We interrupt this otherwise stimulating discussion for a little Yanni's Rituals
an excerpt from the long poem/soliloquy
HELEN
Nowadays I forget the names I knew best, or get them all mixed up—
Paris, Menelaus, Achilles, Proteus, Theoklymenos, Tefkros,
Castor and Polydeuces—my moralizing brothers, who, I gather
have turned into stars—so they say—pilot-lights for ships—Theseus, Pireitheus,
Andromache, Cassandra, Agamemnon—sounds, only formless sounds,
their images unwritten on a window pane
or a metal mirror or on the shallows of a beach, like that time
on a quiet sunny day, with myriads of masts, after the battle
had abated, and the creaking of the wet ropes on the pulleys
hauled the world up high, like the knot of a sob arrested
in a crystalline throat—you could see it sparkling, trembling
without becoming a scream, and suddenly the entire landscape, the ships,
the sailors and the chariots, were sinking into light and anonymity.
Now, another deeper, darker submersion—out of which
some sounds emerge now and then—when hammers were pounding wood
and nailing together a new trireme in a small shipyard; when a huge
four-horse chariot was passing by on the stone road, adding to the ticks
from the cathedral clock in another duration, as though
there were more, much more than twelve hours and the horses
were turning around in the clock until they were exhausted; or when one night
two handsome young men were below my windows, singing
a song for me, without words—one of them one-eyed; the other
wearing a huge buckle on his belt—gleaming in the moonlight.
Words don't come to me on their own now—I search them out as though I'm translating
from a language I don't know—nevertheless, I do translate. Between the words,
and within them, are deep holes; I peer through them as though
I'm peering through the knots which have fallen from the boards of a door
completely closed up, nailed here for ages. I don't see a thing.
[help, I can't seem to stop!]No more words or names; I can only single out some sounds—a silver candlestick
or a crystal vase rings by itself and all of a sudden stops
pretending it knows nothing, that it didn't ring, that nobody
struck it, or passed by it. A dress collapses softly from the chair onto the floor, diverting
attention from the previous sound to the simplicity of nothing. However,
the idea of a silent conspiracy, although diffused in air,
floats densely higher up, almost levelled out,
so that you feel the etching of the lines around your mouth grow deeper
precisely because of this presence of an intruder who takes over your position
turning you into an intruder, right here on your own bed, in your own room.
translation: Gwendolyn MacEwen and Nikos Tsingos
