Grey

We must see that two cultures mixed, are fine. There is black and there is white, too. Grey is just another color, and not a bad one at that. When cheerful cultures mix, something divine occurs, always has, in the distant past, always will in the now, and the next century.

I will argue that the child of two cultures has some of the strengths of both and is thus the stronger for that advantage it has over the parents. The diasporas we all go through creates mutant forms of life, people like me who can combine the best of the two cultures one was born to and make the best of it. I feel I have and it makes me very happy. I am a mixture of the Greek and American cultures and darn pleased about this thing.

Time and nature are frivolous. Time, as nature, erases everything mercilessly. How an artist can stand to paint or do poems baffles me. The odds are so great against the right- creative force. Its survival is problematic, to say the least. How will art survive, the art from the small person such as I? Here is the sage with the poetry, coming to us on interstellar space module, number One, to say,

Young-twenty -eight years of age, on a Tenian ship

there reached this Syrian harbor, a fellow, name of....

name of Emis, with the career plan to learn the incense trade.

But got sick on the trip. And as soon

as he was carried to shore, died. His burial, of the poorest sort,

occurred here-in.

The poet, Kavafi, that cheerful fellow, who regales the Greek cognizenti, says he whispered, did Emis, something about home and his very elderly parents. But they were unknown to anyone in the ship's members. Not only that, but the sailor-mates did not even know which country in the vast Greek empire he had hailed from.

Another anonymous passing, mentioned only by the careful and seemingly sympathetic Kavafi. Seemingly sympathetic, but not really giving a damn about the poor soul or his parents. He implies to us, the reader, that death is that way. Like him. Totally uncaring, so you better watch out, because your demise is but around the corner. And Kavafi is pleased to tell us all about it. That is his peculiar specialty, the matter of sudden and capricious death. He loves the subject and will explore it to the bitter end.

The poem I referred to above, "In the Harbor," ends with the idea that it's better the parents don't know what happened to their hope, their ray of light, their beloved son. He puts it, "they'll always hope he's alive somewhere."

The elders of a unique culture do teach us. It is the Greek culture I refer to. That we are on a course that is tough and we better be tough too. If not, the string will end. America will produce no artists that will tout our way. No television producers to tell our story. No painters, sculptors, advertisement writers, clothes designers who mirror the skills of the old and honorable Greek artists. The bold cuture of the old Greeks will die with our diasporic generation of Greeks and wannabe Greeks. The audacity of the members of the symposium that met 2500 years ago on the island of Lesbos, or Mytilini, will be a silent and distant memory only. This was the gathering of intelligent proto-Greeks around the poets, Archilochus and Sappho.

I marvel at artists more than at the politicals or the captains of industry. That is because I make protestations at the altar of art myself, and identify more with them than with political or business persons. In art there is always hope, being as it appears to be, a mythical kingdom where time stands still and anything is possible.

The writer, E.M. Forster, says a Kavafi can never be popular. So what! I can read him in English or in Greek and he communicates to me perfectly. I went to the library to find recent articles on Kavafi, say, over the last ten years. There aren't any. Who cares if the moderns have forgotten Kavafi. Let them remake all the old errors of the past, as they seek to reach the same olympian heights we reached several times over our history.

One peak was the century's turn, this one's. When a giant named Kavafi wrote from northern Africa about the Greeks. We're not talking old Greeks here, like our very own Aeschylus or Sappho, but of a modern Greek, the masterful Kavafi, a hounded human of the twentieth century. He wrote about the Byzantine Greeks of the earlier times when Greeks were sliding downhill off the mountaintop to the bottom of the hill, captive, anguished, defeated, but still truckin' after a fashion.

Forster says the master has the capacity to "snatch sensation." He grabs at art, carries it to his chest, makes it his own. That is what Forster admires the most about Kavafi, his courage. Now picture this. A small, bitty man, at the least, looking frail and vulnerable and Forster goes to visit this creaky oracle in Alexandria. He passes that way to see Kavafi for the first time and have his whole life changed. He goes and confirms that his way of snatching truth, indeed, is courageous and perhaps the foundation of art rests on acts like his.

Forster puts it that his act of poetry is a way of responding to a call of the people in his breast. He puts the old Greek voices into print, the ones he hears in his heart. He is beckoned by the history of his own race. He responds and the rest of it is history, the making of some of the world's greatest poetry, in Greek which is then translated into English or American.

Kavafi apotheosizes, makes heavenly with his memorial, a person of mixed nationality, the fellow above, in his poem. Most likely, a human forged by the vast Greekness that permeated all parts of the world known at that time. In this mythical character, the very forgetable Emis. We cannot know what parts were Greek and what parts something else. We do not know whether he was one-fifth or one-hundredth Greek. Perhaps percentages don't really matter when you're having fun.

