II - About Love to the land one's born

Here I am, an adulterer before you, my life. One day you took me to the altar with your best formal dress. I swore eternal love to you under a linen and shroud flag, the victor's mourning. You didn't give me the chance to choose. A hand that wasn't mine brought your chin to me, and when you kissed me you didn't realize that it wasn't me who was kisssing you back. My path was decided. Now I look at you and I still love you, but without nostalgia. Along the way, others offered the hospitality of their blankets to me, their dawns' warmth, the inviting smell of their kitchens. I 've brought you inside of me. Despite my unfaithfulness, I've been loyal. Unconditionally, I've gone to sleep in some bedchambers and woken up in others. Whenever I laid my hat I shared you without realizing that you were sharing me too, whether you wanted to or not. Without guilt, I can't offer what a part of you is asking of me. Understand that if someone calls me I should go, the same as when you used to call me. I won't allow you to lock the door, I won't withstand the egomaniacal chants of your greatness, despite the fact that you gave me more than the others did. I love you,... but I do it in my way.

I - About Love and Time

We often deny seeing love as an hourglass, as precious as time and as fragile as glass. Not even handling it by its slimmest part makes it possible to count its grains. At best, we crush it with the hope of injuring the fingertips enough to lose feeling in our hands. In the end, our memory fails and we fall off the wagon. I consider love as time, if you force yourself to get anchored to it, it becomes the long waiting before the disaster. To want to survive love seems like waiting to climb the flow of sand when it is coming to an end: Ashes as the only company looking up from the bottom of a narrow abyss. It seems impossible that so much hope and desperation, every glance and every horizon fit into such a small hole. In that state of mind, anxiousness and euphoria make us blind to beauty outside the glass: "I forgot about Dali because I only remember the surprise on your face" or " I wrote the poem that your lips dictated to me" are just two examples of the trikle of grains that spirits us away from transcendence.

Kostas Vidas III. Blogmemories. Chapter I

I was born in July, 1975, in a noisy beach tavern run by my parents in a small creek on the western side of Candia, Crete. Fried anchovies and grilled sardines made Dolores Ortega nauseas due to her pregnant sense of smell. Those nauseas turned into pains and contractions in her stomach. Mr. Smith, and English midwife, took care of my birth. She had just downed a bottle of Cinzanno when she became alarmed by my mother's screeches that came out of the caravan which dominated the sunny terrace. My mother has always maintained that she would have given birth to me by herself if I hadn't look like my father. She mains the size of my head, a Vida's characteristic that, according to my father, had always distinguished may father's family with honor. This arrogant and stoical appreciation for the perimeter of my family's cranium differs from mine due to the many mishaps that have befallen my mammoth head during my early years. My father, Kostas Vidas II, left school very young, so he couldn't understand such humiliation. Maybe he never enjoyed the fun of games during his childhood, but neither did he suffer continuous accidents that transformed his head into a cubist painting. This fact was impossible to hide due to my parents' Stalinist obsession with shaving my head in order to avoid parasitic fauna over such a vast territory. During my childhood, maybe because of that swinging weight over my trunk, maybe because of an inbuilt lack of locomotor skills, or maybe both, every one of my falls have been cushioned by anyone of my hemispheres of lobes. If I reach my fifties with a better mental capacity than Tyson's, I'll be lucky.
My mother Dolores says that When my Saxon midwife had barely cut my umbilical cord, our dog Diogenes had already snatched it from her hands. It must have been tired of chewing sardine bones and was quickly alerted to smell of entrails that we must all emit when we come out of the womb. In front of every visitant, it doesn't matter if they are friends or relatives or the technician who is reading the electricity meter, she always goes on about the fact that my father and the drunk English midwife had a blazing row about who must be the first to slap my bottom. Before the expectation of the customers crowded together outside, I started to cry in order not to hear them. Meanwhile, one was arguing in English and the other one in Greek. My mother had to calm them down. Finally, my father who couldn't renounce his legitimate right to administer the first smack, slapped my ass. He would have burst if he hadn't... Fucking donkey. Then I was snatched from those British hands, and my father realized the good news. His wife had given birth to a male. My father, shoving his way through with my body, moved the people away from the door, stood up on the step, and with solemn posture and Macedonian pride held me up by my ankle as if I was a tuna fish. People cheered and applauded him. After that, he carried me to the water tank that had been settled under the merciless Cretan sun during the whole summer and washed me like he would wash a chicken leg before cooking it. Hygiene? Who needs hygiene if Balkan blood runs inside the veins? My pendulous head rocking and especially my father's skills caused me to slip away and fall headfirst against the floorboards. That fall left the first of many scars on my head. My father just cleaned the wound with the water of the same tank, placed me in the shade of the old secondhand carry cot that they bought in a street market and invited everybody to a drink. Later, after washing herself, conscious that nobody was going to do it for her, my mother came to lay beside me.

