Comments & modern Greek artists, Greek painters: Day rings in the higher airs...

Literature & Greek artists, modern Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Tree on Hymettos Mountain, oil on canvas

Lawrence Durrell
This Unimportant Morning

This unimportant morning
Something goes singing where
The capes turn over on their sides
And the warm Adriatic rides
Her blue and sun washing
At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.

Day rings in the higher airs
Pure with cicadas, and slowing
Like a pulse to smoke from farms,

Extinguished in the exhausted earth,
Unclenching like a fist and going.

Trees fume, cool, pour - and overflowing
Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake
Carpets from windows[Photo], brush with dew
The up-and-doing: and young lovers now
Their little resurrections make.

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep
Stitched up - and wake, my darling, wake.
The impatient Boatman has been waiting
Under the house, his long oars folded up
Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

Comments & Greek paintings, Greek artists: Escape from our universe...

Science & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, The Spirit of the Sailor, oil on canvas

There is still hope for a better future...

Let's escape from our universe and visit a paraller one...

Let's travel to a universe where there is no decline...

Or to a universe where Greece is still beautiful, Athens is small, transparent and romantic...

It's just a matter of technology - and we just need the right vehicle...

A Quantum Arrow of Time
FOCUS - Physical Review, August 17, 2009

The mathematical laws of physics work just as well for events going forward or going backward in time. Yet in the real world, hot coffee never unmixes itself from cold milk. A theorist publishing in the 21 August Physical Review Letters offers a new explanation for this apparent conflict between the time-symmetry of the physical laws and the forward "arrow of time" we see in everyday events. When viewed in quantum terms, events that increase the entropy of the Universe leave records of themselves in their environment. The researcher proposes that events that go "backward," reducing entropy, cannot leave any trace of having occurred, which is equivalent to not happening.

• Entropy with your coffee. No matter how many times you mix milk into your coffee, you will never see them spontaneously unmix, thanks to the relentless increase in the entropy of the Universe. But the fundamental laws of physics have no preference for a direction in time. A theory suggests that entropy-reducing events are possible, but they always erase any evidence of ever having occurred.

Thermodynamically speaking, whenever two bodies of unequal temperature are joined together, energy flows between them until the two temperatures equalize. Associated with this heat diffusion is an increase in the quantity known as entropy. As far as we know, heat never spontaneously flows in reverse, and the entropy of the Universe always goes up.

Reversing time’s arrow would be equivalent to lowering entropy, for example if an object at uniform temperature were to spontaneously warm up in one spot and cool elsewhere. In a 19th century thought experiment, a powerful imp called Maxwell’s demon is able to perform such a separation for a gas by knowing the position and speed of every gas molecule in a box with a partition. Using a shutter over a hole in the partition, the demon restricts high-energy molecules to one side and allows the low-energy molecules to collect on the other side. It turns out that the demon would have to expend energy and raise its own entropy, so the Universe's total entropy would still rise.

In the quantum world, an entropy-lowering demon would have a different chore, because in the quantum mechanical version of entropy, it isn’t heat that flows when entropy changes, it’s information. Lorenzo Maccone of the University of Pavia, Italy, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes a thought experiment to illustrate the consequences of reducing quantum entropy. An experimenter, Alice, measures the spin state of an atom sent by her friend Bob, who is otherwise isolated from Alice’s laboratory. The atom is in a combined state (superposition) of spin-up and spin-down until Alice measures it as either up or down.

From Alice’s perspective, her lab gains a single bit of information from outside, and it's then copied and recorded in her memory and on her computer’s hard drive. That information flow from atom to lab increases entropy, according to Alice. Maccone argues that because Bob doesn't see the result, from his perspective the spin state of the atom never resolves itself into up or down. Instead it becomes quantum mechanically correlated, or "entangled," with the quantum state of the lab. He sees no information flow and no change in entropy.

Bob plays the role of Maxwell’s demon; he has total control of the quantum state of her lab. To reduce the entropy of the lab from Alice's point-of-view, Bob reverses the flow of that one bit of information by removing any record of the atom's spin from Alice’s hard drive and her brain. He does so by performing a complicated transformation that disentangles the lab’s quantum state from that of the atom.

Maccone writes that such a reversal violates no laws of quantum physics. In fact, from Bob’s perspective, the quantum information of the atom plus Alice’s lab is the same whether or not the two are entangled--there is no change in entropy as viewed from the outside. Such reversals could happen in real life, Maccone says, but because the Universe--like Alice--would retain no memory of them, they would have no effect on how we perceive the world. His paper goes on to show mathematically how this reasoning applies in general, with the Universe taking the place of Alice.

Jos Uffink of Utrecht University in the Netherlands accepts some aspects of the work but is not completely convinced. "The observer might very well retain a partial memory of the event," after the entropy-reducing process, he says. Still, he calls the approach of the paper "quite novel" and its conclusions "startling." He says a vigorous debate continues about the relationship between information as an objective, physical quantity and the apparent "irreversibility" of so many events in the world around us.

--JR Minkel

Comments & Greek painters, Greek artists: Nobody is asleep on earth...

Poets & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Olive Grove, oil on canvas

Federico García Lorca
City that does not sleep

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the
stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead
dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists.Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful!Be careful!Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world.No one, no one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Reflections, refractions, mirages, Fata Morgana...

Reflections & Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Reflections, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

In our times, it is difficult to make dreams about a better future...

It is difficult to be optimistic...

From now on, our hopes sleep in the mysterious world of hallucinations, delusions, illusions, optical illusions - the world of Fata Morgana...

Fata Morgana in poetry

Fata Morgana by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

O sweet illusions of song
That tempt me everywhere,
In the lonely fields, and the throng
Of the crowded thoroughfare!

I approach and ye vanish away,
I grasp you, and ye are gone;
But ever by night and by day,
The melody soundeth on.

As the weary traveller sees
In desert or prairie vast,
Blue lakes, overhung with trees
That a pleasant shadow cast;

Fair towns with turrets high,
And shining roofs of gold,
That vanish as he draws nigh,
Like mists together rolled --

So I wander and wander along,
And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,
In the beautiful land of dreams.

