Save the Storm

The postmodern eye neither sees nor feels, but scans. At the same time, the landscapes, already weighed down by the countless eulogies dedicated to them, are reduced to nothing by the tourist gaze and the folkloric naivety it reproduces. It therefore seems futile to attempt to decipher the hieroglyphs of nature, moving along that border where depth and surface merge. Nevertheless, it is difficult to resist the ecstasy of the light, the dizziness and drowsiness of midday, that stillness of the Greek summer which is permeated by something indefinably tense.

The roads in my dreams were sigmoid, their gentle or sharp bends reminiscent of the fluctuations in the prices of minerals and liquid fuels; my emotional upheavals, taking the symbolic form of my face slowly rising towards the sky or the sudden plunge of a weary body into the sea, mirrored the trajectory of an extremely volatile share; one evening, the trajectory of a shooting star mimicked the curve traced at that very moment by the price of steel. During the day, my clinical picture showed signs of withdrawal syndrome; if a single word momentarily distracted me from the daily grind, I would be swept up in its vortex.

Panagiotis Angelopoulos’s third book, published by Ikaros, is situated where the boundary between poetry and prose has already been dissolved, with the anxieties of classification and content yielding to the fluidity of language. The interval between the exposure to the possibility of the fall and the experience of the fear of the abyss was brief, which did not prevent me from realising that what disturbs me is not the present but the memory, through which you are reborn provided the birth is genuine, like the infant emerging from its mother’s womb with the taste of death in its mouth and then becoming accustomed to oxygen, balancing the opposing forces of inhalation and exhalation with the same naturalness with which we pronounce consonants and vowels as we articulate words.