Hidden

To me, Kavafi is that. Hidden. I can never attach myself to much of him. To his furtive personality, his peculiar habits, his historical allusions, his sexual delights. And yet he fixes me in his glance, when I am touched by lines of his poems in Greek. The simplicity and care of his presentation is what grabs me, as it has, a few generations of admirers. I always feel I am in good company. With him and the pals who pass the time reading and admiring and talking about him.

Seferi has a few ideas about Kavafi that are worth exploring here. He came along a bit after Kavafi and fully recognized his importance to contemporary Greek culture.

It has been too cold to work. I sell outdoors. Too cold to sell and work. So I study. I am a compulsive worker at one thing or another. If I can't sell, I work at writing and producing vids.

I am freezing, as I walk to the library at Regis College, where I will unburden myself among some strangers, who move silently about, in the library. These are young persons pursuing careers in varied medical fields, or so I gather, from the texts they have open before them.

Kavafi is on my mind. Very much on my mind. These young persons are, as aliens to me. I don't think they would like me very much if they were to know me. It is better for them and me that we not know one the other. I could not relate to them if I knew them, I think. Random thoughts of mine, as I walk to the library I will study in.

I am alone, and left alone, for the hours I shall require to work. A long block of time alone, is to me the ultimate. For it will allow me to unburden my soul for a while, before I have to go back to the matter of making a living and doing the maintenance required to keep my household going. I joy in my mind. I like to be alone, just thinking and dreaming a little. Alone and happy. In a library of strangers who don't seem to want to know me any more than I need to know them. Occupying the same space but not communicating in any way I can discern. I'm gonna do my art, and isn't that wonderful! Sure is!

But to back up a bit, I am walking up a steep hill, a road where cars and trucks maneuver carefully. There is sand from the winter on the road, as I clomp, and it grabs me. On this road to the library. I have a big idea. A thought on my work. An excitement is on me.

This fever. I grab a pen out of the parka pocket and write the following, as I walk, "Poetry is... making obsessions go away."

I really don't understand it, then, as I make my way to study at the library. So I sit my hours in the library and wait patiently for Seferi to tell me about Kavafi. He does, and then I go shopping, and go home to prepare some food for supper. The time I have with Kavafi is pleasant, as he has a droll sense of humor, a quiet wickedness I appreciate.

Some days later, I muse over the fact that I don't really understand the statement that came at me on that day I trudged up the hill to study. "Poetry is making obsessions go away." What obsessions and how can poetry help in erasing them or anything else? That poetry can make obsessions go away does not seem possible to me.

The little fellow, Kavafi, grabs me with one of his ideas. That you have to work through anything you think, in order to get to the next phase of the creative journey. He occcupies me and my thoughts a lot. I know he has certain things figured out, I haven't and wish to. He makes it plain and clear you have to work from point to point in your poems or other creative effort, work through the junk and the heavenly stuff, too, to make some good lines. All is grist for the mill. Just go forward, step by step, and you will be alright. Kavafi did this, grinding up in his jaw all sort of both good and bad personal stuff and churning out some of the great poems in the human repertoire. Maybe I can do the same and figure out some stuff too. Make some of my own obsessions go away like he does.

My perspective is the nineties. Not the 1890's, like when the master was alive, but the 1990's. Seferi wrote about Kavafi in the midcentury, around 1950, in the postwar period. I am trying here to interpret their ideas, to fit the new idiom we are experiencing at the end of the century. Trying to figure out how to deal with my fears and inadequacies as they might advise me. Obviously, I am in need. Otherwise I would hardly bother to read Kavafi's odd poems and Seferi's obscure comments. It is a journey from the late eighteen hundreds in Alexandria, Egypt, and Africa, through the midcentury in Europe, to the shiny shores of America at century's end. From Kavafi's Africa, his Alexandria, to Greece with Seferi, and Boston, USA.

We kid ourselves by thinking we are in a new time, characterized by the technology and the gizmos that allegedly change our consciousnesses, but this, I truly doubt. The new media, the alternate ways to see reality with computers and big screens, are but an additional vantage point to the soul. It is the same soul Kavafi, among others, alerts us to.

The dual nature of humans, the good and bad, are the same. We have the same digits on hand and foot as we used to. The physical apparatus is the same as it was a century ago.

The genital itches, as it always did, long ago.

The business of wealth and power, of status and money, have not changed. We hear always, " my boat is bigger than yours." I went to my one and only school reunion and heard two classmates comparing the size of their craft. One's boat was larger than the other's.

My German Shepherd has better blood lines than the mutt you have." My German Shepherd is better than yours." A friend told me about his friend who got into an argument one day in Dover when a fellow compared his dog with my friend's. This fellow bred vigilant canines and certainly knew his stuff and was properly outraged when an imposter came to question his dog's bloodlines. It is ever thus. My boat is bigger, my dog is better. I am better than you because my stuff will prove it.

An elder sits in the shadows clucking at us. Call him Kavafi or Seferi. It doesn't matter much. Call her or him American or Greek or Lithuanian. The past ones, in all the wonderful cultures of the earth, occupy us. They discuss sexual preference, political affiliation, human attitudes toward the materialism that is killing us all. Past voices come through to the living, to say one thing, really. Remember who you are and and learn from a dead elder, that humans are forever vain, stupid and silly.

