Oracle

We are missing the myth

This is a piece on a recent offering of Seferi's work in the Charioteer, Number 35, 1993-4. It is called, "Delphi," and peels back a layer of the master's way of seeing that seems noteworthy.

Seferi is always interesting. He is, however, cyptic. More, he is riven by opposites. Opposite forces, as he writes his poems and prose. He is what is called chthonic. He sees the dark and makes some light out of it. Evil.... and transforms it to an object he can handle. Fear becomes knowledge. Hate, understanding. The bigger the negative, the larger the possibility for turning it around for good. This is a job Seferi takes on, as he contemplates some pieces of his Greek culture.

To go with him is a pleasure. He makes that possible, in the prose writings he has given us. These works are much more helpful to me than his poems. These last are cries and shrieks, angry often, and worrisome. His prose, on the other hand, is reasoned, cool, informative, not a cry from some outraged, a wounded animal. You need to understand Seferi has gone through an awful lot in his life and hurts a lot.

He mixes up a brew like this figure called Hecate, in one of his poems. She's a three-headed bitch who blends potions in a pot that will lull us to a deep sleep, akin to watching network tv from 8 to 10 pm on any one night. She is in the poem Seferi wrote to medicate the Greeks so they don't think about their culture, their responsibilities and all that. His poems are wild, like the witch Hecate is wild. They fly in the three directions Hecate stares in, with mad eyes, and they fly in those three directions all at the same time.

It is most important to realize Seferi is a major, big-league, hot-shot trickster. Big-league. That makes him hard to discuss. To analyze and properly appreciate. Add that I am an American, and the job gets impossible. The poems are most confusing to me. Not just that they are in Greek, but even translated, they often leave me cold and lacking understanding.

But I am no quitter. I have help. I can always fall back on the prose Seferi writes and also I have others who are wiser than I, and know about the Greeks, the modern ones. I start with Lawrence Durrell, the novelist. He loves our people, always has, always will. He understands like Henry Miller does, like Paul Hogarth does. This last, fine-type honey, says "Greece," in his watercolors. I mean to say his paintings capture what Greece is for me. A cyclopean giant, like Durrrell, who paints us, us Greeks, at the same time as Durrell writes us up in his books and travelogues. Hogarth paints with spirit and care. He has a bead on the Greek miracle found in the place he sketches and colors in.

And through all this, we have Henry Miller. Henry Miller who dares say his book on us, "Colossus of Maroussi," is his best book. He lies a lot and loves it, but , in this case, I agree with him.

So, look at Durrell on Greece. At Hogarth and the randy Miller. Durrell claims,

"Suddenly the perenniality of the whole country knocked me flat." and to his mum he says the following . He's a young man about to go out on his life-path.

"I have had a sudden flash of realization. Greece is quite unique."

Indeed.

The point is, we are on thin ice, when we grasp at Greece. Seferi will make this point clear in a minute. Somewhere in his writings, he says we have a fish skeleton before us to look at. Representing the small amount of art, story, poems, conversation, etc, that has come down to us from ancient times. The skeleton is all we have in evidence of the culture that once lived back there in the good old days. From this skeletal remain we are supposed to see a whole fish, writhing and churning in its element, the sea, the Aegean pond of ours.

Well, it's not possible. Greece is back there. The old way is in our blood, but our imagination is too weak to allow us the gift of sight. We stumble in a darkened room, like Seferi has to, and try to see this thing we call our Greek culture. Of course, Seferi sees things pretty clearly. He spends years on the matter of reproducing the Greece that inhabits his body, but lies there, quietly waiting on him, to sketch it in poem and in prose.

Durrell, Hogarth, and Miller see the miracle that we are. To me, they also have a good handle on what and who we were. They put it in English, and also in watercolors, for us to admire and appreciate. They are most remarkable, these cold-weather people, as I think about it. How could they know us so well? What gives them the right? Who are they? Are they some loonies from some Aegean Atlantis come back to haunt us Greeks? I wonder about these wonderful people, who love all Greece, who live there and think about the Greece that was and surely is. A unique spot it is.

For sure, Seferi sees it too. The culture the old ones lived, and liked so much. The ancients thrived, as their social system and their art did.

He describes the old culture and then throws out a challenge to us, to form our own image of the old ways and carry it in our breasts for all our days, to inspire and direct us on the good path of life. The old thing can instruct and lead us and lighten up our lives.

His idea is to force you to think. To think your thoughts. To commit acts based on your very own images of our joint ancestors. It is action Seferi wants of us, not more words. To stir the old ones in their reverie. To get them to turn their heads and say, "oh, the moderns are at it again, like us, doing the arts." To Seferi, they may indeed turn their heads to notice him or us, if we are but good enough, serious enough and driven by the same values as those old ones who stir over us.

To Seferi, action is a half-step away, just after the thought. It doesn't matter a damn, if you have noble, ancient Greek thoughts. You gotta do something about your knowledge. So being on target, philosophy-wise, is no good unless you are willing to act on it. Put it all on the line, like some athlete at the starting gate of a race.

