“... The Greek summer has always seemed to me the unique immutable law of ours. Our bright white stone, luminously white, that lights up the world and eradicates its stains. The transparent little lizard that climbs on the windowsill. The wheels of bicycles half-buried in the sand. The posters announcing the festivities of Saint Panteleimon and the Savior. Folk music groups on hastily set up platforms in the square, lambs and piglets being roasted from the morning, the parish priest treating his cousin from Astoria to the finest cut of meat.
The Greek summer is the moans of couples making love behind half-closed shutters. It is the screen of the open-air cinema rustling in a gentle breeze. It is the enormous bras and panties of grandma that, hanging from the clothesline, cast shadows of prehistoric monsters on the opposite wall. In the Greek summer, the only thing you can slaughter is a watermelon.
If I were to write a Greek comedy, I would have some fanatical ideologue – indifferent to whose ideology – attempting to deliver a speech on the beach. A Cycladic wind covering his voice and taking his papers away, a wave drenching him, a half-naked body shamelessly competing with him. I would have him sulking and concluding his speech with the phrase: “We will return and the Earth will tremble!” And then a flock of seagulls – like a choir of angels or goat-legged satyrs – would mock him by barking.
I read Greek mythology. None of the gods or the Fates anywhere announce the end of the world. They do not threaten that people will be judged according to their deeds and sins. They do not prophesy a Second Coming. What Second Coming? Since everything and everyone is already, now and forever, here. And the earth trembles only from our orgasms. And from the pains of our childbirths.
The Greek summer encompasses everything. It accounts only to itself.” Through smaller and larger texts, relevant but not timely, which outline facets of reality or soar towards fiction, with fragments, glowing coals, and pebbles, Christos Chomenidis attempts a first autobiography. Not his own. Ours.
