:investigation, inquiry, research, written account of past events, narrative, a story
A story always involves a past. I visited Dachau when I was 21. I rushed to the train right after the visit, needing to get out, Munich to Paris. The sound of the language restricted my breathing, and I felt I had to escape to the next border.
Some years later I went to Terezin because my English teacher, Dita, was one of the children that survived both Terezin and Auschwitz. She has a painting that survived and travels around the world with the childrens art exhibit. I thought of my mother, who one evening after dinner the Hungarians came and boarded the jews onto horse carriages to some other place.
Knowing the past, the far past and the nearer, one is crossing the borders of time, centuries and generations, and it reveals to oneself that they will not be here for long. They will not see how things will evolve, will not remain. This often leaves me in owe and saddens me. I want to know. I am curious. I want to see the flying cars, the cures, the transformation of ideas and cultures.
Seeing the past makes my knees tremble knowing that one can be easily swept into forces one has no control over. I went to Hiroshima when I was in my 20's to pay homage. I was born in Athens, and now from my dad's balcony, you can see the Acropolis, a reminder of all that was, the glory and the gore. I lived through the Junta in Greece. An imprint of memory etched forever in my brain. I resolved to climb mount Olympus to have a talk with Zeus.
The Gods always impressed me, studying mythology in grammar school I believed in the powers of Demeter and Athina. I still do. Seeing plays in Epidavros, hanging out in the Agora, taking the metro in Athens, where all that has surfaced in its construction has been preserved behind glass, seeing the Minoan Palace, the dreams of a Labyrinth and Ikaros falling in Ikaria where I spent a summer as a child, forced me to notice.
I grew up in the past and my past is engulfed by a much wider past. My memories are endless: the Alhambra, the Colosseum, Effesos, Agia Sophia, the Sphinx-eternally asking questions, which many, too many remain answered. I immigrated to Israel, and somehow visiting Jerusalem has always been painful and avoided. My father's house, his Patriko is there and no longer ours. I climbed a tree in my grandmother's garden in the Greek Colony in Jerusalem, from which I couldn't come back down.
Both my parents where refugees-one from Hungary, one from Palestine. History is eternity, hidden in the desert, writings of the Nabateans etched on the stone telling us stories, caves that keep secrets of the ice age, a time that began 80 million years ago. I spent a time of my childhood with a family friend, an anthropologist recording the Bedouins oral history and poetry and it impressed me even then how people carried the past with them, mouth to mouth, from memory to memory.
Just lately, I travelled to see the Mylodon cave, following the Giant Sloth's footsteps into Patagonia, another homage to the glaciers from the bygones, and to Bruce Chatwin whose books strengthened my wanderlust. Mylodon was around 10-14 thousand years ago. I live in a house from 1904, before the big fire in San Francisco and the old redwood walls make me think of the people who lived here that I have never known.
Endless places: travelled to where Budha was born, to where Christ lived and died, where tragedy and comedy began. Travelled to so many graves of good and not so good people. Paying homage always meant something to me. I am sentimental that way; Kafka, Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Camus, Shackleton, Lincoln, Evita Peron, to name a few. I was moved when my husband surprised me with a stay in the hotel where Oscar Wilde lived and died. And I rushed to Cuba, during the Bush junior era, to have a drink in just about every hole Hemingway been.
Historia is something about eternity, loss and survival. One's own, one's species. Past species. Extinct. Finished. Except not really, we carry the past and we push the past forward whether it is a good practice or not.
When I was young it impressed me that my grandfather was born in 1900, and saw the invention of electricity and phone and trains that became evil, and planes and television, the man on the moon and so many wars: the first in which he was an officer in the Austro Hungarian war; the second in which he was a slave, the 6 day war and Yom Kippur war in Israel, to where he moved to, escaping the Communist regime.
I immigrated to Israel just before the Yom Kippur war, and since then I have seen the birth of the world wide web, the technological revolution right by my house, living at the time in Palo Alto and Mountain View. My office remains in Palo Alto, in an old victorian in which Joan Baez grew up. I seen gay marriage come through, I have seen a black president in America, I have seen death, war, and genocide continue, despite the never again intentions.
I still think my grandfather's view of change was far more vast. Often I want to tell those who died and I have known, how things turned out. I don't have images from all the places, I carry them mostly in my memory and my mind's eye-my imagination. The past informs my present and enriches it, sometimes its heavy, often it keeps me awake and alert.
