Yorgos Veltsos, Processions
Fifteen years after Camera degli sposi, directed by Michail Marmarinos for all women who are liberated on stage through the persona of Amalia Moutoussi, my Processions —not a “creation of intellect” but a longstanding experience which, as Claudel wrote about Break of Noon, “could go from the realm of emotion to the realm of meaning”— shows me the way to the end: to death, but also to the creator’s aim of finally attaining what he has devoted himself to—his freedom as a recorded fact. Fifteen years later, apart from the characters and the action—the man and the women in the gloom of abandonment—a new, third factor differentiates this reiteration: the poetics, i.e. the reason why I wrote, and as I wrote I was thinking not only of passion but of the discourse.
It’s strange, but I am still haunted by this note on the margin of a first draft for the play: “Your voice won’t be triggered. And what carefully you inserted between my lines won’t be played”. It is my impression that it was death I was addressing, that what I had written was suggested by death, insinuated between the lines. Hence the reader who will seek to read my Processions is kindly requested not to search for a scandal but treat it as yet another procession, yet another rite that pre-empts in writing what is written—the rite that
comes at the end of every human’s life: the pompe funebre. To put it straight, Processions is the funereal text for a man’s love life, inspired by Georges Bataille’s impossible definition: “eroticism is assenting to life even in death”. In my own words: “She screamed. Her mouth against his ear / a woman who climaxes, screams and triggers a quake / Screaming by a tongue and discerning in her body / the organs and the zones / Screaming to the point where she seems to relate / more with her voice and less with her stud / He held her, opening her thighs with one hand / removing the pests from the sheet with the other […] Nursing hs bitterness on the sheets / recuperating with his head on her tits” It is at the same time a reminder of man’s serious motherhood (Rilke), of man’s incessant labor pains and his eternally gestated work: “He says: / When I finish this notebook, too, we will finish” / She says: / “When the notebook’s leaves are filled / you’ll continue to write an onerous work / in which some live and some die / But I’ll no longer be the reader / You did not become the narrative / And what you exhale as you narrate is not you / I won’t haunt tears and ink / Isn’t writing an artless imitation of imperfect acts? / So tragedy will be on my side”. Now, if I were asked what is this thing I wrote, I would reply, like my friend Giorgos Cheimonas, that it is the most failed writing in modern Greek literature—but it’s the only one I know how to use with a flourish.
Reading & discussion moderated by Yorgos Veltsos