Pote

The Right Shoe

Pote tha ksanamylysys?

Now, I guess. When will you speak again? The big, sixty-four dollar question, Seferi asks of us, of me, rather. Pote goes with pote. You can go one way or the other and most go the other. Pote means when. Pote means never. For most, it is never. Greekness goes under and we just watch the telly and shop at Damoulas's supermarket. Animals at the trough.

The great American painter and writer, who was laid in his bed with illness most of his life, Kenneth Patchen, said, "most people don't miss a meal." Just look around to see this. At what we euphemistically call, our fellow man.

I hear the heart beat in me. I am looking for the hook. The hook is the clothes hanger, on which to place my next piece of work on the Greek culture in the diaspora. I have the hidden advantage of not knowing defeat. It is so much a part of my daily existence, I have become thoroughly used to it, and furthermore I say to myself, we don't believe in defeat, we Greeks. Here come a poem.

Welcome day

we Greeks

are on duty.

Once more we adorn

the sun with our

verse, voice.

To do art is all we want.

I shall begin.

The Greek poet who said

"All who arrive at airports

believe in postcards."
That is Yannis Papadopoulos in the piece he calls, "Flight 903." I wonder as to the reason we live in words and conclude that if we didn't, then the world would not make any sense and we could live as if, nothing mattered. We could hurt other people with no concern and take food from the mouths of babies. We could make money on the stock exchange, keep our houses at 85 in the winter, eat rich food and let the others in the community fend for themselves. We could be selfish.

We would not go around saving pictures and making up stories about the days gone by. We would not bother to document life today, with plays, watercolors, poems and stories, so the ones to follow will know what todo with their todays. How they may tell it to their children and the blessed grandchildren. I think on my Lindsay, Timothy and Thomas, Jennifer and Melanie and ask how their life will be informed. By what artists, writers, tv shows that matter, by what poets?

My secret weapon is really three people who roll into one. The obscure-to- Americans.... artist, Theophilos, who wanders on Pelion, the mountain over the city of Volos, around five hours by bus from Athenes. Turn of the century, he paints in the twenty odd villages on the mountain, gets ridiculed, pelted with turds. Seferi's essay in the book called, "The Greek Style," clued me in on who Theophilos was and who he is.

The second weapon in me is Seferi. The third, his hero, Makryanni, the adult illiterate who learned to read and write in his thirties, so he could tell our story. He was one of the heroes of Greek Independence in the early 1800's. Our General Makryanni, tormented, jailed, starved, beaten by his foes . Alone at death and oh so pure at death. Always he said stuff like, I stole of no man and only cared to tell truth and keep our Greekness high. He said, we should never sell a Greek thing to anyone, that the land and the stones and dear poems and stories and myths and heroines and heroes were ours, and to sell a thing was to go straight to hell.

I have before me, in my mind, my mother's father, Nikola, a man I admire. I know nothing about him, have no picture, just an image I make up with a few things I was told by cousin, Niko, whose father was Theodori. This last was my mum's eldest brother, the island's pharmacist. The island in question is my homeplace, Nisiro, a place near the big island, Kos.

What I know, is, he, my grandpa, like my other heroes, never took off any person, even a sliver of land or a piece of bread. He never coveted what was not his, and went around our village, Mandraki, being kind and helpful. I want to be like him. I want to give, not take. I try to save the old photos, the Greek poems and a few other assorted trinkets and pieces of string, so I too, can be a conservator like Grandpa Nikola, Makryanni, Seferi and Theophilos.

The catch is, I ain't really Greek at all. I am not even close to understanding what may be called the Greek spirit. I look at lines of the "Iliad," completely baffled. I want to understand, but don't get the language.

I am American, so I look for the generalized truth in its artists and locate it in the beautiful prints of Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh. The paintings of Florine Stettheimer and Charles Burchfield, the photos of Armenian people in the American collection of Project SAVE, in photographers, David Plowden and Walker Evans, in the movies of Stan Chilson. I have just yesterday discovered the work of painter, George Bellows.

