Help! Fire! Police! What About the Riots in Greece?!

I get asked this too often for humor when people find out where we are going.

Riots=Greece. I think my dad might say, "What's a visit to Greece without some rioting?" He finds--what's the word?--sardonic? things to say like that. My sister and I call these slightly inappropriate, but layered-funny statements "Dadisms." Yes, it is meant to look like sadism. Not that he is always a satirical guy. He's just loves incongruity and finds convoluted ways to express it.

I think underneath all that, especially regarding culture (including American culture), is long experience with what I call 'culture clash moments': This when you simply don't get something, you need to, and you just make fun of it to keep your sanity. Also, my parents seem to have ended up in the middle of coups....a shah deposed in Kabul, Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, a disagreement on a bus in Denmark (that probably made the Copenhagen paper), IX XI in NYC...

My dad, as well-traveled as he is, can't learn languages to save himself from a riot. When we lived in Greece, all he could say was "portokolada" which he thought was "please" (parakalo). He was actually saying to innocent bystanding Greeks, "Orange soda, where is the toilet?" My mom, exceptionally good at languages, smoothed things over; she sure was fluent when driving in traffic in Thessaloniki when I was young. It was part of it; it was almost expected. You were less acceptable if you didn't yell Greek imprecations on the head of a taxi driver, or give the disgusted flick of the head. It is part of the conversation of the polis.

Riots in Greece...I do know that the Greeks let it out when they feel it, and then they move on and enjoy their leisure and their friendships. I know the youth in Greece are, of course, a frustrated lot...they see themselves as paying for the sins of their elders (like the fairy tale of a budget that simultaneously got them into the EU and hot water). What the truth is, or the complexities are, I don't really understand. I just know they have Joseph Pieper's leisure down in some way, but infrastructure? The work-a-day world? Just think opposite of the most Germanic German you can fathom. There you go.

Besides, Athens is in some way a riot everyday--at least from a Germanic/American/British perspective. Traffic laws? Signomi? Thencatalavenete. My childhood and longstanding friend who knows Greece well and is German-Austrian, explained it: "The worst traffic bungles are in countries that pride themselves on following rules. You see, they are expecting others to follow rules--and when someone doesn't? They aren't paying attention. But Athens? You have got to be paying attention every second and driving like you'd drive through a obstacle course with cliffs on either edge, because that's what you're basically doing. Everyone is extremely offensive and defensive...so the serious tangles are fewer."

Just watch a bunch of Americans queuing with a bunch of Greeks. Americans: stiff, offended cats in as straight a line as possible, wanting to punch but keeping it in to fuel the competition for top sales, and Greeks: flies buzzing around meat, having the fight outright.

I think of Euripedes' The Bacchae when I think of Athens and rioting. I think the play is really about an order that drowns out proper outlet of feeling: Dionysus, a 'new' god of feasting and--well, Mardi Gras outletting--is refused a place in the Polis because he is suspect. Law, not passion, says the ruler, only reason and not emotion--that's for the women. The ruler is punished as the god takes revenge by taking the said women out of the city and driving them mad. They rip the ruler to shreds. Thus, in the oneiric world of ancient Greek morals, those who rely too much on law and force to create order, those who banish the passions and the feasting as threats to proper traffic, are themselves ripped to shreds.

Rioting is the Bacchic spirit taking revenge on the city--something has no outlet that needs it--government has been false or oppressive, or the culture itself has become fractured and incoherent. Madness has to be occurring, somewhere. The city is mad--and multiplied laws cannot heal it.

So I grieve for Greece, as I grieve for American cities with rioting. The arts, culture, leisure, education cannot flourish in a polis like this. Better to have Dionysus somewhere within the city--a cult of renewal, proper passion (Christian Dionysus). Not sure a Dionysian government would work well, though it is an intriguing thought. It needs to be a renewal, Christ as Dionysus, a passion for truth, for the Bacchic order of Beauty and Goodness, where human beings are treated and can live as integrated emotional and rational beings with an eternal end, not cogs in large economic power structures, or used plastic bits on the rubbish heap.

