Quality Carpets

It is across the street and down from Sozio's on Squire Road. This is quite what it looks like.

It got me thinking about signage and my love for abecebra, the jolt of words and alphabet.

I sit on the edge of the flower garden at the Burger King which is opposite the Quality Carpets and feast. The traffic moves along at a fast pace down the street in front of me and one big oil truck says,"Evans Transport," so I think of my favorite, the photographer, Walker Evans, and I just sort of sigh. I consider the pictures he took in Cuba. I like these and a lot else of what he did. A very odd man, living on the dear edge all his life. Unveiling nothing of his true self except in the art, the pictures. And then never saying anything about them. At life's end he sold his whole treasure of photos for a mere fifty thousand or so. A most strange man who always seemed to do what he wanted or what his art wanted and never what others of the art market dictated. He sort of listened to himself bounce off himself and took a picture. Only he did this time and time again and left an oevre of great, potent, powerful pictures.

The common is with us. The alphabet teaches and informs. You may miss the sign, "quality carpets," as you zing along the pregnant highway that is Route 60 or Squire Road. I find that staying in a spot a while can hone the observatory powers and that is, to me, a good thing.

I am working on a film by Stan Chilson and was thinking of a split second of reality he teases with, where a woman and a babycarriage appear on the bottom left of the screen in one of his monologues on Wrentham, a town just a ways from Dover. For me a special thing occurs when I can see a thing, one that is quite still and look at it for a while. I can still a piece of footage of the Chilson movies or take a photo on Squire Road and then look at the thing at my leisure. The technology assists me in this freezing of the action that rumbles around me all the time on the tv, in a film or in the day's life on Squire Road.

I feel that I am a participant in the life around me when I can see a thing and then find myself able to talk about it. To say "Sozio's," is nothing. To show a photo is the world. The picture conveys the spirit of the place, of its inhabitants, of the ones who pass by it daily. Life of a mundane nature has a special pulse that I, as an observer of the common, seek.

Value comes of a strong sight, informed by myth, history and fantasy. The magic of existence is out there. Free of us at all times, according to Seferi who says so. Asked, "does the myth exist within or outside of ourselves?," he answers, "outside," and then adds that we need to believe in fairytales.

Only for a poet, it gets kinda frustrating. There are so many stories all over that wait to be told. One has to see them, then tell them.

On Squire Road, at Bob's Discount, at Quality Carpets, at Sozio's, are stories and spirits and feelings and signs and detritus that blows on the street and in the parking lots. Our animated America has its stories, as Seferi's fabled Greece has its stories. The same process occurs. A poet tells what she or he sees. That is all. This is poets!

Sometimes I jump and kick a lot. I am up to Squire Road early and look at this mundane sign, "Quality Carpets," and wonder how come I never saw it before. I look at Chilson's movies by the hour and wonder why I never see things I need to see. The world is just mysterious to me. It vibrates but I don't know how to pick it up. So I still the world and then try to look at the thing. I must be a boring person to take all the action out, but I really don't know what else to do. I say the words I do and stick pictures in with the words to mirror how I feel about the world I inhabit.

My vids are an attempt to prove Seferi's dictum, that divinity is always hovering about us. In his case the gods were thrown out of their temples when they went to ruin and the shapes hover about nervously looking at all the tourists and playing tricks on them. They are the myth, the one of ancient Greece.... these gods are. They remain as a concrete reality that the Greek way is not done. The myth is out there and not in our heads. This I fervently believe.

The artist just captures a few vague forms that meander about. Seferi's great poem, "Three Secret Poems," is a case in point. It tells me what's what. It is a set of images phrased in Greek words translated to American ones. The little book's third section called Summer Solstice, floors me anytime I go near it.

The same when I look on the pictures of Walker Evans. I know nothing of poetry or photography. Only know the special feeling a work of art performs in me. Like the sign on Squire Road when I go there tomorrow. It will leave me speechless. Quality carpets, indeed.

