This post from Macedonia includes observations about two cities: Skopje, the capital city of  FYROM [Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia], and Thessalonica, Greece’s second largest city and the capital of Greece’s northern province, Macedonia. I include them both in “Macedonia,” not only for the historical reason that they both occupy territory once called Macedonia before the Balkan Wars (1912-13) divided it up among Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria, but also for the much more interesting reason that both cities make a very big fuss about the ancient Macedons, Philip II and his boy Alexander, as ancestors.

Actually, they have been doing this for a very long time, and the Thessalonians do it with some justification: the royal seat of the House of Macedon was located in Pella, near Thessalonica; the magnificent Macedonian golden hoard from important gravesites (such as that of the above-mentioned Phillip) was excavated at Vergina, 80 km from Thessalonica; and the city of Thessalonica itself may not improbably be said to have been founded and named for Alexander’s half-sister. However, it is much more contentious to claim that today’s Greeks in Macedonia are in a direct line of descent from the Macedons of yore, given the mish-mash of peoples who crisscrossed these terrains over the centuries or even to claim that the Macedons of yore were Hellenes. (Aristotle, himself born in Macedonia and who tutored the young Alexander, didn’t think they were.)

In any event, I suppose that today’s Thessalonians wouldn’t be nearly so exercised about this identity if it weren’t for parallel and competing claims by their ex-Yugoslav neighbours to the north in Skopje, who have also got it into their heads (the heads of ultra-nationalists, that is) that they too are descendants of the Macedons. In order for this to be even remotely viable, the modern FYROM Macedonians would have to be indigenous to the territory they live in and not descendants of a much later migration of people (much later, as in 1000 years later), namely the Slavs who entered the Balkans in the 6th century. Which is what every sane person knows to be the case.

(An aside here for a mention of Bulgaria, of its important city, Plovdiv, originally known as Philippopolis because it was founded by Philip II of Macedon – him again – and to whom the Plovdivians have erected a statue in the middle of the semi-excavated Roman stadium: sensibly, the Plovdivians do not claim to be Macedonians.)

I have known of these issues for some time but nothing prepared me for the sight of Skopje’s central square, Macedonia Square, since I last saw it 3 years ago. In the centre now rears an 8-storey-high equestrian statue of Himself (Alexander the Great, coyly named only as The Warrior in official circles), at the base of which roar several lions who also serve as spouts for water sprays in a fountain that is very popular with citizens.)

At one end of the square has also been erected a monumental statue of Justinian – “The holy and right-believing Emperor Justinian I (483-565 CE)” -  said to have been a Slav and born in a village near the Roman town of Scupi, today’s Skopje. So far, so historical. But at the other end of the square, equally monumentally, sits Tsar Samuil, claimed by today’s Macedonians but historically known as a Bulgarian Tsar and who lost a terrible battle in 1014 to the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, forever after known by the sobriquet, The Bulgar-Slayer.  So far, so Bulgarian. But Samuil also once resided in Ohrid, in present-day FYROM, and so presto! he becomes a Macedonian Tsar. Just off the Square the finishing touches are being put to a massive (in the style of a)Triumphal Arch. “What triumph?” my friend, a retired literature professor, Ljubica snorts. “We don’t have triumphs, we are always being crushed by our neighbours.”

Among other reasons, this fantastical historiography is why some of my friends in Skopje refuse to go downtown: they are embarrassed, even humiliated. Equally egregious is the current program of constructing a series of public buildings along the Vardar River (the same river that flows down to Thessalonica where it is known as the Axios). By their imperial scale these buildings rival – I swear – those of Imperial Rome, not to mention those of Imperial Constantinople – but the effect, in this small, economically-struggling, hapless republic, is to reduce it to the downright puny.

But there is a third reason to loathe this bombastic self-display of the current government: when I asked my friends where on earth the money is coming from to build such extravaganzas, they shrugged and said “from us.” meaning from the schools and universities, the hospitals, the culture ministry, not to mention from the next generation and the one after that…. “And they call us old socialists ‘komuni,’” said one old friend, bitterly. In this charged nationalist environment – the bombast directed as much at the resident Albanian, Moslem minority as at the neighbouring Greeks – the generation whose patriotism was linked with the achievements of socialist Yugoslavia are now derisively dismissed as Commie pinko finks.

While walking along the river promenade, I take a good look at a piece of Soviet-era public art, a monument commemorating the liberation of Skopje in 1944. The style is pure Socialist kitsch, but not quite Realist: its figures are just too muscle-bound and their faces depersonalized.  And yet, however idealized these fighters are, you can still see in the group something intensely lived – the young soldier slumped in the arms of a comrade, the half-naked dying man , the barefoot peasants wielding weapons from earlier wars, the grim-faced leader launching a grenade, the big-shouldered woman for once not holding a baby or sheaf of wheat but her own rifle. They, or people like them, lived and died in such actions right here. But Philip and Alexander?

What is happening to Skopje? It’s always been an unlovely city, or at least since an earthquake in 1963 devastated most of it.  Rebuilt, it entered the modern age of Brutalist Socialist architecture, even its Orthodox Cathedral.  Yet these edifices did not quite overwhelm the public space. There was still that other city left over from the quake, ramshackle perhaps, but still proportionate and mindful of Macedonia’s historical mixture of Slavs and Vlachs, Greeks, Jews, and Albanians, Bulgarians and Armenians…or am I being romantic in the face of a capitalism that is eating its own young?

Of a Sunday, summoned to Divine Liturgy by the peals of the bells of the church dedicated to St Demetrius, I crossed the river on the lovely Ottoman stone bridge (the leaders of the Karposh rebellion had been executed here back in 1689)  into the old part of town once occupied by the Turkish bazaar. (In fact, it remains the market area, with its winding and twisting cobble-stoned pedestrian streets.) The church was full, and this being an Old World Orthodox church there were no pews. People shifted their feet every couple of minutes or, in the case of the men, left the church periodically to go outside into the little courtyard for a sit-down and a smoke. As with my church in Edmonton, a choir of enthusiastic amateurs warbled from the loft at the back while the priest and deacon officiated in the sanctuary, the rest of us having very little to do except light slender beeswax tapers and make the sign of the cross at every mention of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I deduced that  the language of the Liturgy was Old Slavonic not Macedonian, as the words I recognized had case endings [nominative, genitive, dative, accusative etc  etc) whereas modern Macedonian has none.

The service  was homely (even the clerical vestments seemed homemade) and it was a deep pleasure after to stroll into the market area and seat myself under the vast branches of a chestnut tree in full, luscious foliage, next to a chortling fountain and to be served a cappuccino by an elegant Albanian man in a suit and lavender shirt with whom I exchanged pleasantries in French.

As with all substantial towns in the Ottoman era throughout the Balkans the market or bazaar had once been enormous, with shops in the thousands, but even in its reduced state it still presents an impressive topography of narrow streets twisting every which way, with shop windows displaying idiosyncratic collections of wares, whether bolts of ornate (synthetic) fabrics, gold  bangles, antique Turkish coffee sets, shoes or sinister-looking machine parts, with the proprietor sitting in a stool in the door frame, his small cup of coffee on a box before him, not visibly concerned whether anyone was buying. A few women in hijab walked together arm in arm and I saw a few old men in round white skull caps, but if there is a majority Albanian or Turkish Moslem presence in the market area I could not discern it. There are still Ottoman monuments here – some working mosques and disused hamams and hans – and my friend Slavica, an instructor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, is lucky to work in a renovated han or inn called the Suli-An, a graceful structure from the 15^th century: Monday morning we sat in the sunny courtyard with tiny cups of Turkish coffee and admired the harmony of the arcade.

Then back I drifted across the Stone Bridge, remembering how a decade ago it was lined with Albanian and Roma men, women and children selling little piles of cheap goods – socks, alarm clocks, plastic toys they wound up and demonstrated how they jumped around – but now the bridge has been swept clean, as it were, the better to appreciate the looming proportions of the Warrior straight ahead. By the sixth or seventh encounter with Himself, I had to admit my resistance was weakening: here on a Sunday afternoon le tout Skopje was out in the enormous square, licking ice creams cones, taking pictures of the roaring lions and the dancing waters of the fountain, and posing for the friends back home as they pointed up, way up, to the noble head of the ultra Macedon.  (Judge for yourself from this CNN clip: When my friend the poet, Alexander “Sashko” Prokopiev, suggested we meet “by the lions” for a coffee date, it began to seem unsporting to keep on complaining about them. Nevertheless, when we were shortly joined by a senior poet (b. 1933 so he’s seen it all), I felt vindicated when he asserted unambiguously that the historical panorama on the Square was “inauthentic,” a word he kept repeating, while Sashko added that there had been citizens’ protests against the “development” to no avail. He was particularly incensed by the erection of the new Court House, a building of such stupefying proportions that its only rational purpose is to remind the sniveling citizens that, summoned there, s/he will be shortly crushed. To lighten the mood, Zvonko, the Senior Poet, kissed my hand then ordered large pieces of cake to celebrate his grandson’s birthday – the young man is studying clinical psychology in New York and wants to stay there. Mnohaia lita!

Sashko’s daughter lives in Barcelona where she edits a bilingual Spanish-English magazine. She is unlikely to return to Macedonia, either.

But what of these younger ones we see as we leave the Square? Into the Sunday afternoon hubbub have erupted hundreds of exuberant teenagers (mostly girls) dancing a choreographed routine set to the explosive music coming from a stage set up at one side of the Square. Sashko explains that the song is about the need for young people to respect each other; no surprise, then, to learn that the kids are part of a UNICEF project (Sashko introduces me to the co-ordinator) aimed at the eradication of “violence in education.” That’s what their big, colourful banner says: Young People Against Violence in Schools. They come from various Macedonian cities and include a couple of Albanians (most Albanian school kids now go to separate Albanian-language schools) and the main point they want to make is “for tolerance.” I cannot get a direct answer whether this refers to bullying or racism or sexual harassment or…? Perhaps all of these. Inspired by a Dutch project, One Minute Videos, school kids are being supplied with video cameras and invited to compete for a place with their own one minute videos. I am mesmerized by the dancing, by the youthfulness of bodies and souls that have no memory of a Macedonia that belonged to any other world. They are gloriously lovely.

Speaking of other worlds, I have heard nothing of Canada through the usual media – CNN and BBC World News on hotel televisions – and there are no foreign language newspapers for sale in Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia, at least not the places I frequent. Canadian headlines pop up when I open up Yahoo or Telus home pages so I know that women now are premiers of Alberta, and PEI and Newfoundland. I know that the NDP has been returned to power for the fourth straight time in Manitoba and friends in Athens are bringing me up to speed about the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the call for similar actions around the world on October 17 (including at the Toronto Stock Exchange). I’m missing everything! On October 17 I will be in Istanbul and will keep my ears open for any action there. So, for me no hockey scores (no loss there) but instead, a television interview with Michael Moore. (Clearly, I am not reading Canadian papers on line, mainly because internet cafes supplied with computers are so hard to come by that when I do find one, I catch up with mail and plug away at a blog post.)

When I decide to spend a day outside of Skopje; several people advise me to visit Bitola, known to the Ottoman Turks as Manastir, in the deep  south almost on the Greek border, and redolent of Balkan history to the nth degree.  The bus passes through Veles and Prilep so that by the time I return to Skopje that evening I feel I have been on a whirlwind tour of Macedonian geography, history, architecture, and linguistics. (Speaking of linguistics, I have been depending on my Berlitz Bulgarian phrase book to get by in Macedonia, but each of these languages has its peculiarities: why is it that in Macedonia you do not get on the bus at a “sektor ”(bus bay) as you do in Bulgaria but at a “peron,” as in Serbia? ) As I watched the landscape roll by – rolling hills staggered against each other, stretching out in dry, red plains before plunging into the clefts of river gorges – I could imagine the partisans and troops and militias and guerrillas of all descriptions who have negotiated this coveted terrain, leaving the graves of slain comrades and the ashy tumuli of scorched villages in their wake.

As with all such landscapes, this one too has been normalized, so that what we see now are fields of late summer red peppers, grape vines, corn, cabbages and tobacco, the stuff of the Saturday farmers’ market in Bitola. I watch one exhausted woman with her strings of dried peppers, her jars of preserves, her plastic bottles of I don’t know what, I watch her try to entice customers to her offerings but really they are neither more nor less attractive than all the others on view, and I ache for her: how will she make her living if we don’t stop and buy her apples? Or what about the elderly man with a single small sack of walnuts, the elderly woman with a single bunch of withering flowers from her garden going to seed?

As with all the Balkan cities I have visited, Bitola provides the single most civilized amenity of Balkan urbanism, the pedestrian street. I approach it through a large city park (another such amenity) its walkway flanked by busts of young men and women who all died in 1942, in their twenties, as “national heroes.” What happened in Bitola in 1942? Perhaps a sacrifice to the Communist state that was being born, for here is the pedestrian street, named for Marshall Tito, a hero that Bitola is not ashamed of, and here is his well-tended bronze-headed bust. The street opens into a square where, against the frame of a large and handsome mosque, an equestrian statue of Philip II, Bitola’s founder, is a gathering point. All roads eventually lead to the market place or bazaar, which first opened for business in 1389 when the Turks became Bitola’s new landlords. Wholesalers from Bitola – Turks, Vlachs, Jews – traded with Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig and east to Constantinople and south to Alexandria from their 2500 shops and enterprises, a reminder of just how “globalized” earlier empires were. Until 1920, the mosque property alone included 11 shops, 18 tailors, 7 gunpowder magazines, a bakery and a tambourine shop, among others, and its income supported fountains, a dervish residence, the kindergarten, and primary and high schools.

On to Thessalonica, my first visit in ten years to the city where I began the “Demetrius Project” in 2000, the city of the Demetrian cult from where it spread out into the Slavic Orthodox world eventually getting to the Ukrainians too. And ten years ago, the first thing I did once I had unpacked my bags in the small hotel a few steps away from the Basilica of St Demetrius was to rush over to the church and down into its crypt for a Vespers service. But this time I first make my way down to a bookstore in the city centre down by the Old Port. I have been invited by Despina, a friend of a friend in Belgrade, to her book launch.

But this is not a literary event. The book is the product of a human rights project organized with representatives of Thessalonica’s migrant (immigrant) communities who are having a very hard time of it as the economic and political crisis deepens in Greece. (It’s difficult for them at the best of times, and how the Chinese migrants with their trays of knickknacks and household gadgets for sale make a go of it, or the young African men with their handfuls of pirated DVDs, or the Philippino teenagers with their blankets spread out to display orderly and colourful rows of sneakers, how they all survive is beyond me.)

As the book launch event, with a panel of speakers, is going to be conducted in Greek, I do not linger longer than to arrange to meet Despina the next day, in the café of the new Photography Museum in the Old Port. (It is characteristic of Despina and her politics that she chooses this café with its view onto the cranes of the new port where workers are working, rather than the chic café bar that faces the other direction from the other side of the wharf, onto the picturesque scene of Thessalonica’s seaside promenade. Despina once lived in South Africa, “in struggle.”) I learn that the book launch the night before had been disrupted by an “industrial action,” a crowd of shouting protestors outside the store. Their “action” was ostensibly linked with the on-going national protests against the austerity measures imposed by the government during the economic crisis here but in fact, says Despina, they were friends of a disgruntled employee of the store who claimed he was owed vacation pay. She is incensed that this protest took place without any thought or care being given to the fact that the public inside the store were supporting a human rights initiative.

She is incensed again a couple of nights later when, at the official opening of the Youth Art Biennale in the forecourt of the new city hall, a very loud and persistent group of protestors attempts to disrupt the proceedings. The protestors are municipal employees, afraid for their jobs (reasonably enough) who are misdirecting their wrath, Despina feels, at this hopeful and co-operative event, the Biennale, at which young artists from around Europe are gathering in solidarity with each other if not with their governments.

As an outsider to all this, I find it difficult to judge the efficacy or even the purpose of the public agitation and indignation in the streets of Greece as the Greeks I have talked with are agreed that the cause is lost, that the European Union and its banks are already imposing “solutions” on the Greek economy, and that Greeks will just have to “suck it up” until the economy is put on a sound footing.  (In the meantime, a retired professor has had his pension reduced by 1000 Euros a month  and a young waiter has had his hours reduced to part-time, even though the cafes, bars and tavernas all seem to be doing a roaring business. This will all change, he says, when the weather changes—and when even these middle class patrons will be feeling the pinch on their wallets.) Even those very sympathetic to the protests, especially to the young whose “actions” have been peaceful, are disgusted by the general passivity to the pervasive and profound corruption at all social and political levels that is being exposed. My friend Stephie, a Greek-Canadian who has been living in Greece for twenty years, describes her encounters with the driving instructor who demanded a bribe to pass her driving exam and the land titles officer who declared  that her file was “missing” an important page which would cost her 3000 Euros to replace but that he could expedite matters if she gave him 500 Euros. The building in which she owns her apartment seems neither to have any elected council nor to come under any formal regulation such as a Condominium Act.  People with grand lifestyles apparently have no taxable income. It goes on and on. Stephie has been photocopying a year-old article from Vanity Fair which says it all, she feels. Read it and weep.

For a very readable account of the economic crisis and the options open to the Greek government, read John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

But I came to Thessalonica to deliver copies of my book to two scholars whose assistance at the beginning of my journey proved to be very enlightening.  Prof. Anthony-Emile Tachiaos, whose work has focused on Slav-Byzantine relations, and  Prof Aris Mentzos who is a historian of Byzantine archaeology: it was he who had guided me through the ruins of the Roman Agora and around the splendid interior of the Basilica of St Demetrius which dates back to the 7^th century (those parts of it that have survived earthquake and fire, that is). Mentzos gave me copies of work of his own, including a monograph that established that a celebrated mosaic in the basilica, so long mis-identified as St Demetrius or St Sergius, is actually St George. Here he is and he is beautiful:. A Saint by any other name…

December 18, 2011, 3837 words 

Meslier is barely a footnote to that history today, but he deserves better than that. As British journalist Colin Brewer wrote in a 2007 article in the New Humanist, “Meslier was arguably the first to put his name to an incontrovertibly atheist document.” What makes that document even more interesting, and the cultural obscurity of its author all the more confounding, is the fact that Meslier spent most of his life serving as a Catholic priest.

Meslier was born in Mazerny, France, a small village in the Ardennes region of the country, in 1664. He joined the seminary as a young man, and on January 7, 1689, he became the priest at Étrépigny, in nearby Champagne. Except for a running dispute with a local nobleman that lived in his parish over the treatment of the poor, Meslier lived the same life of worship, public service and penury as other Catholic priests of his era. But there was one crucial difference between Meslier and other men of God: he spent the last ten years of his life producing a 633-page treatise against organized religion. “All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions,” he wrote, “invented by shrewd and crafty politicians, afterward cultivated and multiplied by the false seducers and charlatans, then accepted blindly by the ignorant, and finally supported and authorized by the laws of the princes and rulers of the earth who used these human inventions to keep a tight rein on the community of men and do with them what they wanted.” Even the eternally caustic Christopher Hitchens would struggle to do better than that.

Meslier was well aware of the conflict between his private views on religion and his public duties. “I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments,” he wrote. “I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.” But, as he noted in his testament, the Church had recourse to the pyre, and he didn’t particularly feel like dying for his beliefs. Instead, he transcribed three copies of his testament and left them by his death bed, where they quickly made their way into what Brewer describes as “the lively world of illicit reproductions.”

His testament eventually found its way into other hands, and many of the ideas contained within it were borrowed – some have said plagiarized – by Voltaire some fifty years later in his own writings on the subject. Yet today, aside from the work of French scholar Michel Onfray, who wrote about Meslier in his 2007 book In Defence of Atheism, Meslier’s life remains a mystery to most of us. This is perplexing. By virtue of its ironic value alone, the story of a Catholic priest who made a convincing case against faith ought to be more widely told. But what makes Meslier’s anonymity most confounding is the fact that he is precisely what is missing from the stories that have been told by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and other prominent atheist authors in recent years: a hero.

***

I went in search of that hero, or at least some trace of his existence, this past summer. I suppose if I were a Christian or a Muslim or a member of another monotheistic faith I’d describe my trip as a pilgrimage. It was, after all, sufficiently excessive (and obsessive) to qualify as one, given that I had voluntarily left Paris – in June, no less – so that I could spend five hours navigating the treacherous French autoroutes on my way into the Ardennes in order to pay a visit to Mazerny, a village that had once been the home of a man I’d only read about.

My ambitions for the trip were modest. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find Meslier’s grave, since he was buried in an unmarked plot on the property of descendents of a nobleman that he had quarreled with repeatedly during the course of his life – more irony – and I knew better than to expect any grand monuments to his existence in the town itself. But I had expected to at least find some trace of his existence, some thread to pull on. I was wrong. There was no Musee de Jean Meslier, no Rue Jean Meslier, and no mention of his existence on or near the town’s only church.  This struck me as more than just an historical oversight. But even if his heresy had offended the town’s religious sensibilities, and they had decided to deliberately ignore his existence, it still didn’t add up. In a town with 78 official residents according to the most recent French census and a local economy that depended entirely on what the surrounding fields could provide, how could they afford to ignore him?

They weren’t ignoring me, though. Children stared from the second floor windows of their two-story brick houses, while the adults working in their gardens or trying to fix some thing or another in their garages looked up and monitored my rented Peugeot’s slow progress past their property. It was no wonder, given that it had probably been a long time since the people of Mazerny had seen a tourist in their town, much less one that wasn’t there in search of a restroom. I thought about trying to explain what I was there for but my French wasn’t nearly good enough to communicate my interest in the atheist who had lived in their village three centuries ago. After making three complete loops of the town and with dusk already on the horizon, I decided that it was time to look somewhere else for some clues.

I retreated to the commune of Poix-Terron, a town of a few hundred residents a few kilometers north that felt like New York City by comparison. I also needed to eat something, so I stopped in at what appeared to be the only restaurant on the town’s main drag, a family tavern that curiously advertised the fact that it sold pizza. Here, at least, I was more welcome, and the kindness of the family that ran the joint was sufficiently heartening and friendly that I decided to abuse them with my defective French. Had they heard of Jean Meslier, I asked? Did they know anything of this atheist priest that had lived just a few kilometres up the road from them? They huddled in order to translate both the meaning and intent of my unusual request. Eventually, the woman who ran the place came back to me with their answer. “Non,” she said. “Jamais.”

