Solitary

It's as if I can see him now, as E.M. Forster, that most sensitive of scribes, sees him. He says, there he is, His Honor, Mr. Kavafi, motionless, a straw hat on, standing at a slight angle to the universe. Always cocked, always mysterious, with a little, sly grin, as he contemplates his fate and the fate of his people. His are always doomed folk, or so vain, they become purely disgusting. Who is this person who describes the backwaters of the Greek world, after we lost the strategic battles of Magnesia and Pydna, back in the 100's BC? Who is this person?

The rest was downhill. The Greek culture took second place behind Rome, and anyone else, who cared to exploit and rule us. The world Kavafi describes is one of deceit, failure, complicity, weakness, danger, fear, and hatred. It is a shadow world, of failed Greeks, with not a chance to survive. It is his world and welcome to it.

So accustomed to succcess stories, we, moderns forget that failure, not success, is our most common cohort through life. To understand an era, one cannot do better than to look at the failures and not the successes. Kavafi knows this, because all his life he is unimportant to all, except a few friends, to whom he passes out copies of his apparently abstruse poems. He lives and dies known only to a few, as the great poet and commentator he is.

Kavafi describes few men and women who come out with their pride in tact. Most succumb to the needs of the flesh, get used up, and are thrown in shallow graves. He throws this real life in our faces. Some hundreds of years later, the only reminder of such spent humans is a gravestone that Kavafi treats us to, under it a form, that once lived and breathed like us, but one that is now forgotten. Dead and gone, as they say. Only the bard remembers and throws it at us.

Why he does it, is the big question. Of course, I know the answer. He does it to show that Greekness is so vast it does not require personal or national victories for it to survive. In fact, it does better in poor soil and hard conditions. Like those of the homeland, the Greece, he seldom visits or knows is there. This little diasporic Greek who has seldom visited the holy land, knows its characteristics better than the rest of us and seldom stops telling us to go for it, live fully, not complain. To enter nameless graves of our very own with no complaint. Never complain, never explain.

As Greeks of course, though,anonymous ones.

The Greek, "anonymous," means to say, "one with no name." To be Greek is enough. No name. Who cares if you are a pure Greek? It comes to cover all contingencies....having some amount of Greekness in you.

In a way Kavafi is the the vainest of men. He says that the Greek words, the actual words, in his wacky poems, are all one needs to ride to immortality on the wings of some cockeyed angels. So get about life. Get on with it and make a mess, because it really doesn't matter whether one is successful or not. All matters is, if you are having fun, just doing stuff, and somehow, you manage to live to remember it, and savor it, when and if, you become an old man or woman, or some blend of the two.

Not a nice man at all. No, no, not a nice man. That Kavafi, with his mysterious smile, the candles lit at odd times, in his apartment above that whorehouse in Alexandria. A bad dude who would change the world-view of many artists, mountebanks, gamblers, revelers and second-rate intellectuals like me. Kavafi, a knave under whose banner, gather a rag-tag assortment of dreamers and crooks. Our very own Kavafi, our own.

There is no-one in this whole world as bad as Kavafi. I claim him wholeheartedly as kin. First, his name. From the Turkish, ayakkabici, meaning shoemaker. Even the name is not Greek. Years spent in Constantinople and Liverpool. Speaking the language, Greek, and at the same time, English, with an Oxford-English accent, for God's sake!

Yet, with a surety of form, that one is left agape, at the beauty and parsity of the Greek of his poems. He dazzles, plain and simple, because he is so sure and so weird, both. Creative power lives in him and stirs the subsequent generations, including the later master of our tongue, Seferi, whom I quote here. "He is always discovering things." Seferi is a beacon that follows Kavafi half a century later to remind us of who we are, if anyone cares to know. Only very, very few, care. Seferi picks and chooses from among the scribes and touts who claim to know about our Greek heritage, and he locates on Kavafi, as someone important and most crucial to knowing the Greek spirit.

Kavafi concentrates on the negatives. Usually to do with our inexhaustible vanity and consuming selfishness. But along the way, we see some light from his pen, dipped as it is, in light. Seferi borrows of it. To remind us of our potential to the world if we stay Greek. Also of the perils to world harmony if we don't. Seferi goes to Oslo as a Nobel Prize winner to say that to be Greek is a great responsibility and requires exquisite grace. Only our Seferi can muster such grace, as the ones who chose him know, to let the world realize it will not cure itself of war, genocide, killings, until it gets in touch with its basic soul. The world is not even close.

One knows that the humanness he urges on us, the catholicity of view, is still pipedream. Seferi knows it too, but he can only tell the world the truth. That until we stop being so selfish and nationalistic and materialistic, we cannot go about the job of making the world a better place. We have to be in touch with our negative traits before we can make improvement, and Kavafi is an expert that Seferi draws on to teach us about our negatives.

Seferi writes about his debt to the master over a generation after Kavafi's passing. One cannot begin to value the contribution of this peculiar fellow, his language, his grace, his prescience, his oddness, his Greek fire. His use of language, his ability to say a lot with a few Greek words. Seferi is surely one who knows the value of the master, Kavafi, the one who stands at an angle to the universe. He is never sentimental or overly effusive.