I think of Greece at Easter when I think of Christian Dionysus: families would go out of the city, into the woods, and roast a lamb and celebrate the renewal of life, salvation. Baskets and families are blessed by priests cloaked for the ceremony in mystery and royalty, and then the Body of Christ is sent out to joyous reveling. I think of Christian Dionysus when I remember Greek families walking together in the evening, down the road, old mothers and young daughters like gazelles, arm-in-arm, and young men laughing and putting their arms around each other's shoulders like comrades at the end of the fray. Greeks don't have dead space between people.

Greece is much deeper than riots. These are symptoms of an infection, but not a commentary on their art of leisure and life. I intuit (might be wrong) that Greeks see the civil law as servant to the people, not people servant to it...and they don't seem to have the terrible, silent malice of a people focused on global power chess. Silence in the USSR was more frightening to me than Greece screaming at itself--at any time.

Nevertheless, I hope for everyone's sake we don't have that lesson in drama or politics (is there a difference?). Since we're going with my parents, who have a strange track record, we just might.

Nostos

Nostos means 'homecoming' in Greek; in May, I plan to go home to Greece. I just thought I'd chronicle it...it is also a family reunion including my sister, my parents--and a chance for my husband and children to see my home. I really do wonder what they will think.

My husband loves Socrates but is rather inscrutable emotionally: for example, there's an ancient Greek bust of "The Philosopher" that looks like Thaddeus, with his irregular curls and strong, square face, and intense look,  in the National Archeology Museum of Athens; I can't wait to show it to him. The explanation card below it says, "The Philosopher is portrayed with a rough look, unlike the ordered, ideal portrayals of Apollo, etc.. This is because the archetypal philosopher does not care about the things of this world, including his appearance."  Thaddeus won't appreciate it, though. He won't eagerly tred in Socrates' steps, because the Socrates he cares about is the one who speaks in the texts, the one who lives in every other gadfly trying to wake up the Polis from its complacency.

 He might like the water and he'll get sunburnt on the back of his neck. He'll like the bread and (maybe) the ouzo and the coffee. The buzz of Athens will overwhelm him, but he'll like the turtles that live on the grass near Hephastos' temple on the other side of the ancient agora from the Acropolis; he'll probably name one "Clemmy" and want to bring it home.

For my children, on the other hand, Greece is almost a magical place because they know it is a part of their mother; they love it vicariously, as part of their own history, their own sources--that is one beauty of family. We raise to sacredness the small things of our ancestors, and in this, we honor them and ourselves. But I wonder if the reality will take the magic from them, or fulfill it somehow. We take risks when we open memory boxes for those we care most about; but the risk is a necessary part of love, too.

In the last few years, I've got more bold calling Greece 'home'; I'm not Greek by blood, which means in Greece that essentially, you don't belong--though Greece, over the millenia, is as much an immigrant melting pot as anywhere else, from the early Ionians to the present influx of Albanians, Afghans, Somalians, etc..But I lived there only a few years, so why do I care so much?

They were the four years of my life that contained, for me, almost unadulterated happiness--and I suppose part of that is because I wasn't yet an adult. I came to Greece from the high Himalayan plateaus of Kabul, as a five-year-old. I didn't really remember or connect to the native land of my parents; Kabul had been home, but I had set it aside in my heart because when we left, in the summer of 1974, I dreamt over and over that Kabul was lost in a mushroom cloud of fire. Though I didn't know that Kabul would indeed be lost in the fires of war five years later, I knew I would never be able to go back: I left it behind as a jumble of impressions and the love of people I knew there.

Greece, after that, was like an oasis, an Eden. We lived on a beautiful college campus in Thessaloniki complete with old German Nazi outpost cottages from the war with cellar steps receding into darkness and unexploded bombs left cemented over in the forest, the wind through the pines and the view, far off, of the blue sea. I grafted the land and the smell of pines, warm soil, and poppies into myself, into my child's heart. I came to reason, to self-reflection in the forests of Anatolia College, among ancient temples and clear water. I learned courage from rashness through dares to touch the old bomb and to sit on the one chair left in the darkness of the abandoned bomb shelter; I learned the fullness of silence and contemplation in the wind that came to me from the sea; I learned the deep value of a friend at Pinewood School. It was my world, along with the blue, clear waters off Neos Marmaras, a village on the 'second finger' of the peninsulas northeast of Thessaloniki, where we spent our summer vacations. There I learned simple pleasure and freedom in the water, along with the thrill of danger (sitting on the huge, powerful sprinklers at the local golf course, waiting for them to turn on--not too bright--some enema that would have been).

