Lucia Dawes Durneen

FOURTEEN NOTES that did not become an essay on Cavafy

[1.]

There are some things you can tell people only at night. Slow things, because you are learning how to speak across absences.

You wrote a poem for the beloved when you were no longer beloved, 
and you found a poem by the beloved after you understood 
you were not the girl in the poem. 

The blank page deep in your chest both transmits and receives what needs to be communicated, but sometimes it can’t. Sometimes five years pass, or twenty-six, and nobody ever writes anything down. 

So much of a story is simply our refusal to behave. 

[2.] 

There was a woman swimming in the shadow of the sea road, below the Old Town. I will confess, I had been watching her from the rocks above the cove. I was reading the collected poems of C.P Cavafy. In turn this made me think of the book in The Odyssey, where Zeus tells Calypso that Odysseus isn’t hers to keep, which is to say, I was thinking about you.

A flat shimmer of sky. 

Into and out of the light the woman swam, in a black bathing costume, with bright long hair. She climbed out of the water, or rather, took wing from sea to rock. I thought how, once, many years ago, I had watched owls flying the length of Porthcurno Beach in the far west of England. I remembered this because until then I had not realised that owls also flew in the day. 

The woman had been watching me too. When she approached with her camera, it did not feel unexpected. She said, I hope this doesn’t sound strange, but I took a photograph of you. I thought maybe you would like it. 

It did not sound strange. 

In the photograph, I am sitting on the rocks, looking out across the Straits of Corfu to Vido Island. Pale breaths of cloud above. To the side, almost the foreground, the Kerkyra line ferry to Paxos breaks in half the water and the sky. High up on the rock, I appear as an afterthought yet somehow, the only thing on which the camera is focused. 

Her name was Parnassa. I did not know this was even a name. Parnassa, as in Mount Parnassus, as in home of the Oracle of Delphi, of the Muses. I told her that I was lonely, that this is what her camera had seen, and Parnassa said, There are worse places than here to feel lonely, which is true. 

[3.]

Looking out towards Vido Island I had also been thinking about ancient Scherie, how just along the coast the goddess Athena, companion of the owls, appears in a dream to Nausicaa of the white arms. It’s time to wash your clothes, Athena murmurs in the dream, time to become a wife, and Nausicaa heads to the water and does as she’s told.

I much prefer Cavafy when he is speaking of pleasure and not of war, although that does not seem a surprising thing to feel. So many battles and armies in his words, so much male commotion. Only later, in the early hours of morning, does he write of the baring of flesh, the half-glow of a paraffin lamp in the doorway of a tavern. 

I am coming to learn that I am someone who feels most pleasure in the space between where the body is and the body is not. Or do I mean time? In the time between when I am, and when I have not been. 

What Parnassa’s camera could see so instantly; I will call it yearning.

[4.]

The irrealis is a verbal mood that indicates certain events have not happened or may never happen. The yet-to-be, might-be, might-have-been, might-never-have-been-but-should-have-been. Subjunctive events. Also conditional and counterfactual ones.

To explain the irreal in reality, André Aciman turns to Cavafy’s poem ‘The Afternoon Sun.’

Next to the window was the bed / where we made love so many times

When Cavafy writes these lines in Alexandria in 1919, Aciman says, he is picturing a bed that was once but now isn’t, already aware that with these words he is immortalising it for a time in which he will no longer remember the sound of wet skin on slick, wet skin, or the street sounds outside the window, the softness of the bed, or if it was even many times but one time, a first time that does not yet know if it is the first or merely the only time because it has not yet happened in relation to other times, only this time, which is the precursor to the might-become, remembered from the perspective of the imagined memory, the memory that has not yet been lived.

[5.]

Part nothing*, Aciman says, of the irrealis mood. 

*‘Cavafy’s Bed’ from Homo Irrealis, André Aciman, Picador: New York (2021), p.71

[6.]

The Chatto & Windus edition of Poems by C.P. Cavafy is translated by Professor John Mavrogordato, first in 1937, and then revised for its first English edition in 1951. The front cover of its 1971 reprint, the one I own, reproduces David Hockney’s etching of Cavafy in Alexandria from his series FOURTEEN POEMS by C.P. Cavafy. Alexandria in aquatint, a row of palm trees. Konstantinos, in spectacles and a tie, looking quixotically at the viewer, as if trying to resist what lies behind him. A man who learned to write in Greek in order to yearn in Greek, never fully sure of his grasp of the language, never even publishing a book in his lifetime. 

For FOURTEEN POEMS, Hockney used the 1966 translation by Nikos Stangos and Stephen Spender rather than Mavrogrodato’s original, basing most of the illustrations on drawings of his friends in London, with four set, incongruously, in the Middle East. ‘To Remain’ depicts a man in the doorway of a shop, hand at his mouth—shocked, or tired, it’s hard to say. Another figure, visible only from the waist down, stands behind a row of jackets that hang in the window and turn idly, as if lifted by a breeze. 

In the Onassis Foundation archive of Cavafy’s manuscripts, drafts, printed editions, and other documents, edits of the poems that are waiting to become scenes in Hockney’s etchings sit alongside gambling ledgers and distribution lists. Ghost poems, both yet-to-be and never-were. Words as elusive as owls. If Greek is the language of yearning, English is that of administration. Typed across a number of documents in the Cavafy archive are the words: ‘Not for publication but may remain here.’

[7.]

The image has now come to stay here in this poetry, is what Cavafy said of the love affair recalled in ‘To Remain.’ The half-opened clothes. The blazing heat of July. It took him twenty-six years to find a place for this image to rest. What can the body do that the word cannot?  