This is what we Greeks are to be thankful for. That we have an elder poet, a pretty funny one, who can tell it to us clear and straight. That we are damn fools, always were, always will be. Now get on with it. Destroy yourself with your vanity and poor choice of values, and then sit, like him, in a darkened room and write poems about what you have learned. Funny, isn't it?

What always counts most is the clarity of the Kavafian vision. He has the smarts. Here is where Seferi's comments come in. 1946. A lecture. Just after the Second World war. Seferi contemplates what he calls the Greeks' "devastated homes." Greece is about to indulge in a civil war. A massive, catastrophic war just ended and now the Greeks are about to kill one the other, in sizeable numbers.

Seferi is in the middle of the mess as usual. A diplomat in the Greek government. Also, an intellectual of some power, among the peoples of Greece and, of Europe too. He may not survive. Someone might come along and kill him in a crossfire. Death and also starvation are in Athens' streets. Battles in the streets are common and we might thus lose a great figure of the Greek nation. But he does survive to live another twenty or so years. Long enough to write his great opus, "The Three Secret Poems." With which his life on this earth comes to a close.

Had he not survived, I would have been a lesser person. His guidance to me is of such great importance. He always tells me what to do. I need him so badly to survive myself.

Kavafi may have been forgotten, if Seferi hadn't taken notice of him Of course he does. Who can care about arcane poetry when the world is on fire? Seferi. He writes and speaks on our poetic and social history at some length. Seferi feels to be a most uncared- for scribe of our Greek language. He indicates no-one really cares what he has to say. He says this in a number of poems and in his essays as well. He persists in his mission to tout Greekness, he tells us , although no one cares. His work has little to do with property values, with drachmas, with politics and power, the things that really matter to people around him.

In his poetry Seferi tells us he is pelted with turds by little kids. That is the extent to which he is noticed by the public. His martyrdom is barely registered. He recalls it as part of the bad dream that is his life.

Seferi tells about his most valued mentor, the estimable and greatly reviled General Makryanni, the saviour of our race. He was hounded by the opposition, starved, beaten and maligned. Yet he persisted to become the giant he did. Seferi reaches into the early 1800's to tell us about his hero. He tells us in another essay that he owes it all to Makryanni, the near-illiterate who so loved Greece.

Soon he will tell us why Kavafi also fits into the Greek tapestry so neatly and allows us to understand the history that took us from the eighteen hundreds into the nineteen hundreds. How our way survived from one century to the next. Makryanni learned to write as an adult in order to tell his experiences. In order to keep Greekness alive. Seferi weaves his story by telling us about Makryanni, so he can update with the rest of the story, the part about Kavafi's influence over Greek literature. He teaches us that we have always had people to guide us from one time to another. From independence in the 1820's, to the century's turn, to the mid-twentieth century.

Makryannis, Kavafi and Seferi are but three Greeks who helped carry the burden of our culture on their shoulders, to relinquish it when they died. So new Greeks could carry the torch after them. If no-one carried it, the thing would die. That would be a shame. It can never die, no matter what. Too much blood has boiled and toiled in the literary and poetic pursuit of Greekness.

Greek culture is being threatened at this time in history by technology and by assimilation. My Greece still survives in the diaspora. I cannot speak for the ones in the homeland, beset as they are by the tourism and Pan-europeanization. There may be the tv and the computer, the technical things and there may be the fact that we no longer remember to know the Greek language, but the way we represent still exists in us.

What I know best is my life in Boston. I am thinking about how Greekness may survive here. So on a cold and cloudy winter day, I go to the college cafeteria on the campus of the Regis College just to look. Here I must tell a story and wish to explain my rare departure from my accustomed route.

When I go to Regis to study.....almost always, I leave the white donkey, my Isuzu Trooper, in the parking lot and drag my arthritic bones up this massive hill to sit for hours with the Greek poets I find in the books. The thing never varies. That is my habit, always. You leave the car, walk the hill, look at the statue of the Blessed, Catholic mother, at the foot of the hill, mutter a prayer, and go to the library. But on this day I go to the cafeteria. I don't know why I did it that day, but now I do, as I shall explain.

I wished to see the Americans at their ease, to see humans dressed, and acting as the Americans do. I needed to see them at leisure, not studying in the library. It was an urge, a strong one, so I gave in to it. So I walked over to the cafeteria. Because the last time I had been in that cafeteria, I was mightily worried about having enough food to feed my family.

!978 or so. How many years is that? A lot. I was, in those days, a vendor, and had sold silver jewelry to the students, having set up my display just outside the entrance to the place the students ate. My daughter had accompanied me, and together we barely scraped enough money to put food on the table. I somehow remembered this set of events and went back now to see how, and if, the scene had changed. Nothing had. The lobby where we sold our goods was the same. The students looked to me the same as they had, on the occasions I had sold there. I guess once in a while you have to circle back on your life and see what is what. I always wait for the right moment. If it is to be 17 or so years, so be it. I have time and the building has time and god has time.

So I went to the cafeteria for the first time in some twenty years to relive a piece of my own tortured past. I went to see if the past could somehow be blended with the present. Of course, I was able to see some things with the eyes of the sociologist. With the eyes of the Kavafian student, I had become. I thought and dreamed and breathed Kavafi, as Seferi had analyzed him. I went to the Regis cafeteria for reasons I couldn't totally understand 'till later.

