There was one more obstacle to overcome: O’Donnell couldn’t drive. Rule #5 stated membership would not be considered unless the applicant possessed a legal driving certificate. He took advantage of Dodge down time to familiarize himself with the machine. Whenever the car slumbered he sat behind its wheel practising the smooth shifting of gears, learner’s manual resting in his lap, the glossy, air-brushed wantonness of Ed Levine’s calendar girls an encouraging audience to his lofty aspirations. He approached Pete Dombrowski about his chances. The longtime club member had dropped by Ed’s garage to replace a gasket. O’Donnell held a light. – How long before I’m in? – Depends, kid, Dombrowski said. Maybe never. – What’s your guess? Gimmee a ballpark. Dombrowski slammed the hood and wiped his hands. – Members decide by secret ballot. That waiting list? It don’t mean nothin’. – I’m getting my licence soon, O’Donnell reminded him. Dombrowski slid in behind the wheel and fired up the car. The engine roared to life. – Don’t go celebratin’ yet, squirt. Soon O’Donnell had mastered the clutch. At every opportunity he stole runs around the block. After only a few weeks he was driving as far as the municipal line. Mr. Levine was frequently waiting for him when he returned to the garage. The two had an unspoken agreement. The senior Levine wouldn’t inform the membership of my friend’s unauthorized excursions if O’Donnell remained silent about Mr. Levine’s afternoon liaisons with a certain housewife. O’Donnell says that pressure to influence the outcome of the draw was especially vigorous the first Sunday in May, as Car and Driver magazine invited all interested associations to enter a vehicle in the Spring Festival gala. The winner that particular Sunday had the privilege of powering the Dodge along the flower and bunting-bedecked…
Defences If at some time one comes near you and lays his defences by your feet do not trust him. The true knights don’t yell nor do they wear armour they don’t joust noisily they just stand on the side they observe they feel your moist sorrow and very softly they caress your hair.
Escape He sat on the stool by the front yard; his hands, so clumsy, had already overtaken us. “Someday they will demolish the house,” he says to me “and they’ll discover it.” And every so often, at the far end of the room, someone wrapped a bed-sheet around himself; it was the time he escaped until the bed sheet fell empty on the floor, and we had a friend forever. In the stations, the immigrants were lined up and, hiding inside their their overcoats, they waited for the voyage like a dog on its deathbed. And uncle Elias, our rich relative, years after his death, still stood on the sidewalk, however, he didn’t turn to look at us. “Uncle,” I said, “Since you knew, why did you come back?” “I can’t fall asleep,” he says to me, “I still have to lose some more.” I tried to leave, but I met the deaf boy on the side street; he was leaning on the wall, and he was crying, and now there was a small lit chapel on the wall while snow fell outside, and passersby drowned in their words.
I The lucidity of rose petals suffuses as the wind ripples and caresses the dunes of praying sunlit trees dressed in their primeval innocence and abundant feeblemindedness as the creeks lovingly murmur songs to one another and Heaven whispers lullabies to virgins not yet kissed other than in dreams, when one buries his forefathers under the big oak at the forlorn edge of the village abiding with nature’s peace commanding the birth and death in one breath, all creatures crawl eastward, life lingers in light the greater the number of peaceful days the higher the oak of death irresistibly climbs and the first ode swings in transparency.
Pip: Manolis Aligizakis runs a site where exile, desire, and the weight of history all show up before breakfast — and somehow that's a normal Tuesday.
Mara: vequinox has been posting across a wide range of work lately — modern Greek poetry translations, fiction excerpts, and a philosophical essay on what imagination actually does. That's the territory we're covering today.
Pip: Let's start with the poetry, which is where most of the weight lives.
Voices Out of Exile and Time
Mara: The thread running through these poetry posts is displacement — from homes, from language, from time itself. The question is what survives when all of that is stripped away.
Pip: George Seferis opens the answer with something almost architectural. The setup is a poem called "A House Near the Sea," and it earns its length.
Mara: The poem earns it. Here is the spine of it: "Houses, you know, grow easily resentful, when you empty them."
Pip: That line does a lot of quiet work. The house isn't a metaphor for loss — it is the loss, with feelings of its own.