But when I would enter the gate
Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
For the vision to reappear.

Reflections, refractions, mirages, Fata Morgana

Fata Morgana, is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur in Arthurian legend. Reputedly a sorceress and able to change shape at will, Morgan le Fay was sometimes said to live below the sea in a crystal palace that could also rise above the surface. The fata morgana effect was so named for the superstitious belief among sailors that she created illusory visions to lure men into a false port and to their death.

The term first entered English usage in 1818, when it was used to describe an occurrence of the phenomenon in the Strait of Messina, a narrow body of water between Sicily and the region of Calabria in southern Italy

A special type of complex mirage, one that sometimes gives the impression of a castle half in the air and half in the sea, is named after Fata Morgana. She was known to live in a marvelous castle under the sea. Sometimes the enchantress made this castle appear reflected up in the air, causing seamen who mistook it for a safe harbor to be lured to their deaths.

The fata morgana mirage is one that can occur only where there are alternating warm and cold layers of air near the ground or water surface. Instead of traveling straight through these layers, light is bent towards the colder, hence denser, air. The result can be a rather complicated light path and a strange image of a distant object. A fate morgana actually is a superposition of several images of one object. Typically one image is upright more or less above two inverted images that may be mingled together. The images may undergo rapid changes as the air layers move slightly up and down relative to the observer.

Fata Morgana is most common in polar regions, especially over large sheets of ice with a uniform low temperature, but it can be observed almost anywhere. While in polar regions Fata Morgana is observed on cold days, in deserts and over oceans and lakes Fata Morgana is observed on hot days. In this form of mirage, images which would normally be concealed behind the horizon appear distorted in the sky.

Comments & contemporary Greek artists: the end of prophesies...

Science & Greek artists, modern Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Thesaloniki in Colours, oil on canvas

A definite prediction: We will never meet again the "Thessaloniki in Colours" of our youth...

Unfortunately, we are unable to predict anything about our future...

Well, it is certain that we are getting worse day after day, but the process itself of our catastrophe is unknown, concerning the very details...

Also, intuitions do not exist - some of us are just able to observe better than others and this results to a better understanding of a situation or a human character...

As for those who think that something really happens - that they experience Déjà vu - it is obvious that they should visit a doctor...

According to recent scientific search:

An article by Helen Phillips - New Scientist March 25, 2009

Déjà vu...

Mr P, an 80-year-old Polish émigré and former engineer, knew he had memory problems, but it was his wife who described it as a permanent sense of déjà vu. He refused to watch TV or read a newspaper, as he claimed to have seen everything before. When he went out walking he said the same birds sang in the same trees and the same cars drove past at the same time every day. His doctor said he should see a memory specialist, but Mr P refused. He was convinced that he had already been.

Déjà vu can happen to anyone, and anyone who has had it will recognise the description immediately. It is more than just a sense that you have seen or done something before; it is a startling, inappropriate and often disturbing sense that history is repeating, and impossibly so. You can't place where the earlier encounter happened, and it can feel like a premonition or a dream. Subjective, strange and fleeting, not to mention tainted by paranormal explanations, the phenomenon has been a difficult and unpopular one to study.

Now that is changing, spurred in part by Mr P and a handful of people who, like him, have dementia and experience continuous déjà vu, and also by the discovery that there is a group of people with epilepsy who have déjà vu-like auras before a seizure. They are making it possible for researchers to catch the process in action, bringing hope that the secrets of this strange and disturbing phenomenon could finally be unlocked. Surprisingly, not only is déjà vu proving an interesting window on the peculiar ways that our memory works, it is also providing a few clues about how we tell the difference between what is real, imagined, dreamed and remembered - one of the true mysteries of consciousness.

Speculations about past lives or telepathy aside, the first biological explanations of déjà vu were based on ideas that two sensory signals in the brain - perhaps one from each eye or each hemisphere of the brain - for some reason move out of sync, so that people have the experience of reliving the same event. "Mental diplopia", as it was called, is intuitively appealing but the evidence is stacked against it. Information from the two eyes mixes very early in visual processing, long before we perceive a scene. What's more, déjà vu - rather ironically as the term means "already seen" - can occur in blind people, according to Chris Moulin, a psychologist at the University of Leeds, UK, (Brain and Cognition, vol 62, p 264). Then there are the cases of people who have had their two cortical hemispheres surgically separated in an attempt to relieve intractable epilepsy. If the mental diplopia idea were correct you might expect them to have permanent déjà vu, yet there are no reports of this happening.

A second intuitive explanation is some sort of distortion in time perception. Somehow, incoming signals must get misinterpreted and labelled with an inappropriate time stamp, making the experience seem old as well as current. If the brain's memory system is like a tape recorder, it is as if the recording head has got muddled with the playback head. It is an interesting analogy, but it does not appear to have any anatomical basis in the brain.

Now another theory is gaining credibility. Perhaps déjà vu feels like reliving a past experience because we actually are - at least to some extent. Psychologist Anne Cleary of Colorado State University in Fort Collins came to this idea via an interest in memory problems. Keen to explain instances such as when something seems to be on the tip of the tongue, or when we recognise a face but can't place it, she started looking for parallels with déjà vu. "One particular theory of déjà vu is that it may be a memory process," she says. "Features of a new situation may be familiar from some prior situation."

Her first experiments seem to support this. In one, she was able to induce familiarity for images of celebrity faces or well-known places, even if the viewer couldn't place the image, simply by first presenting subjects with lists of their names. In another study volunteers reported familiarity with words that sounded similar to ones presented in an earlier list. Nevertheless, Cleary acknowledges that this can't be the whole story. "Déjà vu is unique in that it is not just another instance of familiarity, it actually feels wrong," she says.

How to account for this? One possibility is that déjà vu is based on a memory fragment that comes from something more subtle, such as similarity between the configuration or layout of two scenes. Say you are in the living room of a friend's new house with the eerie feeling that you have been there before, yet knowing you can't possibly. It could be just that the arrangement of furniture is similar to what you have seen before, suggests Cleary, so the sense of familiarity feels misplaced.