My Greek ancestors whom I cite above, those of the last and the current century, Makryanni, Seferi and Theophilos, taught me one thing only.

Never give up. The world and Greekness rely on me. The entire weight of the world depends on me. They never gave up.

A word on each. Makryanni educated himself in Greek in midlife to write about the obligations we have to keep the flame lit as Greeks. He spoke of being honorable and decent, as he knew we Greeks could be. Once the land was secure, once the location we can call Greece today came into existence as a separate place, with its land, its oceans and rocks, then, we would be secure as a people. We have a long, unbroken poetic and cultural tradition.

Theophilos, the painter, goes up and down Pelion, this mountain that hovers over the city of Volos. The several villages astride the mountain, are become prosperous and Volos hums with modern noises. Much of his work is destroyed. What he painted on walls and tablets and stuff. Just vanished. In thin air as they say. Some of his paintings did survive. He just wants to boogie and paints on all known surfaces, using as his subject, real life, postcards, trinkets he finds, his imagination, songs he hears etc. Seferi says he is a precious piece of our heritage.

And last there is Seferi himself. He is ours to own and to have ever more. The sun of our dreams, pliant and docile to the aims of the ancestors.

He stretches back to the ancients; Homer, to Sappho and Archilochus, to Aeschylus, and comes to us with the breath of the moderns in his mouth and his nostrils. He knows everything and everyone in Athenes and stays quiet as he ponders our fate as a people. Oh, Seferi goes on, no matter what. I wish I could be a "no matter what" person, but I falter. I get confused. I go off on tangents, as the Bob of Bob's Discount says. I am scattered and so foolish. How can I satisfy the three ancestors here? How can I remain true to Makryanni, and Theophilos and Seferi.... is the question I ponder today.

Just now I came to the subtitle of my piece. I went to the garage to get a phone number I had left in the car. I am looking for temporary work. Hard to find in January. I needed the number of the temp agency. I looked too, for some old shoes to slip on my feet and found in my usual mess out in the garage, three left feet. God, do I need a right foot. If I can always have a Greek piece of writing cooking, I can keep the ghosts of Greece at bay. "A right foot" is the subtitle for this piece.

Greeks don't believe in magic. That is why the world has so loved our thoughts on paper or in marble. The world we inhabit is free of mysticism, religions, goblins, leprechauns, superstitions.

What we did for the world was enter the world, relate it and like it. The world is hounded by those who say they know the deity and what it has to say. In the name of the deity of whatever stripe, wars are caused, humans strip the skin off live humans they torture. Bombs go off and hostages get held.

Our take on the universe is different. We are grounded. We see out of clear eyes and tell what we see. The poems are grand, the prose even better, because poetry is too abstract for me. At most I take lines off the poets and use them as a form of illumination in 1997. It may seem strange that we who created the gods of old and who cling to a form of Christian belief, specialize in the known and avidly avoid the not-known. I just find it strange to hear people tell me what God wants of us.

Pleasant, polite Socrates taps on one's shoulder. "I beg your pardon, oh brother o' sister, but are you sure you know what you are saying?" He goes on to say we can know what we know only. The things we see in this magnificent world that vibrates before us.

Poets speak with a remarkable sense of the world. The sense that propels my day and makes me so happy I wanna fly.

Paul, I, is a wonk. An ecstatic, a fool, a lover, a wack, a silly and foolish person. My closest associates say so, so it must be true. So here's a little poem.

I wish I lived in a shoe

with nuthin' to do

but take pitchsuz of you

My wish to see the world in photos and the heard word consumes me. Heard word means the spoken word. That consumes me. Like I'm burning in a flame. It is an obsesssion. The "you," above in the poem, in the line, "pitchsuz of you,"is the world, the people, the buses, the yellow school buses I see all the time against the naked coldness of our New England winter. They are rooms that travel our streets and they deposit humans, little ones in different rooms, from the home to the school to the home again. What marvelous contraptions.

