Gratuitous autumns
Every time I go in Lemnos during the summers, I can feel the energy that this place transfers to me. During the winter, I work on a novel or any other book, and yet, I know, that it is only when I will go to Lemnos I will decide about it. Whether I will continue to work on it or I will drop the subject. It is in Lemnos that my thoughts are more clear, more transparent, more analytical. And thus, I can create the fate of my heroes or find the solution for a scene or a chapter. As if, the novel is a strange puzzle game, and I have to put the right pieces in the right place.
I go out for a walk, in the alleyways of my childhood. This is a true small happiness. I am looking for the nostalgia of what is lost. I am looking for poetry’s memory. All around me there is a resonance of memory and poetry.”The poetics of space” as Gaston Bachelard would state it.The poetics of Time lived, through the resonances of a Past that demands to become Present. And all this is what creates the “energy”.
Well, in the summer of 2006, I was struggling with my poetry. Ever since my latest poetry collection, “View towards the Unspoken”, which was published in 1998 and was dedicated to “Mother”, I haven’t produced any more poetry. I have told myself that from now on my poetry has been transferred to my novels. Now, for me, poetry is my “Angel of Ashes” and “Moonlight” and all my other novels. I said, now, I believe that poetry is “the walk of a soul on the abyss”. And I gave it up. However, last winter I wrote a poetry collection with the title “And the Abyss rose up to my knees”.
That summer I felt for the first time the need to gather all of my poetry included in my eleven poetry collections under one roof. One single volume. Later on, I thought of writing some autobiographical texts explaining how each and every one of those poetry collections has been created, and what were the thoughts and beliefs I had back then. Maybe those were texts that I wrote mostly for myself. I felt the need to walk once more, back to the old alleys of my life, to look for the scars of my soul , from the pain and the fascination that I felt while writing.
And this is how I started writing the autobiographical texts that are included in the poetry volume by the title “I gather my belongings”. I have to admit that the idea of adding them in this volume, was so attractive to me, to the point that it was kind of scary since they were about my personal and private life. I always believed that our private life should remain at a sacred distance from what we as writers, write.
But, nevertheless, I did it. And when the book was published, a newspaper from Lemnos asked for an interview for an upcoming event they had planned and in which they wanted me to participate. During the time of the interview, an idea came to me, to gather all of my interviews , in a separate volume. Because I realised, that all of those interviews were in some way autobiographical texts. And this is how I started separating them from the piles of my archives. This was the first time I have realised that inside those interviews was somehow, hidden my very personal direction in life, beyond each and every one of my books. My human life path , the life I was living, including all the agony of the ephemeral, that I was experiencing through my heroes. This volume was created within the very same spirit of “Collecting my personal belongings” and the very same need to house in it my transitory and ephemeral life.
Today, as I enjoy sacredly the “Gratuitous autumns” of my life I say that inside those interviews, one can find my true face in its mystic and magical routes of a soul to another soul.