He is just plain on target, telling us, who will follow, why Kavafi is always a key to our culture. In the positive sense. Not as libertine alone, but as a bright light. One who will lead the culture into the 21st century. He is the one who will tell us that Greekness must survive, the Greekness of noble Hellenic values. The ones of honesty, decency, clarity, simplicity. The values that have to do with personal courage. At bottom, Kavafi is about values. The ones we will need to keep the thing of the Greeks going. Seferi knows all this and says so. That the fellow, Kavafi, is not just knocking the human as some weak thing, prone to genitial excess, but exhorting the human as one who may rise to individual and personal greatness.

George Seferi talks to Kavafi about the world in the 1950's, even though the latter is dead and presumably buried. I talk to Seferi about my era, in the late 1990's. Seferi left our immediate company in the early '70's. He sits in the room with me, and I tell him about the baby-boomers in Boston, who are spending a fortune on facelifts and tummy-tuckies, so they will look young and keep their little job. Well, as you can imagine, that seer, Kavafi, also worried in his poems about the loss of youth and the diminution of sexual capability. He could easily understand any unusual taste-thing, we might describe today, in the talk show, or the tabloid. My brother the pimp, or my mother, dreaded, dear mummy, who sold me for a pittance to a sadistic, wicked count. Which last kept me in a closet and let me out only on Christmas day.

He sees all, does Kavafi, especially the weird and the excessive.

He says there is to be no way out, so grin and do it, your rotten life, and then pay the price. Most who are odd and excessive, like Kavafi, do it, and pay the price. He argues that the person must follow his or her instinct as it relates to taste, culture and values.

Let us go a bit with Seferi on Kavafi. Others have a good line on the old bard, and I also have a definite feel for what Seferi is getting at in his appreciation, and will work on his ideas a bit. I must say that Kavafi is dissected and analyzed most competently by Liddell, Bien, Sherrard and others, who translate the poems in charming and satisfying fashion. I just feel comfortable with Seferi and will quote his thoughts. The British always seem to have such a fearsome understanding of the Greek path. I don't know why I like them so; except when I read their work, I feel I am transported back to Greece with the vividness and accuracy of their descriptions. I must add they love Greece and the Greek idea so. I find that so moving and positive a thing to know. They're right on target.

I believe the poet, Kavafi, has a terrible time, handling the burden of the work imposed on him. This is true of any serious artist, and thus, true of this poet. We are told the road is lonely. Seferi says this. "His discoveries are made only along that lonely path which he follows himself."

There are no roadmaps, no firm paths to follow. Kavafi makes up characters for his poems, also scenes, imaginary ones. He lives in a make-believe world of historical associations. He sees history through the eyes of a broken-down ironworker, whose sexual excess has destroyed his body. Or through the actions of a peddlar who is watching the citizens cheer at the news of an impending victory abroad, which will turn out a defeat. The news of the victory is got wrong. The peddlar looks on all these cheering fools with a weathered and practiced eye. Business as usual. A hawker won't care if the Greeks win or if the Romans win. It is all the same to him.

To Kavafi it is the losing that counts most. He studies failure and its effect on the spirit. When you think about it, failure is much more common than success, but we avoid to talk about it. We fear failure like the plague, like it is catching, or something. But decay grabs onto Kavafi and that is what he analyzes. Because of that, some few Greeks and Britons have been laughing and admiring this most peculiar fellow among us. We are all accustomed to failing. It has something to say , failure does, about the human condition. How we handle failure, says much more about us than how we manage success. To fail is human, to live as contradiction, just fact. So why kid about it.

What is most interesting of all, is the way those who know Kavafi realize and accept that he is unique. Forster says it. Durrell and Henry Miller do. Dear Senor Seferi knows it and says it. I think I always return to Seferi because he is so honest and down-to-earth. He is easy to understand in his essays and never, ever lies. If he does not understand a thing, he says so. I don't mind liars. They have a kind of charm to them I enjoy. And after all, I live my life among liars. They are my favored mates.

It is just when I get to something personal and important, the truth is to be preferred. There is the feeling that in Kavafi, one finds a special evocation of Greekness. His Greek fire is kept hid, under syntax and vocabulary, but Kavafi knows to display it when..... if he didn't, contemporary Greek culture would go down the drain. In other words one has to know that with no Kavafi, nothing of our culture, that grand Greek thing, would have been assured.

He, and he, alone, is responsible for keeping us up there in lights in this, our very own, twentieth century. He set a tone that some Greek and other Western artists emulate, admire and cherish. Not Seferi alone, but other intellectuals, read the lines and marvel at him; this little tiger of ours, who never said, yes, to despair, but fought to stay odd and Greek in his own funny way. One who acknowledged failure and the pitiful condition of the human being, you and I, but who said and says, "pal, that's all there is, so make the best of it!" Be of good cheer, he says. It will only get worse.

Remember the Hellene lives sweet. Always serene, quiet, deep, and aware. Aware of everything.

In this way he brings us to our senses all the time. That the human is weak, but able to reach into divinity, if only he or she will try. From muck and mire, from excess and failure and doddering , Kavafi speaks his way into heaven. The language gives him the key to individual greatness. He takes mud and turns it into gold.

Seferi says," So far as my own knowledge of literature goes, I know of no other poetry so isolated as his." Imagine an artist with no benchmarks, no examples to follow. A unique. Not like monks, not like gods, nor historians. Not Socrates or Leonidas. No-one to emulate. A storyteller out of the dark, from no-place, who comes to us, to tell about obscure figures from Byzantine times, who come forward for their minute in the sun and then sink into the mire. That is it. The poet from nowhere, who is going to nowhere, and is willing to take us all along for the ride, if we wish.

