diary 1.01
the time I travelled to delphi, the center of the world, to see if it made me feel weird.
This diary was written over the summer of 2024, originally published in September 2024 on Patreon.
a friend of a friend, a tertiary friend, maybe, a stranger at another fucking function, all that matters is you and this other guy are talking, and it’s summer so the polite talking this season is about traveling, and this other guy says “have you taken a trip this summer”, and you say “yes I went to greece”, and the other guy says “ohhhh lovely how was it”, and you say
“I don’t like being away from home or my cat. I don’t like being without all of my things. my pre-flight dreams involve getting lost in an evil city-sized airport or watching death hurdle into immediacy from the window of the dream plane as I go neon with fear. travel is uncomfortable. I do it anyway, for the reward! my curiosity is sated…my well of earthly experience deepens…my render of the world is made more finished. some discomfort is required. tension is the thing. what a serious and difficult person I am that I can turn even vacation into a kind of pretentious chore. anyway:
delphi used to be a sacred precinct in ancient greece. now it has five stars on tripadvisor. I became interested in it after john vervaeke mentioned it in a lecture about the, uh, meaning crisis. the ancient greeks decided delphi was the center of the world, a really rather definitive title to base solely on vibes, and I like instances in history where men have wrongly decided themselves the central dot in a vastness (delphi isn’t the center of the world; the world isn’t the center of the universe; man is an ape is an animal; and men when asked to point to the center of their minds gesture to its front door, freudianly). I also like that there was an oracle, a woman so very on hallucinogenics, providing ultimate, prophetic knowledge to, like, philosophy students. I hadn’t been on a trip in awhile. I wanted to go. I wanted to see if being there made me feel weird.
the best way to get to delphi is to first go to athens and so that became the trip.
after a series of movements I surfaced in monastiraki, blue-dark and tropical. I stood for a moment in the cobblestone square and adjusted my backpack. from the square the ivory excellence of the parthenon, lit from below by yellow light, levitated in the distant sky like a second moon. I mouthed to myself, woah.
I walked to the hostel*. I smiled at people who smiled back. there were girls in little ‘fits, lads lads lads, et cetera. peals of drunken squealing. peoples’ youths happening. I wove through the happy chatter feeling mysterious, which I tried to present on my face, when I was not smiling, with a neutral-awe expression, and on my body with a confident stride, to say, I know exactly what is going on, also, leave me be. this was tough to do convincingly as the roads were laid like a maze designed as a punishment and the motorcycle traffic was loud and close and kept jumpscaring me.
near the hostel I stopped to look at an enormous mural on a tall building face, just visible in the twilight: three humanoids with mouths too big for their faces, huge toothy smiles. I felt odd, and then it passed.
*(afterwards everyone I told about my decision to stay in a hostel said something like why would you do that? what were you thinking? you? look, buddy! the flights to greece were more expensive than I thought they would be; the hostel was cheaper than I thought it would be. sense. also I’d never stayed in a hostel before and I was curious. I had a fantasy about having a very interesting conversation with someone. the first night in the hostel I realized I was doomed. curiosity, cats. it had happened again.)
field notes
room empty for now…..dim and hot, stagnant air, one little window in the upper corner, smells like mystery boy socks ;(((
australian in the lobby: bought me a beer!!! I forgot his name immediately even though I repeated it. no matter: he’d just come from ‘partying’ on the islands, and was thrilled to tell me his ‘party nickname’ was thor – indeed he was towheaded and lumbering, sweet and clueless – and so he was thor. I didn’t feel like he was especially attracted to me and so I was able to enjoy our conversation. by the end he was showing me photos of his childhood home, outback wildlife, snakes and bugs and things. it got dark, and thor wanted to smoke, and I was buzzed enough to brave my now probably-occupied room, so we said goodbye in the elevator without asking for anything, an acknowledgement we filled a small block of our time here with the other person’s pleasant company and now we diverge forever, and as the elevator doors closed I saluted him(?)…..goodbye, thor….
room: occupied……
bunkmate: named eduardo. disliked him immediately for having the top bunk, which I wanted. a spaniard living in berlin. his english was american-accented. his head was shaved almost bald. he could have been twenty-three or thirty-two. a going out kind of a person. sensitive guy with feminine tattoos. smoking area staple. on my bed he clocked the copy of why I write by george orwell and from then on he was very interested in me.