I went to see people, mostly the students. And I saw one professor. Bald, blue jacket. He talked to this student and that other one, as he walked. He was what we would call popular. One he told, "I'll see you in my office at one. No, make it one-thirty." And the young student said "ok." Then he bounded up the stairs to the inside of the cafeteria building. To go to a joyous lunch, surrounded by his known world of students, chairs, and tables and the cheery food of the cafeteria.

All this time I am thinking Kavafi, as I have chosen to spend a few days and hours, imagining him in my company. He is present in my life. And I am present in his. Tradition is after all is said and done, a personal and live thing, isn't it?

Now I will relate what moved me so about the professor. As he bounded up the stairs, a perfect vision of this thing I call the American professor, I caught glimpse of what appeared to be argyle sox. I think they had blue in them. Yes, yes. It was for me a Kavafian moment. Why, I went to the cafeteria. It was the sox for sure.

I saw this dramatic exercise in display by the ebullient professor and then, I, too, entered the cafeteria. I took a turn around the large feeding room and left. I could say I fled. I knew no-one. No need to sit alone with a coffee and feel sorry for myself. I don't think I will go back there.

But I saw this..... wonderful for me.... vision of a happy person's sox, as he leapt to his duty, and I thought immediately of the master, of Kavafi. How he had this facility for seeing the one thing that would signify the deep meaning of a place or a person. How he dealt with life, with such a precision, that when he dared say one thing about a person or persons, it was a perfect way to characterize them. He would capture the essence and then tell it in a poem, so we Greeks would remember the person forever. We would remember the traits that made them the way they were. He does it with queens, as with ironmonger's assistants, with vague sailors and with peddlers calling out their wares.

The event I was witnessing meant to me that the professor was advertising his prowess as a male among, just-postpubescent females. Accessible, sharp, open, beautiful as a peacock, as a senior brother, who would smartly guide his charges through to their own maturity. A virile, yet safe human, who looked good, as he bounced into the lunch room to tell the young beauties about life and books and literature or science or whatever he taught. A vision.

So I was able to have my own Kavafian moment, as someone might today have their very own Prozac moment, or some sort of thorazine high. What the argyles meant to me was, I would guess, that this human was fitted out, as a ship with sails, to meet the demands of his world. God forbid, he wore the white sox of the worker or drab and plain black or brown sox. He was among young women. They are his charges and he is dressed with a flair, a quiet flair, that, perhaps, he and they, will appreciate. I must admit that I was terribly impressed. As we say in the vernacular, he made my day and those of a few days hence. Kavafi would know, to look at stuff like that. He is a micro-viewer. A very naughty voyeur. There, I have said it. That old man in Alexandria, chewing a dry toast in the dark, outside the light of the candle in his room, remembering this or that thing of his youth, this or that obscure tyrant or king, who was gonna get his head served up on a platter, but didn't know it. Who was planning to go out into the market place, with his version of argyle sox on.

The sox symbolise an aspect of personality one displays to make one look cool. We foolish humans all seem to do this. Wear an outfit that emphasizes some aspect of the body that looks good to others. That will accentuate a body part that we want others to address. Usually it is a sexual part. The crotch or the breasts, but it can equally be a hat or a pin or some sox. Kavafi loves to see us preen and he'll soon enough keen over us and say , " you damn fool, you're about to die a horrible death and you still persist in going around looking like you haven't a care in the world." Then he says to his characters in the poems, "take this", and they die, as he says they would. He does this to kings and to ironmongers both. He does it to gays and to the straights, both. He knows not, when to stop, this little evil man. He loves to leave us perfectly hopeless. To expose our weaknesses and then kill us.

I wished to understand it....what I saw. I carried Kavafi to this cafeteria and registered the event of the professor and his argyle sox. Obviously, I was jealous. As a deposed professor, myself, I could only glare at this man's hubris and wish he would fall and break a leg. Of course, when in the Kavafian mode, you are allowed and even encouraged to think the most awful thoughts, because the master allows us to be our very worst, as we contemplate and do our art.

That, my worthy listener, is how bad Kavafi is. He looks on us with his argyle sox on. See us with our argyle sox on. Tripping and breaking an ankle or worse, as we bound up the stairs.

In his poems he depicts Caesar or Nero goin' about acting large, and whispers in our ear that some thing evil is going to befall them soon. He promises us this, so we won't drop the poem and go for a glass of water or a snack. Maybe now or maybe later. The royalty will get it in the neck. If they are doomed, where could we common folk stand? It is enough to scare the hell out of you.

This is what he is good at, the terrorist, so we become so scared, we refuse to go out into the public light. We become agoraphobics and sit in dark rooms like he does, dreaming about the Hellenic past, or some such thing, just like him. It is a lot easier to tell horrible stories about a homosexual sailor in an obscure Greek port in a Byzantine society. Who wore himself out in sex and was thrown to the fishes. Than to go in the light and take one's chances.

Seferi, a major interpreter of Kavafi, knows all this about the wicked man and is obviously amused. He, like me, knows we would have no life with no Kavafi. Of that he is certain, as I am. Our grand Greek culture would have a huge hole it it without Kavafi. More, he provides the safe shoulders for us to stand upon. Even though the guy is tiny and frail. That is what Seferi says to me in the speech he gave on Kavafi in 1946.