***

Meslier hasn’t always been invisible. In the early 20th century his legacy was conscripted by the Soviets, who saw it as a useful counterpoint to organized religion. They engraved his name on an obelisk that was erected in Moscow’s Red Square in 1919 along with other leading communist thinkers like Lenin, Engels, Charles Fourier and Jean Jaures, and treated him, for a time, as a significant philosopher. But they stopped talking about Meslier when it became clear that his could just as easily be seen as a role model for insurrectionary behaviour and anti-establishment thinking, values that conflicted with the unthinking servitude that the Soviet leadership demanded of its people. The obelisk was quietly moved to the Alexandrovsky Gardens, near the Middle Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin, in 1967 to make way for a timelier piece of propaganda, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

If his value to communist propagandists was obvious, his appeal to contemporary atheists ought to be even more so. Yet somehow, in spite of all the ink that’s been spilled in recent years on the subject, today’s atheists have all but ignored Jean Meslier. Colin Brewer, a British writer and dramatist who played Meslier in 2007’s The Last Priest, noted in a 2007 article that Meslier was even absent from two high-profile television documentaries on atheism, one of which was produced by Richard Dawkins. Brewer thinks this has a great deal to do with the fact that his work was both poorly circulated and widely borrowed against by atheist intellectuals who followed Meslier. There is Voltaire’s famous “Extract,” which Brewer says inaccurately described Meslier as “a fellow-deist and entirely suppressed Meslier’s anti-monarchist, proto-communist opinions.” Meanwhile, the definitive, annotated French edition of his testament did not appear until 1970, and until the 2009 publication of Michael Shreve’s Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier only fragmentary English translations could be found. Shreve’s translation, meanwhile, is ranked number 355,280 on Amazon’s best-sellers list. By way of comparison, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” checks in at number 700.

I had assumed that Meslier’s invisibility was an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and that in France I would find a more receptive environment for his message. Sure, I hadn’t found any pamphlets at Charles De Gaulle about Mazerny and Meslier, and there were no signs on the highway near the town indicating that a point of historical interest was nearby. But I had assumed that I would have been able to find some trace of his influence, some thread to tug on. How could somebody who ought to be so important remain so consistently invisible?

I spent most of the three-plus hour drive back towards Paris that same day – well, that evening – preoccupied with trying to resist the temptation to just close my eyes for a few seconds and keep my little Peugeot between the yellow lines. But in those moments where I wasn’t fighting to stay awake, I was trying to figure out what had just taken place in Mazerny. Okay, I thought, a small, rural French village probably isn’t the most appropriate environment for a shrine to an atheist apostate, but shouldn’t there have been something? Surely, some enterprising local resident would have realized that there was considerable monetary potential in branding the town as the home of Europe’s most outspoken atheist? But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a case of their ignoring him. Maybe they just didn’t need to remember. Life in Mazerny may not have been what I would want, but it was a pleasant, civilized town, in an undeniably beautiful part of the world. Maybe that was enough.

Contemporary atheist thinkers have no such excuse. Almost by the day, it seems, another unfathomably foul-smelling layer of the onion that is organized religion gets peeled back, and for all the notoriety that writers like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have earned with their atheist treatises, the project to which they’re dedicated hasn’t made any detectable progress. In this environment, the story of a 17th century Catholic priest who quarreled with the church, stuck up for those being abused by the rich and powerful and eventually committed his ideas about the failure of religion and the promise of atheism to writing ought to be tremendously attractive.

So, too, should the testimony that this most unusual priest left behind, one that is at once more convincing and more inspirational than anything written on the subject in recent years. Meslier’s testimony aims at something greater than merely rejecting religion or describing its faults, the subjects to which today’s atheist writers seem to restrict themselves. Instead, it is a declaration of the moral and ethical virtues of a Godless existence: an atheist manifesto, in the best sense of the term. As Meslier wrote in his testament, “It has been long enough that the poor people have been so miserably abused by all kinds of idolatries and superstitions. It has been long enough that the rich and the rulers of the death have pillaged and oppressed the poor. It is time to deliver them from their miserable slavery. It is time to open their eyes everywhere and make them know the truth of things.”

***

There are some curious similarities between the approach taken by people like Dawkins and Hitchens and that of the Soviets a few generations back. It was the Soviets, after all, who set up museums of atheism in old eastern orthodox churches in an effort to undermine organized religion, and it’s clear that today’s secular spokespeople would do the same if they could get away with it. While the aims of today’s atheists are both more moderate and more moderating than those of their Soviet predecessors, they share the same basic conceit in thinking that if they accumulated enough evidence of organized religion’s misdeeds the faithful would eventually awaken and realize the error of their ways. But nobody will exchange something for nothing, even if that something is demonstrably flawed.

That’s where Jean Meslier ought to come in. For all the good work that professional atheists have done in highlighting the flaws of organized religion, they have done almost nothing to present an affirmative case for atheism. According to Michel Onfray, a French scholar who has worked diligently to revive Meslier’s legacy, he didn’t write his manifesto in the hopes of destroying Christianity but instead of replacing it. “Atheism does not constitute an end in itself but a beginning, a necessary base, an ethical foundation. Meslier negates the principle of God in order to arrive at a caring morality of a joyful body, of happy existence, of peaceful relations between beings and between sexes.”

Atheists, of course, are no more a monolith than any other cultural or religious group, but they do share some common beliefs. They respect the rights of individuals, freedom of thought and inquiry, the equality of all people, and an appreciation of natural and man-made wonders. Atheists don’t discriminate, they don’t withhold rights from particular groups, they don’t fear scientific progress and the frequently baffling explanations of the world it provides, they don’t wish for the end of the world, and they don’t insist upon imposing feelings of guilt and failure onto the thoughts and actions of others. Perhaps most importantly, atheists are engaged in the one life that they’re given rather than simply enduring it in anticipation of something better to come.

Meslier articulated all of this in his manifesto almost 300 years ago. His philosophy of “social hedonism,” Michel Onfray writes, “proposes the happiness of all and of each individual. Not an ideal happiness, but a real one, concrete, pragmatic: to work, by which people can eat healthfully and sufficiently all the time, live and sleep in a decent and heated house, be nourished, be clothed, have the means to educate their children, and be cared for in illness.”

Most atheists would resist the term, but it’s tempting all the same to describe Meslier as a prophet. In the same way that Jesus Christ’s apostles articulated the values and beliefs that form the foundation of contemporary Christianity, so too does Meslier’s manifesto serve as a template for all atheist thought that has followed. And like Christ himself, Meslier serves as a role model for those who share his beliefs, his life an example of how to be good and decent in a world that often isn’t. The key difference, of course, was that Meslier was completely, and contentedly, of this world.

Maybe that’s why Meslier continues to languish in obscurity. Atheists aren’t prone to idolatry, after all, and the idea of placing someone at the spiritual forefront of the movement would be anathema to many of them. Still, maybe it’s time for them – for us – to take a different approach, given the pitiful returns of our efforts so far.  In a world where atheism ought to be making significant cultural inroads, it is instead barely able to hold its own. The odds of an openly atheist candidate getting elected to the highest office in the land in North America are about the same as those of an openly gay communist with a penchant for flag burning. With that in mind, maybe it’s time we found somebody to worship, to lead by example, to serve as an archetype for everything that’s good and decent about the non-religious life. I can’t think of a better candidate than Jean Meslier.

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Edmonton – November 9, 2011 – 2,782 words

When I travelled through eastern/south-eastern Europe in the 1980s – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period .  But I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

Well, I have since been corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But their racial/ethnic origins change with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed the Slavic side in favour of its Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. I also noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.)  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than I remembered.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to again meet people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.)

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14^th century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields.

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning tv, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

by rob mclennan

George Stanley was born into an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco in 1934.  He attended Jesuit-run St. Ignatius High School, where he read Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry and to drink. The Jesuits also dispelled some of the fear of sin and hell laid on him by the nuns in grammar school.

In 1952-53 he attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. San Francisco had been for him a city of parishes; he had rarely been north of California Street. It was in Salt Lake City that he first encountered a Bohemian milieu, which consisted, he says, of anyone who was not a Mormon.

In 1953, back in San Francisco and broke, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, in order to escape family and psychiatrist. After his discharge in 1956, he returned to San Francisco, and spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley. One Saturday night in February, 1957, seeking the real Bohemia, he wandered up Grant Avenue to a bar called “The Place”, and there met Jack Spicer. He showed Spicer a poem, “Pablito at the Corrida,” and Spicer invited him to join his Magic Workshop, which he had just begun teaching at the San Francisco Public Library.  There Stanley met Robert Duncan. Spicer and Duncan became his mentors. In San Francisco he also met Stan Persky, Robin Blaser, Joanne Kyger, and others.

In 1960-61, Stanley lived in New York, where he met LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Joel Oppenheimer. After he returned to San Francisco, he attended San Francisco State College. There he met James Liddy, visiting from Ireland, who introduced him to the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, and this meeting led him back to his Irish heritage.

In 1971, following Blaser and Persky, he moved to Vancouver, not so much fleeing the Vietnam War, but because, for him, the real San Francisco had died.  He thought of Vancouver as just another West Coast city, not another country, and indeed the distinction is historically blurred. He worked at temporary jobs in bookstores and warehouses until, in 1976, through Persky, he was hired to teach English at Northwest Community College in Terrace, 500 miles north of Vancouver. It was in Terrace that he discovered that he was living in Canada. He lived in Terrace for fifteen years. Terrace, he says, was his second Rome.

In the ’90s he returned to Vancouver, taught for eleven more years at Capilano College, and then decided to retire because, as he puts it, the students and he were no longer taking each other seriously.

1 – How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook (The Love Root, White Rabbit 1958) was ephemeral. Just a few pages of mostly pretentious verse – i don’t even have a copy of it any more. It was the second chapbook (Tete Rouge/Pony Express Riders, White Rabbit 1963) and the third (Flowers, White Rabbit 1965) that immediately gave me a readership in San Francisco and beyond, and were a mark of my recognition as a poet by the older poets (Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan), as well as by Joe Dunn and Graham Mackintosh, the principals in White Rabbit Press.

My most recent work (“After Desire” [The Capilano Review  3.14] ) is intensely personal. This marks a shift from much of the poetry I had been writing over the previous three decades, where my aim was to understand the world — in particular, how capitalism works, first in Terrace BC (“Gentle Northern Summer”), where being so new to the community I could see it more objectively, with less distortion than familiarity would have brought. Later I wrote poems (“San Francisco’s Gone”) to understand the history of the city and of my family, especially my parents, who were both born there.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

In third year high school (grade 11) my English teacher required all his students to write poems.  At the end of the term he took three of us aside — me, my friend Manuel, and a boy named John.  He told the three of us that we had talent as poets. (Actually only two of us had talent; Manuel was writing John’s poems for money.)

More than once I have tried fiction but could not master the middle ground, middle distance.  For me everything was either cosmic or closeup.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

All (or most of) the above.

Sometimes I’m not aware I’ve even started a poem; it’s just a phrase in a notebook that starts something a week or more later.  In fact, I think this is what usually happens.  And when I set down a few lines (or maybe paragraphs — prose poetry) what results may be a single poem but quite often it’s the first section of a serial poem.

Once I know I’ve got going on a poem I usually stick with it, and if it’s a serial poem I may be writing for several months (e.g., the first draft of “After Desire,” May ’07 – January ’08).  And the writing may go fast or slow but the idea stays in my mind.

First drafts can persist through a lot of minor revisions — or the poem can get longer or shorter.  Once in a while a poem is sheer dictation.  I was having lunch at the Pink Panther cafe in Veracruz when a poem (“Veracruz”) began to unreel in my mind.  I finished lunch, walked back to my hotel, and wrote it down.  There were just a few very minor changes later.

However, after all the drafts and revisions the poem may turn out to be crap, and nothing can be done because all the variations that might have saved it have already been tried and rejected.

4 – Where doe a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I used to write when traveling, mainly because I thought I had to — I expected it of myself.  I wrote on planes — to objectify the flight, so I could pretend it was only happening in my mind.  I wrote a lot of Vancouver: A Poem on public transit.  Now I write mostly at home — afternoons.

There’s always an overarching concept of a “book,” but also I sort of take it for granted that all the poems I’ve written over a particular period belong together and on that basis I give them a title.  (Or my publisher, Rolf Maurer of New Star Books, gives the book a title, e.g., At Andy’s.) 

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing readings, especially when I have a new poem to read.

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

What qualifies as theoretical concerns?  Perhaps a belief in inspiration, the Muse, or as Spicer called it, “dictation” — that the poem comes from “outside” — at least outside the person’s conscious intentions.

I don’t have any questions prior to the poem, but a question can arise in the writing, as to what the poem is “saying.”  Sometimes I have to think that through — help the poem come through.  Other times just leave it unclear.

I don’t attach any meaning to “the current questions.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

When poets refer to public issues (politics, science, etc.) they have the same responsibility to truth as other writers.

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Apart from suggestions that my publisher might make about the overall organization of a book, no one but me edits my poems.

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“Cheat at this game.” – Joe Dunn.

10 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

If I’m writing, I write in the afternoon.  I start a typical day by checking my e-mail, the weather and news, then I usually read till noon.

11 – When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

If it’s stalled, I put it aside, and then very likely I don’t write for while.  But sometimes a poem, even if it hasn’t gotten anywhere, stays in my mind as an idea and I may take it up again even years later.  I don’t look for inspiration.

12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?

Not a fragrance, but a kind of day.  It’s cool, the air is slightly misty, the sky is white (it’s never as foggy in Vancouver as it is in the western districts of San Francisco where I grew up).

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My poems are seldom influenced by other art forms, and not so much by books either.  The content of my work comes from life — my own personal experience and what I observe in the world.

14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I don’t want to list direct influences — there are too many; however, there are some poets I think of as my patron saints or tutelary figures: Yeats, Baudelaire, Akhmatova.

Two Canadian poets have been especially important to me: Margaret Avison, for her magnanimous vision of the city; John Newlove, for the way he thinks in the poem.

Maybe the most important book I ever read, “for my life,” was Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, which freed me from the idea that the Freudian stages of child development were deterministic; there was some freedom.  (“Man has but a little freedom; let him use it.” – St. Augustine.)

15 – What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

There are things I would like to have done, like fathering a child or learning to speak another language fluently (I envy my brother’s Spanish).  And there are things I would like not to have done, like joining the U.S. Army (I should have just left home).  But there’s nothing else non-trivial I would like to do now.

16 – If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, my occupation was actually that of teacher.  But what I really wanted to be is a writer.  (“Poets are writers who don’t write” – Jean Cocteau.)

17 – What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

In 1956, after being discharged from the U.S. Army, I went back to school (University of California, Berkeley).  In the spring of 1957 I met Jack Spicer in a bar in North Beach.  A week or so later I showed him one of my poems (“Pablito at the Corrida”), and he invited me to join the Magic Workshop he was conducting at the S.F. Public Library.  There I met Robert Duncan, and others.  I wrote several more poems for the workshop (the poems in the chapbook Flowers) and they were well received.

What had happened was that for the first time elders (not that much elder, but they spoke with authority) had recognized something I had done as being of some value.

In the summer of 1957 I moved out of my parents’ home and into a hotel room on Broadway, in North Beach.  Life for me was then hanging out at the bars with Spicer and other poets.

In the fall I returned to Berkeley, signed up for a full program of courses, bought all my textbooks, and walked down to Shattuck Avenue to get the “F” train back to San Francisco.  I went into a coffee shop, ordered a coffee, and thought about what I was doing.

After about a half hour I left the coffee shop, walked back to the university, returned the textbooks, and withdrew from my courses. Then I took the train back to North Beach.

That isn’t the whole story.  I had sexual issues I could deal with more easily in North Beach than in Berkeley.  But it is the answer to why I chose to be a poet rather than get a B.A. — at that time. (I returned to college eleven years later.)

18 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee.

The Blue Angel.

19 – What are you currently working on?

A new book of poems, the first part of which will be “After Desire.”  I hope to finish it by 2013.

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

http://robmclennansindex.blogspot.com/2009/06/12-or-20-questions-second-series.html

When I travelled in the 1980s through eastern/south-eastern Europe – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period – but I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, and hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

Well, I have since stood corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But as for their racial/ethnic origins, the account changes with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed Slavic for Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. (I noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than usual.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to meet again people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.)

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite or Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart-pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14th-century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour  with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand-strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields.

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning television, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

3071 words, October 25, 2011

September 2011: my umpteenth visit to Belgrade since 1982. That first one, launched from Greece where I was spending the winter, was focused on getting to know the boyfriend, and his family, of a Yugoslav-Canadian friend back in Edmonton. Our lingua franca in Belgrade was French – the boyfriend and his sister had elected to study it and not English. With those in Belgrade who spoke neither French nor English, I cobbled together – and still do – a Slavonic mishmash, hoping for the best. Eventually, I would catch on to the particularities of Serbian – for example, the word for “head” which in Ukrainian is holova becomes glava in Serbian. Change the “h” sound to the “g” sound and drop half the vowels, and voila! You too can speak Serbian.

Back in 1982, the language was called Serbo-Croatian. That’s what my 20-year-old pocket dictionary calls it (and it is represented on the cover by the Yugoslav flag) but all that was before the blood-letting, and the rhetorical hysteria which preceded it, tore Yugoslavia apart in the vicious wars of the 1990s. Now, it appears, there are 4 languages where once there was one: Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and (the latest entrant), Montenegrin. According to an informant in Belgrade, the Montenegrin government secured two linguists who, after due diligence, discovered that the language spoken in their part of ex-Yugoslavia has two additional letters not included in any other language-previously-called-Serbo-Croatian. “Of course,” said my informant, a writer and publisher, “no one knows how to pronounce these letters: they seem to have appeared by some sort of Divine Revelation.”

In March 1982, a mild season as I recall, Miki the boyfriend in Belgrade took me on my first stroll through the great urban park, Kalemegdan, which now surrounds the Turkish-era fortress on top of the promontory overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers. (Not so long ago, ruined bridges bombed by NATO in 1999 cluttered up the waterways but all that is now removed along with any mention of it – no hard feelings? Or just political pragmatism? – and a beautiful new bridge suspended from a web of steel filaments soars in a graceful arc over the Sava.)  From one of the peddlers in the park Miki bought me a red heart on a string, fashioned from dough (I still have it). At the end of my visit in Belgrade he asked me to take back to Edmonton an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Nena. And that is how I came to be deeply entwined within their two families to this day.(Much of my subsequent travel in the Balkans and east central Europe is narrated in my books, Bloodlines: A Journey to Eastern Europe, The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir and Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.)

So, my umpteenth trip. I’ve seen the Belgrade of late-flowering Titoism, of nascent Serbian nationalism and its attendant cultural, moral and spiritual cruelties, of the wars, of the end of the wars and of Milosevic, of the resistance of civil society, and now of Belgrade the European aspirant with its subcultures of corruption, the black market, sex trafficking and Porsches parked outside Giorgio Armani shops while the percentage who are unemployed or living in poverty or eking out their old age on a small pension keeps growing.

But this is also the Belgrade of the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence (which is hosting a Balkan Security Forum this week), of bookshops stuffed with books including an impressive number of translated titles, of chamber concerts in the basement of one of the oldest houses in the city’s oldest street, of the active 16^th century mosque in Stari Grad, “Old City,” of experimental theatre and galleries of modern art, and of cafes where coffee still means Turkish coffee….

Belgrade in September is the venue of the International PEN Congress (under the presidency of John Ralston Saul), which is why I’m here, not as a delegate but as a participant in the parallel literary festival (paid my own way). Festivities opened with a launch of the Serbian translation of Saul’s The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, and Saul’s feisty lecture to a packed crowd in the auditorium of the downtown Cultural Centre: his verbal assault on “management” was received with particular enthusiasm.

Two nights later it was my turn – I shared the bill with three other writers, from Slovenia, Croatia and Denmark – in the reputedly hot, new cultural venue known as GRAD (“city”) which is located , I was told by way of directions, under a bridge. It took me some time to find it in the dubious neighbourhood of rail tracks, emptied-out warehouses and erotic shops all lit murkily in the deepening dusk but there it was, indeed under a bridge not a stone’s throw from where the Sava was slapping quietly in the dark. I arrived 15 minutes late but I had missed nothing. Not counting the people who had to be there – Mladen from the Ministry of Culture who was MCing, Olgica from the Canadian Embassy, two young PEN volunteers and we four writer-readers – there were two audience members.

Except for my reading – an excerpt from Prodigal Daughter – and the poems of the Slovenian poet, the entire evening proceeded in Serbian. (Even the Danish writer, a linguist, has had a book translated into Serbian and could read from it herself, something about the matriarchal cultural context of the figure of Artemis at Ephesus.) So I am at a loss what to tell you about what was being said and read.

The next night I was in Novi Sad, a charming, multicultural city (Serbian, Hungarian and German) an hour north of Belgrade on the Danube (and a NATO target too in 1999, for its bridges and oil refineries). I was on the stage with 17 other PEN writers (only two of us were women and the youngest writer was perhaps in his 50s: where are the women and the young?) Three were Egyptian, three were Greek, the Slovene and the Croatian were there again, as were an Israeli, a Kosovar, a Bangladeshi, and the venerable and enfeebled Gyorgy Konrad, veteran Hungarian writer and conscience of dissent. There was a full house in attendance (it helped that there were two busloads of us from Belgrade), and I received an appreciative chuckle or two in response to my reading (I chose an amusing anecdote from a conversation with a Serbian Orthodox priest-theologian) so I knew there were some English-speakers out there but the untranslated readings in Hungarian and Albanian remained unfortunately completely obscure.

One afternoon I invited fellow Canadian scribbler Charlie Foran (recently-installed president of the PEN Canada Centre) to wander around “my” Belgrade with me as I revisited places and streets that I find evocative. We began at the head of the “walking street,” ulica Kneza Mihaila (Prince Michael Street), a superbly-successful because enormously-popular and beautifully-restored street lined with shops, cafes and galleries; but what I pointed out was the second-floor windows of the old Press Club restaurant in the City of Belgrade’s Cultural Centre, where I had stood in 1984.

I was at lunch with a professor involved in the teaching of Canadian Literature (the now-retired Dr Ileana Cura, still reading Alice Munro) when suddenly a great blast of siren from the street interrupted our conversation. “Go to the window and have a look out,” she said. What I saw was a streetscape of Belgradians stopped frozen in their tracks. It had happened this way every year since 1980, the year of Tito’s death, and at the exact day and time of his death, 4 May, 3:05 pm: the great blast of siren, the frozen gait, the minute of silence. Within a few years as Yugoslavia was disintegrating, all mention, representation and commemoration of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, “father” of Yugoslavia,  disappeared in Belgrade– his photographs from offices, his name from streets, his birthday, uncelebrated – to be replaced in public awareness by the names of kings, queens, princes and princesses, patriarchs of the Orthodox Church and now that perennial favorite of the depoliticized public space, the scientist Nicola Tesla.

