Chimes of a Clock

Athens I see as a city forever in the middle of its life between its rise and its decline moving always but always too in suspense and it tells not whether it is falling or soaring. I could say this of any city that could warm itself with the heat it gives off as it cools at dusk, but in Athens, as I have said before, this sense is necessarily more acute and pervasive.

Most people come here to admire Athens for what it was and most—including me at times—at best tolerate it for what it is. It’s a difficult city to explore, and it’s impossible to consider its modern moment sundered from its ancient moment. But this nagging need to the compare the city’s moments to one another has the effect of joining them in a continuity of separations, like daubing the dry lines in a watercolor so the wet colors intertwine themselves.

Even at dawn the city sounds warm as if has already been swinging itself around for hours. The sounds of birds—doves, and others I do not know that click and fluoresce—mingle easily with the horns of taxis and grumble of motorcycles slowing and speeding as they stitch the traffic together, as if the streets were a wound and they the needles their thread their exhaust and the noise I wish would just for once cease. But it never does. It’s a still life of movement, the steadiness of the changing landscape of cars as color of the streets.

The sound of Athens in the noon of its day is to me the squeak, stick and slip of shoes, that soft parting sound of shoes on the heat-made soft asphalt, thousands melting just a little into the street and back to their feet like a deliberately slowed ending to a kiss that is itself a kiss in the lingering way the lips part.

Marble, however, is solid but still sounds wet when it’s hot and the Acropolis sounds like a basketball court in a close game but it looks like the sorriest you’ve ever seen: all the players ill-dressed and heatstricken gazing up and spinning around looking for the hoop on any one of the many immense white pillars or sitting on a bench developing new and fascinating patterns of sweat in their soaked-through shirts. They map Greek islands on their backs and sea monsters on their bellies.

And maybe it is in its sounds that Athens repeats itself the most—the little grocery carts wheeled by the old women on the way to Laiki, their thin aluminum frames bouncing on the grooved sidewalks, or the sliding tap of the laundry racks pulled out on onto the balconies and unfurled, or the smallest waterfall of droplets trickling from some apartment above, from who knows what source, and the guessing that comes from the patter of its sound going in and out. Can I make it under without getting dripped on? By its sound is it falling on the street or the sidewalk? Is it one drop every three seconds or two? I’ve learned now to ignore it and get wet from that sound.

Yet I’m convinced that’s there’s variety in this grey, tan, and off-white sea. Below it on the street around some blind turn or behind some over-plump dumpster there’s streetart worth thousands given for free and intersections of color and line spontaneous and unexpected and vanished so simply as when a cat wakes and slips away. This city changes with the slant of the castings of light, I swear it. So briefly, the color of the sunset through pollution is the same as the Tang-orange glow that alights the Parthenon at night, both of them in equal dimness and a shade that bequeaths them one color, the artificial and natural seen through each other as the present sees the past, and can, at moments, believe it sees itself. Can the past look at us? Does this city imagine what it must look like to the eyes of the one that came before it? Would the past recognize itself in today?

The way Athens was settled, swelled unthoughtfully and unplanned by rural refugees fleeing decimation after WWII and the Greek Civil War, suggests that this modern city had little time to notice its beginning and yet also had little choice but to depend upon the civilization that preceded it. It was born middle-aged and a little weary—and when it looks back for a mythical vanished youth all it can see, lit up every night in its very center, is a very much vanished old age, its bones worshipped.

It cannot call itself young, and it cannot call itself old, and so it searches for the sound of its name. I’ve written about this before but I find myself thinking about it again and again and for whatever reason I try to listen to city and hear what it says even when it speaks in a wordless language that leaves me feeling more foreign than ever. Cities alienate, but Athens, I feel, more than many others faces everyday the alienation of itself. In its sounds, in its voice, its discrete selves are never so parted, but in its voice it is also never so conjoined, as if the birds and horns were calling to each other though they cannot at all hear one another.



Sean