Taormina, Sicilia. Saturday, May 12.
Buying Flowers
Dear Trail Friends,
The group tour is over. Chris and Judy and I will spend the next three nights in Taormina and leave very early In the morning on Tuesday, May 15.
We left Taormina Friday morning and rode the bus to Siracusa with a stop in AciTrezza for lunch. AciTrezza is a coastal town with lots of lava rocks along the shore and larger lava formations making small islands beyond the shore.
Angela told us that the lava rocks offshore were said to be associated with the cyclops Polyphemus. After getting Polyphemus drunk and destroying his one eye with a heated stick, Odysseus had his men hang from the belly of sheep so they could escape from the cave. Blind Polyphemus could feel each sheep as it left the cave, but could not see the men attached underneath. When the men reached the sea Odysseus yelled up to Polyphemus, taunting him, and the enraged cyclops picked up rocks and hurled them at the ship. This story was associated with an early eruption of Mt Etna when the volcano herself hurled rocks and molten lava down to the sea.
I found a gravel path through some of the larger lava rocks and Chris and I were walking toward shore when I somehow tripped and fell. My left cheek and temple smacked hard against a rock, as did my hands, elbows, and knees. I was very lucky to walk away with a few scrapes and bruises - but basically okay. Having my head hit rock was a shock for me, like when my car spun out of control on the freeway last month.
We stayed in Siracusa at a big modern hotel (Hotel Mercure) located very near the ancient amphitheater. Judy and I did our drawing together. Photo 1 shows my drawing of some of the rocks of Polyphemus at AciTrezza collaged with the photo (by my sister) that inspired it. I particularly enjoyed seeing faces in the rocks, as if looked at one way they might be ricks thrown by Polyphemus in his rage, looked at another way they might be people who had looked at Medusa and been changed into stone.
Judy’s drawing (photo 2) was based on a photo of Chris and me standing in an arch at the Ancient Greek theater in Taormina.
Our hotel was so close that we were able to walk to the play. Just before the play I was talking with Marinka (the daughter in one of the two mother-daughter pairs on the trip). She told me she had dreamed about me. In the dream, she was bicycling faster and faster through dark woods trying to catch up with me, because there was something she needed to tell me. Just as she almost caught up with me, I got into a car and waved goodbye.
Marinka assured me the dream was beautiful and not scary. As she spoke of the dream I found myself thinking again of the Demeter-Persephone myth. I had associated the myth with both of the mother-daughter pairs on the tour, as well as with my sister Judy and her daughter Angel. Chris had told a story in which Persephone, when she returned to the upper world, had told her mother that the underworld, the world of the dead, was a different world, but not as scary as she thought. I had the uncanny feeling that the dream was - (for me, since only the dreamer herself could discover what it was for her) - about death. Perhaps this association came in part because the play we had come to see was about the death of Oedipus and also being our last extant Greek tragedy, about the death of Greek tragedy and a certain golden epoch of ancient Greek civilization, and in part because Chris’s most recent lecture about that play dealt with death, perhaps in part because the fall and blow to my head reminded me of how easily I could die, and perhaps in part because the ending of the tour was a death of sorts.
This dream and my associations affected my experience of the play. I was disappointed that the play didn’t quite fit my expectations, that it seemed to depart from the script (at least as I remembered it) so much that I wondered if it was really the Sophocles play or some modern revisioning of the story. I always get mad at myself when I get mad at life for not being the way I want or expect it to be. Which just tends to add to the overall dissonance. I envied and admired people who loved the play as it was and I tried to find things I could love about it.
I did genuinely like the initial entrance of Antigone and Oedipus. They entered from the same direction as spectators and at first I mistook them for spectators and thought how interesting that there was an old man and young woman who looked a lot like Antigone and Oedipus. And then I realized it was them, that the play had begun. This was a wonderful way to remind me of the connection between life and myth.
Others from our group pointed out how powerful the scene was where Polyneices comes to plead for his father’s support. In the performance, Oedipus never once turns toward his son while he speaks. The son becomes more and more impassioned but the father never raises his eyes. Of course he is blind but his whole being, not just his gaze, seems turned away. Then the father touches the son’s head as if with tenderness - perhaps the way a blind person touches a face to “see” it, perhaps the way a father touches a newborn’s delicate head - so Oedipus touches Polyneices’ head as he speaks his curse: that Pokyneices and his brother will die at each other’s hands. The dissonance between the tenderness and the violence in this scene dramatizes the whole tragedy of the family - son killing father, father cursing son, brother killing brother.