To test the idea, her team produced a large range of images showing scenes such as a bar, a bowling alley, landscapes or rooms from a house. Volunteers saw a subset of these, then they were tested on a new set, half of which were entirely novel and the other half resembling scenes from the first set in structure and configuration but not content. Not only did the similar layouts produce familiarity without recall, subjects also reported a sense of the inexplicable, having been told that all the scenes were different.

Although the familiarity idea appeals to many, Moulin, for one, is not convinced. His scepticism stems from a study of a person with epilepsy that he conducted with Akira O'Connor, now at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. This 39-year-old man's auras of déjà vu were long-lasting enough to conduct experiments during them. The researchers reasoned that if familiarity is at the root of déjà vu, they should be able to stop the experience in its tracks by distracting the man's attention away from whatever scene he was looking at. However, when he looked away or focused on something different, his déjà vu did not dissipate, and would follow his line of vision and his hearing, suggesting that real familiarity is not the key. The fact that an epilepsy aura can cause déjà vu at all suggests that it is erroneous activity in a particular part of the brain that leads to misplaced feelings of familiarity, suggests Moulin.

Hypnotic dissociation

But how? Moulin and O'Connor think déjà vu is the consequence of a dissociation between familiarity and recall. We know that we can have a sense of familiarity for a face or name without actually remembering where we know it from. Using hypnosis, O'Connor and Moulin have been able to create a more mysterious sense of familiarity that leads people to draw parallels with déjà vu. One group of people was given a puzzle to solve. Then, while under hypnosis, they were told they would be given the puzzle again, but would not recall it. Another group did not do the puzzle but were told under hypnosis that they would be given it later and that they would experience feelings of familiarity but not understand why. Both situations produced a sense of eerie familiarity, which some people likened to déjà vu. Moulin and O'Connor hope that their ability to induce a déjà vu-like state in the lab will help them probe the phenomenon. They also believe these experiments support the idea that familiarity and recall are dissociable, and that you can have a sense of familiarity without actually having any prior experience of something.

Studies of the brain also support the idea that separate circuits mediate recollection and familiarity, according to John Aggleton and Malcolm Brown of Cardiff University, UK, who recently reviewed brain imaging and animal studies (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 10, p 455). They point out that different parts of the medial temporal lobe, at the side of the brain, are responsible for different aspects of memory recall (see illustration). The curved tube-like hippocampus, which runs through the centre of the lobe, mediates recollection, particularly of autobiographical memories. Meanwhile, the studies show that the surrounding parahippocampus, particularly the perirhinal cortex, may provide the feelings of familiarity.

This fits well with the evidence from brain scans of Mr P and others like him, who show huge degeneration of neurons in the medial temporal lobe, and the fact that it is epilepsy originating in the medial temporal lobe that leads to déjà vu auras.

It is possible that both Moulin and Cleary are correct. The perirhinal cortex may store information about spatial relationships, rather than time, place and sequence of events, and so normal familiarity feelings could come largely from layout and configuration, backing Cleary's findings. Indeed, there may be many ways to produce false familiarity, according to psychologist Alan Brown of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, author of The déjà vu experience (Psychology press, 2004). His own experiments indicate some other possibilities. For example, he has induced the feeling by distracting volunteers while they saw a glimpse of a scene and then moments later giving them a good look. "If you take a brief glance when distracted, and look at the same scene again afterwards, it can feel like you've seen it before but much earlier," says Brown. He has also induced it by showing people images of things they had forgotten. "Just as a stomach ache can hurt the same way but be caused by lots of different processes, it could be the same way with déjà vu," he says.

The real problem with explaining déjà vu, however, is not how we can get familiarity without recognition, but why it feels so disturbing. "We'd get it all the time if it were just familiarity with real experiences," says Ed Wild from the Institute of Neurology in London. He suggests that mood and emotion are also important contributors to the sensation of déjà vu. We need the right combination of signals, not just the layout of a scene but how we feel at the time, to believe something is familiar when really it is not.

A matter of degree

Moulin agrees it may be matter of degree. The regions thought to mediate recall, familiarity and emotions are all extremely closely linked. A small amount of stimulation could produce a mild sense of familiarity, while a stronger stimulus could spread into neighbouring emotion regions producing a more disturbing feeling, or even the striking sense of doom or premonition some people report with déjà vu.

Cognitive neuroscientist Stefan Köhler from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, believes the role of emotion is even more central in generating the sense of weirdness that accompanies déjà vu. He recently had the chance to image the brain of a person cured of epilepsy with déjà vu auras by removal of a large tumour that was triggering the seizures. The excised areas consisted of parts of the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, but also included the amygdala. It suggests that this region, which is known to be heavily tied up with emotion, was also involved in creating the déjà vu. Köhler speculates that without the appropriate emotional arousal, perhaps the brain cannot recognise a person or place we have encountered before as truly familiar. On the other hand, inappropriate emotional arousal may make us believe something is familiar when actually it is not.

The final element of déjà vu, a sense that it feels impossible, probably comes from the reasoning parts of our brain. According to Köhler, when our rational knowledge tells us one thing, but our emotional instincts tell us another, it can feel very wrong. This final element is missing in people with dementia, including Mr P, who accept their experiences as perfectly normal. Köhler suspects this may be because neurodegeneration in these individuals has caused a disconnection between the temporal lobes, which are generating sensations, and the frontal lobes which are continuously interpreting them.

Our brains are looking for associations all the time. Déjà vu is interesting, says Kohler, because it points to a brain mechanism that helps you interpret what you are doing. When you are having a memory, you have the sensation of recollection. It feels like having a memory, and doesn't feel like daydreaming or current reality. "Déjà vu is a fault in a kind of cognitive process that is going on in the background all the time. When it goes wrong, it's very striking," says Moulin. At the extreme, patients with permanent déjà vu - dubbed déjà vécu, for already experienced - actually make up stories to make sense of it (New Scientist, 7 October 2006, p 32).

