Athens

In the early morning, when only the cats and street cleaners are out, I run from my hotel in the Psyrri neighborhood of Athens up to the Acropolis. The sun is full above the horizon but still low, casting shadows nearly parallel so that little light touches the ground. I stopped enjoying running on pavement the day I left the army, or maybe that was the day I stopped pretending I enjoyed it. I think what I liked was being good at it, or feeling like I was good at it, and the feeling of being in shape, of being able to cruise along without struggle, or to choose when to exert myself so my heart seemed to beat in time with my footfalls and air became compressed and valuable. Running hard enough to create a burning in my lungs. On cool mornings I could feel the air on my throat even before it singed my insides, and I knew it was going to hurt to breathe well into the morning, long after I exchanged my running shoes for work boots. Now I run mostly so I can experience things when other people aren’t around. I leave my hotel in shorts and a t-shirt, the few locals I pass at this very early hour of 8 am dressed in puffy coats zipped to their chins, pampered by the Med. The neighborhood I stay in looks and smells of Mardi Gras, and the narrow, bricked streets covered in the previous evening’s detritus quickly give way to a gritty main road, storefronts covered in graffiti and locked iron gates. After a few hundred steps I cross into Monastiraki Square. Pigeons pick at cigarette butts and cleaned-out peanut shells. They strut lazily out of my way and I sometimes have an inclination to kick at one, only to see if I’m quick enough to hit the bird, or it too slow to dodge my foot, but I never make the attempt. People hate pigeons, I think, because they always seem to be walking around in their own shit. On one side of Monastiraki Square is the Pantanassa Orthodox Church, just 1,000 years old. On a timeline, I would be closer to this church than this church would be to the Parthenon, whose columns I can now see on the hill high in front of me. The rising sun casts giant halos and penumbras and nimbuses and aureolas around ancient structures, hundred million year old chunks of stone chiseled and shaved and stacked and polished, 2,400 years ago, into the buildings I see now. Twenty-four hundred years barely registers when you’re talking a hundred million. A blip. A fraction of a blip. For a human man in his early 50s, 2,400 years is an amount of time so imperceptible as to be inconceivable. As inconceivable, perhaps, as a single thing simply conjuring all of this up out of nothingness. How the Greeks built the Parthenon, and that this thing is still standing here above me is, I think, about as easy to grasp as is the beginnings of all of Earth.

The polished marble of Monastiraki Square is slick from government workers hosing it down. I momentarily lose my footing, and walk for a few steps. I watch a woman, hurriedly passing between me and the church, cross herself in that unique Greek Orthodox way, the thumb, middle, and index fingers of the right hand touching each other, the remaining two fingers touching the palm. The woman first touches her forehead, then her chest, then her right shoulder and lastly her left. The Italians use basically this same configuration, turned upright, to say something along the lines of “what in the fuck are you even talking about”, and I wonder if they took it from the Greeks, along with the alphabet and art and gods and philosophers. My route to the Parthenon, just one building among many in the Acropolis, runs through neighborhoods of tilted cobbled streets and tight passageways, graffiti everywhere. Some images are beautiful but much of it is shit, spray painted by someone in a hurry, under the cover of darkness or influence of alcohol, a messy artistic version of a drive-by shooting. I see one image repeatedly, always in thick black lines but different sizes, unmistakably of a winged and stubbled scrotum and testicles. The shops are labeled in English – the language of money – and Greek. Both, I think, are clumsy and ordinary. The letters lack the beauty of Sanskrit or Arabic or the Georgian Mkhedruli, flowy and connected and ethereal where the Greek seems linear and blocky. I stop in front of an eighteen hundred year old statue of a woman, headless but otherwise in a position apparently immemorial since women posed: Left hand on hip, hip slightly outward, right knee slightly bent and forward, right heel off the ground. I will see this pose a hundred times today. The statue, like all statues in Athens, is extraordinary in detail and accuracy and craftsmanship, and I think this is what their letters should look like.

On the way back to my hotel I join a trickling of people walking west on one of Athen’s main roads, closed today to vehicle traffic. We walk slightly uphill, and when I turn to look behind me I see there are thousands of us. At the top of the slight incline, where I can now see down the road in front of me and into Syntagma Square, I see we are tens of thousands. Two years ago today a train crash killed fifty-seven people, some of them burned to death, many of them college students. The government has held no one responsible, blaming human error, and so here we are in demonstration (English demonstration: From the Old French, demonstracioun; from the Latin demonstratio; from the Greek apodeixis). I wander the square, the main meeting point for the protest, and I realize there are far more than thousands. Most people are dressed in black. The atmosphere is pleasant enough but then I see a man with a gas mask dangling from his back pocket, and then another and another, and I know this is no frequency illusion, no Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but rather an incipient game of Molotov cocktails and teargas. I continue back to my hotel like an anadromous fish: Against a river of people, never ending and flowing, for a solid ten minutes. There are not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands.

In the afternoon, I sit. I drink coffee and beer and try to write. Or I don’t. I rarely have a plan when I travel now, never a schedule. My age dictates my pace, which is leisurely, a recognition that time, the only truly finite commodity, is always coming towards me, never ending and flowing.