Hellenic Helen(s) – Greece, people.

Nearly a week ago, it’s through the gynaeceum that I was officially introduced in Greece. I was not surprised that those women, seated not far from the water, at the shop, and of whom I was explained the complex filiation system (an absent one had a mysterious presence by the evocation of her person), would share between the four of them only 2 first names. One of them was making of the women the homonym incarnation of their country, unless it was the contrary, that the country was bearing her (their) name: Helen!

Breeded, amidst other good seeds, with Greco-Roman mouture, I saw in that genos here gathered the trace of metamorphosis, of the transmission of guilt and of atonement mythology teaches as a burden of kinship, wherein lovers are mothers, men abducters and family murderers, kids with swollen feet and siblings pay for the crimes of their genitors, seers are blind.
In the stifling perfume of orange and lemon trees, in the heat of the small hamlet, in the shadow of a whitened sepulchral wall, I remembered that women of the mythos are not all kidnapped and subdued, buried alive, that they raise too against the law of men, against the polis, to put a brother under ground, that they are born helmeted, wild under the moon but with a civilizing power, shameless, warriors, twins, oracles and wise.
No doubt was possible, indeed was I in Greece, long before the (pha)logos would write itself.

Those women offered me conversation, as well as we could manage, coffee, fruits and cakes, and when the 94 year old grandmother, evoking Germany and Italy experienced, took her shawl off and tousled her hair, with the recollection of some distant sentences, I clumslily shouted in admiration: Kali gunaikos, kali gunaikos !