There are many things I will remember about my summer here on Paros this year. Like the apricots from Angeliki’s garden. And the tablecloth made from the countless fabric remnants that Alexandra has given me.
This foto does not represent just a bowl of fruit on a table. For me it represents the beauty of sharing. A sharing that is not boisterous but discreet. A sharing, that in the moment of exchange, creates a bond. A sharing of small things that makes life bigger. A sharing that lets you know that someone has thought about you and, in doing so, made you feel a part of their life.
And knowing all this makes me feel grateful and what is gratitude if not a form of happiness.
Even when she was seated and still, Mona was a moving picture. Best of friends for years, we were separated by geography. Then by death.
Born in Cairo, Mona grew up in London. She’d studied all over Europe, spoke four languages and had a doctorate in literature. Her love of literature made her good at description. Like the protagonist of a novel, Mona was glamorous and her presence made the world around her seem glamorous, too.
One morning I went to visit her. Mona answered the door wearing an elegant mustard colored tailleur. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Nowhere,” she replied. “I’m just reading Bulgakov.”
Until then I’d never heard of The Master and Margarita (the book that inspired Mick Jagger’s lyrics to Sympathy for the Devil). And I probably never would have read it had it not been for Mona’s death several years later. Although we’d been out of touch for some time, I just couldn’t believe she was gone. It crushed me and, as it often happens when someone dies, things you never gave importance to before suddenly become important. The magical thinker in me somehow made me believe that I could experience a part of Mona again simply by reading Bulgakov.
“The Master and Margarita”
It was the summer of 2017 when I finally decided to read The Master and Margarita. Initially excited, by page 25 I was ready to give it up.
At the sunset hour of one spring day, two writers, Berlioz and Bezdomny, go to a kiosk in Moscow where they drink warm apricot juice. Suddenly Berlioz gets a creepy feeling and feels the need to run away. But before he can do so, a transparent man appears before him. He is wearing a jockey cap on his small head and a short jacket on his long and narrow body. This is the first direct contact Berlioz has with the devil. The devil introduces himself as Professor Woland and predicts that Berlioz will die that evening. And so he does.
This is how The Master and Margarita begins. It’s the story of how the Soviet Union’s state atheism meets Christian philosophy. Part of the setting is in Moscow, part in Jerusalem, and part in places invented by Bulgakov’s surrealistic satirical imagination. It is dense and chaotic. Too chaotic for me. So here I will focus only on Behemoth, a pig sized black cat, and on the Master and Margarita referred to in the book’s title.
Not all cats are the same.
Behemoth is quite unusual. He is a shape shifting cat that can walk and talk. He enjoys drinking vodka, playing chess, shooting pistols, and telling bad jokes. But most importantly, he is part of Woland the Devil’s entourage. Behemoth’s most important role seems to be that of creating chaos.
Chaos has an important role in politics. Who is in power wants to maintain order and who is not in power wants to create chaos. This tug-of-war between order and chaos is the foundation of politics. To avoid the challenges created by chaos, many people are willing to conform and subject themselves to the established order. As it happened during the time of Pontius Pilate as well as during the Stalin regime. When there is chaos, there will be conflict. When there is order, there will be repression. Chaos and order feed off each other to keep themselves going.
In Bulgakov’s book, the Master is a repressed novelist who represents Bulgokov himself. Margarita, although married to a bureaucrat, is in love with the Master. The constant attack by literary critics leads to the Master’s breakdown. He burns his manuscripts then commits himself to a mental institution. Margarita is so in love with the Master that she’s willing to become a witch just to have the Master released from the hospital. Thanks to her pact with the devil, the Master and Margarita are reunited and return to live in their basement apartment. The manuscript that the Master had burned is now magically intact and Margarita begins to read it.
Elena and Bulgakov
But the love story between the Master and Margarita is not fictional. It’s based on the true story of Bulgakov and Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya. Although both were married when they met, they began a passionate love affair. Finally, in 1932, they divorced their spouses and married one another.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev (Ukraine) in 1891. He started writing The Master and Margarita in 1928 during the Stalin regime. But, because of the political repression, he could not see a future as a writer. So he burned his manuscript. But apparently Elena’s presence helped him start writing again. He continued to write until just a few weeks before his death in 1940 at the age of 48. After his death, Elena swore that she would make his book her life’s mission. Impossible to be published in Russia, the complete manuscript was finally published in Paris in 1967. Elena died three years later.
