Streaks of brilliant light shoot down from the ceiling, a dizzying maze of thoughts running in parallel, before suddenly stopping in unison. Dozens of little crystals dangle at the ends like carrots on a stick, beckoning me. Below, inheriting all this wisdom are a fever of rays, wooden and locked in time. The artwork is still yet it moves, rushes even. It circles round and round with an unquenchable curiosity. I imagine its texture; it begs for touch. It’s so much all at once, that it cannot fit in my brain. The thought stops. How can you begin to translate this? I ignore the artwork for the time being—afraid that if I don’t save it for last, give it its due, see it from every possible angle, I’ll miss all that it is, somehow. So, despite its beauty, I deliberately refuse its call.

When I first entered the exhibition, I felt lost. I rarely go to art galleries. I wondered if there was some hidden path that I was meant to follow, something that might trigger a perfect, enlightening domino effect, linking all the artworks together in cascading harmony. Faint echoes of my grandfather follow me as I wander around. My dad’s dad. Costa. Or, as most in this country would call him, Con—short for Kostantinos. But I knew him as my pappou.

Born to Macedonian parents, Pappou grew up in the Greek rural village of Agia Paraskevi. My own dad spent part of his childhood there. He tells me you could kick a footy 50 or 60 metres from where he lived and it would cross over the border into what is now known as North Macedonia. Growing up, Pappou spoke equally fluent Greek and Macedonian, although he couldn’t write in the latter language. Ethnically Macedonian, but Greek in nationality—apparently they call that ‘Greek–Masso’. That’s what I tell people when they ask what my heritage is. That’s what I’ve been told to tell people. That part of my identity feels alien to me though. I feel closest to understanding when I ask my dad, but then I forget what he says. So then I ask him again. And again.

And again—Pretty Beach (2019), the name I learn only when I return. Having examined all the other artworks in the exhibition, I can finally embrace it. It gathers everything else in the gallery and then pushes it all out again. What first translated as a cacophony of separate thoughts now coalesces into something quite lovely. Something personal here—something about the image of rain sprinkling on an already-full body of water, as if disrupting the ebb and flow of the rays’ trails. The imagined ripples demand a journey of reflection, an interruption of the present moment. Look back, not forward. What sense can be made of that?

*

My baba, Traiani, grew up in the adjoining village to the right of Agia Paraskevi called Poliplatanos, which is where she met Pappou and discovered an affinity for dressmaking as a teenager. A lot of these places in Greece have corresponding Slavic Macedonian names. Sfetka Petka is the original Slavic name for Agia Paraskevi. After the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, many place names were Hellenised—‘made Greek’. If the Macedonians in these areas wanted to stay, they had to learn the Greek language. As a result, the Macedonian language was only maintained in some families over the next few generations, which explains why my dad learnt so much more of the Greek language growing up. It was an erasure of Macedonian identity in favour of Hellenic assimilation. The two ethnicities had Orthodox Christian traditions in common, at least. I think I’m starting to get it now.

Baba is the Macedonian word for grandmother, but these days she wants my sister, Emily, and me to call her by the Greek word, yiayia. She’s quite insistent on this too, but calling her Baba is a habit that the two of us are not all too keen on breaking. We’re too used to it. Maybe she wants to be seen as more Greek. Maybe she’s just tired of hearing Baba from us all the time and wants a fresh word in her ears. She was recently diagnosed with vascular dementia. Perhaps it’s making her suggest things she otherwise wouldn’t. I’m sure it also explains her increasing tendency to repeat herself and abruptly shift from one topic to another with no evident rhyme or reason.

*

Reading the didactic for Pretty Beach, I discovered that the artist, Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, built it as a meditative response to his grandfather’s suicide. The artwork acts as proof of his grandfather’s existence. It carves out from a memory of grief, a positive scene of the natural world’s quiet perseverance. Abdullah says he values the emotional responses to his artwork from ‘complete strangers’, grateful that his chosen craft can communicate ‘something universal’. As I see it, all art has the potential to do this—to bridge gaps and break down barriers, whether they be tangible or abstract. I think that’s why I like to write.

