A Language Not Spoken Any More

As we walk about in the garb of the modern, the Greek may open eyes wide to wonder at the marvelous things that abound around us. As Seferi indicated a while back, in the forties I think, we are dimly aware of a past, that to him, is still real. He is at Delphi and says "you have the impression you are listening to a language not spoken any more."

It is not a language alone, but a style of life, a set of needs, a feeling for the beautiful, a caring for the world that has not been evident for a few thousands of years. He speaks of the old Greeks as having "different ideas, different loves, a different devotion." It is clear to him that the old way had a grace, beauty and a modesty, above all, that is absent today. In a time of bigness, commercialism and that.

To Seferi the operative term is "soul." There, at that seat, is where the world can be controlled, and governed. Not by brain, or thought, but by heart and feeling. This is where our very own Theofilos comes in, to speak to us through his pictures. Many are lost now, but we have a few to remind of our way of being. It is my task here to introduce a few of his fine pictures, his paintings and make a few remarks. Seferi has already done so in his work of prose, the essays, " The Greek Style." The first essay is about Theofilos and his devotion to his craft. He is an odd fellow, eccentric, driven and kind of weird. He dresses up, puts the Greek warrior's dress on, and struts about with a sword. He makes that he is Alexander and parades the street with his Macedonians, some little kids also dressed up.

What is most striking about our recent ancestor, he lived in the early part of century, twenty, is that he is pushed by an extremely strong hand. That hand is the one of culture. In any real sense he seems a primitive or folk painter. He does his figures from his heart and groin and not from any design learned in a school. Like Makryanni, he is self-taught. Makryanni is a hero of Greek independence, who learned to write in his thirties and did so, so we would not forget where we came from and what the struggle for independence in the early eighteen hundreds was all about. He wrote a chronicle of his time that is an inspiration to us Greeks who followed. His hardships and sufferings are great in comparison to ours today.

The objective for Makryanni, Seferi and Theofilos is to keep Greekness alive. Not to argue it is the best of anything, but to stress its preoccupation with the handling of everyday life and the needs of people who live in harmony with their deity. You never hear these three be shrilly chauvenistic. They just call to us to act right, as the most recent recipients of the Greek gift. The language, the culture and its needs.

It comes through in Theofilos. His homely scenes are direct and easy to digest. The deeper meanings are something else, but Seferi requests we look well and see the other dimension in his world and work. The operating philosophy in Theofilos's paintings works off this major statement. I will recite it here.

Efharisto tis makries seires ton progonon pou tholepsan ty fony.

It is really no more than that. Theophilos's pictures make noises in Greek that we may gainfully employ to make our way into century twenty-one. He stresses the human, just standing there, looking straight at us with the clear and pitiless eyes Seferi seems to admire so. In some part of his work he speaks of the need to look at life head-on and face what will happen to us. We get old and die is all. If we are secure in our culture we never do die because someone will come along and occupy our shoes. Someone will shout the lines of Seferi from the rooftop. The fiddler on our roof will play. The batter will strike a homerun in the stands, four hundred feet away.

Well that is what happens every day. We remember and celebrate the remembered. Theofilos is videotaped off a rare book, a not so easily gotten book and he takes on a new life in Dover, 1997. His figures join us and gambol and play with us as they did when he shared them with the villagers on the mountain, Pelion, the grand hill, back of Volos, a city to the north of Athens. He lives....does Theophilos, our little brother. Zy. He lives. He always will live if we remember him. Trouble is we get preoccupied and forget sometimes. We can't afford to. Simply can't afford to, as the times they are a changing. Awful fast. We have got to go faster to keep up.

The scold of us and ours, Seferi, says,"we must call things eternal in order to be able to struggle up to our last moment and to enjoy life." Very Greek.