It is not Greek, to think alone. Never has been. One must act. The writers and poets do. That is the only thing that matters. In the Western sense, product is what counts. You have to do something about what you think, for the thought to be worth a damn.

So Miller and Durrell write, Hogarth paints. They live Greek. They are tough, uncompromising. Kavafi, the magic poet of Alexandria, breathes hard at us from his darkened room. He slaves alone, year after year, in his work to get the words right in his hundred or so poems. The only things he will write over a long and sexy lifetime.

And Seferi writes and charms with his poems and prose. He lives the life he thinks. Courageous, creative, indefatigable. Uncompromising. A diplomat, historian, critic. A great human being, inspired by the ancestors who are fearfully alive to him, in his mind, imagination, in his groin and heart. In his very veins and capillaries. In his hair.

Now we will begin our archaeological dig. I will make the following statement to begin; the spirit of a locale lies, right there in the ground, in god's earth. The same ground one is standing on. Fact. Spirit is a thing. Tangible. Here is a piece of an interview with Timos Malanos, in the Middle East, 1943-44. He's having a conversation with the master.

Seferi. "I wish I were in Greece. They are near the myth while we...."

Asks Malanos. "Does the myth exist within or outside of ourselves?"

Answers. "Outside"

Later, in one of his articles, one of his very best, "All Things are full of Gods," Seferi quips, "sometimes we do need fairy tales." First, from the interview with Malanos, we learn that the old way, that of the ancients, can be found by looking for a tangible, real thing in the earth and the trees and the plants and the weeds of Greece, the now that is Greece. The path can be uncovered by talking to the rocks and the waters of Greece. The spirit is topos-based, found in the place itself.

Second, the Greece, Seferi looks for in his little hunt, can be found, if one is but playful and not overly dramatic. An attitude is called for. The old long-gones are funny players, who don't like it when you try to talk to them with a serious look on your face. They are all tricksters who put a lot of store on a smile and a pleasant approach. The best smile is what we call the "hamoyelo," the serious-smile. That is how it translates, the wry smile. That is what Seferi is saying to me. That to know his Aeschylus, my Sappho, my Archilochus, my favorites, all I have to do is wish on a smile and they come right before me. If I am good, a good little Greek, anything is possible.

The old ways are but a wish and a smile away. At any time I wish. Seferi taught me the technique of greeting the ancestors. His approach to the old ones is so clear. It is a roadmap back to the old time.

Call it anything you want. This conversation and this play with the old people. Asparagus or broccoli. Take one part faith, and another of joy. Mix them and the fairy tale Seferi talks about, comes into focus. Whether you believe it or not, doesn't matter to Seferi, as long as he does. He believes in fairies. I do too, as I have been in Greece for short spells, and fallen under the blanket of odd, old Greece. I have seen the way and I follow it slavishly. I write and do poems. All are the ancestors'. Not mine at all. The fingers move with a strange pace. They write themselves. Take instruction from the moon, the stars, the weeds, the sea and ground of Greece. I can not explain it much further. I am unable to. It is not any different from the Korean diasporic person, doing his or her Korean thing. A 4000 year old culture. Powerful and beautiful like mine. Only Korean, not Greek. Mine is Greek and I work the mine or the gold mine works me. Which latter is the better way to put it.

Always tweaking, Seferi is underneath, serious. I know. I am too. The little journeys we take are really our lives. We concentrate on these mind-jaunts, like some people concentrate on never missing a meal. It is in our spirit to inhabit, at any one time, two shores. The here and the there, the real and the unreal, the factual and the imaginary. The now and the then. Astride two continents, if we are diasporic. U.S.and Greece in my case. Living and dead at the same time, if we are Seferi as he writes. He's a dead man talking. Says that all the time, if you read between the verbs. Plays and acts serious. Jokes, but is serious underneath. Says it is fairy tale, but plays it as a deadly and serious game. His life, that is.

We play it, this song we sing, in our own language. Greek language. We believe, both the here and the there, this life and the past-life, are real, factual, actual, here-now, vibrant, alive and all that. In a Greek fashion. All this is the case, my listener, and it doesn't seem strange to Seferi or to me.

I would bet the great Chinese director, Yimou, feels the old China the same way and knows how to show it in his great movies. He is an ancient Chinese human, come to new life and selling tickets to the movies. Fellini is an old one, too, in his movies. Very deep, in spirit and emphasis. The splendiferous courtesans in the paintings of Utamoro, who lived in the eighteenth century, are examples of an old Japanese style that must be revered for its beauty and candor. And then we have the art of the Dogon of North Africa, great expressionists , who portrayed for some thousands of years, their ancestors and relatives in plastic arts, masks, sculpture.