The Queen, who ruled for 70 years, will be mourned by many British subjects and their grief is to be respected. However, respect should be reciprocal.
It’s estimated that the Queen’s funeral, which will be paid for by the British taxpayers, is estimated at $9 million. Why should the Brits, at a time when they are finding empty shelves at the grocery store, inflation exceeding 10%, and an 80% increase in heating costs also be expected to keep their mouths shuts just to placate the monarchy who live a privilege lifestyle?
No head of state should be considered more important that the people it represents.
After the overwhelming male mortality of WWI, England had a big problem—too many women and not enough men. Women were obligated to fiercely compete for the men still around. If you weren’t rich or pretty, your chances of getting a man were practically zero. Which was a problem because women at that time had little possibility of becoming, on their own, economically independent so a husband was often essential to their livelihood. Otherwise a woman could only hope to have relatives willing to take her in.
“Lolly Willowes” by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Laura Willowes lost her mom as a small child. But her father was very present in her life and the two lived tranquilly together in the country where Lolly was free to explore the nature around her. Then her dad died. Although he’d left her a small income, she was expected, as was the custom of the time, to go live with relatives. That’s how she wound up in London with her brother and sister-in-law. Here Laura became “Aunt Lolly” and was moved into the small spare room. She was expected to help raise her brother’s kids as well as occupy herself with “shopping, letter-writing, arranging the flowers, cleaning the canary-cage…” in other words, she was a spinster relative who was meant to be obliging, useful, and negligible.
One day Lolly went into a flower shop where she sees wonderful chrysanthemums in a brown jar. Suddenly she has a vision of that autumn countryside that once was so much a part of her—a part of her core being that was obliterated by being forced to live in London. So, after 20 years of subservience, Lolly decides to move back to nature. Her family is not happy about her decision (especially as it comes out that her brother has lost most of her inheritance in speculation). But Lolly insists and moves to the village of Great Mop in the Chiltern Hills. Here she rents a room from Mrs. Leak and begins reconnecting with her core. She makes friends with the trees, learns about the magic of plants, and feels the air that lets her breath again. All is wonderful until her nephew, Titus, decides to move to Great Mop, too. His presence flashes her back to all those years she was living a life not her own. With the anger of a freed slave who’s about to be captured again, she stands in a field and yells out “No! You shan’t get me. I won’t go back. I won’t….Oh! Is there no help?”
Lolly, with no answer to her plea, walks towards the wood and hears the woods say “No! We will not let you go.” Once back home, she is surprised by the presence of a small white kitten. Lolly doesn’t like cats but the cat is so tiny that she decided to caress it. The little kitten immediately claws and bites her. It bites her so hard that Lolly is left bleeding. It’s then that Lolly realizes she’s made a pact with the Devil.
The Prince of Darkness had heard her plea and sent the kitten as his emissary. Not having previous experiences with the Devil, Lolly doesn’t know what price she has to pay. All she knows is that the pact has liberated her from Titus and other family members trying to enslave her spirit. If she has to choose between being a servile aunt or being a witch, she chooses being a witch.
Lolly now understands that it is not the Devil who searches for you but you who search for the Devil. Nevertheless, he’d been watching her. He’d seen her discomfort when the others had not. And once she cried out for help, he was there more than ready to give it to her.
So why do women become witches? Not for malice or for wickedness. One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful or to ride a broomstick. One becomes a witch to escape an existence doled out to them by others. One becomes a witch simply to have a life of their own.
The Broom
Witches were invented by men. German churchman and inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer, insecure about his masculinity, felt surrounded by witches. He began making life difficult for women by accusing them of being witches and having them put on trial. Helena Scheuberin was a no nonsense woman who’d had her fill of witch-phobic inquisitors doing their best to make women’s lives miserable. Helena tried to avoid Kramer and his witch crazed sermons. But one day, passing him on the street, she spit in his face and called him an evil monk. Obviously Kramer had her tried as a witch. Luckily she got off but Kramer, his ego battered, decided to get back at Helena and other women like her and, in 1486, wrote Malleus Maleficarum, a manual on how to hunt, torture, and exterminate witches.