That the poet, Kavafi, is a dark giant, a melancholy soul, who,drop by drop, says Seferi, gives us his blood-being in his work. In a language, only a few million, in the world, read. Even though he knows the English well and even speaks the Greek with an English accent. He tells the gory, human tale in Greek and that is the key.

His Greek is unspectacular. It is simple. Yet it burns a hole in Seferi's brain, so he cannot sleep. He doesn't say this. I only think it. What is true, I believe, is he has Kavafi on the brain, as I did, when I observed the professor jumping up stairs to the lunchroom. Dear Kavafi has the capacity to take the Greek and put it on a page in such a way it becomes updated Homer or Aeschylus. Easily translated into the varied languages humans speak today. He gives us his poems in American, in the American language, and makes us laugh. He regales us as a naughty Socrates would. Through his lips in the Greek come three thousand years of fun and tears. Mostly tears and tragedy.

With Kavafi, we are home, is all. Home in the vastness of our Greek way. That we live in a diaspora is no matter. Greekness survives. We can relax a bit.

Seferi interprets and praises the Greek way, in 1946, as he finds it. So we, at the century's end, will have something to whisper to ourselves as we walk, in awe, among our foreign countrymen in the U.S., or the U. K., or wherever we are. Seferi encourages us to have a Kavafian moment just to pass the time, until we, also, die. He teaches us, that to know the master, is to know the power of Greekness.

I do know that power, thanks to Kavafi, to Seferi, to Makryanni. Just a few centuries of my people and the lessons of that time period allow me to analyze and see clearly the America that is unfolding around me. I need not feel insecure, as this American culture plummets into a new century.

We lug our portable Greek reader with us, the one with the poems in it, and stop in a park to sit on a bench and smile. As we read about the duplicity and deceit that Kavafi describes in this or that piece. His Greek light permeates my daily, American life. In a good way. Not intrusive, just illuminating my most convoluted path through life.

Once in a while he treats us to a victory. A person who is noble and good and wins in the end, but most of the time, the hero is killed, or made to die, by his or her own evil hand. God, how can he force us to look on human perfidy, at that intense a level? But the Greek lines in his poetry come at you so innocently, you don't even know you are being had, until the poem ends. The hero is slaughtered, dried out, and thrown away.

And it gets you to thinking. Then it hits you, and you go about shaking your head, wondering how he does it. How he sucker- punches you into thinking there is hope in your miserable little life, and then tells you you haven't got a chance, so go out and live for the moment god gave you. It is the only thing to do.

Seferi says Kavafi is a poet of old age. Well, of course he is. The spent elder muses over all his sexual dalliances and puts his historical figures to the flame, just to pass the time 'till he dies. He is cruel and nasty. Which Seferi never says. But I do. Seferi goes to say he is a lover and a loner. Both. His love gets him in big trouble. He travels a road few know, will know, ever. Only he does it with a kind of flair, a resigned kind of flair. He looks back on a sordid youthful life and puts all his anger and frustration into the poems. He can't do it anymore, have wild sex. His body and body parts can't do it anymore and that is the crux of the matter. He takes his frustration out on us all, and leaves us to cackle over some odd, little poems. He will never be popular because his message is so sad and tragic. No-one really wants to hear what he has to say. The Greek language he writes in is not a popular one to the masses of people in the world.

Seferi admires this old man. He too, is into a quiet journey to the old culture that few will know and applaud. He will spin a few tales too, from the Greek anthology, like Kavafi. The Nobel Prize is in Seferi's future, but even that, will not make him popular in the decades after the award. Few will care about his ideas on Greekness. The subject- matter of our Greek way just does not get across to many. Maybe it is hard work to get it. Maybe it is boring to people, used to different kinds of thinking. The Greek language is a problem. Few know it. Maybe this or that. I don't know, except to say we are few who get what Seferi says; a few Greeks, some English scholars , who feel something deep when they look at Kavafi and his Greek arcania. Who know and listen to Seferi. Who view our history and go "wow!"

It is a matter of necessity for me. There is no choice. It is what I do. Stay with the language and the ideas it fosters. Most of the time, I don't feel pressed by any compulsion to do the darned Greek thing. I just do it. I resonate to the Greek ideas like a butterfly shivers in a summer day. It is a natural thing to me to respond to my first language, the Greek I learned as a little kid, before I came to master the blessed American tongue.

Kavafi goes into our history and pulls out odd, forgotten pieces of the story. Vague stuff that has to do with a king here, a sailor there, a queen who has lost her power, an aristocratic Greek trying to decide whether to be a pagan, or a Christian. Kavafi takes up snippets of Greek life in one of our many diasporas. These snippets come of his reading, or he just makes them up. Then he latches onto these poor characters he creates and figures out ways to torture them. They quickly cease being Greek, noble and all that. They are reduced to a pathetic status, are slain, or made slave. They are revealed to be vain and selfish and powerhungry. They die. Kavafi kills them in the poems.

Poetry is a link to all periods of a Greek history. That is why we can count on it to protect and illuminate for us. It is a constant and will be, in century 21. Why this is, I cannot say. I don't know, except to say it is a natural thing to us, like breathing is. We have done it a long time and just do it as a matter of course.