I don't know much, than to say a smiling simplicity reigns in the world. It is in a sign that an artist paints, an advertisement in a magazine, a photo or a picture out of Stan Chilson.

We are in this mess together. Wait and get it down. Be patient. You have a lot of time to get it down to pass to the seventh generation out there. The myth stays put. It won't go anywhere. It sits restlessly in our America, in Greece and in Italy, too. It is all over. A thing to be captured and we call it art or tradition or joy or song or music or poem or dress design. That is how we get through the day. By believing that the universe is charmed.

Amid all the horror, the hurry, the neglect and that, is the little flower, the bell that chimes, the sign, the pretty picture in the magazine or the photograph. These are the things that matter and the things we need to emphasize and to flaunt. We may call it inspiration or imagination and that rules, always.

The artist is always making a statement, saying, "I think I'm very pretty."

And we get the advertising that graces our magazines, the advertisements on the tv screen that to me are grand works of art. That is how I see it.

In Greek, we query, "poune o thaskalos?" Where is the teacher and the answer is, it is Seferi, Chilson, Evans, the culture, the sign up on Squire Road.

The artist knows to create a simple document that somehow moves within you, when you see it or read it or wear it, if it is a suit of clothes or a garment for a woman. The creation is something unto itself. The artist breathes a life into a created object and the piece takes on a life it owns. We cannot know how this works, but take it on faith, like a religion. The artistic object has a separate existence as a legitimate piece of the universe would. The thing is a baby and it has its own trajectory in the world. The small snip of the woman and the baby carriage in Chilson is this for me. All an artist has to do is keep trying to be good. The great artists are good indeed.

Maybe it is Bebe Spanos who says it for me. Her line in the journal, The Charioteer, where she offers the idea that Greece as a place inspires the artist, gives him or her a sense of freedom to make things and "becomes a celebration of the abiding and heroic spirit of all men who refuse to be alienated from the earth."

Art is dangerous and leads to madness in the maker. See if you will, Jessica Lange dance in the movie, Blue Sky, and you get my drift. I say of her that artists have their own peculiarness they long to express and Lange does express it. The human is but an excessive who longs to sex and eat and dream and play and say words that melt on the tongue. That is what an artist is, an excessive, a mad person, a foolish one. Most of all foolish.

One time I was trying to talk to a friend who explained me best to me. We were standing in the lower parking lot of the town hall and I was campaigning, holding a sign for someone who was sure to lose and he mentioned to me that I wasn't a bad person, not evil, or grasping or dumb even. He said I was foolish to chase my tail around all the time, trying to force the world into my image which is saccharine and giddy and joyous and impractical. I suppose I really believe in my foolish visions or I wouldn't be able to survive at all. As it is, I barely function now and with not a vision, a very foolish vision, I would be rendered inoperative to my self and that wouldn't be any fun.

In "Prasini Mera", the poem by Ritso, "Green Day", the virgin-maid knits the dowry and the man braids the basket and the goats feast on the salt by the water. Life goes a way and then some more and Yiannis Ritso grabs the image and lays it on us in all its simplicity. Life rules. Art is that way. The finished painting just stands there. Breathing like Seferi says of the statue of the little boy, the Charioteer, he visits and stands aside at the temple of Delphi. Or the poster of a Hockney flower arrangement that I feasted on yesterday in the office I was working at. I spoke to it silently and thanked God he or she put a Hockney before me to mitigate the horror of the filing and counting I was hired to do in the office I was in for the day.

I have come to know I am totally useless and utterly valuable. This I believe. Let the friends worry over me and my musings. Let Bob call me Professor Nutmeg, a rare spice. I am a so-called spirit of the place, Bob's. Fact is fact. Face it and go on. The soul is loose.

The spirit is at Bob Briggs's, up at the Shady Oaks farm. I am certain. It resides at the Natick Community Organic Farm, off Route 16 in South Natick. I am sure. I see it in the eyes of the goat.

