Kapka Kassabova: Love Letter To Europe

Kapka Kassabova's Love Letter To Europe is projected onto the National Monument of Scotland, Calton Hill, as part of Message From The Skies

Dear Europe, I speak to you from the Highlands of Scotland, one of your peripheries that feels like a centre. Not a centre of political power, but much more – an omphalos of this island. I walk the waterful, skyful Highlands, home to the last Caledonian forests and lately to giant pylons like armies marching against time. And I talk to myself, like this –

Who possesses this landscape?

The man who bought it or

I who am possessed by it?

Dear Europe, we’ve been so busy with petty politics, we forget you are mostly nature. We’ve been so busy bickering, we forget we are mostly nature. We your people of the centres and peripheries are linked with invisible tendrils – not like pylons, but like trees. Though we don’t know it. If we knew it, we wouldn’t be divided and afraid. Afraid and therefore divided. And full of our righteous selves. But whatever we do or say, our contribution will be modest. We are only the latest in 46,000 years of Europeans. Of tinkers and shepherds who had the whole round hill for a road, the whole round continent.

We, your people, weren’t called Europeans until the Late Middle Ages, and even then it was an exclusive label for western, Latin, Christian Europe. The east – Byzantine, Ottoman, now Balkan – was too ambiguous, too redolent of the Other. Speaking of the Other, sometimes when I hear your name

Europe, Europa, Evropa

I see a bull with golden horns. Let me explain. When I was a child, my favourite book was Ancient Greek Myths and Legends. The men were naked even in fight, and the women wore light tunics, goddesses too. Clearly, in the ancient world it was eternal summer, another reason to love that book. This is how I learned that you begin outside yourself, dear pagan, pastoral, exotic Europe.

Once upon a time in what is now Lebanon, a Phoenician princess called Europa had a dream: two mighty continents in the shape of women wrestled over her. Straddling a strip of land, their powerful figures towered over the seas. They were Asia and the smaller continent to the west, linked by a strait over the Pontus Euxinos. That’s the Black Sea with the Bosphorus. Though it was Asia that had raised the princess, it was the other continent that won the wrestling match.

Soon after Europa’s narcissistic but prophetic dream, a bull with golden horns appeared. She straddled him in a moment of unguarded passion, and off they sailed over the waves to Crete. Crete: halfway between the two continents. The bull: an avatar of that primordial lecher Zeus. Europa gave birth to Minos.

Minos whose own wife fell for a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur – a half-man, half-beast tormented by duality, kept prisoner in a labyrinth.

A labyrinth built by the architect Deadalus. Deadalus whose son Icarus flew on waxed wings too close to sun – the Earth too small for him – and fell to his oceanic death. A classic case of hubris.

And on it went, the story of the ancient world, each action followed by reaction, a lesson in causality and karma. Even a child could see the painful but hopeful lessons of your history, dear hydra-headed, many-tongued, thousand-isled, Fury-chased, oracular, metamorphic old Europe. Europe: late heiress of the ancient world.

Even a child could spot the motif in your bovine origin myth – migration. Departures and arrivals, sea voyages and homeward-bound odysseys (beware the island where men turn into pigs!), your continental essence is migration.

Everybody came from somewhere. Migration is our inheritance.

You’re like a neurotic Moon, my dear beautiful continent, you struggle with duality. The dark side or the light side? But you have both. Yesterday, we were your immigrants of today. Before us, there were others. There were always others, dear restless, many-hued Europe.

Not so long ago, barbarians of many tongues arrived and stayed. Barbarians meant first non-Greeks, then non-Christians, then people not like us. But they were us, our mongrel ancestors. The movement never stopped.

When I disembarked in Scotland, I heard the waste music of the sea. There was always more of the north, the land was haunted, the stones stood, I was coming home. Scotland is on your watery edge but it contains your essence.

What is your essence? I know it when I see it. In the light. In faces with old expressions. Everywhere, I look for your faces, dear elusive Europe.

In your landlocked countries where borders and peoples have moved across the land like spilled mercury.

In your seedy ports where ships like lit-up cities bring the red wind of the Sahara.

In the Balkan Mountains where medieval frescoes want to tell us something and old minarets like pencils point at the sky.

Not in your great imperial capitals, but in your pot-holed roads between villages with names difficult to pronounce. In your fishing towns and islands where jumpers smell of lanolin, in lonely coastal cottages, in Orcadian graffiti scratched by Vikings in a moment of drunken immortality.

I look for you in what is small and inofficial, damaged and secretive, dear wounded, human-sized Europe. Home of The Ode to Joy, Fado and saudade, Flamenco and duende, polyphony and the Gaelic Psalms. Home of the iggdrasyl and the Selkie destined to return to the loch of the psyche. Psyche is Greek for soul.

Ptolemy, the father of geography, had only a vague idea of the British Isles. They were on the margins of his Mediterranean world. Anywhere beyond Hibernia or Ireland was too cold to live, he wrote. Well, he was wrong. Here we are and it is January, and they tell us we’re about to break away, like a melting glacier over a warming pond.

But we’re not going anywhere. We have nowhere to go. No nation is an island.

What will become of us, dear troubled Europe, what will become of you? It is the same question. It is the same warming pond and we’re in the same boat because we’re one people linked by tendrils, like trees. If we test our DNA, we’ll be surprised. Nation-states and borders mean nothing in deep time. Our DNA code is dendritic – it works in hundreds, thousands of years. Take two people from neighbouring countries, islands like Britain included, because seas mean nothing in deep time. They share up to 50 relatives from the last 1,500 years. Who will have the last laugh? Our ancestors – the immigrants, the tinkers and shepherds, the barbarians at the gate.

And our war flags and grand posturing, our righteousness and tribalism, our clever speeches and primordial fears – what will be left of them 200 years from now? Or 20 years from now. Or even two.

Sometimes, I feel we’re all inside this poem which is about Harris but also about something else:

And light bends down

in seeming benediction, though it comes

from where hail buds and vicious thunder drums.

Its storms lie round,

already here where a roof shows its bones

or where a child sits in a field of stones.

And I shudder. But then I remember: I’ve seen your multi-continental faces, dear Europe. We make history, not just the other way around. Remember the unbearable hope when the Berlin Wall fell?

Hope and love – that’s our antidote to fear. I carry it like a torch through your bitterest winters. I will not let the flame go out, dear neighbour, future friend from near and far, kindred uncynical soul, known and unknown, dear indivisible self.

Quoted lines are from George Mackay Brown, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, and facts from Ancestral Journeys: the peopling of Europe from the first venturers to the Vikings by Jean Manco

Devised by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay in partnership with Edinburgh City of Literature, Message from the Skies sees texts by six leading writers – William Dalrymple, Chitra Ramaswamy, Louise Welsh, Kapka Kassabova, Stef Smith Billy Letford, projected on to some of the capital’s landmark buildings during the first month of 2019. This year’s celebration of the written word features six specially commissioned “love letters to Europe” in which the writers express their feelings at this time of political uncertainty. Supported by Creative Scotland through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo fund, these literary illuminations will continue until Burns Night on 25 January. For more information, visit www.edinburghshogmanay.com