live in me.

One time I was asked if I have returned to Samos, the island I spent my first eight years of life. I have not returned because the island lives in me; I’ve swallowed the island, the village, the place, time and child. We have not been parted.

What did your Ulysses write for his epitaph, Eleni?

I hope for nothing.

I fear no one.

I am free.
6

I thank you, Eleni, for waiting for me.

I thank her for teaching me.

My other emotional and intellectual teacher has been Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a highly educated man, and yet he still wrote, lived, and spoke in the “blood,”
7
the truth of his life, and of course he was influenced by the world that my grandmother spoke about in her illiterate manners and ways. I discovered Nietzsche when I was twenty-four and he has not left my writing space. He guided me to the pre-Socratic philosophers and so many other thinkers. He was more alive in his thinking than the actual university lecturer who tried to understand what he had not lived or experienced with his blood. As Kierkegaard once wrote,

When I am dead there will be something for the university lecturers to poke into. The abject scoundrels. And yet. What’s the use, what’s the use? Even though this be printed and read again and again, the lecturers will still make a profit out of me, teach about me, maybe adding a comment like this: “The peculiar thing about this is that it cannot be taught.”
8

Nietzsche taught me to remain true to my blood and to follow my nature and destiny. Even though he has been dead for over a hundred years, his thoughts and journey are alive to me, or as T. S. Eliot wrote, “the dead make more sense than the living.”

I am so glad I went into that second-hand book shop and I was drawn to his book. These are the bread crumbs of the soul that others leave for us to find. We have not met them, and yet they are and become kindred and family to us. Nietzsche also believed that his family were the thinkers he had studied and wrote about. Therefore, without knowing of my existence, he offered freely to me knowledge and the seeds from another generation, another time, another world—the seeds of this world as it makes itself over and over again.

It is true what Amalia believed: the living and the dead are in tension and co-exist through deep longing to offer each other love and life.

I thank you, Nietzsche, for waiting for me.

I thank him for teaching me.

All my three great influences and blood loves are dead, and yet there is something so strong in their physical absence, so haunting and lasting: the anchor of their memory, the anchor of their love, the anchor of courage and hope—for hope without courage is only a paper flower (so Amalia thought and wrote in my heart).

It is this living memory that gives life to those who are no longer with us. But first they would have had to be truly alive, and not just in body (millions are alive in body and when they die they are not remembered). It is something more than just physical, although their work is created from the physical.

What makes their memory electric and alive is their passions, desires, and authentic ways, the sacrifices they made for us to get their message, even if they sent it in a bottle. This is what makes my three muses alive in my life and world.

They had the courage to leave some shape or form of themselves, the important part of themselves, the seeds from their soul, the nakedness of their inner world, in literature and in their way of life. They left breadcrumbs of their struggle, their authentic nature, the choices they made that went against the belief and opinions of many, and the hope that their love will keep someone in a different generation, a different time or place, warm and sane.

I am truly grateful to my three muses for allowing me to see the nakedness of their soul, for confining their soul in words or on paper (T. S. Eliot wrote, “When I am formulated . . . how should I begin?”
9
), for making themselves vulnerable and deeply inspirational to me in the darkest night of my creativity and soul.

I thank them for waiting for me.

I thank you for reading this and sharing this journey with me.

All that has been written is from

Myth

Fact

And Nonsense.

Introduction
 

The Jewel of Ideals and Despair

The physical earth keeps particles of light compressed for millions of years in total darkness and then this jewel that was created from great pressure and aloneness, separated from all other light particles, surfaces—and what brilliance, what transparency we see in this rare solitaire!

Such is the crisis of the soul in its darkest and most critical night, which is not twenty-four hours but eternity, for numbers do not stop; they go on and on forever.

The Jewel of the Soul is the birth of transparent brilliance in which all faces of life look into the light contained within and see their real face. And how much truth can you bear?

In our history, we have pushed our rarest teachers and masters into the ground. We have wanted to cover the brilliance of their souls. And when we have driven them into the ground, we find we cannot live in total darkness; we cannot live without love.

Like orphans and abandoned people we seek and search the four compasses of our world to see, to find, to seek forgiveness, and to return the brilliance of their souls in a world that has gone mad with either pain or indifference. As people we need the fire, the light of love.

Such a small light contained within, but what turbulence and demanding presence it has upon others who want to bury it again in the earth! The creators of love contain such ideals and despair and reveal and share such a light from the night of the soul. This night has no division of time: it is from the fire of all forming stars. Look closely at “Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh and you will see the many suns that burned in his exile and on the canvas of his soul. When you listen to Ludwig Beethoven, you are transported into the intimacy of desire, his “rage against the dying of the light,”
10
his deep longing to share his soul and music with us. He believed that music could change the world. He contained “truth and beauty,”
11
and yet he lived in total silence and exile. Is it silence and exile (or solitude) that feeds our desire and longing to create, to invent, to explore, to play above and below the taught rules and dogmas? Even Galileo wrote his most evolved work when he was under house arrest. It is at these times that one refuses defeat, surrender, and nihilism. Instead, one defies without a violent revolution and keeps true to their authentic self and design, which creates beauty and truth in the expression of their life.

I have been in exile and have been writing in my heart, in my head, on the sand, in the sky, and on the tail of the mermaid, long before the world taught me language, long before the world gave me permission to breathe and dance.

For many eons I did not wish to speak with anyone. I had realised that I had fallen into hell. Look at the world through the eyes of our troubled children and you will see the deadness or the rage. Look at Don McCullin’s photography and you will see that we have made a hell out of a heaven.

I was driven and separated from the “memory” of another home.
12
As I witnessed injustices small and large, I kept the memory of love alive. This is not how we behave where I come from. I first thought this when I encountered my first injustice when a girl was being mocked because of her deformity, and I could not, and would not, join in. It was as if I had a memory from another home, that we did not behave like this. In later life, when I read Plato, I understood about this former home and this former memory of the good. Where does love come from? Why do some of us carry it? And why do some of us relinquish the right to live in love and then proceed to remove that human right from others? Such a memory of the good requires solitude and devotion to one’s life, and to their purpose and meaning in this life. One learns and discovers many untouched and unnamed galaxies in this solitude, and the time has come that I return from exile to surrender to others what belongs to them, to offer to others what was left with me for safe keeping. What I found in my exile, in presence and absence, is deep love for our world. My “art” is my way of living; my creativity breathes and tastes of deep humanity.

At the age of twenty-three I whispered the word “flight” and disappeared into the exile of wilderness and solitude. For ten years I measured the depth and sides of the dark abyss, and in my mad dance I decided to call the abyss my sandpit of forming stars. I could see the stars and I built castles and stairs and climbed into a deeper wilderness and forest of imagination and deep vision.

I fell in love.

I fell in love with the beauty and tragedy of this world.

My next twenty years were spent searching and seeking, of swimming in uncharted and unmapped waters and travelling the roads of chosen solitude and exile.

I have decided to return from my exile.

I decided to return because I desire to devote my creativity to the “young and tender,”
13
as the previous generations have left their questions and the nakedness of their lives to be explored to find a way to each other, to find a way to evolve and enrich our lives so that we do not live in fear and that we are fully in our lives.

I thank the earth for waiting for me. I thank you for waiting for me.

I have struggled to bring this to you, for I am painfully shy and do not seek the attention or recognition of the world. This work is a gift to all our ancestors who have stayed awake at the wheel to navigate our human journey.