While déjà vu is starting to divulge some of its secrets, there is still a long way to go before we understand how we actually decide what is real, imagined, dreamed or experienced, and how these various tags lead to such different conscious experiences. One anecdotal finding that came to light while working on this article is that people who think a lot about déjà vu are more prone to it. I had déjà vu about reading about déjà vu, and researchers have had déjà vu about having déjà vu. It certainly retains mystery enough to justify further study. After all, says Wild, "déjà vu is one of weirdest brain experiences that normal people have".

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: The far sound of cities, in the evening...

Poetry & Greek paintings, Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Piraeus, oil on canvas

Arthur Rimbaud
Departure

Everything seen...

The vision gleams in every air.

Everything had...

The far sound of cities, in the evening,

In sunlight, and always.

Everything known...

O Tumult! O Visions! These are the stops of life.


Departure in affection, and shining sounds.

Comments & Greek painters, Greek artists: No one can advise or help you - no one...

Literature & Greek artists, Greek paintings, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Portrait of a Young Woman, oil on canvas

About advice...

From:
Letters to a young poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

(translated by Stephen Mitchell)

No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

... For the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds - wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. ...

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. - Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating

If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. (...) Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don't hate anything. Sex is difficult; yes. But those tasks that have been entrusted to us are difficult; almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious. If you just recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own talent and nature, out of your own experience and childhood and strength, to achieve a wholly individual relation to sex (one that is not influenced by convention and custom), then you will no longer have to be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your dearest possession...

--------------------

Source: ELLOPOS.NET

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: To the spirit, to your body, Greece...

Greek poets & Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Angelos Sikelianos, mixed technique

Angelos Sikelianos
from
March of the Spirit

Gigantic thoughts,
Like clouds of fire or islands of purple
In a mythical sunset,
Lit up in my mind,
Suddenly my whole life flared up
In concern for your new freedom, Greece !

So I did not say:
This is the light of my funeral pyre…
I said, I am the torch of your history,
So let my abandoned body burn like a torch. With this torch
Marching upright, as at the final hour
I shall light up every corner of the Universe,
I shall open the road to the soul,
To the spirit, to your body, Greece.

I spoke and went forward
Holding my burning liver
On your Caucasus,
Every step of mine
Was the first, and was, I thought, the last.
My naked foot trod in your blood,
My naked foot brushed against your bodies,
For my body, my face, my entire spirit
Was mirrored, as in a lake, in your blood.
There, in such a scarlet mirror, Greece

A bottomless mirror, a mirror of abyss
Of your freedom and your thirst,. I saw myself
Moulded out of heavy red clay
A new Adam of the newest creation
That we plan to create for you, Greece.

--------------------
Source: Mikis Theodorakis Website

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law...

Philosophy & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Sunday promenade, oil on canvas

"The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real." - The Leviathan

Thomas Hobbes, the greatest materialist philosopher...

Rejecting Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy in favor of the philosophy of Galileo...

Thomas Hobbes

Quotations

• In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
• It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
• Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.
• Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.
• That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
• The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
• The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.
• The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
• The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.
• The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
• A man cannot lay down the right of resisting them that assault him by force, to take away his life.
• A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
• A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
• All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.
• Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
• During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
• Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
• Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
• He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.
• I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
• I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
• Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.
• Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.
• No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
• Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.
• Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
• Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
• Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

Comments & Greek paintings, Greek artists: there’ll be a suspicion of sea...

Greek poets & Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Moon Shine, oil on canvas

About the Greek poet, Miltos Sachtouris...

...The rejection of a decorative use of poetic language, and the greatest possible condensing as a permanent method for creating style are two elements that accompany Miltos Sachtouris in most of his collections. Things and their uses are described with relative fidelity, poetic action is enhanced thanks to a quick succession of images-episodes, whilst the descriptive part of the narration (space layout, details about the elements that demarcate it) is minimised to the lowest possible degree...

From Introduction to Miltos Sachtouris poetics, by Yiannis Dallas

Miltos Sachtouris

The Poet

When they find me on the cross of my death
the sky around will have reddened far beyond
there’ll be a suspicion of sea
and, from above, in a now terrifying darkness
a white bird will recite my songs.

The Saint

He stared deep
deep
into the well
its depth
had no end
in this life

the flesh peeled off
and fell bit by bit
soon nothing would remain
but his skeleton

I’ve decided - he said -
I’ve finally decided
I’ll live among the drowned
and among the lepers

Comments & Greek paintings, Greek artists: Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition...

Aphorisms & Greek artists, Greek paintings, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas

A great mind...

About human nature...

Michel de Montaigne
Aphorisms

• A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
• A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
• A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.
• A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
• Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.
• Ambition is not a vice of little people.
• An unattempted lady could not vaunt of her chastity.
• An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
• Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
• Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
• Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness.
• Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.
• Death, they say, acquits us of all obligations.
• Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
• Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
• Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.
• Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.
• Few men have been admired of their familiars.
• For truly it is to be noted, that children's plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
• Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.
• He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
• He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
• How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!
• How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.
• I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
• I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.
• I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.
• I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.
• I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.
• I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
• I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
• I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.
• I quote others only in order the better to express myself.
• I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate.
• I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.
• I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.
• I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
• If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: and unprepared as we are - now no time left - tears us apart...

Poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Morning At the Port, oil on canvas

As catastrophic events happen every day...

As most of our actions cause the fall of modern civlization...

Only poetry is able to observe...

Finished
Konstantinos Kavafis

In fear and suspicions,

in mind disturbed and frightened eyes,

as we melt down we design how to act

to avoid the danger

the unavoidable thus horribly threatening us.

Yet we err, it isn't this on our way;

false were the messages

(we didn't listen to them or didn't rightly sense).

A different disaster, never imagined,

abrupt, rapid falls upon us,

and unprepared as we are - now no time left - tears us apart.

--------------------

Source: ELLOPOS.NET

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Open always, always watching, the eyes of my soul...

Greek poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Hydra landscape, oil on canvas

A great Greek poet...

The so called national poet of Greece...

Dionysios Solomos
Free Besieged


SWEET and free the soul, like she is gone, / and they raised in smile the wounded front.

15.

Have you as many has the East and as many the West wishes.

22.

Chasm of quake bringing forth flowers that tremor in the air.