lower bunk two: named carol. french, pockmarked and frazzled, tangly dark hair. her english was not good but she was eager to speak it and scoffed at my ca va. communication was smoothed by charades: rubbing one’s hands up and down the arms for cold, prayer-hands pressed to one side of the face for sleep, et cetera. because of this we couldn’t learn much about each other. later I discovered her terrific hacking cough that persisted into the night. she also had a smell I’d not ever encountered, a sickly, vegetal cloud that followed her, that intensified after a coughing fit; there was a terrible moment in the first night where I realized what I was smelling must have been her lungs. I’m sorry carol. language failed us. you were the cough; you were the smell.
upper bunk two: [MISSING] (later: in the night Upper Bunk Two appeared as a sleeper. he rose and fell for three nights. that was all)
NIGHT ONE:zzzzdOCK OCK OCK [REDACTED]d.d…..mmrr…
the acropolis was erected in 800 b.c. and has four and a half stars on tripadvisor.
the internet said to get there early to beat the crowds and sun. I set off at seven into an athens devoid of the activity from the night before, alleyways still asleep and cold with misty blue dawn. cats with stiff backs and wiry fur padded up and down the cobbles. they were wary of people, which made me sad and suspicious, wondering why.
I’d dressed wrong. I wore a floaty white top and a little black skort, and although this would’ve been fine for midday, I was chilly now. men unshuttered their tourist storefronts, full of plastic garbage, and their eyes on me, the little twitching line of their mouths, told me I was obviously not from here and that I was wearing too few clothes. in this realization I felt exposed and stupid. my nerves frayed. I wished to be invisible, or an orb, or a pair of eyes only, levitating through town.
then I had an embarrassing interaction with the woman who sold me my ticket at the acropolis; she wouldn’t take my five euro note because it had a tear in it and I insisted it was still good and she looked at me like I was dead, like I was an actual dead and fermenting person speaking to her on my two pale legs, and then I trundled onto the acropolis using my brain to hit myself: what was the point of your ‘it’s still good’; you don’t even know if that’s true; know-it-all; little brat; tourist scum!*
*(I’m a guilty tourist. I remember feeling like this even when I was young. oh, the humiliation of taking a picture in front of the thing everyone else is! you went there, did you, to the most obvious place? and how loudly you speak your own language and bask in your holiday’s unreality, lizzie mcguire, while around you locals do mundane errands, work shitty jobs, serve you your special brunch, print your acropolis ticket.)
anyway, the parthenon was, uh, under construction. cobwebs of scaffolding hid its entire front face. from inside whined power tools, worker men dwarfed by the tall cage. this is the memory, I thought.
I looked around. the hill was high. the ruins were ruinous. dust itched my sandalled feet. I was as early as I was told to be and still the place was swarmed with people: tanned eurorailers, young couples, conga lines of middle-aged americans taking so many pictures it was as if they planned to create a 3d rendering of the acropolis. the bustle made it very difficult for me to think about what I was seeing. I walked circles, empty-minded and self-conscious, trying to feel an emotion, or think something profound, not getting much further than, wow, it is big, and it is old; it used to have a roof.
an hour later I decided I was finished, whatever that meant. down the steep stairs I went with the rest of the tourist current. on the way a little girl with the same haircut as me wriggled out of her father’s hands and dipped beneath a guard rail to pick a dandelion, golden and as big as her fist, then yoinked herself away before anyone could tell her no. that was a good thing to see, her dangerous errand.
back at the hostel to put on pants, I came upon the nightmare of nightmares: my things had been touched.
why I write by george orwell had been moved from one part of my bed to another part of my bed. after a brief jolt of panic, a feeling of unsafety in the empty room, I inspected the book (for…prints?) to find a note taped to the back, a note that was, devastatingly, amorous—‘in case you need company :-) -eduardo’—with his number. company! what a fundamental misunderstanding of my disposition!!!! I was annoyed by his misunderstanding me, annoyed that the stranger had touched the sacred and private plot of my bed and moved around in my only allotted personal space. I was also a little flattered. I mostly wished it hadn’t happened. anxiety bopped in my stomach. if I had to snub an advance it would ruin us both—him from my lack of tact, me from the mental effort it required to be so tactless.
I put the book back where I’d found it so I could later feign cluelessness.
I went out again and walked and walked and felt much better and less nihilistic wearing my trousers. I was led around town by all sorts of wonderful happenings: clouds of purple flowers…..a pond full of turtles clambering over one another for a spot of sun on a rock…..grandpas seized by raucous conversation at cafe tables….a chapel, where I cried briefly, lit a candle, watched a man kiss an image of jesus…..