My argument is that we poor people need a home, a spiritual home, not a religion or an ideology like capitalism or socialism. Or a strong and exclusive nationalism, or racialism. What we need is to find where the soul resides, the Greek soul if you will. It is in farms and signs and around highways. There is where the Greek soul resides. In the cows at Bob Briggs's farm, in the huge maws that are Bob's own hands, in the chicks at the Natick Community Farm. In the lines of Ritso and those of Seferi or amid the photos of Evans or the picture show of Stan Chilson.

In my own words, there is the notion, a Greek one I fantasy, that each individual has his or her own peculiarness they have to get out and when they get out an authentic vision, sparks fly. Artists create and we enjoy the production for ever and more in the photo or the line of sacred print. I just read the biography by Dunning of Alvin Ailey, an American dancer and choreographer, and he was such a fire-maker. A god in his own right to choreograph a generation or two of American ballet, much of it with an African-American twist.

Live Greek! You don't gotta be one. Just join the party. Say it sweet. Say it right. Tell the truth. Dare to speak. Try to be good. All that stuff. And Seferi muses, then wonders how close have we come to the spirit that is the old Greece, and the truth is not very close, but we must be in there pitching for the unborn. That is why he enjoins us in the poem I noted earlier to "call the kids and gather the ashes, fonakse ta paidia na

mazepsoun ty stakty."

People are lost today because they have no home. They don't really identify with the place they live in or with the larger polity much any more. They are global times we live in. They have no Greece of their own. Their spirits wander and they are scared.

I spend my time here dreaming of the place I call Sweetland, the America in me. One is ever after one's own freedom in the art. A search for pure beauty. To climb another mountain when you start a new piece of work is so grand. It ennobles you and the mountain too. Here is Pogo who says, "We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities." That is what I needed to hear from Pogo. The beat has to go on or we just drive the car around to do a spiritless shopping at Walmart and then Damoulas. Without quirkiness, one wouldn't take pictures of signs up on Squire Road in Revere, or sheep at the Natick Community Farm or the town hall in Dover at all times of the year. One wouldn't think about fables and myths, or try to be good at the least. We must seek to stop being automata and start to live, is all.

I am not sure how to finish, than to say that we seek the past to teach us. Seferi says "The ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again and smile in a strange silence." From his poem," Mythistorema". There is a unity that culture provides.

Daily life is a lunatic asylum. I am at the Hellenic Nursing Home, watching Michelle cut the hair of residents in a smallish room that is the beauty parlor. The customers complain and holler. One old woman drops her doll and starts crying. A gentleman in the chair has lost his mind. He is younger than me and just sits there grinning, as Michelle jumps from him to one under the dryer, to the one whose colored curlers need to be removed now, and like that. A madhouse, I think, while Michelle controls the whole thing with a calm and an aplomb that is breathtaking. She is a young woman and I don't understand where all her patience and wisdom come from. Maybe 'cause she's Greek and know how to act. I don't know.

Well, civilization is that way too. Loony, with its clones rushing about so, they have no time for beauty. At Damoulas's if you're not careful, the suburbans will run you over with a shopping cart, as they are in a hurry to get the barbeque started, or get to this event or that, they are spoiling their kids with. While I stand there, admiring the eggplant under the gentle mist coming from somewhere above it, or wondering over the pretty cereal boxes, or spectacular detergent containers.

I stand there, is all. All I know how to do, as I am about to hit 60 years on the planet. Like Michelle at the beauty parlor in the nursing home, I don't get rattled much by the inmates of our joint worlds. I do my job like she does, efficiently and with grace. I look out, while she takes out curlers. She makes an old head beautiful and I do another video.

There is ever the witness, the scribe, the seeing thinker. The fool selling apples in front of a university. The Stan Chilson recording Wrentham slowly and lovingly. That is why I said in one of my vids he will be back on the streets of Wrentham one day, recording and saving again, our sense of the everloving journey on the fair earth. Or it is Evans taking his pictures,. or the Frenchman, Eugene Atget. We have so many to thank.