23.

Thousands of sounds innumerous, in great creation's depths; / The East was starting it, ending it the West. / Some from the East and from the West some; / Every sound had a joy, every joy a love.

32.

Complaint waste of time in whatever one might lose.

33.

Joy in my eyes I wish to see, the much beloved, / Cruel dream revealed into the shroud shut.

36.

Open always, always watching, the eyes of my soul.

41.

Small light and far in darkness great and desolate.

43.

To depth from depth falls until was no one left; / there of came forth invincible.

49.

Probes you the stone you hold, and holds itself a voice.

52.

In this world flows and in worlds beyond arrives.

---------------------------

Source: ELLOPOS.NET

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: time for journey...

Travel & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Marine landscape, oil on paper

It's time to travel far away from here!

As the number of mental diseases increases rapidly in our times...

As we meet dozen of phychopaths both in public and private life every day...

It is not a surprise that a new, updated catalogue of mental diseases is about to be created...

Well, hurry up..! We are sure that everyone of us is ready to add a new case...

The relative announcement is posted on the official website of American Psychiatric Association: http://www.dsm5.org/Pages/Default.aspx

Publication of the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in May 2013 will mark one the most anticipated events in the mental health field.

As part of the development process, the preliminary draft revisions to the current diagnostic criteria for psychiatric diagnoses are now available for public review and comment. We thank you for your interest in DSM-5 and hope that you use this opportunity not only to learn more about the proposed changes in DSM-5, but also about its history, its impact, and its developers. Please continue to check this site for updates to criteria and for more information about the development process.

Proposed Draft Revisions to DSM Disorders and Criteria

The draft disorders and disorder criteria that have been proposed by the DSM-5 Work Groups can be found on these pages. Use the links below to read about proposed changes to the disorders that interest you. Please note that the proposed criteria listed here are not final. These are initial drafts of the recommendations that have been made to date by the DSM-5 Work Groups. Viewers will be able to submit comments until April 20, 2010. After that time, this site will be available for viewing only.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: The thought is holding on to them...

Literature & Greek paintings, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Small Church in Attica, oil on canvas

Let's start our day with literature...

Have a nice day...

An essay by Giorgos Seferis

Delphi
Giorgos Seferis

Translated by C. Capri-Karka.
From "The Charioteer" , An Annual Review of Modern Greek Culture, No 35, 1993-1994

In the beginning was the wrath of the earth. Later, Apollo came and killed the chthonic serpent, Python. It was left to rot. It is said that this is where the first name of Delphi, Πυθώ [Pitho], came from pith- (the root is πυθ = I rot). In such a fertilizer the power of the god of harmony, of light and of divination took root and grew. The myth may mean that the dark forces are the yeast of light; that the more intense they are, the deeper the light becomes when it dominates them. One would think that if the landscape of Delphi vibrates with such an inner radiance, it is because there is no corner of our land that has been kneaded so much by chthonic powers and absolute light.

Descending toward Parnassus from the direction of the Stadium, one sees the wide-open wound that divides, as if by a blow of Hephaestus' axe, the two Phaedriades ("shining rocks") from top to bottom in Kastalia and, even lower, to the depths of the ravine of Pleistos. One feels the awe of a wounded life that struggles in order to breathe, as long as it still can, in the light and rejoices that it is dawn and the sun is rising.

Or, again, as night falls, when the weary cicadas become silent, a whisper can remind one of the stammering voices of the prophetess Cassandra. It may be the only authentic sound that resembles the unknown to us -I mean "unprocessed"-"clamour" of Pythia:

Woe, woe, woe! O Apollo, O Apollo! (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1072)

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy, as they say; but God wanted nobody to believe her; as we ourselves do not believe her

As one comes from Athens to Delphi, after Thebes and Livadia, where the road meets the road to Daulis, there is the crossroads of Megas, the "bandit-killer," as he was called in the popular novels of the last century. In the years of Pythia, this crossroads was called Σχιστή Οδός [split road]. It was a very significant crossroads for the emotional complexes of the people of those days; maybe, in another way, for us too. There begins the story of Oedipus, who answered the Sphinx; of the blind Oedipus, the ultimate suppliant. Pythia had given her oracle to his father: "Laius, you ask me for a son; I will give him to you; but it is your fate that from his hands you will lose the light of day." Laius was going to Delphi; Oedipus was returning. They met at this crossroads under the heavy mass of Parnassus. Neither of the two knew whom he was facing. They argued. Oedipus killed his father.

We are living in a technological age, as we say. Pythia has vanished; and out of the myth of Oedipus science has drawn symbols and terms that occupy us perhaps more than the Oracle of Delphi occupied the ancients. Today this tale may still give many people a pleasant evening at the theatre, if it happens, by chance, that a-good actor is performing: But if we do not: have that Oedipus, we have the Oedipus complex and its consequences. Is it better this way? Maybe. The problem is not so much which things have come to an end but with what we-who are living, like everything in life, amidst decay and change - replace those things we consider finished.

I am thinking of those big waves from the depths of time that shift the meaning of words. For example, the meaning of the word oracle: Where has it gone today? The word became an archaeological object. Agreed. But its meaning? Could it possibly have taken on, imperceptibly, a particular scientific or mathematical form? Who knows. However, what one feels is that in the depths of today's thought something must have remained of the old, abolished expressions. Otherwise how could we feel such a vibration here?


One can also go to Delphi from the direction of the sea, from Itia. It used to be called Kirra, and there Apollo, transformed into a dolphin, brought the Minoan ship. Thus Pytho was named Delphi, if we believe the Homeric hymn:


and in as much as at the first on the hazy sea
I sprang upon the swift ship in the form of a dolphin,
pray to me as Apollo Delphinius; also the altar itself
shall be called Delphinius and overlooking for ever.
(To Apollo, 493 ff.)