I walked many thousands of steps that day. I made sure to be grateful. I’m glad nothing hurts right now, I thought. I’m glad my nose isn’t stuffy, and my throat isn’t sore.
the platonic academy ruins have only four stars on tripadvisor. they’re a decent walk out of the center. google maps dropped me off in a quiet, grassy park and said I’d arrived. for minutes I wandered, looking for a sort of entrance, or museum, feeling silly and lost, then narrowed my gaze on a stone building foundation, unceremoniously laid, enormous grey teeth that studded the ground, and realized the clue was in the name: ruins! of course. that will explain the missing star, I thought.
there wasn’t much to see but it didn’t matter what I saw there—it was about being in the spot—and when I realized I was in the correct place, that I’d been in the correct place all along, I was given over to calm and positive emotion. it wasn’t too hot or too cold. the air was gemmed with birdsong. my mind rested comfortably in its cubby, nothing pushing against any components; a fluid and pleasant moving through the moment, in the place the philosophers stood.
I took off my sandals and padded barefoot through the grass, warm on my feet. there was nobody there. it was very quiet. I couldn’t see anything modern from the park, just the ruins, and the recessed fields, and the shimmering trees, and so it was easy to imagine this place was as it had been. I imagined myself in the philosophers’ time as a blue ghost, and them in my time as blue ghosts, and all of it happening at once.
when I left the park I had a clear sense of passing over a threshold, whooosh, my phone thick in my pocket.
at the hostel, I pressed the elevator button like a marionette. my joints felt loose, my lower back crumbly. I wanted to lie down in the dark.
I opened the door to the room and – oh hey! eduardo chirped at me from inside. we exchanged pleasantries. I could have died. eduardo said, you woke up really early today. he said, I respect that. ha! to respect my total inability to cohabitate as if it were a demonstration of character, or drive; you do misunderstand me! I said, ah, I couldn’t sleep.
did you see the note, eduardo asked,
and I said, no :)
I was just going onto the roof, eduardo said, and invited me to go with him, and I said I might meet him in a second, intending, of course, to not, but then after some time lying very still, I resolved to go speak to him, because that had been my hostel fantasy, to have an interesting conversation, and I felt to say no to the roof invitation would be a missed opportunity, would have made the hostel not worth it at all, because most likely eduardo would say something interesting, because that is what people do.
eduardo was surprised to see me on the roof. we asked about each other’s days. he immediately struck out with an account of how a cafe sign reading ‘a flower only blossoms for its own joy’ had touched him to such a degree that he felt moved to sit in the cafe and write on that theme. I felt a phoniness to this, like he had done it, but highlighted that part of his day to signal to me his sensitivity, to impress or attract me while instead doing the opposite; he actually repulsed and embarrassed me with his affection for this limp aphorism, this facebook post, it’s also not true, that’s not why a flower blooms at all!!; and the sign, yes, the sign, a money-taking device, did exactly what it was designed to do!!!!!; eduardo could have said ‘I was successfully advertised to today’ and that would have impressed me more with its honesty. (wilde I feel can be forgiven for saying it. whatever.) anyway, I was too tired to raise these points with eduardo, too disinterested to be myself, and instead said something dozy and absent like oh, yeah, nice, which added nothing, and each of us adjusted our weight.
eduardo asked for my age. he said he couldn’t tell how old I was because I carry myself like a woman but have girlish tendencies: he cited my heart choker, my yellow star pimple patch, my perfume (‘white musk is for girls’). ok. interesting.
we spoke about our childhoods and our siblings….my younger sister who I feel entirely apart from, his older brother who he resented when he was young but now can clearly see he’s becoming…..this was a fun line of questioning, but I couldn’t lose myself, because I knew he found me attractive, and when I lose myself in conversations it makes people think I’m coming onto them, but I’m just genuinely interested, but oh well, so I held back, and thought please don’t want me, please don’t make me uncomfortable with your wanting, please don’t make me participate in games of wanting, please don’t put me in a situation where I need to let you touch me if our dignities are to remain in tact……….
did you put sunscreen on? eduardo asked, moving closer. he pressed his cold hand against my shoulder. I flinched.
you’re definitely getting red, he told me.
I went back to the room alone. in the even light there, I saw my skin reflected back at me, pale as the moon.
thinking, I searched the notes of my perfume: orange blossom, rosemary, labdanum. white nothing.