What I am saying, is we, are among those ethnic and racial groups, who drag out tradition and claim it yet lives. We do it in our own distinctive way. Not Japanese, or Dogonese, or Chinese , or Roman, but Greek.

What you've got, in all these cases, is not art, really, but artifact. I mean the Dogon ancestor, or the Chinese, or the Japanese genius of olden day, was not setting out to do art, when they did their pots or painted their picture on a wall or wrote the poem, sang the song. All they did was create a thing that was merely reproducing and celebrating a culture. This is not art, but artifact, product, evidence of a way someone thinks. A lot of thought tucked into a set of old traditions and histories, in bones, in shards and ruins of structures, in covered-over stadiums and amphitheatres.

We engage the old spirit, as it appears in sculpture, song and pottery. The evasive ghosts in and around the temples, talk to Seferi, back there in the homeland, on some airy hill, deserted, but by Seferi, and his spirit-forms. He seldom is in Greece in his busy career as a diplomat, but returns finally to whisper to the dead, create his magical poem, "Three Secret Poems," and then die. Over his life he gets back once in a while, a short while. Some of his fairy-tale thinking comes when he visits his own homeplace, Asia minor. Non-Greece, but close by. Sort-of Greece, but not the mainland. Maybe Greece for some periods of history, but also land owned by others for long periods of history. Remember he was raised in Smyrna. He comes to Ephesus in Asia Minor, and talks to the theatre patrons, the quiet ghosts, there, who occupy the seats in this open structure, a bare stage ringed by the empty seats. Only, to Seferi, they are not empty. He specializes in empty amphitheatres. Makes no big deal of this. Only does it, quietly and with not any fanfare. Just does it. Lives in the old theatre for a little while and listens to the words on the stage and notes the reactions of the old Greeks who hear the Greek words off the stage.

The old and holy philosophers and playwrights and poets and poetesses who inhabit the land of Greece and near-Greece, chat amiably and intensely with Seferi. Hear Sappho. She speaks to me and maybe to Seferi at this time. She says things like the following. To anyone who will listen. "Come lyre, speak to me, take voice."

I don't know who Seferi hears. I know who I listen to. I make things up a lot. And then make believe I hear some fine figure like Sappho or some other poet.

Seferi makes similar claims that he hears one person or another. Maybe not Sappho, but some obscure goddess, no longer revered by the Greeks. Maybe Aeschylus, or Apollo, or Pythia, divining on some rock, near Delphi. He never says too much about how he hears, who he hears. I assume Seferi hears a gaggle of voices, some hard to distinguish. One or more comes to the fore, to center-stage so to speak, to say a thing to him. It seems hardly necessary to say I hear some of the same voices. Hidden safely in the diaspora, in my Boston, I imagine what Seferi hears.

This is not magic. It is fact. It is not supernatural. It is natural. Seferi makes it plain that he is conducting an interview with the ones gone past, not reporting a sighting of ghosts and goblins.

He feels and hear things. Big deal. It isn't to him, nor to me. That is how we know what to do. It is a way to tie into wisdom and knowledge. It is our way to figure out what to do. In hard times that is something you have to do, to be able to live well and right.

Seferi downplays any magicality. That is a special grace of Seferi. He revels in the world of daily living and renders it magical in a daily sort of way. His is a pedestrian miracle. He practices a daily wonderment. His way is oneiric. In Greek "oneiro," is only a dream.

One sees fast enough, that Greece is, on the surface. It reveals itself. It really does not hide anything much. Durrell intuits that much and says it when he senses the country's specialness, what he calls its uniqueness. He sees its longevity, on the landscape and in the faces of the live people.

It is but an electric space.... Greece. And that, is what we call home.

The uniqueness meets us in the face, in the eye, but few see and can describe it. If we, of average cast, see anything, we immediately suppress the vision. It scares us too much. We seem to need to invest our observations with some arcane magic that will titilate our puny senses. This we do, as we prattle on about eternal Greece, its genius and this and that. We speak on this or that matter, to do with dead Greeks, who, can not bother us or to whom we can never relate. That is a lot easier and safer to do than to view the essential Greece, as Seferi has the know-how to do.

There is no need to dip in magic. The Holy are always where they're supposed to be. Where we last left them. Holy are the ancestors, " the long lines of progons, fore-runners, who worked the voice." I remember the line I quote from some poem or piece I read a few years ago. The image of a long Greek line and those of us, alive, are in line, on line, too.

The Holies are evidenced. They live, they breathe. They cuss and curse. They are us and we are they. They are living Greeks, in our memories, they are. Alternately some are not so Greek at all. They are not Greek, some of these one gone past we respect so, but Philhellenes, ones who love Greeks, like Durrell, Hogarth and Miller. Remember it only matters..... one speak and/or think Greek, to claim the way. And for many long periods in history, our way was held together by humans not of our blood, but ones who just thought our way and loved it, as they loved us. I don't mean that all spoke Greek, the language, but rendered their own language in such a way as to reflect our language. The passages in Miller's work on Greece fly on the wings of a Greek angel, although the prose he renders is in the American language.

