Kiki Dimoula: “I am still hungry for life.”

The Greek poet and academic, Kiki Dimoula, on the occasion of the publication of her poetry collection ‘Anon Telia’, gave an in-depth interview to Giorgos Archimandritis for the magazine ‘K’ of the newspaper ‘Kathimerini’, speaking about time, death, love and the prevailing uncertainty. The interview was published on Sunday 6 November and you can read it below: Anapha. A metaphysical punctuation mark, embodying the end in its least definitive form. A punctuation mark synonymous with a temporary pause. On the occasion of her eponymous poetry collection, which encapsulates all the laws of her poetic world and offers a comprehensive portrayal of the human condition, the poet and academic Kiki Dimoula shares with us the thoughts, anxieties and questions of a person faced with the art of poetry and the human condition. Kiki Dimoula, in one of your poems you say: ‘A long, tiring journey / destiny / but the worst thing / is that you don’t know whether you’re going or coming’. Where are you coming from and where are you going? It is said that after this life there is another. I neither believe this, nor does it comfort me. That’s why I say ‘you don’t know’. Are you setting off for the next life, or are you coming from the other one and this is the new one? Destiny is unknown, yet certain at the same time. And I believe this without having any proof or argument. What strikes me, however, is that everything unfolds as if it were premeditated. And it unfolds with such precision that I cannot call it a coincidence. I cannot say ‘it just happened’. I do, of course, consider ‘chance’ to be responsible for many creations; I attach far greater importance to it than to the planned. But in our case, where there is life there is also death. No one will ever change that. Do you believe there is a guiding force? Yes. And it is rhythm. The rhythm of life. I see no other. And I cannot, of course, blame any God. If there were one, and if there is one, I believe he is not as cruel as fate. For fate is cruel. From the moment death is foreseen at a time when you have learnt to live, at a time when you have grown accustomed to this terrible thing, or if you like, this meaningless thing – because in old age life doesn’t have much meaning – yet you prefer it to dying, to heading towards the unknown. But it is not so much that you do not want the unknown. It’s that you don’t want to lose the familiar. Because that is what we have come to know. We came here through life, we didn’t come through death. And that is nature’s great trick: that it sent us here unprepared to face what is to come.Are you afraid of death? I tremble at the thought of it. I really do tremble. Because I know that then none of the things that are happening now will be happening. He is the almighty one, after all, and no one else. Just think that from the moment you are born, you are on the verge of death. Because that is what it is all about. I have not got used to that, and I have not forgiven it. And I am still hungry for life. Perhaps even the fact that I am still writing poems at eighty-five is an expression of this reluctance of mine to die, of my inability to imagine what might exist when a body dies. Because, let’s be honest, what is a soul without a body? Without a body, what is a soul? The body is the soul’s justification for existing. Its justification and its home. Yes. Within this body, it is nurtured and it nurtures. Of course, it’s not impossible that it has created everything in wisdom; I’m not in a position to rule that out. I’m simply not an enthusiastic devotee of all this business and all this uncertainty where you don’t know who our creator is. That is what I would like to know. Unless I shouldn’t or mustn’t know. Ultimately, life itself is cautious towards us. It neither betrays us, nor foretells us anything, nor reveals anything to us. Whatever comes is as if we are experiencing it for the first time, even though we may have lived it before. Does it promise us anything? No. Our desire promises us. Our desire pretends to be the voice of life. Life itself is detached and moral. And not at all a liar. Life makes no promises. We imagine. Life simply exists and lets you see it as you wish. That is why some people are very happy with the way the world is, whilst others are disappointed and unhappy. The point is to analyse and evaluate what cannot be otherwise. That is why we write poems under the illusion that we will change what is happening or describe it in a different way.How certain have you ever felt about poetry? I have never felt certain about anything. Never. Only that I will die. And I consider poetry to be an extremely treacherous and deadly state of affairs. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve been had. It doesn’t tell you that you’ve said this before. It doesn’t tell you that you’re repeating yourself. Nothing. It lures you in, traps you, and you think that this time you’ve said it a bit differently from last time, when in fact you’ve said it exactly the same way.So she’s a bit of a deceiver too, just like life? Yes. We help her with that, of course. We give her a face that the poor thing might not have. Ever since poetry has existed, pretence has existed too. Poetry is a form of acting. You’re playing a part whilst you write; you’re creating certain roles. I can’t think of any other way to explain this persistence or even this ambition – because it promises you that some people will talk about you, that you’ll occupy their minds, that you’ll influence them. But that’s not it. It’s a force I can’t stop. And the fact that I’m still writing is perhaps a desperate move to ward off old age. Because poetry is a way of not understanding time. To spend it, trying to write and thinking that this is ultimately a saving rather than an expense. But isn’t a truth ultimately revealed through this pretence? We don’t know if it’s the truth. It’s another mask. I believe that everything that circulates, everything we present, everything we use, is a mask. What and who we really are, we either do not