Call the Children

When you do this kind of work, you have to be relaxed and happy. I am that at this moment, except it is very cold outside and I am cold inside here, as I go for some inspiration to accompany the pictures Aunt Angie gave me yesterday. It was a banner day in my life. Aunt Callie was to leave next day for home in California. Aunt Stacy walked over to Angie's, just like that, she was there. Then John called and he, too, appeared. We looked at fotos. Old ones and new ones, I had taken. Some that Callie had brought from California. We had a kind of chocolate cake Angie made and an aromatic apple pie Stacy made. It was a day made in heaven. I left with a red shirt box that had in it the old fotos you will see here. I needed two sturdy rubber bands to tie the box, which Angie provided.

This cold morning, the day after the fotos accompanied me home, I spread them on the big dining room table and let them do their thing, so to speak. I mean they fell into a satisfactory order, as cards do when you are shuffling a deck. That they speak to me, is nothing I would ever claim. They do, however, have a presence to them, as many represent humans I knew and now know. A few generations of Greek and American life a

t the edge of the sea. In this case the Atlantic Ocean at the side of Boston, Massachusetts.

One funny side note. We in th e family know who is who. THat is enough. You the viewer need not know that this is this person and that is that person. May you , viewer , simply register that we are we. A people. If you are Greek or Greek amerrican or American'greek, you feel a slight swelling in your breast, because we greeks do look alike in the fotos and some of the pictures remind you of your own uncle harry and aunt Mary. If you are not greek, no crime of course, I hope our family fotos and the words I offer from the poets, give you a sense that we are a good people , that we lived and live with hope and tolerance , that we love our old ways and the America that we found our way to.

Now what I find amusing. Some of the pictures we don't know who the people are. THey are here, though, along with the relatives. It so happens that some of us fall through the cracks. Angie assures me they are greek. I look at a handsome fellow posed in front of the camera in Boston, sometime in the '20's and because we don't know who he is , I just begin to concoct stories of how he felt, what he found and how he confounded death. H ow he lived, that is.

We are ksembarkoi, disembarked Landed. That is, we came, we saw and we stayed. In the by and by, we kept some of the old ways , as we adapted to the new. It has been a kind of process, as the next crop of kids pop up before the Kodak, brownie camera. Isn't it something that Michael and Diane's, first child, Melissa, honey bee, is a thespian, that she acts with some natural grace , on the stage! Bravo.

For reasons I cannot fully understand, the artists we spawned have to most to offer as to directions to follow in this promised land, America.

My pitch today is toward Michael Lekakis, the flower arranger. I wanted to call this videostory, "Bouquet," a most lovely word, because of Lekaki. He sat in the chill of the florist shop on 28th STreet, Astoria, long Island and made flower arrangements, to sell to the people for all occasions. Lekaki , by the way, is also a sculptor in wood. He can be found easily in the charioteer, the greek american journal, in volume 18. THere are fotos of his organic works there. My mission is a little different tha n the legitimate one of touting his work. I am interested in his thoughts. I wish to know Lekaki and hear what he has to say about our diaspora. Our journey into t he night. OUr emergence on the outer reaches of the moon. I mean our emergence into the light of the day. To this end I will introduce you to the florist-brother, the one who stayed apart all his life, I imagine. Who sat in the studio day after day and year after year and listened to his voice, as he fought the wood before him. As he waited for the wood to direct his hand. He makes it plain that his medium which is wooden does never die. Like the fotos here, the wood lives, though it was cut from the ground. In a matter of fact way, he informs us the wood breathes. He does not mean it metaforifcally. He merely states a fact. The wood is breathing. He can hear it and its rythm pulls his fingers to form the wood. Recall too that our poet, Seferi, also speaks of breath. He says poetry is merely a form of breathing. SO the wood breathes and seferi breathes and the fotos do too. It is not magic. We don't believe in magic. We greeks believe in deeds, done here and now , for the relatives and for humankind, to guide the world and assuage our loneliness and fear. Lekaki is a giant, another one to go alongside Seferi, the dreamer. That hunter of dreams.

Now a bit on Lekaki, so you will know him.