The old ones seem to wince. As I think of it, at any rate. How could such fools as we, be alive and kicking, when Giants and Giantesses used to rule the world? What have we come to, when little fools and cowards like me are supposed to represent the Greek spirit? This is where our recent heroic figures come in. For every little silly and worthless person, there is another, a little less silly and worthless. The ones gone are all in a jumble. Until you get up to the greats, like you-know-who. The most wonderful you-know-who. Quiet, thoughtful, amused, all-seeing you-know-who.

How much can we say about Seferi? At least we have one person who is worth his weight in whatever we value. No Seferi, would have left us more bereft and confused than we now are. And this spirit of Greece, where we can find it is ...... Well, Seferi tells us straight out. I have seen it a thousand times in Greece. He has it right. Please, listener. Please. He has it right.

In the lone dance of an old one, at a deserted village coffee house, in the strides of the Colossus of Maroussi, one named George Katsimbalas.

In the bread, in the wine. In the hand of the old woman on a stoop who's knitting and going, "tsk," In a roadside churchlet. In a summer festival with two thousand Greeks present, with their kids and the grandparents. In buses, boats, motorcycles, cars. In the casual and wacky Greek dress or uniform.

Now the spirit is topocentric, as Seferi claims, but it is also migratory, on the wing of a bird that will cross the Atlantic pond to reach Boston. I saw it yesterday at the flea market as I greeted and saluted Greeks I know.

The Greek spirit occupies the friend I have, name of Christo, up at Royal Pizza in Medfield. The spirit is mobile. Holy spirits are found in the damnest places. In a fellow I saw a day ago, who comes upon me at the flea market, and hounds me with lines of Pindar in Greek. He says to me, what's your news? In Greek, ta nea sou? Then does not wait to hear. He's in too much of a hurry. To have fun. He is seventy-one, he informs me and is busy. Something about eggplant he likes, and his son is a genius. Do I need a good lawyer, the son is one, and he's written a book on the Greek baseball player named Harry Agganis and "come, look at my car over there; see what is on the roof? Yes, yes, a bicycle. I ride a bike. At my age and I am an ancient Greek." He says all this as I gape for breath and he hurries off, like some little kid to the next adventure. Does Greece live? H Ellada z?

The culture shines. In the diaspora, in Revere, Massachusetts. In the homeland, Greece.

It is often located in the signs, the signs on buildings or streetcorners all over Greece. With the funny and charming script we have been twiddling with for a few years now. The little alphabet letters, our soldiers, who let us battle ignorance, violence, murder and mayhem. Our army of letters, script that we carry in our pocket, when we have lately come to the promised land. To legendary America. Our alphabet, ours and no-one else's. Ours alone. The Greek alphabet we use to make love with, to sell stuff with, to pray with. To talk to Seferi and Kavafi with , as if they were in the room with us. At all times. Breaking any loneliness we might feel. Dispelling any weakness, now known to man or to woman.

To understand Seferi is to understand Greece. He is that key. To understand Greece, Seferi indicates that we must exercise reason over emotion. We must look to him to see contemporary Greece provide signs of the old culture that lies beneath the current skin. An expert on diasporic cultures, Seferi lived away from Greece for long periods, he clues us in on how the culture transplants in outer regions like America and Amsterdam, too.

Old stuff counts the most. The old emphasizes one large, recurring theme. It gets painted up on a canvas in nouns. In poem and the play.

The justice, the right, the Good, the reason, the light, the need for clean laughter, the need for community and family, and art, too. Might as well throw that in too, eh Seferi? Let's throw art into the mix of what is the Good.

All these things make up what we value the most. It is hard to make up one word to cover it all. But you might say the old way has a spirit and a push to it. Of a positive and loving nature. I think that is what Seferi is getting at. That the ancients were grasping toward an ideal; that it appeared in their verse and statue. That is the ideal we are stiving for too. The way to move to the future for us and the rest of the world. On the lookout for a positive motion. Call it something. Love or reason, or justice, or mind, or community.

Go beneath the contemporary Greece Seferi lives in, and find this huge substratum of evidence he constantly turns to, for confirmation of his daily path. His evidence is intuitive, shady, hard to get at. Yet one sees him intuiting and interpreting for us. Finding signs of old life in the modern existence he is living at the time. So we can prosper as a people, in order to give the world some focus, some clear direction of a positive nature.

The resulting image Seferi develops is telling. He imposes stuff on us to inform us on the eternal dualities; love-hate, life-death, light-dark, procreation-murder.

As you know, the Greeks trod some pretty dicy ground. Some killed their parents, ate their children, unknowingly of course, killed for sex and love, enjoyed it. The killing and the sex. Devious acts are rife in the Greek history. So Seferi digs into the mayhem and looks for answers to today's murders, its atrocities. Also for ways to avoid our old Greek mistakes.