However, in the Belgrade City Gift Shop on the ground floor under the Press Club – as I showed Charlie – one can now buy Tito’s Cookbook, souvenir photographs of Tito and a glass paper weight with his image inscribed. And just outside on the street, at kiosks selling postcards, newspapers and cigarettes, I have seen buttons for sale brandishing his image alongside those of Che Guevara and Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia who died while on trial as a war criminal at The Hague.

Next stop: Dom Omladine, or House of Youth, by its very title a leftover of socialist Yugoslavism but unashamed of it. In 1988 it had still been the epicentre of youthful counterculture – commemorating the heady days of protest in June 1968 known as The June Days when students accused Tito and the Party of having become a “Red bourgeoisie” – and in 1991 it had been the collection point for European youth activists descending from their “peace buses” in support of local anti-war actions. (By 1995 these had included Women in Black, lesbian groups, some media, intellectual circles in the universities, the artists at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination, Open Society supported by the Soros Foundation, among others.) In 2001 Dom Omladine had retooled itself again, described in Prodigal Daughter as a café bar with sleek furniture and track lights with a billiard club up the stairs. Now, as Charlie and I stood in its front lobby, these too have disappeared to be replaced by a bank of computers and a banner announcing this as a Europe Information Centre.

Upstairs in this building the alternative radio station B-92, which had never not once slackened in its in-your-face cultural and political programming during the era of yawping nationalism and grievous war, has been bought by a Greek media company and moved to chic headquarters across the river in New Belgrade, its programming  under redesign as we speak.

Next stop: 7 Francuzska Street, home of the venerable Serbian Writers Association from which dissident writers had split in the 1990s, leaving – according to one account – only an aging coterie of writers who feel nostalgic for the good old days, by which they mean the days of Yugoslavia, conveniently maintaining a silence about their own role in aiding and abetting the Serbian nationalism of politicians that led directly to war. Three years ago, the back garden of the building was under reconstruction; now Charlie and I stopped for ice coffee under an enormous umbrella in the shade of plane trees – very elegant, and an enterprise of some private company that pays the Writers Association to lease the space.

We walked one street over into Skadarlije, the curvy and cobble-stoned street that leads through a vintage neighobourhood still associated with the bohemians who used to be its denizens – artists, writers, actors, musicians-  and turned into Gospodar Jevremova Street where we came across the 19^th-century home of the celebrated Pavlovic family and a City of Belgrade cultural monument. The current Pavlovic – 7^th generation – opened the gate and in we walked into a lovely garden with fig and quince trees and a fountain, into the world of privilege unbuffeted by war, strife and want but also a world of accomplishment in diplomacy, visual art and literature. As Charlie commented, the main message from our host seemed to be: “We also are Europeans, we who have picked up the ropes of civilization broken by Communism and nationalism, and kept the faith with the West.” Well, good luck to them, who live up the street from the mosque where a group of young men sat in its forecourt and eyed us suspiciously.

Finally, we walked past leafy and elegant Student Square which had been occupied by protestors in June 1968 who had spilled out from the Faculty of Philosophy across the street, and into Plato Bookstore, once a chaos of books, journals and office supplies but now nicely rearranged a la Ikea.

Chebika Oasis, Atlas Mountains.

The Romans called Tunisia their breadbasket. Curtained by the proud shoulders of the Atlas Mountains, the fertile valleys and hillsides of the north are luxuriant with citrus orchards, fig and pomegranate trees, vineyards producing grapes for red, white and rosé, wheat, barley, sugar beets, and almonds that taste like real almonds.

But most of the country is desert, of three distinct types: a salt desert so flat it looks as if it had been planed by a giant trowel, rose beige sand providing a thin cover for the blinding white of the salt. Along the lonely highway, a perfectly even ribbon of shallow water glistens. Once this was the bed of an ancient lake.

The second is the Sahara sand desert: vast undulating dunes, sometimes naked and sometimes dotted with sparse but tenacious gray green brush. Its dunes move relentlessly: dramatic hulks of fine sand able to spring into action at wind’s whim. And windstorms come often. Camels roam, heading for the water they can smell, desert foxes and other mammals run wild, and small rodents and insects leave their crisscross tracks.

Near natural springs, great date palm oases shade the horizon. These are holdings of gold. The trees, with their green frond fans, bring millennial riches. More orderly plantations, called palmeraies, are planted in straight rows. In whichever configuration, each tree—although wind-pollinated in the wilderness—is now more advantageously pollinated by hand, and expert farmers shimmy up the rough trunk to carry out this task. A single male tree can fertilize one hundred fruit-bearing females. The seed clusters are gathered together on the branch until the tiny green pebbles begin to grow into Deglet Noor, Medjool, and a dozen other variations. Then the fertilized bundles burst and the fruit matures.

Desert Sands, Sahara

The third is the rock desert: gaping wide-open mountains and valleys where wild canyons hide isolated stone or adobe villages. Periodic floods have rendered these villages uninhabitable, devastating abandoned troglodyte berms that have become an extension of the rock itself, blending into its jagged folds. The mouths of their windows and doors cast small dark shadows across such resistant land. Nearby, more modern yet simple homes are painted a blinding white. There is always a mosque, and a school, carefully tended. A few worn rugs hang over low walls and a coffee can of rhododendron or oleander registers a culture’s yearning for color.

This small cone-shaped country of eleven million inhabitants, wedged between much larger Algeria to the west and Libya to the east, also has a long Mediterranean coast. What it offers to the world is agriculture, phosphate, textiles, steel, and some manufacturing. A rich mix of ancient cultures and unique contemporary philosophy imbue it with a particular, sometimes contradictory and often surprising philosophy: the spirit that embraced Muslims and Jews living in harmony when expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century and in January 2011 produced the first revolution of the twenty-first. 

The tone was set by Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s first postcolonial president. At mid twentieth century, when the north African countries began defying colonialist Europe, military men such as Egypt’s Nassar, Libya’s Gadaffi, and Algeria’s Ben Bella shaped their nations’ independence. While these larger North African countries vied for power and influence, Bourguiba understood that his small one would always be militarily weak, and he cultivated other priorities. Education was primary, and during the early years of his mandate 63% of the GNP went to building schools and to staffing them with the best teachers foreign study could buy. In an era of neighboring generals, Bourguiba, a lawyer, paid more attention to social welfare. He made poligamy illegal, raised the marriage age for women, outlawed the burqa and chador, established full legal and labor equality, and indeed asked that the title “emancipator of women” be inscribed upon his tomb. 

Today Tunisian women and men earn equal salaries, 46% of the country’s doctors and 58% of its teachers and professors are women, maternity leave is impressive (full salary for the first six months, 75% for the next three, and none for the final three but with job security when returning to work), and abortion is legal during the first trimester. The Tunisian army builds roads, helps harvest crops, and is involved in other communal projects. A year of military service is obligatory for men but optional for women.

Chenini Berber Village

Bourguiba is the beloved Father of the nation. He opened the political system to opposition parties. He modernized the country, emphasizing free education and health care for all. And he diverged from most of the other Arab countries by supporting a negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. But he also made the mistake so many fathers of nations do. He conceived of himself as president for life. When senility overtook him in the mid 1980s, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali staged a bloodless coup. At first he continued his predecessor’s democratic reforms and investment in economic growth. But he became increasingly autocratic and corrupt. Opposition efforts were crushed. The president and his family bled a poor country dry.

Phosphate miners organized and tried to rebel in 2008, only to be put down brutally. The press and other media were rigorously controlled. It is against this backdrop that, toward the end of 2010, Tunisians lit the spark that would soon enflame Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and other countries of the region.

The western press—and at first many within Tunisia as well—spoke about an incident between a street vendor and a policewoman who confiscated his scales because he lacked the proper license. In protest it was said that the vendor immolated himself and this, it was reported, set the country ablaze. An international news media, always avid for catchy sound bytes, called it the Jasmine Revolution.

Tunisians prefer to call it the Dignity Revolution. They say its seeds were planted by those phosphate miners several years earlier. When initial public rage around the incident leading to the street vendor’s suicide gained momentum, it was briefly seen as a generating force. Young people—adept at cellphone, Facebook, and Twitter communication—took over. Demonstrations were large and well-organized. There was very little loss of life, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia.

But when people learned the real story behind the incident between the vendor and policewoman, they stopped referring to it as the incident that sparked their revolution. It seems when the woman took the vendor’s scales he made a remark about using her breasts to weigh his goods. Incensed, she slapped him. He doused himself with gasoline, having instructed a few friends to come to his rescue before he could be seriously injured. Somehow, they weren’t quick enough. Most Tunisians today see the famous vendor as a fool, and one who was disrespectful to women.

                                                                  ***

Tozeur, Man at Date Palm Oasis

On the short flight from Djerba to Tunis, I flipped through the pages of Tunisair’s inflight magazine. The issue’s introductory note caught my attention. I read it and begin to cry. The internal tension created by trying to get a reading on how to juggle widespread revolutionary fervor with the hard cold facts of what has so far been accomplished gave way to a simple delight in the victory won. Despite the less than perfect English translation, the sentiment comes through loud and clear:

The historical wind which blew on Tunisia has well revolutionized the spirits. The people are living a new age marked by a vision liberated from all forms of restrictions. Have we ever seen jasmine flowers open in spring? That was the case in our country with elegance and without too much violence. The jasmine revolution was started by young people, ravaged by distress, against an autocratic power; their claim was not only bread: “but bread in dignity” they were shouting very high. Their cries were relayed notably by other youths politically conscious, hungry for freedom and democracy, and hooked to the global means and methods of communication (Internet, Facebook and Twitter). As a result a new world bravery was born out of the new and unprecedented relations established on the political, economic or social levels, between citizens sharing fraternal ties and happily recovering their most cherished value: freedom.

The dark page is definitely turned over, the people awoke, conscious of the damage inherent to any overthrown regime, ready to start the programs of economic revival with loads of work ahead. But it is not to disturb its certainty because the climate is encouraging and youth is carrying its destiny over its shoulder. This upheaval is from now on engraved in the national and even in the international memory. The tourist, the visitor and the Tunisian people have got many things to share among which freedom of speech with its positive effects of the direct contact without the fear of being bothered or disturbed: the wall of silence, which often separated the visitor from the Tunisian people, was broken.

Conscious of meeting the challenges and putting up with the difficulties, ready and proud to fly even higher, our company endorses its name Tunisair Express and faces the challenges, with optimism and solid confidence. A door opens on luminous horizons, let’s share them.

These words, offered by an airline hoping to rekindle tourism in a country people are afraid to visit, exude so much more than awkward translation. They speak of the relief and joy people feel when they can suddenly voice long-stifled opinions. Fear is gone, and everything remains to be done.

My partner Barbara and I traveled to Tunisia in May 2011 with twelve other U.S. Americans. We were fortunate to have a wonderful guide, a forty-year-old art historian, husband and father of two named Mohamed.

Now, four and a half months after the dictator left, with ongoing demonstrations, some curfews enforced in areas where they have been particularly intense, and occasional acts of police brutality reported, there were few tourists in the country; certainly almost no one from the United States. During our stay we saw a half dozen groups of French and German visitors.

A hotel where we spent several nights near the Libyan border also housed refugee workers in their tan vests with UN stamped on the back in pale blue. Norwegian relief workers from some sort of Christian aid organization were in the dining room at breakfast. Tunisians themselves, poor as they are, were collecting truckloads of food and medicines. One day we saw 15,000 tons heading east.

Bearded and turbaned white-robed men from the United Arab Emirates roamed the lobby of that hotel, often accompanied by medical personnel in blue surgical scrubs. We learned the former are financing the camps (there were 330,000 Libyan refugees in the country the day we arrived; two weeks later that number had risen to 440,000).

An interesting aside regarding the United Arab Emirates’ use of their exuberant oil economy to support the refugee camps: even as it does so, it has invited the U.S. paramilitary company, Blackwater, to establish a mercenary army within its borders. This army seems to be filling with Colombian recruits, and the usual suspects—retired British, French and U.S. officers—are its advisors. Clearly, the UAE wants to be prepared for any threat to its own system of autocracy. When I voiced surprise at this seeming contradiction, Mohamed said he didn’t find it at all contradictory. “One policy has to do with human rights,” he explained, “the other is an attempt at preserving a political system.”

                                                                  ***

At Tunisia’s great archeological sites—Carthage, Dougga, Kerkoune, Sbeitla—we roamed alone, often for hours, without running into another foreigner. Roman influence dominated, although we also saw the contributions made by Phoenicians, Greeks, Vandals, Byzantines and Sicilians. We were grateful for the rare opportunity to experience these places without crowds even as we felt for the country’s loss of needed revenue.

Dougga was my favorite, situated as it is among green fields, with olive groves and a profusion of wildflowers. The vast site includes a well-preserved theater, baths, communal latrines, a large forum, housing blocks, and a gorgeous temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva (the Roman trinity). On the esplanade near this temple I could just make out the immense sundial-like circle called Wind Roses. Twelve directions of wind are still faintly engraved upon its face.

Ruins at Dougga, Detail of Column of Theater

                                                                       *** 

Tunisia is a Muslim country. Ninety-nine percent of the population identifies with Islam, and an hour a week of religion is included in the public school curriculum (non-Muslims may opt out of the class). But in some ways separation of church and state seems more respected here than it is these days in the United States. For example Sharia law is not observed. Alcohol is sold (Libyans drive across the border to buy it), and many Tunisians drink and smoke. At the resorts, discos are hopping all night long. Although, if asked, the vast majority will say they believe in the Koran, people seem pragmatic and practical. They live their faith in diverse ways.

As in all Muslim countries, the call to prayer rings out across cities and towns—beginning an hour before sunrise. One of the five pillars of Muslim religious practice is to pray five times a day. But only on a couple of occasions did I see someone stop what he was doing to fulfill this obligation. The attitude toward another pillar, making the Haj or traveling to Mecca at least once during one’s lifetime, also seemed to be regarded quite casually. When I asked Mohamed if he intended to make the trip, he said “Well . . . maybe . . . but there’s always something one has to spend one’s money on: buying a house, a car, maybe something for the children.”

In the holy city of Kairouan we visited a mosque, where Mohamed had arranged for us to meet with a retired imam. The man would answer any questions we had about Islam. Muslims know there are many misconceptions about them in the West, and this would be a chance to hear the truth from an official source, so to speak. The imam greeted us and said we should go around the circle and not be shy. For every answer he consulted a copy of the Koran, which he had in a bilingual edition so that Mohamed could read us the translation. By the time it was my turn, I realized our questions were political and the Koranic answers were religious—something of a disconnect—so I passed.

Then it was Barbara’s turn. She asked if the imam would mind if she stood, and then addressed him very respectfully. I noticed several in our group gasped audibly; it was clear they thought she was going to ask about homosexuality. But this wasn’t what she had in mind. She stated, very simply, that she is an atheist and also a moral person who wants to do good in the world. Her question was: What does the Koran have to say about someone like me? Our travel companions breathed a sigh of relief. The imam searched for the appropriate verse and had Mohamed read it. Nonbelievers cannot go to heaven, the Koran says, but Allah himself may decide if such a person may escape hell. Barbara thanked him and sat down.

It was obvious that the imam was intrigued by Barbara’s question, and several minutes later he had more to say on the subject. And then, as we were leaving he called her back for a few final words, looking with kindness into her eyes. He told her she is on a journey, to take her time and persevere.

Mosque, Holy City of Kairouan

                                                               *** 

In the busy medinas and souks, where shops sometimes offered beautiful handmade native crafts and sometimes hawked Chinese fakeries, vendors were clearly eager to sell but never insistent. Their dignity overcame their desperation for a sale. Walking through Tozeur’s medina, Mohamed said both his parents had grown up there. He told us the stories he heard from them, of a time when the narrow streets were spotless and covered with rugs where children played, women cooked food for an entire neighborhood, and communal life was slower than today. He told us about his grandmother, who was forced into an arranged marriage at the age of eleven—only realizing she was married when, at sixteen, she had to go to live in her husband’s home.

One of the two double doors leading to each walled home still stands slightly ajar, an invitation to passersby to enter the shelter of a vestibule always present between the street and the house’s inner doors. In that vestibule one has access to cool water, sometimes even food. Visitors may also spend the night. Customs that speak of a different time, and a culture born of desert’s harshness but still practiced today.

                                                                    *** 

Bardo Museum Stairwell, Tunis

Crafts of different sorts are in evidence throughout the country: fabric, ceramics, leather, silver and gold jewelry, and the ever-present mosaic—with its rich presence in the ancient ruins to modern workshops that produce so much of what decorates many Tunisian homes and public buildings. The Bardo Museum in Tunis is breathtaking, both in its building (a stunning renovation of the 19th century harem of the Beys of Tunis) and its contents. There, in the most beautiful natural lighting I have yet to encounter in a museum, walls, floors, and even ceilings are covered in mosaics large and small, many dating back to centuries before our era.

Each tiny cut of marble, with its unique color, came from a different part of a world long gone; the yellow was local, the pink and green were found in what is now Italy, the black white and red were from Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Considering how long it took, centuries ago, for shiploads of these different stones to arrive at an artist’s shop, the artistry and craft are nothing short of astonishing. Those visionaries had to conceive of their images with the complexity of sources and ancient trade routes in mind. The smaller the individual chip of stone, the finer the overall mosaic.

The art of mosaic continues today, and we visited a small workshop where a dozen young women were engaged in the craft—in this case following prescribed patterns used in tabletops, trivets, wall pieces and other commercial variations. Despite not sharing a language, some of the young women and I joked around. I took pictures and they wanted to see them on the camera’s monitor and to select which they felt I should keep and which erase.

At one point Barbara had quite a conversation with two of these women. They asked to see her earrings—also made of mosaic turquoise—and she took them out to show. They examined and then insisted on replacing them themselves, at the same time placing a red carnation behind her ear. When one of them noticed her ring and asked if she was married, Barbara said yes. The woman then asked to whom. Barbara pointed to me. All the young women seemed deeply shocked. One quickly hid her face behind her scarf. Others turned away. I’m not sure if Barbara gave them something useful to think about, or ruined their day. We have been holding hands on this trip, and generally acting as we do at home, although being careful not to deliberately offend a cultural sensibility very different from ours.

                                                                       *** 

It wasn’t until I’d been in Tunisia for a week that I realized there are no McDonald’s in the country, the ubiquitous golden arches nowhere to be seen. Coca Cola is sold, though. Tunisia has its own fast foods, most of them liberally saturated with harissa, which is a spicy paste present at every meal. Harissa is made from red chile, garlic, salt, olive oil, coriander, caraway seeds and cumin.

There’s no Tunisian Disneyland, either, although in the seaside resort of Hammamet we saw a Carthageland, complete with Hannibal mounted on his elephant.

The country does, however, have a strange little personage, seen prominently in almost every town and village through which we passed. It stands upright and is modeled after a caricature of a desert fox, although its ears are longer, it wears a baby blue suit and has something resembling a school bag slung over its shoulder. The chest of its suit has a badge with carrots and other vegetables. Sometimes a second smaller fox, the main figure’s sidekick, stands beside him. Mohamed told us these odd statues symbolize Tunisia’s new environmentalism.

                                                                      *** 

Tozeur is a city of yellow brick. Forty percent of every new building must be faced with these bricks: a way of keeping people working. Here we visited one of the hundred or so men who labor to make this building material, digging local clay, mixing it with water and sand, removing small stones by hand, forming the bricks in wooden forms as people have for two thousand years, covering them in ash, drying them in the sun—ever hopeful a hard rain won’t ruin weeks of production—and baking them in crude ovens.

The young man showed us each step of his laborious process. He fires up his kiln with dry palm fronds, also from the area, and the only way he can be sure it has reached the necessary temperature of 900 Celsius is if it is packed with exactly 10,000 bricks; there is no thermostat. The palm fronds are balanced on an interior floor with holes that allow the heat to circulate. A few bricks will come out red, but most will emerge dull yellow like the desert surrounding the town. This is backbreaking work. In the 120- to 130-degree summers this man may labor twelve to eighteen hours a day. The cold winters, when it rains, can devastate production.

Entering the town of Kairouan, the country’s rug-weaving capital, we passed a monument four stories high depicting intricate rugs rendered in mosaics. Entering other towns, equally large monuments advertised their specialties: one giant bowl of bright oranges, another huge ceramic pot.

Monument to Oranges, Entrance to Kairouan

Rug-weaving is a Berber specialty, an age-old tradition. In contrast with Egypt, there is no child labor here. Adult women do most of the weaving in their homes, and each family has its traditional designs. Centers seem to use the old U.S. American Southwest’s trading post system, whereby looms and yarns are provided and the rugs purchased outright. Examples range from the crudest weaves, with 10,000 to 40,000 threads to the square meter, to the finest silk with a million threads in the same amount of space.

                                                                  *** 

In Kairouan we had lunch at the home of a local family. The mother and father have two grown sons and a daughter. An 84-year-old grandmother also lives with them. Our language barrier kept us mostly silent during the hearty meal. Then, over mint tea, we relaxed and, with the help of Mohamed, began to ask a few questions of each another. Their first question was how we had the courage to come, when so few from the United States are doing so. We wanted to know what each of them does, and learned that the father worked in copper until the price of his raw materials became too high. He brought out a few beautiful hand-hammered pots and platters for us to see. Now he and his sons run a coffee shop at the street level in this building where they live. The daughter is still studying. The mother stayed home. Our attention turned to the old woman. She was feeling ill and one of her grandson’s lovingly stood behind her chair and massaged her shoulders.

Someone in our group asked what they think about what is going on in Libya. They got excited as they expressed their disdain for Gadaffi, their sorrow that there has been so much bloodshed, and their hope for a rebel victory. “Gadaffi is a fool,” one son said, and took out his cell phone on which he had recorded a new rap song mocking the dictator. Then the other son turned to the grandmother, obviously urging her to show us something. Amid laughter she retired to a bedroom and soon reappeared dressed as Gadaffi—the turban, dark glasses, and a white towel her props. She waved the towel in true dictator style as she repeated an Arabic phrase we couldn’t understand.

We learned she was playing with words from a recent Gadaffi speech, the one in which he vowed to go “street by street, door by door” until every so-called agitator was routed out. Despite not feeling well, she was obviously enjoying herself tremendously. Mohamed told us that before the Libyan uprising her favorite impersonation was of Michael Jackson.