What has this to do with Greekness, one may ask? And he answers, everything. Our race pulses with life and confusion, and comes out whole in the end. We witness constant failure in ourselves, and emerge ticking and ready for more of the everloving, crazy, life-journey. Like the guy on the Timex commercial . We take a licking and keep on ticking.

Madness, crazyness, irrationality, and all the bad stuff... are what humans are about and Greeks are no exception. No glossy stuff about the good life, no savior telling us to turn the other cheek, no talk about the joys of celibacy here.

Kavafi is clearly on the side of sin and how we experience it, interests him. We all sin, he says, and most of us like it; only it comes back to slay us and then we wonder if it was really worth it. But Kavafi answers, "sure, it was," and goes on to assert, "because we now have something to remember about the days when we were young and crazy." These memories serve to warm the later days of age, when the limbs ache and the body heaves with any major exertion. It is the naughty memories that keep you warm on cold evenings.

He is master of deception. Humans spout all the time about their personal honor and decency, but it is a lie. Kavafi's heroic figures do the same and they lie, too. Seferi describes Proteus, in the fables of Homer, and compares him to Kavafi. His line about Proteus; "Nor was the old man forgetful of his skill in deception." The two elders are fibbers of note.

Kavafi's work is but one longish poem on the matter of deceit, one long one, not a series of separate ones. His line is always the same. That men and women are doomed, and better well realize it and live now, because tomorrow they will be old and worn out. They will always deceive themselves about how fine they are, but they are liars and compromisers. This failing, Kavafi points to. He is talking about you and me.

One long song of complaint about the delicious straights humans get born into, and die in. A lament for wasted youth and the wrinkles of age. The fat belly, the crooked smile, the inability to climb up stairs. The decline of age and the ugly and certain death. Ever pure and young, Kavafi sings the song of youth and then defiles it, reminding us of the certain coming of age. I don't know how he does it, but he makes it seem that we live a joke and refuse to see it. His analysis is realistic. It does not gloss. He is a documentarian, not one with any exaggeration. He is not telling us one race or ethnic group is superior; just that people are this way and that there are few ways out of the human dilemma.

Only, Kavafi figured there was a possible solution. If one were strong and Greek, one might get by, leaving this earth, with dignity, grace and a smile on one's face. Kavafi manages this. This is his ultimate triumph and the later biographer Seferi knows and points out this fact.

Kavafi sees the joke that is life and tells us, not to worry. Just live. Not one way or another, but according to the deepest dictates of our souls. Pay the price, he says. It is worth it. I am not so sure, but he is. Just get on the first step of your own very dream. The front car of your very own, dream train. See, he says," Ki' an eisai sto skali to proto, prepei nase uperyfanos k' eftihismenos. If you get onto the first step, you gutta be proud and satisfied." He sucks you in with a promise and gets you in his grasp from then on. That old magician corrupts endlessly with his poetry and rhyme. His is a siren call and woe to the one or the ones who listen. I did and look what it has done to me. God save us!

Seferi's claim is mine, that the poems of Kavafi in the Greek, are an important add-on to the thing he, Seferi, calls the Greek Anthology. The anthology is the Greek writing that stretches back into our history. That mix of blood and gore and sex and violence and love and joy and happiness and light, as the Greeks have explored it. The blend of light and dark the Greeks specialize in. The Freudian-style exploration of the so-called spirit that we know intimately. Seferi says that the poems of the master are merely the latest in an old line of verse. But what an oevre, what a piece of work! There is none like it in human description which can match its carnage and exhaltation, both.

His poems are political and personal both. He writes the one about the Achaian league set in the pre-Christ ages. It's just a poem about long-dead Greeks. But it's not really. Because it has modern parallels, as Kavafi intended. Kavafi never says this, but relies on the astute Seferi to point it out. The story is always the same, whether pre-Christ or 1996. Or some time early in the twentieth century.

Seferi claims, it.... the poem about the Achaian league, is also about the slaughter at Smyrna in 1922, the date on which Mr. K. composed the poem. Seferi notes the date of the poem and in a sudden burst of understanding, he realized that Kavafi was talking current, and not old, as he spoke of Greeks dying for their country, for the country, and doing it gladly. All the time, the master was being contemporary, but just hid his sense of pride so we would have to uncover it. In 1922 the Ottoman soldiers slaughtered and expunged the Greeks from Asia Minor in a rout that shocks us to this day. Kavafi's poem refers to this horror, according to Seferi, who became a refugee, himself from those trials. He says, like the Achaians, we must die gladly and willingly for our culture, whether the victor is Roman or Ottoman. The test is to live and die Greek, no matter the foe or the circumstance.

Seferi and his family had been in Asia Minor, in Smyrna, and were forced to leave and come to the mainland with thousands of other destitute refugees. Athens in 1922 was a place of starvation and upset. More Greek suffering, more Greek pain, and more horror. Just like other times of our history.

Kavafi speaks of the valor of the soldiers of the Achean league who long ago in our history gave their lives, so we could remain Greek. Doing so, he also alludes to a contemporary tragedy that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Greek people. Kavafi works at different historical levels and different personal levels.

The poem on the Achaians has two themes, the general and the personal. At the general level it tells us to stay Greek as we always have been, while on the other, it says, be strong as a person, whoever you are. Recognize your individuality and go forward boldly and confidently. Humans are like you, weak and strong both, so do not despair. Just like the Greek race, live strong as a person and die, if you must, for the vision you need get out.