He says in his article about the place, Delphi, " One feels the awe of a wounded life that struggles in order to breathe, as long as it still can, in the light and rejoices that it is dawn and the sun is rising."

In short his Greece lives, in his daily experience of the place. As long as he exercises reason over emotion, he will be able to draw on the whole past to sustain and to inform him. The strange past, the violent past, the one that seems spooky and so ghost-rigged. He brings forth some ghosts with his intellect, and brings images to light with his prose. He cleans it all up and presents his image in a way any fool can understand it.

It may seem strange to you when I argue that Seferi is rational when he presents his arguments. Here is a guy who tells us the spirits are lurking about. The temples that lie in ruin or partial ruin there in the holyland, Greece, are their home. In Dephi, for example. Spirits live amid the ruins, their former homes. They circle and roam about, causing some havoc and confusion, he tells us.

But there is no contradiction. None. The Greek mind is rational. It allows for everything. If you can imagine it, in your mind, you can deal with it. Just clean it up and the Greek language will find a way for you to express it. Seferi will write the Greek and it will get translated, so I can read it in the English, and tell the story to others thus.

Even when we don't understand, we accept the veracity of a thing, as if it makes sense. Entertain a thing as possible.

Only we don't get carried away by it. Nor do we get melodramatic. The dead live. They just do. Walk into any room, next to where you are now, and you will see your late grandfather.

Or into the kitchen, and see your mum, as she was.

Look at a Hogarth watercolor. See Greece. I mean, see. You are there. Magic is our everyday companion. So nothing's new. The imagination that accompanies the Greek vision operates in a mighty fashion, inspired by its object of view, the place, and the spirits that inhabit it. A special quality accompanies us to the feast that is Greece. A blend of what we can see and that which we cannot see but feel.

Seferi is in two worlds at once. So am I, and that is not a big thing. The mind comprehends the other dimension and folds it into the real and everyday world we inhabit. Ritso, a Greek poet does it. Vrettakos's poems do it. Last Sunday I bought a bouquet from a woman who grew flowers from seed. I must admit I immediately thought of Vrettakos's poem, a symphony, the set of work he calls, "A Philosophy of Flowers."

I am in Bellingham, MA and Mary is arranging this dynamite bouquet that will grace my kitchen table for days and what I can think about is Vrettakos puttering about his garden in Athens, turning his head to the dear sky and thanking his god for the flower.

Seferi asks the trenchant question. What have we replaced the oracle with? Pythia, the prophetess, would make her pronouncements in the long ago. Supplicants believed her words and her. At least we think they did. They took her pronouncements seriously at least some of the time. Seferi suggests that the old Greeks were not totally overwhelmed by the oracle, but believed it more often than they did not.

If she is vanished, dead and buried, what knowledge has taken her place? Surely technology is not enough. Not for the ones who reside with spirit. Seferi asks, from where can knowledge come to us, on who we are, and what we should do about life. Not an unreasonable question. Pythia gave her listeners some answers and directions to follow so they would live well and proper. Seferi wants to know what we can use to substitute for the muse's wisdom. This question he has is odd because he ought to be telling us that the oracle was the end word and that the people believed in it totally, but he realizes the Greek of any era takes most things with a grain of salt and says as much. So if the old oracle is dead, what new font of so-called magic knowledge do we have today to guide and instruct us? It is clear to me Seferi sought some answers in a rather desperate fashion to explain his murderous times. A time when Greece was at her most troubled state, what with war and depression.

The vision of a whole culture, a Homeric culture, is gone. He asks how we can dream of it. And thus bring it to life. How we call access it, like we do with a computer. How we can dip or dive into its format, to know what to do in our everyday life. His research into the old Greek ways of Homer and his successors indicates to him that some answers about the good society lie on the spot where he is standing. In this case Delphi, but it could just as easily be an empty lot he is visiting on the outskirts of Athens. Anyplace in Greece will do. The land itself will lead him to revelation if only he is patient enough and takes time. He does, and that is what is so fine about Seferi. His patience and then the ability to reveal to us what he sees and feels.

He says, "we feel such a vibration here," at Delphi. Something is going on, surely. That is what he says. He feels something and is drawn to describe what he feels to us. Across a few decades in time. Puny temporal jump, when you realize he and I, as well, are standing in the same line, that of the penitents who believe Greek, and are willing to pay the price of being Greek. Who don't see a few thousand years as an impediment for understanding the most important questions, like how can we live better, and how we can stop the slaughter of human by human.

He's gotta look at Delphi. He finds some tentative answers he will reveal to us. Contemporary life is intensely frustrating to this lovely, old-fashioned man. He does his thinking in a veil of sadness and loneliness. Like the poet and writer Holderlin who says,

" Meanwhile it sometimes seems better to me/ to sleep than to be without companions as we are/ to be always waiting like this; and what's to be done or said in the meanwhile/ I don't know and what is the use of poets in a mean-spirited time?"