Grandmother Impersonating Gaddafi

                                                                      *** 

At the beginning of this trip, flying from Paris to Tunis I noticed there would be an hour’s time difference. But wait. It would be an hour earlier in Tunisia, despite that country being one time zone east of France. Shouldn’t it be an hour later? I asked the flight attendant, who explained that France observes daylight savings while Tunisia does not. I sat and thought about that for a while. Wouldn’t this then make it two hours earlier? Or the same time? I went around and around with this but couldn’t make it work. I went to Air France’s inflight magazine and searched for the world map. As I suspected, it included the time zones. Tunisia: to the east of France. No way I could make it come out right.

Time itself, the essence of time, seemed to accompany me throughout this trip like a great rubber band, stretching and contracting. With so many out of work, the cafes were filled with men of all ages, sipping tea or drinking beer, gesticulating in a language I don’t know (Arabic or French, sometimes in symbiotic combination), playing cards, occasionally smoking from a hookah or water pipe. Women, as everywhere, walked arm in arm, whispered to one another, carried bundles, shopped, took children to and from school. But their pace seemed slower than in other places I have been. The heat of summer was still a couple of months off. We were told it routinely reaches 120 to 130 Fahrenheit in August and September.

Girl Walking in Street, Testour

But the time issue seemed to embrace centuries. The ruins of Carthage, for example, blend almost seamlessly with the present-day busyness of a modern capital. Around the Gulf of Tunis, 3,000 years of civilization—Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Muslims—lack the continuity of documented history due to the fact that the Romans, after destroying and before rebuilding the city, did away with important sources. The story of Queen Dido told in Virgil’s Aeneid may be more about attitude than accuracy. Kerkoune, a 2,300 year old Phoenician ruin with the Mediterranean lapping its low stone walls, is unique in that every house had its own private bath: a time warp if ever there was one.

Most of the hotels where we stayed, if they had WiFi at all, had it only in their lobbies. One morning, very early, I sat in the reception area of one, using my laptop. The night watchman rose from a couch where he had spent the night, stretched and gave me a shy smile. Then he came over to where I was working. “Are you writing to the United States?” he wanted to know. When I told him I was, he asked what time it was there. I explained that mine is a large country, with several different time zones. The concept didn’t seem to register. “But what time is it where you’re writing?” he asked again. “Eleven-thirty last night,” I replied, before realizing how absurd that sounded. “I mean it’s still yesterday where I live.”

The man was incredulous. Clearly he could not conceptualize it being yesterday somewhere in the world when here it was already today. The people of Tunisia, who through largely peaceful protest have just changed the course of their history, must play a new game with time. How long is too long to wait for change? How will memory deal with past abuses?

                                                                  *** 

Time also has a different history in the small village of Testour, in a lovely valley above the Mejerda River. There, the square minaret of the oldest mosque bears the imprint of a clock whose numbers run backwards. As with any modern timepiece, the twelve is at the top. But the one is to its left rather than to its right, and the rest of the numbers continue counterclockwise around the face.

This minaret, which also displays eight Stars of David, dates to 1609, when Muslims and Jews—expelled from Spain together—settled here. They longed for their Andalusian homeland, and this backward moving clock symbolized that longing. Unfortunately, the clock’s hands are missing, so I had to imagine a movement of time, which may or may not have been mechanically possible.

We saw the Star of David often, on ornate doors, in the beautiful tile work on so many mosques and other buildings, even on signage. Tunisians seemed proud and at ease with the Jewish presence in their country. Early in our visit we had lunch at Mamie Lily, a small family-run establishment in Tunis that we learned is the only remaining kosher restaurant in the country, possibly in the entire Muslim world. Two women prepared a meal of barley soup, salad and lamb. Then Mamie’s son Jacob, the place’s gregarious owner, gave a short talk about the history of Jews in Tunisia—from their sixteenth century arrival, through most of them leaving for France after post colonialism gave them (and all Tunisians) French citizenship, to today’s paltry population of around 1,500 who live in productive harmony with the overwhelming Muslim majority. Jacob had an incisive sense of humor.

Sixteenth Century Mosque in Testour, Minaret with Eight Stars of David and Clock with Backward Face

Later, on the island of Djerba, we visited a very different sort of Jewish site. Djerba is often referred to as the island of diversity. Among its 90,000 inhabitants, Christians and Jews mix with Muslims. Even once-defined ghettos have disappeared, and they no longer speak of a Christian quarter or Jewish neighborhood. At Djerba we visited La Ghriba Synagogue, in continual use since 586 BC. The small, richly tiled place of worship is said to contain in its foundation stones from the Temple of Solomon.

In 2002 Tunisia suffered its own Al Qaeda attack, when a suicide bomb detonated near a bus of German tourists at this site, killing seventeen plus their local guide and driver. Today security is rigorous. Next to the synagogue a large hotel welcomes Jews from around the world. Although they may stay at any hotel on the island, this is where they can meet friends and family members, and where a kosher kitchen caters to their needs. In the synagogue itself several elderly men were reading the Torah, seemingly oblivious of our presence.

In other Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, I remember being shown a synagogue, often in disrepair, as evidence of “different religions living together in peace.” Most often these were more museum or monument than place of worship. In Tunisia, and despite the very reduced number of Jews still living in the country, I had a sense of mutual respect and fellowship.

                                                                      *** 

The Berber village of Chenini is a short drive from Tataouine, originally a prison site—thus the French phrase “Go to Tataouine!” meaning “Go to hell!”—and then a center for nomadic tribes. Now Tataouine is a city, not far from the Libyan border. Along the highway: small stands sell smuggled Libyan gasoline, much cheaper than that found in Tunisia. Headed inland we saw many elegant cars belonging to the wealthier Libyans who are not confined to the refugee camps.

The landscape in this region is dotted with hundreds of villages like Chenini, but none more beautiful. Their old uninhabited dwellings, unseen at distance, are carved into mountainsides the same color as their eroding stone. But Chenini is unique. Partially, perhaps, because it is so large. The old city soars up a mountainside and beyond, creating a skyline reminiscent of some of the Hopi villages but a hundred times larger and more ornate. Few people still live up there since a flood in 1969 washed important pieces away.

Berber Village of Chenini, Mosque

Below is the new Chenini: freshly whitewashed homes with their proverbial blue doors and window frames. About halfway up and already in the older section, is a white mosque. The bright blue sky was studded with high cirrus clouds; we call them mare’s tales. The entire tableaux was a sight to behold.

We hiked up a steep and winding stone pathway as far as the mosque. At one point Mohamed told us the story of The Seven Sleepers, a sort of religious Rumplestiltskin. “This is in the Koran,” he said, “but . . . well . . . I will tell it as a legend” (his first admission that he regards at least some of Islam’s holy scripture as stories rather than the word of God.) The tale is about seven Christian men who went to sleep in a cave, only to wake up centuries later as Muslims. This is supposed to have happened in this village.

Miriam

On our way down, Mohamed asked if we would like to visit a friend of his, a woman in her eighties named Miriam. She lives alone in her small house in Chenini’s ancient heights, although a granddaughter comes to stay with her every night. Miriam showed us through her tiny cave-like rooms: one for sleeping, one for weaving, another for cooking. When some of us, conscious of her extreme poverty, offered her half a dinar (roughly thirty five cents), she seemed grateful. One in our group gave her a silver dollar, apparently believing he was bestowing a special gift. Quietly Miriam asked Mohamed if she would be able to exchange the strange coin “for something useful.”

                                                                       *** 

Throughout this vast rock desert, situated for visibility and protection atop mountain ridges, are the 17th century ksars or storage warehouses where nomadic tribes kept foodstuffs and other necessities. The women and children remained wherever the community was camped, while the men divided themselves into groups and rotated, one staying behind to defend the ksar while others traveled in every direction in search of grains, beans, olives and olive oil, dates; even tiny sardines from the coast which were dried to last through the harsh winters.

These ksars are huge complexes, often four or five stories high, made up of small rooms with low doors, no windows, and a web of winding staircases leading to the upper levels. From the very top of each stack of rooms protruded a sturdy stick, much in the manner of Amsterdam’s narrow many-storied houses: to help in hauling goods to the top.

My favorite of the several ksars we visited was Ouled Sultane. It is an architectural wonder. I could have spent hours just photographing its elegant angles. Barbara could have spent hours sketching it. Two other ksars were used by George Lukas as destinations in his Star War films, a fact of which Tunisians are proud—although few of them seem to have seen the blockbusters.

Ksar Ouled Sultane

                                                                 ***

From the rugged Atlas mountains in the north, across great deserts that left me gasping at the power of landscape, through cities and villages where we saw vestiges of cultures that have shaped one another for centuries, at archeological ruins where we were the only visitors, on the still embattled streets of Tunis, in cottage industries, mosques and a synagogue, I received a taste of what Tunisia is today.

Only four months prior to my visit, the country made a dramatic change, one that must be defined and sharpened for it to truly make a difference in people’s lives. Enthusiasm for the revolution is palpable, from big cities to the smallest village. Broken shop windows, graffiti on many walls, and continuing demonstrations all attest to an ongoing process. In many places the number seven had been ripped from a façade or monument. This was Ben Ali’s favorite number—he assumed the presidency on November 7, 1987—and it became a symbol of his regime. Now it symbolizes corruption. I noticed that paper bills in Tunisia also bear a very large seven in the upper right hand corner. “Will you also be printing new money?” I asked Mohammed. “No,” he laughed, “we are not rich enough for that.”

In this North African country time and memory converge in ways that run from the surreal to the deeply pragmatic. If I return in a year or two, I believe I will find progress—whatever that may mean. And I will find, again, a country of rich history and culture, warm hospitality, and enduring dignity.

 —Margaret Randall, May, 2011.

The American Continent is such a patchwork, from polar north to Patagonian south. Between: the riveting majesty of Grand Canyon, thundering waters of Iguazú, stark desert beauty of Atacama. The secrets of Kiet Seel, Palenque, Tikal. And great modern cities like Montreal, New York, Mexico, Río de Janeiro. Places where anguish and absence are always just below the surface: Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Guatemala. And places where that absence has been redeemed, like today’s Bolivia, Uruguay, or Cuba’s last half century.

Malecon, Havana

Cuba, against every neocolonialist and neoliberal obstacle, chose freedom in 1959. That the Cuban revolution, with all its problems and forced retreats, still stands, is as much a natural wonder as it is the fierce resistance of men and women, a people who continue to respond to no with yes. And within Cuba there is a space called Casa de las Américas, as old and obstinate as the revolution itself.

In the first months following victory, a visionary named Haydeé Santamaría was given the challenge of creating an institution capable of breaking the cultural blockade. Not the military or economic or political blockades, those guns lined up against a tiny island nation, but the more amorphous and ever so much more dangerous efforts aimed at silencing the country’s artists and writers. Silencing ideas, erasing images, in both directions.

Casa stands at the bottom of G Street, close to the malecón, that serpentine sea wall that protects the city from an ocean embracing and threatening simultaneously. It is a three-story gray building, once a synagogue, with a large map of the continent embossed upon its northern face. Inside, galleries, conference halls, and the offices of magazines and research centers contain a living history of cutting-edge thought and artistic production from every reach of the Americas. Haydeé endowed it with courage and wisdom alive long past her death. What has happened at Casa, what happens there still, is nothing less than the powerful magic of creativity and change.

Havana, Casa de las Americas

Haydee Santamaria

Along with a couple of dozen other writers and thinkers from Bolivia, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Peru, Colombia, Brazil, the United States and Cuba itself, I have been invited to be a judge in Casa’s annual literary contest, known simply as Premio 2011, The Prize. Every year for half a century, literary minds from the Americas have gathered in Havana to read hundreds of entries in the genres of novel, short story, poetry, testimonial literature, theater, critical essay, literature written by Brazilians, inhabitants of other Caribbean islands, and Latinos living inside the United States; and have awarded the prestigious prize to the best in each. I judged poetry in 1970. Now, 41 years later, I have been invited back to judge testimonial literature.

This prize represents so much more than simply choosing the best book and assuring its publication and attendant monetary compensation. Periodically, the institution has used the Premio as a context in which to establish new centers or programs of specialization in such areas as Caribbean or women’s studies. This year the focus is on Culturas originarias de las Américas, native cultures of the Americas. And they really do mean all the Americas, from Canada to the southern tip of the continent. Casa’s library is among the most innovative I have known. Its magazines publish the most exciting new work and retrieve classic texts that would otherwise be lost.

And this is one of Casa’s many strengths: brilliant young people work alongside the old timers who remain. Cycles of tradition and renovation characterize the physical space and all that takes place within it. I cross the threshold and my skin comes alive with an energy difficult to put into words. I am besieged by the faces and voices of those who are gone: Haydeé herself, Rodolfo Walsh, Violeta Parra, Roque Dalton, Carlos María Gutiérrez, Mario Benedetti. I feel their familiar touch upon my arm, a conversation surfaces, an image pushes up. I fight back tears or, in some quiet corner, let them come.

Here, over the next weeks, we will work in the spirit of giants, always conscious of our seriousness and commitment. But also of our defiance and humor. The great debates, achievements, mistakes, and personalities of half a century accompany us.

                                                                 *   

I stand before my old apartment building, trying to recall images of a time more than thirty years gone. Chunks of memory drop away then come crawling back, jostling for a place to stand. I can’t find my old neighbor’s name on the register but hesitantly press the worn tenth-floor button. A voice comes wavering through the rusted speaker. I say my name and hear a faint metallic release as I push against the glass door and step into the vestibule. Suddenly I am three decades younger. I touch the layers of worn fieldstones on either side of the elevator, trying to find the loose one that once covered the place where my children and their friends hid secret messages.

Inside the gray metal box, I notice a surprising absence of graffiti. Thousands of coats of paint, brushed over the walls of this elevator through the years. On the tenth floor, Silvia’s door is open and she embraces me warmly. The interior of her family’s apartment, similar to the one we lived in on the floor just below, begins cracking the dense barrier of time. I find myself wondering about buckets of water collected against frequent shutoffs, a stash of used candle stubs for electrical blackouts, cooking oil poured carefully from a refillable bottle, all the machinations in lives that have weathered the revolution’s ups and downs but have yet to secure that leap of progress for which so many died.

We talk about old times and new, neighbors who are gone and others who still inhabit the eighth floor or the fourth. A son and his wife are there. The last time I saw him he was a child. Now he is a city planner, involved in the magnificent renovation of Old Havana. A thread of genuine caring runs between us, a strong, unbreakable line, dancing from memory to memory, avoiding the entanglements of lives now unfolding in spheres so distant one from the other it would take days or months to retrieve that space in which we might truly inhabit each other’s obstinate hopes and failed dreams.

Later Silvia walks me back to my hotel. A couple dozen blocks shrouded in Havana night. We hold onto each other as we navigate cracked sidewalks and uneven curbs. Groups of young people pass us, arm in arm. A small table where four old men play dominos emerges in a circle of light beneath a rare streetlamp. The 1950s-style building that was a Jewish cultural center when I lived here. Is it still? The hulking Américas Arias hospital, referred to as Maternidad de Línea, where I once had an abortion and so many Cuban women still give birth. We turn down G toward the sea, feeling a rise of moist breeze against our faces.

Now we are standing in front of the hotel. Silvia excuses her home attire and says she won’t come in. We hug goodbye. We will see each other often while I am here, but I will never feel closer to her than I do at this moment, touching the thin woolen scarf she pulls about her shoulders, the one she reminds me I gave her forty years before, when together we patrolled our neighborhood on a night much like this, convinced we were on the winning side of history.

                                                                    *

Cienfuegos. Middle of the island, nestled along the southern coast. This city was settled by French immigration and many of its buildings conserve their French colonialist architecture and period furnishings never quite at home in this tropical destination. Casa de las Américas has installed us in the Jagua, a four-star hotel situated on a small tongue of land protruding into the bay. I am in my room, watching from my balcony as a last splash of pink fades to night. The phone rings, and the woman’s voice that responds to my “oigo?” wastes no time.

“My name is Rosario Terry García,” she tells me, “your daughter Sarah Dhyana Mondragón Randall’s third grade teacher.” She pronounces all Sarah’s names with perfect recall. “I was fifteen,” Rosario goes on to say, “and Sarah was seven or eight. I was one of the Makarenkos, just starting out.”

I remember the Destacamento makarenko, a battalion of young people who stepped up to fill the vacancies left by so many teachers who emigrated in the revolution’s early years. Boys and girls themselves, with no pedagogical experience and only the training a crash course of weeks or months could bestow. I remember my son, who at eight had a teacher of fourteen who was immensely relieved when his student told him no, masturbation doesn’t really destroy brain neurons as he had warned. In those days teachers and students learned together.

Rosario Terry Garcia

Rosario’s voice cuts through my reverie: “I’ll never forget that little girl—so smart, so beautiful, so active. One day I was teaching Playa Girón, and I saw she was crying. ‘What’s wrong, Child?’ I asked. And she sobbed ‘No, Teacher, it’s the government not the people who attack us!’ And you came to talk to me the next day. I’ve never forgotten that lesson. It’s served me well, through all my years of teaching. But what did we know back then? We were hardly more than children ourselves!”

Rosario had seen my name on the news and tracked me to the Jagua. Time collapsed as it so often does in Cuba, along with crops and infrastructure and the passionate dream of a different world. I want to see her face, embrace her, learn more about this woman who remembers my forty-eight-year-old daughter when she was seven. She says she lives far from the provincial capital, but if I tell her where I’ll be in the morning she will try to find me. I say I’ll be visiting an art school, the Benny Moré. “Why don’t you try to meet me there?”

At the school the next morning I hear a voice calling my name. And there’s Rosario, a heavyset black woman with a broad grin. “Back then I was just a slip of a girl,” she says, no doubt picking up on my appraisal of her appearance. She must think I remember what she looked like. I don’t. I am just very moved by the woman and her story, by the complexity of this web in which both our lives are caught. We talk. We take a few pictures. We hug.

The Benny Moré’s principal asks Rosario how she came by her last name, Terry. It is famous throughout the province for having been that of the plantation owner after whom the city’s gorgeous Teatro Terry is named. “Well,” Rosario laughs, “most slaves got our names from the family to which we belonged.”

When I tell my daughter about Rosario, she remembers nothing. Not the teacher, not the incident. As a child, spending all week at boarding school was unbearable for her, and for many other children of revolutionaries who believed we were changing the world and that our offspring were getting an education based on the values we hoped would launch the new society.

                                                               *

Did it fail? The revolution, I mean. And how to measure failure? For fifty-three years it has been pulling itself along, a sack full of stones, a hunch between the shoulders, a garment frayed at the cuffs. Half a century of people wanting only independence, nothing more. Independence from a crude dictator, one of a fraternity at the time. Independence from the puffed up nation to the North, and its swindling mafia of casinos, its crime syndicate of profit over people. Freedom to make the future of its choice.

When I lived here, through the 1970s, life seemed simple. Everyone worked. Health care and education were free. We paid ten percent of our salaries in rent, and after twenty years owned our apartment or home. No matter that someone else had owned it before us, and had fled the Communist takeover sure it would be a matter of weeks or months before they could return and reinsert their key in the lock. Some of those wealthy families hid jewels and silver services in the walls, walls they hoped would remain mute until they could reinstall themselves in mansions or elegant 1950s high-rises.

There were problems, to be sure. The United States has never given up trying to destroy the revolution. Transportation was difficult. Food was rationed, insuring everyone had enough. After a Sunday spent harvesting potatoes in Havana’s greenbelt, Monday we’d find proud pyramids of potatoes at our neighborhood market. Simple, that’s what we said, and smiled. Simple. Knowing class divisions were being eliminated was more important than a varied menu or other luxuries.

In 1989, when the Soviet Union fell apart, Cuba lost its strongest ally. The socialist world disintegrated. Cuba remained defiant, opened to tourism, invested in biochemistry, tightened its belt. There was always Vietnam, then Nicaragua and Venezuela. But the monster to the North regained hegemony and intensified its blockade: a point of attack both painfully real and, increasingly, the excuse for every ill.

Corruption began to corrode. When a construction site or office came up short, it was simply el faltante: that which is missing. Cubans wrote historic pages of selfless internationalism, sending teachers to Nicaragua, medical personnel wherever a natural disaster struck, well-trained professionals to those countries where a new society struggled to gain ground. Some say 10,000 Cubans died in Africa—Angola, Ethiopia, Congo. Some say 20,000. Cubans are proud of their internationalists.

And proud of their generosity, of the shipload of sugar sent to Allende’s Chile when sugar was still severely rationed at home. Of the shipments of coffee and medicines. Of the schools they built for tens of thousands of children from all over the world. But hardship and shortages carried over from one year to the next. Some asked why the country was giving so much away, when the need at home remained so great. Cuba taught the Vietnamese how to cultivate coffee. Now Cuba imports coffee from Vietnam. Something is wrong with the equation.

I walk along the malecón, a rhythmic pulse of waves crashing over the battered sea wall to my left. To my right, blocks of once-elegant buildings, their floors of multiple apartments, gawk broken and sad. Electrical wires strung in haphazard disarray. Clotheslines hung with faded laundry. Home to thousands who have waited in vain for paint, building materials, relief from a ceiling that threatens to collapse or a flight of stairs creaking menacingly beneath the ups and downs.

Further toward the center of the city is Old Havana, whose exquisite renovation, block by block, has made it a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here the polished cobblestones of some streets alternate with others where upended wooden planks mimic original surfaces. Old houses have been restored to their earlier splendor, with attention to every vibrant detail: the wrought iron balcony, dark woods and tile work, colored glass of the media luna above the door, an old-fashioned pharmacy with its shelves of ceramic jars where one can still fill a prescription or buy a tonic.

This whole area functions as both tourist attraction and neighborhood. People live in these houses. School children study for months at a time in museums of African art. Booksellers stock their open-air stalls with Fidel, Che, an out-of-print novel or maps of the city when it was controlled by the English or Spanish.

It is Saturday morning, and I am at the beautiful Plaza de Armas, waiting for Mirta Yáñez’ book launch to begin. The book is a novel, Sangra por la herida. Its author describes it as settling scores for dozens—or hundreds—of talented artists and writers who suffered during what Cuban intellectuals refer to as el quinquenio gris, the gray period. That period, from the late sixties to mid seventies, wasn’t confined to five years, and it was a good deal darker than gray for those who opted to emigrate, or who ended their own lives when faced with the shameful repression.

There aren’t enough chairs for the crowd that has gathered for the book’s presentation. I catch sight of dozens of old friends but also see many young faces in the crowd. There is an atmosphere of anticipation. Around a small table in front, Mirta is flanked by her publisher, a critic—people there to introduce the book.

