Food Source
Take Mr. Shattuck, my Farm Street neighbor. He is kind, careful, timely, civic-minded. Funny, generous, modest. Everything a friend and neighbor should be, except he isn't here anymore. He is a Yankee politician, Harvard financier, generous donor, who lived a few doors down Farm Street from me. He is a person I would enjoy talking to, but that is no longer possible.
Wallace Stevens says the poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything. Even my broom which I did the poem on. "My broom is an utter friend".... is the first line. You can't fake it. Good words never lie. The broom I got from Bob Briggs up at Shady Oaks, that I use to clean the parking lot at Bob's.
I went to the museum and saw a Japanese print of a fellow who cleans the temple. He is considered odd, and the picture shows him with his broom on the ground, he "laughing out loud at the moon."
I am an invisible who exists in a benign, creative, fictive, world.... ancient Greece and the Dover of twenty years ago. Or nineteen-thirties America.
This happy creature, the poet, invented the Gods. It is he that put in their mouth the only words they have ever spoken, Seferi tells us. He, not the gods, speaks. I marvel.
I did a video of a very old woman, the most lovely, Kuria Disberaki, singing her songs of the village at the nursing home. A hundred plus, year old man, is watching her. Both gone now. Mr. Dasaki said of Kuria Disberaki, "Ty thavmazo," and that is how I feel about dear Seferi and Wallace Stevens, too. " Tous thavmazo."
Here is Wallace Stevens. When the mind is like a hall in which thought is like a voice speaking, the voice is always that of some-one else. We hear voices of ones gone by, or not yet here, or the grandchildren grown up.
The trick of Seferi is he makes the ancestors speak, as Stevens does. Both talk to the wind and the hill, when the grass is blowing hard and it looks like the hill is moving. I went to Walmart's one day recently, saw this hill moving, next to the parking lot, which is adjoining the graveyard. I, dumbfouded, mouthed these words. The hill is moving.
Those near life's end, talk to the dead, trying to get a ticket in. Somehow Seferi makes it pretty in Greek. What I like best is not his lines about the ashes and the kids, but his vitriol. His hatred for the modern. He has this line of "gather the kids to sow the ash." His ashes and mine and those of other has-beens who are old. Post-war Greece. World War Two and the Greek Civil War tear at him, immobilize him, leave him reeling, until after some several years of not doing much poetry, he will write the masterpiece, "Three Secret Poems," which is out of print and not known. Then he too is gone off the earth. I miss him so much. Not to have him to tell my stories to.
I sit in the large room at the nursing home with humans beyond repair, and I know the thing is hopeless. They sleep in chairs or look without seeing. The tv high up, is on snow, this electronic dust, passing across the screen, and no-one minds. I don't.
To study and understand the fictive world is the function of the poet. I manage to find sense in a small place that makes dailysense. No longer possible in the Kevin Kostner world or that of the tv comedies.. I find it in my Dover, in Bob's parking lot. I find it on 128, in Walmart, in Damoulas's supermarket. It waits there weekly for me.
The only answer is to make the daily world divine, so as to have a place to live. I take the broom and clean at Bob's. When the dailies come to the parking lot, the shoppers, they deface it with trash and cars. They defeat divinity. When I am alone, I talk to Bob, of Bob's Discount, even though the fellow is now no longer there. I miss him so, I ache.
I greet the sun and the Sunoco station. Both are to the east and I glance over, as the sun comes to meet the gas station. I imagine Mr.and Mrs. Ferragamo getting out of bed, and I see him drive up the street to get the paper or something else. His house is next to the Sunoco.
Dover is my rest stop. Not the current Dover. I see double. What is now and what is in my mind from some time ago. The early years of Dover for me, the seventies. Paul Fryer, Henry, Ruth, Ralph McAllester, Mr Heinlein, the town's police chief, Mrs. George. I revisit Grange meetings at the lower town hall.
Here are a few lines from Wallace Stevens, the poet I mentioned earlier.
"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
"Life is the elimination of what is dead."
"We have to step boldly into man's interior world or not at all."
"Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling."
"There must be some wing on which to fly."
Many who reproduce modern life on tv and in movies repudiate beautiful living. We gulp down evil, choke at good. There are a few good scenes, a few good blokes, and everything else is shades of alienation, violence, greed. We cannot see the world through innocent eyes. It is necessary to see the world through innocent eyes. Everything must make an impression that is positive or at least hopeful of a stable future and a noble present.
Two prime voices. Seferi and Stevens. The Greek poet is talking about the hole in the sky he escapes to, and about the statue he talks to, and about the ashes and the kids, and a big, old-red rose, that represents his sex.
Wallace talks about Greeks too. He says the greatest piece of fiction is Greek mythology. Classical mythology.