Dear Theofilos is very Greek too. Very Greek. His figures move and squirm and I rejoice. I enter the mall at Natick and see them walk toward me. In the live shoppers. I see them in the windows of the wonderful stores up there. The mannikins, the draped shapes, speak as if from the canon of Theophilos. Greece is ever on my mind. This thing Greece is up at the mall on an empty Sunday. The mall doesn't open its stores until eleven, but they let you in early to walk as an American mall walker. I have a tag around my neck to prove I am an American and a mallwalker both. If I drop to my death on the floor, then they have on file my next of kin. I should have put down Theophilos as next of kin, as all I can see is this little artist's figures as I look in on the Gap and the Lord and Taylor's. Theophilos men, women and accompanying props. A handbag, a lovely hat on a maid in a painting. A wavy shape over a shoulder in the Theophilos painting and the view in the window of the Limited, the store called Structures with the Greek columns.

Like Seferi I can imagine the old ones with me in intimate relationship. I have the figures walk with me and confide in me. They reassure me, as they did Seferi. The ancients just stood by Seferi as he fashioned his lines of poems and prose.

He, Seferi, makes the point that Theofilos just did it. His art. He did his art and wanted and got nothing more. Neither recognition nor fame. He did what he did to do what he was doing. Period. And Seferi admires this. Remember in his day people were scheming and politicking to be number one on the literary scene of Athens and of Europe. Good old Seferi just lay low and did his work and they gave him the big prize, the Nobel and the others who wanted it so bad, did not get it. Seferi never asks for much and truth be known, he never gets much. I don't think the prize was that important to him personally. He gave it to Greece, where it belonged.

He dies very lonesome, it seems to me. No very dear friend, he says, to tell the old Greek things to. That is why he admires Theofilos and Makryannis so much because they could do it, alone. Suffer greatly and just go on.

Seferi does not speak of the technical devices and the color combinations in the works of Theofilos. Of his having a deft use of the brush and the paint. Seferi basically says he painted what he saw. Did his own paints, ground the pigments, and went about as an itinerant painter to Thessaly and the mainland, to Volos and to his own Mytiline doing pictures of what he saw. He loves the heroes and the heroines of the Greek history. He adores the stolid citizen, the woman, the shopkeeper. Heck, he loves any one he sees. The Greek. He loves the Greek and we have that fact at our disposal, to this day, to remind us of the Greek essence, what it means. What it means to be human and to breathe free. We, the still living, and Theofilos and Makryanni and Seferi have to just live and take joy in that fact.

We gunnna figure out how to make movies on our way of feeling, how to control the internet with goodness, Greek-style. How to lead the brethren and the sistren out of darkness into the total, individual light Theofilos sheds on his many subjects.

The individual is what counts. Each other. The sheep and the cow have a place with the human, as does the sky and the water and the earth and the tree. In Mr. Theofilos everything counts the most. The human is just in the picture peering at us with those eyes. He may not be a salon painter, a master of the portrait, but he gets the eyes right. They say to us to be good or else.... they show us what a good person looks like and how he or she feels. The paintings show feeling and that is their greatest feature for us as the modern.

We live in a time when our ads and paintings of the current moment are vivid and trenchant. Sometimes I don't think we fully comprehend their beauty and plangant nature. It is a mysterious, sentient time, as all periods of history are. We got over the Depression and some wars. We have the peace here that eluded Europe and South Africa and Ruanda. We have it all and our own models show it. This fulfillment that we have to adopt as the living humans in the culture. Theofilos's people have it all too. They look on us, as if they just took a moment off from their work or leisure to say us a hello. Our ads are the same, as far as I can gather. They talk to us and say to be good and true to something or other that is modern and makes some sense. The new icons are as powerful as the old. Maybe they are the old in new clothes. Everything comes around and all that. I don't know, but Theofilos's figures join my bevy of beatiful people and they chat and amble with them. In the ads and up at the Natick Mall.

