"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "7 LOGOMACHY or the Dialect of the Tribe" "You know..." "There is a centre of the World a Navel of the World... which is a little circle a perimeter of hardly 10-15 miles." "There you'll find Miletus where Thales invented geometry, or Samos, where Pythagoras invented arithmetic and where on the opposite coast you'll find Ephesus where Heraclitues invented well, collaborated in inventing physics." "So, within a tiny circle, within a very short distance you'll find Patmos where St John the Evangelist said" "'First there was the Word'." "A tiny but extremely fertile area of several different 'logos' - arithmetic logos, natural logos, geometrical logos." "It's as if there was a little hole which sprouted out a road that we couldn't ever miss." "A road we have followed over 3415 miles down to the cave of Cape Verde islands..." "Following the Greek example we, on Cape Verde we are the children of poverty." "And this poverty has given us a spiritual force dominated by the need to survive and which has upheld that... that infatuation with energy which has dominated our history." "This animistic force born out of poverty, the necessity or need to survive, helped form present day Cape Verde, an indirect image of Greekness." "On the wall of Baltasar Lopes photographs from Sao Nicolau seminary when Cape Vede islands were still a Portugese colony." "The seminary on Sao Nicolau was founded in 866 AD and abandoned in 1916." "In the interim, the official life and the private life of Cape Verde relied on the seminary's guidance." "Logically, the Portugese as Latin people were Greece's true heirs but after their fight for freedom alongside Amilcar Cabral" "Capeverdians now claim that heritage." "I think I was a good teacher." "I took an interest in my students." "They were my friends." "I would sit with them." "Discuss things with them." "We were like brothers." "This humanism derived from my personal way of being and my way of educating." "It pervaded a generation, Amilcar Cabral's generation." "For that reason I feel responsible for his humanism." "The teaching profession uses heuristics, question and answer." "The word 'logos' which means language and thought is the root of words like 'logic', 'dialogue', 'dialectic', 'logistic', 'logiciel' (French for software)." "I think that we should start with the roots of words." "The verb 'lego', I say, in the Homeric tradition means 'to structure'" "and 'to choose'." "So what we today call 'structure' is found in the root of this word." "A structured notion of the world." "It's also an answer to a world." "Logos..." "Paideia.." "Cosmos..." "Psyche..." "Micro..." "Chronos..." "Musiki..." "Politico..." "Polemos..." "Chaos..." "There are subtle distinctions." "Pre-Socratic logos could not express the mind." "Plato did that very successfully." "Pre-Socratic language of thought expressed the world metaphysically." "Even Heraclitus?" "Certainly, all the pre-Socratics." "They didn't express the mind?" "No, they didn't have the language." "There wasn't a system of thought, there certainly wasn't dialectic." "That was Plato's big achievement." "I think you've just raised a fundamental question concerning logos." "These famous logos' adventures began in that bloody Aegean sea which can be considered the centre of Greek civilization." "The Chalice?" "The Chalice of Bitterness, rather, but it was the epicentre throughout the Middle Ages," "Greek and Western Middle Ages." "The adventures of logos may be the most meaningful thing in world history." "Don't forget that in hellenism as early as the hellenistic age the logos, this rational discourse, if I may call it that, started to decline or to get confused" "and took on elements beyond logic." "Up to the point that compared to Plato's discourses it became unrecognisable." "If literature is language" "then the language we're using now is made up of five languages." "The archaic one" " Homer's Greek, the Old and New testament Greek, the Bible Greek, Byzantine Greek, as we call it, used by Church Fathers, then there is the Purist Greek the Katharevusa, the Greek studied in universities since the fall of Constantinople," "everything revolves around that." "And finally, the non-taught Greek used by the people under the Turks but never taught at univerisities." "When the Greek state was forming as an independent state in 1830 after 450 years of occupation" "the problem arose." "Which language should we speak?" "We had to choose between the five." "The supporters of Antiquity said we should use the old language." "The self-taught Diaspora Greeks, diaspora - another Greek word, who came back from abroad to help to build the new state." "And finally, another form of Greek which had been constantly spoken." "So a compromise was reached which lasted a hundred years." "This compromise was in school, we learn Katharevusa the language taught at university." "At home, we use the other language the one people used every day." "And that started a kind of national schizophrenia which is still felt today though the problem has been sloved." "Because for the basic words, words which mould young children like the words 'water', 'bread'," "we use two words, one at school water is hydor - hydro, hydraulic, the scholar word is hydor." "But at home, it's 'nero'." "So when a child says to its mother 'Can I have a glass of water?" "' he doesn't know which word to use the school word or the home word." "The same goes for bread - 'artos', 'artoclasie' as we say in church and 'psomi' - the everday word." "This led to national schizophrenia." "I like this idea of schizophrenia." "It's not untrue, but what wealth!" "I think it's wonderful that Ancient and Modern languages are all mixed up together." "True, it's a bizarre situation." "First, you take an interest in the etymology of words." "Then you realise the advantage of having nearly three languages." "The popular language - the Demotic, the learned language" " Katharevusa, and also the archaic language." "Some simple, everday Greek words were bathed in a metaphysical aura." "They were loaded with a greater siginificance." "For the Greeks words weren't just tools." "Today, language has become a mode of communication, expression." "As a brief definition" "I would say that for the Greeks words give