It is nice to start from the seashore and enter among the olive trees under the silver leaves of the plain of Criseos, enumerating, as you pass by, the wrinkles on the dense gathering of trunks; and if by any chance this shadow weighs heavily upon you and you raise your eyes, you suddenly see, in the perpetually moving blue, the twin peaks of Parnassus; further down you see the extension of the western Phaedriad and even lower down the acropolis of Crisa. Around there the chariot races that were praised by Pindar took place. There is this rhythm that breathes, along with two or three other stark voices, over Delphi:

…. neither by ships nor by land canst thou find
the wondrous road to the trysting-place of the Hyperboreans
(Pindar, Pythian Odes, X, 29 ff.)


It is said that Apollo used to go to the Hyperboreans for three months every year. Who were the Hyperboreans? They have sunk into myth. At their table -Pindar continues- Perseus sat one day. He saw them sacrifice excellent hecatombs of asses to the god; Apollo was laughing as he looked at the erect shamelessness of the beasts that were offered to him. The Muse is always with them; neither sickness nor age touches this sacred race; they do not need to work hard; they do not have fights. They have escaped the avenger Nemesis.

Up there in Delphi, after you pass the village and reach the temple, you have the feeling that you have entered a place separate from the rest of the world. It is an amphitheatre nestling on the first steps of Parnassus. From the East and the North it is closed by the Phaedriades: Hyambeia, which descends like the prow of a big ship and cuts the ravine; the northern Rodini, which almost touches the Stadium. From the western side, the rocky wall of Saint Elias and further down the mountains of Locrida, Giona, where you see the sun set. If you turn your eyes to the South, you have in front of you the robust lines of Cirphis and at its foot the ravine of Pleistos.

Pleistos is dry in the summer; you see its dry bed shine in the sun but a river of olive trees is streaming, you would say, flooding the whole plain of Amphissa, all the way down to the sea, where the seafarer sees them for the first time. Close by, the shiny stones of the ruins of Marmaria, where the three columns of Tholos jut out. I almost forgot Castalia. However, its water has a fragrance of thyme.

The temple of Apollo is reckoned to be approximately two hundred meters in depth and one hundred thirty in width, not including the Stadium. The space is not very large and it is natural that the monuments, as they were crowded here, had to develop vertically in order to grow taller than the others: think of the Sphinx of Naxos, the column with the dancers, the snakes of Plataia. One tries to imagine all these, as they were when they breathed intact. They must have looked, from a distance, like cypresses, shiny, multicoloured, around the temple of Pythia. One just tries. What comes to mind is the dawn that Ion saw; as far as the natural landscape is concerned, this dawn is, I think, conventional but it reflects; I feel, the brilliant splendour of the temple as one imagines it to have been in those years:


Lo, yonder the Sun-god is turning to earthward his splendour-blazing
Chariot of light;
And the stars from the firmament flee from the fiery arrows chasing,
To the sacred night:
And the crests of Parnassus untrodden are flaming and flushed as with yearning
Of welcome to far-flashing wheels with the glory of daylight returning
To mortal sight.
To the roof-ridge of Phoebus the fume of the incense of Araby burning
As a bird taketh flight.
On the tripod most holy is seated the Delphian Maiden
Chanting to children of Hellas the wild cries, laden with doom, from the lips of Apollo that ring.
(Euripides, Ion, 82 ff.)


One is still trying. The imagination grows tired. The retrospectives and the reconstructions, no matter how useful, become most inhuman. What else do we have from this "instantaneous present?" In the end, the imagination prefers that the river of time should have passed and filled this limited space. Today, looking down from above, let us say from the theatre, you have the impression that you have before you a downward sloping bottom where everything is levelled - these marble fragments and carved stones and the rocks which rolled in older times from Parnassus and on which Sibylla once sat; the bottom of a calm, shallow sea where the pebbles shine, where everyone discerns as much as he can, depending on his nature: a polygonal wall so much alive that one's hand spontaneously repeats the movements of the craftsman who carved and fitted the stones; a bending of the thumb and the index finger to raise a dress with the same grace that one saw the other day in a Greek village; a life-like thigh, as the knee of a woman descending from the chariot bends; the head of a Sphinx with the eyes neither open nor closed; a smile that one would call archaic -but this is not enough- of a Hercules or a Theseus. Such fragments from a life that was once whole, stirring pieces, very close to us, ours for a moment and then enigmatic and inaccessible like the lines of a stone licked smooth by the waves or of a seashell at the bottom of the sea.


Yet, the Phaedriades shine, as does the dry rock of Parnassus, and higher up in the air two eagles with outstretched, immobile wings move slowly in the azure sky like the eagles that Zeus once set free so that they would show him the centre of the world. Perhaps these things come as a big relief.

At noon, in the museum, I looked again at the Charioteer. He did not live long in the eyes of the ancients, so we are told. An earthquake buried the statue one hundred years after it was erected - this perpetual dialogue, in Delphi, between the wrath of the earth and sacred serenity. I stayed near him for a long time. As in older times, as always, this motionless movement stops your breath; you do not know; you are lost. Then you try to hold on to the details; the almond-shaped eyes with the sharp, transparent look, the strong jaw, the shadows around the lips, the ankle or the toenails; the robe which is and is not a column. You look at its seams, the crisscrossed ribbons that hold it together; the reigns in his right hand that stay there, tangled, while the horses have sunk into the chasm of time. °Then the analysis bothers you; you have the impression that you are listening to a language not spoken any more. What do these details, which are not artistry, mean? How do they disappear like that within the whole? What was behind this living presence? A different idea, different loves, a different devotion. We have worked like ants and like bees on these relics. How close have we come to the soul that created them? I mean this grace at its peak, this power, this modesty and the things that these bodies symbolize. This vital breath that makes the inanimate copper transcend the rules of logic and slip into another time, as it stands there in the cold hall of the museum.


I chose to walk up to the Corycian Cave from the ancient path; it is too rough for today's habits; the animals slip. The rhythm of the mule's bell and of the horseshoes on the rocks is something from another time; this iamb.


