Nun-head

On Sundays I often go to the Nunhead cemetery, which is 10 minutes walk from where I live and where a chapel survives along the trees. They have grown so thick that the sun can barely penetrate trough the leaves. Heavy rains have cancelled the inscriptions on the gravestones and they seem to sink in the moist soil.

Baudelaire sings: “ La Nature est un temple... L'homme y pass à travers des forêts de symboles”. Nature, i.e. ourselves, our innermost truth, is a temple, a portion of land or sky that has been cut off from us. It is a place where we can not go in.

There was a time when gods were living amongst men and could be easily seen by a river or in a wood.
Later the nudity of gods started to be a scandal and they were pushed inside the corners of the temples. Nature withdrew with them in those shallow recesses.
In the modern times it is not the case of nature being inside the temple.

The Gods are gone and the nature is the temple, meaning nature is reduced to that city park, that small portion of green where we go for a walk.

The modern man hears a call from there and has to cross forests to get a partial vision of the nudity of nature, i.e. of his own nature.
Forest might seem an inappropriate word for such a small amount of trees and bushes we can possibly find in a park. But it is actually the most appropriate word. The words wood or bois have their origins from the material trees are made of. Forest comes from the same origin of foreign, from Latin FORAS, outside.

In the middle age, when people lived enclosed in castles and cloisters, the vast world outside was a forest, and to forest meant to ban. The forest is exactly where Dante found himself, by the gate of all the dangers and ultimately of hell.

The modern man is now called up again, to leave his refurbished house and venture himself into the forests, into the foreign space, It could start with a walk in the park, but if he looks at the symbols, it might get him very far, maybe to the core of himself.

I was not born here. I came in November 2007 and stayed in a cheap hostel in Camden for a week, then found a room in a house in Archway, N11. It was a temporary solution, I had to be out after Christmas. I was desperate and a bedsit in Lewisham was my only choice. That's how I moved to south east.




We say that in Greek the word xenos has 2 meanings, foreigner and guest. Wrong. It was one word with one meaning. Our modern languages are broken: the words multiply but their meanings shrink. Xenos was someone who comes from outside and needs to be washed, fed, and showered with gifts, because he could be a messanger of good news or even a god.

Nowadays we don't mind a guest for dinner (guest after all comes from sanskrit ghas-i, meal), but he/she is normally a friend, not a stranger, who could be rather a fiend.

Ancient Greece was not a political entity and its centre constantly shifted over the sea. Small communities were scattered between the islands of the Aegean, the costs of Greece and Asia Minor. His supreme God was Zeus, the god of metamorphosis and protector of the xenoi. A foreigner is in fact someone who might need to change his apperance in order to travel safely. In Homer, Odysseus is the xenos, often in disguise. When he lands on unknown shores, he wonders whether it will be a civilised place, where people know the customs of xenia and do not make difference between a foreigner and a guest, or he will meet barbarians, who will treat him with hostility.

The time of change and metamorphosis has gone. Rigid boundaries have been erected between countries, meanings, identies. The more the country is civilized (which means only technologically advanced) the more his officer at the borders will look at us with suspicion. We can have the impression that we are freer to travel, but we lost our right to be xenos.

SE-a-Borg

SE stays for South East and borg is the old name for burg, borough (and it is the roots for the word bourgeois).
A city in the south east of a land is often far off from the main routes, maybe on the SEA. There is a centre somewhere, and there is a rugged town on the shore. There might be a sense of marginality at the beginning, a desire of being somewhere else. Men turn into sailors, pirates or merchants, sometimes the 3 things together. On the way up north, up on the ventura.
It was only when London ceased being an encampment on the north west borders of the Roman Empire and started seeing itself as a south east city of Britain that its luck began.
My address is SE14, London, Borough of Lewisham. Not far from me there are Greenwich and Deptford, with their memories of maritime matters and SEABORne trades. If there is only a big steel anchor on the beginning of Deptford High street to recall its Dockyard history, the Royal Naval College in Greenwich is an unmissable memento.
I live on Telegraph Hill, once known as Plowed Garlic Hill, when there were no houses, but only fields and gardens. In the 18 century a semaphore telegraph station was build on top of the hill to warn the ships in wartime. In the 19 century lofty Victorian houses were also erected and I now live in one of those. My flat is on the top floor and my bedroom is a converted attic overlooking the city. The London Eye seems very far.
I moved here 2 years ago and it is the start point for my adventures.