I was also struck by the chorus of women (not I think based on anything in the original script) whose chanting made them resemble at times the Eumenides, at tunes the Furies - the chthonic forces that were honored in the sacred place where Oedipus had come to die. At one point these women all, in unison, pulled black scarves over their heads - and I had a visceral sense at that moment of the presence of death.
The play ended - to a standing ovation and (I was told) rave reviews in the next day’s paper. So I suspect my mood (I had really been grumpy all day, even before my fall and the sense of something uncanny in the dream Marinka had shared) kept me from fully opening my mind and heart to the play.
That night - Friday night - the last night before tour group members dispersed, I had a dream of my own. It began with my renting a motorboat and then discovering I did not know where the controls were, so I was speeding around a bay in the midst of other boats with no control. In the second scene of the dream, I am in a large group voting on a measure that is important to me but I think cannot pass. When the vote is called for, though, a very high proportion of hands are raised, and it is clear it will pass. Then in the third scene I am on a trail in a large meadow in dark woods. I am with a tall man who seems to have helped defeat those who opposed the measure in the earlier scene. I am looking around (in the dream it is a beautiful and familiar place, probably somewhere on Orcas, and we are alone.) I realize the man intends to kill me and that he is bigger and stronger than I am and we are alone.
“So you are the dangerous one,” I say (meaning the real danger was not the people he helped us defeat in the vote). He says “yes.” I look into his eyes. I am thinking that I want to face my death peacefully, without fear. I am working hard to find that deep inner calm. At the same time I am thinking that I hope I can turn him to stone - that I can protect myself, that I will not have to die quite yet. We are gazing deeply into each other’s eyes when I awaken and the dream ends. It is Saturday morning and the tour group is dispersing. Most of our goodbyes have already been said.
After breakfast (at which we see even fewer group members than I expected) we depart for Taormina. Stephen, the curmudgeonly tour guy (husband of Lucia who did most of the organizing), who helped Angela manage the tour and helped the bus driver load and unload baggage, drives us back. (He suggested we cancel our rental car and he drive us. Lucia arranged a low cost taxi to Catania airport early Tuesday morning and cancelled our parking reservation at the Villa Schuler, saving us both money and stress. Stephen was on his way to Taormina anyway to meet Lucia who was guiding a tour here. The new plan was a great win-win).
Our hotel room wasn’t ready when we arrived, so we walked down to the sea and had lunch, and rode the funicular back. The beach was so much more crowded than ten years ago that it was shocking to me. Photo 4 is a collage of then and now but I don’t think it really conveys the difference.
I found my death dream stayed with me all day. I was drawn to signs that mentioned death/morte, and photographed several. I particularly liked photo 5, because the flying horse reminded me of how Pegasus, the mythological flying horse, who came to be associated with poetry, was born when Medusa died.
Before the tour group dispersed, Chris’s son Peter mentioned to Judy that he usually gives Chris flowers on Mother’s Day (which falls often near or on May 13, the birthday of Chris’s second son Eric), just as Peter gives her flowers on his own birthday to celebrate her birth as a mother (he was her first child). The two of them conspired for Judy to buy Chris flowers (Peter had noticed a flower store in Taormina) on his behalf. Photo six shows Judy offering Chris Peter’s flowers on Mother’s Day Eve.
Mother’s Day makes me think of my childlessness and of my mother. I remember, when my mother died, the visceral surge of love I felt as I viewed her body. I found myself looking at her hands and realizing how deeply I had loved her and her body, her face, her hands - all my life. Sadly, my fear of her, and of our difficult interactions, often eclipsed my love. I made a vow that day in honor of her life and her dead body, to try from then on to make love a stronger presence in my life than fear.
I am thinking of my fear of death and of my resistance to change and to things (like the play, or the tour) that aren’t the way I expect or want them to be. I am thinking of the end of the dream when I am calling on my Medusa-powers to transform the death-figure in the dream into stone. And it occurs to me that maybe I should change him into flowers, instead.
This makes me think of an ee cummings poem I used to love. When I look up the poem now I find that it is very different from how I remember it (like the secluded beach from ten years ago that is now a crowded resort/tourist destination). I remembered it short and simple but what I found seems crowded with words. Nevertgeless, I will copy it here just in case it has something important to say to you (or to me?).
Falling is such a shock. Impact. Pain. Disorientation. Adjustment. Onward. But now with a sense of fragility. Like dealing with cancer. Thanks Riv. For helping me connect this.
ReplyDeleteYou help me realize how much the fall shaped my feelings. Thank you.
DeleteI too would like love to be a stronger force in my life than fear,.
ReplyDeleteI think of Empedocles (of Sicily) who saw life as an ongoing interaction between Eros and Strife. Probably nobody ever wins but I know who I’m routing for. 😘
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