It is dawn; from above the Stadium looks as if a child built it in the sand; then what scares you is the big gaping wound of the Phaedriades. On the ridge of Cirphis you see the rosy shades of the houses in a village. It is Desfina; behind it, down at the seashore, with more golden shades, is Galaxidi. We get off the horses at Kroki, where a fountain is running and a flock of goats with twisted horns and black fur, shining in the light, are drinking water. In the old days these places were pastures -Dionysus Αιγοβόλος (goat-thrower). Then we walk under the fir trees; their cones -people call them "rubala"-like the candles of a Christmas tree, shed tears of resin, which makes them look silvery. At the foot of the hill of Sarandavlio, as the cave is called today, we left the mules. Pausanias is right. "Climbing up to the Corycian Cave is easier for the pedestrian than for the mule or the horse," he tells us (X, XXXII, 2 ) . But even for the pedestrian the path is very rough. As we climb up, I ask my mule driver if there are still fairies in the cave, as I heard down in the village. He laughs; he does not feel that fairies are appropriate for a modern man. "Fairies in our times!" he says: Yet, his denial seems to me less sincere when he adds: "I myself never saw them;" and after some silence he continues: "A foreigner told me that here, in this cave, Apollo had forty beautiful weavers, gathered from the surrounding villages, who wove for him all the time." It seems more probable to me that he heard the story from his mother rather than a foreigner. A fellow villager of his told me the other day, down in Castalia: "And these plane trees down here are the ones that Agamemnon himself planted." "Agamemnon?" I said in surprise. He looked at me as if I was ignorant. "Of course Agamemnon," he said, "what did you think?"


Through Delphi passes a large crowd of tourists. "Delphi has become an endless hotel," a native told me. As in Plutarch's time, I thought. I had remembered his dialogue about Pythia.'s oracles. In those times too, the temple had becorne a tourist place with organized guides showing the sites to the crowds. The difference is that in Plutarch's times, the people who visited Delphi still had, as a common tradition, a faith that was on the decline, as in Jerusalem in our times: Today the common faith has been lost, and the people who come each have different personal myths. They read or they listen to a guide; to this information each person adds his own. Among these various crowds, the people of Parnassus continue to live obstinately with the traditional myths, which their collective subconscious nurtures

I wanted to climb to the Corycian Cave because I thought that this visit to the place of Apollo had to be completed with a feeling of Dionysus, whom Pythia supported so strongly - of the dead and alive god, the infant god; that emotional force which willed that the instincts of man not be spurned. In the plateau around the cave, the Thyiades and Maenades held their periodic nocturnal orgies-whatever that ecstatic outburst of women possessed by the god means for us today. I was thinking of that frustrated king, Pentheus (Euripides, Bacchae) . I was afraid of the example of his tragedy; I said: better the frenzy of the Thyiades in the high solitudes of Parnassus than its substitutes in the contemporary boundless anthills that are our big capitals. I was thinking of our collective madness.

To the right, as you enter the cave, the stone is still preserved with the half-effaced sign to the god Pan and the Nymphs. Then you have the feeling that you have descended into a large womb. The ground is damp and slippery; stalagmites and stalactites can be discerned in the dim light; it feels cold after the heat and the panting of the climb. Only after you proceed further and turn around, do you see the rays of the sun like a blessing as they enter, parallel, through the mouth of the cave striking its walls with a rosy and green iridescence. You rejoice at being born again in the warmth of the sun, certainly not poorer; you know that there is still something behind these things.

At one time, Plutarch tells us, people from a foreign land came to Delphi to consult the oracle. The preliminary test with the goat, which would show if the day were auspicious, was performed so that Pythia would deliver her oracle. But the animal did not shiver when sprayed with cold water; the sign was not good. Yet, the foreigners must have been important and, in order to please them, the priests exceeded the proper limits, until the animal, wet all over, showed signs of shivering. Then Pythia came down to the altar of the temple "unwilling and reluctant." As soon as she gave the first answers, Plutarch continues, the ferocity of her voice showed that an angry and mean spirit possessed her. She looked like a wind-swept ship ("δικην νεώς επειγομένης"). Finally, in a complete frenzy, with dreadful screams, she sprang towards the exit. "The prophet Nikandros, the priests, and the foreigners fled in terror. Later they returned and carried away the still frantic Pythia. She died a few days later.

This incident, they say, should be considered authentic -it happened in Plutarch's time and the prophet Nikandros who witnessed it was his friend; it shows us that Pythia was still functioning in the first century. It also makes us return to the eternal question that all of us who have thought about the very significant role -religious, political, private- that the oracle played in ancient Greek life have asked ourselves: were all these oracles and prophesies fabrications and frauds of sly priests or was there possibly real sincerity underlying those things, something that goes beyond our common sense.

Plutarch's narration should make us think that it was not very probable that the breakdown of a woman leading up to her death could be mere acting. Of course there were priests who interpreted Pythia's words -how articulate nobody knows-and delivered them, arranged in hexameters, trimeters or prose, to the faithful; no doubt they were opportunists, shifty, cautious, masters of ambiguity. But as in our times, it is one thing to look at such matters of the soul from the point of view of God and another from that of his servants.

It has been said that the phenomenon of Pythia must be included in the phenomena of that which we call today spiritualism. Perhaps. In that case though, the least one could remark is that Pythia resembles a contemporary medium as much as the Charioteer does a contemporary statue of mediocre art; let us say of Jacob Epstein. This is the difference. By this I mean that in the sanctuary of Apollo there has remained a mystery that goes beyond us, just as in the art of the Charioteer. I don't know. What one can consider more clearly is that if the oracle did indeed stimulate Socrates' thinking as Plato teaches us in the Apology, its contribution to the development of human thought would have been so great that it would have been worth founding for this reason alone.

Plutarch's narration approximately coincides with the event that brings to an end the world of the idols. Then the Oracle of Apollo slowly dries up, sparkling faintly, and, tired, finally disappears. Sometimes it whispers sentences that remind us of Sibylla's "I want to die," quoted by Petronius. Three hundred years or so have been spent among the wrinkles and the formal gestures of the clergy, who merely repeat and do not create. The only concern that seems to preoccupy them is the fear -that the old habit of offering gifts to Apollo might come to an end. This until the ultimate answer of the Oracle to the tragic Julian:

Tell the king the ornately designed temple has collapsed. Phoebus no longer has a home, nor a mantic laurel, nor a talking spring. The babbling water has run dry.