IN THE NIGHT CAROL COUGHED AND IT WAS FFUFJCJ I SMELLED! IT AND I SQUISHED MY STUFFED. RABBIT INTO MY NOSE AS MY EAR WENT NUMB IN MY. HEADPHONE
beeeeep
delphi is a three-hour drive out of the city. I went on a bus with a tour group.
as we drove, flat green lines resolved into blue bays and mountainsides. the guide told the story of oedipus over the intercom. I drifted in and out of sleep, thinking idly about how different it is to travel alone versus with a partner. pro: there is no one here to start a fight with. con: there is no one here to twirl my hair. pro: there is no one here. con: there is no one here.
I felt alone, a displaced-ness, far from my home, further still from the place I grew up in, and thought of my mom, how I’d felt her tense on the other end of the phone when I said ‘hostel’, and so I texted her a picture of my view out the bus window which wasn’t especially beautiful or interesting but did communicate my aliveness, as I hear from mothers that their child just communicating aliveness is both beautiful and interesting.
on the cliffside we debussed. I fluttered with excitement. we were up very high. the sky was so blue that it made my eyes hurt.
we were led through the grounds. the tour guide spoke into a microphone which fed into our earpieces. this felt weirdly intimate; I had just met her and now she was in my skull.
we saw what was left of the temple of apollo, dead in the ground.
we were shown a stone wall carved all the way across with very small engraving. news was written here, the guide said, messages, names of released slaves. then the guide said: you could even say it was the first facebook wall, and everyone laughed. I was exhausted and sleep deprived and I don’t know if what I felt was related to that or my personality, but this statement felt so flippant as to actually offend me, and I set my face. slaves? facebook? I oscillated between shame and self-assuredness. I’m too serious for the world, I thought; nobody takes the world seriously enough.
we were given an hour to explore on our own. I put on my noise canceling headphones, which let the world pulse with excellence. the earth opened in green. the sky was a misty blue veil. nature! the valley below was combed through with lazy white cloud.
I looked out over the temple of apollo and mapped out where the oracle would have sat. I was emotional for reasons of history and altitude. I did feel a divinity, to be sure, a swelling, a bloom in the chest.
then I thought of death and felt the old black rush.*
*(two weeks after this I’ll have a conversation with a friend where I’ll complain about the transhumanist crowd, ‘indefinite lifespan-ners’, technocrats hooked up to IVs of young blood. I like technological advancement, am even a ‘fan’ of it, and yet it will seem clear to me that measures taken to avoid death are measures taken in fear, which is itself a dead end. to concern oneself with the indefinite prolonging of life seems to be entirely missing the point, I’ll think, like insisting a good film ought to arbitrarily extend its runtime—indeed, ‘millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy sunday afternoon’. then there will be a realization that participating in and identifying with eternity can happen immediately.
that conversation with my friend, and my new strongly held opinion about obviousness and necessity of death, will feel directly linked to the rush of fear I felt at delphi.)
after I thought about death I milled around in the museum, then floated back onto the bus. the strangers and I started on the long drive back. I slept again.
I was glad I went to delphi, even though I left feeling like I hadn’t really learned anything about it at all.
the third morning, I finally shit. nice!
the sun was only just up. I was exhausted, dehydrated and foggy, and my mind clunked along like an apocalypse generator. I slept the whole night in forty-five minute intervals, and the day before I’d eaten only a bag of almonds and a half sleeve of oreos. my body was going to kill me for killing it.
my past self, mercifully, had scheduled me something relaxing for my final day. south of athens, along the coast, there’s a naturally-occurring saltwater lake called vouliagmeni. the website said, it’s full of little fish. the website said, its water is as warm as the air. I wanted to swim, and lay around it, and do nothing, and wait for it to be tomorrow, so I could go home to a room that smelled like me.
I booked a cab to the lake. as I waited I looked up how to say thank you and good morning in greek and listened to a robot say them through the little speaker in my phone, then mouthed them a few times to myself to make sure I didn’t forget. finally, the car pulled up, and it was time to be a very pleasant tourist! I opened the door and nervously said efcharisto! kalimera.
kalimera, said the driver. then he pointed to the gps and spoke to me in greek. a hole opened in my chest. I could probably just say yes, I thought. but what if it tangles your web even further……
I smiled, embarrassed. sorry, I said.
oh, the driver said. to the lake?
a quick ride down the coast. near the ticket desk a red cat half-dozed in the sun. her eyes flickered open on my approach; she let me touch her; she closed her eyes again when I scratched her chin. my body was combed through with good feeling. safety?...
behind me the ticket desk was unshuttered by two beautiful girls in polos and I suddenly felt embarrassed, wanting them to like me, remembering the rage I felt whenever I opened the goodwill and there was already some damned early-riser gawping at me while I unlocked the front doors. I tried to be very sweet and socially adept to compensate, americanly.
the girls let me in. to the left, cerulean water, still as a moment. above it a grey and brown cliff-face glittering with white sea birds. the sun brought yellow attention to itself from behind. it was very beautiful but I was a little chilly and distracted and self-conscious so I needed to address those things before I could appreciate it.