The seer I quote here, says he'd rather sleep for company from the dead than go through the paces of life with no-one to talk to. He is so lonely that you have to feel for this Holderlin fellow. He is walking in his sleep, in his daily life, too, as a figure who just thinks all the time about his ancestors and talks to them as if they were alive. Because the ones who are alive don't seem interested in him or his ideas.

Seferi is alone too, all alone. His poems stress this. So he goes on a tour of the past, to pass the time. He goes on a visit. He hasn't any friends he can talk to, so he just talks to himself. What comes out, are some poems and prose. He dumps preconceived notions, superior airs, any certainty about anything, and goes to find the ancestors. That he locates them, is a joy for us. Because he is a great thinker, he hones his writing skills continually, and is kind enough to leave us a record of his travels. He sees with a clear eye, never romanticizing or exaggerating the intelligence or wisdom of the old. He seems to say they are a lot like us only they had a more unified culture in which to screw up their lives than we do.

Says, " whoever learns the finest details of an art, moves always forward in the dark, and without his initial knowledge, because had he not left it behind, he would never have been able to free himself of it." From the essay, "All things are full of Gods." He's gonna wing it. On a prayer, dumping as dumb ballast all he knows, entering the realm of Greek imagination, entering the same room as the old. He flies high with no net under him. Very dangerous. Seferi may never come back, or he might, deranged and disfigured from the journey. He is an artist, a rare one and will chance it with his skills.

He takes off in search of Greece and finds it, where he may look. In Delphi, the site of the old oracles and their keepers. He will bless us with the voices and appearances that come of the holy spot. But what may we call the things he sees? How do you label intuitive feelings and evocations? He has the language and the means of delivery. It is all there. If we are patient as he is, we get some sense of how the ancients were and how they can help us now.

In an essay, he says, " we have to believe in these ancient indications as we find them-- placed in their locations; to believe that each posssesses its own soul." That's it. We have to believe. Ancient indications that Seferi will rub himself against. He will rub himself against these old ghosts, like an animal his skin against a tree, to solve some itch or other that is bedeviling him. He enters into a communion with the old forces and assumes a polite and quiet stance.

He comes as a pilgrim. Here is a distinction he makes. A pilgrim goes hat in hand to admire and remember. A tourist, which beast Seferi hates, goes to snap a picture.

The word, pilgrim, is one he chances to use, he says, but immediately apologizes for its use. He says he must use the fearful word, nonetheless. Pilgrim. He said it. 'Cause that is what he is, he tells us sheepishly. Who can argue? Not me. With that word, he is giving a piece of himself away he wishes not to. The pilgrim is on an emotional journey and Seferi always tells us his is rational and scientific. A tongue-in-cheek thing Sefei is saying. He is but pulling our chain again. He makes as though he's rational, but sees ghosts recite lines in Greek, as he folds his body into the shrine at Delphi. He writes an article about what he saw there. It is such a joy to have it.

He finds the old emanations in his own way. He locates his loves, his loved ones. I quote him here at length and in his text of the article on Delphi, you will see he underlines the word, "alone." That is important to know. That he wants us to share his condition, as he speaks. Please hear him a bit. It adds piquancy to his quest. His loneliness will be lessened in his successful search of the past. It is an important thing to him, as it has to do with maintaining sanity and balance. Also, no small thing, the past will be the subject matter of his prose and his very nice poems.

The pilgrim, name of Seferi, is to communicate with the ancestors, which latter, are in the form of spirits. The pilgrim poises his self on the edge of the cliff, so to say. Now he "will be able to strike up a conversation with them, doing so not amid hordes of tourists all worked up in different ways, but, if I may say so, alone, mirroring the soul at his disposal in the soul of those blocks of marble together with their earthen ground."

He is walking around in the heat amid the tourist gaggle, the Greeks selling this or that thing to the tourist, and he sees none of it, but the thing below. In the earth, on the limbs of the trees of Delphi, in the ruins themselves. He marries his soul to the marble and the earth that holds the marble.

He reports to us from the totality of Greece. From the sum total of who and what we are and will become. From the underground, the supraground, the heavens, the skies to the rocks and the dirt. His is a report, as Kazantzaki's, "Report to Greco," is a report. Where he talked to his ancestor, too. The painter, El Greco, the one from Crete like him.

What is most interesting, is how Seferi goes about this process of communicating with the past ones, the ones I earlier called the Holies. He does not tell us what color they represent, what they have on, whether they like garlic or late-night movies on tv. He does not descibe their ideas, because he can not know them really. He wants to know how they can help us in our present, precarious circumstances. He asks us to consider what the modern equivalent of the oracle is. That is something he can grab onto and discuss with some certainty. It reduces his quest to something practical and sensible, like going into a shoe store and picking a good pair of walking shoes. He does not care to get into the metaphysics of ghosts and goddesses, but asks what all the old things mean today and how the old ways can inform us and improve our societies, our selves, our families.

