CHARIOTEER

A statue, the Charioteer, lives in the museo, the museum, at Delphi. Seferi says, "I stayed near him for a long time."

He reacts to this presence by saying to himself of course , 'cause there in no-one else to talk to, that the thing before him has a "motionless movement." Hard to figure, but not impossible. The statue moves in its stationaryness. It seems to have a motion locked up in its molecules and its atoms that it is trying to set loose. This is a feeling we often have when we look on a tree we like, or look at the Lincoln memorial, or at a loved one we feel passionately about. This feeling may have varying depths and in Seferi's case it is a very powerful reaction, is all. He is so locked into his ethnic dream he can see little else. In a way, his article on Delphi, in the magazine, the "Charioteer," is a cry for help. The words on the page bounce out in a plea for understanding. There is something desperate about Seferi. But now that I think about it, many great poets and writers give off a sense of total desperation, as they grapple with issues of ethnic and racial identity. I think of the great Armenian poet, Sevak, as he unreels the fishing line and plumbs for the Armenian spirit, a thing that is complicated indeed. Or the African American, Langston Hughes and his attempt to understand his people in a tumultuous time.

Same thing with Seferi. He looks at a statue and it enthralls him. His poems, we're told by his analysts in the Greek critiques of his works, are filled with statues that bleed blood. No relief for poor Seferi. He stands about and watches our heritage drip red stuff. On the carpet. He is silent as birds lose their wings, statues bleed and pine trees bend. That is his sad vision. That our way in the life of the earth is characterized by sadness, loss and bleeding.

Why? Because we refuse to take the world seriously, as it should be taken and become infatuated with modernity, nihilism, self-pity. This last thing, the self-pity, is the thing that does us in the most, Seferi implies to me. Vision is impaired, light lost and we wallow in the dark and interstellar cold space, as he puts it. Because we refuse to vibrate when we see our statues, carved by old ancestors, living and breathing persons, who had but a vision of what man and the woman were and could be forever and ever, on the fair earth. All lost. The statue in question, Seferi reveals was lost in an earthquake a mere hundred years after its creation and recovered a long time later. The one he contemplates and communes to.

Some kinda magic. He describes the eyes , the jaw, the shadows around the lips. He does this to have something to do, to keep busy, to keep his mind off the overall spirit the thing exudes, the spirit of the thing that is driving him nuts. So he tells us its characteristics so he can keep his mind off the greater thing, the overwhelming power it has to transfer him to the old country, the ancient and honorable Greece in his mind. He travels often, is a frequent flyer, as they say, and it brings on him some wear and tear. His article on Delphi, is a very tired article. He has to engage in periods where he rests his imagination and does it with a list of stuff about the holy statue's eyes, and chin. The fold of the skirt, the fact there are no horses before the statue anymore. And where are the horses now? Where indeed!

Here is how he puts it. "You have the impression you are listening to a language not spoken anymore."

He goes on in great pain and sorrow. So bad you wanna cry. Not for yourself, but for him. His pain is palpable, one can say. You feel it in his translated words, come to me from the Greek to the English, because I can't understand Greek all that well and because I wouldn't know where to find the article in Greek anyways. That is my excuse, but the way I feel is, if I saw his words in Greek they might kill me with the sorrow they expressed and I can handle only so much before I too break and decide to devote the rest of my life to endless tv.

It's funny, how he puts it to me. He talks in his article about talking to someone from Delphi who describes the place as an "endless hotel." Tourism is evergoing, and has to be that way to support those dependent on it. I remember the docks at Rhodes, the endlessness of the planes depositing all those foreign souls on our land to find whatever they were looking for. Endless faces, body shapes, needs. For sex, suntan lotions, the same foods they ate in Germany, or in Scandanavia, served on Avenue Themistocles or Socratou, in good old Rhodes. So they could have their dream amid the self-same food they had left behind in Bavaria or Oslo.

The ever accomodating Greeks, selling them furs in 90 degree weather, after plying them with a drink of the very best stuff from here or there, products of the grape we are so famous for, the distilled essence that comes of the holy Greek earth. All this is part of our endless hotel, as it is mentioned in the article on the sacred statue, the Charioteer. And we are without shame. We feel none. There is nothing to do with our sullied spirit but to go to the plane and say do you have any more friends or relatives you can bring here next time to experience the magic that is Greece?

All this I saw in 1992 when I last went there. This and that. That the eyes of the sensitive Greeks have a glaze over them these days as they have fully contemplated the economic crime they have committed and are desperate to right the wrong. They just don't know how. If they did, it might contaminate the business, the endless hotel. They live off that and sit around worrying about its effect on their children. The future of the race, the Greek race, depends on the answer Seferi demands in his article. It is 35 odd years now that we have looked for the answer and have not figured it out yet.

Perhaps we will. Perhaps we won't. No paradise on earth, as there was in the time of Sappho or Aeschylus. Just the hotel, grinding out the baklava and the airy retsina wine. The huge planes with the names of the old gods, carved out in English, with a cute Greek font, to resemble the script on the pizza box. Greek culture, boxed and packaged, while our leading thinker, Seferi, contemplates the sacred boy, the little man, the vigilant charioteer, who holds reins to horses that are no longer there. Sad.

