Boston Between Worlds

Seferi has this line in "Summer Solstice, (9), where he says, "You spoke about things they couldn't see\ and so they laughed." It gets me to thinking. A certain way of seeing things was transplanted here by the immigrants. They carried it unawares themselves. Especially those from the backward villages, who could barely read or write. I am drawn to that message the immigrants brought in their trunks. It was peculiarly Greek. I feel the new Greeks, born here, do not understand what it was. I imagine they may laugh at me, as others laughed at Seferi. I am not surprised or very concerned that my work is not valued. An audience would help, but you can't het who only wants to be left alone. Who they sent to all the good schools for naught.

I wanted nothing more than to sell on the street. To peddle. To be a peddlar. Hear noises of the road. I want only to peddle. I no longer want to teach, as I once did. I realize now that it too was time lost. Such a waste of time. Oh, I sometimes see the ghosts of my students in my dreams, but I did them no good. I have not heard from any of them for years, so I am sure my impact on their lives was minimal. I was such a good boy and did what I was told. I did my homework. That was my error. I believe I knew then I was hooked as a writer, a poetry scribbler, who wanted nothing more than to go out on the tired streets every day and look for stuff that was going on, to write about or to dream about. I went to schools I never sought, advised countless who never benefited. At the same time, I heard the poems in me, read the poems of my beloved, bloody, ancestors, the poets I recite here.

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BETWEEN WORLDS.

Seferi has this line in "Summer Solstice, (9), where he says, "You spoke about things they couldn't see\ and so they laughed." It gets me to thinking. A certain way of seeing things was transplanted here by the immigrants. They carried it unawares themselves. Especially those from the backward villages, who could barely read or write. I am drawn to that message the immigrants brought in their trunks. It was peculiarly Greek. I feel the new Greeks, born here, do not understand what it was. I imagine they may laugh at me, as others laughed at Seferi. I am not surprised or very concerned that my work is not valued. An audience would help, but you can't have everything. I care the more to document the ideas that the Greeks brought, clinging to their white and red corpsucles, than to gain acceptance or accolade. I mean to say the first kin here brought the mental baggage that derived from ideas in the village culture, which culture, was a few thousand years old.

The first folks worked hard and trusted in God. They brought the Greek mind with them. I don't mean the ancient Greek mind, but some watered down variant of it. We are told the Greek mind is very alien to us. Seferi says we can't begin to understand the old ways of thinking, their profundity and beauty. The reference is to the lost, old Greek mind, the one which gave us Aeschylus and the ancient architecture. What happened is a number of heroic types, the poets, have come into the breach to tap into the root of the old way. That way some snippets of the old may survive.

It is words again that save us. Greek words of course. The word always provides relief, remembrance, music to the ear, joy to the heart. The words are so beautiful in Greek. Our native language is not a dead language; not when it is on our lips. The Greek goes as follows; rizomena san to polirizo liothendro.\rooted like the many-rooted olive. This is Seferi speaking again. This Greek poetry is from Greece. It did not become popular here, to my knowledge, among my intimates, at least. The message comes from Greece, where it continues to reside. The message is not popular here.

I was living here in America; I have been living here in America, thinking about my roots as it is popular to say, and the poets crossed the ocean and came to visit me. They came in the form of Tina Ioannidis, a student of mine from B.U. Nothing surreal or magical. I sat with her hour after hour and translated poems which forged the backdrop for my life, the one I am telling about now.

