Katerina Anghelaki Rooke – Greek poetess in noisy Athens about the difference between silence and silences

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

---

Very often when attention is turned to the relationship between philosophy and poetry, one thinks about the denial of poetry by a line of thinkers ranging from Plato to Hegel insofar as they deny poetry to be a source of truth. Then, in the twentieth century and despite Paul Celan whose poetry the German philosopher Gadamer identified as messages bottled up as if from someone stranded on a lonely island in a big wide ocean, Adorno of the Frankfurt School stated that after Auschwitz no more poetry was possible. A lot of people, poets included, have rebelled against that but then Adorno’s point of passing on messages to the future only to the ‘imaginary witness’ since he did not trust people to do that, has yet to be understood. But there is a third dimension to this relationship. It was Michel Foucault who said in his book analyzing the relationship between insanity and society that ‘we have to discover the places of silence before the lyrical protest covers them up.’

The fear of silence to be experienced in the imagination once man finds himself completely alone in the universe dominates the motives that make man flee into the noise of the street as this is taken to be a sign of life, of being alive. No one knew that better than the Ancient Greeks who would argue, bargain, shout and play in the street theatre if only to trick his fellow men to thinking this drama is real. Still today any visitor to Greece can easily mistake such shouting match as a serious fight and draw the wrong conclusions. Others modify their perception and ask simply do they have to speak that loud. Certainly it makes Athens one of the loudest cities with everything from loud motor scooters to people talking lively in their favorite place, the street cafes as loudly as they can to demonstrate to each other that they are indeed alive. No better place then to meet Greek poetess Katerina Anghelaki Rooke, god child of Nikos Kazantzakis, translator and writer of poetry with a natural philosophical bend, than at Phileon, the café on Skoufa in Kolonaki, the famous district near the Greek Parliament and located at the foot of the Lycabettus Hill overlooking the noisy streets down below. Katerina has written this piece ‘silence and silences’ for the opening of the Kids’ Guernica exhibition to be held in Kastelli, Crete from April 20 to April 24, 2006 – the time of Greek Easter. I asked her to read the text in such a noisy place:

Silence and Silences (Translated from the Greek original by the author) by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Silence is a herd, a swarm of birds that you see from afar, rising slowly and covering the sky. It is the troupe of actors that bows to the public. But within a herd every sheep has only one heart that beats. Within a swarm every bird has only one pair of wings. And the actor is alone each time he risks to be rejected.

So a silence includes endless amount of silences. There is the silence of sweet expectation. It unfolds within you like a piece of paper all around the bunch of flowers that you are waiting to receive. It is a seductive silence because you impose it; you don’t want anything to be heard besides the announcement of a resurrection, of an arrival, of the end of loneliness.

There is the silence of the babbling everydayness, when you are deafened by the buzzing of all the stupidities that man has invented so that he won’t hear the silence.

There is the silence of creation. A crowd of wounds and the one struggles to close the mouth of the other. Which is the deepest? She is the one that will talk. Rivalry in depth.

There is the silence of emptiness. You look into the eyes of the other human beings and you know that whatever he was able to understand in you he has already said it. The rest is silence.

But you’ll keep approaching the great silence the herd, the swarm and you’ll be more and more certain that this silence you’ll never experience because you contain it entirely. It is you that will be the great silence of the end.