Shores of Greece

I hitched down through France to Marseilles and the trip took about a week. From there I took a train to Genoa and hitched down the West Coast of Italy to Rome and over to Brindisi. I felt I was back in the days of the Renaissance from the look of the countryside and small towns along the way, the way the light played over the ocean coming down in huge shafts, as in some old painting of the Annunciation or Birth of the Christ-Child. I seemed to be traveling through time as well as space and at times felt that I could easily be a medieval bard as well as a modern folk minstrel. These sensations had an eerie reality about them. It was all so strange and yet familiar, as though I'd traveled these roads before. Many experiences along the road fueled this sensation of "time travel" but my goal was set and I didn't linger too much along the way.

I took the overnight ferry from Brindisi and I will never forget waking in the early morning to the vista of the Greek islands and the inky blue Mediterranean Sea. This was surely something from my past life for I felt a deep recognition within me and a sense of homecoming and joyfulness mingled with the feeling that perhaps I had finally stumbled into paradise. The air seemed so clear that I could see for miles where the islands rose in fading fantastic majesty before me and with each breath my consciousness seemed to expand, open and heal. All the fear that had resurfaced in England faded into a new hopeful expectancy of the adventures awaiting me.

From Athens whose exotic neon life, somehow marrying the old and new worlds, excited and inspired me I shipped out for Rhodes, to an older, more familiar connection with this inward growing sense of the medieval and from there to the island of Symi where I was to spend the better part of the next year. From Rhodes the trip was a couple of hours on a stormy sea in a small ferry and I arrived in the sheltered, winking harbour after dark.  It would not be until the following morning that I was able to see that half the village was bombed out and derelict ruins from World War II but at night the place seemed ancient and serene.

My friend, the English poet Tony Clarke, had given me a book to read on the island of Symi, written by a recent wayfarer to its stony shores and from its pages I had penned down the names of a few locals, among them the mayor of the town.   I mentioned the man's name to a young guide who had offered to show me to a hotel and was shown to a small pensione above a waterfront taverna.   I had no sooner settled into my room than I was summoned downstairs and introduced to the mayor and a friend of his who had stopped there for a late night bite.  I suppose the word of this young foreigner asking for him had somehow piqued his interest.  The mayor, an elderly and dignified man who was also a doctor, greeted me in a respectful but very stern way and I suddenly felt too young and out of my depth in asking for his advice and help.  He reluctantly gave me the name of a few possible locals who might have houses to rent and in leaving, paid for my meal. His parting tone of voice was unmistakable though and in it I clearly heard "Don't bother me again!" 

The next morning, walking along the harbour, I met a young American woman with the unlikely name of Barney, who invited me to come and meet her friends and I wound up sharing a communal house with them.  The haze of hash smoke and  camaraderie came to a close when one of our house mates came down with severe cramps and vomiting and I summoned the doctor, the same stern mayor Nikitiades who I had first met, rousing him from his evening routine and this time incurring his anger at being disturbed.  He took one quick look at the unsanitary conditions in the house and closed us down.

I fumbled around, asking everyone I met and finally found a house right on the water's edge a few miles from the main village. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that the roof leaked or that it was populated nightly by huge waterside rats, that were easily as large as cats!  Although the little stone house (more like a hut), a few miles from the main village, gave an authentic air to my poetic hermitage, there was no access to water and after being frightened out of my wits the first night by my unexpected rodent visitors chasing over my sleeping bag I found that the task of carrying supplies from the village and repairing the roof occupied most of my time.  The daily trek with water, especially, began to wear me down.

In the meantime I'd already begun playing my guitar in the waterfront tavernas where an atmosphere of music and retsina prevailed nightly and one party seemed to stretch into the next. I was invited to join a group of local musicians who played weddings and the church festivals that abounded on the island. The group was fronted by Kostas, the village barber, who played a lean and mean accordion.  Kostas was a small, wiry, moustached islander who welcomed me into his circle like a brother and whose friendship for me bordered on reverence. This experience was not unique, either, in my island acquaintances, who gave their fellowship to this passing stranger whole-heartedly and without holding anything back.  Kostas basically taught me the songs in the tavernas where we played for fun and free food almost nightly and until we were ready to "hit the road" as a group.