Then he calls you from the dark, "little dear,I am talking to you!" and you know you've been had. Kavafi is talking to you in person and you better listen. I do and this leads me into all sorts of existential dramas. I feel the same was true of Dear Seferi and the wonderful Britons like Forster and Durrell, who listen to such fateful advice from the poems of Kavafi. I guess that great literature is great, because what it does is change our lives. We listen and heed the words of the great writers and poets.

I wish to concentrate here on the personal advice found in the poems, rather than the political meanings Dear Kavafi gives off. When the Greeks began to lose battles and found their severed heads served up on platters, they had to do something to survive. That set of actions, the reactions to failure, is what Kavafi is best known for. The culture was doomed, so all people could do is become heroic as individuals. That is why and how we survivied. How the Greeks managed to stay in the scene in the world of the 1910's, that of the '50's, and now the one of the late '90's. They survived as individuals who bore the specific label, Greek or Philhellene. They used Kavafi, we must be open here and admit it. They used him through his poems, to forge a personal philosophy that would allow them to survive the horrible events of the twentieth century in tact. Seferi, Durrell, and so many others acknowledge the master's role.

How we managed to remain centered and focused and driven by the artistic madness our language and culture inspire. Kill us, work us to death, and we will come back and yet haunt you, o' Western world. The legacy of Constantine Kavafi is that strong in me and in the others I have been referring to, especially vibrant in our great poet that followed Kavafi, the estimable and humble, George Seferi.

Stage ritual crucifixions that no-one attends and the one fixed on the cross will get resurrected, not to worry. Let them nail up the artist for his misdeeds and vain boastings. Let him or her die with no notice in the obituary pages. Kavafi does not care if one gives one's life for right and no-one else will notice. He will, so get yourself nailed on the cross, and let it be a non-event the Globe and CNN don't bother to cover. Kavafi is going to report on it and that is all that is needed. He's gonna write a little poem about you, or maybe about me, and that will mark your or my unwitnessed passing. He will immortalize the vague poet or the deranged painter who meets an untimely and excess-caused departure from the earth. Art kills, always has, so why need a witnessed passing?

That is the great legacy Kavafi keeps alive. The one of tormented Greekness. The one of anonymous heroes and heroines. We can't talk gender here. He is as genderless as Sappho, who tells us to live out lives doing what we love. Not as heterosexuals nor homosexuals. As anything we care to be, and Sappho tells us we must stay whole as humans.

So too Kavafi is as gender-free as the other poet, the one from Lesbos I just cited. Very modern that way. Love and get nailed, he says to us. I'll still love you, you damn fool. Just stay Greek. He personalizes history and tells us, if we do our job-one, to stay as we are, then the bigger picture, the survival of Greekness and world integrity, will have a chance at seeing success.

He exhorts us personally. That we don't ask much of life, that we work alone in a dark, candle-lit room, that we have ourselves as audience. Not only must we be alone, but when we might get some attention our way, it will be negative. Seferi promises us that kids will pelt us with dung.

We live and quietly tend the garden, the same as Vrettakos tends in his memorable poems on the flowers. This worthy is another one of our people, a poet who dazzles me and some of the rest of the Greeks who follow poetry. With surety and quiet, and a sense of the world as a wondrous place. In the contemporary scene we have a recurring resurrection of poets and their Greek lines. One of the greats is this Nikiforos Vrettakos. His piece, the one called, "The Philosophy of Flowers," is memorable.

They are lone toilers in the vineyards of Greekness, these poets. The one they call Ritso. Mylas and Seferi. The wonderful poet of spring and flowers, Nikiforos Vrettakos. Oh, the poets we are so blessed with. So many. Saying the same thing over and over, only now in the languages of Brooklyn, of Pretoria, and Istambul. In European languages. Oh, the poets we have!

Or take Odyseas Elytis. I always think of the line of Elytis when he says, "when will we, all of us, feel how deep, serious and charming life is?" That one line, more than any other, has changed my life. I always look for what is deep and serious and charming about life, as Elyty has instructed. I learn so much from that one poet. About life, about Kavafian ,and about Seferian poetry. That is the case, even thought I cannot make heads or tail of Elyty's poetry, surreal and wacky, as I find it. I look to his prose which I can understand and it informs me of my past as a Greek person. He makes me proud and gives me some minimal understanding of the culture that in some foggy manner is in me.

All our poets, old and new, come to speak on this question of the nature of life. It is central. Indeed, when shall we realize what the poet, Elytys is saying to us on the life? I rise with it every day, as I confront my reality and the joys of the day. It is another Greek day when I will find the evidence that life, indeed, is about charm, seriousness, and the very human experience all life comprises for all humans everywhere. How heroic and strong we humans often are. And we don't even know it. Just one more Greek day.

Well, Sire Kavafi knows and shows life has its intensity. So does Seferi. I am never able to ask for more, than that I be given one more day to sing the praises of our poets. All of whom know what the human condition is about and can talk about it without pretension or clouding. Just life, as conflicted and tragic humans live it, and have always lived it.

Here is one line of the poem, "Those who fought for the Achaean League," to whet the appetite. One poem in the work of Constantine Kavafi. About those old Greeks in the reign of Ptolemy Lathyros, in the century before Christ. Kavafi praises the ones who fell, knowing the enemy was stronger than they were. But he tells us they were willing to die as Greeks do. Unselfishly not for Greece alone, but for the values that comprise human decency and proper behaviour.