We lost Pappou in April 2022. The whole thing was expected, given the slow, degenerative effects of Alzheimer’s, but the inevitability of it all didn’t make it sting any less when it happened. I remember waking up to the sound of Dad’s voice on the phone with the nursing home in Whittlesea. We’d just been there the day before. He was just there. He was singing. The day before he died, he was singing. I mean, fuck. How does the life just go from someone like that? Empty. Hollowed out.

Stars. Sunlight. Something, something—something else. I wish I could translate what’s in front of me. Follow the rays’ trails to their natural end. Is there a natural end? Make sense of it. Find the meaning. No—stop. Just experience it. That in itself is the translation. But then what is it saying? I’m back where I started.

*

My pappou always spoke enough English for me to understand and for us to have a semi-sustained conversation, but I never spoke enough Greek for him. I often felt like I owed him more effort than I gave. Greek was offered as a subject at my primary school, but I was never committed to learning the language outside of that environment. Dad never spoke it with my sister and me when we were growing up, so all we picked up in our early childhood were little words we found funny. I really liked the Greek word for lemon—lemóni, not just because it’s so similar to the English word, but also because it sounds a bit like my sister’s name (Emily). She used to say it a lot, and she also loved eating lemons as a kid, so it tracked. But I should’ve learnt more Greek outside of these vocally satisfying phrases. I should learn more Greek now, lest I squander the chance to connect with Baba on a deeper level before her recent diagnosis takes hold of her memory.

Pretty Beach is infinite. It forgoes centrality, refusing to be pinned down or boxed in. You cannot dwell on a single section of it without losing something, just as a sentence cannot be translated into another language without a similar loss of meaning. If you get lost in the sparkling dreams above, you’ll miss the fever growing at your feet. You must take it all in at once. I think of music this way too; sounds layered on top of one another, only making sense when heard together.

There’s a couple of lyrics I adore from a song called ‘Akuma no Ko’—one of the end credits songs for the anime, Attack on Titan. These lyrics take a meta approach to the idea of translatability: ‘Once this word is translated / The real meaning won’t be understood’. These lyrics suggest that only in their original language and form can the emotional essence of a group of words be fully appreciated. Anne Carson speaks to a similar concept in her essay ‘Variations on the Right to Remain Silent’, drawing on the idea that certain phrases are untranslatable. She uses an example from Homer’s Odyssey, where the word ‘moly’ from the language of the gods is not given an ‘earthly translation’. Carson believes that Homer ‘wants this word to fall silent’, which is why he refuses to translate it in the text.

I’m reminded of the Macedonian phrase ‘abre sho praish!’ which Baba would spit out in a rage at Emily and me when we were younger. This is back when my family lived with her and Pappou in Whittlesea during my early years of primary school. When I ask my dad what it means, he usually places a hand on his forehead, thinking hard for a few seconds before telling me there is no way to translate such a phrase into English, barring a vague ‘Hey, what are you doing?!’ Although I didn’t know the meaning of the phrase, the exasperated tone Baba would always use was enough to tell me she was pissed off with whatever mischief Emily and I were up to. I wish Baba would sell that rundown brick house and move closer to us. We helped her put it up for auction last year, to no avail. Display furniture was too expensive to put in, so it still looked like an aging Macedonian lady’s house—fake flowers; sad, wooden chairs and tables; overly ornate utensils. Maybe that’s why it didn’t sell. I think her recent diagnosis discouraged her from ever wanting to try again. I know she’s lonely there now, living alone. She tells us so in no uncertain terms.