There were 350 churches, I was told, on this small island and there was a celebration for every saint whose name attached to the church, so festivities went on all year round.  I was paid for my services and so mingled my repertoire of Western pop classics which were constantly requested, especially the Beatles and Bob Dylan, with the rhythmic strummings necessary to accompany Greek accordion (played by my good friend Kostas), bouzouki, and drums producing the fast paced folk dance music that echoed and wedded the oriental sounding styles of Crete and Turkey with the more European sounding music of northern Greece. This heady mix of music proved most welcome everywhere and our services were always much in demand. Along with the drachmas that came my way as playing fees was an abundance of free food of the most delicious variety imaginable which was always available for musicians at a feast. In the tavernas, when I wasn't playing, so many people would recognize me that I wonder if I ever paid for a meal anytime I ate out.  If I did offer money, someone would have already paid for me, the restaurant owner would offer the food "on the house, just this time", or someone would grab my hand as I held the money out and refuse to let me pay, paying in my stead. This was the old Greek style of hospitality to a stranger, something that is fast vanishing in the modern tourist times, but which was then still very much in evidence along with the kind of honesty we find it difficult to conceive of these days. As my friend Jill Ginghofer once told me and I found out later for myself, if even a half empty pack of cigarettes was left behind by a tourist, an islander might walk several miles to return it.

Another lesson that went deep in me was the habit of many islanders I met to ignore my outer "hippie" appearance and look past that, with a sense of great respect, to the person inside, to who I really was. And who was that, really? Well, whoever it was, it was enough to command respect.  In retrospect I see that these old values were extended impersonally to all who passed through the islands. It was a way of being, a way we in the modern world would do well to learn from. As a dervish, I am very aware that this is a sufi way of seeing, without prejudice and that it takes long training. It is a cultural heritage from an older civilization that was in many ways wiser than we are today. I believe this heritage is a result of the crosscurrents of teaching in the old mystery schools of the middle east that knew no boundaries between Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or Moslem.

Playing in this island band was also a test of stamina, for there was the ever present challenge of getting to the gig.  Since there were no roads (or vehicles) on Symi, and all paths led either up or down hill, the walk to most nearby events proved an arduous task, considering the weight of the my guitar case and my lack of climbing muscles.  Such concerns were no problem at all for Kostas, who leapt like a goat in advance of any of us, playing his accordian all the way, singing, telling jokes, shouting out messages to unseen shepherds in the nearby hills and showing even the most seasoned islanders how to do it.  He was simply tireless.  I, in contrast, was usually out of breath within the first half hour of any walk.  If we didn't walk, we traveled to the gig via caique, the small one-pistoned engine fishing boats that sputtered and putted around the island.  The familiar pop-pop-pop of the caique was a background drone to most waterfront walks. If the weather was good, an outing on one of these little boats was sheer pleasure, but if the weather was bad, it was a white-knuckle, bowel-churning ride all the way.  Except of course for Kostas, who carried on with his one-man show, entertaining all of us even in a storm.

On the island I met a Canadian girl, Veronica Finnegan, who had returned to Greece, typewriter in hand, to compose what she called "The Great Canadian Novel". We set up house together in the village and began what was the first long term relationship of my adult life. Veronica possessed a love for music and poetry that at least fueled mine and we seemed destined for each other. We both started to write poetry and songs in the house she had rented and which we came to share and she introduced me to the writings of Laurence Durrell whose work was to influence me for many years to come. Although I'd already begun to keep a loose leaf journal, she brought me my first hard cover journal, a practice I continued all through the years, until about 1996 when I began to keep a journal on computer disk. At times this journal has been my only companion and confidante and the keeping of it over the years has been a great source of comfort and healing.

The island life seemed to plunge me deeper into that sense of living in more time zones than the present. Symi was soaked in history and felt like it. Looking out each day over an ancient landscape, in view of the Turkish coastline which Jill Ginghofer had called the "purple hills of Anatolia", filled me with a sense of inexpressible mystery.  It was as though I was a character in a story, but the story line was beyond my comprehension.  I only knew for sure that it was something about a great adventure. I felt that time was a curtain, a very thin veil, and that with a little insight or at the right moment I might be able to pierce through to another dimension with my physical sight and see my past and future before my eyes. I also knew that the story or stories I would see would amaze and astonish me but would also make perfect sense and clear up much of the mystery about why I had chosen to come here, of all places in the world and what my true connections with this place were, for I was certainly more than a tourist here. I felt I had found a kind of home.

