Revisiting Hydra Post-Chernobyl

by David Solway (September 2015)

Revisiting the Greek island Hydra, after the passage of more years than it’s good for me to count, not from choice but because the use of my friend Chris McLinton’s house enables me to repair the vast trench in my budget caused by three days in Athens. Emotionally, it is unwise for me to be here. I recognize too many aging faces, pass too many houses in which I was young, happy, productive and unfaithful. Every path I saunter down takes me deep into some region of my past when I knew that I was immortal and poetically privileged, and gives me the disorienting sensation of living stratigraphically, on two different time levels at once. Which means that I am not only in Greece but in some miasmic internal realm of which the island is merely the external configuration.  more>>>