voice to things." "The word 'telephone', for example, is used by nearly every nation." "What does telephone mean?" "'Phone' is the voice." "'Tele' means far, as in telescope." "We don't make telephones in Greece." "We imported them from the States when US brought in the Colonels, the ITT phones and the CIA." "Now we import them from the EEC." "But we don't manufacture them." "This is the writer's dilemma." "He is aware of what words signify, he doesn't take them at face value." "When I hear Greek words in French" "I feel very proud, priviledged." "And I say to myself I know where that word comes from" "I know its roots." "I can no longer hear my language so I am glad to rediscover a word." "It may be almost unrecognisable, a bit disguised, a bit different, like someone you knew as a child who is now a grown up, changed." "Because the French have changed it." "There is a sort of feeling of..." "of love...of pride..." "I smile to myself and say" "'Ah yes, I had forgotten that that word comes from so and so'." "'Logotechnia' means literature." "Logo-technia." "Logo is the word technia is techniques." "But the word has been banished ever since the Middle Ages." "The word 'literature' was adopted." "But the word 'technology' is the reverse of this word." "Logo-technia became techno-logy." "Technology is now your password." "But why not the word logotechnia which is the word for literature?" "But going back to the question the word for writer, like scribe, scribbler, ecrivain are taken from Latin not from the Greek syngrapheas, the Greek word for writer, you kept graphology from grapho, to write." "Photography, writing with light." "You kept graphics but it doesn't mean writing." "That's also interesting because grapheas is the scribe" "so syn-grapheas is a co-writer, someone you write with." "Only co-writer exists, not writer." "Who is this other you write with?" "It must be the famous Other." "Sartre's or Heidegger's Other." "I'm a Cratylian like everyone who sings or writes." "I come back to Plato's Cratylus where Reasonable Man says as would modern linguistics 'words are arbitrary'." "The word 'horse' isn't four-legged." "Cratylus said 'Don't be so sure." "Words and objects have affinities, primordial and strange attractions'." "Every poet is on Cratylus side." "I believe the Greek language allowed for abstract reasoning" "which somehow developed early on, this questioning of existence, of what Man is, of physis, energy, of nature, how time and the universe relate," "all was made possible early on, by a syntax of interrogation." "Aristotle would say that the human animal fights with specific weapon - words." "So in the dialectics' world, those who understand each other could not fight but communicate, convince each other, risking the pitfalls of debates and the power struggles as well." "It's true." "Socrates did oppose the sophistic method of arguing which is like fencing." "To win, regardless of the truth." "But it's also true that Socrates exploits every means and when he reaches an agreement, the consent of the other person," "Socrates speaks about it in terms of surrender, of putting to the test, judgement." "You know that any dialogue, any question-answer mechanism is a hand-to-hand combat, a battle." "It uses a series of procedures which presuppose a disparity between the speakers." "And after the debate" "the person Socrates interrogated ends up utterly depleted, for his own good, of course." "He feels happy, he thanks Socrates but he is also utterly demolished." "He was a cosmic pain-in-the-neck, the most unbearable man in town." "He must have been responsible for much uneasiness." "This man on the street corner who interrupts everyday thought saying 'Get thinking'." "It's unbearable." "Someone once said I love Hugo like a beast." "I too loved Socrates like a beast, as a whole." "If only we could make a programme of paintings, music, plays, novels which all through the 19th century queried" " Socrates or Christ?" "Which death was the greatest?" "Which death really left its mark on the very soul of the West?" "Hegel shocked his century by saying in a public lecture" "'Christ knew he would meet his God after a few unpleasant hours." "Socrates knew no such thing.'" "It was morally courageous death, Antigone's was even more so." "This comparison marked split up, even withered the imagination of the West." "Was Socrates' death religious?" "It's a very difficult question." "I can't say for sure." "Was it also an aesthetic death?" "Was his death a work of art?" "Plato's Dialogues made it into one." "It's like a scenario." "It is the death of the Righteous, the death of absolute thinking, as if, in the Dreyfus affair," "Valery had his Monsieur Teste shot in the Place de la Concorde." "Assorted through the streets of Athens, where every plaque is signpost for an adventuring language, the names from within that maze may bring us further back into a world whose language is still open to choice, or reaches towards extremities of language," "to point which no language is able to touch, which we call music." "Let imagine that faith of the Logos is logomachy, the wrestle with words, that music be the tool of self-renewal and self-purification." "And lets call it, to use another Greek word, hypothesis." "We tend to forget that you and I are closer to Homer than Homer was to his sources." "Proust, Valery, Homer, Shakespeare belong to our world of publishing, the world of text, of critique, where a pedagogue teaches a text, makes you learn it, comments on it." "That's not where you find spurts of incredible genius." "That was before writing in the domain" "of the very first stages, the utterings, hysteria, anguish, the first cries, Pan's cries" "which also echoes through Greek mythological thought." "Music before words, maybe." "A myth obsessively studied, that of Marsyas and Apollo, the music and instruments debates." "Orpheus with torn off limbs, as Ovid tells us, whose mouth continues to sing long after his body has died." "Not even his head, just his mouth." "I think the age we belong to keeps reverting to Greek myth yet asks 'Are we at the twilight of narrative possibilities?" "'." "Hence, Samuel Beckett's play with only a huge mouth on stage, wailling and screaming at you, is the motif of Orpheus' death thousand of years before Homer."