The angel —
three years we waited for him, attention riveted,
closely scanning
the pines the shore the stars.
One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel
we were searching to find once more the first seed
so that the age-old drama could begin again.
We returned to our homes broken,
limbs incapable, mouths cracked
by the tastes of rust and brine.
when we woke we traveled towards the north, strangers
plunged into mist by the immaculate wings of swans that wounded us.
On winter nights the strong wind from the east maddened us,
in the summers we were lost in the agony of days that couldn’t die.
We brought back
these carved reliefs of a humble art.
I woke with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbow and I don’t know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult for it to separate again.
I look at the eyes: neither open nor closed
I speak to the mouth which keeps trying to speak
I hold the cheeks which have broken through the skin.
That’s all I’m able to do.
My hands disappear and come towards me
mutilated.
And a soul
if it is to know itself
must look
into its own soul:
the stranger and enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror
[…]
What are they after, our souls, travelling
on the decks of decayed ships
crowded in with sallow women and crying babies
unable to forget themselves either with the flying fish
or with the stars that the masts point out at their tips;
grated by gramophone records
committed to non-existent pilgrimages unwillingly
murmuring broken thoughts from foreign languages
Three rocks, a few burnt pines, a lone chapel
and farther above
the same landscape repeated starts again:
three rocks in the shape of a gateway, rusted,
a few burnt pines, black and yellow,
and a square hut buried in whitewash;
and still farther above, many times over,
the same landscape recurs level after level
to the horizon, to the twilit sky.
We who set out on this pilgrimage
looked at the broken statues
became distracted and said that life is not so easily lost
that death has unexplored paths
and its own particular justice;
that while we, still upright on our feet, are dying,
affiliated in stone
united in hardness and weakness,
the ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again
and smile in a strange silence.
So very much having passed before our eyes
that even our eyes saw nothing, but beyond
and behind was memory like the white sheet one night in an enclosure
where we saw strange visions, even stranger than you,
pass by and vanish into the motionless foliage of a pepper tree;
having known this fate of ours so well
wandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years
searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes
trying to remember dates and heroic deeds:
will we be able?
excerpts from George Seferis, “Mythistorema”
commentary
The images in this essay were all shot in the Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City, the house and studio of one of Mexico’s greatest architects, whose eminently modernist spaces are suffused with warm, glowing colors. UNESCO’s 2004 World Heritage listing describes the house as “a masterpiece in the development of the modern movement that merges traditional and vernacular elements, as well as diverse philosophical and artistic currents throughout time, into a new synthesis.”
I could have conveyed the diversity of modernities equally well with photos taken in Prague, or Singapore, or Tokyo—or, come to that, the Tex-Mex borderlands around Big Bend national park: not just Donald Judd’s unlikely artists’ sanctum in Marfa, Texas, but the nearby ghost town of Terlingua, where the Chisos Mining Company once extracted mercury from cinnabar, a mineral “known to Native Americans, who supposedly used its brilliant red color for pictographs” (Wikipedia), and an assortment of creatives now live off grid.
I have loved “Mythistorema” since I stumbled across it as a teenager in the Penguin Modern Poets anthology Four Greek Poets. This translation is by Edmund Keeley. It seemed an appropriate juxtaposition here, I am not sure why.
Camera lucida 
Leave a comment