I'm wandering around the house, looking for a way to tell about him, so you will get to know him and know him as special, as a light in the dark place, New york, the place of fecundity, of world-leading creativity. Ha, he sits amid the fashion industry, tv, movies, what all there is there.. Broadway, wall street, the brooklyn Bridge, the Museum of Modern art, the libraries, the stores, Gimbel's and this fella stays in his known corner. He lives amid the greeks, his family . He sells flowers for a living. He is quiet, deadly quiet. He is busy, looking at creation. Think of him staring at the egg of time, in a busy shop in AStoria, with the din of the greek language around jhim or in the studio, pleading silently with a hunk of wood that appears to be breathing at the moment.

Enough. I have a long way to go today and I must finish this piece before the house cools down so much I cannot feel my feet. You see I am too cheap to turn up the heat and it is 15 degrees outside. Why heat up a whole house for one fool sitting in front of the computer, composing vague doggerel. So Lekaki i s as common as a greek rock or a scrawny leafy thing amid the stones on and arid island like my own, Nisiro in the Aegean.

Now it happened I brought adozen carnations to Angie yesterday. She said she loved carnations. One of our pet poets, Papatsoni has idealized and immortalized, the garyfalo, the carnation in his mystical poetry. Lekaki takes the stem, the carnation and that gets me thinking about the poetry of Nikiforos Vrettakos whose symphony of flowers is a series of lovely poems. I did some of his verse in the first program I did on the fotos of my family and dedicated two to my aunt, to theitsa. SO the flowers stalk us,as we hear Lekaki inform us that the aridity of Greece precisely accounts for a dipsomania for live and flowering things. That the flower is in itself the journey of life in three-d. I t blooms and dies as we do. THat we have nothing to fear. THe flowere is in no pain. IT merely has faith. we must also, despite our fears and all that. ?We come and we go. THe children come and they grow up and they have children and the world goes and continues.

So Lekaki arranges his flowers to sell. By the side of the road he contemplates the wood that goes into his sculpture and he dreams. Just dreams. Like me. Just dreaming.

And why is he so special? He is. He is contradiction. He never marries, yet stays in the family circle, getting its needed warmth. He lives in a great city, but is not worldly. He shuns publicity, yet needs it. He has no training in his art but knows a great deal. He is self-centered, vain, I am sure. I don't mean to imply he is any sort of saint. He is sly. He says, look I'm great, I know that but I do not need to publicize myself. Just throw myself before the altar of Art. She will judge me among the ancestors. I don't need or seek the approbation of the dealers, the NY Times or the critics. So he remains invisible and works.

He has a certain toughness about him . I think allj immigrants to this place do, if they live to tell about it. I am reading about the remarkable Italian and American Painter, Joseph Stella who lived in Ny off and all all his life. He would concur with Lekaki. Who says that in the long run it is toughness .... that is what counts most. Lekaki says it and means it. His path is without balm or succour. All the feeding he gets for his art comes from within. A writer on Lekaki, Priscilla /Colt says. "He has never taught, never married, and hsi contacts with the art market and the museum establishment have been limited and singularly unproductive." He is , we hear, a vanishing type, an artist who is pure. /An innocent. "Exclusively and religiously devoted to the cultivation of his art."

Lekaki is an innocent. THe people in the fotos are innocents. I am an innocent. You the one watching , is an innocent. Look in their eyes, those living now and those who are dead. They are innocents. We in this universe of harsh judgements, in the tough year, 1995, live in a climate of judgement and sin. THe fotos and Lekaki come to us in all innocence. THey remind us to live as we are, innocent. TO create as innocents, to love and to play as innocents. THe great lesson in the pictures is to live as we are, innocent. Today, tomorrow, and for all the days that have been given to us.

Lekaki is the demiurge. IT means simply, the maker, one who makes or creates. He does it with the tools of Homer. THere are just three. THe first poet is plain, simple and noble. Nothing more.

His sculpture breathes as I said earlier. His locomotive is entasis. It is the life force. I guess we all call it different things. The early ones bulged out the columns in the middle. You wouldn't notice it. YOu don't now when you look on the acropolis in Athens. But it led the eye and soothed it somehow. They were loaded with such tricks, were the greeks then. And the woman's arm pulsed out a tad in the sculpture before our eyes. The statue is pleasing to the eye , a sight to behold. Entasis is the greek bulge. IT is the sprites at play before the temple at Sounion. It is the genius that comes to us in the great poem of Seferi, Summer solstice, which I will quote shortly to end my piece on Lekeaki. I gues s you jmight say genius deserves genius. One to the next. It's funny, I need Seferi to help me tell a story on Lekaki. When don't I need Seferi? He is the alcolic's bottle, the addict's needle.

