in the hall of mirrors

...

A technician told me my test results at the hospital today: distinctly bad. Which has various implications for the future.

In the kitchen, much of the fruit seems to be going straight from underripe to rotten, with nothing in between....

Thessaloniki

I don't know where I got the idea that Thessaloniki was known for being the home of witches in ancient Greece. I read it somewhere, but can't find any reference to it.

My mother's family was from Thessaloniki, from a small town called Pentalofos ('Five Peaks') north of the city of Thessaloniki itself. My mother and father visited there some years ago; Mom told the story of buying something in a shop, only to have the woman who owned the shop snarl at her in Greek, You can keep your filthy American money. But of course my mother speaks Greek, so she was able to reply: Well, I will then; and scooped up her purse and left the shop under the astonished eye of the angry woman.

Strange dreams last night: of Thessaloniki, of witches, of a pointlessly malevolent curse visited on a stranger for a trivial insult. A curse which might lead to speechlessness? – my mother's stroke; or curses that might visit itself on her children – her eldest daughter, her youngest son?...

For me, the curse: when von Franz, in her brilliant book on projection and its transformation from religious and superstitious thinking, explains the group of related fairy tales of which one version was turned into Swan Lake, she speaks of the curse on the sons, that they are transformed into birds: rootless, without grounded lives, homeless and scattered across the gray sky....

And it's strange how, all today since I started thinking of this, I keep dropping things, my knee keeps bleeding through various bandages no matter how thick, the bed and laundry seem ruined with bloodspots and bits of lint, and small mechanical items stop working completely.

I have a strange feeling that I should be trying to arrange a flight to Pentalofos.

•••

So much for that... my cousin Joan has corrected me, saying that we are from a different Pentalofos, the one in Kozani, which is some miles to the west and I think out of the traditional area of Thessaloniki... a good thing I waited to look for flights.

Carnivale

Another amazing television show, which Bennett and Merrie told me to see: Carnivale. A shame it ran for only two years before cancellation (but no wonder, either, it was so expensive and elaborate).

There's a great deal to say about it, of course – a Gnostic battle of good and evil, brilliant characterization and complex storytelling and deep, intense mystery –

but tonight I am especially seeing some of the startlingly beautiful pictures: this won all sorts of visual/artistic awards, and is one of the most visually conceived of complex television shows.

For example: when Libby is left behind by her suddenly cured husband and the healer, they have the nerve, the daring, to simply leave her in the center of a darkened road as they pull away, and the camera slows –

very beautiful.