Seferi says our poetry is "living art." We tell the old stories anew. The Greeks of the earlier periods lost their battles a lot of the time. In one poem Kavafi describes knots of Greeks who gossip and rue the fact of our impending demise as a result of a huge battle we are surely going to lose. The Greek in the street knows defeat is assured. Kavafi gives us a kind of photographic precision with his Greek lines. Of how we will suffer a loss at Leucopetra in 146 B.C, an important battle in Greek history. One of many we lost.

Another huge battle we are to lose. The soldiers die heroically. This is important to Kavafi, as he usually has us dying anonymously or in futile fashion. He comes through just often enough to let us, who will follow, know that we are as courageous and prescient, as we are vain and foolish. We are not cowards all the time. Just most of the time, like all people, he implies.

He tells of how the Achaeans will have died at Leucopetra, knowing the Greek race will make it as a people. That is how they go to their willing death, before a superior foe, knowing Kavafi and Seferi will sing their song , far, far, into the future times. An unknown Achaean speaks in his poem of these proud warriors and says the subsequent among us will remember them with verse, in the Greek, of course. The line goes, "It's men like those our nation breeds." Who die courageously against odds that can never be surmounted. Life's lost, but that does not matter, if, and only if, some scribe will come along and let us remember, recall and praise those who fell for the honor of Greekness. If the poets had not written as Kavafi and Seferi did, the soldiers' lives would have been in vain and the Greek way would have perished, off the face of the earth.

We have Kavafi to remind us of their sacrifice and our continuing obligation to these nameless warriors. Seferi, of course, will be most polite and understated as he relates the poem by Kavafi about the fallen soldiers at Leucopetra. After all, it was long ago and really does not fit into the day's concerns. He suggests it is but a piece of the old times that he is recalling, so the audience can better appreciate what our culture valued in the old days.. He gives his little speech to a symposium arranged by the British in Athens in 1946 and reminds everyone we have been dying for Greekness a long time now.

Seferi lives in an Athens in 1946 ruined by war, hunger, and guns. He as a Greek, looks at the city, at its devasted homes. He says this, that he is looking at a city just beaten down to a shadow of its former self. He exhorts the Greeks and the others too, to put the evil aside and begin to build. To remember soldiers who died for our way and to figure out ways to keep the Greek dream alive. Seferi tells the audience it is only one side of the human equation to want to kill in a civil war those from the other side. To burn their houses and kill their women and their children. Just as Kavafi portrays mostly the evil in us, it is possible to contemplate some good in humans as well. The soldiers who fell at Leucopetra are among the few good people portrayed in Kavafi's work, but there they are, as a reminder still. Even as it is a human trait to be selfish, grasping, scared to do one's duty, it is just as human to be good, courageous, a proper Greek.

Seferi speaks to his audience in war-torn Athens, many of it English-speaking, British philhellenes, a special group, indeed. He extolls Kavafi's virtues. He argues that Kavafi is needed to overcome the present difficulties. He seems to me to say something like...." if you can just see the magic Kavafi creates, the way he talks about us when we have the troubles, then we will be able to weather current difficulties as we did the earlier ones." That is the tone I imagine Seferi sets for his audience. But hear what he actually says to the room of listeners that day.

We hear Seferi say of Kavafi these words. "In a life span of seventy years he did nothing else but distill himself, drop by drop, into his hundred and fifty or so poems." His mind encapsulates the heroes and villains. They are him, in him, rolling about in his mind. Our Greek path is both noble and venal. Any people has its good and its bad. He sure knows how to tell the story well. Seferi is rightly impressed. I imagine his audience must have enjoyed his talk.

Alexandria is the ballfield Kavafi plays in. Not Greece. Not ever, really. Not Constantinople or Liverpool, where Kavafi lived for some periods as a young person. He blended his spirit, his soul, and his body foremost into the streets of his beloved city. His obsession, his passion. His Alexandria, his Egypt. His place, and his alone. He wrote and the rest is history. He wrote from the coast of Africa, some of the world's sublime poetry. He wrote in a poem of Alexandria, "And you have been made into sensation, the whole of you, for me." That is, the place became him and he became it. He sampled sex and food, the sights and sounds, and lived to tell about it. His job? I mean, his way of making a living. Forget about it. A low clerk. A job he hated, but tolerated 'cause he needed the money. He wasn't much different from the rest of us, who work because we have to, and play, to forget how awful work is.

Seferi is plain and clear, as he tells of Kavafi.. He has to be, to explain this most unusual, odd, seemingly confusing human. He says, "the poet incorporates his perishable life in his work." That is the same model Seferi uses, also, some years hence, when he writes the opus of his life, "Three Secret Poems." The both of them put themselves into their work, so they, and the work, will go to heaven. The Greek language will carry them safely to the other side.

This is how I see it, at any rate. Both pretend to hide themselves. In the process they give themselves away. They do this, so we can survive, we future Greeks, who will inherit their mantle. If they had truly hidden themselves, we would be so lost as Greeks, we would not survive as a people. So I argue, they hide stuff in such a way, we will find what we need to move forward, as a Greek people.

