Parking

One stands, hour after hour, alone. No sound or sight or feeling, just alone in a room of one's making. Oh, there are outside noises, but the active imagination can shut them off at will, if other inner sounds beckon to the person. It is this inner source that I find interesting. At this time I ask myself about two matters. One is the question, "what are you dressed up as?"

And then I manage to say, "you must have compelling reasons for being the way you are." Now, in the background there is a third matter I must confront, as I stand at Bob's in the parking lot. But I don't know what it is, this third issue. This essay is an attempt to locate it.

The holy man in South Africa who stands in the parking lot with his sign is important. It is cheaper to hire him than to put in a permanent sign. So his wage pays for him to stand there and advertise for the parking. All day, and maybe into the night. And then he gets to go home and get ready for the next day, and he stands there. I admire and applaud the patient fellow. I wonder as to the nature of the apartheid I have read about, for some thirty years now, since I went off to graduate school at Brandeis in the mid -sixties. It is just that kind of society that would be able to put a fellow into a parking lot because it was cheaper than a permanent sign.

What I do, is go into a trance, or what is called "koma." With a "k", as we don't have a letter, "c", in the Greek. I don't know what this heroic fellow does inside his head, as he stands there, a beacon of goodness and information. An ad for the nature of the society he lives in. I couldn't know, as I can not come close to feeling how he feels. I think, instead, of Mr. Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, and Steve Biko. I think of fellows who were pushed out of six-story windows to splat on the street below. I think a lot about what they did in apartheid. Always have and will not forget.

I have chosen to be in a parking lot to sell my wares. I do not come close to knowing why someone else does what he does. Only, it was a poignant thing for me to see the photo in the photo-essay, a book called "Standing Apart," about the former South Africa. I have on my mind the current trials of reconciliation where the criminals, most of them white, confess to the horrors they did to the South Africans of darker skin color and they get to go free, because they confess. A remarkable thing. I try in my heart to understand why people do what they do, how they feel afterwards, and finally, will they do it again if they can? I don't know, but the current South African trials interest me.
My job is to understand the late time of this century, as we move to the next one. I do it with the weapons of the old Greek culture I explore. It has to be a cold, hard look. Borrowed of the poets and artists of that time. Greek aristocrats. "Aristo," meaning excellent and "krats" meanings members of the polity, the nation. The best of our people, is what it means to me. Aeschylus, for example. But in the land of the free, America, there are some aristocrats too.

I did an essay on the photographer, Richard Nickel, a brave fellow who documented the buildings of the architect, Louis Sullivan. This latter revolutionized tall American structures at the century's turn. His buildings were being demolished thirty or forty years later and Nickel didn't like that. All he could do is object, and gather what he could before he witnessed Sullivan't structures crumble. Photographs and shards.

He worked for our grandchildren and theirs also. To save pieces of earlier greatness that is called, American art. Nickel was way out there into the next century, in his mind at least. Saving... so we would remember and act on that remembering. So one of them, a little child of the future, would have the courage to stand out alone, like Sullivan or Nickel. I mean there would be a model for a new person to have the sense and the power to stand alone. To do art in the form of a building, a poem or a photograph. Like the man in the picture of the parking lot, I led my essay with. He is my hero.

So is Sullivan and so is Nickel. They are not men to me. They are in the category, "human," and could be women or girls or old women or any other kind of women. I am far beyond gender typing at this point. When I say man, I mean woman too. So Nickel stands as human in the quote below by the newspaper writer, Donald Hoffman, as he correctly remembers Richard Nickel, that holy one. He writes the following in an obituary. "It is convenient to forget a man who stood alone."

I am not modest. Haven't the time. I stand alone too. I know I do. Stand alone, so down the track they will have words to write the new popular songs, so the people will have heroic-type themes to celebrate the human spirit.

Anyone who stands alone is an heroic. It is not a color or gender thing, but a mixed matter. Brown, not white. Grey, not white or black. The blending of the human style is where we are heading, whether we know it or not. Where we will leave people alone to develop as they will, and not tie 'em up with racial or gender labels that leave them alone to stand hour after hour in parking lots, holding up signs.

Instead, humans will be hard at work in village or backyard, making things like pottery, poem or song, or building, to sing, or proffer to neighbor. One who is not black, white or brown, not female or male, but just human, another creature in god's panoply. Not Assyrian, or Phrygian, not African or Asian, or American, but first human, and then one of those other things. I don't care a damn about whether some person I love is Greek or American, fat or skinny, a farmer or owner of a factory, seventy or seventeen. Man. Woman. White or Black.

All I care is what is your song? Can I hear it and can you make it so I can sing it too? So we can have something to sing about. Together.

The parking lot attendant, me, for example, says this of one's position in America in the late time of the nineties,

"I pray, I stay, I stand, I hope, I get by, I get along, I get what I need. I am happy."

