I lost my voice in Athens

Thoughts on losing, finding and what comes between

July 1, 2023

A lay of the land

I got to Athens on a Thursday afternoon and declared that I had no idea what was here for me. That night, I had dinner at the top of a hill that featured a panoramic view of the city. It kind of felt like I was standing on an island but the body of mass around me wasn’t so much water as it was the centuries of antiquities laid out right there.

I didn’t care much to examine the culture through its ancient landmarks. I like to move my way through a new place by observing the dress among locals, or tasting the food — perceiving the dynamics between the two.

If you come to Athens looking for an endemic souvenir you can wear, you should probably look to the jewelry. One of the first things I noticed about the women and their look is that there is a lot of emphasis on what goes around the clothes. Wrists full of beads, layers of necklaces, and almost always a pinky ring.

It struck me because wearing a pinky ring is a sort of talisman of masculinity in the Eurasian diaspora — the animus, not anima — but you’d be hard-pressed to find one among the fingers of the men here. Maybe that’s the thing about feminine strength in Greece? The wearable tell of its presence?

At dinner on Friday night I sat with a group of stunning Athenian women who reminded me of my Turkish grandmothers with their subtle gesticulations and in the ways they told stories from the soft underbelly of their voices — like messages direct from this familiar, though infrequently-visited broadcasting center. One such woman pulled a necklace off her person when I complimented it. “You like it? You take it.” For good luck, of course.

They all seemed to hold their eyelids heavy over their eyes and somehow this quality felt so all-knowing to me in this tragic and gorgeous and deeply feminine way as if they had seen it all and could not be bothered to fling them so wide open anymore.

These women are gentle matriarchs: on their toes but at ease. I wasn’t sure if the quality is an age-begets-wisdom thing but in evaluating my own psychic inheritance, the genetic feminine wisdom I continue to try to excavate from just across the Aegean waters they swim, I suspect that in fact, this quality of strength has a direct correlation to life experience. The treacherous history of war and on the flip side, perseverance through it. The inequities one faces, the inflated (sometimes undue) pride to which one must bear witness, the respect she must erect from within and for herself if she is ever going to feel, going to have it.

This is the thing they teach us about true depth: it cannot be cultivated without the presence of profound contraction and expansion on the same turf.

A coffee (with oatmilk!!!) from Me Cafe in Kolonaki

I wrote on Friday, after walking to a coffee shop about ten minutes away from my hotel that the people in Greece seem friendly. I wasn’t sure if I felt this way because of their demeanor or because I have more confidence when I am a stranger.

Somehow the condition of being in a foreign place feels more natural to me than belonging — to a landscape, to a neighborhood, to a social group, or category. But on the topic of landscape, one that thing struck me is that even though this is a city, it seems clear and obvious that as far as priorities go, respecting nature, nurturing it, living beside it as if any other honored neighbor is paramount to the culture’s value system.

We don’t really have that in New York — the trees so to speak come after the infrastructure whereas in Athens it feels a bit more like the infrastructure is built around whatever was here first.

But back to being foreign feeling natural: I suspect this feature has something to do with the Frankenstein patchwork of heritage I don’t so much carry around with me as I do wear like a precious medallion around my neck.

When I travel, particularly through parts of Europe or Eurasia or the Middle East, it’s impossible to not draw correlations between the very substance of my heritage and the place I find myself.

I imagine this is true, to a degree, for everyone. We use our own understandings of: where we’re from, how we feel, what we know, as proxies to make sense of what is around us.

The worlds we move through and around are mere reflection of our affinities and aversions.

How I got here

By the afternoon on Friday, I had completely lost my voice, which, given the context, I began to think about philosophically: what is gained from this loss? What other systems come online, what lower frequency can be heard?

I think it left on account of exhaustion — I hadn’t slept longer than 3-4 hours too many days in consecutive order, but this was the social leg of my trip, and I am surprised at how much came up through the loss of my being able to socialize through speech.

