Empty Books

When I was expecting Aretousa, I made for her a book with collage animals in it and the Greek equivalent word printed underneath. (Some examples of this book can be seen in the post Happy New Year). Then I started working on a second one, using the same kind of black, square, spiral bound book, to make a series of images of first words a child usually learns. This time I wanted to handwrite the word in Greek underneath rather than print it. When I was learning to write and read, I remember finding it very hard to read handwritten words; they seemed to me very varied from person to person and not at all similar to the printed ones. I still find it hard to read handwritten words in any language except maybe French, where the calligraphy people learn at school seems to be quite uniform. So I thought if I handwrite very clearly the words underneath the images, it will expose Aretousa to handwriting and help her get accustomed with it easier than I did. I barely had started the second book and Aretousa arrived, so I left it and still have not continued with it. I would like to finish the next five collages in the space of a month, which seems a very doable deadline. I thought maybe I should ask my mother to handwrite the words underneath, as she has an immaculate and almost perfectly even handwriting, but then that kind of defeats the point and will make the whole thing feel a bit alien to me if someone else finishes it. So I will leave the writing bit for the very end and decide what to do then.

Below are the ones I managed to finish: girl, boy, house, boat, ball, doll, teddy bear.

The thing I like the most about making these two books, is that it feels in a way as a very organised and complete thing to do and it makes me very satisfied to know that I stuck with it. I have been unable to ever keep a sketchbook, for example. I seem to draw and write mostly on whatever is around, before I forget my own thoughts; on opened letter envelops, behind or on shopping lists, on bits of paper laying around, in address books, on bills and so on. Whenever I bought different sketchbooks, I might start something very self consciously, but there are never more than a couple of pages used in either one book. Sometimes the drawings feel trapped in the sketchbook to me, and I want to see them next to other things, move them about and the only way to properly do this would be to tear the pages off, which really frustrates me. I am very envious of people who can keep sketchbooks and trace their ideas backwards through them. I am not sure where the root of my own inability lies. I once tried to stick all the bits of drawings in a book in an attempt to create a kind of sketchbook, but it looked very artificial and I was never sure which side to stick down, as most of the times there is something drawn on both sides. The best thing I could do to keep things together, is insert them in clear sleeve books, where you can see either side of the drawings. The problem then is that everything becomes a bit like an archive behind plastic and you are much less likely to work on any of these drawings again.

When I was a kid, we lived in an apartment that belonged to two, very modern at the time, twin blocks of flats, on split levels, that had one of their walls in common. This was apparently, one of the first blocks of flats to be built in the area, by an Italian architect, and because of its location on the mountain and its remarkable view of the whole of Athens, had the very exotic name of Bella Vista (Beautiful View). We were lucky, as the owners lived in Australia and let us rent the apartment there for years and years without ever altering the price. The first floor was raised from the ground with thick rectangular cement columns, so that it created a great play area for the kids in the winter. All around the two blocks of flats lay a huge garden. It took around fifteen minutes to walk all around it. In the summer we stayed and played "downstairs" from the late afternoon till around 10:30 to 11:00 pm. Amongst the residents of the two blocks of flats were altogether more than twenty children living there. There were around ten kids of my age and we had formed a very strong gang. I was slightly older than the rest of the kids and the leader of that gang for about five years, till we left the building.

One of our main missions was to stop a very mean, sad old man from destroying new born kittens in the cruellest of ways possible, that I will not go into here. I am sad to say that this was not uncommon in Greece of that time for stray animals to be disposed of. We managed to save many, but it was very difficult to find the money to bring them all up and without attracting the attention of the neighbours. We also played extensively hide and seek, with another version, solemnly retained for night play, called in Greece, German Hide and Seek. We played this after 9:00 pm. and it was a truly thrilling game. In this version everyone closes their eyes and counts to 100, while only one person hides. I still remember the darkness and the smells multiplying in the dark where you crouched hidden. There was grass, wild laurels, a weeping willow, honeysuckle, rosemary, cypresses and lots of bushes all around the garden. Then everyone spreads out in different directions looking for the one hidden kid. If you found them you had to hide very quietly with them till one poor person was left alone looking in the dark. Very often, we giggled and gave ourselves away and very occasionally the last kid would give up and call out for the rest to reveal themselves.

The reason I remembered all this, is because we also used to play a story telling game. Everyone wrote a paragraph on a piece of paper of a real or an imagined event. If you were not good with words you could only write down one single thing. Then one of us collected the papers and took them home the day before the game. We were given a beautiful leather black book, by the father of one of the boys there, that was from his job, to keep accounts inside. It smelled beautifully of leather and had pink shaded pages with lines and columns. We agreed to write our names, do a drawing of ourselves, the rules and missions of our gang, the money we had and the stories we told from the story telling game. I was responsible for this book and I don't think I ever wrote anything more in it than a title. Instead I wrote everything in bits of paper hoping to copy them properly down at some point. When it was my turn to do the story telling, I collected the bits of paper and made a hole in them and put a string through.  Then I carried it around with me and read them wherever I was. The bunch got bigger and bigger through each week in the summer.

At the very back of the garden, along the end, there were a series of very tall, old elm trees planted. I think there must have been around thirty of them of a silverish shade. When the wind blew from one direction the first tree moved slightly and touched the next one, then the next one moved and touched the following, so that it really looked like they were nudging each other tenderly, warning about the wind. When there was a storm or something like that, they really moved and made a very specific noise of fine wooden fractures and loud whispering. They looked like they got really panicked when there was a storm and worked each other up. Next to one end of that line of elm trees, was a round sand pit of about four meters in diameter. We lay there in the dark, like spokes of a wheel, with our feet in the centre of the circle and our heads outwards. You could see all the stars in the sky and hear the summer noises of people on the balconies and the elm trees always talking. One of my friends managed to somehow make her stories always include aliens. No matter what information everyone had given to her. You were meant to combine all the information and make up a story to tell. I always brought with me the pieces of paper with the string through them, but I could never see anything in the dark, so I made it all up anyway and no one seemed to protest if their bit of the story was not there. When I was leaving they asked for the book, which was still empty, so that we all went through all the stories. I told them some kind of made up thing I cannot remember, about burying it in the sand pit without opening it first. So I think it still lays buried next to the elm trees, without much written in it at all. Just the title and maybe a date.