The ones who would follow would then be able to argue, "Tetious vgazi to ethnos mas. Those sorts, our nation puts out, for view."

Always ready to fall for an idea, an ideal. Fallguys and fallwomen. To be remembered in poems and in real life for the rest of recorded time. Kavafi is a camera. Kavafi, a kodak. So is Seferi a camera, snapping photos of the ones gone to dust, so we can be proud and fearless as we too, go to dust. Secular icons, not sacred to the church, but to Greeks, nonetheless.

Another human heroic figure, in a line of Greekness, the line of Greek humans that spreads its fame.

It operates as a protective cloak for the living, this memory of Greekness does. If we so wish to acknowledge it. In these, the electronic times, of the new century's turn, the one of 2000. Kavafi does not look to the history books to recount the famous battles, like some boring history teacher in the schools. Pydna or Magnesia or Salamis. Instead he pores through obscure texts like those found in monasteries, in monks' damp rooms, in the archives of forgotten museums, for tidbits of gossip about one minor king, fishmonger or politician. This human he resurrects and immortalizes. This human with no name, who has no-one but Kavafi to rely on. And boy-oh-boy, Kavafi comes through. Every time; in his body of a hundred or so poems, the work of his lifetime. Each poem the result of hours and years of toil and worry. His work is slight in number of lines, but earned with enormous amounts of blood and personal sacrifice. He makes it look so easy we forget he is our Larry Bird or Michael Jordan. It looks easy until you try it and then you quickly know.

And in his strange, personal way, he brings these obscures to light, so we can remember a bit of the past he seems to feel important. Not an important date in history, but a reaction Kavafi feel toward some odd, minor person living at the time. How that little human reacted to big issues of his period. It is a hard thing to understand what he is doing, and we need the British admirers, the translators and commentators, to interpret. Sherrard and Bien. They are so wise and understand Kavafi so well. Forster, himself, has such a strong sense of what Kavafi is getting at. He asserts baldly, "Kavafi is largely magic." He faces certain defeat with a grim grin on his face. Like the soldiers at Thermopylae, he knows he is cooked, but says what the heck. Forster admires this stolid front in a person and patterns his life after Kavafi, to some extent. He visits the sage in Alexandria and learns from his presence. He comes away, as he says, utterly a different person than he was before he showed up at Kavafi's den.

Forster has a way with the word. It is almost as if he is writing in the Greek of the master when he asserts, that the key to life, is to "snatch at sensation." He will connect this thought to the making of art. One must grab at opportunity to expand oneself, even when the act is dangerous. Because one might learn something and be able to make art of it. He says that the act of courage or, alternately the acts of cowardice, are the platforms for art that may, one day, follow. To live a nothing-risked life, means, there is not a chance of art coming of you. You will ever be still-born, a dead bloom, a waste product , as we say in the West. To Forster, Kavafi is " a very wise, very civilized man." Indeed.

So we find a man in Kavafi who is devoid of personal confusion or pesky alienation. With his fearless Greek glance, this latest oracle in the history of Greekness, mesmerizes with his cold charm, his pitiless view. He is no pussycat. Only a bright beacon to Seferi, Forster and the rest of us who plunge into the pleasures of art and Greekness. He pillages through odd texts in strange places and weaves his web, around us and our culture. We seek certitude and a safe harbor and he pushes our dinghy into the roiling sea. He says humans were meant to suffer and bear agony, in order to survive the trials and write stories and poems about them.

The artist " must destroy himself for the sake of his work, " Kavafi is believed to have said.

In his world of swindlers, liars, and dupes, Kavafi travels fearlessly, in search of the right word, with a faith in art. He will leave behind his story, his personal story, his autobiography, based on his life and his trials. Told with no adornment or exaggeration. He tells it as a documentary photographer tells the story of a city. Plain, straight, with no emotion.

Under foreign skies in places called Sidon, Antioch, Alexandria, Seleucia, Osroene, Commagene, decidedly non-Greek places, he travels peacefully, looking at gore, deception, poisonings and badly performed decapitations.

At crucifixions no person bothers to attend. In outposts of human settlements few have heard of. Only some of his locations, are not even of this earth. Made up places for made-up stories, of made-up people. All gussied up to look like history he claims is Greek history. What a liar Kavafi can be.

He loves to look; it's always at a grisly thing, at horrors. He is a voyeur, and unabashedly so. He is not one to say how pure and sweet and kind and good the human can be, if they believe in, this or that, Jesus or Buddha. He says the human is a most awful monster, barely hidden under his robes and his words. Humans are just plain bad. Praiseful as they are of this or that empty philosophy. The words are cheap, he admonishes us, constantly. His characters are polite Christians or pious pagans, on the surface, but beneath, the cauldrons boil and soon the actor and the actress will commit the sex act, a ritual murder, a surgical dismemberment, and in this manner, the Greek play or the Shakespearean drama is sure to get its energy and life.