Some effort is needed to get the messages of either poet. They are not really secretive at all, but merely selective of the company they would keep. Those who know the two giants, Kavafi and his sidekick Seferi, are just plain lucky to be in their company. The duo are not secretive, just cautious. They do not strew their fertile seed, their precious blood, where it is not wanted. They need only a few acolytes. After all, they had few disciples, and their lines still survived.

The knowing Greek, or Briton, will carry Kavafi or Seferi on proud shoulders. Look at the fine translations and commentaries by some few super writers and translators in English. Fine company, in fact. Not that hard to get, if you only will it, and wish upon a star, so to say.

Known to few perhaps, but to the right few.

Seferi says the language of Kavafi's poems is really pretty basic, simple and easy to get , sort of like prose is. Kavafi, argues Seferi, just tells us one tale after another. These little stories in poetry-form occur over the known and unknown worlds of Greeks. Not in Greece, but in a place in Asia Minor or maybe Sicily. This man's speech is stripped down and the way to get it, Seferi says , is to listen to the rhythm or the beat. It is oral, not written poetry.

It is heard, the heard word. A primordial language is the system of delivery that he renders it in . The words drip, like blood on a stone, like salt in an hour glass. His meter is that of our heart's beat. To read Kavafi is to hear time, as it really is, and has been over our Greek history. Such are the grand claims Seferi makes, as he thinks on the master in his speech in 1946

. Kavafi is a Greek timekeeper, a little old and odd watchmaker who just knows to keep a perfect beat in his poems. Our luck, to have him among us as Greeks. So much to say to us in the modern days we are enjoying and enduring. Kavafi wrote little other than the poems, so we have no prose to tell us how he saw things away from his poems. Yet he still communicates because his poetry is his prose. It has to be, as that is all there is of him, for us to know.

One can can hear Seferi at the podium, as he says to his audience, " poetry strips herself in order to become prose." He cites Kavafi's "bitter devotion", as he puts it, "to the great race and tradition of the Greeks." The poet in Kavafi speaks from the heart, as any good poet does. It becomes poetry and prose both. But more, he does it with simple phrasings, and assures himself we cannot get it wrong. If only we will pick up his work, and use it to get us out of our contemporary pickles and confusions. Seferi uses the master to clear his head of the horrors he has just gone through with World War Two, horrors that will multiply in his current experience, as the Greeks sharpen knives to kill one the other in a civil war. He knows it will be hard. Kavafi is so clear to him. His promise is that the human will not change ever, but will feast on lies and killings. Seferi uses Kavafi as a reality check, a Greek reality check.

I, as a living Greek, know the current time is hard, and getting harder. Life is that way. Hard, getting harder. That is why poetics are important. To get us to run straight. To remain focused. To see unvarnished truth. Greek style. Kavafi's message can reach us. That is the point of Seferi's speech to the audience in Athens in 1946.

Only we today, in 1996 don't care to listen. Or don't know Kavafi is there to be listened to, in the first place. We get sidetracked if we know him, by his historical allusions, by his sexual picadillos, by his offhand manner. I do know we often don't listen to him seriously.

Seferi describes the Kavafian method as one which exhibits no feeling. It is as if one is watching CNN. No need to connect to the images and sounds on the tv, when you are safe at home and not in the picture, in Sarievo, or in Zaire, amid the ebola virus.

The poet, Constantine Kavafi, uses an objective platform to stand on, as he tells us his story of the Greek past. No emotion, no feeling, no sympathy, no love, no compassion. Kavafi gives not a damn about his characters, totally without heart, he is. Then how is it we come away with knowledge from a man's pen, a man who is so uncaring? That is something Seferi wishes to know and tells us he can't figure it either. He is as impersonal as any one of our modern media, tv, or the videotape, the internet.

He has this old queen, Kratisiklia who offers herself hostage for Sparta. On a pier, waiting. The queen is old and shaky. Kisses goodby her son. No gloss or hype.

Or listen to this poem. It is about the dead who speak. In a grave at the side of the road some voices inside the hole ask, then tell the passerby, to remember Greekness. Nothing eerie in this. The dead in the poem call to the passerby not to forget them and the fact of why they died, to save the Greek way. It is just an event, like a bombing in Machester, England, is an event. Or a fire by arson in the south of the U.S. in a church is an event. The world we live in is full of events, says Senor Kavafi, and the human has to have the courage and will to register them and thus change him or herself and the world.

One can read Kavafi, in the same way, as one looks on a modern photograph or looks at the day's news and one says "ok, that is how it is, " and then one gets on with his or her life. Incorporating the message that has come over the impersonal airwaves. In the modern case it is the coaxial wire that comes from the street to my house in Dover. In the other case it is the poem Kavafi pulls from his delicious mind. The result is fact. It feels and looks like fact. No pity or love here.

Just fact and the dictum that goes, "if you don't like the truth, get lost. I am not any use to you if you can't see what a bitch life is, and how you are sure to lose."

Kavafi tells us a few tales to pass the time until we too will die. Likely he says, you won't be as lucky as the unknown warriors who fell in battle for a good cause. He seems to say your death will be as prosaic as your life. All you have to protect you, is a few dead Greeks, men and women both, who were martyred for their ways.

Seferi compares the characters in Kavafi's poems to the humans who now tred the earth we live on for such a short period. He says the following; "there are so many dead and they are so many alive that we are unable to distinguish them from the men we saw a minute ago, as we were walking in the street, standing at the door of the cafe, sitting by the casino table, or working in an ironsmith's shop."