Mara: And the Yannis Ritsos volumes — both Volume IV and Volume VI — push that further into the political. Volume IV's "Without Counterweight" puts it plainly: "All the flags are torn to the whole length of time and there isn't one on a balcony to lower half mast."
Mara: Tasos Livaditis, in Poems Volume II — longlisted for the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize — turns inward. The observation that cuts is this: "each person keeps the key to their prison in their pocket and pretends to have forgotten it."
Pip: So the exile isn't always political. Sometimes it's the one you've arranged for yourself.
Mara: Antony Fostieris, in Selected Poems, takes that further into paradox — "In my future time, I'm already dead, fresh and dead in my darkness." Alive and dead simultaneously, in glassy cities that sink into clouds.
Pip: Hours of the Stars and the Neo-Hellene Anthology pull in the other direction — toward light, toward a "solemn and beautiful stranger" welcomed until exhaustion, toward wild lilies and the nectar of April lips.
Mara: Entropy frames the whole range: "between the minimal and infinity." Second Advent of Zeus traces selfhood back to its cellular origin, and Titos Patrikios distills community into six lines — seed, acorn, oak, path, forest.
Pip: From houses that resent you to forests that remember you. That's quite a range for one tradition.
Mara: The fiction posts ask a different version of the same question — what does a self do under pressure? Let's go there.
Fiction at the Edge of Endurance
Pip: The fiction excerpts here aren't comfort reads. They're interested in what people do when the situation is genuinely impossible — and how quietly that can happen.
Mara: Straits and Turns opens with a CIA agent named Bradley arriving home after a long flight, his life running on institutional routine, two years from retirement. Then: "he smelled the strong alcohol odour all over the…" — and the excerpt cuts.
Pip: The ellipsis is doing real work there. Everything before it is procedural calm, and then the floor drops.
Mara: Water in the Wilderness takes a different register entirely — warmer, more fragile. A boy named Bobby with missing fingers, escorting an elderly woman through a hospital door with his shoulders erect and head held high. The damage is visible; the dignity is louder.
Pip: And then Redemption lands its immigrant quietly in a three-by-four-meter room with paint peeling off the walls, trying to order food from a menu he cannot read. The stakes are enormous and nobody is shouting.
Mara: Gospel of Silence is the one that swings hardest. The narrator describes choosing "the rebellious Christ" over "the hermits' Christ who resigned himself to everything" — and then his father beats him with a wooden ruler until it shatters.
Pip: He endures it without a sound. That detail is the whole book in one sentence.
Mara: In Turbulent Times catches a family holiday collapsing in slow motion — a son counting down the minutes before he leaves, his mother's voice going "shrill, like the high-pitched squeal of scraped metal." The Qliphoth goes stranger, into an occult archive kept by a psychiatric patient who has memorized forbidden lore.
Pip: Poodie James brings a dead mayor, a woman who doesn't cry, and piano music that might be Chopin. Nostos and Algos asks the plainest question of all: if love is there and you won't give it, "why are you still breathing?"
Mara: Across all of it, the body under pressure — institutional, familial, historical, self-imposed — is the constant. The desire to escape, and the question of what you carry when you do, runs right into the next theme.
The Body That Desires and the Body That Endures
Pip: Red in Black is reviewed here, and the review makes a distinction that matters: the strongest poems are the ones where the beloved isn't just observed.
Mara: The review puts it directly: "The poem's lyric force comes from mutuality." When touch and transcendence are shared gestures rather than one person's projection, the erotic becomes something more durable.
Pip: What this means in practice is that desire without mutuality is just description — and description alone doesn't hold a poem up.
Mara: Red and black move through the collection as moral categories, not just colors — passion and industrial damage, the body that wants and the body that gets worn down. Wheat Ears lands the same collision differently: a phone call from someone already buried, their laughter roaring through the wire.
Pip: Hear Me Out takes it into the digital — "I started falling in love with you, without even knowing you." Same ache, different medium, same unanswerable questions about what's real.
Mara: Which is also, quietly, a question about imagination — what the mind constructs when the body isn't there. That's exactly where the essay goes next.