Only because the human is so contradictory and evil beneath the surface , may we expect to have great poetry and art to remember him or her. If we were nice, life would be boring as hell. We would all sink into a mire of goodness and sweetness, and life would not be worth a damn. So for him, the evil in us, the duplicity, is the lubricant for art, action and motion. The solutions to the dilemma of man's inherent badness are the art itself. Kavafi makes it very plain that art is the result of confusion and terror and constipation of the brain and digestive system. Upset leads to drama. Especially to Greek tragedy. Stasis to death. To be still and do nothing, is to be dead. Better to get into all sorts of trouble, and live a life. To live and tell us about it, is what, some day, will be called art. That is what Forster did, and Seferi did and Kavafi did. That is what the poet Ritso did and the one we call Elytis did and now does. They dissect the seamy side and re-dress it to be sublime. Human. We call it art. Only that way, can we understand the unswervingly complex human, the man and the woman and all the variations that hide in between.

What is most comforting about Kavafi is that he accomplished his Greek art by seldom stepping his feet into the homeland. He refers to the place Greece, seldom. He is a true diasporic. He sees the place from afar, as I do. From all those places in Sicily or Asia Minor. From places that don't exist but in his imagination.

He speaks Greek with an English accent. He, by and large, does not get into Greek politics of his day. Avoids the literary set of his time in Athens and other Greek cities in the homeland. Does not get off on the ancients, the dead Greeks of the old times before the fall around 400 BC.

The language his characters speak is an alloy, according to Seferi, a bastard form, like the people he describes, are bastards. Not really Greek, not pure Greek, whatever that might mean. Not ones with Greek names, really. Recall his is of Turkish origin. Made into a Greek name, sort of.

Like mine, Campanis, was made American, when my Uncle John greeted Ellis Island. All mix and match Greeks here and elsewhere in the known world. Watered down, sort of. He most definitely argues, that is best. We haven't got a letter "c" in Greek, only the "k." Yet in English, my name begins with a "c." Even my name is but fabrication. Why couldn't Uncle John have realized the name should have begun with a "k"?

The pure Greekness, bitched about, into its mixed form, is made even stronger and more interesting in its blending. I would, of course, agree wholeheartedly. I have no problem being a bastard Greek. I have been called a lot worse in my life and I don't really mind much. Nor am I much hung up on my name. Call me what you wish, only don't call me late for dinner.

My style of Greekness blends Socrates with Michael Jackson. Queen Kratisiklia, the heroic martyr of Sparta, with Mother Teresa etc. I like and understand the much-maligned Mrs. Leona Helmsly of hotel fame. She is nasty like some of the heroines of Kavafi's poems who want to slaughter everyone around them, so they can rule. She is a figure right out of a poem I read of the master's. I recognized Mrs. Helmsly directly.

This little eavesdropper on history, Kavafi, is to be the last heir to the Greek language. We might have disappeared, as a world player had he not written when and what he did. That is why he is indispensable. According to the eminent and immaculate expert on matters Hellenic, Seferi declaims that with no Kavafi, the line would have ended. Our rich culture might well have ended. We were sunk in obscurantism and fights over who we were and what our language meant. Lots of arcane arguments about our Greek past and why we, as Greeks, were sinking so fast. The academic arguments of the time were a bore, and so were the people who made them a bore.

Kavafi at the century's turn, kept the flame lit with his odd verse and even odder subject matter. He kept the essential flame of our way lit, even though, or because, he concentrated on the down side. He dared speak the truth. Of what had become of us, over the few thousand years since Pericles and the thing of 500 BC Athens. He taught us to learn from our decline, off the center stage of Western history. He showed us how to remain Greek, by facing our failures, with wisdom, humor and a dark grace. Kavafi is the one who glories in our last thousand years in such a way as to make it memorable and useful to our rare race. With no Kavafi, no sense would we have, of how to continue to cherish and try to emulate the long line of our ancestors, through good days and bad days.

Kavafi comes along and explains us to our selves in such a way, we can excuse our failings and excesses and find a way to enter the next century, the one about to begin, with a kind of soberness and cold analysis that is frightening, it is so real. Only reality can save us now. Not the icons, not the ancient tales, not the hoary verse. We must try to save ourselves by ourselves. That is his ultimate message.

He is ever a cheerleader, but one who is realistic above all. He saves us with his realism. He forces us to look into our souls with scientific examinations. The result? The result is the art of Seferi, the paintings of blessedTheophilos, the music of Theodorakis, the poems of the great one, Ritso; the dear,dream worlds of Elytis. Oh, you might as well throw in the little flowers of Vrettakos.

When Kavafi cleared the air and explained the world to us so we could begin to live in it, he set the stage for the next chapters of the ongoing saga of the Greeks. On foreign shores. A dream that could be as fearless and charming and serious and naughty, as any one the real Greeks ever lived in Greece. He makes life possible in the diaspora. Without Kavafi the diaspora would be Greek-less. None of us would have had the courage to paint our worlds Greek. Not I, for sure.

Seferi. "He is the solitary of an extreme period of Hellenism, the period of the twentieth century." He says it plain out. Alone, he led us and our people into a new world at the start of the killing century, the twentieth. Murder, mass mayhem that has now culminated in the mind-games of the late century that will totally desroy the tender minds of the young with not one bullet.

Cybernation, world-wide corporations, buyouts, scads of scandals. No problem, Kavafi. Sexual ambiguity, cross-dressing, aids, race hatred, genocides every decade. Senor Kavafi purses his lips and says, I told you so. The human is a beast, driven by a genital, not by heart or soul. An animal, only worse. I told you so.