Not to worry. He has me, at the computer, creating all the stuff I write, all the dreamy pieces on the tv about my Greece and hopefully his. The thing he and I both can characterize as "skias onar," shadow dream. I paint pictures on the electronic machine, the tv and make believe I am Seferi, or Theophilos, making paintings on all level surfaces, on ;match boxes, walls, streets, paper or wood. Reproducing endlessly the Greece in the heart . The same one Seferi wrenches forth with or the same one Makryanni summonses up in his mind. Always the same Greece. The one we all love the most. The same Greece, effusive, open and lovely to behold. As when Seferi sees the statue, the charioteer or when I do my vids. I am not proud, nor very humble . It is the same vision, whether from a great artist like Seferi or from the breast of a little citizen of the earth like me. I am speaking for all us little, tiny Greeks who can carry a bit of the pain and the sorrow of Greece in our souls to our very grave. The woman I knew in Greece from Mytiline who saw what Rhodes' tourism was doing to her dream.

But her husband is an accountant , has many clients from the tourist shops and the little hotels that vie for the tourist trade. These establishments line the road from the town of Rhodes right out to the airport. All the land from here to there that sits on the road is valuable, because the tourists can stay here or there on the main road, eat or revel at this or at that nightclub, coffee bar, or restaurant and catch the next bus to Lindos or to view the Valley of the Butterflies. Oh, how convenient everything is. Only my friend whose name I forgot already hates the tourist and the tourism and says it is ruining the place Rhodes, the country she lives in, and she can barely stand it. I mean, her feeling actually makes her body shake. Her eyes make tears. Really. I can say this because I was seeing it. I never understood it until I saw myself looking at Seferi look at the statue of the charioteer in the pages of the journal of the same name.

We are old, very old and the blood dies hard. But it does die. Of this I am certain. So is this woman who describes with vile words , with undisguised hatred, the tourists who inhabit her holy space, the one made into the endless hotel. She is a small person like me and all the hotel keepers, waiters, chambermaids, taxi drivers, architects, police officers, vendors, sponge sellers, postcard manufacturers, ceramic makers who turn out copies of the colossus of Rhodes for the tourist to tuck in the luggage. We are certain the dream can die, if this continues in its current form. What to do? Who knows. My cousin is trying to reproduce the village in a safe haven, where only people like him will stay. Where they will drink clear water, live in simple houses, sit at tables where the conversation turns naturally to the old issues. He imagines a kind of Greek paradise devoid of tourist bustle. More power to him. I already live in his village, his image of Mandraki, Nisiro, the home of his mother and father, of my uncle, Thio Theodori and his sister , my mother , Anna.

At one time, Seferi tells us, the tourist to the endless hotel, Delphi, shared a common culture and tradition. Times were a bit slower before Christ and folks believed in roughly the same stuff. Their fantasies had images in common so when they went to Delphi to ogle and observe, many felt sensations that had things in common. No more. Seferi says the tourists no longer have a common tradition they savor and share. They can no longer share the mystery that the place exudes. They feel nothing, like the moderns who look at the slaughter on the tv and reach for another Dorito or Diet Pepsi. Haul off the warrior who broke his leg in the NFL game, have a commercial cover the horror and when we come back to Dallas or San Francisco the slate will be clear, the tragedy forgotten or worse still, ignored, and we can get on to who will be the next superbowl champ. Seferi makes it clear we have lost our humanness, our feeling for humans, for stones and trees. For barnyard animals. For anything that lives and breathes. Only spectacle counts any more and we wonder why we drink and eat so much. Why we despair over what has become of our kids and their kids. Who would ever have imagined that the Western progeny of the ancients , of the ancient Greeks, could have ended up this way, on the couch, eating potatoes, in chip form. And now comes the biggest revolution of all . Nabisco or Proctor and Gamble, two gentlemen from middle America, have figured out a fatless fat, olean, which means we can sit on the couch and observe mindless mayhem, eat chips and not get fat. The stuff just comes out of us, like it came in us, making barely any impression at all.

We are what is commonly called consumers. As if that is a good thing. Not makers, or producers, but as animals in the fields, consuming Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake and Jeopardy on the tv. And buying the miracles the ads sell, as we ingest the dramas the shows provide.

Seferi glowers in the naked sun of Greece. He stoops and picks up a thing that looks like a weed. He smells it, grinds a piece between his fingers, twitches his nose, puts it up to his nose, smells and then gives off this dream-like look, as he feels the Greece that loves him as he loves it. In his article on Delphi he says, "You have the impression you are listening to a language not spoken any more." The matter is rather delicate. He states that "that culture"...... was characterized by "different ideas, .....loves...... a different devotion," is how he has to say it. I really think about his words in order to be able to imagine the old Greece, so odd to me in my current state as a modern. His language is plain and simple as he said he wanted it to be. No perfect poems here to wow us with their Greek, their completeness. No Seferi here, with his finely crafted art, the thing we call his poetry. to the soul that created them? He refers to the pots and the statues as well as the fine words. The few words that have come down to us. He continues to say, " this grace at its peak, this power, this modesty and the things these bodies symbolize." Bodies like the Charioteer, the little fellow who stands aside Seferi in the museum and who breathes. Right?