I seek where my memory belongs, but riding on sediment, my direction is awry. I go first where logic was; to the Acropolis, to the Theatre of Dionysus, where I am surrounded by beauty, ugliness and excess; by whores and immigrants and tourists –not to say I don’t find them elsewhere- and am accompanied by a fat man. Fat-man comes from a space of death and has a funny accent. The space of death is for all intents and purposes a form of consciousness, and thus weighty with matter; burdened, sometimes lightened even further by the words. It is an imaginary form tainted by the reality of terror; cultures of terror. It is a black hole; a vortex one may enter never to return. Yet imaginary is not imagined. Fat-man tells me he is returning to his wife and children in Iraq. Then he invites me to his death-space.

But I choose not to go. I have entanglements elsewhere; ironically an appointment with another space of death –an ‘ëstan: a place, somebody’s home- and so must journey further on this road. But when I open my eyes, Sali, the fat man is gone. I missed him at the border, and I miss him. Sali pronounces on everything: history, immigrants, mosquitoes, loose woman, jealous husbands, pregnant woman, freedom, money, power, sex, dentistry, tax evasion, flags, linguistics, Kurdish illegals, horniness, murder, Sao Paola, Hindu cremation, Irish revolution, Waziristan, Swiss too-many-rules-ness and seagulls. He pronounces on many things and snores in his sleep. For this I cannot forgive him. We eat at his cousin’s restaurant for free. He is back in my good books. It is a meeting point for Kurdish illegals who stone-step through Greece to Italy. Everything is under five euros. Most eat on credit, and that night we witness a stabbing outside our hotel room.

The victim was a shiny one, dressed all in shiny white, although a red patch dulled and finally sullied his aura. A woman lay half-naked and unconscious and a young child stood alone under a doorway in endless tears. Everyone else is screaming blue-murder while a record of one man’s words assumes that to enslave a man is not to know him. ‘It doesn’t know what’s happening, poor thing,’ said Sali of the child, ‘Look. It’s all confused’. I take out my camera, have confused thoughts about enslavement and Sali tells me he had seen this many times before. Perhaps, I think, it is because we have the ability to know,  that we can subjugate –and it wasn’t in Basra, nor in Baghdad, nor in  Kirkuk that he had witnessed these things –and also that we have the ability to kill – but in Sao Paola where there live millions in Lèvi-Straussian innocence –and so if you can kill; if you can dominate, obliterate and completely negate the sensory capacity of another being, and still know ‘one part of mankind’ without treating them ‘on the epistemological level’ as an object, then I have to..…… but in a flicker this image is gone.

-KW, Athens/Istanbul.