"Tonight I want to drink", Haris Alexiou

A friend of mine who also has a divided soul gave me a cd two years ago. That cd contained this theme. As I'm still translating some episodes of my life into English which will be published here in the following weeks, I want to share this song with you, my friends. Sthn geia soy, Pake.



I want to drink tonight
so as nothing to remember
I want to trap myself in smoke
and fear no consequences.
I want drink tonight
and surpass my limits
I want to confess my lost dreams
covered in a smoke's veil.
I'll light up with cigarrettes
and burn out with liquor.
Now that I've been taken fright,
may everything turn into ashes.
I want to drink tonight,
erase everything and everyone.
I want to dissapear in smoke
and look back never again.

"First Sunday of May". Awarded as best short movie at Mostra de Cinema de Valencia.

"First Sunday of May" directed by Martín Román and Iñaki Antuñano has been awarded as the best short movie in 35mm at the Mostra de Valencia last Wednesday. Kostas Vidas would like to congratulate the team. I may assure that the character played by Pilar Matas may make your hair stand on end. At the moment it isn't possible to vision it if it isn't shown in an official contest. But you may get more information on the following sites:
Blog of "Primer Domingo de Mayo"
Blog of Martín Román
Iñaki Antuñano website

Bay the way, I invite you to watch this photovideo performed by José Fernández while the work was filmed:

"Praise to a Freedom Combatant". Poem by Erich Fried

To read it in Spanish, click here.

Not long after the end of the Vietnam War, the blood of the dead still warm, Erich Fried's 100 Poems without a Country (winner of the I Premio Internacional de los Editores) was published in Spain. At the moment I have in my hands a copy which was lend to me by the sculptor Mariano Poyatos ten years ago. I got on touch with him to give him the book back. I hope his mind will be as sensitive as his hands, but in any case I'm ready to accept his complaints. In order to deflower this blog I've decided to translate this poem full of irony. E. Fried (Viena, 1921-Baden Baden, 1988) always mantained an exceptional sensitivity. He denunced social matters in a poetic voice, using aesthetics and irony in the same way as Brecht. When he was seventeen, he and his mother were forced to go into exile just after Fried's father was killed during questioning by the Gestapo. In 1963 he became a member of Gruppe 47 with Böll and Grass. According to Pacifism and Marxism, Fried was able to show the current situation trough a perennial poetry. Many of his poems are based on the conflict in Vietnam, and they may be applicable to later atrocities as Iran-Iraq, Yugoslavia, Gulf wars, and others. I'll try to make a proper translation of his poem:
When he was asked
what he felt watching and listening
every detail of the war,
he fixed his glance on the one
who was questioning him
-Michael Carlton-,
and answered:
Nothing.
Nothing in face of the dead,
when listening
women's wails,
tortured prisoners' groans,
and nothing when the sound
of the mutilated children's crutches
banged on the floor.
Nothing at smelling
the boamboo mats covering the corpses,
nor listening to his comrades' rasping breaths,
black and provincial men recruited
for the great bach.
Nothing.
Oh, perfect warrior,
the goal of the personal strategist
finally achieved.
You are free of weakness,
always available!
Wihtout you,
These decisive wars,
remote wars far away from the fatherland,
would be impossible.
What do you feel?
Nothing.
Hero from this world reduced to a thing:
The one like you
also will be able to throw
children to the dump
or to the gas chamber,
less painful death than napalm.
Happy, the General
who uses you:
He'll be free of limits,
He knows you are free
of femenine scruples.
In order to become perfect you miss:
Nothing.
A monument should be built,
you, still alive,
still shooting,
still throwing grenades,
still being paid,
giving yourself pleasure
on Saigon bordellos.
You're as hard and constant
as those stone and bronze men.
So, you feel nothing,
what could disconcert you?
what could warn you?
what could save you?
Nothing.

This post was published on Kostas Vidas in Spannish on May 21st, 2008.