The Americans play dress-up. It is beautiful. The whole darn country with its tv and its music and movie, explores the human spirit and then sells it to the rest of the world to "catch up with." Isn't that wonderful to see? I think so and refuse to feel we are alienated. We are simply thespians, to dress up in one the other's clothes. We have a set for the week of work and then another on the weekend, when we do the lawn or shop at Damoulas's or go to the mall. Oh, the American who can be anything he or she wants by going to Walmart and thus getting outfitted. We are such Winnie the Poos, and then Donald Ducks, Madonnas and Seinfelds. I think that is so amusing to see.

What are you dressed up as?

I read some women in the office wear a red power suit, because the color red is one of power, blood, feminine superiority and that. That is amazing. And the ones who write our songs and hit our balls in the baseball or pitch them fast, or dunk the basketball, get millions of dollars to help us to dream some more and get us to buy the products with the Nike swoosh on them. How curious.

We all stand in the parking lots of our lives and await the circus parade, the show under the big top, the next spectacle. We have a fantasy and then live in it.

We really do here in America with its variety of song, vid, movie, print book, rom, net, drug, alcohol, daily experience, career, sexual experience, trip to the mall, job, religious experience, gender trial, family drama, soap in the afternoon, cosmetic trial, bad hair day, experience at the ballfield, trauma over the plight of the New England Patriots, drama of the Italian national soccer match, and on and on.

For the matter gets phrased now. We are dressed up, as whatever we want to be. We can now be anything we want. Millions died for our sins, so we could be in that position. We have an aweful responsibility to be as bold as Chryssie Hind, as intrepid as Superman, as seductive as the Folger coffee siren in the ad. As creative as Louis Sullivan. Because they taught us how.

How to dress up.

Aristophanes did it in the Greek plays. His actors gussie up in the garb of the Athenian to make fun of Socrates. What a fool this didact was. A ridiculous busybody. Oh Socrates, they bought you off, the rich did. Your patrons.... and you strut about saying how virtuous you are, you fool. Says Aristophanes in the play "Clouds."

The humans do dressup, and we are fixed to the Gump, the Nell, the cop of "Homicide on the Streets", the mountie of "Due South," the Budweiser frog, the Clairol woman with the shaking hair. The Pinesol woman whose house is clean and smells up so nice. One must ask, "what are you dressed up as?"

In my life, I saw the professors in the seventies who pontificated about this or that in the universities I taught at. I asked them, what they were dressed up as, and they found it in their heart of hearts to throw me out. God bless them.

As protest, I sold apples in the street in front of this hallowed university and told them to stuff it, as I wanted not any part of their reality.

I went to the lovely flea market of the nineteen-eighties and the smelly gear-making machine shops. I went to the offices of the places the temp agency sent me to in the nineties. I cleaned houses and took pubic hairs off the toilets of customers whose houses I cleaned in the nineties.

I stood and stand as a fool, as a silent one, in the parking lots of the nineteen-ninety sevens, waiting for the messiah to come, and I think it may be in the form of a South African like Tutu, Mirian Makeba, Mandela or the acappela group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

I want to be tough like them. I don't really give a damn, whether I survive. As long as I can stand there in the parking lot of my dream without a cane, a walker or a wheelchair, and simply sing my song. In my head. The one Chryssie Hind taught me. The one I heard from Mr. Shabalala and his crowd, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Let us dress up nice for the new decade in two thousand.

"What are you dressed up as?"

Let us pre-two thousand humans set the pace for dress-up in a free two thousand, in all the countries of the world, including our United States, as they say. All those states with the names of such wonder, as I mouthe them. Wyoming, Arkansas and dear old Ohio. Massachusetts. Oh, how could one begin to survive such beautiful place-sounds. The places where our heroic persons of this century have lived, loved, died and been reborn to usher the new century in our heads. Oh, Oklahoma. Oh, Florida. Oh, Pennsylvania. Oh, America.

Some thing causes us to be the fools we dress up as, in the wonder place, America.

In our personal biographies, a set of reasons lurks which makes us what we are. Our personalities are formed of our experience with the worlds we inhabit. Now my second query.

I phrase it thus. "You must have compelling reasons for being the way you are." The truth is.... the freedom they have, scares the hell out of these American people, because they have too much freedom and cannot know what to do with their high definition televisions, their sudden love for ecology and the ties to nature, the rom, net and prosac, the alcohol, tv sex, gadgety car, bullet train, new contraceptive pill and the now- abililty to clone a quiet sheep to another of its brethren, to create a new, still quiet sheep.

The truth is... many of us aren't too nice, really. So introverted and tied up with our reverie, we haven't the time to talk with anyone who doesn't see the world the way we do. So we don't talk to the young when we are old. The white to the African-American, 'cause we don't know any. The gay with the straight. The marijuaned with the non-marijuaned. The liberal democrat with the certain-minded republican. The Bush with the Clinton, or the Hillary with the Nancy Reagan. Funny isn't it. That we fall into our niche and cower and shake, like a dog getting a rabies shot.