What I can never get over, is he did it alone. He did his thing by himself. Not much of an audience for his work. He slaved, alone, to tell a bloody tale, and lived with the fact that the whole story was tragic, bloody, and certain of defeat. He did it with a smile on his face and left us unbowed as the result. This I feel, and admire him for it. That is why I feel like I want..... to praise and remember him in the latter part of the century.

Says Seferi with his deep understanding. Kavafi would look on the forgotten graves of our people, ones created over the last thousand years of Greek decline. He looks fearlessly, with a frightful sense of humour, and just now has pronounced the world, good nonetheless. The innumerable graves, and one wonders, does Seferi, whether our troubles will just suck Kavafi in and under as well. The question is "whether he will be able to bring to life with his own blood even so much as a single dry twig in this dead garden- a thing that, for a thousand years before him, no one has yet done with his tradition." Please to hear the words. Seferi uses the words, single dry twig, to say the culture was but tinder waiting to burn up. And what is the Kavafi contribution? Life. He brings a new fecundity to the Greek garden. Seferi says he alone has done this thing, at a crucial time in our history. I am sure that is true. I believe Seferi. He just doesn't know to lie about such an important matter. He takes a single dry twig and makes it bloom. He takes our whole culture and makes a flower blossom, without going under himself. He risks all and has found a way to eternal salvation with his act of art. Unselfish, total art, devoted to whatever muse this odd man admires at the moment. A whimsical, frippy fellow who under it all is as tough as all getout.

That is all he's done. Save us. According to our most recent and loving historian, Mr. Seferi. Kavafi has saved us and our way. Not a small achievement, eh? In his hands the tales of sorrow and hardship come out positive for the maintenance of the Greek culture and its people. The language is the vehicle for our salvation, not some vague or passionate belief in a deity or a saint, but the very real and hard thing of the Greek language. Saved by the bell. The language of the Greeks. Fortunately his Greek is so easily translated to English because he thought English and Greek both, when he wrote down his feelings into verse. A bit of license and the Greek poems can enter into the American canon of verse that can guide us in the shadow days of the twentienth century we are in the process of living through.

Yet few know him. He is so hard to access. To get to follow. He shuns accolytes, even as he wishes he had a few. The commentators who report on his work make the most outrageous claims; that the Greek language and its tortured tradition hold the survival of the world in their hand. The language, Greek, "stands for the collective conscousness(and conscience) of civilized mankind." Ridiculous. This absurdity is from one named Golffing. He reports in an article in a book about Kavafi. I think it is Rae Dalven's precious and beautiful anthology about Kavafi. I guess Golffing means we Greeks have seen a lot and have a language and a style for describing it. In the same dastardly fashion Kavafi favors. By alluding to the Greek diaspora and sticking to tales of blood and gore. Deviousness and flummery.

Because we have charted the unconscious of the twentieth century with poets no-one reads in Greek, Ritso, Seferi, Elyty and Kavafi, we stand high on the list of humans who can unravel the predilection humans have for mass murder. Witness Bosnia, Ruanda , Cambodia, Chechnia etc. The Greek solution is love and not war, but we were wrong then and we are likely now. The humans will continue to that slaughter of women and children and a lot of teenage soldiers and continue to provide fill for the networks that sell us the life insurance and the fatfree cookies. Nothing changes and that is what the point surely is. The Greek solution is as good as any other and of course, noone cares. Never has really. And so what? The next genocide will come to sell soap as we in our millions will sit in the coffeehouse or on the couch and actually watch it on tv.

The Greek language has for a few thousand years been a tongue of obscure truth, of complexity that baffles, and does not interest the common man, bent as he is on daily survival. Our language has always been one of mystery. A good language for charting the mysteries of the century's unconscious. That claim made by commentators on Kavafi's work should not surprise us. The odd language of a few million people can instruct us on our current condition. That few know or care about this, is of no importance. It has been the case with our neglected alphabet for some large number of years of Western history.

Seferi saw a few decades with 50 million souls sacrificed. The time of World War 2. He barely survived as a human. Only his Greek words in the book, "Three Secret Poems, " managed to save him. No-one reads that. It is not in print any longer in English. So much for recognition of our Nobel Prizer of the 1960's. Fame is fleeting. Famous ones soon forgotten. Seferi might be beneath one of those forgotten gravestones. It will only take a few years to forget him, in this cookie-molded world of cyberness and cocacolas. Praise the tourism, the Disney, we have made of our lives.

But Seferi is mine. I own him like Nike has its trademark swoosh. My exclusive ownership may rivals theirs of our Goddess of Victory.

No matter. Kavafi also lurks beneath the surface of existing life. We will continue to make a mess of modern life. Clinton will lose,and Hillary too. They may make president again but the world will attack their vitality and render them impotent as it does us all. No heroics will survive long. Lloyd's of London will go bust. Chrysler will have to recall 50,000 crummy cars, because the rear seatbelts are not proper.

The claims Kavafi makes on the evil in us, will play out endlessly, on "Cops," "Homicide on the Streets," and "Due South, " my favorite tv shows. What the night tv does not elucidate, the day-time soaps and the marvelous talk shows will. Kavafi lives. Long praise Kavafi. Man never changes, nor woman. Thank god. Ricki Lake knows what evil lurks in the heart of the human, and so does Kavafi.

