THE ICON LISTENS, SERIOUS AND SAD

In one of Kavafi's poems he has the line above about a sailor who drowned while his mother goes to light a candle to the Great Mother, so her son will have good weather and he will return. We hear the grand tragedian and sociologist about town say her ear is cocked to the wind, as her prayer tumbles from her fevered mouth. Her son, her son, and the icon can only listen and know the aweful truth. Her son will not return.

Here's the poem, "Prayer," one which I love. It is a typical work, spare, clean, deadly in its impact.

The sea in all her depths took one sailor

His mother, unawares, goes and lights

to the Madonna,before her, one tall candle

for him to travel home fast and for good weather;

and always toward the wind stretches her ear.

But even tho she prays and supplicates,

the icon listens, serious and sad,

knowning that the son she waits for will not be coming.

H thalassa sta vathy tys pyr' enas nafty

H mana tou, anyksery, piani ki avafty

styn Pangia mprosta ena upsulo keri

gia na epistrepsi grygora kai nan kaloi kairoi

kai olo pros ton anemo stynei t' afty.

Alla eno prosefketai kai theiitai afty,

y eikon akouei, sovary kai lypymeny

kserontas pos then thalthoi pia o eios pou perimenei.

It takes a great artist to instruct us as to life's meaning. With the world being the world and oblivious to our hopes, aspirations, our needs. We create artificial meanings to explain the void, our certain demise, our death.

Yesterday I saw shy, sky sister again. It was 6 in the morning and the parking lot I occupied was empty, except for me, some blown papers and coffee cups from the Dunkin' Donuts, some randy seagulls, obscene in their good health, scratching at the semi-empty bags and papers from the above-mentioned Dunkin' Donuts and from MacDonald's up the street. I forgot to mention, dear listener, there were a lot of tickets, quick scratch tickets, from the state lottery. Losers.

And shy, sky sister brought her four children out from under the fence to show me. About some hundred feet from me, the cat paraded the kids and then disappeared again. She fascinates me, as does the old woman pushing a shopping carriage down the street at this time every day loaded with bottles and cans. She has on a heavy coat and usually a hat, only this day her white head was uncovered. Once she waved to me. She is rather fesstive and open in her wave. I hope to meet and talk to her, or at least offer her some of the bottles and cans I pick up. She rummages through the rubbish barrel at the side of the International Bar, the place Deano owns, for the lovely amber and the stately green beer empties the revelers leave there.

I have looked in the barrel, seen the empties and have been cheered she will soon pass by to collect and cash them in. So they will be recycled and all will be well in the republic again.

Shy, sky sister and the odd bottle lady mean something to me, as I try to live my life with some verve and meaning. That the world is always going around being the world and never paying much attention to me and my dearly felt needs. My prayers reach a silent icon which just looks back at me and does not answer. He or she may wish me no ill but at the same time does not acknowledge me and my needs. I must do the work I do. There is no other solutions to get. I do the vids, make a little money doing something else here or there, and go home at night to rest for the next day's events.

I will not win the lottery and thus be spared my daily toil. I will not find a person who understands me. I am too odd and nutty. I must do the work myself, as any artist must. Alone, cheerfully and with an open and kind mind. With courage and certitude and resolve like cat mother and the carriage woman.

Like the icon in Kavafi reminds me...... fate is just standing there and we can not know it any more than the worried mother can know about her dead son. The news will be bad. That is always certain, but it is in the human to have vain hope so as to get through the day. That is why people drink and use drugs; because they know there is not escape but death which will relieve us our burden. The great artist like Kavafi knows the truth but he plods along because he, like Mr. Mandela for the South Africans, is the saviour of the faith. I mean, he represents us, as Greek people, so he has to do his dance. So we will thrive. Same with the other giant, Seferi. Together they provide hope in a hopeless world. The ones who show an example tell us to live anyways as bold as we can and just face the fact that nothing does any good. We will die anonymous, empty beings, no matter what, so say the hell with it and go on and just live as American, or some other thing in this great land of ours. The cat does, without thinking long and hard on the meaning of life. So does the bottle lady. Just goes on, no matter the weather.