He continues and describes the impact this feat of poetry can have on a people. For him the dead and the live ones merge in his mind. Kavafi is so compelling and realistic in his poetry he can bring the dead to life and make them walk around on the streets where Seferi lives.

Somehow Seferi knows to talk for a people. He elects himself as a representative of a sort, of the Hellenic poetic tradition. I don't think it is arrogance for him to do that. I believe a few others in his current time thought he had some wisdom to impart and considered him worthy of the role he decides to play. About Kavafi, he says, "he comes from the capital of an intellectual fatherland," dotted with "innumerable graves, but ...still immense."

The risk is the graves will suck Kavafi under, says the speaker, Seferi, at the wartime podium. He will win or he will lose. The role of the old poet is heroic. He is already dead, as he sits alone in his room. He is a dead man talking, is all. One who hears old voices and mouthes them without really knowing what he is doing. It is a kind of what I have called before "necrophony." Talking with ghosts and telling about it. Seferi will notice this and use that stance when he gets to write his last poems. He will be silent for eleven years and at the end of his life here on the earth, will declaim his remarkable ghost story, the "Three Secret Poems," replete as they are with voices of the dead heroes and heroines in his memory. No different from Kavafi who resurrects the dead from past centuries to tell Greek stories.

But for now Seferi just tells us that the master is some kind of great guy, to be able to hear the dead, as he does, and not get sucked under by the enormity of the task. He will do us the favor of remembering what the ones gone past feel toward us. He tells us an emotional tale with no emotion. Kavafi can do this.

Seferi doesn't know how to end his talk on Kavafi, any more than I can here. He says, look, if you want to find him, go to a little Byzantine chapel somewhere and be silent for a bit. Or read a snippet of verse from the past, an epigram, a folk song. Seferi says to look at a few lines of Aeschylus, if you want to say hello to Kavafi. He can analyze the thing no better than that.... Seferi can. Recall, he is talking to an eminent British and Greek audience. He, as literate representative of our people, does no better than to say, I can not really help you find Kavafi in modern life. He is no more use than I, an obscure character out of a Kavafi poem.

I go to a library and a cafeteria in a woman's college, in 1996, to find a Kavafian moment, a defining moment, in my quest for my own immortality. And I find it in a professor's argyle sox. So much for making any sense of the Greek tradition.

I guess the point Seferi is making to me is that our way is a contradictory blend of East and West, light and darkness, intellect and emotion. To know us, is to observe the little things that give us away the most. So the great thinker, Seferi, reduces himself to a shopping list, as he tells the people before him in Athens in a speech in 1946, how to find Kavafi in their daily life. He lists a bunch of contemporary poets, Sikelianos, Calvos, Palamas, of course. He says Kavafi is in them. In the same breath, he notes the Parthenon and Homer as places where intimations of Kavafi may lie. Most unsatisfying. Really not very useful for those who would wish to understand the importance of Kavafi. How could a recent poet, a Kavafi, be a piece with a ruined monument, the Parthenon, or kin to a playwright, Homer, gone now, three thousand years? How indeed! Kavafi awaits one, in a Greek idiom, and all Seferi can do is say Kavafi reminds him of the Acropolis, Aeschylus and some village songs. This, as, "in this Europe of today and looking at our devastated homes," we contemplate how to go forward as a Greek people.

I must, my life now. I must, to go out in the cold streets of Boston and its environs to punish myself for one more day. How to finish this piece on Kavafi and the reasons he warms the heart of Seferi? I am rifling through the poems of Kavafi to locate a proper finish. To get this piece done means I can go on to the next. On Kavafi, I hope, and another attempt to solve the power he emits for our culture.

I just found a spot of special Kavafi in the poem, "The Going away from Greece." It's about these nameless characters, just like me, who visit Greece and wish they were home , in Asia Minor or wherever. Greece is so alien to them, even though they appear to be Greek and speak a variant of the language. The homeland is a strange place, even though they are Greek. This is so typical of Kavafi. He reminds of the contradiction we live in the diaspora. We go to the holyland that is Greece and can't wait to leave and get home. To N.Y. or Beirut. We are Greek, but we aren't either. We are alive, but dead, really. Male, but female too. Big and strong, but weak and puny, both. Always he is jumbling things.

So these people in his poem are on the water, in a ship, going away from Greece and we hear them talk.

"As tyn parathehthoume tyn alythia pia;

Ymetha Ellynes k'emeis- ti allo eimetha?-

alla me agapes kai me sugkinyseis tys Asias,

alla me agapes kai me sughinyseis

pou kapote ksenizoun ton ellynismo

This is to say, " If you tell it like it is for a change,

We're Greeks too, what else, eh?

Only with loves and sentiments that are of Asia,

only with loves and sentiments

which on occasion make Hellenism seem like a stranger to us."

So he speaks of these cats on the ship's deck, who are assimilated to another way, like all of us in the diaspora. His in a case study of the Greek diaspora, but it could be any diaspora. His thinking applies across the board.

