Tsiknopempti

Today is... Tsiknopempti here in Greece! No, I don't expect that to ring any bells for most of you. The word literally means, "the-smell-of-roasting-meat-Thursday" and, in the preparation for the fasting of Lent (the Eastern church is on a slightly different calendar), people all over Greece will fire up the coals and put slabs of meat on the grill, or join friends in crowded and overbooked tavernas for a raucous night of overindulgence. The sublime aroma will rise up to the heavens to be savored by God--or gods--and people get to dig in to the left-overs--that is the actual flesh. In other words, it sounds suspiciously like pagan sacrifices, when, again, the gods enjoyed the fragrant smoke from fat wrapped around thigh bones, while people got to enjoy the rest of the lamb or goat or calf. Though the Athens of Pericles seems infinitely far away in the mists of time--as difficult to envision as a technicolor Parthenon--somehow the Greece of Homer always seems to be right around the corner.

Certainly one of the things I do love about Greece is the rhythm of feasts and of fasts, the ceremony of the calendar. Coming to the end of my tenure here on Harriet (there might be one last post tomorrow on Leap Day), I have been thinking with gratitude about what a feast it has been--of conversations and controversies--so much learned, or rethought, or discovered, so much left to say. I shall put by posts that I had meant to do but didn't get around to, or maybe thought better of--on Sincerity & Artifice, on English Sapphics, on "Robert Frost is the John Ashbery of New Formalism." But I'll enjoy peaking back in from time to time, and seeing what the new bloggers, and our faithful commenters, have to say.
A calendar only of feasts, of course, would become tiresome and bloating. The purification of fasts--the giving up of meat--is a necessary corrective and part of the rhythm too. (Here, even McDonald's gets in on the act, offering a McSarakosti menu--McLent.) Lent for me will involve less time on-line, less time in conversation about poetry--but perhaps more time listening rather than talking, more time in poetry itself--which for me is a kind of having life, and having it more abundantly.