It seems all that counts is.... he's dead, poor Emis, and whether he was a lot Greek or a little, doesn't matter much anymore. It appears to be of little issue, what we are. We are all cooked and doomed, the ship heading for shoals that will engulf us soon enough, so why worry about racial and ethnic purity. We are of the race human and let it go at that. Our hands will wrinkle, our genitals dry up and our hearts despair, no matter how Greek or Egyptian or Roman or anything we are, so let's say it, how it is and be done with this worm, the human and go on to some other subject, 'cause people are but fodder for the cannon that is time and nature. The human is not the center of the universe, as Kavafi sees things. Only a recurring nightmare placed somehow on this earth to perhaps amuse the gods or god or some other frivolous deity. Not a cause for concern, the human, but merely part of the earth's landscape.

Of course, if you know Kavafi, he further asserts, it does not matter how we use our genitals, what kind of love we practice either. He argues we matter so little anyways, so who could care how we get off on our sexual journeys? Such a small and silly matter, sex. He's out of the closet, way back at the turn of the twentieth century.

That sex-stuff, too, goes by the board fast enough; steamy and stained sheets. Humans rot and die. The genetic imprinting that makes us one race, color, ethnic group or whatever, is temporal and will not be of any lasting concern to anyone. It all dies out in a wink. Nothing matters. Nothing matters, says Kavafi. Do you hear me? Nothing matters, so start from that pronouncement and dare to live. If nothing matters, everything does, he implies.

Everything does count, if nothing does. Such is the condition in this fellow Kavafi, whom Forster, a great writer himself, admires so. It is plain that Kavafi is a fine figure, telling his version of a truth, so we can go on a pace or two into century twenty-one. With a feeling that human life is the same in all history and that the truth, what really is, has not changed a whit since the Greeks were sailing the seas and putting into Syrian harbors to live and to drop away. A soul sinks into oblivion, a corpse is tossed into the sea, off a boat in a strange harbor and life just goes on. No-one but Kavafi notices.

The artist is that most fortunate of all humans because she or he has divinity in hand. Kavafi makes extraordinary, a common thing like a passsing, a death. All any person can do is explore the immediate surroundings of the world. Then tell or describe it to us. It is a blend of the known and the unknown. The world of houses and cars, and the one of dream and passing thought. The result is a piece of art, a poem or a watercolor, that is bestowed on us nonartists, as an anonymous, undeserved gift. The art is anonymous because we really don't know Hopper or Burchfield, or Atget or Chilson or Kavafi. We only know a bit through the art work they so humbly give us.

I honestly feel the artists are the most humble of life's servants. They toil in the dark so we can feel stuff and mostly marvel at their reports on reality. They let us travel our known worlds with them as guides, telling us don't worry, I have already been here before you, and this is how the world really is. I have always heard the great artists, the Kavafis and the Hoppers, the Burchfields and the Walker Evans, in my ear, whispering encouragement as polite pioneers , that the world can be traversed without one's being paralyzed by the fear of death or illness. The arts are intrepid and the artists bold. They give one encouragement and courage to go on. To live fully and fearlessly, smelling the fragrance of the flowers along the way. No art, to me, would be no life. Fortunately we have the artists, if we will see, and hear, and love them. We must read their words out loud. See their pictures and marvel at them. Their beauty.

The art is the only thing that keeps us from getting lonely and desperate.

Art, the real thing, is one-of-a-kind. It has a ring to it. Only Kavafi can do a poem as he does. Same of the American wonder, poet, Donald Justice. No-one else could talk about the world he lives in, like Justice does. See the poem, "Variations for two pianos," which has in it the line, "Higgins is gone, taking both his pianos," preceded by the line "There is no music now in all Arkansas." If that is not enough, look at the glorious painting done in America over the last several years, of Grandma Moses, Arshile Gorky, Curry, Wood, Hopper, Burchfield, of the illustrator, N.C. Wyeth. Remember Reginald Marsh and his steamy Coney Island paintings.

The thing is just endless as we daily go back and forth, to work, and from work, and pay not the least notice. We forget 'cause we are busy surviving. That our world is enriched by the silent and careful and passionate artist, sitting in dark, wondering this or that. She is lurking. He is lurking and trying to get our attention, that we notice how deep, serious and charming our daily worlds are, if only we will notice and pay heed.