That is where my thinking is, as I live my life in the summer of 1996. How my culture and its poems inform me and make my life so exciting to live. Only I feel a need to express myself and that takes time and effort and I am alone. As I ruminate on what I see. I stay away from the tv and the car radio for long periods and just think.

I make words, even though there is no-one but sky sister, the cat to hear them, and the old lady pushing the cart with the cans in it, who once gave me a warm wave which cheered me for the whole day. I mumble anthems, the poems I wrote long ago, as cherished statements of what it means to me to be Greek. I do this to make myself think I matter to, at least, myself. The world going around acting like the world, pays me, not any mind. I need to survive and do so on a diet of Greek poems and things I see in my daily life. To make the void, the fact of death, seem farther away and not so awful. I just live and try to be cheerful and hopeful in the face of the sorrowful icon in my mind and in the poem of Kavafi.

Kavafi is a person who offers hope and then pulls the rug out from under you. He does it to show you the world only cares about being the world and you will get disease and die and no-one will care, not your children or your in-laws, or your neighbors, so get used to it and do the only thing possible. Create stories and lines no-one will read to carry you over to the other side. Make your own music to carry to the crematorium, to accompany you to the new reality, death will provide. That is what Kavafi does with his own life. His work, only a few poems really, convey his spirit to a place of his own making and great ones like E.M. Forster, the blessed Forster, look to Kavafi to see how he does it. Who is so sly and smart and strong and lean and, good and bad, at the same time.

He writes the "Tomb of Iasis," which I will read now. It is plain and clear and may instruct us in the year of the lord, 1996.

Well, I'm Iasis, buried herein. This great city's

model, famous for my beauty.

They marveled deeply the one we call wise; as did the common citizen,

the simple-minded laity. And I joyed in it, here and there.

The both. But from being too much identified with Narcissus and Hermes,

excesses wore me down, they killed me. Oh, traveler,

If you hail from our Alexandria, you'll not blame me. You know the fast motion

of our way of living. what fervor it has and its total devotion to exstasy.

Kavafi writes terrific short poems in Greek. We who are still living, need to know that we have a function in the world to create our own myths and stories. He sits in his room and writes and rewrites his words to get them right. He succeeds. I put mine to vids. This is the preferred vehicle to me. We, Kavafi and I , both do our work.

The world will not care. We hope it will, but people look at me and my work once and go off shaking their heads. It gives me pause, why I do this thing, but I get up the next day and do it again. I guess because I have to. I don't know why else .... how to explain it. I do what I do, to do what is called on me to do. I am called to my work. I like that and heed the calling.

It is an effort on my part to explain why sky sister and the cart woman move me so. Tremendously so. I am in the parking lot at Bob's and God, my god, gives me some lessons, if only I will see. What my teachers of the day do is compelling. They simply enact their daily lives with a kind of grace and a cheerfulness. A directness I can apprehend and appreciate.

I go through the rest of the day, composing stories and hearing music in my head. The drugs I take for my real ills, drugs from Walgreen's pharmacy, not street drugs, make me goofy and through it all, I compose songs and form compost for tomorrow's stories and ballets and soap operas. I look to real artists like Kavafi for clues and they are there for me, in Bob's parking lot, at six in the morning, in July.

I am surrounded with beauty. I can see it. I have no alcohol or illicit drug, no ususual sex drive or craving for junk food to move me. My world is within and I coordinate what I see inside myself, with an ability I have to survive on a daily basis. America the surfeited, provides me with the drama I need. Even though my mind is often in a small village in the Aegean, I move my body around in a great nation of cities, the U.S., and look at its tv and print in newspapers and magazines with a practiced and clear eye. My training in all those schools they sent me to, gave me some tools for understanding the big things I see in my frenzied America.