Yet, although the Oracle seems to write the last page of its history by itself and to descend into the grave of its own volition, the theoreticians of the new religion found it worthwhile to devote a lot of thought and ink to fighting it. The strange thing is that they do not set out to prove that such prophecies are the work of charlatans. They recognize the prophetic power of Delphi, but for them these things are the work of Satan and of the forces of darkness; and Apollo is a metamorphosized devil.

Here in Phocis, in the monastery of Saint Luke, a mosaic of Pantocrator, over the lintel of the west door, bears the inscription:


"I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness." Nature abhors a vacuum.


In the morning, at Marmaria, I went again to see the rocks that rolled down from Parnassus and destroyed the temple of Athena, as mentioned by Herodotus. In the beginning of our century, another storm again detached three large rocks and completed the destruction. The rocks are there among the trampled works of men, still showing, motionless now, their initial force. I remembered Angelos Sikelianos as he was listening to the onset of such a wind. "Not a sound is heard anywhere; and suddenly a horrendous roar, a strong and unbelievable roar breaks out as if from every direction. It is the great wind of Parnassus which starts up unexpectedly from the peaks toward the open spaces, with such force that you think it will shatter even the rocks to dust." The poet of Delphi -if any of our contemporaries can be called the man of Delphi- was writing in his house, high up near the Stadium, where I met him for the first time. His house is now in ruins; an ugly bust of him outside the door underlines the futility of glory.

As I was returning to the place where the round pool of the Gymnasium baths remains dry, five or six girls, very young, with legs naked up to above the knee, as if obeying a decision or an order, walked down very seriously, linked arms and danced two or three rounds, singing in a Hyperborean language I did not know. Hyperborean girls, I suppose: the dances of the Hyperborean virgins of Pindar. Then, looking very serious and still panting, they approached a guide who started lecturing in English: "The gymnasium was not only for the training of athletes; philosophers taught the young, poets recited their poems; astronomers explained from this spot the movements of the stars in the sky . . ." In the evening, at about eleven o'clock, a friend showed me in the starry sky an artificial satellite which was moving from west to east with a discernible motion; it had the intensity of a star of second, or perhaps third rank.

Like everything human and like the life of the stars, Apollo's Pythia had her beginning and also had her end in the wrath of the earth. "Phoebus has no home any more." Now again it seems as if we have completed a cycle; we are again facing the wrath-of the physical forces that we have set free and do not know whether we will be able to control them; one might say that we have in front of us a Python, that we need an Apollo, whatever these names mean. I don't know. What we know now is that the duration of this earth, as well as of this corner inside the loins of Parnassus is relative. It may end tomorrow or after some million years; that when we say eternity, we do not have in mind something measured in years, but we do something like Pythia, who, when falling into a trance, saw the whole of space and the whole of time past and future as one thing; or, to remember my friend E. M. Forster, we must call things eternal, in order to be able to struggle up to our last moment and to enjoy life. This sacred temple would probably whisper something like that to us.

If, however, we wish to look at things in a more simple and more direct manner, we could sit down on a stone at the time when the sun has passed the mountainous wall of Saint Elias and goes to set behind Giona. The light now comes parallel and strikes the Phaedriades showing them like Clashing Rocks; stopped, half-open. They are grey and light blue with the shades of an old mirror, with wounds of rust and blood. Down in Marmaria, three columns of the Tholos can be discerned; a smile of that earthly grace. Further down, the olive trees keep changing colour in the unbelievable flexibility of the light, from golden green to silver green; the mountain masses also keep changing, always becoming lighter: from golden to violet, from violet to the colour of crushed black grapes. Only the ridge of Cirphis still shines in a saffron-coloured light and stays alive for a while before everything turns to light blue and then darkens. You look again at the stair-like temple that is disappearing in the shadows, this seashore with the big broken pebbles. You want to get away from it all. You want to get away from this change -of things and feelings- that makes you dizzy. You turn again toward the Phaedriades that you looked at and looked at again throughout the day, and especially at high noon, when they shine, dry, when the old mirrors have found all their power again. The thought is holding on to them, as long as it still can, to the dry stone that refines you. No matter how much you resist, you cannot but have a feeling of sanctity about it. At least this: let us be true to ourselves. Delphi - Amorgos, August 1961

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Source: MYRIOBIBLOS

Comments & Greek painters, Greek artists: By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing...

Contemporary thought & Greek artists, greek painters, greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Port, oil on canvas

One of the great philosophers of our time...

Although he is not a systematic one...

Philosopher & poet...

Emil Cioran
Aphorisms

• A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
• A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
• A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
• A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
• A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
• A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
• Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
• Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
• Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
• By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
• Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
• Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
• Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
• Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
• Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
• For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
• Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Knowledge is power...

Aphorisms & Greek paintings, greek artists, greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Still Life, oil on canvas

Facing every day life with wisdom...

Sir Francis Bacon
Aphorisms

• A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
• By far the best proof is experience.
• Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
• Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
• Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
• Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.
• He of whom many are afraid ought to fear many.
• Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
• I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
• If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
• In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
• Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
• Read not to contradict and confute, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
• Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
• Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
• Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out.
• Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
• Silence is the virtue of fools.
• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
• The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
• They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
• There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
• Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.
• Houses are built to live in, not to look on; therefore, let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.
• Knowledge is power. ((Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est)
• In charity there is no excess.
• Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Comments & Greek artists, greek painters: nights of my country that never change...

Poetry & Greek artists, greek paintings, greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Hydra V, Oil on Canvas

Greek landscapes in poetry...

A town in Southern Greece
Titos Patrikios

This town has crippled me, just as long ago
a town might have crippled me,
with its barracks its empty factories
its black walls topped by broken glass
its narrow streets, treeless, dry
its swarthy, salty women
mobile, fluid, with coal-black eyes
olive skins lightly perspiring
just enough for transient, fleeting love
on shadowy, half-deserted sea-shores
with their stones, tar, rust and thorns.
This town cures me with its nights
the nights of my country that never change.

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Translation: 2005, Peter Mackridge