“Ἀλήθειες φτιάχνονται στό δευτερόλεπτο / ἀλλά προϋπάρχουν, / ὡς σταγόνες” writes Dean Kalimniou in his latest poetic offering, Ἀνησυχασμός. Here he maintains that no thing comes from nothing. The truth of our self-identity, individual or collective, does not come into being out of nowhere.
We exist because we recognise other bodies, hearts, minds, souls, objects distinct from us, and in so doing, acknowledge our relationship with them. And so we grow, or dissolve. Individual identity, like cultural and national identity, is organic and fluid, always moving and changing as one small but unique and intricate part of a complex whole, of countless others. Who we consider ourselves to be is determined by our continuous negotiation between the flashpoint truth of our immediate experience and a timeless truth and dynamism beyond our own self-knowledge, one greater than ourselves. This is the underlying theme of this collection of poems.
There is a keen self-awareness in these poems, which are intensely personal yet synecdochal from the collection’s outset. The introspection in Kalimniou’s poetry here reveals a restlessness, a disquietude, an ambivalence in the relationship between the individual’s interior world and the living, physical world around them, one which often appears unaccommodating. By naming and describing some of the forms such a crisis may take, Kalimniou reappraises his own experience of and relationship with such a world, and with its metaphysical elements. There is a kind of engaged metaphysics here, with various paradigms of Eastern mysticism, including Eastern Orthodoxy, which are key to unlocking what Ανησυχασμός offers.
The collection’s title and that of the opening poem is an inversion of the term Ησυχασμός (Hesychasm) and so we must first take a brief look at its significance in order to appreciate Kalimniou’s re-appropriation of its dynamics in his poems. Hesychasm is a tradition of prayer and practice of meditation within Eastern Orthodox mysticism and part of its eremitic and ascetic practice. For the Hesychast, the awareness of the energy of the pure, uncreated reality of the Divine is an awareness through feeling and is in the form of light – of illumination, a luminescence, a luminous essence.
In his poems, Kalimniou re-appropriates and redirects the function and significance to self-knowledge of such an awareness of the light and energy passing between and connecting all natural, sentient life, showing how it can also be inverted. This however does not mean that he negates or contradicts it by invoking its opposite, but rather it is its symmetrical reflection which he presents. The poet likewise neither negates nor contradicts the religious and existential tenets of Orthodox mysticism, but complements and expands upon them by taking up one end of this strand of mysticism and following it. This strand forms a circle. The poems contribute to the awareness of the Divine, immortal light of creation and breath of life by showing its crises, its ruptures and fragmentations, and of course its verso. This is in part the reason why the illustrations in this collection are perhaps most significant in their relationship to the poems: the vast majority are inversions of black and white line drawings, resembling photo negatives.
Kalimniou recognizes each disconnected part of the self, or of existence as essential to recognising the whole. His poems speak to the folds and the cavities in the illuminated surface of the created world – the gaps and cracks, the spaces and holes into which we may slip and find ourselves, or lose ourselves. This exterior is also the shifting terrain of time – both of personal and collective experiences, identities, histories. So many things are consigned and hidden, buried and forgotten in these twists and folds and holes, yet they refuse to fall away from us completely and we refuse to let them go, allowing them to come back again and again.
Considering the poems collectively, and their subjects and themes more broadly, we can also see how Kalimniou challenges the reductive, linear view of Hellenic cultural identity and its legacy constructed by Romanticism, as one confined largely to classical antiquity – a view we have no doubt adopted and internalised. Kalimniou does this by reinvigorating aspects of Hellenism’s own cultural history, particularly its religious and spiritual life, inverting and re-appropriating them in order to illustrate this fluid dynamism of inter-connectedness both within and without the self. Even in common Hellenic consideration of collective identity, the influence of Hellenic culture on the rest of the world is unidirectional. Such a homogenising view does not recognise the complexities and nuances of this light and its connections. When Kalimniou speaks of such illumination, its rays are not unidirectional, but cyclical – part of the floating terrain of self-identity, one which is a site of convergence and divergence. Thus places significant to his conception of Hellenism, such as Tepelenë, Himara, Alexandria, Mesopotamia, Olympia, Ioannina, Aksaray, Cyprus and even Station Pier, and people such as the theologian Origen, Sufi Saint Hajji Bektash, Ariadne of myth, primordial man Deucalion, Cadmus of Thebes, Federico Garcia Lorca are the canvas upon which Kalimniou’s light show takes place.
Τhe poems in Ανησυχασμός illuminate and re-invigorate in Kalimniou’s uniquely bittersweet voice, the maxim of Metaphysical poet John Donne, that “no man is an island”, the ebbs and flows of creation and of un-creation, of immortality and of mortality, the timeless and the temporal, stillness, quietude, light and their inversions, and the connections and disconnections which these things foster appear to us invisible. However, the restless, unquiet spirit of Kalimniou’s latest collection of poetry shows how all beings and their experiences, even the once-living, the once-existing – the sunlit tree in buckled floorboards and the music of a broken violin, the restless heart in the continuously shifting terrain of our self-identity – are all an integral part of the infinite holiness and mystery of life in the here and now which refuses to be still and to let us close our eyes and sleep. The humility of recognising this is how Kalimniou invites us, the readers, into the dynamic fold of his poems, to perhaps see in them aspects of our own unique identity, and another’s in us, writing in Δευκαλίων, the Noah of the Greeks:
Εἶμαι
σάν νά μήν παρομοιάζομαι
μέ τίποτα….
Εἶμαι ὅσο πρωτόπλαστος
εἶσαι καί ἐσύ,
καί βάλε.
* George Mouratidis teaches Communications and Media at RMIT.
*Dean Kalimniou’s poetry collection Anisixasmos along with two others, Plektani and Kelyfsopastis will be launched on 8 September at 3.00 pm at the Panarcadian Association, 570 Victoria Street, North Melbourne, by Professor Vrasidas Karalis.