I would hang in the water, like a fish, a fish with fish, a droplet in the blue and golden world where God spoke to me, like He spoke to me in all the other dialects of Greece, the dialects of Beauty. In Greece one never mistakes human ingenuity for creation; it is as if the human beings, after Pericle's flowering of Athens in marble, have ceded the competition quite wisely, in the face of the natural and astounding colors, the graceful curves of the land, the stark exclamations of crag and mountains. The rather haphazard and rat-tat city streets are not desirable; perhaps one might desire only the white-washed, ancient towns on the edge of the sea, or the intricate towns like Metzivan in the forests--yet these humble villages have beauty because they work from, reflect, the nature around them. To me, most Greeks, though, live in relative hovels in the middle of a great and beautiful palace: a palace of sun, water, rock, of gold, blue, and browns. They don't need individual mansions when the communal one is the best in the world.

I left, unwillingly, when I was ten. Somehow, I knew that I was going away from light and into darkness, a dark night, because I reacted then as if I was going to an execution. I was not  wrong in this; it was for me an exile from beauty, from simplicity, from my own heart--but since then, my exile has given me the opportunity to grow, and to be a nomad in this world--which is a necessary lesson for those who love God. I have learned that we must chase our heart all the way to heaven.

My path has been a dark one at times--I am still, at nearly 47, learning to deal with pain of being away from the land that I love like I love my own hand, the only land on this earth I could understand fighting for, dying for, the land that is a part of my soul in some way, my foundation for a' sense of place'--everything from plants to food to building shapes, those things imprinted as 'home' in some way, especially upon the senses. Like a fly catching a glimpse of an eagle (well, it'd see about 100 eagles) I imagine Adam and Eve dealt with this in a massive way after being expelled, and I understand why Socrates did not wish to escape death by leaving Athens, and why, for Dante, exile from his beloved Florence would be worse than death. Is this strong sense of place just reserved for the jewels of this earth? I don't think so, but I think it also has to do with whether or not your childhood was also full of love and happy. Mine was, in Greece. My sense of place is tied up with watching my graceful, handsome father come out of the water with tanks on his back, the water running off him and my mother kissing him in welcome, and that same beautiful, young mother receiving kindly the basil leaves I gathered for her on campus; it is bound up with my sister and me, and Gretchen and Jeff, making up musicals and acting them out.

But a mystery of this life is that we cannot stay still in place, even if we desperately want to; time is a reality of this life, and we are timeless at heart, looking for eternity through a shifting maze of life choices and non-choices; so, God has been slowly taking the roots out, and a nostos, a homecoming, is sometimes--ironically--a way to do just that: take the roots out so that the soul can be ready to be re-planted in its true home. Seeing something again with mature eyes can disillusion us.

Greece, over the years, has also become a memory of pain for me, which should intensify my search for the eternal, unadulterated Good and Beautiful. Things happened which the child I was could not have received, things now known that--even though I am an adult--have nevertheless ripped my soul. I understand more now that the desire for nostos, though very human, and in many ways natural and good, is really a sublimation of True desire, of True Beauty. What is here always fails us and it is not a place of ultimate happiness, or a place where our will can rest.

My father and mother, myself, and my sister, my husband and my children: Between us all there are differences in world view, religious and political and social.  There is also deep love, but it has potential to be an exciting time.

And I hope we get there. We've got to get from one land-locked island, Lander, down to Denver, out to NYC, and then via Turkish Airlines to Istanbul and finally, to Athens.  I'll probably embarrass everyone by weeping uncontrollably when I can see the Three Fingers, the first recognizable sight of Greece from a plane, and down the east coast to the islands, Athens, and the Peloponnese.

I am hoping for some simple things: Coke and bread in the early morning with my sister, the light dancing on the water, dinner in the Plaka, and hearing the fruit seller crying his wares "Come children, delicious fruit" in Monastiraki Square. Beyond that, I hope to offer Greece to the part of my family that has never got a chance to bask in the magical light under which Phidias found form in matter, within which a new revolution of thinking emerged, under which a child found God and reveled in unadulterated joy for a few years in the 1970s before the path turned grey, turned towards the shadows that demand we look for a higher light.

I am not sure I want to know my family's reactions. I'll have to detach a little and hear them. Their Greece is not exactly mine. I must let them have it.