Maybe what Seferi is saying is to have imagination and put it to a human use. Not to criticize or compare one culture or one person with another in some carping way, but to say, look the two-leg hasn't changed all that much and Theofilos's profiles are but another set to take and integrate into our conscious minds. He says they are very Greek is all, and that seems to me to be the case also. I locate them easily in my beautiful America of the mall, the photography of the last three decades of America, and of course in the paintings I admire so much. If he is a primitive or folk painter, so be it. I look on the books of American primitives and am struck by their depth and beauty. I locate Theofilos there. I look on our accomplished artists, our American painters and locate a Theofilos in their frame or context and his people join the scene merrily or at least with some dignity. He just fits into my world.

He is eternal and universal as Seferi said he'd be. It is no big thing; just fact and that causes Seferi and me to celebrate. We have another small victory and it is a bunch of them that can spell success for the Greek culture in the next century. It can cause us to keep mumbling this or that about staying Greek. Not denying our other allegiances as Australians, or South Africans, but merely remembering where we came from, which will allow us to get to where we are surely going. To a Greek land and language where the people look and act like the figures in Theofilos.

I never know where a piece will take me. I don't dare contemplate what pictures will accompany this vid into the can, so to speak. But it will work out. This I know. I suffer no confusions or worries over my work. It just flows because of the long,solid line I alluded to earlier. The long line of the ancestors. That is what I admire so much about my African friends. Their long lines make it possible for them too, to strive and survive, as we try to survive and to prosper. Long lines characterize old cultures and there are so many old cultures all over the world. That is wonderful to me, as the world of the teevee will have so many good stories to fall back on. My Theofilos tells us a Greek story that begins on the mother's knee. In my case at least. She'd go, "mia fora kai ena kairo." And then my mother,she'd go off about the prodigal son, or a wolf that had wisdom or a kid that saved a village or some other thing and I would be lost in the story. As I am now with the stories Theofilos tells. Once upon a time is what mia fora kai ena kairo means.

It seems to me that technology is very much sacred and special if used right. It takes on the mantle of the ancient if used, as I use it. The point is its values, lessons, stories and myths. The bright cable and the seeing teevee are instruments of education and transmission of our glorious pasts, American, Greek and the others as well. We might as well joy in it.

The movie up the mall, the advertisement of the superbowl, the ad in the magazine, are ancient indications, if seen one way. They are, for me, ancient billboards that tout one thing or another. Some are sicky sweet, others bawdy, and others exortative. Repent, buy, stop. All of these emotional pleadings were among the ancients. Sappho and Archilochus are most modern in their strictures about how to live and how to love. And they were way back bc.

The point is the times do change but nothing else does. The human keeps the same bodily configuration the old ones had and the mind follows the body, so to say. We worry as they did over pimples and hemmorroids, over insults from our neighbors, and why this or that group is more successfull than we are. We wonder where we will go when we die and what will happen to us who have done awful things. The rich man huddles the wagons because he knows everyone wants to take his money. The woman of his will be wary of relationships that arise for the same reason. Oh, it is endless.

And Theofilos gets up everyday and hits another of the twenty-six fabulous villages on Pelion, the mountain back of Volos, and he arrives and sets up and paints a picture on the wall, in the house of the butcher or baker, and stands back to look at the wall he decorates and utters a sigh, to know he has created just now some more Greek life that will never die.

That the avaricious and demanding ancestors will give him peace for a while at least. That he is doing his job as best he can. May be that it is out of scale and the colors don't match, but he is doing the best he can and it is not bad really. This is this sense Seferi captures in his article on Theofilos in the book I mentioned. Our heroic painter is but a careful workman with limited tools but he does a good job anyways. Because he understands his Greek soul. And, as I showed the book of Theofilos paintings to a few Greek friends from the old country, I watched them sink into the pictures. Literally got to go into them. As we do with a good movie or story on the teevee. This one person sighed, smiled, shook his finger at a figure here and there. He greeted the people as he turned the pages of the book and then I just knew Seferi must be right. That Theofilos was an original and an important figure to reckon with. I haven't the vaguest idea what the old Greek spirit is about. But I have a willing heart and the blood of my father and mother to help me. That does help, as I hear a little call from Theofilos as I view his work.

Theofilos tries to convey a sense of what he sees and feels.

pression you are listening to a language not spoken any more.