There is something in Hockney’s copper plate lines that is more poem than Cavafy’s written ones. 

Not a wine shop but a dry cleaners. Not Alexandria in 1919 but Beirut in 1966, Hockney having visited there after deciding the city was more Alexandrian than Alexandria.   

[8.]

What would you say to a person you could never see again? To a place? The myths warn us not to go back into the underworld, but I had forgotten, Orpheus actually turns around. 

This is how T. Fleischmann described Orpheus: Just a man deciding he would rather see his beloved / than any future the gods could promise.*

A scattering of clothes on the floor is a kind of myth. They were not my clothes, which was the first indication I would not see the future the gods had promised for you.

Eurydice would have kept walking, I am certain. A woman would have known to take the warning seriously.

To which I might have said, [ ]^.

What is it men want? Anne Carson asks of male pleasure†. I have become afraid that it is what Cavafy sees: first the wildness and violence, the victory, and only as an afterthought the enduring beauty, something slow, soft, to be entered, dreamed.

*Time is the thing a body moves through; T. Fleischmann, Coffee House Press: Minneapolis (2019) p.48
^’At Evening’, in Poems by C.P. Cavafy, C.P. Cavafy, trans. John Mavrogordato Chatto & Windus, London (1971.)
†‘The Anthropology of Water’ from Plainwater, Anne Carson, Vintage: New York (2000), p. 200

[9.]

Your tongue whetting on the plosive of her name. I do not want to think of your hands running over the books on her window ledge, and yet I have, so often. Your soft white bed, the fan blowing gently. What happened when you came up for air beside the outline of her body? 

It is impossible to live with what is good for the art. Which is to say, when I try to stop writing of love, I have only found myself writing harder of love. 

The heart already wants to beat in step with every other human heart in the living world. This is something to do with the torus field. The aura that flows around us and through us. It is something to do with that. 

[10.]

A form is chosen not for its weight, but for what it can hold. Or remove. The page, for instance, is a zone of entanglement, of intimacy, asking us to draw shut its door. 

Once I was the girl in the poem. Girl as ghost, girl only as afterthought. Like a crab I moved, with pain, as I slipped out from the shell of your life, unnoticed. Provisional. Part nothing.

Another way to put this: apocalypse, from the Greek apokálypsis, actually means an ‘uncovering’, a ‘revelation’, not an ending.

Another way to put this. Is there any part of the self we will not try to turn into art? 

[11.]

Can a place be a mood—the steps of the Byzantine Museum on Arseniou, for example? Can a mood be the moan of the sea behind a woman’s back? 

Kiss me properly, you had said, on those steps, one night not long after the Pisces full moon. I said no, because you were still married. A man walking up the steps towards the church apologised for disturbing us. He spoke in English, which will seem strange, when this becomes a memory, afterwards. It will be accompanied by the concussive bursts of swifts in flight, loud as summer rain. The image has now come to stay here. How easily it arrives. How easily something slips into a subjunctive space.

[12.] 

The you in the soft white bed is not the you on the steps of the Byzantine Museum, I must make that clear. You are yet-to-be. Might-have-been. One of you had very beautiful eyes, but I imagine many have told you that. 

What confuses me about human desire: the strength with which* we want to do the things that in other rooms, at other times, have been done to us, and by which we have been broken. 

The consummation of their lawless pleasure 
Was done. They rose up from the mattress;
And hurriedly they dress themselves without speaking.

*‘Their Beginning’, in Poems by C.P. Cavafy, C.P. Cavafy, trans. John Mavrogordato Chatto & Windus, London (1971)

[13.]

The Panagia Antivouniotissa looks out across to Vido Island and the mountains that follow Greece into Albania. On the steps of the Byzantine Museum I became obsessed with the view of mountains the way you might become obsessed with a lover’s body. I did not feel alone when I looked at them, that is all I can say. I too became antivouniotissa, unmovable. 

In the shadow of the sea road, swimmers brighten the water like pearls stitched across raw silk. I did not see Parnassa again, although I looked for her there many times, swimming down to Alekos beach to break the surface in the Contra Fossa beneath the citadel, unsure if she, or I, had ever really been. Underwater, my body has always felt new, lacking definitions. My old self as impossible as a distant star. My future self as impossible as light finally reaching Earth. 

[14.]

Anne Carson also says: Love is a story which tells itself*.

About this, I long to talk to the ancestor poets, but I do not know if they would want to speak to me. They are suggesting instead an essay on silence. An essay that fails to express the thing it has been seeking to express. After all, they say, the site of the crisis can lie far from the wound. 

But what if Athena had been wrong? Not a man but an owl that Nausicaa was supposed to find beside the water.

It will be a long journey, is what the ancestors are saying. Write only to describe the bones.

*The Anthropology of Water’ from Plainwater, Anne Carson, Vintage: New York (2000), p. 190

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Lucia Dawes Durneen’s poetry, short stories, and essays have been published and commended internationally, in journals including Meniscus, World Literature Today, Hotel Amerika, and Poetry Ireland. Her first short story collection, Wild Gestures, was published in 2017 with MidnightSun; it won Best Short Story Collection at the 2017 Saboteur Awards in London, and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2018. Her most recent story, ‘The Grief Hour’ was co-authored with Leila Aboulela, and published in the critically acclaimed anthology Duets, in October 2024, while her poetry chapbook Men who do not love me explain love to me was a Finalist in the YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest 2024. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, UK.