The immigrants brought a lost tradition with them. It had decayed over the generations in Greece, what with occupation, war, hunger, death and suffering. The ghosts of the old way had been submerged for hundreds of years. This tradition plays out in shadow form, in the lives of the immigrants who first came into the U. S. It is barely conscious, but in the form of, "this is how we have always done things." I shall give a few examples. They, the immigrants, base family life on old values. They pray with a mixture of zeal and fear, as bearers of both a Christian and pre-Christian past. They hold education and art in highest esteem, as did their forebears. They live with a kind of careful abandon, sensing the finality of the death the poets talk so much about. They revere the woman, treat her as a sacred being. The mother. The bearer of the seed. The one who will secure the foothold in the promised land. The only one who can bring out children, the insurance policy, so to speak. They play music they make on the mandolin, the flute, the violin. The music and dance above all. The music and dance we no longer master, those of us born here who were taught to study and work, work, work. We forgot to play and later we forgot how to play. Oh, the first ones were so joyous. They had such a good time, so much fun. Hard work. But they played and made such jokes, enjoyed practical jokes, laughed from the belly, had endless card games, parties, outings, ceremonies to partake in. Joy, in the new land, based on a very old style of life they brought from abroad.

The early immigrants had a superior grasp of things, too. This is hard to explain. I mean material things; stuff. They used everything that passed through their hands to full advantage. They were frugal. The women sewed a storm. The men made things of wood that were useful. The food was hand-prepared. The clothing was selected with care and worn with a sense that it was a valuable and valued drapery. It was no throw-away world. Like today is. The reverence for the object was there in them. As it was with the ancients. The sense that everything on this earth was somehow special and even sacred. That each thing had its own spirit. The candle you lit in the bedroom. The sewing basket. The scissors, the vase that sat next to the foto on the mantle. That to damage a thing was to anger a god, lurking somewhere. It just wasn't right to steal a thing or break a thing intentionally or to throw something around with no respect. In the home this sense of the majesty of everything was strong. The home was a museum of sorts. You still see it in the homes kept by the first generation born here. Especially in the folks still living in their parents' homes. There is an order that mimics that of the first parents. Order is paramount. Cleanliness next to godliness. In some ways then, the old strictures were obeyed. Even when the immigrants didn't really know why they were the way they were. At least that is the way I see it, looking at the matter now from a distance and allowing full well I may be wrong. It is funny. To this day, I become most uncomfortable when I see a stranger handle a thing carelessly. I get nervous. Maybe the thing will mind. Our things did in my childhood , as my things do now. The old notion that things are valuable as themselves is strong in me. The idea is found way back, that in all things is divinity. Oh, well, may I be forgiven for putting words in the mouths of the first-come, but I swear the thing I say is true.

The poetic sense is strong in me because it is the window I have used for a long time to locate myself in Boston, as a child of an immigrant. I never was an American. It was not to be, not possible. I mean I was a citizen and reveled and revel in the way the country changes every year or so. You really can't help yourself. America is charming, exciting, fun to be in. But in my case, my mind has always been in some slow place where I watch the trees, the village and its circumscribed pace, the people, all known, doing lives that are very Greek. I never left the village, perhaps. Maybe it is 1453 A.D. or 1860, I am not sure. But my view of Boston always came through the eyes of the villager, looking at some alien existence. Not a bad place, just a strange one. Who could have prepared me for the Boston Irish I came up with in Jamaica Plain? They were not like me, and I was not like them. I dealt and deal with my peculiar universe through writing and poetry. I use the Greek language to lull me, relax me, play me music. It is a window, this poetry, this Greek tongue. It is a filter to allow me to have my cake and eat it too. America through the Greek filter.

I have concentrated on the Greek sense because it defines me. It is that simple. I am that amalgam of old Greek grafted on the new one, whose parents came here one day in 1936. The stance, vis a vis America, is not an unusual one. I am not sure the modern Haitian coming here or the Irish immigrant of today is different from me ,in his facing a strange place with a culture he has brought with him in his head from Haiti or Ireland. All I can say is my dilemma is real, to me, and has colored my behavior and the kind of art I do. As a dilemma, I have to tease out the issues and play with them. Much of the phrasing of my life has been poetry. To me poems are only shorthands, for a bunch of emotions and thoughts. One of the things I am always fighting in my mind is that poetry is some form of exotic, pseudomagical device. It is as common as a milk bottle or a pack of Sen-sen. Oh, I don't know. I am not trying to be cute. Poetry is odd today because it is old-fashion. But to me old-fashion is the only fashion I know. I go to Boston, the city, and do not recognize anything. I hear music groups on earphones at the mall and their exotic names seem so strange to me who grew up on Glenn Miller. At the supermarket,

the products look at me and I know they are strange to me. They are not the products of my youth. Everything changed without my knowing it. My world became a strange place, strange to me. Forgive me, viewer, but everything here is so strange. Sometimes alien strange, sometimes, funny strange, sometimes wonderful strange, but strange, nonetheless.

