Three Books, Three Days on Paxos

I took three books with me to read on the beach on Paxos.

Two of them I've read before, but not as conscientiously as I should have done (no underlinings on past readings).

1) Homer's The Iliad. I tend to go back to The Odyssey, and avoid all the battles and bloodshed in The Iliad. This time I'm persevering, with a purpose.

2) Russell Hoban's "The Medusa Frequency" (1987). I bought this short novel some years ago because of its (slight) connection with Paxos, but I found it never suited my mood on previous attempts to read it. This time I just about got through it, though I can't say I fully understood what Hoban was getting at. Nevertheless, it has some extraordinary and poetic passages.

3) A new 'novel' in Greek called "O erotevmenos Elytis" (Athens 2011), by Philippos Philippou, which is about the period that the poet Odysseas Elytis spent on Corfu in 1937 (January-September), at the Officers' Training School, in the Old Fortress. It contains a lot of material about Elytis' contacts with Lawrence Durrell,   Dr Theodore Stephanides and others, and about his relationships with some young aristocratic women on the island.

Readable, but not very illuminating so far.

To go back to Russell Hoban and "The Medusa Frequency", Hoban writes (p.16):

"I sat down at my desk, put a stone from Paxos on the HERMES flyer....
There's a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it:
                          I trusted you with the idea of me
                               and you lost it."

A little later, the narrator undergoes an experimental EEG session wired to a brain-cell stimulator, to cure his creative writer's block. He is obsessed with an olive tree on Paxos. Luise and he had once agreed that it was "an entrance to the underworld, a Persephone door" (pp 25-26). It's a great passage.

I leave it to others to interpret the book. Is it mainly inspired by myths like the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or about getting in touch with archetypal myths buried deep in our subconscious minds? Is it about losing someone because you "stop perceiving her" (p. 118). Is it about art, art as "a celebration of loss, of beauty passing, passing, not to be held"? (p. 119) Or is it about the difficulty of faithful communication?

"Now that I'm lost you will perceive me fully and you will find me in your song".

I'm not sure. I'm left with my own pebble from Paxos, with an image of an olive tree, and the sound of the crackly world radio at three o'clock in the morning:

"Far, far way in the darkness are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak...Always on the night air sweet women singing in all the tongues of humankind, singing to the accompaniment of strange instruments, strange rhythms in places unseen but existing at this very moment, perhaps with red dust rising on the plains or monsoon rains beating down or snow on mountain peaks impassable" (p. 14).

How much more can be perceived, Hoban seems to be saying, if only we can tune in to the right frequencies.

A haunting, poetic book, at least in parts:

"I left the house at about five o'clock. It was novembering hard outside; the dark air sang with the dwindle of the year, the sharpening of it to the goneness that was drawing nearer, nearer with every moment" (p. 54).

Russell Hoban died in December, 2011. See also a short story by Russell Hoban set on Paxos.