He asks about the substitute myth we have covered over Delphi with. Not with any intent to focus on that matter. He just throws it out as a rhetorical question. He poofs about with how technology is a wan response to Pythia, who just now happens to be standing near a rock at Delphi.

We have no equivalent to the oracle at Delphi that will get us out of the mess we're in. I think he wishes we did. He goes looking for an answer. Surely a culture as wise and powerful as ours, could lead us out of the current wilderness.

There is another question that burns him inside. He states it thus. I paraphrase. "Did the old culture's people rely totally or nearly totally on Delphi for answers? He says, probably not that much. Because there was a bit of flim-flam and mumbo-jumbo to it and the proper Greek, then as now, values most what is clear, true, verifiable.

But again, he implies, the oracles were interesting and had to be considered by the citizens of the time. Like we would consider some wise person's words or the ones of a prophet or priest. Some Bucky Fuller, or Bishop Sheen or we might take a close look at a painter or sculptor, doing work that seems weird but somehow suggestive of spirit and value. I mean that the oracle conveyed some thinking that the people of the time considered and then fitted into the fabric of their intact culture. The oracle spoke. They listened and acted within the framework of their culture, in such a way that made some kind of sense. Whether they really believed in the oracle, or not, seems not as important as the way they folded the knowledge it offered, into their day-to-day existence. At least , that is the way Seferi gets off the hook. They were as smart as we are, or more, so they didn't believe in the thing , lock stock and barrel, any more than we would today. Yet, there was something to it. It required a reach on the part of the citizen of the day and that reach for an answer made their daily life richer, more interesting, more charming, more exiting.

Who cares whether it came from the Goddess of this or that? Through the lips of Pythia in a trance. The oracle was treated as a piece of daily life and was given its due. A bit of knowledge or evidence that seemed to come from the divine. That had to be fitted into everyting else going on in the culture of the time.

The proud pronouncements of the oracle were important, whether they were false or real. It had an effect on who got killed, who won a battle or an argument, who got the guy or the girl in the ancient drama, comedy or play. It had to do with seductions and trade. The temple that was prefabricated in Greece and was on its way to Syracuse in Italy would make it to safe ground in Italy or it wouldn't, and would live at the bottom of the water of the Meditteranean , until some glib graduate student would find it in 1972 and write a doctoral dissertation on it.

Seferi rightly argues the voice was one piece of the old fabric and he tells us to recall that the old fabric was whole, the culture more unified, which isn't the case with ours today. So he says if we can understand a little of Delphi, with its lights and whistles, it will inform us a bit on the rest of the old culture. This all makes some sense to me, as I , too, resist belief in supra-normal knowledge and magic. Yet wish to understand how the ancient culture worked.

Note how cautious he is. I think he acts and sounds as a scientist does. A scientist of the past. So he has to go on and say something like.....well, they had what they had, but what is it we have replaced it with? Anything better? We, who kill at such wholesale rates. We who kill at so rapid a pace. You know the answer.

So, he gives us the article on Delphi. An essay I consider a great , fine gift , from the giant, Seferi. He makes the usual and nice comments about the place. As Henry Miller did once earlier. He describes the routes to Delphi and describes the place. He's come to the temple of Apollo where he's gonna share some fireworks, as only he can. He quotes his love, Euripides; the piece called, "Ion."

"As a bird taketh flight/ On the tripod most holy is seated the Delphian Maiden/ Chanting to children of Hellas the wild cries, laden with doom, from the lips of Apollo that ring."

Seferi is all emotion. He has some anger in his heart. I must confess he is not all reason at all times. Sometimes he loses it. In the Greek of Homer, "Su the megalytora themon ishein en stythessi." Rough treatment in English, is "You just have to control this larger anger, no... rage , in your heart-chest, in your very gut." There are times his emotions overcome him in his journey to the past. His trip to Delphi opens some wounds in his chest. His anger rises to the surface, but he won't stop and rest. There is no time. He must get on with his research.

He goes deeper into his subject. He sees images, forms, figures, in the mounds of rocks, the still-standing walls, the worn friezes, the columns. You know why he is angry. Do I have to say again? Well, yes I do. These are what we have abandoned. These figures and images from the old days. They are full of meaning that we avoid to see. We have ceased turning to those materials for answers.

I fear to quote him, but it is all I can do. "A polygonal wall so much alive that one's hand spontaneously repeats the movements of the craftsman who carved and fitted the stones; a bending of the thumb and index finger to raise a dress with the same grace that one saw the other day in a Greek village; a life-like thigh, as the knee of a woman descending from the chariot bends; the head of a sphinx with the eyes neither open nor closed; a smile that one would call archaic- but this is not enough- of a Hercules or a Theseus. Such fragments from a life that was once whole, stirring pieces, very close to us, ours for a moment, and then enigmatic and inaccessible like the lines of a stone licked smooth by the waves or of a seashell at the bottom of the sea."

