Eleni's Dog

I passed Eleni's dog today - the stray she loves - as I was walking to the street with the minaret. It was foraging in a half moon of turf land that accidentally carries sounds like an amphitheatre and always needs its grass cut. The dog looked busy enough, with its small head perched on a big barrel body and a kind of permanent grin on its face; familiar looking wiry biscuit-coloured fur; short legs to trot around the harbour with, unkempt nails tapping on the paving. A mutt's life, that black gummy grin still hanging in the air after the dog has gone. Tourists stood nearby taking photographs of the decrepit houses crumbling above us under the sun.

I looked at the dog and remembered how Eleni had been telling me one evening about it. We were sitting on the harbour with our backs to the people and watching night creep up at us from the sea, watching as the world beneath the water's surface disappeared and the waves transformed themselves into brooding slow-moving beasts, blackening. Eleni told me about how the dog would come and sit beside her to share the view and she made the sound of the dog's sigh. And with a jolt, just like that, the two were one!

Shut Eye

More Liminal

It is a beautiful bright sunny morning here in Greece, still quiet before the traffic. I just read the Wikipedia excerpt on liminality again and am turning the concept round in my mind.

Imaginitively, the line marks the edge of one thing and the beginning of another - a road to cross. Liminality becomes no man's land between two worlds, the threshold before dissolution of identity, disorientation and a relaxation of normal thought, self-understanding and behaviour. Out of this period of liminality we emerge again with new perspective, as a new person.

Now I'm near the end, I feel somehow that my time in Greece has been entirely for this reason.

I'm going to do something a bit cheeky now. I just did a Google image search with 'liminal' and found that the word is a popular one with artists. So, I don my curator hat and present a select few. I haven't asked permission, but copyright and credit lies with the artists and any objections will be graciously adhered to.


Liminal Condition Detail copyright Susan Palmisano


Land-Care Yuccas copyright Kurt Brereton


Liminality copyright Kevin Sargent


Copyright Er| Naem & X.iso for album Liminal Sampler 2008 by Various (Liminal Recs)


Liminal copyright Andrew Rose

Just touching in very quick. Reading Kazantzakis' God's Pauper. It's amazing. Got me thinking about religiosity as a beautiful thing. Sublime!

A little Day of the Triffids moment for us. Plants spectating, speculating, prospecting, over the balcony, escaping?

At lunch with C today was laughing at the Jesus Christ Lord and Saviour People label she gave some elements of her home community. I love the specificity of this. She went on to explain the difference between the Lutherans and Evangelicals and so on. I was thinking about classification, the need to classify, the way we get more and more specialised the more localised? our specialisms become. The line of definition slides between priority, exactitude, accuracy and fixity, identity, enclosure.

Everything I see at the moment seems to be a visual parable of some great natural wisdom. Even the stuff on YouTube. I have been popping in recently for a cry and a laugh.

Took this today on my walk up to J's to feed the cats and water the plants. Currently fascinated by construction - concrete, steel, order, solidity and magnitude. Think I'm responding to it metaphorically, as well as antidote to the picturesque beauty of Crete. Don't think the image really conveys the awe that big constructed things can make us feel in real life, but happy to discover a kind of twisted elegance in the two arms' coupling.