Call Me
Spiros Mylas spent 20 years in prisons and concentration camps. I am
his heir, free. Free of desolation, chains, modernity. Free to see, to last, to exist tomorrow as a seeing being, a sentient, vibrant human. That's why... Stan Chilson, you live, we live, El Greco lives, Seferi muses, Henry Miller yaps, Seferi calls us. He labels this the age of mechanistic automatism.
There is only the void. Live in it. Fill it with song and word. Here comes 20 minutes of Greek culture. The key is simplicity, a basic dailiness, free of complication and guile. Ten lessons of the Greek Cynic. 1) Keep things simple.
2) Get used to loneness. It is you. 3) Travel. Keep the baggage light, the camel loaded. Wander the landscape. Leave accustomed places for new. 4) Revere and render the spirit. Cross borders, a citizen of the earth. My friend, Rebecca, who works as a receptionist at the firm, Aboud Holloran, said Thursday, she liked my sense of world order. I think she meant I'm grounded here on the whole earth.
5) Be bold when life looks good. So good, one is willing to chance it all. 6) Create. Words as light as the silver rings on my hands. Life isn't consuming things. It is their creation. For a future day that is good. 7) The cynic levels. Doesn't need much. Assumes others don't either. Here is my belief. Humans need garden their own soul, look after their own needs, trying not to bother others.
The duty, our katheikon, is to make it minimally and be satisfied. Surplus is for others, the young, the old, sick. Accumulation of wealth is not important. One is a spiritual wanderer and can't haul much. 8) Revel in the mundane, the daily, the glory of everyday living. 9) Be against excess and pomposity. The vehicle is the diatribe, the cynic scythe for cutting down the enemy. 10) Know the cynic is the scout, for a just and smiling society. Cynics blanket the earthly and not so earthly landscape to plant their nuts.
I am years in my art. It lives under a rock, over me in the branch of the tree. It is there for the touching. What is a poem? "It has a scent, a body, a end. When it is on, it has a shield-like substance."
I photograph phones. I don't know why but they pop out when I get the developed pictures back from Walmart. A poem I love. Gold-plate telephone. "They speak in measured tone. They speak in dulcet moan, on gold-plate telephone, dial-tone, all alone." God, that's a terrible thing to say. What in Hell is that all about?
I am before Basho, whom Seferi quotes. "How piteous. Beneath the helmet chirps a cricket." The warrior, long dead, his cause forgotten, his hat is a hollow for an insect's voice. That 's about right. We fill the void with pictures, words and cries. With the master, Seferi.
The cynic tells the story to a dog. Cynic means in Greek the dog's tail or some such thing. That cynics are shameless, powerless, foolish to look out and consider. They revere dogs. At any time there are only 7 cynics on earth, to be maligned, incarcerated, reviled. The dog gazes back, glassy-eyed and confident. Looks at the human and forgives the cynic. Dogs just know. Max sweeps his tail, so pleased to be with you, in an arch that will protect you from daemons and zealots.

Art defines the cynic view. To wander over the earth, hearing all sort of noise is my need. The pious pilgrim, the polite pilgrim, as Seferi says. Greece is so poor we need to travel to some other place to survive. Further, the spirit likes change and excitement and some new people to learn from.
We write airy and clean. Reflect the spare economy out of which we Greeks came. Go there. Stones talk, sea soothes.
I have no idea where I am going. This is hard on kin but I don't seem to care. We immigrants sought an immortality in the diaspora and found it. I did a piece, Greek Heroic. "From sea to shiny gazebo, in the land of Bounce and Fab and Glad, came the immigrants of the spirit, escaping endless toil and seeking endless life. To America, Ameriky, to honey-landed dawns and sunny sunsets. Oh Texans, Chicago and my Boston."
For you see the soul is portable. It moves over when you nudge it. It caresses the world, your soul will, when you tell it. To traverse an ocean, a time zone, a century, is kids' stuff.
We know everything we need. It is in us, if the confidence prevails. The supreme confidence and sense of Seferi, and his father, Makryanni, and their father, Aeschylus. They guarantee their answer is the right one. To wonder at our miracle. That life in us.
No-one but the Greek can do this, it seems. You may have a country of several million, with airplanes and bridges, but it is for us to answer a key question. Like my friend, Arthur Vrakas up at Bob's asked me one day.

"Why are oranges so expensive this year?" See, only a Greek like him cares to ask that, with piteous need in his eye. I'm just kidding now, but it seems to me we Greeks have some purpose in the world I seek to define. To drag my kin to the future. All of them with me, where we may one day thrive.
We cynics are not people. We are ghosts who search to unify past and present. With no enosis, a meld, the world will fracture. That is the Greek myth. That story.
Seferi is so old, odd. He trusts in his mind and feeling. Thrusts himself forward because he feels crucial to solving this earth's dilemmas. We, Kazantzaki, Ritso, Seferi, I, must live but one way for the earth to flourish, for the Greece to be proud.
The heroic stance reflects the need to stay firm for something, anything, so long as it is generous and human.
I dream as a cynic does. If I were a rich man......I think. I wonder about the Fiddler on the Roof and say.... if I were a cynic. I would have some wondrous thoughts. That community may one day occur, when humans cease to filter others through the veil of status, when money means less than honor, when builders build honest product, teachers and doctors teach and heal, when food is cooked at home, when the house is a home, and love and kindness and a smile reign. These are the cynic Greek's dream.
One day I was goofing in Okonjo's office, the Ibo I taught with at B.U. She has a magic, leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. That's always trouble when an assistant professor does that and the other assistant professor, soon to be an ex-assistant professor, gets into it with her. She says in a funny voice, " you are a cynic. What is a cynic?" I says, "I don't know," and will spend the rest of my life trying to find out. This was 1977. Okonjo was a card. I miss her.
The Sunday before Christmas a guy is by my spot outside Bob's as I try to set up. Cold but tolerable that day. Austin. An Ibo. Master's degree, works as a security guard. Tells me a lot of Ibo PHD's drive cab in Boston. See, I didn't accomplish a damn thing at B.U. by objecting when they fired Okonjo. Ibo, my blessed Africans I love so, drive cab. I sold the apples in front of the statue for Martin Luther King in the plaza at B.U. Okonjo went home and 20 or so years later it takes Austin to remind me of my foolishness in the name of right.
The professors won and we lost. We lose. But I took it as an omen that Austin came to me just before the Christians' big day. At the start of the holy month of Ramadan, too.
To remind me of my utter foolishness and lack of value as a human.
How my one-man band to reverse racism in university was of no gain.
But still and all I say, "Halleluya Anyway," to paraphrase the grand American poet, Kenneth Patchen.
My wife says I have a phone message, New Year's Eve, from one she says was foreign and yes, maybe he said he was Austin. She chatted with him. He said I was a good person and he was calling to wish me a good new year. I am relieved to report my wife agreed with him. She said I was indeed a good person.

I live in a murky, mythic Greek world. I invent past, invent honor, invent justice. My ideas are in no lesson of history. I make things up and attribute them to Greekness. I am at an end now. I must stop and let the pen rest, go out and see my cats. It is cold, early January.
Kindly note the stately cedar on Route 128, as we daily travel to sell our selves. It lives amid the noise and pollution and gets scant shrift. Says I to it, "Silent stands the cedar on the highway." It has a blood-red center when you cut it. Grows on the least fertile soil. The ones that have the largest diameter of red grow on the least fertile soil. Now that is good because if you use them for posts as I do, you know the outer, white part rots and the red center is good for many years, 50 or more. Cedar makes fine post. Humans, tough, get strong in lean soil, in lean times. The strong come at you.