What the Imagination Actually Does
Pip: An Essay on the Structure of the Human Imaginative takes on a question that's been wrong since Aristotle — what truth means when you're talking about poetry.
Mara: The essay argues that Europeans have reduced truth to correspondence with empirical fact, and that this is a fundamental error. It goes back to the Greek word Aletheia, drawing on Heidegger: "Aletheia is understood as unconcealment, the state of being disclosed."
Pip: So the upshot is that a poem isn't lying when it doesn't match the facts — it's doing something the facts can't do, which is disclose what's otherwise hidden.
Mara: The essay is careful to say this isn't a call to revive ancient Greek philosophy wholesale. The point is that the dominant model of truth has narrowed what we allow imagination to count as real — and poetry pays the price.
Pip: Every poem in this episode is, in some sense, an argument for that claim.
Mara: Houses that grow resentful, bodies that endure, love that arrives by wire — and underneath all of it, a theory of what imagination is actually for.
Pip: Same questions, next episode. The site keeps publishing.
At first, the face of love for me was the humiliated, broken, rejected barefoot beggar. Later a quiet rebellion nested itself in my heart; by then I had grown irritated by helpless love that endured everything, by the sour stench of passivity, by the endless swallowing of humiliation. Instead of the hermits’ Christ who resigned himself to everything, I chose the rebellious Christ. When I arrived home on the day of the awards ceremony, I found my mother crying. My father was delivering one of his endless monologues in a pitch far higher than natural, intoxicated with himself, circling endlessly around his own words. “Where were you?” my mother asked. Silently I handed her the certificate. “What’s this?” my father tossed out indifferently. “Be first in your studies!” Then he threw it aside. That same day, when I was supposed to leave for the reward excursion, my father attacked me with the long wooden ruler for some reason — today I no longer remember why, perhaps there was no reason at all. He beat me until the ruler shattered into pieces. I had only one aim: to keep the blows from reaching my face. I endured it without a sound. I looked at him with cold hatred and with a cruel kind of pity, watching the shameful, helpless rage pouring out of him. That only enraged him further. He could not bear that I never humbled myself before him, never begged forgiveness the way my siblings did. I could not ask forgiveness for something I did not feel was a sin. It was around then that the desire to escape awakened within me. I stepped outside my body, and from then on observed the entire inner and outer chaos from a distance, the world struggling with its external and internal laws, and within it my own self, stripped of meaning. Instinctively I kept away from artificial intoxication — alcohol, drugs, anything of the sort — not out of virtue but out of self-defense: I was terrified of losing sight of myself even for a moment. Later I tried to direct both myself and my surroundings through carefully planned or improvised scenarios. At first it was a game;
In my Future Come then to my future time when you won’t find me however, do come pull the thread of all events that will take place exhaust me to the final possibility. The current returns and I melt with the cities and the reddish buildings stones and roofs melt the metal of my voice too. A heavenly light floods me most shining dead light black. Come then to my present past come then not death, sleep, beyond flesh not expiation cauterize this laughter cauterize this side of me stop the smile, the futile heart the infrared blood. In my future time, I’m already dead fresh and dead in my darkness not forgetfulness, memory, truth, I’ll think, I’ll tell you, I don’t know, I love you, until when, never, not yes, not no I, a rider, jump over exquisite hurdles valiant rider in glassy cities alive and dead that sink in clouds and clouds which perhaps yes, perhaps no.