know or do not want to know. Because poetry, too, is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Why else would you create the world? Because that is what poetry is: you attempt to create a new world. But who will believe in this world, and who will inhabit it? Is it not enough for its creator to inhabit it? Isn’t poetry a way of magnifying life? It is rather an illusion that in this way you are fighting against the death of leaving and being forgotten entirely. Herein lies the delusion: that you will not be forgotten. And so what if someone momentarily remembers the great Tassos Leivaditis, Seferis, Elytis or my own Cavafy, me, my own? What does it change? I know that we each have a different character, which we serve at all costs. So, a person who is pessimistic isn’t just being fussy. It’s their hormones that make them that way. Nor is it because they deserve a different life – they don’t even know what life they want. They are simply born to worry. And they must entrust this worry to something. And they entrust it, I think, to poems. Tell me about the first word of a poem. How important is that first word? That word is ‘You’. ‘You’, my interlocutor or the one I dream of and wish to move or cause pain to. For the target is always the Other. Your ‘I’ cannot be unframed, however much it serves you. Is it possible to want to be alone? Besides, I don’t think the poet himself is in a position to analyse his own poems, because he inevitably becomes too lenient towards them. Although I am happy to decapitate them. The reader, however, I would not want to decapitate them for me. Anyway. There is but one deity here: uncertainty. Not just in the poems. Everywhere. That is the driving force. That is the goddess. She may be a tormenting goddess, but, on the other hand, she lends such charm to that which offers you no certainty, that in the end you love her. She is wise. She protects you from boredom. Because it is a bore to know what will happen. You mustn’t know. Because you can’t explain it? Exactly. That’s why I say ‘the inexplicable silences you / and go on, try to grasp it’. Isn’t that what we do? Don’t we struggle to grasp something that is inexplicable? And the inexplicable hurts you, kills you. All the inexplicable things that happen in our lives, however much they carry the weight and significance of a new garment, are variations. Only death makes a difference. If you think about it, love is also a death – its own – which is bound to happen. So I ask the Almighty, and I ask you too: ‘Why do we die?’. How on earth did this happen? Someone tell me. The agony of death ought not to be part of man’s destiny. And yet it is. It is an agony he has never experienced before. Not even in loves that die. These are grand words. A painful death is merely the end of life. You can recreate love – for love too is artificial; we create it ourselves. But you cannot recreate life. ‘Dreams and love’, however, as you say in one of your poems, are part of this life. They are very fragile, of very short duration. If only life were all love, that is what I wanted. All of life. It would end at some point, of course, but the fleeting nature of our intense moments causes us pain. The possibility of losing them fills us with fear. And I think that, in the end, the way all this is put together, there is a wisdom to it. Because, if it weren’t like that, perhaps weariness would eventually prevail, which now doesn’t have time to take hold. The new being arrives, rested, thirsty to live out this whole lie that is our life. Because it is a lie, a lie that sometimes lasts many years, sometimes few. Of course, if they asked me, would you now like to be reborn and not be entangled in this lie? Now, yes, I wouldn’t, because I am bound to everything that has been. Did you love what has been? Certainly. And first and foremost, my actions. And my actions are that I have given birth to children and raised them as I did. Is there one action of mine I do not love? That I grew up myself. Ultimately, I believe that the only thing that is truly ours, and not entirely so, is ourselves. Ourselves and our mistakes. That is why I say somewhere: ‘Wisdom is not experience; it has simply lost the power to err’. Because when you err, you care about nothing. You dare. But how can I err now? What temptations do I have left to face? The temptation to believe, despite everything, in life. But if I fear death, it is because I believe in it. And ‘I believe’ does not mean ‘I trust it’. It means ‘I love it’. We believe in someone we love. I would like to know, I would like to have seen the face of God. And, you might say, is faith of any value when it is based on certainty? But I cannot understand how anyone can be faithful in the face of uncertainty. Generally, life teaches you to want to put your finger ‘on the pulse’; you didn’t come up with that yourself out of your own imperfections. Life tells you: ‘I want to grasp that which rules over me.’ Because supposedly, the whole of the heavens above is authority. And time? How would you describe your relationship with time today? Bad. Very bad. I don’t look at my watch, but I’ll tell you this. If I had an old watch that was always two seconds slow, I’d wear that one. Precisely because, if you multiply two seconds behind every day, think how much time you gain. Time is something that cannot be gained by any means other than forgetting. Because along with that, you will have forgotten that it is slipping away too. The best method is to forget. If you forget again, you are an empty vessel that doesn’t know what it’s for. That is, things are never just like that and only like that. They are like that and otherwise. And whatever draws you in, the full or the empty. And you’re not to blame for that choice. Nature makes you that way, the thousands of cells that came before, that programmed you, that changed and shaped you. All this mysterious thing. Which we call destiny. And where, let me emphasise again, ‘whether you go or come, you do not know’. And that is far more tiring than the word itself, which is in itself very tiring.