Traveling in Crete this summer I rented a car. This seemed the only sensible way to get around. I’d mistakenly pre-booked for somewhere other than the airport and all Hertz had was a European wee bitty wiener of a Ford. It was decidedly more petite than a Mini with about 3.75 cylinders. But we got to know one another and with the right persuasion it could be coaxed to passing people on two lane Cretan highways, where traffic was adventurous compared to the U.S. but stayed when considered from Beijing.
Heading out from Heraklion, early in the morning we climbed
the barren hills and hugged about the rough cliffs tumbling down to the azure
expanse. This island is, of course, the
improbable home of the Minoan civilization, which enjoyed indoor plumbing two
thousand years before Christ. My
daughters, insisted on calling them “The Minitrons” when queried. I was mid-way through a re-read of “The King
Must Die” by Mary Renault, and had just reached the point, as the plane landed, where Theseus volunteers to be a bull dancer for the uh, ancient Minitron’s
court, I tried to explain.
The Palace of Knosos we’d save till tomorrow. Instead we headed straight for Rethimnon,
where we had breakfast by the cyan shore.
Reading an editorial a week later by Roger Cohen, undoubtedly my
favorite New York Times (Herald Tribune, really) columnist I realized that we
had shared the island at the same time. Perhap that was Roger just now, overtaking me.
His meditation during his time in Rethimnon and Chania was all about the
new self-reliance on island of Crete. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/opinion/global/roger-cohen-greek-ship-turning.html
Enjoying blintzes and espresso by the morning seaside, Crete
certainly felt like paradise. But Crete
as Fernand Braudel whom I quoted in the initial DustyBrine blog post, was a
difficult land to farm. Like other islands in the Mediterranean Crete often
built up populations it had difficulty sustaining. The dry rocky hills were difficult to till
and the sea was not sufficiently abundant.
Famine was a constant specter. Self-reliance
an appropriate and time honored meditation.
Walking around the old Venetian quarter thoughts turned to Patrick Leigh Fermor, the extraordinary British soldier and author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Leigh_Fermor He’d walked the same streets undercover, pretending
to be Cretan to the Nazi’s he met until such time as he could kidnap General
Kreipe. How comparatively quiet Western
Europe has been since then, living under U.S. hegemony. My daughters paused by a fountain for a look
at refrigerator magnets. I randomly
picked up some discs for the car’s CD player that were advertised as "Cretan Traditional
Melodies" and "Golden Folk Classics of Greece from the 60s"
The second of these I listened to first and it was
useless. I’d had good luck with this approach, “give me what you got from the
60’s and 70’s” traveling elsewhere, in West Africa, Cambodia, etc. I’m sure there is some compelling Greek
psychedelia out there somewhere, (I have a wonderful Turkish psychadelia album,
unimaginatively entitled “Turkish Delights”, which I got many years ago) but
the ‘Golden Folk Classics’ sounded a bit like a box of Hostess pop-tarts. And it was with decidedly low expectations,
that I undid the plastic and inserted my disc of Cretan lute melodies.
The first song “Pasarogiannos”
sang out. Beautiful, and I was immediately
captivated. Confident, capable, optimistic. The pace accelerated, and so did the car. Pulling up the hill en route to Chania,
I was completely drawn in. Sheets of
sound repeated over and over very quickly like Irish reels with just
a note or two differently emphasized, Phrygian I suppose, to suggest
something Arabic, and yet decidedly European.
Who is this?
Setting in behind a slow truck, I began to learn, that this
was the music Yiannis Xilouris, one of three pivotal brothers, in Cretan folk
music, Antonis, and Nikos Xylouris being the other two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Xilouris
The second tune “Pseftis Kosmos” (False World) gathered
itself up like the tide before a difficult walk along some sharp ridge between
East and West, Islam and Christianity, Europe and the Middle East. And after a long, pensive introduction, a
voice rang out proudly. Now the island was truly 含商咀征[1]. The
sea changed color again, the hills rose higher.
I passed the truck, and then another.
I’ve written about music influencing the way you drive (see
‘Flat Tire Blues’) and the Xilouris brothers had now occupied the car. The Ford’s teeny engine straining, pushing the
vehicle up over another bluff, out and around another line of cars, I road the
line between rocks and sea and for the first time, considered the lute. Louder than an acoustic guitar it
seemed. Loud and full like a sarod.
“Hey girls, isn’t this instrument awesome? It’s a lute.”
Popping out their iPhone earphones: “Huh?”
“This, this is Cretan music.
Isn’t this intense?”
“Not really.
“Is this Minitron music?”
“Where are we going, anyway?”
A false world, perhaps.
And where Cretan hills and strumming lutes would be forever fused in my
mind as I played the disc again for the second time, and signs for Chania came
into view, the island would perhaps always conjure pouting, androgynous
Korean lads for them. Who’s to say
which world is really “false?”
This evening, doing the dishes, I found the Xylouris
brothers on Rdio. This surprised
me. I didn't know one could find Cretan lute music, just like that. Bereft of any foreseeable plans to return
to the refrigerator magnate shop in Rethimnon and this was a boon. I cranked it up while I set out to cut the onions. When I
asked my nine year old, “hey where’s this music from?” she didn’t miss a beat
and said “Crete, Baba.” Amazing. It had permeated after all. I was so excited I gave her a hug. And in my mind I was overtaking someone on a
sharp turn, speeding along a ridge somewhere between the east and west.
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