NOTE: Statement for a solo exhibit titled "Journey Trace Locus" at Rosa Esman Gallery in 1991. The basic theme was travel and not understanding the language very well. The essay didn't describe the paintings, just the theme. I don't think many people made the connection even though that was the whole point of it. The Professor was a pretty shady character, still is.

Journey Trace Locus: The End of Europe
Robbin Murphy
September 1991

In The Names Don DeLillo wrote that to be a tourist gives one the license to act dumb. To fumble with guide books and maps, stand perplexed and needful on street corners and to ogle sites that natives pass everyday without notice. Others may shun that designation but I embrace it and enjoy the opponunity to cultivate what I sense is my innate flare for gullibility and awe, a talent I dare not practice at home in New York. Besides, entire economies depend on our ignorance abroad.

The Professor is an old Athens hand who feels a pedagogic duty to escort newcomers around but would face death rather than huddle with the masses at the entrance to the Acropolis. This place was his, he was not visiting and with an agility belying his bookish bearing we charged through the herd, outflanking crafty German and Japanese guides to stand victoriously separate at the fence surrounding the Parthenon. At the first camera click of the approaching crowd we would scurry off to the next sacred spot leaving me with but a fleeting glimpse of the sites I'd travelled thousands of miles to gawk at like a tourist. When I complained at last, there was an offer of a trip to the end of Europe, the gates of Hell, the Mani in the Peloponnese. How could I refuse?

Driving in Athens is a skill I preferred not to acquire so I opted for the role of navigator and was handed a Greek map and told to keep an eye out for signs that looked something like Korinthos. As we sped down the Sacred Way with the diesel trucks I gazed out the window of our rented Fiat and watched the landscape rush past, keeping one eye cocked for signs. I faithfully traced our progress on the folding map with my finger but had to give up around Daphni when I decided that spelling to the Greeks is a matter of very personal choice and that what was printed and what was posted rarely converged.

I'd imagined vast views of romantically wrecked ruins bathed in amber light surrounded by groves of olive trees protecting innocent shepherds playing mournful ancient tunes for their flock. The real Greece, so to speak. Once over the Isthmus of Corinth the reality that the real any place can be pretty much the same these days sunk in and I couldn't help thinking how much this stretch of road looked just like the one between Spokane and Coeur d'Alene my friends and I would drive on our underage beer runs to the state line. There's always that sense of generational melancholia that permeates a back country, a feeling of make-do as well as a heady sense of absolute freedom.

Once in the heart of the Peloponnese we encountered small shrines perched on posts along the road like bird feeders. Little houses filled with flaming oil, photographs, bits of cloth and trinkets, they floated across the landscape before us. My friend Dimitri said they were for the survivors of accident victims. Little vacation homes for the departed souls. I recalled reading that during the reign of the Greek Colonels not so long ago the government called their torture chambers "guest rooms".

The Mani is, appropriately, the middle finger of the three southern peninsulas of the Peloponnese. Grayish umber and ochre rocks and ground dotted by cypress and carpeted with olive trees, cacti, snakes and always towers and Frankish walls looming in the distance. It's an area of brutal geology, vendetta and silent atrocities and on every available surface there was painted the logo of the conservative Neo Democratica party. The towers had slots pierced through the sides to enable owners to pour boiling water on would-be attackers.

We stopped at Vathia near the tip of the finger and close to the end of Europe and the gates of Hell. Each building was a tower packed so close together that you could fling a knife through your neighbor"s top window and kill him in his sleep. At the tavern we met other Americans for the first and last time in the Mani. Hearty types, bicycling through Europe they ordered Coke while the Professor and I drank wine.

Past Vathia everything seemed to stop, particularly road signs. We made one final descent from the high road stopping when it ran out on a beach at the water's edge. Locals saw nothing odd at the sight of our little biack Fiat just giving up. If it wasn't the end of Europe it was cenainly close enough for us.

While the Professor retired to an ouzo and a nap in the car I stood knee-deep in the water looking out to sea and to Africa beyond. I remembered a passage from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson about the people in the Hebrides Islands doing "The America Dance" when sending their kin off to America. I thought I saw Egyptian sailors in the distance bringing their history to Greece. I did a littie dance myself and noticed the fishermen staring at me. "Dumb tourist," they probably thought.