But then, Pretty Beach looked lonely to me too at first. The stingrays seemed so sad. I didn’t initially see community and solidarity in their formation—but cold, rigid uniformity. Part of a group but separate somehow—their agency ripped away. That might be the loneliest feeling you can experience. A shared but unspoken understanding that, along with all the other participants in this game of life, you are being suffocated—no, drowned. It is when you find yourself at the bottom of the ocean, when all you can see is distant sunlight that reminds you of a better yesterday. Maybe that’s how Pappou felt in the nursing home—stagnant, marking time. I think art makes the drowning more bearable. It connects us, and then we can breathe.

*

Pappou was an unapologetic lover of music, and he fought for that love against parents who insisted it was a fruitless pursuit. He helped his family by working as a shepherd in his teenage years, and to pass the time on the pastures he would play the recorder. I wonder what the sheep would’ve thought of that. In his young adulthood, he was conscripted for two years into the Greek army, and would boost the morale of his fellow troops with his clarinet playing. He was an eccentric, optimistic dreamer, in what I can only imagine was a system built on no-nonsense protocol and unemotional hypermasculinity.

His proficiency in the clarinet proved useful in his later immigration to Melbourne, when my dad and his siblings were still very young. After half a decade of thankless work in a factory near Lygon Street in Carlton, a serious back injury rendered Pappou unable to work labour-intensive jobs for the foreseeable future. Following this, he turned to Melbourne’s vibrant Greek–Masso community, playing his clarinet, and even a bit of saxophone at cultural dance events, picnics, christenings, weddings and many family celebrations across the city. He’d please wedding guests by playing extra songs at the end of the night and never saying no to an on-the-spot request, provided he knew the song.

Eventually he started busking with his saxophone in the streets of 90s Melbourne, inviting questions from passers-by. Someone once asked him, ‘What country is your music from?’ to which he replied, ‘My music has no borders.’ A man born between the ethnic identities of Macedonian and Greek, he appreciated the merits of all different people, and sought to understand rather than to label, priding himself on his use of music as a vessel to expose what unites us, rather than what divides.

I have fond memories of Pappou hiding Dairy Milk chocolate bars inside his coat. Beckoning me closer, he’d whisper, ‘Choc-ate, choc-ate, choc-ate,’ softly under his breath, reaching inside his pocket to produce a piece for me. Three or four sometimes, if I was lucky. Now all that’s left are the tiny bars you find in those Favourites boxes. Baba’s thrown them all in disproportionately large bowls for decoration. They’ve all gone mouldy and tasteless.

*

For a while after Pappou’s back injury, he became a househusband. Baba was the family breadwinner, working hard in a Melbourne sewing machine factory to make ends meet. How’s that for beating patriarchal norms? Pappou’s gentleness, quirky sense of humour and accepting nature rubbed off on my dad, and neither has ever felt like a traditionally ‘masculine’ role model to me, whatever those words even mean. I’ve never bought into the idea that men must conform to a certain way of being, to be tough and bottle up emotions. I think that’s thanks in large part to the male presence in my life being so comfortable in their artistic methods of emotional self-expression, namely through music.

The day before he died, he was singing. We played an old Greek tune my dad had found for him in the nursing home. Through ragged breath, incredibly, he found his voice, and very faintly sang along. It reminded me of when we’d visit him in Whittlesea in the years before his diagnosis. He’d be sitting up straight in the living room, clarinet in hand, always present and eager to gift his music to us. Sometimes he’d even hand Emily and me a pair of cheapo plastic recorders and we’d play along (very badly). I’ll admit I could never fully distinguish one song from the last. They all just sounded wistful and vaguely Greek. But the excitement with which he’d perform was infectious.

I’m a singer myself, I’ve always been inspired by my pappou’s passion and grace when it came to music. As I move forward with my own artistic pursuits, I look back on him fondly as a north star. His legacy is not one defined by a lineage of cynical and traditional patriarchy, but of artistic integrity and unwavering kindness.

I started writing a song about Pappou shortly after he died, but I never finished it. It currently exists as a lingering brain dump that may never take its intended final form. I’m okay with that, though. And if one day I’m not, I can always go back to it and continue writing.