I wish to tell a piece of my life in Boston through poetry, mine and that of my friends, Ritso, Seferi, etc. I will start with a blockbuster, The Act of Building, To Htisimo, by Ritso. I use the poem in a symbolic sense to let the viewer know I too am building a house. That house is the history of my people in America, beautiful America. Ritso, like me, goes way back to the ones gone, to find his strength. That is all I mean to say in the recitation of his funny little lines. We are constantly in debt, borrowing from the ancestors, the ones who came before. It may be the first-generation Greek, now gone from this earth, or the Greek in Homer.

This here house, how'll it get built? The doors, who'll put 'em on?

Don't you see the hands are slight, the rocks, too heavy to carry?

Quiet! Be quiet.The hands at their work grow powerful,; they get bigger

and don't forget that nightly the dead, they help.

Back to the dead again. But they are not really dead. We imagine the parents, the ancients, the poets, are dead, but they are just resting. In our heads. In our tradition. I am a trifle annoyed to have to keep apologizing for our morbidness. It is not that, really. Ritso sees all the things he tells about. In his mind the dead feed his brain, so he can get up the next day, rush to the writing table and get down another poem or hot line. The man is incredibly prolific. His hundreds of poems are on the lips of fevered , hopeful poets like myself. Only I am here and they are there in Greece. No-one I know here has ever heard of Ritso. This includes modern, first-generation, born here Greeks. Get this! He feeds from the dead. He is my reference. I don't know who they know as poets, these modern kin of mine. I can't ever remember one talking about poems and poets. I don't mean to be hard on them, but they do not think in the poetic idiom as I do.

Anyway, Ritso always paves the way for me. Or I use Seferi or Cavafy to run interference for me, if I want to stray from Ritso. The past is always the stepping stone to the present. Ritso talks of building a house with counsel from the ancestors. The past gives him strength to go and build or create some more. Our past experiences mold us. Our past is all there is for us to fall back on. I look back to my dusty past to understand where my enormous appetites came from. Where I got the power to be the person I became. Against odds, I ended up as I wanted, as a writer and thinker, unaffected by the things around me. Listening to the old songs, sung the old way.

This is a poem I wrote years ago about Theo Belezo. He ran a variety store in Codman Square, called Mary's Variety. I remember him most fondly, more so, now that his daughter, Aunt Angie , has given me fotos which I recently videotaped and put on the air as the show, "call the children." He was nice to me. Let me spend some hours with him at the variety store. Then we would walk back home, to his home, to the 3 decker together. His kindness fed me. Without food, you don't last long. I lasted because the folks around me fed me. It may not have been a big thing to them, but I was constantly cared for by the big people around me. It was natural to them . It was what civilized people do. I grew up that way too. Knowing how to love, live and care for those around me. I learned from Theo Belezo. It was no big thing really. Only in this day when people are so preoccupied, busy, worried, sullen and all that, how many people seem to care as he did for this little kid, me? Not many, in my experience. I go about caring for others because it is the right thing to do and because it is all I know.

I have always been without a father. Mine died when I was so young. Laura, my daughter, says unflatteringly I am always in search of a father. I guess she's right. But as they say, it is neurosis or a mental flaw that makes a person into a character. I never heard anyone say that before, so I change the "as they say," to , as I say. I just keep on truckin'. Assuredly odd, I am, but it is all I have, and at this point, I find myself interested in the poetry I did back then. It defines a piece of the life then, as if it were one of the fotos I peer at from that period. I do believe in human color and know I am colorful . Life experience is what made me the way I am. There is no denying that. I only kid when I use the word, neurotic. It is tricky to say one is healthy or sick, in the mind and spirit. Too many subjective issues come into play . It is perhaps kinder to say some folks are a bit different. That they are the ones we call artist, poet, fool, karagioz. This last is the classic Greek fool-sage, both, who is key to the shadow plays of the old village. This is my little poem that remembers Theo Belezo.