A witch hunter, like a serial killer, is a sadist. Once accused of being a witch, the woman was first stripped down then tortured for a confession. Various torture methods were used to get this confession. Dislodging a shoulder, cutting off an ear, being tied and pulled on a rack, waterboarding, flogging and gouging out the eyes were some of the methods used. And when a woman finally confessed just to stop the torture, she was burned alive at the stake.
from the Wickiana by Johann Jakob Wick 1585
One would like to think that witch hunters no longer exist. Unfortunately they do but just dress differently. Some are dressed as Fake Christians who, for the most part, seem to be illiterate because, although they claim their beliefs are based on the Bible, it’s apparent they haven’t read it. Take abortion, for example. Melanie A. Howard, a professor of Biblical studies, states that “the Bible was written in a world in which abortion was practiced and viewed with nuance. Yet the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word ‘abortion’ do not appear in either the Old or New Testament of the Bible. That is, the topic simply is not directly mentioned.” But this doesn’t matter to the Fake Christians who’ve illegalized abortions condemning women to pregnancies that can endanger their health causing them much physical as well as psychological pain. Because these Fake Christians are insecure women-hating sadists.
So if we women continue to be treated as witches, maybe we need to conjure up a devil of our own.
World War I had much to do with creating new directions in art and literature. Virginia Woolf wrote that everything seemed to be going so well “then suddenly, like a chasm in a smooth road, the war came.” Initially idealistic soldiers proudly marched off to war and everyone applauded their bravery. But when they came back, the soldiers were most often physically and/or psychologically wounded. Europe was left depleted and many romantic ideals were destroyed provoking disillusioned artists and writers to break with tradition. In literature, the Modernist Movement began. Writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf developed stream of consciousness pushing the reader to float around inside someone else’s head instead of their own. And maybe influenced by Freud and his dream interpretations, Modernists were into disguising their truths with symbolism.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born in New Zealand, a country that was slowly trying to create an identity of its own. Too slowly for Katherine who moved to England at the age of 19. Here she started hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group and had no problem adapting to their bohemian lifestyle and their experimentation with literature and sexuality.
At the age of 29, Katherine was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. Not wanting to stay in a sanatorium, she went to the village of Bandol, France hoping that the French sun would be good for her health. But it wasn’t and her health deteriorated. Although sick and depressed, she continued to write. And one of the stories she wrote at this time was “Bliss”.
“Bliss” is about 30 year old Bertha Young who has an interior frenzy she interprets as bliss. Bertha is especially “blissful” about a dinner party she’s having that evening. Preparations finished, she goes to her balcony to look at her garden. Focused on a pear tree that is standing against the jade-green sky, Bertha is pleased with the beauty she sees. Then the cats show up—a grey cat dragging its belly across the lawn with a black cat crawling behind it. The cats give her the creeps. She shivers then turns away from the balcony window.
That evening the dinner party goes well and she’s so excited by the presence of a new acquaintance, Pearl Fulton. Although nothing in particular has happened between them, Bertha is convinced that they share something very rare and intimate. This feeling is intensified when the two are alone in the garden looking at the pear tree. Bertha feels so much bliss that her breasts feel like they’re burning.
Finally, the guests begin to leave. Bertha’s husband, Harry, helps Pearl put on her coat. He moves to embrace Pearl while telling her that he adores her. They don’t know that Bertha has seen them. Finally, Pearl leaves and Bertha is reminded of the cats in the garden.
So what’s the deal with the cats? According to literary analyses, many scholars believe that the cats symbolize the deception of Harry and Pearl. The problem with symbolism is that it works only if everyone shares the same symbols. We adore our cat, Volver, and in no way could we ever think of him as a symbol of deception or anything else negative.
Another problem with symbolism is that if you spend too much time trying to figure out the symbols, you can lose sight of the plot. Or you can even try looking for symbols that don’t exist. Take To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. The mockingbird is an obvious symbol. However, asked why there was so much symbolism in her book, Lee denied that this symbolism existed. So why are characters named after Confederate generals, she was asked. Because, she responded, “Those characters in the book were white trash. In the South, all the white trash are named after Confederate generals.” (This answer may indicate why Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning book keeps getting banned in many school districts dominated by a white supremacist mentality.)
As for Katherine, desperate to stay alive, she tried unorthodox cures as conventional ones were obviously not helping. This eventually took her to George Gurdjieff’s institute at Fontainebleau where she sought solace in Gurdjieff’s esoteric teachings. Katherine was here only a few months when, after running up a flight of stairs, she suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage and died an hour later.