A commentator on the master, Sarejannis, remembers the bard and his behavior pattern as he actually saw them. Lucky, oh how lucky he is. To be a contemporary of the cunning Kavafi. He knew the rascal in real life. What I would have given, to have had a sight of him, just for a shiny moment. He tells us he loved the crowd; to get lost, head down and cocked to the right, eyes lowered, as he hurried, as he scurried on no mission at all, through the narrow streets of Alexandria., his blessed, bloody nymph, his Alexandria. Always seeing, seeing, seeing.

I am always alone in the crowd, and feed off it in the same way the master does, I imagine. I stand hour after hour, unnoticed at the flea market, on the side of the road that is named Messenger Street. There is no sign to that effect on the street, but that is its real name. I love the silence, as also the cries and the voices, I hear. I nary say a word, but hope I won't die, before I can return to be there tomorrow. The anonymous crowd is my motivation. It was for our Kavafi. Only he heard different voices from me. He heard them in a divine Greek. I hear them too, in my broken Greek. Then I return home, time after time, broken, and in bodily pain, to sit at the typewriter and describe the whole etherial, delicious process. The arthritis does gnaw and I take the pill that barely disguises the ache. My shoulder is aching these days and I can barely raise my right arm. But the Greek fire beckons, as it did Kavafi. I am convinced it is the same fire that burns in Seferi, and the others, who describe us as a people.

By the by, the city of Revere has changed the name of the street from Messenger to Ferragamo, the latter a family of prolific humans who are today enterprising and prominent in the place.

This selfsame fire that burns in our collective breast is.....

very Greek, very lovely, very pure, very nice. That is why I can love myself as much as I do. That is why I can love my countrypeople as much and as totally as I do.

Comforting in a complete sort of way. Something that breaks the loneliness that threatens to inundate me, all the time.

Back to Kavafi. He brings " us to a halt in front of unknown people." As his contemporary Sarejannis tells us. He is the original lonely man, in the full crowd of strangers. His achievement is that this lover of crowds, of anonymous humans in the crowd, teases us with odd unknowns, heroic figures, who lie at the fringes of Greek, diasporic history. His specialty is the biography of unknowns, who have something to add to the drift and sway of Hellenic culture. What is more, Kavafi argues that it is from them, more than from the so-called stars of the Greek story, that we can get lessons on how to live in the present. How to live Greek now and into the future. His figures are able to convey to us the rigors of life, the certain defeat, and the stolidity and humor that will have to be in large supply for the Hellenic path to remain viable.

The commentator, Sarejannis, offers us in his article on the crowd, important insight on this peculiar man's contribution. The lonely crowd, it was called by David Riesman in a recent decade. The same phenomenon Kavafi saw as he peered back into the past of the Greek people he so wanted to memorialize. The lone Greek lost in the crowd of history. He gives us individuals, easy to identify with. They are just like we are. And he does it, to make it easy for us to remember.

So as never to forget. So as to provide a model, a set of models, to carry us forward. Seferi makes it plain and clear that without Kavafi, we would have been in serious trouble. Praise Kavafi for his herculean effort. Such grace, perfidy and slyness in the Greek.

His approach is largely positive when one goes below the surface. A friend, a young person with whom I produced a bunch of Kavafian vids, recently called me to ask I send a poem he liked; the one called, "The retinue of Dionysus," about a sculptor who sold himself for money and counted himself successful.

Kavafi is full of lessons to us. Never to give in to money, fame or acclaim. But to do a thing because it is right or for art, pure and simple. So my friend calls to find the fine poem by Kavafi which I had recorded in a vid. I put it in the mail and wonder how the poet can have such relevance today.

For me he is constant comfort. He makes me feel cozy. About my daily world. I turn to him and think of the words of Melakopides, another commentator, who wrote an essay on him in the volume by Denise Harvey, from which I have been quoting in this piece. That is where the words of Sarejannis above can be found. Melakopides argues that the overall thrust of Kavafi is positive with its blend of common sense and responsibility along with the alternate drive to wild abandon and sensuality. This duality is but a human thing and inevitably must be faced by any thoughtful person, especially one who claims art as his or her home.

If one wants to do poems or paintings or do sculpture that is free, one also has to blend the daily life with the wildness that allows for new art to occur and survive. It is always art that is the end. One lives for it and not for life, the daily life we live. One only lives for art. The proper phrase, the right description, the sober analysis, found in the painting or the poem. Art comes from the passion we express in our daily lives. This passion comes of life and we turn it into something else, etherial and longer lasting than the ephemera of existence. Art flowers on the dry twigs of daily living, with the necessity it forces, to feed,clothe and shelter ourselves and the loved ones. Of ours.

Kavafi spent but a lifetime getting the words right. How could we object to suffering minor inconveniences and setbacks in our lives, as we, too, try to add to the body of thought that is both Hellenic and universal too?

He seeks what is good. Call it stoic, Epicurean, Christian, Socratean, or whatever; the characteristics we call the good, are sought by him. The things called kindness, artistic sense, community, sense of the street, the ability to be quiet, and all sorts of other things that make life palatable and civilized.

This poem to be given you by Kavafi, is " But the Wise perceive things about to Happen." It goes as follows and one must forgive Kavafi his elitism. He earned it. The poets are a vehicle for the material we may call "that which is to happen." A ridiculous claim by Kavafi, that little elf, that he and his odd mates could predict a future. He does that for our race, the Greeks and we may rejoice. One of a line that slouches into the mist.

"The mystic sound....

comes to them of events about to happen.

And they attend in reverence, While in the street

outside, the people hear nothing at all."/