The Shadow.

When my father died, another family helped raise me.

Sundays in magical, late, Dorchester afternoon.

Listened to the Shadow on a dusty radio that

stood behind the marbly soda fountain of my uncle.

Wry smile, apron, hat on his head.

Knew customers' names; gave Credit, where due.

...had the best collection of penny candy in the whole world.

Powder from bullseyes

would come off in my hand.

I have always lived in the world between; between this one and the next. Our poets and I explore the gray world between this and the next one that is sure to follow. There are another set of worlds I am between also. Between the hard world of Boston weather, making a living, rearing kids, and the world of the intellect, the imagination. I imagine a lot of folks who write or paint have this split sense of the world, but it has always been very strong in me. I float about, groping for words. Greek words. American words. I have done this since a child. I have always been alone, as a thinker. As an only child, which I am indeed. I float in the gray world of thought. Between life and the other side, between the real world of Boston and Dover and the imaginary world of Boston and Dover I create to get through the day. I am not sure I feel so desperate, but maybe I do.

I see art all around. I carry about my metaphoric butterfly net and catch sights and words about me. I think everyone is my friend. I am friend to everyone. :I get screwed a lot. People use me to tell their troubles. They heap them on me. I suffer. They feel better. This has gone on for years. People entering my house or my life to hang on me the burdens they do not wish to carry themselves. Cleansed, they go on and feel much better. Or I am cheated in car repairs or people steal stuff from me at the flea market when I am selling.. My neighbor once said of me. It is my epitaph. He'll help anybody. I am, in truth, a little soft. School never made much sense to me.Except I learned to read. Latin School was torture. Being forced to compete against my pals was abhorrent to me. I didn't want what they sought so zealously. To go to Harvard. I went. It was wasted on me. So was graduate school. Brandeis. In no sense to I blame my teachers or the advisors who knew what was best for me. I blame no-one, as the past is gone now and there is no blame to change it. I am what one would call a viewer. I am content you see to watch the others run. I only want to hear the wind blow through the trees. The ones who have troubles to unload have done this since I was young. They came because I sat there happy, twiddlling my thumbs. They thought I had nothing better to do than listen to their pallaver. I was idle, wasn't I? No. I was busy; being quiet. Learning and listening. THey thought I had nothing better to do than therapy on them, so they formed lines and came and I spent oh so many hours and years on them. Wasted really. They felt better when I left them, but next day they were back with the same plaints and again I helped them My kids don't appreciate all I did for them. Or my wife and I have drifted apart. Or money is too scarce. Or now I am rich but too sick to enjoy all my millions. On and on into the night. Wearing me out , the pok back on a life if it is misspent. There are no real palliatives. I am too conservative to drink or get lost in imaginary things like drugs or tv, or self-pity, worse than I express here. What is left is for me to externalize my spirit on the cable so I can see where I am and where I am going.

Years and ;years ago I wrote a poem about Boston and being of the Greek style. You see, everything is colored Greek. That is the problem of the alien, the immigrant. Every piece of the life has the color of the homeland, even though that place is far away, poor, often exaggerated and made unreal. I always imagine the first generation to come here suffered from the same malady. I should like to introduce a poem, "Greek of Boston." For some time now I could not find it, so I could not go on with this piece. It fits well here as it illustrates another point about our diaspora, the Greek one. No matter anything, the Greek stays the same. I misspent my youth, not on drink and that, but in schools that gave me little. I wasted a lot of the rest of my life looking after people who should h ave looked after themselves. Hours and hours, ;years and years, when I should have tended my own garden, m;y poetic garden. /Wasted on others' troubles. My wife told me ,"don't you see, you feel, you are letting people use you? And my daughter said, you are a martyr. THat is all you are. Nothing . A martyr. So I am now at the other end of the tunnel, still writing, not taking care of people who should be taking care of themselves. Now I am writing and seeing my grand-daughter and her father, playing in the fields, so to speak, going to quiet libraries to study, producing my dream-videos. Paying off the debt to the ones who first came here. /So they will not be forgotten. The point is what I am doing is Greek. Staying fit and strong to continue the tale of my people. The old poem I wrote when I was young, is a case in point.