The publisher opens the event, then Mirta reads an impressive passage. I look around. There are tears in many eyes. During the launch, several exotic figures appear and position themselves behind the presenters: a mime painted in silver, a woman holding a straw hat and large sunflower. The silent tableaux speaks of significance and tribute.

When the formal reading ends, I get up and approach one of the two tables toward the back where stacks of the novel are for sale. “How much?” I ask. “Fifteen Cuban pesos.” “No, How much in CUC (convertible currency, an effort to rein in the black market).” “We’re only selling the book in Cuban pesos.” “Please,” I beg, “all I have are CUC.” And a chant goes up: “Sell her the book, sell her the book!” “One CUC,” the salesperson finally agrees. Less than a dollar.

                                                            *

After the demise of the socialist bloc, Cubans pulled their belts ever tighter and suffered through a Special Period in Peacetime. There was less of everything. Blackouts were scheduled and daily. Thousands of bicycles took the place of cars that broke down or whose drivers couldn’t buy gas. Those were the 1990s. Nineteen-ninety-three was the hardest. Gradually production went up, yearly GNP increased impressively, and life got better. A little bit better.

Today when I ask people if they think the nineties will return, everyone says no. Yet five hundred thousand State workers began being laid off at the beginning of January. People are being forced to accept the fact that work is no longer a given, a right guaranteed by the socialist State. The Cuban workforce was grossly inflated, three or four people doing one job, and no one’s salary was really enough to live on. Thus the mass-scale ingenuity, whereby people devised all sorts of creative ways of getting by.

Some people will retire. Many are being encouraged to establish small private businesses. A friend tells me three cafes have sprung up on his block in just the past month. But these enterprises need capital. I can’t see Cuba’s banks being able to extend the necessary credit. Investment will have to come from outside the country, and undoubtedly much of it will come from the exile community. These economic transfusions will certainly bring with them troubling quotas of power and influence.

My old friend is a sociologist. He has long been involved with a group whose job it is to analyze the country’s problems and suggest policies aimed at solving those problems while preserving some of the revolution’s gains: shelter, food, free education and health care, culture and sports. To what does he ascribe this failure, I ask. “Two things,” he says, “trying to go to fast, and the paternalism of the State.”

Going too fast. Yes, I remember a time early on, when some idealists believed Cuba would be able to create a communist state without going through the socialist phase. The goal was rooted in the fervent desire for a society based on justice. But the world got in the way. And today none of the isms offer a complete answer. The internationalization of greed makes those long-ago dreams seem utopian.

And then there’s the paternalism of the State: a ruling party that makes all the important decisions, allows citizens’ input only to a point, tightly controls information and isolates or punishes those who dissent. The problem isn’t that people must conform to a Party line, but that their innate creativity has been dulled. Every once in a while a passionate people stand up and demand explanations, answers, apologies. But half a century of authoritarian rule—even while making a genuinely better life for many—has robbed Cubans of initiative. Their sense of real agency has been suppressed.

I link paternalism with patriarchy, a failure to challenge the conventional distribution of power.

                                                            *

While I am in Cuba someone mentions a news story about the Pope urging people not to use “unusual names!” I wonder: unusual by whose standards? Perhaps the Catholic pontiff hopes to encourage the use of names from the old or new testaments. I don’t know how children are named in Africa or Asia, what rules apply in the Arabic world. In Egypt and Jordan I met a great many Mohammads. And Jesús and María are popular throughout the Spanish-speaking countries.

In Cuba unusual names have proliferated, since the revolutionary victory and before. I remember early on hearing about a girl called Usnavy—U.S. Navy. Her parents were intrigued by the letters they saw on the underside of the wings of a North American military plane.

When I lived here, the president of our block committee was a jovial black man from Camaguey. We always called him by his surname, Masa. His wife was Elena, but their daughter was Krupskaya. One of my poet friends is from a community deep in the countryside at the eastern end of the country. His parents had named him Bladimir, after Lenin, spelled just like it sounded to their ears.

Children’s names often reflect their parents’ heroes, and if an idol falls from favor the namesake suffers. Lenin remained popular for boys, more so than Vladimir. But I won’t forget three brothers in exile from the Dominican Republic. Their names were Stalin, Lenin, and little Mao. In Cuba the youngster, especially, was in for a tough time—as if being in exile without their parents wasn’t enough of a burden!

As beauty aids and other consumer items disappeared from the shelves of Cuban stores, nostalgia developed for certain brands and their names came into favor. Miladys and Ivorys are two I remember. Adding the s at the end seemed to be the twist that made a product name fit for a human being.

Cuban magic realism is unique to the island. The Pope would have a hard time imposing his plea against unusual names here.

                                                                                 *

After fifty-three years—eleven of which I shared in everyday bus stop waits and lines outside the fried rice restaurant, and after a half-dozen return trips—I find I have a single question: why did some Cubans leave and others stay? I’m not so interested in the stark ideological differences, nor in those more amorphous reasons such as tedium or exhaustion. I want the answers hiding beneath the answers, that complex fabric of emotions, decisions, choices that finally tips the balance in one direction or the other.

To leave or not to leave, a long dilemma. The first waves of emigrants were the super rich, whose expectations and lifestyles went beyond mere class. The sugarcane magnate who resettled in Peru, only to find himself facing another nationalization. The Bacardi family, whose elegant mansion was turned into a clinic, where my youngest daughter awaited her parents’ arrival. All up and down Miramar’s lavish Fifth Avenue, homes once belonging to the wealthy were transformed into boarding schools, where at five each weekday afternoon doors opened and thousands of children of all ages and skin-shades ran shouting and laughing between dorms and dining halls. Before the revolution, if you were a black child in those neighborhoods you could only have been the son or daughter of a maid or gardener.

People kept leaving, first sure they would be back in weeks or months. Then that conviction fell apart, and they made their lives outside, complete with organizations dedicated to the destruction of this political process that in their sense of things had robbed them of life as they knew it. There was Operation Peter Pan through which parents who believed the wild rumors about children being taken from their families, sent them to the United States in care of Catholic Charities. Many of those children were all but orphaned, not to be reunited with a mother or father for decades.

There was the Camarioca boatlift in 1965, followed by the so-called Freedom Flights that lasted until about 1972 and brought some of the first waves of Cuban emigration to Miami, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Two hundred sixty thousand refugees is a figure often quoted. And the United States granted these refugees special status, guaranteeing them residency and citizenship. One confluence of events after another provoked the major exoduses: 125,000 marielitos in 1980, the balseros who sailed from Cojímar in 1994. Until there were a million Cubans living off their island. Ten percent of the population: not as much emigration as produced by a whole lot of other countries, but clothed in a hysteria that inflates the numbers.

The U.S. and Cuban governments engaged in their calculated games of chess. Sometimes one side was caught off guard, sometimes the other. But the chess pieces were human beings, with illusory hopes, a desperation that sometimes outweighed fear, resentments and, too often, sorrows no one could really decipher. Much of what has been published about these great human migrations has been little more than an attempt to justify one side or the other.

Fought against extraordinary odds, the Cuban revolution nurtured a bristling pride. One had to place it at the center of one’s life, support it against all odds, agree with its tenets, trade silence for argument, let go of or hide religious belief, be willing to embrace a routine in which dissent was not permitted and travel didn’t exist. Being forced to defend a single ideology, combined with the daily sacrifices implicit in creating a society that works for everyone, made many feel like outcasts in their own land. As families were torn apart, this too became a factor. How could a mother contemplate never again seeing her son or daughter? How could a child reconcile never again embracing a mother or father?

For years, those who left were called gusanos (worms), and battered by repudiation on their way out. In 1980 I looked out my ninth-floor windows and witnessed mobs gathered in front of the homes of those whose names were on the exit lists: sneers, spittle, rotten eggs. To what did this rage respond?

If a person who made the choice to leave had up until then assumed a revolutionary self-righteousness, one might understand a degree of resentment. Opportunism rarely leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. But why the mob scenes aimed at ordinary citizens, who simply decided they wanted out? What emotions of their own were the batterers hiding?

I remember the shame I felt, and also the unspoken expectation that if you supported the revolution you naturally took part in those painful demonstrations. When the time came for their cowering targets to be transported to boat or plane, police escorted them courteously, protecting and keeping them safe. It was easy for those of us who supported the revolution to argue the repudiation was spontaneous emotion, not official policy. But the atmosphere was one of hate. Couldn’t the revolution just as easily have prevented those scenes in the first place?

For much too long, Cubans on the island were encouraged to break with their relatives who left. Telephone calls were difficult. The Voice of America’s blatant propaganda painted a picture of idyllic life in the North. Even letters were frowned upon.

In time, the true spirit of revolution won out, and this crass rigidity was tempered. Cubans on the island, comfortable in themselves, with nothing to prove and nothing to hide or of which to be ashamed, pushed for better relations with Cubans outside the country.  More thoughtful members of the diaspora initiated contact with those who stayed. The Cuban Communist Party relaxed some of its more exclusionary rules, such as denying membership to those with religious beliefs. People began traveling back and forth; the audacious color snapshots of full refrigerators and late model cars gave way to a more realistic storyline. And some U.S. administrations were slightly less belligerent than others with regard to the small island nation to the South. No U.S. administration has had the intelligence or courage to dismantle the blockade. But both governments found ways—some public, some less so—to obtain what they needed from each other.

The word gusano is an echo, never far from my ear. How many times, during the years I lived here, did I myself use that ugly epithet? What currency did it offer? Why did I think that if I wasn’t out there on the front lines, I was somehow absolved of blame? It’s been a while since I’ve heard anyone who emigrates labeled a worm. Gusano. Those six letters continue to prick at my consciousness, begging exploration or redemption. In my synesthetic mind they should be a dark silvery blue, but streaks of bilious yellow run through them, rivers of nausea and shame.

Now, thirteen years after my last visit and fifty-three from the revolution’s birth, I ask everyone I believe might have something to say. What do you think makes some Cubans leave their country and others remain, faithful beyond expediency? Not the obvious reasons—a worldwide wanderlust, aging relatives abroad, the perception of greater professional success or an easier middle-class life? No, it’s the other reasons I’m looking for, deeper and less easy to decipher.

Several friends tell me they think it’s about personal space. If they are committed to the revolution and have a minimal geography of privacy and movement, people aren’t so likely to want to go. Those who are forced to share their living quarters with too many others, even perhaps an ex-spouse or aging parents, may be more inclined to give up and emigrate. I ask my question again and again, and one after another refers to the importance of space. An ample map upon which to stretch, move, hide, and be who we are called to be.

More profoundly, I suspect it has to do with a deep love of country and culture, an identity that depends on place for full expression. Or, alternatively, on what another beloved figure of the diaspora, Lourdes Casal, once called “a marginality immune to all returns.”

Yuca al mojo de ajo. Ron añejo. Platanitos. Even chícharos, that staple that has become the stuff of so many jokes. El son matancero. Changó. Yemeyá. Oyá la Furiosa Patrona. Waves breaking over the malecón and ocean as far as you can see. Landscapes both wild and gentle. And always those beaches with their stands of Royal palms. Images, smells, sounds, tastes. Bits and pieces of an answer impossible to translate.

Perhaps my question comes too late, or has become irrelevant. Today so many leave and come back to visit without the strictures of years gone by. It is in this coming and going that the fabric of an answer is woven.

Sonia Rivera-Valdés is a writer and professor of Caribbean literature who was born in Cuba and emigrated to New York because she didn’t like the revolution. She wasn’t a child taken by her parents. She knew her own mind. And then, through the years her mind changed. Her path and the revolution’s crept towards one another until they touched and finally embraced. Earlier she had joined a group of exiles beginning to question their initial assumptions. In time, the necessary opening arrived and she boarded a plane.

Since then, Sonia has made many trips back to the country of her birth. In the context of the literary event in which we are both judges, I notice people sometimes refer to her as Cuban-American, sometimes as a Cuban living in the United States. But she always calls herself Cuban. She speaks of her first trip back: “When I left Cuba I left a house. No one took it from me, but when I returned it was inhabited by a family with lots of kids… and I was happy. I realized there was no room for resentment.”

When asked why she, in contrast with so many exiled Cubans, hasn’t gone the way of resentment, Sonia says: “Maybe because they haven’t lived, like I have, the experience of a little girl in Peru asking me what a book is for, because she didn’t know what it was, she’d never seen one. In the context of how complex this process of five decades has been, a process in which I too have lived through many difficult moments, stories like that say it all.”

On this visit Sonia receives a phone call more startling than the one I received in Cienfuegos, and discovers a half-sister she never knew she had. In the grand scheme of things it’s a brief history, after all, that has erected these barriers, this pain. The longer fuller history allows Cubans to claim their heritage wherever it is they live.

 .

Spring, 2011

I.

In Edmonton, in the 1950s, in Delton elementary school in an Eastern European working-class neighbourhood, the stately rhythm of official holidays – Easter, Queen Victoria Day, Dominion Day, Labour Day, Remembrance Day and Christmas – was only ever interrupted for two kinds of kids, the Jews and the Ukrainians.

 Jewish kids got the school day off for their High Holidays and we Ukrainians were excused for “Ukrainian Christmas” on January 6. I always thought I was getting away with something, namely an extra Christmas, but it never occurred to me, as might now be the case, that my classmates should celebrate with me. “English” Christmas on the 25th of December was everybody’s Christmas, with its department store Santas, Christmas cards, trees, and decorations, the caroling, the crèches, the churches with the spires and the lovely stained-glass windows. But ours was ours alone. Private, familial, and celebrated in an elaborate code of ritual that no one outside the Ukrainian language and the Byzantine rite Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic Churches would be expected to understand. And it was St Nicholas, garbed as a bishop (the original of St Nick) who gave us our presents on his feast day, December 17, Old Calendar. There would be gifts again under the Christmas tree December 25 but none on the Feast of the Nativity, January 6. Only Baby Jesus got presents then.

The Protestant church was the default position of the church-going who lived in a secular, English-speaking, bourgeois democracy. (I assumed Roman Catholics were like Protestants but more dramatic, with their costumed nuns and beaded rosaries; on the other hand, Catholic kids had their own schools, named for saints.) As I grew up, I gradually became aware of the various kinds of non-Orthodox Christians – from the pairs of Mormon youth in their snug blue suits who stood respectfully outside the screen door to talk with mother, to the stoical figures in parkas on the downtown street corners, holding up a copy of The Watchtower, from the Anglican girl sitting in the desk ahead of mine with the delicate silver crucifix, a Confirmation gift, hanging on her angora sweater, to the sisters next door who rushed off every Thursday evening after supper to the United Church in the next street, their distinctive CGIT [Canadian Girls in Training] white middies and blue ties marking them as their God’s own flying squad of virtue. But they were all nevertheless to me citizens of a republic of faith which was ubiquitous and intelligible, in a word, Protestant. They were in and of the world.  The Ukrainian Orthodox were not Protestant, and perhaps not even Western. We genuflected in front of an icon screen under a dome from which glowered the Pantocrator, the Lord of the Universe, and we worshipped in a Divine Liturgy lettered in Cyrillic, and named for a fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, while a bearded priest in glittering gold and white vestments swung a smoking censer around like a yo-yo.

 But in the Spring of 2008, while visiting churches in London, Bath and York over a month, I came to realize that the sweet and kindly normality of the Protestants of Edmonton had been purchased at a shocking price.

Green Park, one of London’s swath of greenery known as the Royal Parks, was, in March, promising Spring with its bushes in bud and the long tendrils of the Weeping Willows only just showing their new green sheen, although daffodils bloomed in masses on the green lawns. “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” then sat awhile on a bench to read, in Peter Ackroyd’s literary companion to London, about 16th century executions not far from here in Tyburn. Knowing that the Tyburn River once flowed where the stands of trees I admired from my bench now stood, my interest quickened.

Shortly after the events of the execution of Carthusian martyrs at Tyburn in 1535, Dom Maurice Chauncy, himself a Carthusian monk, wrote The Passion and Martyrdom of the Holy English Carthusians, and it was from this text, translated in 1935, that I read and learned of Carthusian martyrs. There were five of them, their bodies “tightly fastened with cruel cords” and dragged by horses to Tyburn, the well-known place of public execution. First to mount the cart, which stood under the gallows, was the venerable Father Houghton, “our father and our prior worthy of every title of respect, prior of the London Charterhouse.” As was the custom, the executioner kneeled before him and “craved pardon for the cruel death which he was going to inflict.”[1]

Of cruel deaths during Tudor England I knew something, from school textbooks and historical dramas on television and in the movies, and from those untraceable sources in the slurry of Anglo-Canadian culture in which everyone was immersed until the 1960s: Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, beheaded in 1535 for treason, dying as “the king’s good servant, but God’s first;” Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, editor of the Book of Common Prayer, burned at the stake in 1556 in Oxford (Oxford!); and with him, legions of unrepentant Protestants tortured and burned alive during the reign of the satisfyingly-named Bloody Mary (1553-1558). But of these tender Carthusians I knew nothing.

It is a pitiable story. Founded by St Bruno of Cologne in 1084, the Carthusians established a Charterhouse or monastery outside the walls of London in the late 1370s principally to pray for the souls of those thousands who had died in the plague known as the Black Death. That’s what they were about, these monks: reading and writing and praying in enclosed monasteries, virtual hermits in their daily round of meditation, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, and weeding in the garden. In fact, they had first been invited to England in 1182 by Henry II, anxious to pay penance for the murder of Thomas Becket.

Now here at the gallows they gave up some of their own, to Henry VIII and his rage against pious Catholics and clergy who would not bend to his Act of Supremacy passed by a compliant Parliament in 1534. Unable to move the Pope to annul his marriage of eighteen years with Catherine of Aragon (who had produced no male heir) in favour of marriage with the pregnant Anne Boleyn, Henry, by expedient act of a loyal Parliament, which severed ties with the papacy, became head of the Church of England.  Monasteries were forcibly dissolved and their communities dispersed. The King’s commissioners traveled from one location to another, leaving behind workmen to rip out gutters and rainpipes, melt lead, pull down bells and smash them to pieces with sledgehammers, the easier to transport the valuable metal in barrels. Monastic buildings were almost literally torn apart for their building stone, relics destroyed from ransacked tombs, and treasures carted away. The books in the great libraries of Worcester Priory and the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York were stripped of their leather bindings, the pages sold off by the cartload to those who found a use for them – “…some to serve theyr jakes [privy], some to scoure candlesticks, and some to rubbe thyr bootes.”[2] The lovely parish church in the village of Wellow, county Somerset, lost its fifteenth-century Rood Screen separating chancel from nave, with its green, red and gold paneling and its precious carving of pomegranate and vine. At the sacred pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, home to the medieval saints Patrick, Dunstan, Benedict, David and Bridget, the abbot was tried for treason, then hanged and dismembered.

By 1540, only one ghostly monastery was left standing in all of England and Wales, “an astonishing act of bureaucratic destruction……the most audacious act of vandalism in England in centuries,” according to a recent history of the dissolution of the Benedictine monastery in Durham, 1539.[3]

The Carthusians, obeying their conscience, refused the oath “by God Almighty” that Henry was the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England. Not even Henry’s royal commissioners, on their visit to the monastery, could force the oath out of them.

“[Father Houghton] was ordered to mount a cart placed just beneath the gallows on which he was to be hanged. Meekly he obeyed the cruel order. Then some man of note, one of the King’s council present by the King’s order, asked him if he would submit to the King’s command and will and the public edict. ‘If you will, on the King’s behalf I promise you pardon and life; if not, you see what a cruel death awaits you.’ The invincible soldier of Christ made answer before the people gathered in countless numbers to gaze at the tragedy: ‘I call to witness heaven and earth and God the Lord of heaven and earth, and before you, my beloved, I make confession…that my disobedience, if it deserves the name of disobedience, in refusing consent to your King and his law, arises not from malice or obstinacy or wish to rebel, but from the fear of God, King of Kings and Judge eternal lest I may offend His glorious majesty’.” [4]

And so, of his prior Father Houghton, Dom Maurice, who had himself signed the Oath and was to live years of self-loathing, wrote that “he made a rich sacrifice of sweet savour in return for an attack on truth and justice.” [5]

The bodies of the five executed men were then mutilated and disemboweled, “but the slayers, though their task was over, found more savage work to do. They cut off each head and mangled the bodies by quartering. All the portions – the principal object was to horrify the spectators – they parboiled in cauldrons. Finally, they hung them on gates or elsewhere in public places.”[6] Nine monks, sentenced to Newgate Prison, died there of starvation, eventually.

I closed Ackroyd’s book, stunned.

In public school I had studied the history of the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, and eventually became familiar with the head-spinning proliferation of Protestant churches into sects, communes, cells and utopian colonies. And yet I was still unprepared for the violence that descended on Christians and their churches in the transformation from Catholicism to Protestantism, visible even now in the churches I was visiting. Through narratives of the centuries-long dominance of the Ottoman Empire over parts of Orthodox Christian Europe, I was used to the idea of non-Christian assaults on “our” churches, of the “them” and “us” of Orthodox Christianity: Muslim and Christian, Crescent and Cross, mosque and basilica, minaret and dome. But in contemplating the violent, physical internecine conflict in the west, I was reminded vividly of the frenzied atheism of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and later the purge of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – church buildings desecrated or turned into granaries and abbatoirs, priests sentenced to penal servitude, and a vulgar state campaign denouncing prayer, liturgy, alms, and sacrament.

In 1934, the stupendous eleventh-century cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv housed the Spartacus Brewery: to one writer who walked around its frescoed interior, the ancient walls now exuded “the sour smell of hops and malt.”[7] In 1943, in wartime Moscow, exiled Ukrainian film-maker Aleksander Dovzhenko, despondent in the grey, cold city, made a list in his notebook of the monuments of architecture that, in his lifetime, had been destroyed in Kyiv. He listed twenty-three, including monasteries, academies, churches, and even whole streets. He named no perpetrators, no guilty parties; only the “twentieth century” stood accused: “It has ridden roughshod over the remains of the nineteenth, seventeenth, and eleventh centuries, leaving debris, a crippled land, and disgusting stone boxes.” [8]On the site of the demolished belfry of the Piatnytska [Good Friday] church in Chernihiv, ancient city upstream form Kyiv, former seat of princes and bishops, the city council decided in 1963 to erect a public lavatory.

But at least there was recuperation, eventually, in the East: the Turks driven out of Europe, the Bolsheviks consigned to the dust bin of History, and the belfries rebuilt.

I reopened the Ackroyd book to an excerpt from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (first published in 1563) about the first Protestant martyr, John Rogers, executed twenty years after the Carthusians, at Smithfield, well east of Tyburn just outside the city walls on a smooth field already notorious as an execution site for political foes of the State. It was also the site of a cattle market hard by the Carthusian Charterhouse, long since dissolved.