The icon I refer to above at the top of my story just looks back at me. We Greeks are big on icons. The icon is reality, the cold reality all humans must confront as they age and go through the phases of life, the youth, the marriage or coupling, the kids of one's own and all those troubles, and then the age. One sees all types of human in the daily life and they fall into one of those categories marked by age. It takes the artist to separate out the issues involved in passing from one phase of life's journey to the next.

Kavafi chronicles the passage from one phase of life to the next and does it with his poetry. He handles the shift in the human from youth, to the old age that will follow. He always says to us all, homosexual, and not homosexual, to live to the hilt because the prognosis is bad for us all. We will die a nasty death, so we better have some sexy moments to remember, when we can do the young life no more. In this sense he is a poet of old age, and what a poet!

He has in the poem, "Tomb of Iasis," the phrasing about life on the edge, the margin; the excessive life that seeks "pleasure above all else." He means sexual or visceral pleasure above all else. The crunching of bodies, of music heard, paintings observed, street scenes seen, silence registered in its deepest form. He refers to what kills people who are moths that go too close to the fire as he did as a youth. The thing does in the hero in his poem. He says excess wore me out, so Traveler don't blame me. He says those from his home town, Alexandria, Egypt, will understand how passion works. They will forgive him, he hopes

Well, the same is true in my Boston and Dover, as I observe people killing themselves around me with food, drug, sex, and too much tv and trash movie. They live in a nether world they create or that gets created for them by Boston and the symbolism Boston creates. It is a world of overfed bellies, but the faces are not happy with the surfeit. That is what confuses me, that the food and the daily messages, does not satisfy.

It does not result in new kittens like sky sister's four offspring, nor in the happy wave of the bottle lady. Why don't the Doritos satisfy? Why don't the people I see in my village, Dover, feel happier over the luck their kids have, to go to colleges of their choice. What I see is tentativeness and little joy in the people around me. I wish they lived a little bolder, like Kavafi says we should. I wish more people would create more art around me, so I would be inspired more to do better work myself.

But they do create something, these large bellied people and smug suburbanites. Only I can not hear the noise of their lives they create, that excites them. Maybe it is silent and personal art they create, in the quiet of their homes at night or early in the morning. May, that they create their own songs and art, good food, tomatoes in the garden, stories they tell kin and friends, travel that excites them, a ticket from the lottery where they can win a million. I don't know what. Maybe they are like sky sister and the carriage woman, daring and intrepid in their appointed life style. I don't really know, but I see America's artists, whom we all acknowledge and my heart speeds with the thrill. Roseanne on tv, Jessica Lange, Clint Eastwood, the writer and poet, Donald Justice, the painter, Burchfield, the photographer Annie Leibovitz and I just know I am blessed to be here looking at the world in 1996. That I have lived long enough to record my life in some form. And to share my enthusiasm for this place I live in. It provides answers to deal with the horror of death, encourages boldness and creativity, as does Dear Kavafi and the cat mother.

I can't wait to see Brian Di Palma's movie, "Mission Impossible." The joys of being in a wild and dynamic culture, at the edge of the world's ability to incorporate technology into its dream-life. So I just wonder as to the minds and thoughts of citizens around me. I know they are not Greek like me. They do not know what Kavafi says. I wish the odd basketballer named Dennis Rodman did. It would help him, but maybe it would make him even crazier. I don't want that, as I am always offended, conservative that I am, by his antics on the court and his odd hairdos. I observe the social mayhem around me and locate it into a Greek mode. I do this because it is the only way I can understand the world I inhale and inhabit.

The Greek culture in its varied guises informs and enchants me. It is my drug, my Dorito, my favorite comedy-sitcom on Fox Channel 25. I drive the car early through Boston and have visions and voices, Greek ones, in my head, to explain what is happening to me. The notion is that an old and traditional way can form the basis for a creative survival in America. We always need counsel and direction. The Americans have this fantastic, vital material culture to occupy them. It doesn't really work too well for me, so I fall back on what is for me tried and true. The culture I was raised in..... and I hear its voice as I look at cat and carriage person, at the tv and the skyscrapers of Boston. You get learning from where you get it and I get it from my mind as well as from what I see daily.