GREEK OF BOSTON

I am neither here nor there, yours or his.

I am free, not of public relations, not a special kind of greek.

I am a greek who screams from the level of the ancestors.

Not precious, cute, correct, worried, not standing for something.

I am free, a greek. I won't say what you want

nor do it still unless.....

My Greekness has always sat jaunty-hat on my head.

I did not discover it at a late age.

I am it.... greek, forged of wet hot dishes, sweat-scarred menus.

I am a black greek, an irish, a universal.

Mostly a one-of-a-kind. It is not hard to be a greek.

Just feel your way through cocacola land. No comfort in history.

Just today. A Boston Greek sitting here at Park Street Station and

the man goes by to say "the coolest place in town."

I don't speak for another greek. This is not what greeks of Boston are like.

I speak for one who won and current lives. I know no grace nor make a claim.

Just a greek, alert and made.

The sense of the poem is that human strength comes from a culture, a rootedness. It is the same I feel when I read Toni Morrison about the Afro-american tradition. It is what I feel when I hear the Irish music. My peculiar idiom is the pome, words strung together , scribbled rapidly when the consciousness admits them. I panicked that day at Park Street, to be sure I got down what my unconscious Greekness was favoring me with at that moment. It is that way with our people. They are constantly at ease, hearing poetic voices that come at them at the strangest time. The world is this huge carnival that talks to you and all you have to do is have fun and write it down. That is all the ancestors and the tradition of Greece really demands.

The culture of the Greeks is so gentle. Not hard like the train that rushes through the tunnel at Park street station. Nor like the commuting humans so serious and like that. No, we are just perusing, thank you. Passing through this world, having fun. Making it easy as artists for the next generation to have as much fun as we. Thinkof it . It has been going on since Sappho. Seventh century b ce. I mean that is a long time. To remain the same. The poetry, the plays, the arts, the ceramic pots, the buildings, are all one. One stone mosaic, little timeless tiles, that tell the same story. The story of the first people , the second people, the third, etc who fled from the wilderness to occupy a magic land which is Greece and lived and live to tell a story of the magic land. The same story. One that has never changed and probably never will. No matter what we do it will always be there to remind of our roots. As long as Greece is there , so will we be here. THe poem, Greek of Boston, may sound boastful. It is not really. It is fact and the fact is the greek is that strong, because the history and the memory are that strong.

I will finish my piece here by meandering some. It is what we do best. Walking down the path in our ethnic garden, we meet the little flower man, Kurie Nikiforo. It is Nikiforos Vrettakos. Perhaps it is darkening some. Over the smell of the garden's flower comes the magic of the evening words, Kaly spera, good evening to ;ya. It is in the littlest words that the magic of a culture is most found. Vrettakos has a few lines, like this one.

and the rabbit erect, heard the infinite.

I do not know what he means to say but I get his drift. Anyway Vrettakos joys in his life, flowers and garden. He is so Greek. A typical Greek, so I say! Marvelous.

M;y lemom blossom, I've downed three tankards of sun

and have been out drinking with the angels-

I've burst into flames!

Now I stagger in my drunkedness.

I just love him so much, the luscious drunk. WE don't seem to drink alcohol, but flowers, dreams, the sea.

Or he speaks to me from another poem.

When I was tired

the flowers created a calm

so I could rest

I feel as though I can never get enough of the man. He is so deep in his reverie. So wonderfully alive. He has so much to say to us in Boston and Dover. He says so much. His Greek path is secure, so is mine. THe Greek of Boston. THe poetry grounds me and gives me such deep pleasure. To hear it from the lips of such wonderful persons who sired me, bred me, gave me solace.