So Lekaki informs us entasis is the thing. It blooms like a child in the belly. It forms and informs. THe carnation in long bloom. I hate to do this,but Lekaki is so effusive I get embarrassed to continue in this vein any longer. He should not be so emotional. When you look at our old pictures you can see we pretend to a certain reserve. To a dignity. Now Lekaki blows the cover. We greeks are really so emotional. So flowery and child-like. He says entasis "is a means of ecstasy." There , I've said it. It means to expand from a center. OUtward toward fullness. Ripeness. It is in every flower. ZEntasis is the god within. The demiurge.

He argues," If we observe rightly, Entasis is the key through which we can organize all our thoughts."

He argues some more. He sounds eerily like Seferi. ONly it is not Seferi, is it? So Lekaki says as follows; "my tradition is very important to me, because all the forms have been broken d own in our time...." He thinks we need to reconstruct a new order, a universal order, that we need to live in a more noble way. ;WE must transform this materialism.......it is the one and only necessity ..... the artist's job one....." so that we can understand what we are doing. " He could not state it more plainly. THis america is for something. It is not us living in a vacuum. We must translate america into the greek so we can deal with it. so we can guide america in our small way to light and fecundity. So we can help the new land blossom.

I need to finish my portrait of Lekaki. A few lines of Seferi beckon and I cannot wait. The artist sits apart and alone. He may just as well be Ritso or Cavafy. After all we greeks just dress up in one another's clothes. Seferi the great change artist, sees the greek play as ongoing over many years and trials. He puts much of his poetry on stage, so to speak. THe theatre is his idiom, so I am nnot surprised our little Melissa, the grandchild of George and Loula Belezos is a thespian, on the stage in her hometown, cantonmasss.

Here is Lekaki, in conclusion. We must come to the point where we can soar beyond ourselves, to be free of ourselves, where we are no longer victims of our stupidity, emotions and prejudices." Lekaki saw all that from the florist's stall in AStoria. Artist. Apart . Alone.

I have enjoyed the pictures on my dining room table this morning. THey are arranged for tomorrow when Geoff and I tape them for the ages. Or so I imagine. THe tape will give the fotos added depth. THe players will be more real to me. It is always hard to know what to say. For me it is always a problem that gets solved. I may be tired, old, sick, scared, cold. So I guess I seem to wait. It is always for deliverance. It comes in no dramatic fashion. creating stuff is about as romantic as cooking a meal or doing the shopping. IT just happens and the greek lesson is always the same. We greeks simply go the place of the artists, sculptors, flower arrangers and poets and hang around. Sooner or later the pure person, the innocent , gets rewarded. The artist in this case,m Michael Lekaki, talks to me. I mean this is nothing mystical or magical. I simply think about Lekaki and his thoughts enter my head through the writing in the Charioteer, the journal before me.

In the greek tradition anything is possible and may happen. So the fotos have a kind of transcendance in them that is multiplied by the modern technology I humbly employ. THe fotos blend with the ideas of Lekaki, which have traveled by way of Homer all the way to the city on the Atlantic, New York. It is ever a long journey. THat is why the poem of Cavafy, Ithaky , is ever on our lips. May your journey be long....etc.

In his later days, ?Seferi came to understand that he had to finally spill the beans and tell what was on his mind. Summer ?Solstice , a piece he did, does this. THis is how I will finish this video. He dances against time. He suspends his tired frame in midair, like one of the flying sculptures of Lekaki. It is time, he says, to stop fooling around and get down to the business. One of the things you see in our fotographs is we are not a folk that wastes much time. There is so much to accomplish her e in America and we have the toughness to do it. It is in the eyes of the players on the screen.

So, as another player on the st age of greek drama, Seferi comes now to talk. The good book, THree secret Poems , is introduced by Walter Kaiser who quotes the great Se;feri, the one whose baleful eyes envision empty seats at Ephesus, in Asia Minor, but empty seats in vast amphitheatres , pestered by frisky satyrs. Any way, Seferi sees life in empty, old theatres and writes poems about the people he envisions in the seats, as they are being bothered by the gods who inhabit and torment any one goiing near their destroyed theatres. Seferi imagines the greeks of old and their places of pleasure the theatres and forcibly argues the play goes on today. THe same amphitheatres, the same rearends in the same seats bothered by the selfsame gods, leprechauns and ghosts. THey are the ghosts of his ancestors and mine too. Here is Sefei. "I am a monotonou and obstinant sort of man who.... has gone on saying the same things over and over again."