He is utterly contemporary, if his poem is taken, as I believe Seferi and Kavafi wish us to take it. It comes to us to speak of the angst of the Cuban Americans, the sighs of the Dominicans or the stenahoria, the anguish, of the Greek like me, or the Greeks I see at the flea market all the time. It is 1996, yet the ones on the boat returning home to Asia minor in Kavafi's poem speak with me. They are Greek. Only not the same as the ones who live in the homeland. The Greekness won't die in them. It is strong, only it is a different kind of Greekness than the Greek behaviour of the ones they have just left on the Greek shore. Let us see how the poem solves the dilemma. If I may paraphrase the last lines, he says, be proud of the new Asian variant of Greekness. You, who come from Egypt can be proud too. You who have lived there all your life and still can claim Greekness. "Na my ntrapoume." Let's not be embarrassed." We are a mixed form but still Greek. We can live with that fact and even revel in it.

Once I was coming back from the time zone we call Greece. The actual place, the land of Greece..... I think it was my latest visit, but I am not sure. I couldn't wait to leave that most frustrating place, Greece. The damned Greeks got on my nerves. They were no longer poor, but still acted as if they were. I was tired of Mercedes cars, overweight, complaining Greeks, the whole thing. I wanted nothing more than a cold Diet Pepsi. So I got on the plane at the dusty, worn Greek airport, strapped myself in and said good riddance. The merry Greeks around me in the cabin of TWA were going back to Astoria or Chicago for another round of toil, until they could go back to Greece again next year. I couldn't get away from these Greeks as we were locked up together some thirty thousand feet off the ground. So I sighed and waited and wished these damn Greeks were not my kin.

The plane comes to New York and I get off. I get on a plane to Boston and I am almost reduced to tears. I see an American Airlines employee, a stewardess in uniform , an African American. I saw few such on the Greek islands, and I say to myself , "thank god. I am home. I don't think I ever want to go through this again. Leaving my place in the sun, my very own America, where we have African American hostesses dressed up as this young woman was." I went on in my mind to ask Greece to stop bothering me with the voices of my parents and the old kin I found in Seferi's and Kavafi's poems. Why can't I just be left alone to live in my country with its varied people, its wonderful sights, smells, and tv? With its various musics, foods and cultures. Greece is such an odd, defined and limited place. Always looking back and not forward like the U. S. That is what the poetry is about to me , an American in 1996. It always dotes on a past and I am tired of living in the past. I want so to be American, lovely and sharp and clean and multivaried. And I am always drawn down into the miasma of a history of some succcess and a lot of failure. Greek history is like my life, a mess and I can't really handle it.

I mentioned earlier that Seferi couldn't finish his lecture on Kavafi in a sensible manner. He couldn't summarize the nature of the man, so he and his audience could go home with a concise summary of the man's contribution. All he could do was say that Kavafi was here and there and was looking on us all the time. He was in the cupboard of our kitchen and on a street corner near Omonia Square in Athens. He just can't be pinned down, Seferi informs us, and says, go to the Homer to find him, and then go to Aeschylus. Seferi's sure a big help.

Kavafi is a list of things to me, as he is to Seferi in 1946. Let's see, that's about 50 years in time that I am leapfrogging. If Seferi can have a list that reminds him of what Kavafi's contribution is, so can I.

Here goes with my list. And Kavafi, my friend, have a nice day. I will look at your poetry again soon.

As I need confidence to keep on loving my life here, as a Greek in Boston in this year of the lord.

To find Kavafi, I look first at the running professor's glorious and splashy, argyle sox. At his vain yet appealing personal statement. Kavafi makes me smile when I see the vanity in us and in the locomotive teacher. No greater message in the argyles than the fact that we gussy up to meet the day and then usually trip or screw up somehow.

Kavafi is in the Greek I hear weekly at the Greek Nursing home, coming of the lips of very old and sick patients. One man named Elias, grabs my hand as he smokes outside. He can walk, but has trouble remembering things. He grabs my hand as I pass, and whispers in my ear.

Kavafi is in the ubiquitous monosexual rantings of Michael Jackson, rock music, peculiar tv and rental videos.

Kavafi is in painting I see of American masters. Let me just mention the two great lonelies, Hopper and Burchfield, lonely old men like Kavafi, ones with inner vision.

He is found in the poems of contemporary Greek poets, in the music our singers offer in the home language. His dialogue is up at the local pizza in Medfield. The dramas in his poems are similar to the ones being played out in the Greek neighborhoods of West Roxbury where so many Greeks now live.

I know my list of Kavafian emanation is scattered , like Seferi's, but that is how it is when one contemplates. Kavafi is us. He is in us, like blood is in us.

In the everyday we find Kavafi. Seferi says every drop of his blood is in our veins now. I cannot get through the day without thinking of Kavafi and what he would say about this thing or that I am now experiencing. The most he does for me is make my daily decisions simple.

I am a Greek of the Diaspora. I know better than to inflict harm on others. I try not to. I try to be like the heroic persons in the poetry I love so in my language. It is the acts I commit that judge me when I go before Kavafi. He is my ancestor. I must be worthy. I have to speak up for what is right. What is Greek. I do, most of the time. Except when I feel cowardly and weak. Which these days is often.

So I go back to the canon of Kavafi and try again. To be Greek as a proper Greek should be Greek. That is all I can do. Try again. Hope I shall be accepted by those ancestors who do the poems. Ones that I so adore.