I just think we should step out and celebrate our new posibilities. Not cower, but proclaim the freedom and the possibilites we have; to stop killing one another for religious, ideological, gender or sexual-preference reasons.

Step out and say hello, is all. To stand in one's own parking lot and say" hi." Smile and be content with god's presence as you happen to define it. I don't care if you speak Spanish or American. I spend much of my time talking to people in Bob's parking lot who don't know what the hell I am saying and we communicate fine. We don't need language. I touch them with my hand and my love and my smile and the joy of being with them that is mine. They know. They touch me back, feel something good that they give me back.

I don't give a damn whether they are gay as they say, or from Haiti or the Dominican Republic, whether they are American or Martians. Whether they eat meat or don't. Whether they have money or are poor. Fat or skinny. A child or adult.

I see they must have compelling reasons for being the way they are and let it go at that. So they are confused some of the time and occasionally nasty and intolerant. I just say, to try to be nice and get along, so we can stop the murders, the beatings of people with hard words and blows, the genocide, the financial exploitation.

If we will just create for one another, some of the tough things we do to one another, will disappear.

The great Greek culture I follow, says to be nice and work for the mass of the citizens. To be noble, spare, kind, and it says..... to be elegant. This last eludes me as I am always too scattered and preoccupied. But I try, and that is all I can do.

The issues are to be summarized thus. First. Dress up as may make you comfortable as the train pulls in to the station, to move us to the century twenty-one. Biography, one's past experiences, makes you act the way you do. I dare to suggest; " you must have compelling reasons for being the way you are."

Third, lastly, let me say, "let me learn to sing the song you sing, so we can sing together."

I will sing along with you and hope for a society with the good things and not the bad. So the children of the seventh generation out there, will prosper. I read the Native Americans care about the world that far into the future, so I do too. A couple hundred years. It is them we must focus on and not keep tying ourselves up in knots. A seventh generation of human beings who will one day inhabit our space, our parking lots, shoes and homes.

I can give you examples of people I admire. I have done some seventy or so vids on that matter and many haven't been erased yet. Forrest, Nell, Winton Marsalis, Stan Chilson, photographer David Plowden, movie-maker, Nancy Savoca, members of the family that raised me, Mr. Fryer of Dover, Richard Nickel and Louis Sullivan. The Greek poets. They are role models we can learn things from. Meanwhile the beat goes on and I must turn to the work at hand.

All I care, is the next piece I am doing, and I finish this little essay with a bit of "Green Day," or in the Greek, "Prasini Mera." By a pal who writes poems, named Yannis Ritso. He lived and died in Greece. Some liked him, a lot didn't. He was, and is for me, a very good poet in my culture.

Prasini mera liovoly, Green day sunshiny,

kaly playia sparmeny, the hill nicely planted,

kouthounia kai velasmata, myrties kai paparounes.

hear bells, sheep bleat, amid myrtles and poppies.

The maid or young woman knits her dowry and the young man braids baskets and the herd of goats along the shore, pastures on the white salt.

H kory plekei ta prika ki o nios plekei kalathia kai ta trayia yialo-yialo voskane t'aspro alati.

The poet, Ritso, tells us, life goes on as usual. The family and the nature will survive. Will survive war and civil war, and witchhunt. The key is, to keep your eye on the ball, the poet says in other places. Whatever you believe, hope for, want. You must always be focused and have an eye on the ball, so you can hit a home run and be happy. And not hurt the other person next to you. He argues in his work that the issue is freedom. Freedom to develop as a human being within a society that is decent.

It comes down to living simple, being modest and having small aims to just live and live well. Without grand accumulation, without artifice. We have to think big and live small. I feel that way and need to say it.

I stand in the parking lot at Bob's. I think about that fellow in South Africa standing in the parking lot holding a sign, and just standing there, all the day for months and maybe years. How far the reality is, from justice, or even common sense.

Yet there is hope, if we think, and try to conquer despair and anger. Let us do this.

Ask, why we are the way we are, so we can change and stop the negative things that dominate our news in the papers and the tv.

I feel there is always hope for a better day. A better way of being. That different ideas, loves.... a different devotion, will one day rule, as it did in the old days.

Seferi, the Greek poet, talks about another way, as he stands aside the statue of the Charioteer at Delphi, at the old shrine of the ancients and he seems to hear the statue talk and breathe and smile to him and hint of a different way of being, of another kind of life. Of a simplicity, grace, quietness, modesty, that pulls Seferi into his history. So much so, he never comes back out of his history. His poems are that tied to his vision of the world of old that he lives in. He reinterprets the old world for us today, so we will look to it for answers for the time we are entering. His findings seem appropriate to me as we make better people of our young, as we create villages anew, and nations from scratch.