Athens is burning....summer island reading and reflecting

Here, the life on the island paradise continues. The sky at night is red red red in the direction of Athens and the mainland, though so far away I doubt that the sunset really has a thing to do with the redness here. Though who knows? Until this change, the world was all blues and greens.

As I reread Incubation : a space for monsters by Bhanu Kapil last week (click title for spd link), laying in the hot sands so very far from all Americaness that peppers that book, reading through it, reading to write back to myself at times, to my own movements over a life, I drifted, re-re-reading, thinking of the colors in it versus the colors here. Very different tones the greens and blues and browns of here and the reds and oranges in the book.

But with last night's sunset, the palette shifted, indicated the hot elsewheres of the world hovering just beyond our touch in this aquatic life. On p 80 of Incubation, Kapil writes "It is arrival in reverse to approach an ocean. Are you an immigrant? Don't panic, immigrant. There are places to curl up in under a cliff, in a cave, and in the morning you will be covered with starfish opening and closing all over your body. Encrusted, riveted, bright orange, what will you do? What will you do with your new body?" This passage speaks to some seachange in me, some post-PhD emerging, setting sail, drifting that I feel part of at the moment.

Here, I keep swimming out to the rock where Sappho wrote her poems and is rumored to have perhaps killed herself, but as of yet I have not had the luck of seeing the starfish some others have found there. Yesterday, however, many dark and colorful fish circled round my feet as I tread water looking down at them.

Anyway, here are some images of Athens from Zeeinfo and thinkinginpictures, the battle taking place on the Greek mainland while here I head off to lay on the beach, rest, read Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses (click title for the amazon link, though the cover on the edition I am reading is much better!). To see aerial views of Athens, or for more, check out the blog and images at firefighters blog: http://firefighterblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/satellite-images-of-fires-in-greece.html