I was here with a group on the occasion of the 10th-anniversary fashion show for the brand Zeus and Dione. They were introducing menswear and before I continue, let me just show you some of what was on tap (designed by Marios Schwab):

It felt good to be at a show. Sometimes I forget how much I love the theatrics of it all. You take it for granted when you’re shuttling one to the next, or maybe when you feel like you have to have a strong point of view, but when you think a bit differently about what can be gleaned from a show — when you separate shows from each other and evaluate the creative objective of the designer, there is a play-like nature to the spectacle.

The port in Piraeus

A sort of culture-and-the-arts tilt about inviting an audience into this world you have just erected. I like the idea of show as one-off entertainment opportunity as opposed to essential to the mechanism of commerce and I think a lot can be saved (in more ways than one) by adopting this mindset.

There goes her voice

As I sat through the lunches and dinners and danced through one party silently, trying to drink or eat my way back to energy and sound, emoting effusively, slackjawing fervently, gesturing gigantically to project my presence, gratitude and the image that I am FUN, I just got myself more tired.

So I tried to…eat or drink or move my way back to energy until finally, I gave up and shut up. I was in pursuit of energy, this much I know, but this kind of energy could come only from sleep. My behavior was a fools errand on repeat.

When I stopped trying so hard, I came to notice a conflict between two present, interior voices. One was like a rasp, or a whisper, really, telling me not to: have another coffee, drink that drink, eat that fifteenth sugared thing, while the other was a louder, more familiar impulse that I suspect inclines me to want in the first place. I know it much better, I use it much more and heed its calling just the same. Keep going, it says. Keep doing! Be FUN! I am surprised at how frequently “be fun” came up.

It hadn’t occurred to me how much more often I listen to the latter voice, how much more aware of it I am. I guess on the occasion of my outward rasp matching this newish interior one, I was more inclined to hear the quiet voice better.

It’s weird to notice a dynamic you haven’t paid much attention to, and it’s hard to ignore once you’ve acknowledged it’s there. My sense is that the loud voice wins out because it is louder, yes, but also because it affords me the promise of instant gratification: a shock to my adrenals, the brief quieting of exhaustion, the ease with which you can put the whisper back on mute, stop listening to the quieter message.

And another thing too is what the voice comes to represent — I had not realized how uncomfortable I am just sitting there, how much I need a prop, a gesture, a decoy, a sound to suspend quiet observation in the presence of others. It’s like I dart myself forward as an expression of friendliness, thinking anything less might across as cold.

But there’s power in being a quiet observer, you take on a different role. It’s a role that I guess I have infrequently tried on because I have judged before: called it cold, unfriendly, not fun. I’m starting to see something else in it — a thoughtful commitment to another sense. A sort of maturity I hope I can embody. So much is gained from listening.

The friend holding up her bag, inspired by the shape of a woman’s bust under clothes ca 1950 at Wine is Fine in Athens

July 2, 2023

Lost and found

I slept like shit again last night but I’m sitting at the airport now, writing this and thinking about my cab ride over, which I spent in conversation with the driver. We spoke about who knows what for however long and I thought to myself that there’s something so rich about communion like this — about the dynamic created between benevolent strangers exchanging interest in the other.

It’s like this confessional quality presents itself in the way you converse, in the way you can zoom out and float above yourself to get a broader view, then hone right back into the bullseye — to that most internal depth-of-depths from where you extract ideas you did not know you had, thoughts you are surprised to find here on the surface.

This mirrored what the trip felt like: a fly-on-the-wall observation of place and a deep, though unintended analysis of the self.

And the reason this dynamic forms at all, I think, is because even though you chopped down a tree in the forest of your silence, no one save for the benevolent stranger will have ever heard its fall.

My voice was with me the whole ride to the airport, the whole time we spoke. There was no effort or exert. It was easy and soft, unmarred by…anything, really. I wondered if it was the quiet of mutual anonymity that brought it back. If in the end what was here for me in Athens had in fact been mine all along.

Hope you are having a great weekend,

Leandra