John Rogers, who had abjured his Catholic faith, preached against “pestilent Popery, idolatry and superstition” in the dangerous time of Mary I’s restoration of medieval heresy laws. He was duly sent to the stake and, in the familiar narrative of martyrology, went there “as if he had been led to a wedding.” He did not endure the fire that roasted his flesh so much as bathe in it: “he, as one feeling no smart, washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been in cold water. And, after lifting up his hands unto heaven, not removing the same until such time as the devouring fire had consumed them – most mildly this happy martyr yielded up his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father.” Foxe called this the Protestants’ “first adventure upon the fire.”[9]

In the end, John Rogers’ adventure prevailed. There would be no reunion with Rome. As in the waning days of Imperial Rome and the conflagration of the Christian martyrs in massacres that did not stop (in the eastern empire) until 304, it was these burnings and the heroism of their victims which helped to harden the hearts of the people against their Catholic Queen.

Looking back from the pyre at Smithfield, I would come to see that in those twenty-one short years since the passage of the Act of Supremacy, the ultimate success of the revolution against the catholicity of the Holy See was foreordained, so radical were its transformations not just of canon and doctrine but also of the humble, everyday practices of the faithful.

Catholic icons are destroyed at St Paul’s 1538-1559: Saturday 12 August [1559] the aulter in Paul’s, with the rood, and Marye and John in the rood-loft, were taken downe…This moneth allso, on the Eeven of St Bartlemewe, the daye and the morrowe after, were burned in Paules Church-yarde, Cheape and divers other places of London, all the roodes and images that stoode in the parishe churches. In some places the coapes , vestments, aulter clothes, bookes, banners, sepulchres, and other ornaments of the churches were burned….[10]

It was the second year of the reign of Elizabeth, who had just been confirmed Supreme Governor of the Church of England and who was embarked on a program of reversals of her Catholic half-sister’s reign, dismissing bishops whose replacements then protested loudly against the reintroduction of icons, crucifixes and roods in the Church of England.

After the rood-lofts, it was the turn of vestments, statues and stone altars. A new version of the Book of Common Prayer was introduced in the Anglican services, which were now compulsory to attend. But there were still many Catholics in the realm who hid their chalices and candlesticks and holy images, and prayed furtively before them. What is loot to one faction is a dearly-loved memento of faithfulness to the other. Even Elizabeth understood the diplomacy if not the psychology of it.

Elizabeth I interrupts a sermon at St Paul’s 1565: The day was Ash Wednesday, 1565, and the Queen had come in person to Paul’s Cross accompanied by the Spanish ambassador. She was doubtless anxious not to embarrass her companion and was consequently not pleased when the dean, in the course of his sermon, condemned the use of images, handling his subject “very roughly.”  “Leave that alone,” Elizabeth shouted from her seat. The zealous preacher did not hear and continued his tirade. “To your text, Mr. Dean,” she cried, her voice growing more angry, “To your text! Leave that; we have heard enough of that! To your subject!” The unfortunate Dr. Nowell completely lost his nerve…quite unable to continue. Elizabeth stamped off in a rage with the ambassador. The congregation, at least so we are told, were in tears.[11]

The dean’s zealousness is impressive, given the decisive victory of the reforming forces over the old order. Didn’t Dr. Nowell realize that he had long ago won the war as well as the battle?

On my own visit to St Paul’s – while a little celestial choir of white-robed Estonians sing antiphons in Latin under the great dome – I feel almost surreptitious as I make out prophets, but no saints, wrought into the iron of the gates which flank the high altar, and the Virgin Mary in a discreet nativity scene in a stained-glass window in the apse. That the Mother of God should have to be so modestly remembered while that sappy Holman Hunt painting of a dewy Teutonic Christ in lantern light, The Light of the World (1853), is given such prominence in the cathedral baffles me.

During the Cromwellian revolution, when kings fell alongside saints, and the monarchical institution known as the Church of England still stank of Rome to some, St Paul’s cathedral nave was turned into a cavalry barrack and stable. “From Inigo Jones’s noble portico the statues of the two kings (James I and Charles I) were tumbled ignominiously down, and dashed to pieces. The portico was let out for mean shops, to seamstresses and hucksters, with chambers above and staircases leading to them….The pavement was trampled by horses, the tombs left to the idle amusement of the rude soldiers, who, even if religious, were not much disposed to reverence the remains of a Popish edifice…”[12]

If I was indignant on behalf of the much-abused Church of England during this Puritan interregnum, it was in part because I already knew the details of a much earlier assault, Christian-on-Christian, in the twelfth-century Byzantine city, Thessalonica, occupied by brutish Normans from the West. Citizens fled to the Basilica of St Demetrius, but the Normans had got there first, offering up slaughtered priests as mock sacrifices, hurling icons to the ground, stomping on them or breaking them up as firewood. They ripped the silver off the saint’s tomb.

“Even more unholy, and terrible for the faithful to hear,” wrote contemporary chronicler Niketas Chroniates, “was the fact that certain men climbed on top of the holy altar, which even the angels find hard to look upon, and danced thereon, deporting themselves disgracefully as they sang lewd barbarian songs from their homeland. Afterwards, they uncovered their privy parts and let the membrum virile pour forth the contents of the bladder, urinating round about the sacred floor…”[13]

II.

Bath Literary Festival 2008: my visit to friends coincides with the Festival and, as it happens, with an event on the Saturday afternoon in the lovely apple-green and gilt Georgian ballroom of the city’s Guildhall. The Festival has announced a new sponsor, Highland Park Whiskey, and we are offered a tot from a silver tray as we enter the Hall. Very civilized, I remark to my friend. Civilization is all around: I learn that the Stuart-era Guildhall’s period rooms are available to rent to film companies (all those Jane Austen costume dramas, I suppose), which is appropriate given the 150 years’-worth of  celebrations, balls and plays that took place here, a real community centre for the rising bourgeoisie.

The Festival event features an on-stage interview with two authors of recent books about 17^th-century English history. The Cambridge historian John Adamson has written The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles 1, a subject of vague familiarity to me but clearly still lively for British readers. It is a new examination of the political crisis that led to the overthrow and execution of King Charles I, and Adamson describes for us his excitement when he had come upon heretofore unpublished archives which helped him make his provocative case: that it was members of the English nobility who were in fact guardians of the nation’s “ancient constitution” so grievously flouted by Charles I and his Catholic wife who tried to gain the upper hand in Parliament. Puritan noblemen also feared the restoration of “popery” under the King’s high-handed Bishop Laud. It was a stand-off – Parliament vs Church and State – that would lead to civil war. The civil war may be said to have started the day the loyalists around Charles raised their standards at Nottingham on 22 August 1641, while London was held by a wildly popular Puritan mayor.

Adamson: “Why is there something different in my book as opposed to earlier interpretations? The Civil War is the key event of the last five hundred years: fighting on a matter of principle and on course to adopt a parliamentary monarchy form of government, forestalling bloody republican revolutions. How you viewed this framed how you oriented to contemporary politics. Ever since, everyone refights the civil war.

“Until recently, the House of Commons and the gentry have been seen as the driving forces of the War, embroiled in class conflict. I’ve put aside those ideological nostrums and gone back to the archives, which haven’t in fact been exhausted. Who were the figures that mattered to their contemporaries? A totally different set of characters than the ones we usually read about.”

As I don’t have any such set of characters in my own Canadian head, I am a disinterested but alert listener.

“In fact, the dominant political group remains the nobility. Why were they revolting? These aren’t just disgruntled barons but a group – all grandsons of the first Earl of Essex – asserting for the people not just for themselves. A populist explosion. What they set out to do is quite astonishing: the personal monarchy is unsustainable, and they almost achieve a republican aristocracy, as among the Dutch and in Venice. They want a king who is a Venetian Doge…and Parliament backs them in 1640.” Doge. Chief magistrate elected for life by the aristocracy.

Adrian Tinniswood is a professional writer who has also been mucking about in the archives, in his case a stash of some 30,000 letters found in an upstairs gallery of a country house in Buckinghamshire. From these he has fashioned a 592-page saga of a family torn asunder by the Civil War, The Verneys: Love, War and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England. Where the donnish Adamson has delivered a stirring lecture as though to a group of bright History majors, Tinniswood is at home with a camera in his face. He’s been interviewed many many times in television studios.

Adrian Tinniswood: “As the story unfolds in letters – I read them on microfiche in the British Library – of Mary Verney dying at 34, I felt, for the first time as a nonfiction writer of ten books that I wanted the story to turn out differently. I didn’t want her to die.

“The Verneys, Ralph and Mary, were 15- and 13 years-old when they married – an arranged dynastic merger – but they were deeply devoted to each other. Ralph outlived Mary by some fifty grieving years.

“The War ruined the Verneys. The patriarch, Sir Edmund, was a luke-warm Puritan but honour required him as a courtier to follow the King. It was to him that the royal standard was entrusted at Nottingham, and he died defending it. But his eldest son, Sir Ralph, did not take the King’s part, he took Parliament’s part, causing a terrible rift in the family. Matters of conscience transcend even family loyalties. The other son, Sir Edmund, had joined with his father, and was then killed by Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers when they massacred a garrison in Ireland during Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland.

“The Verneys are fascinating. The family founder, Sir Francis, walked out on his wife in 1608 and kept on walking, to Morocco where he converted to Islam and became a Barbary Coast pirate.”

John Adamson: “All the interesting sources are in places where people haven’t chosen to look, for example at Buckminster Park, an estate owned by a branch of the family descended from Charles I’s whipping boy. The top letter in the stash was signed in Charles’s hand.”

On the way back to my friends’ I stop at a shop to buy a slab of Pennard Ridge, a fine local goat cheese which, for its long-ago association with a monastery dairy, gone all gone, puts me in mind again of what the Protestants have wrought.

III.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records that a monastery church was situated where the much-restored Southwark Cathedral stands on the south bank of the Thames. The Cathedral’s foundations date to the thirteenth century, and I glimpse them in the excavation dug out from an exterior wall before I enter the nave, and take a deep breath as I look up the soaring shafts and flutes of Gothic columns aiming for the light. After years of immersing myself in Byzantine architectural space – in churches, monasteries, basilicas and chapels throughout the Balkans, ensconced within the dim light and nooks and crannies of the cruciform nave, four equal arms of a right-angled cross, all its surfaces darkened by blackened icons and frescoes, and where I fairly crouched under the dome of the heavens – I am exhilarated.

Southwark had begun as a trading place – Southvirki – held by the Danes along with strategic possession of a castle, bulwarks, ditches, and a bridge across the Thames. The Danes were Christians but this did not prevent King Aethelred the Unready seeking the help in 1014 of the Christian Norwegian King Olaf to confound them: Olaf’s fleet managed to sail under the bridge, where they tied cables around the piles from their ships, then sailed off: London Bridge is broken down, Gold is won, and bright renown…Odin makes our Olaf win.[14] Odin?

There has been a parish for a thousand years named by the grateful English for Olaf. My friend and I are seated in a pew at St Olave’s, within spitting distance of the fogged-up Thames, balancing a plate of lasagna and a glass of red wine while we wait for the posted event to start: “DON’T MISS: Parallel Lives – Companions in the City. Who Pepys knew and whom he didn’t! Milton-Dryden-Marvell-Bunyan and much much more. Every 1^st Monday of the month in 2008; 6:15 for food and wine; 6:45 talk, readings, music.” I look around this softly-lit, well-proportioned space, grateful for the western church’s cheerful gift to world civilization of stained glass windows. There are poignant wall plaques in memory of the lamented dead: to Peter Capponi, who “endured with constancy the exile which he suffered, the victim of an unjust fate,” a Florentine gentleman dead of the Plague in 1582, aged 32. “He endured with constancy the exile which he suffered, the victim of an unjust fate.” To Sir Andrew Riccard, “a citizen and opulent merchant of London, frequently chosen chairman of the Hon. East-India Co.” d 1672. To Samuel Pepys himself, “erected 1883 by public subscription.”

St Olave’s,  a medieval church that survived the Great Fire of 1666, was Pepys’s parish and it was here on several Sundays in 1663 that he squirmed while his wife Elizabeth’s dancing master, Mr. Pembleton, “leered” at her throughout the sermon from his own seat, and Pepys “realized that she had become uncharacteristically eager to attend both services at St Olave’s.” So writes Pepys’s biographer, Claire Tomalin, who also describes the horrors of the Great Plague as it ravaged London, and how, when Pepys returned from the more salubrious environment of Greenwich, in January 1666, “he was frightened by the sight of the churchyard at St. Olave’s, in which the graves were piled high; more than three hundred burials had taken place during the previous six months.”[15] Elizabeth has her own monument – she died at twenty-nine of unassuageable fever in 1669 – a marble bust fastened high on a wall which shows her wide-eyed, her mouth slightly open, as though caught in a moment of animated conversation. Pepys never remarried.

Our lecturer is Graham Fawcett, poet, editor, translator and radio presenter, and his aim is to bring to light the connections between these two parishioners of St Olave’s, John Milton and Samuel Pepys. It is a bit of a stretch, as Milton (1608- 1674) was already twenty-nine, a Cambridge graduate, a poet and a multi-linguist when Pepys was born in 1633. But they shared a schooling at St Paul’s independent public school, and an innovative literary bent. Fawcett: “Milton was a poet, scholar, teacher; radical republican, politician, propagandist; criminal and diabolical radical. He was the first to write an epic in blank verse in English. Pepys invented the diary.”

In 1649, Charles I was beheaded, an event that was to turn everyone’s life in London upside-down. Pepys, a fifteen-year-old bystander, was an enthusiastic anti-royalist who, after the Restoration in 1660, would be always nervous about being exposed as a “Roundhead” sympathiser. Milton served the Puritan and Parliamentary causes and became Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues. But after Cromwell’s death in 1658 – Pepys was still just a frustrated clerk in the Exchequer – the monarchy was restored, and Milton experienced the full “tyranny” of the Restoration: poets rushed to acclaim Charles II, Milton’s books were burned by the Hangman, and he was in fear for his life, and in fact was briefly imprisoned. “If it wasn’t for the poet and MP Andrew Marvell, who spoke in favour of Milton in the Parliament, we wouldn’t have the later works, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Fawcett elaborates. “It was only Marvell’s intervention that saved Milton from execution. By then, Marvell argued, Milton was old and blind and posed no threat to Charles II.” Blind, loyal to the end, he walked behind Cromwell’s funeral cortege in 1658, right through the street where, perhaps peeking through the curtains, the Pepyses lived.

Milton lived in quiet retirement with his third wife, and composed Paradise Lost, written “within a stone’s throw from the #38 bus route to Victoria Station, and was buried in St Giles Cripplegate (#43 bus),” Fawcett explains as though consulting a London Transport map, then adds that it was Karl Marx who said that the reason Milton wrote Paradise Lost was the same reason a silkworm makes silk: “It was an activity of his nature.”

The very young Milton could have seen Shakespeare on his way to the Globe Theatre along Bread St, working on Act IV scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale. (Shakespeare died in 1616.) Or Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern. Years apart, he and Pepys walked the same streets, breathed the same air. “It was a phenomenal time for the Mother Tongue” – and Fawcett cites the critic George Steiner – “when English stood at high noon.” Yet in 1697 none of Milton’s work was in Pepys’ library. When, twenty-four years after Milton’s death in 1674, an edition of Paradise Lost shows up in Pepys’ library, their “parallel” lives have intersected.

But Milton and Pepys had also lived lives buffeted by political and religious turbulence. The new king did not flinch from chopping off the heads of rebels of the party of the regicides who had executed his father, and mounting their heads on London Bridge. We know from Tomalin that “Pepys was horrified” when he learned that the body of Cromwell was to be dug up from its grave in a vault in Westminster Abbey and hanged on a gallows then decapitated, on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. The head was stuck on the end of a pole and set up next to the Houses of Parliament. “Every man, woman and child was bound to see it sooner or later; because there it remained, as a warning against rebellion and republicanism, throughout the twenty-five years of Charles II’s reign.”[16]

Cromwell’s head, being embalmed, remained exposed to the atmosphere for twenty-five years, and then one stormy night it was blown down, and picked up by a sentry, who, hiding it under his cloak, took it home and secreted it in the chimney corner. Pestered for years by the Government, it was only on his death-bed that he revealed where he had hid it.

In 2009, visitors to the Abbey were able to view the nineteenth-century stone tablet covering Cromwell’s original grave while the blue carpet that covered it was in a deep freeze at -30° to kill off moth larvae. The thing is: was his decapitated corpse reinterred there? And where is the skull? It had passed to a series of opportunists who exhibited it in marketplaces and museums and finally into the care of Mr Wilkinson, “a medical man,” according to Peter Ackroyd’s A Traveller’s Companion to London, another amiable text for the literary flâneur in Westminster Abbey. And what did Mr Wilkinson do with it?[17]

IV.

Aethelred, begotten by Edgar the Peaceful, begat Edward the Confessor.

O God, who didst call thy servant Edward to an earthly Throne that he might advance thy heavenly kingdom, and didst give him zeal for thy Church and love for thy people: Mercifully grant that we who commemorate him this day may be fruitful in good works, and attain to the glorious crown of thy saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.[18]

Though he had died in 1066, Servant Edward, Confessor and ever since Patron Saint of the Royal Family, was ultimately interred in Westminster Abbey in 1269, his body still uncorrupted. He was the Abbey’s founder, and his Christian piety was such that when he wed Edwida, it was on the condition that they live chastely as brother and sister; and it was in the week before his death that he had rededicated the Norman Benedictine monastery church of St Peter’s (known as the “west minster”). His funeral procession can be seen on a panel of the 11^th-century Bayeux Tapestry, four men in tunics carrying his bier on their shoulders as they walk toward the colonnaded Abbey.

His likewise-colonnaded shrine on a marble base is now unapproachable, protected from a too-numerous and curious public; but perhaps also because of the memory of the desecrations of Oliver Cromwell and the revolution of the Puritans, who had taken away its gold feretory, which contained his coffin, and destroyed his coronation vestments, which had been venerated as holy relics after his canonization.

The Anglicans, however, still keep his feast day, October 13, commemorating the translation of his body to the Abbey. Perhaps a residual memory of the night an Apostle walked among the English haunts them still.

“The dedication of the Abbey (10^th century): The night before the dedication, it is related that St Peter, in an unknown garb, showed himself to a fisher on the Surrey side, and bade him carry him over, with promise of reward. The fisher complied, and saw his fare enter the new-built Church of Sebert, that suddenly seemed on fire, with a glow that enkindled the firmament. Meantime, the heavenly host scattered sound and fragrance, the fisher of souls wrote upon the pavement the alphabet in Greek and Hebrew, in twelve places anointed the walls with the holy oil, lighted the tapers, sprinkled the water, and did all else needful for the dedication of a church..” [19]

For the first time since 1964, I visit Westminster Abbey. I make a bee-line for Poets’ Corner, a miniature pilgrimage to the Mother Tongue: Lord Byron, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden – each with a line of memorable verse or prose. I have always adored Dylan Thomas’s sumptuous cadence, “Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea,” and I mouth it before moving on to George Eliot, who pronounces that “the first condition of human goodness is something to love: the second something to reverance,” and that is exactly what I stand here to do, to give thanks for the gift of this tongue which only became mine by the accident of immigration away from my ancestral speech. There had been a time, more than twenty years earlier, when I stood accused and guilty before the ancestors for the catastrophe of not speaking the Ukrainian language – which was never simply a language like other languages, a means of expression, but a carrier, a veritable caravan of cultural and political and psychic goods. It was as though I, unilingual in the diaspora, had stood idly by and watched it go tumbling over a cliff while on its way to the beleaguered colony of countrymen in western Canada.

Eventually, I did learn to express myself in Ukrainian but it is only a learned language, not the Mother Tongue of my education, my literacy, my art. And just as my great-uncle Peter Svarich had once made a pilgrimage to Oxford and Cambridge universities just to be in awe of what they represented to him – the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon intellectual achievement which he had been cut off from in ancestral Galicia (where, however, he did speak Polish and German) – so I stand in the Abbey and look down on a black stone inscribed as a memorial “to Caedmon who first among the English made verses.” His is the first name we have of poets “singing” in their native English, and whose art came to him in a dream while sleeping in a cell at Whitby Abbey in the late seventh century.

The song he dreamt was Caedmon’s Hymn, his only surviving work as far as we know. Now hail we heaven-kingdom’s Lord, the Measurer’s might, and His mind’s thought, the Wonder-father’s work! Of all things He the Living Lord beginning made—ah! [20]

That “ah” holds me, an exhalation when the words run out.

Edward Confessor may be only a shadow of his former reputation but, as I leave the Abbey, I look back at the niches above the west door, which once held medieval saints and apostles, to see figures of Maximillian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan friar who voluntarily died in place of a stranger in Auschwitz, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for Christian opposition to Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and Bishop Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran good shepherd assassinated during Mass. Twentieth-century martyrs have been raised up in the places emptied of earlier heroes, the apostles, saints, prophets, as though we have periodically to do a kind of Spring cleaning of our spiritual attics, and assign ancestral objects of veneration to the local parish tip.

When you come into the church of St Martin’s in the Fields, you see the memorial to the “victims of injustice and violence during the apartheid era in South Africa” and over the arch to the High Altar the impressive Royal Arms of 1725. Along the north wall is a memorial to the Far Eastern prisoners in the Second World War – many of whom worked on the notorious Railway of Death in Thailand. Two pieces of the railway’s sleepers are preserved in a glass case, relics for a secular age, now that the left hand of John the Baptist, say, has no place in a modern church. But in a monastery in Montenegro, in the Holy Community of the Nativity of the Mother of God in Cetinje, it may be viewed through a small glass window, leathery but beautifully-formed in spite of missing two fingers, and resting on a velvet cushion.“We who venerate it will have our souls watered with life-giving piety,” my host Fr. Jovan had explained, “just as this hand baptized Christ with the water of the Jordan River.”

I’ve arrived at St Martin’s in time for Evening Prayer, and join a rather battered-looking and bewildered middle-aged man, a very fat young woman who periodically nods off, and the gray-haired vicar who wears the clerical collar, mannish trousers and shoes of her calling. Of hymns we sang not a note, for prayer we stood for none except when directed; but there were canticles, including the Magnificat, to chant, remnants of far older worship. A few days later, I am back, again for Evening Prayer, and again there are three of us, all women. Two lighted candles have been placed on a simple table and the “prayer director” mumbles into his prayer book as we each bow our heads over ours. The Book of Common Worship, which I have picked up, falls open at February 14, Cyril and Methodius Lesser Festival, for the two Greek brothers who translated Scripture into the language of the Slavs newly-arrived into the Christian cosmos. If it were February 14, we should sing this Collect/Kontakion in their honour, the short prayer for the day: “Lord of all, who gave to your servants Cyril and Methodius the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavs, make your whole church one as you are one, that all Christians may honour one another, and east and west acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”

Hallelulia! I move my lips to this prayer but wonder if it is ever said at all any more in this era of modern, “reformed” worship in the west? Am I the sound of one mouth mouthing?

