HYDRA
Postcard to a Cohort in the Western World
I’m not used to saying where I am, but as you asked me recently with a world-weary tone to “tell you things about Greece, please”, I’m on Hydra, an island in the southwest Aegean. No cars allowed. Or wheeled vehicles, in general.
If you are an unfit bastard and packed too many pairs of shoes, you can pay a hirsute man on a donkey €20 to climb the hillside with your things as he chain-smokes and mutter-yells, “Neh, neh, neh!”
I went up to Leonard’s (Cohen) yesterday and there was a cat crapping on his literal doorstep. So odd. I thought about all the times he had spent there, in the white washed house with its saffron trim, bougainvillea climbing the walls (not out of insanity, but out of a natural inclination to be beautiful), writing music, drinking, in and out of love, barefoot and ruminative. Never giddily happy (because, what a crock) but definitely not as proverbially blue as he was in Montreal, so … let’s say … sustainably content. Because that’s a very real thing, and even Leonard had it for awhile. When he wasn’t trying to fill his bottomless well of need with things outside the moment, outside his very enough self.
There’s something about Hydra that banishes glumness. I can be completely drained, steeped in existential dread, on a doomer beat because it’s a rule now that people in power be dazzlingly depraved, and then I’ll look up and see a beautiful Hydriot mother striding through the plaza, tiny son on her shoulders clapping his hands. Effortless, buoyant, seeming almost out of time, and then the massive bells chime in the tower to signal the hour, or half hour, or siesta (surely it’s called something else here), waves lap gently against the colorful boats, and the man sets my tea in front of me as if to say, “See? Everything’s fine. It’s Hydra.”