Last night on Larry King, Tony Randall talked about how the ancient Greeks invented theatre in Western civilization and why don't we have a national support for theatre like other countries do?
Air-conditioning, insurances, benefits, products that coddle and talk to us. A lot of virtual realities. No risk. Where will our stories come from? Hollywood needs new ones. Our movies and tv are all special effect. Not any story or drama any more.
Genius creates words and they protect us from the furry world. The alienated, cold, frightening, family-less world. The words must be straight, unvarnished, truthful. Funny, whimsical, sardonic, wise; leading us toward some understanding that will supercede the current foolishness. Seferi and Stevens serve them up to us.
Words as vehicle. It may not be prose or poetry. Just words. "The Three Secret Poems;" is words Seferi gives off. I take his Greek and put it into everyday American. The beauty and soaring aspect of his words. Put them to picture to see how I feel. I put advertisements and things I cut out alongside his beautiful poems. To explain how America feels to me in 1998. Seferi knows the modern, the desolation better than me, and more importantly, how to overcome it with words and with gods. Language is perpetual creation. I read that in Stevens. Words provide relief from fear and boredom. Stevens says he is not just taking poetry in mind when he says language is perpetual creation. Somehow we believe poems are special, when they are not any better than a picture in a magazine or something we read in a book. Print, all kinds, pictures, all kinds are what we have to see as sacred and revealing and interesting and inspiring.
More Stevens. "Yet the imagination gives to everything that it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly." I don't understand what he means by nobility except that it is rare and good to have. I want to be noble like Stevens would want.
I imagine Seferi to be noble. He says somewhere that he seeks the nobility of the Greeks. In the little boy, the Charioteer, the statue he communes with, the time he is at Delphi. He just doesn't want to be bothered with anyone living. He is busy scripting a play for the empty stage at Ephesus. The themes and words are noble.
A literate human takes the long trip back to find solace and comfort, and locates noble ideas and representations, statues and the like. Seferi's poems come to terms with the old way, with statues that bleed, amphitheatres that talk, yet are empty.
He creates a world of the past and lives it. It is in opposition to the modern. He survives war-torn Europe only by creating an alternate world. The food source, the only one, for the poet, is the word.
A vast fairytale, as he calls it. Seferi's work roars and rumbles. It is spare, simple, desperate, modest, quiet, beautiful, anonymous, forgotten, like the tree in the forest deep in winter no-one goes to see. Alone, shivering in the mist. That is why I love Walker Evans, Charlie Burchfield, Reg Marsh, Diane Arbus. They make a thing that stands on its own for a long time, that vibrates with its own energy, fueled mostly by fear and loneliness. You punch in your time clock and feel that someone else is with you on the journey through life, as you work, write things, do videos, shop at Damoulas's and Walmart.
I think about a poem of George Seferi, "An old man on the river bank." I wait for the traffic to move when I am leaving the parking lot in Bellingham yesterday, snowy and cold. Going to West Medway, where the farmer and the milk of Shady Oaks Farm wait.
"I think so much these days about the
great river,
That symbol which moves forward among herbs
and greenery....
That current which goes its way and which is not so
different from the blood of men,
from the eyes of men when they look straight
ahead without fear
in their hearts."
Seferi is thinking about his father, Aeschylus, and his concept of justice. The river is civilization, current real time. He puts it thus; "We should consider toward what we go forward. It should be in some other way."
His gods are homeless, like me in Dover. They circle the old temples; "pouring out again into the outdoor landscape and threatening us now on every side with panic and/or seduction." We must spend the time on the Greek spirit-forms so they will continue to create and do their very own mischief. We are entrusted with the work of gods.
The artist is our only hope. Only David Hockney can save us and give the heart a double pump, as it did today when I saw two of his paintings in the New Yorker magazine. Take the words of Frederick Kiesler, found in a book about Gene Moore, the window designer for years at Tiffany's in New York City. The artist.
He must be young in spirit and agile...
He must always be on the qui vive.
He is the first to read dozens of periodicals,
he overlooks no important theatre opening
he neglects no important film or exhibition.
He must be able to absorb information like a sponge.
There must be no limit to his capacity for knowledge.
He is a silent market crier.
His ancestors squatted in marketplaces,
lounged in the doorways of ghetto streets.
sprang about on the platform of a circus outfit.
This way gentlemen! here only can you see....!
All this he does, but in a refined, subtle
invisible, inaudible way."
The integrated, whole artist is the miracle of the century, not the planes and the big buildings. I am with Seferi standing by the statue of the Charioteer at Delphi. "I mean this grace at its peak, this power, this modesty, and the things that these bodies symbolize. This vital breath that makes the inanimate copper transcend the rules of logic and slip into another time, as it stands there in the cold hall of the museum."
l this he does, but in a refined, subtle
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