I switched loungers three times until I found the spot I liked best (at the front so I could watch people swim, but away from the steps, and far enough from the cliff to get the sun as soon as possible). clean dozy morning air. saltwater. breezes from memories, from a childhood vacation.
I drank a coffee, and waited for the sun; I tried to sleep; I didn’t know what I wanted. I felt delirious, docile, light as a hologram. I worried if anyone spoke to me I’d say something strange.
I watched the sun rise up above the cliff and honey the lake. I undressed.
at some point in this process, at some point while the morning lazed on and people gathered along the shore, the beauty flared, absolutely immense, as did my ability to relax, and at once I realized all I had to do today was sit there, in that very beautiful spot, and do nothing else! I was suddenly aware that I looked pretty in my bathing suit, and interesting because I was alone, and in my exhaustion, too, I knew, there was beauty, that flayed and dark-circled thing that pulls people towards me, that complicated and magnetic expression, and so I felt very beautiful, and I also felt then, like I have in moments before in my life, the relief of knowing I had successfully endured the part with the suffering, and it was over now.
I swam.*
*(I enjoy the water very very much. I swim well. I feel beautiful when I swim, especially when I let myself wet my hair, my face, go fully under, give myself over in total to the experience. I love the water’s encompassing. it feels wonderful to kick hard into bottomlessness. I even quite like the spongy lake feeling on my feet. meanwhile any awkwardness or dyspraxic strangeness is hidden by the water, and I can move totally free from judgment. I like swimming very much.)
birds communed in a recess in the cliff face and chattered. a pretty man and I surfaced at the same time and locked eyes; we both laughed a little and swam on.
I floated for a while, far from the deck, submerging my ears in the deaf bubble of the water while keeping my face and belly in the sun, my breath loud and singular in my skull. this was a very comfortable moment for me, that came with a sense of travelling to another place, an exposed sort of privacy: here is savannah, but she is somewhere else.
we are about to change gears very drastically because it was during that final night I had a dream, a horrible horrible dream!
it was a dream so obviously twisted that when I woke up I kept saying evil to myself, evil, an evil dream, it goes like this: from omniscience I watch hands lift the lid from a brown shoebox to reveal a baby, dead. it’s bloated with decay. its eyes are open. from outside my dream field of view come hands to lift the little corpse from the box. now a man holds the baby to his chest, at which point the baby starts to separate into thin slabs of body, red and brown, that slap wetly against the ground; the man holding the baby remarks, sort of distractedly and happily surprised, ‘oh, it’s just falling apart, isn’t it?’ he smiles, and the other men around him, who, I just now realize, have been there are along, also smile, and I am pushed very close into the faces of these smiling men who are presented to me in rapid succession, the rapid lineup of off-men, there is no sound, then the dream shows me what’s left of the baby, then the man, who’s laughing, now; he too starts to come apart into featureless gore, and then I WOKE UP THANK JESUS FUCKING CHRIST JESUS!
I decided it was time to leave.
I changed in the pitch darkness. my heart buzzed with terror. I felt that the french woman was awake and was looking at me. I knew she wanted me to look at her, presumably because my alarm had woken her, because she wanted say goodbye, but I couldn’t bear it, I was being puppeted by fear, and I surged with all of my things out of the room, feeling, in the obscene fluorescence of the hallway, like I should actually break into a run. there, my phone’s face told me it was 3:45.
I don’t know why the dream happened. I can’t link it to any other part of what I’ve written here. but it happened and it was memorable so I felt it should be included. then I went home.”
…
…
…
the tertiary friend, the stranger at the poetry event, whoever, is unsure what to do conversationally with what you’ve told them, especially in regards to that last movement, that very random and disturbing dead baby dream, such an odd note to end on. I don’t know, the stranger thinks, it sort of soured the whole thing, the stranger doesn’t say any of this with their voice, their face tells you this, and your cheeks flush, because you played your hand
oh well. you’ll keep looking
I chose a great day to be an audio listener
This was a delightful read that made me both giggle and feel contemplative. I felt seen in several of your internal moments: the opening thoughts about vacation/being difficult, feeling fundamentally misunderstood by the offering of company (and way in which it was extended), feeling too serious for this world, etc. I also love how you juxtapose your internal world with the tangibility of your surroundings. Thanks for sharing your words :)