How often do I go by the Needham public library, that has on the door, "free for all," and never go into its portal to see the paintings of N.C. Wyeth, who grew up in Needham. These works of Wyeth sit or stand there. I think maybe they breathe too. And I go by, in early light, to suffer another day of work and ignominy, unaware of the greatness around me. Of the power of the works of N.C. Wyeth that hang on the wall of this library.

The artists are explorers. It drives them up a wall but they persist in their work. They explore the known. The known to them, which may be unknown to us, or even alien to us and our way of looking at things. Because we always accept the usual way of seeing. Only the artist has a special sight or sound, whether it is the trumpet of Wynton Marsalis or the voice of Frank Sinatra, the movies of Spielberg, the tv situation comedy, "Cybil," or the writing of Updike. Their world of creation is known to them and they tell it to us, humbly and as completely as they can. It is an odd world of shadows and gargoyles but they slug it out and bring their varied visions to our attention, care we to see.

The artist tells us the world in our heads also, is endlessly varied, if only we can dare to let the imagination loose a little bit. It won't hurt. It is just a little scary to think something different. Go and try it. Artists are ever challenging us non-artists, or very minor artists to go for it and try to tell what we know and see and most importantly feel.

Society always discards the odd and different person, or idea for that matter. It is just what society does. The world is always doing what the world does. The world does world-things always, all the time. The world favors sameness and regularity. At six-o-clock the center of Boston is building up a mighty roar, to let us all know the traffic is just beginning another day and watch out. This mass of metal in the form of car and truck, will make its way past the gentle and lovely huge structures of the city one more day and things will get screwed up for sure.

Some nut will drive a huge truck into a bridge. He's drunk. Drives off and gets caught as he enters the Mass Pike a few miles down the road. Probably doesn't know or care he damn near knocked down a bridge and all the things is represents. So traffic was snarled for miles and for hours and we will never forget the traffic jam of that momentous day. I mean it was a Monday or a Tuesday but the world was being the world and we weren't ready to accept that. We always make up myths about the world, so it will be more appealing to us. We see it through glasses to be able to accept its sudden surprises and tragedies. We call these visions art. They are the popular songs we hear on the radio, or the tv drama or comedy or the stories we make up in our heads to get through the day.

The result of living is always the same. We get old, sick and die. The nursing home receives us and some damn fool of an attendant talks baby talk to us in a loud voice, as if we can't think clearly unless someone is yelling in our ear. We all practice in becoming disabled, because that is our fate. So the art is our fable for getting through the day, weathering the fact the world is going around, acting like the world, and grinding us daily into little pieces. Without the song on the radio, someone's creation, or the lovely billboard or the graceful skyscraper, there is only the world being the world, a damn scary thing. Art is our spice, our incentive to go on, our daily laugh at the sillyness of life and the fact that if we don't laugh we will surely cry.

All Kavafi does is laugh at life, as he weaves the story of our culture, the Greek one. And all Langston Hughes or Gay Talese does is laugh, as these folk tell stories about their people in the American promised land. My country 'tis of thee and you. Life is a matter of getting discarded, be you African-American or Italian, be you Greek or some mixture therin and thereof. How fast you get it in the neck is a matter of whether you stand out and assure life's inexorable forces will get you a bit faster than normal.

If you got on the Reeboks and the J.August suit.... well, maybe you might get by. Maybe. No, the fate you have coming will still find you, as Kavafi declares, Reeboks or not.

Things get a lot more complicated if you stand out. Even though the end is the same, for everyone. If you look different, a bit goofy perhaps, maybe the hair, the body shape, the accent, the skin color, the preferred language, the colorful clothes. Something gives you away as odd. Like you were wearing two socks of different color. You try to disguise it and go among the Americans in drag, their drag, but it doesn't work, like you are always caught for wearing odd socks. Everything else is perfect, only the socks give you away. That is the artist, who weaves about in the sea of corporate sameness. Marches to a noise of a different drummer.

Always bent on sameness is society, so art is the only hope for the darn society to get from here to there, from one era to the next. Kavafi gets us Greeks from the Byzantine to the turn of the twentieth century, when he was writing. The poems he wrote, or that wrote him, carry us safely into the twentieth century plus one. One century or the next .... it doesn't matter. Most folks will get up and think about money and the things it buys. And a nut someplace will unfurl her wings and spin a tale of this or that fancy thing. She will make a poem or a painting that will change us somehow, if we dare look. That is the artist, changing us. He as artist, is there to challenge us. To make us see that the same thing all the time is boring. That as soon as society will make us all the same, it will be some kind of totalitarian state and that is horrible. But society insists we all be the same and it discards the odd.