I believe in mantras, in anthems. This is my very best one, the one I will read now, and I hope someone may get its drift. I did it on the radio, about two or three minute of Greek radio in Lynn. I sat in my home and over the phone was able to read a few lines before they cut it off. I don't know why, but they had something more pressing to report, so mid-poem they shifted to something else and I did not finish the poem.

The piece called "We," is a statement of the facts of life in the diaspora. I like best the line, "we are the ones who gave you blue." The sky and the waters of Greece. The blue in the Greek flag and the loved one's eyes. We own it, the color blue, like the Americans own the statue of liberty and the Constitution.

There can never be understanding from the host American. I know that and have to deal with it. I don't wish to appear ungrateful. Immigrants, like me, are always being told to go home, if they don't like it here. If it's good enough for them, the Americans, it ought to be good enough for anyone else, like me. They do not see that we are here for good and won't leave, but we think about the home culture and incorporate it into the American vision and thus create a new America that is even more rich and powerful. Hardly a threat to their America, it is an extension and an amendation, merely.

When you do an ethnic or racial anthem, it is not to say your way is best, but to locate only one voice in the rainbow of cultures in the U.S. and the world. It is one person's answer to the questions of the meaning of life and death.

The Chinese culture, or the Indian from India culture, is not the best, because it is old. It has not the real answer to life's dilemmas. Nor the Dogon from North Africa because it is old, or the Puerto Rican or Dominican, because it is lively, or the Cuban because the path has been tortured, or South Africa or Trinidad. The cultures are just there. They explain the void in their own fashion and because no-one really knows the meaning of life, all these alternate explanations have a kind of pregnant meaning all their own. They are ways to say, "oh, I get what life is about now," and the Puerto Rican child or the Cuban one, can go on and live a good life, seeing the daily events through the colored glasses of a culture or a blend of two or more cultures. This all results in a grand culture, the one we call American, the one we live in now.

I don't have any notion that the Greek is best or at the high end of the list of bone-shattering cultures. It is just mine and, as I claim it, I sing it and proclaim it. I know a little about it and do the poems to locate myself and the culture in the maelstrom that is America. When I did the poem on the radio, some really nationalistic types said the poem showed how we were superior and they liked that because that is how they feel.

I disagree. We are what and who we are, and that is all. We're but ones who...... and that is all.

The icon sits and broods, as we go our way, us Greeks, to the cities of the world. Any sensible human like me wonders what will happen to us in our scattered diaspora. Is the thing, Greekness, dead? Is the Greekness about to die, as we finally forget the language of the Greeks? We have come to think we are the ones who own a land that is good for the tourists to visit. Come to Greece and all that.

Will they keep marketing the land of our parents as a place to go to, to have fun? The young who are children of those in the first generation do not comprehend Greekness. My children, for example, and now theirs. In a few years, they will be all that is left on the earth and we will be forgotten. So will Kavafi. His poems are known to very few now. He is seldom mentioned in American letters or on the tv.

My anthem is a listing of who we were once, when the first- come, our mothers and fathers, came here. I don't think the children of those pioneers remember much anymore. Or whether their children know anything about being Greek.

The poem, "We," is my answer to the worrisome void called death that all humans must confront, whether the old man, Kavafi, or the old man, me, or the two heroines of my story, the cat and the carriage woman. Life and death are explained in stories, and song and poem.

This is the poem. It has to end on a cheerful note. Like the mother of the dead boy in the poem I started this session with, there is hope, even when there is not any hope at all. The mother of the kittens will feed her group. The old woman with the shopping cart will have the energy to push her carriage some more over the busy streets of Revere, and I will continue to dream the dream, where we Greeks survive as a known and valuable people in America, land of the holies. Stories, lies, and poems to get through this day.

