Perimenondas, My Son

By Dr. Paul Campanis

" Eiper pote kai nyn......" Now if ever. Is this piece Greek, Bob's Discount, Stuart Davis, Stan Chilson, me, Laura, Professor Okonjo?I don't know. It is as if I was talking to somebody.....my son. How must I speak to you, my son, my brother? I don't believe in Fathas, Mothas, uncles,
aunties, sons or daughtas. The only thing is age and the death that follows us. Look back. Over
the left shoulder. Death. Paul, understand this. You are but a brother. The lawyers say other
but to me I love you as a junior brother, one I teach, mold, push, pull. Oh, the wise guy, Kavafi. The monster in the dark, my little pussy cat, Konstantine. He's everyplace. I read a book on David Hockney, the painter, and who does he refer to in his work? K.K. How dare he? Well, it's ok, 'cause Hockney plain changed my life around when the Museum of Fine Arts had two exhibits of his wondrous paintings I saw. Anyway the evil one, he says to me, we "plan how to avoid the obvious danger that threatens us so terribly." We look to and fro with terror in
our face but " another disaster, one we never imagined, suddenly, violently, descends upon us....there's no time now-sweeps us away." We plan, worry all we want, supplicate gods. Nothing helps. This is it. This is all there is. The glorious now. I call on the spirit forms that stand in Laura's once bedroom where I now write, amid mountains of junk, detritus, advertisements, stuff, from my life that really makes no sense. Ask my wife who knows. I write words on
a page. All I ever was called to do. Unless you take the way I blend manure
from Shady Oaks Farm to Dover soil to make flowers grow.


I am fit for very little. I am loved but barely tolerated. Respected but not understood. Friends laugh at me, but they are joking is all. I wanna talk about Bob at Bob's Discount of Revere. He gave me life for a long time . Every day he just worked at his place. That was my foundation,
my platform. The jokes, banter, work, dirt of the place. I can't manage to make sense. My body rules my tongue, my feet run my brain. I just react to the world around me. I leave a place and
mysteriously show up five years later. Abruptly I shift direction as if a hand moves me. I can't understand it one bit. Stuart Davis has a cornerstone for all his paintings. The Amazing Continuity. Contin-you-it-y. This touchstone gets you through Coca Cola land this late summer day, 1999. It provides backdrop for me to shepherd my loves, my Sheila, Laura, Paul.
I did a great video piece on photographer-historian, Richard Nickel, called "Mission in Dust." He attempts to save the buildings of architect, Louis Sullivan of Chicago. He'd go in to dust and ruin to grab out a piece of ornament or terra cotta. He was pinned in a torn-down structure,
crucifix-style and when they found the corpse it was preserved, pickled, 'cause the dust and water they sprayed, coated him. He died in a Sullivan structure. Perhaps he was crazy, as reporter Studs Terkel said of him when he rambled on about history, art, architecture, continuity. So who am I to complain? I just wanna live, go up to Damoulas's supermarket, dig manure at Shady Oaks Farm, be with my wife and just get by. I wanna jump and shake. Talk to Bob, my Bob. I look in Sozio's window for Bob and hear him say to me, "you fool, you get tracked, always off on a tangent." Bob tells me this. We need daily strength, for daily needs. That is all. I can work. That isn't the problem, but I'm in some other place. Always Greek. Wandering, a restless spirit, a rolling rock. I prefer death, Seferi says. Sees," the ancient dead risen again to smile in a strange silence." Urns at the museum of the geometric period, 1000-650BC. Before the
pretty pots of 600-300, with figures and stories, as you go around the pot to look. Old, old faces look back at you from Rhodes, 800 BC. You see what Seferi means. O Paul, my young brother, will I explain before this hulk I haul crashes? We are old, we Greeks. Yet so is Nickel and he's an American, American old. They measure by decade, we by century, but old is old, as Nickel
shows his love of his brother, Louis Sullivan. So Seferi loves his ancestors, as I love Stuart Davis, a brother from the first half of this century. Brothers, Sisters. Age, decay, rebirth. "Mother," as we called her, my mother-in-law, is older sister. My wife, daughter, sisters. Melanie, sister. Three artists, sister. Florine Stettheimer, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson. Kin, I live for and through. I claim and they are mine.


Kavafi wrote a silly poem for tourists. "Waiting for the
Barbarians." In it the enemy is us and not the foe at the door, the
barbarian. Silly. The title of this piece here is a nod to Konstantine.
I came from a volcano. It rumbles. I heard the sucker this April on
Nisiro. I thought it was a Turkish jet on a flyby. I was amused.
A poem. I cannot say what is a poem. Don't know. Better call it a
spaghetti, a honda.
Land o loud
Nisiro I call

You know the poem, "We." We are the ones; well, "we are the ones and
don't even know it." We come of a land that has something immaculate about it. It makes us
immaculate. I swear. I have seen it. It causes me to feel chills. This
is Henry Miller on the protevousa, Athena. Our capital, Athens. "A
world waiting to be.....it was preserving itself in tact, inviolate, until one
day when restored to his senses man would summon it back to life again."
It is a waiting game. All we have to do. Perimenondas, we enter the
holy gate of our pasts, a mythic world. Remain there satisfied, even
though we live someplace else. I am beneficiary to great art, great culture, great brothers, sisters. You never need look far. Advertisements contain the fables of a people.
In ephemera, dailies, stuff, life vibrates. Pulses. That is all Stuart
Davis ever said. There-in lies continuity. For me it was in Bob's and in the parking lot at Bob's. The continuity, a blessed daily life. It is in signage, signs. In words anywhere. In
Stuart Davis, Reg Marsh, Walker Evans, People magazine, on Squire Road in
Revere. Davis feels art should be for the common person. Sold in stores for
five and ten dollars. He speaks of a "socially viable art." He alone
explains the current miasma. How to go from this culture to the next in
the American adventure. With branded symbols for the products is how.
For we are not Greek, Ethiopian or Andalusian. We are American, just
kidding when we call up our over-the-ocean ancestors. We are here. Now
is now. Here's what Syms's book on Davis offers. " The product image is
fully displayed in all its promotional splendor, envisioned as a commodity
shaped and supported by advertising. The Davis paintings display the salient
American tendency to view the everyday world in terms of commercial
brand-name products." Our mission, brother Paul, is always the same one. To preserve and
further the amazing continuity Davis has uncovered. To invoke Kavafi and
Seferi on the Greek past, to revere the now, the this is it! The
fairyland America with its Viagra, its Kennedy downed in a plane, its Pringles with
olean, so you can eat potato chips and not get fat. Davis is an authentic American hero with his jangles of things he calls paintings. Stuart made designs that became dresses. The ad for the Franklin Simon department store says " you as you look this Easter."
I fly now. This design he calls "Flying Carpet." It was woven into
one.