We are an inspired people. We fly into fantasy, as a child runs after a ball in the yard. It is so easy to make things, you wonder why more people don't. We do. It is our historical mission to inform, whether any one listens or not.

I think I shall end by introducing you to Archilochos. He is 680-640, from the island of Paros. He went off to fight the Thracians. Killing was his game. He went north of his homeplace and fought in battles against the Thracians up north. THese were fights begun in the earlier generation by his father who conquered the tThracians, taught themn a thing or two. So Archliochos left his island in paradise, in the ones we call the Cyclades and went north to beat shit out of some poor barbarians. Now I will tell how he ends up, this silly, foolish and nasty man. His island started up war with Naxos, an adjoining island, or did they start up against pure and heroic Paros. I don't remember. He was killed fighting against Naxos. It was the waste of a perfectly good poet. They are sort of valuable, don't you know? The poem has in it reference to the Thracians. The author thinks theyare barbarian and wild. Dying isn't such a good thing for Archilochos. Remember those folks had no heaven like ours. Not even Purgatory. It hadn;t been invented then. So our poet warrior managed to get offed by the neighbors who were glad to be rid of him and his rhymes. Here is how he goes. He is so contemporaryand funny. The lines could be coming from Tom Arnold on the Roseanne show or from the Comedian, George Carlin.

I don't like a tall general swaggering

proud of his curls, with a fancy shave.

I'd rather have a short man, who looks

bow-legged, with a firm stride, full of heart.

THis is how he thinks. He is eminently practical. Very Greek that way. He is also funny.

Some Thracian exults in an excellent shield,

which I left-not willingly- by a bush.

I saved myself. What do I care for that shield?

TO hell with it. I'll buy one again, no worse,

It was unseemly to leave a shield behind on a battlefield. Not a very heroic thing to do. Not very heroic or Greek. Pshaw. He wanted to make it for supper. The shield could be replaced. His life couldn"t. Practical, funny, the ancients are ever a light to us in the electric era. THe information highway pulses with new battles and issues. I don't need to repeat them. And Archilochos spins poems. Very little of what he wrote survives today. I guess that is why we here have to remember his words and fill in some of the lines left blank. That is what Seferi and CaVAFY DO for us. THe Greek cultural experience goes on. THe express train rumbles along. Over at Harvard they play a Greek piece on the stage. It is two thousand years old and the Americans put a modern interpretation on it. THey upgrade it and the actors wear modern dress and work in a skyscraper. But it is the same old story. Like the Greek of BOston which I am or the funny fighter of 650 bce which Antilochos is, what you see is the Greek light shining . It shines on. At the play at Harvard, at the Park Street Station, at the side of the Aegean in the glorious Cyclades .

THe motion of the Greek gift is ever the feeling that you better do it right away because...... because it is the way to do it. Because the moment is special, never to be repeated again. Because there is no better time than the present and what do you really have to lose? Only your chains. So the Greek creates, stays free, and plays.

I finish with Praxilla , mid fifth century From Sikyon, on the gulf of Corintho. Her ;poetry is in for scorn because she combines mention of the sun which is sacred, like a god is, and the lowly cucumber. By the way her home town, Sikyon, is also the word for "cucumber bed". It was not seemly for one to mention the god sun in the same lines with the cucumber and that accounts for the ancient expression you must have heard. It deals with Adonis who is now on the other side, slain poor fellow and the ancients say "Sillier than Praxilla's Adonis. He is the one who pines from the dark and wishes he had light and cucumbers. But he is dead and Hades has none such. ANyway Praxilla is blasphemous and is known through her world as the one who dared put words in the hero, ?aAdonis's mouth.

THe fairest thing I leave behind is sunlight,

then shining stars and the full moon's face,

and also ripe cucumbers, and apples and pears.

The Greek sense has always combined the practical with the ethereal. IT is the only way to live.