It is very difficult now to reconstruct an England that had once been part of Catholic, let alone Orthodox, Europe, just as – come to think of it – it is almost impossible to reconstruct in today’s Balkan countries, now proudly etched into maps as singular ethnic and Orthodox entities, the fact that they had once been part of a multiconfessional Empire under the Ottoman Turks: minarets, madrasahs, synagogues, bathhouses, markets, cemeteries, all, all gone. I remember a friend’s bitter reminiscence in the ancient Bulgarian city, Plovdiv, of how under the strata of two thousand years of Christianity lies the rubble of Roman and Greek cultures, of how, as a student on summer archaeological digs, excavating Christian-era streets, he had been heart-broken to find the marble head of a beautiful Roman girl used as paving stone.

But the amount of sheer extraction from these maps gestures toward the fullness of the originals, some earlier and much more expansive space of European Christianity, where the cultures of east and west recognized a common matrix from which they had emerged, well before the Protestants of England in the Thirty-nine Articles of their faith abjured the ancient sacraments, the sacrifices of the Masses and the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome which had once bound them to this common narrative.

V.

I am a baptized Orthodox Christian, for whom the Reformation is an event in the history of western Christianity. For eastern Christians, the great rupture within the one holy, universal (i.e. catholic) and apostolic Church occurred much earlier, in 1054. It is the date of the Great Schism, when both arms of the Church, in Rome and Constantinople, pronounced anathemas on each other. In that first olympian gesture of ecclesiastical overhaul, Cardinal Humbert, legate of the Pope, and Patriarch of Constantinople, Cerularius, excommunicated each other, forever – as it turned out – alienating Christians of the Eastern and Western Churches. (The anathemas were not rescinded until 1965 at a meeting between Patriarch Athenagoras and Pope Paul VI).

Efforts east and west to reunite the two great Christian ekklesia were not in fact abandoned until the fall of “the Queen of Cities,” Constantinople, in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, but the irreperable damage had been done. Pressed hard and then overwhelmed by the forces of Ottoman Turkey – no “popish” excesses here when churches were even forbidden refurbishment – Orthodox Christians lamented and cursed their fate, increasingly embittered over the indifference of the western churches. They remembered the violence of Schismatic rhetoric and the trauma of the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by Crusaders. The assault of Christian armies upon a Christian power and one of the patriarchal seats of the Church was horrific: rape and pillage, desecration and looting, fire and sword.“I would rather see the Muslim turban in the midst of the city than the Latin mitre,” protested Byzantine writer Nicetas Choniates. “Even the Saracens are merciful and kind, compared with these men who bear the Cross of Christ on their shoulders.”[21] At the fall of Constantinople in 1453, as though it were an offense to the natural world itself, lamentations rose up from Armenian, Italian and Hebrew singers, all of them grief-stricken by the loss of the Second Rome, which had held sway on the Bosphorus for almost a thousand years and over many peoples. Now “in the desolate valleys, they are embracing dunghills, as the earth herself laments. There shall be a consumption in the midst of the land, for the earth is utterly broken down.”[22]

St. Gregory Nazianzen: And now I rove Estranged and desolate a foreign shore, And drag my mournful life and age all hoar Throneless and cityless…Living from day to day on wandering feet. Where shall I cast this body?  What will greet My sorrows with an end? What gentle ground And hospitable grave will wrap me round?…The air interpose, And scatter these words too.[23]

But their words were not entirely scattered, because many Byzantine artists, poets, philosophers and teachers fled to Italy where, with the dissemination of the Greek and Latin texts they brought with them, they are credited with inspiring in turn the European Renaissnance’s rediscovery of Classical humanism. Venice already boasted the 11^th century Byzantine basilica of St Mark (adorned with treasures looted from the Sack of Constantinople) with its glories of fresco, mosaic and gold; and I think I see a conscious evocation of this in the Great Screen in Southwark Cathedral’s Choir erected in 1520, so  reminiscent of the icon screens of Byzantine-rite churches with their tiers or bands of holy images. The Reformation had forbidden all statuary and so the niches of the Great Screen remained empty of religious figures. But in 1930 the lower panel was gilded and a new panel, inspired by a panel in Venice’s St Mark’s, was added, with depictions of the Latin and Greek Fathers of the Church. Mirabile dictu, historical memory! Once upon a time, after all, Christians of this realm did not flinch at the sounds of Greek in their sanctuaries and did uncover their foreheads for the anointing with holy oil and filled their humble clay vessels with blessed water while St Peter himself walked the paving stones.

Popish? I suppose critics meant the splendour, the grandiosity, the ornamentation, forgetting that what is pleasing to the eye may also be a conduit to the spirit. Churches with icons understand this, how the beautiful image meditated upon acts as a sort of hinge between the temporal and the eternal, and how the gold of its surfaces represents the brilliance of celestial light. In Westminster Abbey, I had noticed two very large icons placed outside the Choir, a Christ Pantocrator (Lord of the Universe) and a Theotokos (Mother of God), whose Byzantine presence in this most venerable shrine of the Church of England startled me, as it did an Anglican friend, who told me she wanted to throw them down and blow out the votive candles to boot. She muttered in exasperation, “Don’t they know we broke away from Rome!” But it seems to me that it is not just “Rome” she wants to have broken from but from all of ancient Christianity which wrote icons as early as the fourth century.

Not a year later after my visit to the Abbey, the spiritual head of the Church of England, Dr. Rowan Williams, said of icons: “Religious art in particular mustn’t just be representational of a day-to-day world but must somehow connect with the ‘dwelling of the light’, quite a challenge for westerners trying to make religious art today.”[24]

The Byzantine ecclesiastics used the terminology, “bright sadness,” the sorrow and the hope on which the gaze of the prayerful rest.

By the time Westminster Abbey was rebuilt in the thirteenth century, the high point of Byzantine art in the Balkans had been reached, in the churches and monasteries of Ohrid, Macedonia (now a UNESCO World Heritage site). And by the fifteenth century Byzantium could look back on a thousand years of artistic achievement, most of it inspired by the teaching and patronage of the Church.

The Royal Academy’s exhibit of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder has created something of a fuss in the London media. Royal Academy posters showing his Eve in the Garden, a high-breasted, slim-waisted, full-thighed, hairless beauty, with her nakedness draped in a diaphanous strip of see-through silk, had caused an uproar when they were plastered all over the Underground. But what I was not prepared for was the intensity of his paint. The blacks are pitch, to the point of emitting sulpher, the reds/burgundies are blood-coloured, the textiles are palpably fur, velvet, brocade, wool, and their embroidery and stitchery and jewellery lure the eye straight into their warp and woof. Figures are posed every which way in the cheek-by-jowl crowd scenes, mouths gaping, arms akimbo; and although the men are depicted with pitiless personality, the women strike nary a variation on Chastity/Fidelity and Seduction/Duplicity.

Cranach was a die-hard Protestant and worked with his close friend Martin Luther on his German Bible as well as issuing his pamphlets from his own printing press. He was also commissioned to do portraits of sombre burghers, and seems to have taken a dislike to real women. Some reviewers see in Cranach’s women a “celebration” of the female form “in all its alluring, fertile, nurturing glory.” [25] But perhaps his sexless, vapid females – as I see them – are simply how Protestantism now represented certain canonical subjects, female fleshiness such as the womb of the Mother of God and her milky breasts having gone the way of other Catholic excesses.

The other revelation was that he painted in the early 1500s, and is called a Renaissance master, but he seems much earlier, given his awkward, gawky humanism. Perhaps this is the gawkiness of the apprentice’s flourishes adapted from the Byzantine masters whose ancient, sophisticated and treasure-laden world was fading from Western view.

Did the two worlds not once know of each other? I stand in western, Protestant churches and wave back at that old world, trying to summon it into view. It is the sheer loneliness of the effort, though, which is becoming an agony.

In Westminster Abbey I visited the tomb of Elizabeth I and Mary I. Only Elizabeth is represented in effigy but we are assured both are interred within. I decipher part of the Latin inscription: “Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection.” In 1977 an inscription was added to the floor pavement and so I read: “Near the tomb of Mary and Elizabeth remember before God all those who divided at the Reformation by different convictions laid down their lives for Christ and conscience’s sake.” We  may very well wish to compose such a prayer here. But where can I pray for those divided by the Great Schism of 1054?

And for those, a thousand years earlier, who were the first of the Church’s martyrs, the first to lay down their lives “for Christ and conscience’s sake,” the ones tortured, beheaded, burned at the stake in the persecutions of the late Roman Empire, especially savage in the east? St Polycarp, a bishop martyred in 155, defied the Roman proconsul in the stadium in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) and confessed, cheerful, even joyful – the stake and kindling were already prepared – to being a Christian. “You threaten me with fire that burns for an hour, and after a little is extinguished, but you are ignorant of the fire of the coming judgment and of eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. But why do you delay? Bring forth what you wish.”[26]

And for those in Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) who built a church of St Sophia in the fourth century, in ruins under the now-impenetrable layer of stones, to which Constantine the Great, venerated in the East as the first Christian emperor, summoned the bishops to hammer out a common statement of faith and belief. I once stood on the site, within the ruins of  a later church, and crouched before a faintly-coloured fresco showing Mary and St. John the Baptist (the Forerunner) who, together with Christ in Majesty, form the iconographic subject known as Deisis (Greek for “supplication”). These are the same Mary and John carved into so many rood-lofts in pre-Reformation churches in England, and which had caused such offense. But when Constantine summoned the bishops and they came, he did not release them until they had promulgated the Nicene Creed. Even Anglicans still accept this Creed as their profession of faith. But they’ve thrown out the rood-loft!

In 988, in the waters of the Dnipro River which flowed through the many-hilled city Kyiv, seat of the newly-Christian prince Volodymyr, throngs of men, women and children were baptized en masse while the totems of the old gods were smashed to smithereens. Where they stood rose churches in the Byzantine model and to serve them Greek-speaking patriarchs from Constantinople. I used to think, as a child, this happened a very long time ago, eons older than anything I knew of history anywhere else. But now I know better. Not even the Slavs who lived in Kyiv in the tenth century were as old as the Saxons and Angles and their Church in England, nor was their Christian faith yet so deeply rooted.

Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People [In 597] St Gregory the Great, being moved by divine inspiration, about the one hundred and fiftieth year after the coming of the English into Britain, sent the servant of God, Augustine, and with him several other monks who feared the Lord, to preach the word of God to the English nation.[27]

What follows is a disjointed time-line of conversions among the peoples of Britain long after the Romans had decamped, although the British had their first martyr in St Alban in 209 while the Empire still had the teeth to persecute Christians. Canterbury, Iona, Lindisfarne, King Arthur, St Cuthbert, are all legendary names even to those, like me, who claim no inheritance from them. London had its first Bishop, Mellitus, in 604, and the monks of Lindisfarne had their own superbly illuminated Gospels by 715. (We are still 273 years away from the conversion of the Slavs of Rus in the Dnipro). In 960 (28 years away) Dunstan, Bishop of London, established a Benedictine community on the site of Westminster Abbey, so we can be sure (according to the visitor’s guide) that God has been worshipped on this site for over a thousand years.

So it is not a trick or foolishness of overheated piety to confess a certain degree of nostalgia and yearning for what had once been imagined as one world, a shared cosmos of symbol, gesture, reverie, even as nobles beat serfs like clods of earth, priests chose Mammon over the salvation of souls, and the Kingdom of God, evoked in the opening of lines of the Eastern Liturgy – “Blessed be the kingdom of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, now and forever, unto ages of ages” – was not yet here, no, not in our lives yet, but was there, beyond our deaths.[28]

VI.

In Yorkshire in 1536, an army of some 30,000 gathered – men of the great families of the north, and yeomen, country gentry, freeholders and leaseholders – to march, as the Pilgrimage of Grace, under linen banners inscribed with the five wounds of Christ.

The Church had denounced the enclosing of common land for private sheep pastures but to no avail; tenant farmers and their families were being summarily evicted. Away from London, whose parish churches and university colleges received donations formerly deposited at the monasteries, communities were bereft of the charitable works once performed by the eight hundred local abbeys and convents. Where were the indigent, the lame, the abandoned, the sick to turn now? Laymen appropriated income from parish tithes. Monastic hospitals, schools and kitchens had closed. Only some fifteen per cent of the wealth that had been expropriated by the Crown had been reinvested as endowments for such good works. One now begins to hear of the packs of “sturdy beggars,” able-bodied men and women roaming the Tudor countryside begging for food.

The pilgrims were not looking to overthrow the King; they wanted the monasteries re-opened and protection from the abuses of the enclosure system. For this, they were called “seditious and traitorous.”

The Tudor Chronicler, Edward Hall, on the insurrection of the northern men of Yorkshire, 1536, in the reign of Henry VIII: They also declared, by their proclamation solemnly made, that their insurrection should extend no further than to the maintenance and defence of the faith of Christ and the deliverance of holy church, sore decayed and oppressed, and to the furtherance also of private and public matters in the realm concerning the wealth of all the king’s poor subjects. They called this, their seditious and traitorous voyage, a holy and blessed pilgrimage.[29]

With an army of less than 10,000, the Duke of Norfolk did not even attempt to fight but, negotiating for the King, promised a pardon for all rebels if they would only disband, as well as a session of Parliament to address their grievances. The Pilgrimage dispersed. But Henry betrayed them. He imposed Martial Law, arrested “rebel” leaders and executed them, hanging them in their chains.

Since, Lord, Thou dost defend us with Thy Spirit,
We know we at the end, shall life inherit.
Then fancies flee away! I’ll fear not what men say,
I’ll labor night and day to be a pilgrim.[30]

There was one more cathedral I wanted to see, in York, a massively-walled city from Roman times (first century CE) which boasts an important Gothic minster. Of the rest of its story I knew nothing but what I read while on the train north from London (e.g. in 1840 this journey would have taken thirteen hours). Its first church was dedicated to St Paul in 627, the city was captured by Vikings in 866 (who left wooden walls now under a shopping mall), there were anti-Semitic riots in 1190, and in 1472 the Minster was completed, the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps.

This was another blustery day in early March, but full of sunshine, and I cheerfully made my way up and down streets, some of them laid out in Roman times, aware that three metres below lie the Roman barracks and baths. The fortress was called Eboracum and was once the capital of upper Britain but in 410 the Legions were forced to abandon the place as the entire Empire wobbled under Barbarian incursions along its frontiers. The Roman Empire: once upon a time the great pre-Christian cultural unifier from sea to sea.

York comes from Jorvik, the Viking name for their settlement outside the crumbling walls. At the Jorvik Viking Centre museum, I pay to have a replica of a Viking Age coin struck before my very eyes. It’s a tenth-century coin, and shows a cross, a sword and the hammer of Thor, covering all confessional bases. But, once inside Yorkminster cathedral, I am inside the wholly realized world of medieval western Christianity: built in the shape of the Roman not Greek cross, it is adorned spectacularly with stained glass, a Lady Chapel though Mary herself has been banished from the precincts, the domed octagonal Chapter House; with statues of fifteen kings of England in the Screen, the arms and shields of noble families in the arches, and the tombs of archbishops in the transepts. Thank God for the sun, lighting up the grey and green “grisaille” glass of the window of the Five Sisters, five tall and slender lancets, their panes filled in with the calligraphy of black lines etched into glass as though by text. This is another world away from the lugubrious, gaunt and haunted spirituality of so much of Byzantine Rite iconography.

Inside the Chapter House of the cathedral, the face of the Virgin and the head of the Christ Child on a 13^th century monument have both been destroyed but a small carving of Mary suckling her infant has somehow been spared, the men with cudgels perhaps pacified by the tenderness of a mother and child embracing each other. But they did their work above the entrance to the Vestibule, whose empty niches once held statuettes of Christ and the Apostles said to have been made, wantonly, of silver.

A ghost map of medieval York would show all the vanished churches and abbeys suppressed and/or demolished in the period of the Dissolution of Monasteries: the 11^th century All Saints at Fishergate had disappeared by 1549; St Gregory in Barker Lane, demolished; St John in Hungate, suppressed; St Mary’s Abbey, founded in 1080, deconstructed in the 16^th century stone by stone as a virtual quarry for building sites all over Yorkshire. That St Nicholas in Lawrence Street had been severely damaged in 1644 by Parliamentarian cannon fire in the Civil War – York was held by Royalists – reminded me that, into the tumultuous narrative of Protestantism in England was now added the sub-plot of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads.

Outside, I walk slowly around the spectacular circumference of the cathedral when, almost at the entry again, I come across an imposing bronze statue, larger than life size, of a seated Roman figure. In breastplate, he’s clearly a soldier and a regal one at that, with his right arm slung casually along the back of a lion-pawed throne, his left arm resting lightly on the pommel of an enormous sword which he is regarding with transfixed thoughtfulness, as though wondering whether even to wield it. He has a clean-shaven Classic but strong-boned face and a soldier’s short-cropped head. At the sculpture’s base, I read: “Constantine by this sign conqueror.”

Of course! In hoc signo vinces.

By this sign thou shalt conquer: the legendary promise made to Constantine in a dream or vision the night before the fateful Battle of the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber in 312. The next day he was to confront the army of his enemy, the vile and licentious emperor Maxentius; he won that battle and many more after, eventually in 324 to become Constantine the Great, emperor of all Rome, seated in the splendid new capital on the Bosphorus, Constantinople. The promise was “written” in the sign of the chi (Χ) and rho (Ρ), the first two letters in the Greek name for Christ (Christos/ Χριστος).

It was an epic journey which began in 306 very near this spot at what is now the cathedral entrance, when Constantine, who had come to Britain to assist his father, Constantius, in his campaign against the Picts, was immediately proclaimed their leader by the Legionnaires on Constantius’s death. “Where Caesar is there is Rome,” it says on the back of the statue’s base. Even here in Eboracum.

He entered the Empire as the son of a Roman officer and a Greek stable-maid, as a member of the court of Emperor Diocletian under whose watch Christians were savagely persecuted and probably as a devotee of the Persian god of light and truth, Mithras, protector of warriors; and he left it as the protector himself of Christians in the Empire whose civil liberties he recognized, whose churches he patronized, and into whose faith he made a death-bed conversion in 337. According to a plaque attached to the adjacent fence at the cathedral, by this conversion “he established the religious foundations of Western Christendom.” Actually, these were the foundations of all of Christendom, which was still one world. And, remembering this, Orthodox Christians call him, and his mother, Saints. They are often pictured together in icons in the church, the low-born mother at the side of the ruthless emperor, but draped in the long burgundy robes with jewelled borders of the Byzantine court, their heads wreathed in silver haloes, co-founders of a church and a civilization that held sway from the North Sea to the Black Sea and all around the Mediterranean, for a few centuries at least.

Constantine’s Vision of the Cross:  The year was the sixth of Constantine’s sway

Since he was raised up in the Roman kingdom

To be battle-lord and leader in war. […]

He was threatened with war,

Tumult of battle. The Hunnish tribe

And the Hreth-Goths also assembled a host. […]

Then to great Caesar as he lay in slumber […]

To him appeared a beauteous Presence […]

Then Constantine, the glorious king,

Protector of princes and Giver of gifts,

War-lord of armies, bade quickly work

And shape a symbol like the Cross of Christ

As he saw that sign revealed in the heavens.[31]

The Anglo-Saxon poet, Cynewulf, who  may have resided sometime in the ninth century in Northumbria, in a kingdom whose capital was York,  has for his own reasons transposed Constantine’s great battle against the Roman army of Maxentius on the Tiber to a mighty clash with the Huns on the Danube. I suppose, by the ninth century, this seemed a livelier contest. But the Sign of the Cross is still there, and the “fair heavenly form” of his dream, and the standard of the Holy Tree “in the thick of the foe.” In York he is still remembered, and thrillingly, as the soldier. Great but no Saint. It was that Church which claims unbroken inheritance of his legacy, the Church in the East, which gave him the eternal Crown. His soldiers raised him on their shields and called him Augustus, his first biographer, Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea (d. 339), eulogized him “pre-eminent in every virtue that true religion can confer,” but the Church declared him “equal to the Apostles.” There was joy in this as well as reverence, for, as Eusebius tells us, in becoming emperor of all of Roman territory, “in a wide circle embracing north and south alike from the east to farthest west,” and abolishing the persecution of Christians, Constantine had “wiped the world clean from hatred of God,” and his people then “kept dazzling festival; light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes….good things present were enjoyed, those yet to come eagerly awaited.”[32] Not quite the Kingdom of God, but a place to start from: the ecclesia, from the Greek, to call out.

EPILOGUE

I walked away from Wellow Square, turned down Mill Hill, crossed Wellow Brook over a stone footbridge, turned right onto a bridlepath, walked uphill until a sign indicated “Historic Site of the Stoney Littleton Long Barrow,” and turned right to walk across an open slope, where primroses and daffodils shook in the wind. I could see what I was heading for: a great grassy mound gently rising from a point of elevation which gave a good view all around. Wind whipped me something fierce and spat shredded plastic shopping bags onto the thorns of the hedges lining the lovely course of Wellow Brook below. Sheep safely grazed on the slopes. Besides the flapping of my coat in the buffeting winds, there was total silence, not even a bleat out of the sheep.

A plaque on the encircling fence read: The mound in front of you is the remains of a Neolithic shrine or tomb. It was built about 5000 years ago and probably served a local farming community. At the south-east end of the mound is a central gallery with three pairs of side chambers which formed the burial area. Tombs like these were used over hundreds of years before being sealed and abandoned.

Through a hole in the roof made c. 1760 by the farmer who owned the field and was scavanging for stones to fix his roads, a Reverend John Skinner of Camerton and his brother Russell, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, and his steward and surveyor Philip Crocker, assisted by a labourer named Zebedee Weston, all gained entry May 25 and 25, 1816. There was a lot of rubbish to clear away from the interior before they could identify anything of archaeological interest. And when they did, they could see that what the mound had concealed was a burial chamber: in the end chamber, leg and thigh bones; in the west innermost side-chamber, a confused heap of bones; in the east innermost side-chamber, four jawbones with “perfect” teeth, upper parts of two long crania (middle-aged male and elderly female), both unusually flat in the forehead; in the west central side-chamber, bones of two or three skeletons. Not a week later, “some riotous colliers” from the local pits broke the slab which sealed the entrance and made off with some of the bones and anything else which appealed to them.[33]

There is nothing of the ossuary to these chambers now. But posted near the entry is an “artist’s impression” of the burial ceremony which may have been performed here: a white-cloaked priest holding a human skull stands in a cow’s head mask in front of the barrow. The newly-dead is laid out on a platform. On another lies a pile of bones, the ancestors, I supposed. Three figures in the foreground prostrate themselves in the grass.