Seferi looks up as he walks over Delphi and sees two large eagles crease, over the sky. Their wings are "outstretched," and "immobile." They remind him, he says, of the great god, Zeus, who once set free eagles "so that they would show him the center of the world."

He probes the river of our history. He likens the river to man's blood. It is our life, the moving water, the coursing blood, the mysterious Greece. All are one and one is all.

But, to look. He says, in a piece, " An Old Man on the River Bank,"

"that current which goes its way and which is not so different

from the blood of men,"

and he puts himself in the grand company of all the greats before him who see life,

"from the eyes of men when they look straight ahead without fear in their hearts."

It seems I can just let Seferi speak for himself on the tv, to CNN-concerned viewers. I can't add much of value that will magnify his words. For me he is complete as he is.

We need the oracle. A new one to get us through today's muddle, however we wish to define it. Something we can call the new Delphi or some such thing.

He the piece he wrote at Delphi with the year, 1961.

He witnesses these calm eagles, as he contemplates the site. He ties the big birds into the myth he contemplates before him. He talks about the eagles and then offers a typical Seferi thing, a minor query, a funny aside, a curious petulance. He says with his maddening voice to the reader of the piece, "Perhaps these things come as a big relief."

What does that mean? To me? Seferi leaves our company on the wings of eagles to go to the center of the world. There he will reign over a minor kingdom because he deserves to. His way is so fine. The feathered beings guide him in his quest. His relief comes when the nature and the gods around him give him a hand up into the chariot we can call imagination. The very same vehicle that will deposit him in a land of joy and Greekness. One where he will reside forever with his muses and his pals, the ones we call the poets.

He swooshes off the face of the earth and becomes himself one of those ghosts he describes.

As an artist, his function is to see figures from the past, breathe life in them, disguise them, making up new ones all the time. Kavafi does the same thing.

That is what literary saints are for. To give us, the living, some more fantasies to mull over. Their words are our art, the legacy from the great ones.

They constantly recreate the past, in modern terms, so we will keep it alive. In the case of the Greek past, it is so alive that mostly the non-Greeks do that job for us in plays, stories, advertisements and tv.

We are amused. A lot worried. Seferi can go to Delphi and diagnose our condition as modern Greeks. His article is a roadmap for us to get a glimpse of our ancestors. Yet the moderns, Greek and non-Greek, slick up the story too much. They are too busy, selling a point of view, a product, a sneaker, an olympics. Should they do what they do? Of course not. But we are too cynical and resigned to believe we can change them in any way when they use our buildings and columns to sell stuff, when they take our goddesses and make them into sneakers, when they go to Atlanta and show that their olympics have nothing to do with the way we conceived the olympics a while back in Western history.

We offer that the competition is nefarious in its influence on the athletes, their countries and the whole world. That it fosters narrow nationalisms and we need a lot less of that in our fractured world. Where one side sets off a bomb in a crowded city that disfigures innocent humans, but does not kills them. Such careful planning in a world gone mad.

Who cares who is the best swimmer in the world? I don't, or who is the best sled-driver, or basketball group?

Who in an objective sense could really care if the gymnast who wins the whole ball of wax, as they say, uses Clairol or engages some deep, wise force to make the choice to ingest Excedrin over Advil , for those pains associated with physical activities?

All that coming up to us in Atlanta with the next Olympics, in the months to come. And back home, in the magic Greece, a lone column stands to the sun, settled as it is in the hoary ground of Greece. And a modern ceremony to celebrate athletic prowess gone amuck, does not much bother me. I look with a kind of whimsy that this is where we have come as a modern people, all of us, Greek and non-Greek alike. I think to myself, "we will never know." Never know what a thing our culture was. We can barely recognize it any more with all the distractions that are set before us. Our sleepy and tired eyes see no more.

Seferi knows and tells me. It is not the swoosh thing , the symbol Nike uses to sell its athletic shoe that I focus on, nor the Olympics as they are currently constituted. It is, instead, that dreaded necessity one must engage from down deep in oneself. That dread necesssity one uses to look on our shrines with the care and reverence and understanding they deserve and get from only a few persons, these days.

So with Seferi. In his obscure article in the magazine, he suggests we pay due respect to the old intimations, the old stirrings, as if they could help today, or in the early sixties when he wrote his piece. Nothing helps. He knows that, but still writes what he does. Why he bothers is beyond me. He cannot help seeking "logos," knowledge that will solve the current dilemma, the hate and the killing and the greed and the manipulation. He can solve the modern dilemmas, he informs, if only people will listen to him, listen as he quotes Aeschylus and his hero of the nineteenth century, the mostly illiterate general of Greece, Makryanni. Humans must resolve conflicts, reconcile with one another, across battle lines of the mind and spirit. Or else..... he seems to say to me.

The oracle at Delphi was about elucidation and knowledge. Special knowledge, it was claimed, but still knowledge, bathed in the light of reason.