I am one who is odd and am always being junked. I am tired of it, but it does not seem to matter. The world goes on being the world. Creating sameness and boring experiences, just like that traffic jam I was in the other day, and the folks I will see at the town meeting on Monday night will look like the ones I saw twenty years ago, when I first came to my town. Suits, and women who are knitting, and ones with false smiles, and scared people who are shuffling papers so they won't make a mistake when they get up to say why the town should remain small and rural like it once was. Of course amid the conformists are those with the twinkle in their eye, the mischief and mirth. They were also there at town meeting when I first came to town in 1968.

Like life is always the same. Boring, as the young tell us so often. The young are there to warn us to try things and dare things. Yet they succumb and become like everyone else, most of the time and they, too, die as Emis did, in the poem by Kavafi. Endless boring life, all the same, except for the artist's variations.

Watch society casually discard a human who is odd. My whole life has been a long look at discarding. Of myself and the others who are different.

Get rid of the odd and strange. Make life endlessly the same. Only you can't.

It comes back to haunt you. I always come back to haunt you. Kavafi does as well. So too Hopper, and Burchfield and the poet, Donald Justice. So, the Jessica Lange of "Blue Sky," the comedian, "Mr. Bean," on public tv, the characters we put forth to knock about in everyday life, as we tuck them away in books and libraries to hold them at bay.

We call things art to disarm the acts they represent. The art is hidden from the busy people, so they won't get that way and screw up society. We scarcely give the artist a notice unless we go to the museum to gawk a bit, like we go to the church on a Sunday to get a quick dose of religion and then we can get out of there, to be the way we always are. Conformist, career-driven, consumptionist. The three c's dim our consciousness. We forget we are human and become automata, which is what the world needs to continue to be the world.

Only the artist can help with the "little sensuals." For me it is the footage of Stanley G. Chilson done in Franklin,MA in the year of our lord, 1935. The estimable foto-master looks at home town. Or Atget looks on his pacific Paris, or maybe Burchfield at Salem, Ohio or Grandma Moses at Vermont. Hopper at Truro on the Cape, or Updike at the suburban couple screwing around with another's spouse, or Kavafi putting down an anonymous, yet Greek sailor, in the Syrian harbor, far from anything that mattered to him How piteous. How pitiful that we do need these reminders to keep going, reminding us our mortality is brief. We need persist in our duty to art no matter what.

Only the art counts. I feel this in Chilson, the photographer from Franklin, although he likely does not see as art, the thing he does. Atget, the photographer of France, definitely says it is just documentation he's doing. Some kinda documentation. As if our artists just give us reality. The reality they claim to offer is grand art because it mixes their feeling with what they see. That is what art is, a blend of the known and the unknown, the black and the white, the shade of grey. It is the generous shadow in a Burchfield watercolor, the choice of a verb, in the poem of Donald Justice. There is no reality, just its interpretation by artists of genius. And they abound. They exist to make life possible, to make it grand and gay.

To finish, I started with grey as a theme, indicating that we Greeks are a mixed bag and that it really doesn't matter how Greek we look, as long as we remain sly, and blend the curiosity of the Greek with the hard work of the foreigner. We are ever the immigrant who enters foreign harbors, to do, or die.

Mostly to die, as it takes three thousand people to spawn one little artist. Please forgive me for quoting this statistic I just made up. Blend the heck out of us Greeks and it makes us the stronger. We are for art, our own and that of the world. Our mission is to turn the world to art, all art, and away from dollars and landmines, drachmas and fake visions of the glory that was Greece. We are, as genius, all of us, if only we have the courage to find our way there, to the house of the muse, the palace of art. It matters not a damn if we are Greek or not, gay or straight, tall or short, Catholic or Protestant.

I was flipping through a book on window art for the decoration of department stores and found it a tribute to a fellow who decorated Tiffany's store windows for several years. The book quotes, one Frederick Kreisler, a wise man ideed. He is describing the role of the displayman, the one who decorates store windows of the department stores. He is telling what is the role of an artist, any artist.

It is an exacting, exhausting thing." 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 here can you see....!'

All this he does, but in a refined, subtle, invisible, inaudible way."

Thank all goodness, for the artist. Only one who sees and can tell. And we Americans are the most blessed of all people, it seems. We mix and match, scream and patch, scratch and moan, and then go out and make an art that causes the world to quake, causes the rivers to run their banks. Our art is a blend, a beautiful grey of all the whites and blacks and colors in between and that is what makes our art and our country to be special. Kavafi gave us Greeks the foundation, the platform that we use to marvel at the culture possible for us in this most interesting land.

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