My memory of the Olympic Stadium visit, with a rehearsal for the ceremony for the next winter Olympics.
As we enter the scattered ruins outside the vast stadium:
- The quiet. Calm, like an invisible snowfall, diluting the colorful, chaotic babble of tourists and all their attending petty commerce and logistics. Desaturating. Muting. Soothing. Slowing the world.
- Small strange birds, unseen, twittering quietly in high registers, decorating the silence with tiny filigrees of almost-music.
- Warm sunlight dappled by olive trees over a barren land arranged with 10-ton sections of stone ruins, deeply pitted, waiting to be assembled. Someday. Somecentury. Like walking among the towering redwoods. Making slowing. Making calming.
- Even the glowing blue ripstop nylon pants of the Bavarian grandpa cannot create dissonance in this place. The brand names on the camera straps feel as natural as the veins of a leaf. Every man-made detail has its place in this Olympic scale moment. Here. Now. It is all ok, all part of human achievement. The great stones drape a vast blanket over us all.
- The Music. Long notes drift from a silver flute by a slender woman wearing the timeless vertical dress of ancient Greeks. No instruments timbre could be a better tribute to Apollo, Athena, Demeter, the calmer and wiser Gods.
- Procession. Like Elven maidens parading slowly to the sea in Tolkien legend, a series of women, all of a pleasing sameness in pose, pace, and appearance, appear from the ruins, heading toward the Stadium. Order. Poise. Grace. Their thin sandals make no sound as they gather around a silver hemisphere.
- Fire. A black half-sphere of film, lowered slowly into a silver bowl, where the sun ignites it with a WHUMP. Slowly, so slowly, it rotates in the arms of a woman, through a graceful arc, coming to rest in a kneeling position. Her counterpart carries ...
- The Olympic Torch, its silver form tapering. It lights gently, flickering delicate and vulnerable in the bright sun.
- Athletes in green tunics, frozen in Olympian poses, line the path to the stadium.
- The martial rhythm of our footsteps in gravel echoing in a gladiator-style former tunnel, now open to the calm clear sky except for a lonely, narrow arch of ivory brick
- The booming crash of a great drum, worn high on the belly by a drummer standing aside a sound tech playing thundering drumming soundtrack, as we emerge into the gently sloping grassy grandstands.
- The center is simple - a gravel oval with stone start and stop lines.
I feel lucky to have seen it.