I take my counsel from the Greek tradition, but lately have branched out and dared look at something called world poetry. Mostly blood and gore stuff about being tortured in some revolution or other. It seems poets get hassled a lot by dictators and thugs. I looked at the "Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry."

I borrow lovely lines of beautiful poets. Here are some.

Hikmet. "I didn't know I loved...." A sixty year old Turkish gentleman says I didn't know I loved this or that, as he relates a poem about how his life has passed by him and he didn't see things until it was too late.

Or, Maunick who says "the whole world I name garden."

Or Alegria, another poet. "Come, be my camera."

Neruda on the cat. "He walked by himself and knew what he wanted."

Deandrade. "From everything a little remains."

Nasrin, a woman of Bangladesh, put down for being a strong person. "I'm going to move ahead."

These folks are not Greek like me, with my poetic dictates, but who keeps score when you are having fun? I don't begin to get poetry, but I like certain lines and these are some from the Vintage book that I noted.

We are always looking for a right shoe to stick on, on a cold day ,to go with the three lefts I have sittin' there on the garage floor. To be able to walk the universe, we need both shoes. One represents our current reality and the other the past.

We forgot the American baseline. We went into the media and got lost. We are lost. In the late seventies we began to get prosperous and neglected to be poor in fact and rich in spirit. In the forties and the thirties, we had life that pulsed as a good life could. Today is just surviving. Prosperity is another word for stifling, for distraction, for non-life.

What we did was dress up as someone else. We became what we dressed up as. Corporons. Slaves of Organization. We dreamed the dreams of Wall Street, of money, of selfish needs. We forgot the baseline, the America I love, poor yet majestic. We have to look back to find the future. With Seferi I travel to a Greek past. With photographer, David Plowden to an American one. I run with artists. With Reg Marsh to Coney Island. With Charles Burchfield to upstate New York. They picture the America that is the best one we have. The past hides but never disappears completely.

The Greeks say that Apollo still plays unconcernedly among the pines. There is no escaping a world permanently ancient. The Greek past lives in our imaginings, as does the American one.

America may be the first place to live entirely in its media. Today in Boston the airwaves are alive with the Patriots and the superbowl. I am tired of it. Last night Roseanne's husband may have confessed to loving another woman, god forbid, when he went to the West coast recently, to care for his old, sick mother. Media dictate our dreams. Songs, commercials, products, new forms of the diseases sure to kill us and our kin. The American past of just a few decades gone by is forgotten completely.

When we don the right shoe, we become whole and can act in accordance with present time and the past. Only thus can we enter the lower level of what the poet Vaphopoulos calls the "pyramida tys haras." The pyramid of joy. We can dress up any way we want as long as we remember to take the costume off at night and dress ourselves as the ones gone before did.

We Greeks have always dressed up as men, women, gargoyles, bad winds, suns, moons, young girls, wolves, and on and on. We live on the stage, invented this and that form of drama, dance, tragedy, comedy.

We invented performance on the stage. We invented the word Nike, and didn't have it mean a sneaker. It means victory. We invented gorgeous sculpture and column that these days holds up a bottle of alcoholic beverage. No matter. In Greek "the byrazy." It is of no matter. I correct errors and misstatements the ads perpetrate.

When you dress up, you need be yourself after the performance. The Americans have forgot to. We never forget. Our way is to remember. Pythia at Delphi may need to go in a trance to remind the brethren and the sistren that to stay in drag is a kind of problem. Essential verities come through in the old culture.

I dare ask the American, what are you dresssed up as? I ask you to take off the costumy, the costume, and resume your pre-world war two form. I like it a lot better than what you are now.

The only way to climb the pyramid of joy is to be secure in who you are. Only history grants that path. Poets have the answer, like the artists who paint have the answer. I look so closely at the stable of American artists of the twenties, thirties and on, for answers.

I always try to understand a thing alien to me. Why are the people that way? They must have compelling reasons for needing to chase the dollar and not the art, in their and our lives. To not live for art and beauty, is a sacrilege.