…ently held out his hands to her. His missing fingers did not seem to faze him; he appeared to be learning to compensate for the loss. “An’ you know what, too, Auntie Tyne?” He gazed up at her when she stood, his eyes like saucers now. “Rachael says we’re goin’ home on the really biggest old bus she’s ever seen, with a long dog on the side.” Tyne chuckled. “You sure are, Bobby. And when Uncle Morley and I come home you’ll be able to tell us all about it. Okay?” Solemnly, he nodded his head then offered his hand to Tyne’s mother. Shoulders erect and head held high, he escorted her through the door. A few days later Emily Milligan brought the children back to the Holy Cross, to say goodbye before starting their trip home to Emblem. Tyne took them to see Morley. Following Sister Carol Ann’s gentle instructions, they approached the bed quietly, and stared in wonder at the man they scarcely recognized as the jovial person whom they called Uncle Morley. His hair had grown a little so that he didn’t appear bald anymore, and the bruises around his eyes and cheeks had faded to a pale yellow, tinged with blue. But Tyne knew that he must look strange to the children who were seeing him for the first time since the beating. She had been of two minds about bringing them to his room, but Morley had asked to see them. And when he opened his eyes and smiled at them, she knew she had made the right decision. There was something she and Morley wanted to do together before the kids left for home. “Do you … have the gifts, hon?” Morley asked haltingly. Tyne removed a large bag from the bottom of the bedside table. Opening it, she drew out a brightly painted dump truck followed by a Shirley Temple doll. The looks on the faces of Rachael and Bobby brought tears to her eyes. When they had gone, Tyne took Ronald to a quiet waiting room. He had tried, without success, to hold back the tears. She wanted to hug him, but knew he already felt embarrassed because of loss of control over his emotions, so she sat quietly by his side and let him talk. “I wish I could go with them, Mrs. Cresswell. Do you think the doctors will let me go soon?”
Necrophilia Bradley reached home late at night after a long flight, during which they experienced their fair share of turbulence. He knew this flight so well after twenty years of taking it, since he started working on the East Coast, and his house was in Los Angeles. He also knew most of the American Airlines personnel; he had an account set up by the Bureau and always flew this airline. And tonight, Georgia, the flight attendant, offered him a second glass of wine and a good plateful of food, which he relished to the last crumb. Being with the Bureau for so long, he almost did everything as part of a routine, a repetitive action, from the time he’d call to arrange his reservation to the arrival at the airport and to the airline counter where most of the girls recognized him and always served him the best way. The agency took care of all the bills, it was part of his contract with the CIA and no one ever raised an eyebrow at what he submitted; it was times when he thought of having something extra, something the bureau wouldn’t even bother to look into, however, Bradley was a common sense man and always did his side the best and fairest way possible to make sure he wouldn’t disturb any waters a couple of years away from his retirement. When he got inside the house, he noticed there was no sound, other than the ventilation system humming its rhythmical music. Brad was so tired that he took off his shoes and went upstairs to their bedroom, only to find his wife, Beth, asleep, even though he had informed her he was on his way home. Undressed, he slipped under the bedcovers when he smelled the strong alcohol odour all over the…
He walked back to the rented room and settled in his new home. It was a small room with a table, a chair, a closet for his clothes, and a single bed. The size of the room was no more than three by four meters, with paint cracks all over; some paint had peeled right off the walls. He didn’t really care about its condition. It was a very cheap room. A small window with shutters opened to the street, and Hermes saw a small garden. He took out his clothes from the suitcase and hung them with care in the closet. He, then, sat down on the bed and thought it would be a good idea to write home and let them know he had arrived and was okay, three letters to three different addresses. Realizing he had no paper, he walked out to the closest corner store, where he bought some paper, a small jar of coffee and a small rectangular box of sugar cubes, which he encountered for the first time in his life. He went back to his room and sat at the desk to write his first letter to his uncle and untie. He described in detail that his trip was very good, the city was beautiful, and he felt enthusiastic about the university. He wrote with intense feelings, particularly in the second letter, addressed to Magdalene. He signed the letters and sealed the envelopes. He would post them first thing tomorrow morning. Hunger took over him. He got up, knocked at the door of his landlady and asked where he could find a restaurant to eat something. She informed him that “Black Cat” was the closest restaurant to the house and told him how to get there. Hermes got out and walked the few blocks to the restaurant. The server brought his coffee. Hermes understood that coffee was served each time, even before an order was given to the servers. He looked at the menu, but he couldn’t understand the words; therefore, he didn’t know what to order. He had his coffee and a cigarette. The girl refilled his cup and looked at him with questioning eyes. He pointed to the menu and said, “I don’t know what these are…” his finger travelling down the list of food items. The young server asked him, “What language does he speak…” He said, “Greek,” she called him to follow her. He got up and followed the girl through a hallway to an opening that connected the restaurant to the kitchen.
