ABSTRACT
The individual absence has to have echoes in the natural world or distant events and a variety of sign systems such as warnings, dreams or readings of the landscape. Crying is a performative and not a psychological category; it demands a chorus to transfer it across borders —natural, geopolitical, individual or collective— to witness, validate and seal it as true and powerful. Most rebetika, early popular songs, and folksongs are characterized by an antiphonic movement from nonlanguage to language. The sob incrementally subverts language as emotional-sensory power increases. The murmuring of the gathering crowd in the streets, his chorus, echoed like a hybrid music bordering on sob. The musician’s tactile relation to his instrument is not a technical striking of chords and notes, a touch on a surface. The bouzouki with its music of pain has been rescripted and recodified into an eloquent reminder of cultural and historical unconscious, a tactile medium of social memory and cultural resistance.