I remember that Jill had told me that Greece was the farthest east one could travel and yet still remain in Europe and I felt that the classic definition of Greece as the seat of Western civilization had somehow missed the point. Plato and Alexander the Great only represented the interpretation of the Western academic mind with its cultural biases. What Greece really represented to me was the doorway to the East and the world of the spirit. It was a window through which the mystical teachings of the East found their way into Europe. These teachings came as much through Christianity as through the old myths and as far as I could see were still continuing, especially on the small islands, despite a rampant paranoia about the Turks. I fear however that political and academic forces in the present day have done much to distort the importance of Greece as an ancient passageway between two worlds and have spread a propaganda of Greece as a bastion of defense and philososphy that has permeated the consciousness of even the remotest local islanders through a growing military presence. To travel to Greece later, in the mid 80's, was a vastly different experience than my first trip there. When I returned, in 1986, the cost of living had increased 500 fold and the person of the visiting stranger was now respected chiefly in terms of US dollars and VISA cards. In the little waterfront tavernas there was no more room, at least in tourist season, for the local men to sit and pass the time of day. All seats awaited the arrival of the tour boats and neither was there a place for an unstructured evening of just plain feel good music. Very few it seemed, anyway.

What had happened, in 15 short years, to the vestiges of  that ancient hospitality? I believe the answer is that through new technologies the modern West is catching up and modifying the old ways, not necessarily for the better.

One of my favorite pastimes was to wander over the island and visit the churches that stood clean and candlelit to welcome the arrival of a pilgrim. Each church was filled with icons and was a pleasure for me to spend time puzzling over these, both in their subject matter and their beauty of technical execution. Icons are an example of that sacred art that has come down to us through the centuries modified in many forms. This art has its echoes in all religions of the world. As I sat meditating, the smell of frankincense pervading the atmosphere seemed to take me back to the Roman Catholic upbringing of my childhood and I was filled with a sense of peace and tranquillity as though the guardian protectors of these churches were somehow watching over me on the island too, helping and protecting me.

Being in church alone seemed always the best way to visit a church, giving one the solitude to commune with oneself and with the Creator. But there was beauty in the masses too and it was at one of these that I first heard the liturgy being chanted in the Eastern Orthodox style with its highly oriental overtones. A group of twelve priests in full regalia chanting the hypnotic head tones produced a trance-like effect in me as I listened and once again the sensation seemed peace inducing, familiar. Inside myself I felt a connection being made that had not been made before, something that has stayed with me, in musical terms, over the years.

Up to this time I had not listened to much religious music outside the hymn singing of the Canadian Christian churches where I grew up and this experience opened a door for me. I was later to hear echoes of this music in the call of the muezzin from the minaret, the chanting of Tibetan monks, the qawwali music of northern India, Bulgarian choral music, zikr in the Turkish style and in the "Gregorian" chanting of the medieval Christian monastic orders. Later on I would try to interweave this style of singing in the composition of my own songs when I became more deeply involved in the techniques of meditation.

All too soon, however, my first Grecian sojourn ended. I became more and more interested in taking the new songs I had written on the island back to England and picking up the strands of my performing career. As this desire grew in me, I became more and more frustrated with the slow lazy pace of island life and finally financial and other considerations combined in the decision to leave Symi.  Veronica and I decided to return to England as a couple and , as I recall, we missed the first ship we'd intended to take back to Athens and had to wait a further week for another one. At this point I realized how much I really yearned to return to an English speaking country.

When the Katadenios, the big ship from Athens returned, we were ready and Veronica and I returned to England, hitching up through Northern Greece and Yugoslavia to save money. But in Yugoslavia, I fell ill and in Belgrade, much to Veronica's consternation, I purchased two train tickets to Germany.  Still, we hitched from Munich to Ostende, Belgium and there I sweated through two or three days and nights of a high fever, shaking in bed as I can never remember doing at any time of my life before or since. Finally, after my body had purged itself of whatever was plaguing it, we caught the ferry to Dover and arrived back in the pale, pastel green countryside of England.