Sometimes in the morning, on our terrace surrounded by plants and bees and butterflies, I look at our sleeping cat, Volver, and feel as if I am in a tableau vivant.
Frida Kahlo lived in a tableau vivant of her own. After seeing her paintings for the first time, Andre Breton said Frida was one of them, a surrealist. However, Frida did not agree. She said she was a Mexican artist relying on Mexican imagery and all Breton had to do was go to Mexico to understand why. Aztec artifacts, Day of the Dead folk art, and Catholic Church iconography, for example, offered imagery that not even the most hard-core surrealist artist could surpass.
“Unos Cuantos Piquetitos” (1935) by Frida Kahlo and me
But way before surrealism, there was the Gothic style both in architecture (ex. Notre Dame with its buttresses and gargoyles) and literature. As for literature, many academics say that the first gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) that introduced gothic characteristics: eerie architecture falling in ruins, an atmosphere of mystery and uncertainty, the presence of the supernatural, and a woman in difficulty because of some tyrannical man.
Women, with less social mobility, enjoyed the sensationalism gothic literature offered. It helped get them out of the house, so to speak. Plus all the stories of vulnerable women being exploited by men was something that they could easily relate to. So attracted to this genre, women writers eventually took it over and began redefining the female sensibility according to how they themselves experienced social and economic upheaval. Present day scholars often refer to this as Gothic feminism.
But literary trends come and go and eventually the interest in Gothic literature dissipated until it was rediscovered by the American south. The post-Civil War south offered many of the grotesque elements found in Gothic novels—decadence, questions of moral integrity, distorted personalities, oppression and discrimination.
One well-known Southern Gothic writer was Flannery O’Connor. Before reading Flannery, it’s best to understand two things about her. The first is that she suffered from lupus and knew she would die young. The second (maybe somehow dependent upon the first) was that, devout to her religion, she considered herself not just a writer but a Catholic writer.
Last night an intense dream woke me up. I thought maybe reading a bit would help get me back in the mood for sleeping. So I grabbed Flannery’s Complete Short Stories and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The story, published in 1953, is described by Flannery herself as “the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida [from Georgia], gets wiped out by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit”. Although not exactly the best example of literature conducive towards a good night’s sleep, once finished it did give me something to think about.
The main character is the grandmother. She is some kind of post-bellum, expired southern belle who expresses her “superior” morality by constantly criticizing others. While driving towards Florida, the grandmother is sitting in the back seat with two of her grandchildren and her cat, Pitty Sing, secretly stashed in a basket. The grandmother (as she is always referred to) nags her son Bailey to take a dirt road so she can see a plantation she visited when she was young and pretty. To shut his mother up, Bailey takes the road. But slowly the grandmother realizes she’s made a mistake and they are not going in the right direction. Embarrassed and afraid of how her son will react, the grandmother makes an abrupt move that sends Pitty Sing out of its basket and onto the shoulders of Bailey. Bailey, startled, loses control of the car. The car flips and falls into a ditch.
No one is severely injured and they all scramble out of the car. In a few minutes they see a hearse-like car driving down a hill towards them. The car arrives where they are and three men with expressionless gazes get out. All three are armed. While Bailey is trying to explain the predicament they’re in, the grandmother stares at the driver. Gradually she recognizes him from a newspaper article. He’s an escaped convict known as Misfit. But instead of keeping the information to herself, she blurts out “You’re the Misfit! I recognized you at once.” To which Misfit replies: “It would have been better for you if you hadn’t recognized me at all.” Finally realizing the mistake she’d made, the grandmother starts crying. And as Misfit’s companions start taking the other family members towards the woods to kill them, the grandmother is left alone with Misfit.
Finally Flannery has arrived where she wanted to go to from the start—a moral duel between grandmother and Misfit. The grandmother thus far has been portrayed as someone who is selfish, someone who is constantly orbiting around herself. But now, with a gun pointed in her face, everything changes. She begs for human compassion, something she herself has never offered to others. Seeing Misfit’s twisted face, she cries out to him “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children” then touches him on the shoulder. Misfit responds by shooting her three times in the chest.
Faced with death, the grandmother seeks God’s mercy. And, in doing so, Flannery seems to say that the grandmother redeems herself. But not having Flannery’s same creed, I often find her stories somewhat difficult to relate to.
Sometimes, instead of seeking God’s mercy, maybe we should try seeking our own.
The Narrative Within 