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[Denise Tart & David Green]

RW HEDGES WROTE:
Before leaving I checked what Lawrence had to say about it; "...a damnably dull hole of a place" Which is bullshit. He clearly never saw the place. It would have been empty of much life by way of taverna and banks back then but the landscape and the nature and the geology of the island is astounding. To go in spring was a Godly gift and seeing five and a half tourists in the nine days was also a wonderful relief.
  I much prefered the site of the Venus de milo's discovery than the piece of armless crap in France and I wondered how men can be so stupid to clamber about galleries when one can just stand above Klima in Milos and feel centuries where the sheperd is the artist and the goats make the music with the wind.

Roy, those last few lines are poetry and remind me very much of Paros, to which I went in 1985 (another age and time, that's for sure). There were peasants on donkeys going to market with wicker saddle baskets filled with agrarian produce and a easter ceremony in the silent night of the darkened streets with the voices hushed and strange and the candle flames standing straight up and the procession led by bearded priests and incense that was not so much old ordodix but pagan; animals being later roasted and eaten, the lamb of god, the goats of older times.

My feeling is that Larry was not as enamoured of the stony, white, stark, blue and spring flower scented Aegean islands where peasants, stones and old olive trees can not easily be told from one another in the fading light when the fishermen beat octpodis gainst the sea wall by the pier. He prefered the fecund islands of Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus, larger and with damper climates on their western aspects wher his English firnds, admirers and lovers like to go; no wonder he settled finally in southern France. 

I loved the sparness of those stony islands, like a good poem, well honed, where less is more and the stanzas of life a told, windswept and swirling like the Cyclades themselves coming out of the blue like awareness itself.

David

16 William Street
Marrickville NSW  2204
+61 2 9564 6165
0412 707 625
dtart at bigpond.net.au
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