I looked down into the valley of the Wellow onto the stone buildings of the village. The Roman Empire once embraced this now soothingly-peaceful spot – local history refers to it now as the Roman “occupation” – for as well as a villa there was once, speculatively, a Christian church here. Well, why not?  The Edict of Milan, 313, which was promulgated by Emperor Constantine, lifted the persecution of the Empire’s Christians, and so perhaps the Romans who packed up and left Wellow c. 400 were Christians.

After them the Saxons built a church and then the Monastery of St Andrew. In 1117 Henry I established an order of Augustinian Canons at Cirencester (once an important Roman town) in the Cotswolds and gave to them the “ancient churches of Froome and Wellow.” After the ravages of the Black Death in mid-fourteenth century, the church, it seems, fell into decay. But on May Day in 1372, at the feast of St. Philip and St. James, a new church was consecrated, St Julien the Hospitaller Parish Church, named for a pious medieval pilgrim to Rome, whose bells still chime the quarter-hour. Perhaps once they chimed rather for that round of prayer of matins, vespers and vigils, terce, sext and none, which gathered medieval Christians together in the Liturgy of the Hours. Now it is the ineluctable, forward-pressing passage of time which preoccupies us; then it was the reassuring cycle, which brought us every morning once again to the promise of the Risen Messiah.

The oldest site I know of near my hometown in Alberta are the two Standing Ribstones which bear signs of human carving and which may be thousands of years old, or 250 years-old. They too lie on a high point of land, from which approaching herds of bison could have been sighted, although there were no burials there.

The Wellow Barrow is a very well-preserved tumulus, its sod covering a structure founded on carefully-laid stacks of flat stones (I imagine hauled up from the creek) which also form the inner walls of the chambers. I peered in and could see the burial chambers clearly, sepulchral berths in the underworld.  Hill and dale have been farmed as far back as the Neolithic. Before Christianity, before Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire and the Reformation, before Protestants and Bolsheviks, I have finally found a source for my spirit beyond which I discern no other: a ghost-pile of bones, and a potshard.

Myrna Kostash

January 17, 2011

11,786 words

[2] John Bale, 1549: http://infao5501.ag5.mpi-sb.mpg.de:8080/topx/archive?link=Wikipedia-Lip6-2/95214.xml&style#2

[3] Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Purgatory be damned,” London Review of Books, 17 July 2008. 28-9

[4] in Ackroyd, op. cit. 220

[5] ibid, 221

[6] ibid, 222.

[7] Danilo Kis, “The Mechanical Lions,” A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Penguin, 1980), 40

[8] The Poet as Film-maker, ed. Marco Carynnyk (MIT Press, 1973)

[9] from Acts and Monuments by J. Foxe,” in Ackroyd, London, 172.

[10] from A Chronicle of England by Charles Wriothesley, in Ackroyd, London, 62

[11] from A History of Saint Paul’s ed. W.R. Matthews and W.M. Atkins 1957, in Ackroyd, London, 65

[12] from E.H. Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (London 1702-4) in Ackroyd , London, 67

[13] O city of Byzantium: annals of Niketas Choniates,  trans. Harry J. Magoulias. ( Wayne State University Press, 1984), 167 ff.

[14] From J. Stow, Survey of London (London, 1598) in Ackroyd, London, 140.

[15] Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Viking, 2003), 177.

[16] Claire Tomalin, op. cit., 117.

[17] It then passed to a series of opportunists who exhibited it in marketplaces and museums and finally into the care of Mr. Wilkinson, “a medical man.” The Times 1874, in Ackroyd, London, 260

[18] http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/266.html

[19] from W. Thornbury, Old and New London, 6 vols. (London, 1873-8) in Ackroyd, London, 245.

[20] Robert P. Creed ,“How Caedmon Got  His Hymn.” http://saintsandspinners.blogspot.com/2006/02/caedmons-hymn.html

[21] in Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church new edition (London, 1997), 60.

[22] Michael Ben Shabbetai  Cohen Balbo, trans. Avi Sharon, “A Hebrew Lament From Venetian Crete on the Fall of Constantinople,” http://www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/_resources/articles_pdf/article0007.pdf

[23] From Elizabeth Barrett Browning, The Greek Christian Poets and the English Poets (London, 1863) in http://www.voskrese.info/spl/browning.html#naz

[24] http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/winter-2008/picture-perfect,202,RAMA.html

[25] Sarah Greenberg, “The shock of the nude,” RA Magazine, Spring 2008. 13

[26] Mike Aquilina, The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers (Our Sunday Visitor, 2006), 72.

[27] http://www.juniata.edu/faculty/tuten/bede.html

[28] I am grateful to Brian Fawcett for this note.

[29] englishhistory.net

[30] http://www.hymns.me.uk/to-be-a-pilgrim-favorite-hymn.htm

[31] “Two Rune Signatures of Cynewulf,” An Anthology of Old English Poetry, trans. Charles W. Kennedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 135-137.

[32] Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine trans. G.A. Williamson (London, 1989 rev), 332.

[33] StoneyLittletonGuideBook.htm

12000 words  February 2, 2011

Siegfried is a funny name. It means peace and war. Or rather, it means victory, Sieg, and then peace, Frieden. You have peace after you win a war. Otherwise you can’t have it.

My second name is Siegfried. It’s after my uncle, Siegfried deFiis. He’s not actually my uncle, he’s my godfather—Patenonkel. In the country where we come from your godfather is both a father and an uncle to you. He is an uncle in Heaven and represents God to you, and he is a father on earth who represents your family.

Siegfried deFiis was my father’s best friend in the army. They went to university together and then to the war. DeFiis is actually a Dutch name, although I used to think it was French, because of the de—“from.” My uncle Siegfried’s last name comes from the border country between France and Holland and Belgium and our family’s country, and all those names and languages meet and get mixed up there. My grandmother still uses the word Portmonnaie— “wallet,”–which is actually French, for example, but which she thinks is our language. She says the French stole that word in a war and her using it is a way of making them give it back.

2.

Siegfried von Xanten. Xanten was and still is a town about twenty kilometers down the Rhine River from the town where my grandparents live and where my parents grew up and where I was born. It is a fortress town from the very olden days of myth, and it has stone walls around it two metres thick. Up there on the ramparts the heroes used to walk and throw their spears and hurl their missiles at strangers trying to invade their country: French or Dutch or Belgian enemies: the heroes of Xanten fought them.

My uncle Siegfried’s name (my second name) is written in stone in the archway of one of Xanten’s town gates. There it is, carved into the granite: Siegfried von Xanten, still completely legible after all these years. And right below it, in smaller letters (and without the von) is my first name. I originally come from Xanten too, and I was a hero just like Siegfried. The original Siegfried was the first hero of Xanten, and I was sort of like his sidekick. My first name is written a little bit smaller and a little bit lower down (and without the von). People didn’t expect quite as much from me in battle, I didn’t have to face quite as many enemies as Siegfried did, but I was still a real man and a warrior. I was Siegfried’s friend, his sidekick. We fought in battles together: together, Siegfried and I were invincible.

Uncle Siegfried, my father’s best friend who later became my godfather, actually lives in Xanten. That is the amazing thing. Here is this historical town with its huge historical name wrapped like muscles around it, and my uncle Siegfried has the same name, and actually lives in that town and comes from there. He is from Xanten, Siegfried von Xanten, just like the original Siegfried; only the last name has been changed.

He is small and dark-haired. My uncle Siegfried is a slight man with black hair, and he works as an accountant or a lawyer or something. A dentist. He has an office by the town hall, right near the gate where his historical name (and my historical name) are inscribed in stone, and he can look up and stand in the shadow of that name every day when he goes to work. He can hear its echo bouncing from the walls of Xanten: Sieg, victory, and then Frieden, peace, freedom. The English word “freedom” comes from Frieden so  I guess that proves the English stole some words in a war, too.

3.

Every year at Christmas and on my birthday my uncle Siegfried sends me gifts. Godfather gifts. Since I don’t know him very well and I only saw him a few times before we immigrated I sometimes can’t tell where these gifts come from. They come from a word or a name; they come from a godfather or a goduncle,  Patenonkel, who is up in the sky and down on earth and who has the same name as you for a second name, and who is named after a hero from the olden days of myth. A godfather, I think, can live in Heaven and also on earth. I imagine my Uncle Siegfried’s hand reaching down from a cloud and giving me those gifts. His hand has flown all the way over the Atlantic Ocean from an old country to our new country in a cloud and when the cloud opens it becomes a palm and inside this palm are these gifts.

The gifts my uncle Siegfried sends are books. They are the stories of the heroes he and I are named after, and he sends them, I believe, so that I will remember the heroes and know them, even though the stories are from so long ago. Heldensagen, they are called. Helden means “heroes” and Sagen means “to say”: so you are saying something about the heroes when you read these stories. You retell their deeds. The English word “Saga” comes from Sagen and so when you tell these stories you are simply saying things: it doesn’t matter which language you are in.

Siegfried is in those stories, and I am too. I am a little bit smaller and a little bit lower down, like on the town wall of Xanten, and I don’t have a von attached to my name, but I am still a fighter.  Siegfried, as I said, was the strongest boldest hero of Xanten and I was his second in command. I am not mentioned as much in the stories as Siegfried is, so you don’t find out as much about my deeds, but you know I am there fighting along with Siegfried to defend that town. I don’t mind that Siegfried stole so much of the limelight, because I am Siegfried’s friend, his companion, and I love him. I will later (much later) take Siegfried’s name as my second name to commemorate this love. So it doesn’t matter so much that in the myth time Siegfried is getting all the credit. “Deed” comes from “doing,” “to do,” so its more important what you do than what you say or what is written about you.

In some of the stories I’m not there at all. The deed writer, the myth writer, has left me out and it is only by remembering myself from other stories that I know I was there. I sometimes get sad that I’m not in all the stories and I wasn’t as famous as Siegfried was, but I’m glad someone remembered to write me down on the stone walls of Xanten, right there next to Siegfried. Xanten, as I said, is a real place and you can go there and see it if you travel twenty kilometres down the Rhine River from where I was born and where my parents grew up and where my grandparents still live.

4.

In the myth time my uncle Siegfried’s books speak about the hero (my second name) slays the dragon. He bathes in the dragon’s blood and becomes invincible. He has to slay the dragon because the dragon protects the power, called the Hort, owned by the fabulously wealthy (and in this story evil) dwarves who live in the mountains about forty kilometres upstream from Xanten on the other side of the Rhine. The Siebengebirge, the Seven Mountains. These are the same seven mountains that appear in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; the dwarves Siegfried outwitted to get the Hort are probably the same seven dwarves, or their ancestors (dwarves live for hundreds of years) Snow White met, because her story comes from that place too; and this is an example of how stories can get tangled up with each other, just like languages and names do, and you sometimes don’t know which one you are telling. You can see the Seven Mountains where the seven dwarves lived and where Snow White swallowed half an apple and it caught in her throat, and where Siegfried went to get the Hort, if you stand on the west side of the Rhine, about twenty kilometres upstream from the place where I was born and look east, across the river. You can point to them and count them: one, two three, four, five, six, seven. Seven is a magic number in this and in a lot of stories, and if you wanted to found a town in the days of myth all you had to do is go to those kinds of magical places like forests and mountains and outsmart the dwarves (and sometimes witches) who lived there and get their wealth and power. Then you could take the power down into the valley and start a town or a city and become a hero.

Kids here, in my new country where I now live, don’t seem to have godfathers or sky uncles. Or at least they don’t talk about them. They don’t have Patenonkels who send you gifts in a cloud from which a hand reaches down to teach you where you are from, von. I look at the other boys here to see if they have a man standing behind them whose name is written on the stone wall of a town and who sends them sagas that tell you where you are and have been, and I never see such a man. So I don’t’ know if you can have towns here that have your name on them and that you need to defend because they are said to tell your story. Sometimes the boys here fight me and call me bad names. They tell me I don’t come from here and can’t live in their country because I come from an evil country whose leader was a monster. When they do this I sometimes think of my uncle Siegfried and my father, fighting foreign enemies in the border country where we all come from. Sometimes, then, I become Siegfried, fighting on the ramparts of Xanten.

5.

What are myths? I watch my father’s mouth reading the Siegfried (and my sometimes invisible) story. I imagine the deeds. I can’t read the books uncle Siegfried sends because they are printed in black Gothic letters that look like caves or cathedrals. So I listen to the words coming out of my father’s mouth carrying the deeds, sagen them, and sometimes this is a bit like looking at the speech bubbles in comic books where you imagine what’s being said but you don’t hear it: you have to know beforehand that the words appearing in the speech bubbles above the characters’ heads are what they are supposed to be saying. So myths are a little bit like comic books. They tell stories about distant lands and heroes and deeds that you partly imagine and that are  partly real, and the only difference between myths and comics is that you don’t get your name from comics. Comics come from the United States, thirty miles down the Columbia River, across the Line, and you can go there and look at that country but you will not see the places where the stories and the names come from. You will see a blank where these should be.

Are myths true? After he bathed in the dragon’s blood and went off to found Xanten with his new-found power and invincibility—the invincibility he got from the dragon’s blood is like the stone walls around Xanten—Siegfried married the King’s blond daughter Kriemhild, and would have lived happily ever after, except for the evil dark man, Hagen, who knew about Siegfried’s vulnerable spot, right in the middle of his back, between the shoulder blades, where a birch leaf caught and stuck when Siegfried was bathing in the dragon’s blood. Hagen thrust his spear into that spot and it went from the back right through to the front of Siegfried’s body, the point poked out of his chest (I saw it in the picture in the book my Onkel Siegfried sent me) and it was from this wound that Siegfried died. Hagen did this evil deed to pay Siegfried back for the mean thing he had done in beating Brunhilde, the Fire Queen of Iceland, up in bed on behalf of his king, Gunter, who couldn’t vanquish her, he wasn’t man enough. Brunhilde (imagine such a name!) was too strong a female for him, even though she was a woman and he, Gunter, was a king. It took a hero of Siegfried’s stature to overpower Brunhilde, who never forgave him, and Hagen connived to use her resulting hate for Siegfried to help murder him because of course Hagen wanted and desired Kreimhild, Gunter’s beautiful and blond daughter, whom Siegfried had married as a reward for helping to conquer Brunhilde. Hagen and Brunhilde were dark, evil people; Siegfried and Kriemhild were blond, good. That is the crux of the story.

Hagan could kill Siegfried in such a cowardly way, by stabbing him in the back (to imagine them fighting face-to-face is impossible, is a joke) because he had watched from behind a willow bush when Siegfried bathed in the dragon’s blood. He had seen the fateful birch leaf caught on Siegfried’s skin creating the vulnerable spot which became his downfall. Willow bushes, like birch groves, are magical places in these stories, and in many stories, and the fact that Hagen was lurking in one and saw the leaf (I can see the jagged tooth-like edges stuck to Siegfried’s white skin) is a true story about his country. I am careful in my new country which has many birch groves and  willow bushes because I think they might have this fateful power. Plant power can move across oceans and carry its magic with it. When the boys here want to fight me and won’t let me be in their country I think they are Hagens, hiding I the bushes, getting ready to strike.

6.

Are myths true? Were they? Some people in my parents’ and my grandparents’ country act is if they are. Partly true. They are partly made up and partly true, I think, and this is a little bit like having a god-uncle or a sky father who is half spirit and half person to you, whose hand comes down from a cloud (blown by breath) and who remembers you with books. This man, who is half  in one country and half in another one, tells you, sagens you, the story of your name. He tells you where your name comes from even if you have wandered across a border into another country. Myths tell you with their breath where your body is von, and in this way the situation with myths is different than with comic books. Comics, as I said, come from the United States and you don’t get them from god-uncles or sky fathers: you go up the highway to Lewis’ store and buy them for ten cents with your own money because your parents won’t buy them for you. Your parents hate comics.

Yes, the people from my family’s country, the border country between France and Holland and Belgium (and maybe England, too, looking on now from across its Channel) thought, or think, the myths about the blond Siegfried and the dark Hagen and the dragon and blond Kriemhild and dark Brunhilde and Gunter (and the one about the imaginary me) are true. They act, or can act, as if these characters were still around. I watch my father closely when he reads me the stories to see if he betrays, with any of his hand or eye movements, the idea that these heroes and heroines are not real, and he never does. This is an easy thing to fall into when you come from a town or valley where the events in the stories you are telling, sagen, actually came from and are told to be true: you can go out and look at the Seven Mountains, or the walls of Xanten any time of the day or night, and sure enough, there they will be; you can count them on the fingers of your hand or trace the shapes of the letters in the stone with the tips of these same fingers. There’s even a cave today in the Siebengebirge (I don’t know if it’s the actual same one) that’s made up to look like the dragon’s cave where he guarded the Hort and where Siegfried slew him. The English word “hoard” comes from Hort (or it could be “horde” that comes from there) and the dragon hoarded (or horded) that Hort and no one could contest its power until Siegfried came along and ended that part of the story. There’s a statue of the dragon made out of concrete there now to commemorate the event; people look at the pool of water below which I guess is supposed to depict the blood Siegfried spilled and then bathed in to become invincible, and the people throw pennies in there and make a wish. That’s what happens to myths these days. You pay one Mark to get into that place.

7.

What are myths? I have thought about this question for quiet a while now and have come to a conclusion. Myths are a different kind of talking. When you talk about deeds in this way you use a different tone of voice than you do for normal speech. You use a different part of your body to speak from and you use a tone of voice that is reserved for speaking about your ancestors. You revere them with your voice. When I watch and listen to my father read me the books my uncle Siegfried sends I can tell by his tone of voice that he is revering, that he is remembering and saying—something: sagen—about the ancestors, and about their country. I can tell also, by the movement of his body and breath,  that the ancestors are close by and the Sagen is not finished. There is something more to be said.  I don’t know if people who don’t have, and can’t imagine having, godfathers or sky-uncles somewhere across a border who maybe speak another language and who send you stories in clouds blown by breath over an ocean will understand this, but I’m telling, sagen, this story to find out if they can.

8.

Dear Onkel Siegfried. Thank you for sending me the books that sagen me where our names come from. It is good to know that one’s name comes from a real country in which one has lived and where one’s ancestors once lived and are revered by their descendants.  Some people here might believe their names come from comic books and from the United States which is a country south of us where lots of stories come from but where ancestors are mostly silent, and these people don’t tell or write true tales or sagas about their mythical past. When the boys here fight me and say I can’t live in their country and I come from an evil country that had a monster for a leader, I often remember you and our names. I imagine we are standing on the ramparts of Xanten, defending out town against foreign enemies, British and Dutch and French ones who are trying to invade our country. You and I fight back-to-back: your first name from myth protects my back, my vulnerable spot that says I’m not strong enough to fight the boys, and my first name from life protects your back, your vulnerable spot which says that you were not strong enough to fight the foreign enemies that wanted to invade your country when you and my father were in a war. You and I, I and Siegfried, fight back-to-back to defend our names and our countries and its stories.

I think now that you send me those books to tell me, sagen, a secret. You didn’t want to fight in the war where you and my father became friends. You, and maybe my father, too, were scared. You, Siegfried, didn’t want to be a blond hero from myth fighting foreign enemies; you would rather be a small dark-haired accountant or lawyer or dentist; you would rather take care of people’s teeth or their money than fight in a war. You, and perhaps my father, too, only fought because an evil dark voice behind you, a Hagen voice, was telling you, sagen, that you had to. The voice would stab you in the back if you didn’t fight.

Yes, I think books can carry secret messages. They can tell you, sagen, one thing and they can also sagen, tell you, something else. I know now, from reading in my new language, that the part in the Siegfried story about the blond and the dark people is not true. It may have been true in the myth time, but it is not true now. I am blond, and I am not a heroic warrior from myth who loves to fight, and you are not an evil dark Hagen who waits in bushes to stab people in the back. When the boys here fight me and say I can’t live in their country I sometimes imagine they are Hagens, but they are both blond and dark-haired, and so this can’t be true. Some of them can be Siegfrieds.  I think now that they fight me because I come from a real country that has a true story and also a myth, and that has my true name carved in the stone walls of one of its towns. I am in this way remembered. I know where I come from. Stone tells me where.

I don’t believe, like my grandmother does, and like you, who came from a border country were names and languages mix, maybe sometimes thought, that countries steal words from each other. Words cannot be stolen: they are sounds that fly over an ocean and open like hands and reveal a story that has been pushed here by wind, and that wind is breath. When you and I fight (in my imagination) back-to-back on the ramparts of Xanten, or in the border country between our country and three other countries, we sometimes turn and whisper over our shoulders to each other. We whisper our—secret—names : I my first name (whispered to you) and you your first name, (whispered to me.) When we do this the fists of the boys who fight me here and who I can’t beat, hurt me less; and the words that hail down on your back and say, sagen that you must be a blond heroic warrior from myth when you are just a scared, dark-haired accountant or lawyer or dentist hurt you less. We whisper to each other like brothers, and with our names, and with each other; we have peace and freedom. Our Sieg is a secret, silent, not a noisy one.

Your Patensohn, NS.

PS:

Do you remember the part in the Siegfried story where Siegfried puts on the invisible cap and fights off the horde of dwarves (I think it was the dwarves) who can’t see him? I always thought when my father read me this part of the story that Siegfried wore a cape, Kappe, and I only learned later, when I was thinking about the story in my new language, that Kappe means “cap,” or even “hat,” not cape.  Stories in books, I now think, are like invisible caps: they hide your body like a cape does while being in fact only a small piece of cloth on your head. When Siegfried conquered Brunhilde in bed he also wore the invisible cap (cape) and Brunhilde loved him forever after, with her whole body, even though she couldn’t see Siegfried and was sometimes angry at him and thirsted for revenge. I often wonder what Siegfried said to her from inside the invisible cap or hat he wore in bed that night.

PPS

I’m not sad anymore that they myth writer of the Siegfried story sometimes didn’t write down my name. I know now that I’m still in the story because you, Siegfried, real and the imaginary Siegfried, are remembering me. So are the stone walls of Xanten.

4101 words  February 1st, 2011