Don't the glorious, funny, lovely, smart, kind Americans know that? They must. America, as I have experienced it, is this marvelous, deep and great place, that has been visualized and represented by its artists, writers, intellectuals. American arts are wildly creative, beautiful, fabulous, profound.

The problem is, we ignore the baseline. Left it high and dry, got distracted. Before the affluence that came full force on us in the late sixties and seventies, America was a pretty nice place. It had scale, community and humanness. A daily wisdom we now lack.

Homer focuses on arete, a Greek word that connotes wisdom. The "Iliad," a Greek story, is a long poem on the matter of arete and how it plays out in daily life. Arete is the sum of qualities that make for character. These are virtue, excellence, valor, wisdom. Earlier, grand Americans had a lot of that. Look at their art in print, photo, movie, advertising and you see a lot of what the Greeks call arete. Unabashed arete. Damn good wisdom. Common sense. Life that had scale and drama. A people who were up to living life, no matter what. Depression, war, no money.

Both the Americans and the Greeks understand the importance of being beautiful, human and good in the daily life, which after all, is all that matters. Beauty is a universal imperative. The divinity is with us always. Seferi claims all things are full of gods.

Just look at a Burchfield watercolor of nature as he sees it. Or look at the coloration of a Stettheimer painting and see how she lives in the divine room in her head to our benefit. Our lasting and eternal benefit.

Examine the work of our photographers, tv producers, advertisement makers in the magazines. Faith in art and beauty abound. One is left agog, as in a field of flowers in spring. You don't know where to turn first. We create and may listen as the art tells us how to live and love. How to see American. The Greeks were like us that way.

They heard the gods they made up tell them to be good and creative, and they were. We may accept the gods as metaphoric personages. They symbolize the wind and the stars. We believe in the winds and stars, so I guess we still believe in gods. I think maybe the ancients were like us in that way too. They knew, perhaps, that the goddesses and gods were ideas personified in trees and nature, in the contemplation of death and disease and war. They stressed humanness and the obligation to the community, the polity.

The Iliad says, "filofrosuny gar ameinon." This means "kindliness toward the better, whatever is better." Village dwellers in Dover, Franklin, Norfolk knew the "better," as those of us who live in these small places today don't. To wear a left and a right shoe so as to be able to tred toward the good.

It is easy to miss the miracle in the simple thing. We are the beneficiaries of all the past. The tv and the book to inform us. These fountains of learning are inexpensive. The right foot represents art. The left may be the paycheck, but the right is the Greek foot. Art, beauty and arete.

We need to live life as if it mattered. That we dress up as something else during the day is ok, but we have to take off the costume at night, and become as large as the gods in our little heads. It is only dress-up, this nonsense of making our daily bread. The real job-One is art, love and community. The right foot forward, so to say.

George Bellows, American , around 1910 or so, spent his short life of forty-two years having unabashed fun at the canvas. He located what was beautiful to him and passed it along enthusiastically to his viewer. He is a literal, uncomplicated, direct artist. We need him in these crazed, late nineties.

He never thought much about what he saw. Just painted it and went on to the next thing. Never giving much of anything a thought. The work flowed and he followed its dictates blindly. He faithfully reproduced the things he saw and, if you were to look at his paintings, you would see that he saw a lot of different things, people, houses etc. Mahonri Sharp Young wrote on him. He says Bellows lived fully, had no special message, died on the spot of a ruptured appendix. He joys in his stern Emma and their three daughters. Goes around just lookin'. Goes to a circus with a friend on a lark and just happens to come out with a good painting. Nothing special to him but, life as usual.

What it ultimately comes down to, is what Bellows has down pat. We need to learn to live better, as the old ones did in Greece, as did the ones in the thirties and twenties here. Just better. Not live the best way, but somehow incrementally better than we are doing now. Mahorni Sharp Young says of Bellows, that he did know some deep things, but made nothing of them. He just sort of painted pictures.

Young said something else of George Bellows. That....life is a matter of being mentally alive and constantly thinking of your work. That sums it up for me and seems a good prescription for the artist, citizen, parent, worker of today, to follow.