And the icon remains silent and somber, as she watches her son, me, go about , dragging a tired body around the travails of a day.

We are the ones who gave you blue.

We gave you the woman, refined and glorified in Aristophanes' "Lysistrata."

We are the ones who lit the flame.

We early set truth and meaning, as we stayed to pay the price. To pay the price.

We gave you Socrates who knew the price the body must pay for the truth.

We gave you Ritso, whose wonder dog Ntic, the border cops were wont to kill. Thank you Ritso.

We are the ones who fly to all five continents. Put "we are the ones," on the side of the jumbo jets, so the Australian cousins will hear my cry. We are the ones...

who never do it on Sunday. We man and woman the pizza ovens deep in the night.

We watch the Disnification of the homeland. The pure spirit of Mycenae hovers. It lurks and insinuates.

We are the ones who bear the flame...of justice and truth and sit there mute as the world makes it flicker and it begins to die.

We gave you the Kazantzakian passion for the land, every last wave and rock of Greece. We gave you Kazantzaki.

We are the ones who gave you Katsimbalas, the Colossus of Marousi in Henry Miller's book. Cocking up the crows of Attica. We, of the Greek madness, the passion that chokes us, the passion that may guide us.

We gave you the lintels that grace your suburban homes.

Second stanza.

We float the feta cheese on the salad. That your belly fill.

We are of Dukakis and Agnew, Tsongas. We almost made president. We are wonderful ones.

We are the ones whose stolid and supple souls match the landscape of the island cliffs. Why did we leave?

We are the women bowed with the weight of the gold chains at the neck. The donut and the salad kings. We are those ones. We do keep up.

We keep up appearances. Forget we are Greek.

We Americanize gloriously and let the Greek culture go to dust. We know truth and prefer tv.

We are the conscience gone silent. We gave you philosophy. Epictetus and his love of practical knowledge we refuse to use.

We gave you the endless arguments of the coffeehouse. We are the ones whose marbles are called Elgin. Don't forget it.

We are the conscience grown strong. Henry Miller came, saw us, and was agape. His mouth open. The wonder of our people. The Greeks, how wonderful they really are.

We sit in the daylong bathtub of Diogenes.

Own the Aegean.

Own the lonely pine tree in the poem of Seferi.

Run the rickety steamer, the Panormity, coursing the Aegean.

We are the ones who avoid welfare rolls.

Occupy the belly button of the universe, astride Africa, Asia, Europe.

We are the ones in the middle of the mess.

We are the ones who left to live... to raise families on strange shores, to yearn for the homeland when there was time away from the work.

We are the ones whose language would conquer the world if sound and feeling were the major criteria of worth in the world. They aren't.

We wonder what it all means and turn to Kavafi and Ritso to tell us.

We know the words but nobody listens.

We go mute before the lights of the cable tv.

We want to speak but forget how.

We revere the pioneer generation in America but it is dying anyways.

We are the trity genea, the third generation. Are you there somewheres?

Will you write a poem, a song or a story about the great Greek people?

Please!

Third stanza

We pen a love poem to the homeland, to the new land, anyland. History and now herstory in this decade of the woman. May the goddess smile.

We made a god, then gave you Saint Paul.

We are the ones of the glass of cold water.

We of hospitality, a generous love of humankind.

We are stewards and stewardesses of right, the flame called right.

We are ... who reject material for spirit.

We know the way. We point the way.

We are the ones of Athens airport. Invent confusion, chaos and clutter.

Just go try Athens airport.

We are the ones who once knew scale. How to live.

We are the ones of balance. Of body, time, energy and love.

We are the ones to whom the gods whisper. "Tell us," they say,"what the hell's going on ? All this bustle."

and we say, "just the barbarians jingling change in their pockets as they walk along. Nothing to worry. It will pass. Soon."

We are the ones to pacify the gods.