So he has. SO has Lekaki. So have Cavafi, Kazantzaki and Ritso. So have the fotographs here. His words are self-evident. On stage, stanza 6.

pote thu ksanamilysys

einai paidia pollon anthropon ta logia mas.

Spernountai genniountai san to vrefy.

RIZONoun threfountai me to aima.

Opos ta pefka

kratoune ty morfy tou ayera

eno o ayeras efyye, then einai eky

to idio ta loyia

fulagoun ty morfy tou anthropou

ki' o anthropos efuye, then einai eky.

Isos yurevoun na milysoun t' astra

Seferi is the talker, isn't he? He promises to be simple so we immigrants here can understand him.

My translation in liberal . In other words, loose.

When are you gonna talk or speak again?

They are kids of many humans', these words of ours.

THey are sown, get born like the infant

They form roots , are given nourishments with the blood.

Like the pines

they hold the shape of the wind.

Even tho the wind left; it isn't there

the same with words

they watch or guard over the shape of man and woman

and woman-man left, isn't there . Not there . Gone.

Maybe the stars are seeking to talk

This is our heritage talking. Seferi at the peak of his game. Navratilova peaking the tennis ball over the net and uttering a sqeal of glee. It is hard for me to stay quiet when I translate his lines for you. He knows we speak like the pines when the winds pass through the branches on their way to some deserted theatre where the same winds will spook the patrons. Call the place Ephesus, if you will. IN Asia minor. OUr words, our poems, are spoke through the mouthes of humans, men and women, babes and elders, as we crane our necks skyward to see what the stars have to say as well.

Summer Solstice, stanza 7.

you can see the light of the sun boreis na ithis to fos tou yliou

falling on two red carnations na pefty se thio kokkina garoufalla

on one olive, the tree, and a little honeysuckle se mia elia kai ligo ayioklima

theksou pios eisai. admit who you are

to poiyma the poem

don't cast it down under the thick plane trees. myn to katapontizys sta vathia platania

threpse to me to homa and to vraho pou eheis nourish it with the dirt and the rock at hand, in your possession.

ta perisotera for more stuff for more and better things

skapse ston idio topo na ta vreis. dig in the same spot to find them.

So you see Seferi talks to us, in the vernacular. In American english. Translation is not a problem. THe linguistic curtain comes down. THe magic of it all is that Seferi talks pretty good english, doesn't he? I mean I can't translate for beans but it sounds nice to my ear anyways.

He is a pilgrim. He tells us this in other places. So he has a sort of authority to speak. I will paraphrase seferi here. May he forgive me or strike me down! Whichever comes first. Go to America, he tells us. Make it yours. Go and be it. It becomes you. You become it. A new form arrives. THe grandchildren, they are the new forms. Greek life at the edge of the sea. Not a big thing. WE sigh a collective, "whew, we did it."

Then we go on to prod the next generation, the third one, with the same strictures. Do your homework. Be a good boy. Be a good girl. Remember you are greek. Remember to keep the flame lit in front of the icon that sits in the corner of the bedroom. THe holy room. One we sleep in. Where life it made. Where our loins got pleasure. Where we pray for our own as we do for humankind. In that bedroom. ?Clean, airy, holy. THat bedroom of ours.

Finally I can finish and get seferi off my back for another day. I shall gather my granddaughter and her father and Jennifer Catherine and bryan and I will pigrim over to Lambert's ;fruit market where I can get those grapefruits and some more oranges. I seek relief from these words and from the fotos on the dining room table. I wish to hurry to tape them so I can return them to Angie.

THis is Seferi and I wish you a good day and pleasurable thoughts.

Don't be afraid. It is the last stanza, 14, of Summer solstice.

fonakse ta paidia na mazepsoun ty stahty call the kids to gather the ashes

kai na ty spyeiroun and that they sow it, the ash.

O, ti perase perase sosta. whatever passed, it passed rightly

Ki' ekeina akomy pou then perasan and those things that still haven't passed

prepy na kaoun have to get burned

touto to mesymeri pou karfothyke o ylios this very noonday when the sun got crucified

styn kardia tou ekatofyllou rothou. to the heart of the hundredleaved rose.