Etesian Winds

It is the season of the Etesian winds here in the Aegean. They blow all summer long but are at their strongest now, at the abundant season's luxurious height. They blow out of Bulgaria, out of the Balkans and the Black Sea, rushing to fill the pressure void over southwest Asia. From Balkan crags they sweep over town and plain and then blow down the sea, scouring and cooling the northerly isles of Thasos, Samothrace, Limnos. Then, skirting the Turkish main, they rush down the open sea to find the beaches and valleys of northern Lesbos. Having streamed over the foreshore and the tiled rooftops of the vacation villas that punctuate it, the winds surge over dale and grove, sprinkling hilltops, radio masts and the abundant Gulf of Kaloni with distant migratory dust. On Kaloni the wind collects itself, gaining strength and mustering the Beauforts needed to scale the high Lesbian slopes before cresting our island's own Olympus. Thence the wind flows down the southern face, rustling the olive crowns in their tens of thousands, providing comfort to herd and shepherd and shepherd dog alike, before at length blowing down the roads and roofs and lightwires of the little hamlet of Plomari. Even now the wind is rustling our grapevine and reeding through shutters. Even now it is propagating in taut ripples off the town's shore, striating the water with fugitive goosebumps and the illusion of rain. Even now it is kicking up devils and dervishes on dusty lots and sundry aprons of marginal land or derelict frontage before unfolding over the southern sea and the shadowy masses of land at its limit.

These Etesians also course through the mind. Without embarking on a futile stalk for origin--though it would seem that they are born out of an imbalance between two pints on either side of the mind--it might be said with some truth that the counterpart Etesians begin their blowing in the oppressed Balkans of the mind, in the reptilian hinterland of cognition that lives in terror of diffuse horrors and turns out grim foretastes of saturnine things to come in its cerebellar sweatshop. A single jasmine-scented rustling of this wind is enough to inspire that foundry's wage-slaves to down tools. Now the winds rise up and gather strength as they tumble over conduit and plain and emerge to play on the mind's middle sea, scouring and scoring its surface until they break the iron spell of exigency and imperative that rules the waking day. Soon the winds reach the dormant isle of Amygdala. Here they soothe and cool and coax that island's craven inhabitants to exchange fear for enterprise, dull suspicion for healthy skepticism, passive shock for active understanding. Having fructified Amygdala with transformative pollen, the wind skirts the shore of oppression and tyranny until it overtakes the island of the self. There it cleaves to the local hills, the local houses, the local trees, to all the familiar memories and sentiments that can be seen and reckoned and lived by. And as it cleaves it dissolves. New and bracing vistas are born, cracked wide open. As night falls the winds pick up still more, accomplished now, beckoning the self to forsake vigilance, to unrivet itself from the local ridges and horizons of lurking past and looming future, and in that velvety windblown darkness to abandon itself without fear to the cool current of abiding renewal and there undergo secret baptism into the luxury of time, time like a gale of scents and spirits and dreams and windborne particles that flay the face until flesh falls from bone. For what are the Etesians, or any other wind, but the insistent systole and diastole of the nunc stans, the abiding now forever on the tongues of history's great mystics? Similar winds blow down the plains of America. They rustle the crowns of the Amazon and surmount the Andes. Like breezes play on the endless watery world of the Pacific, no less than on the cracked dunes and crags of the Sahara, and even the arcades and warrens of all the world's great pandemonic cities. All that is needful is that you step out onto the balcony, the precipice, the prow. If you are not wearing a scarf, your face will feel them.