Katheikon

It always comes down to a try. To try. I clean the parking lot at Bob's. In a piece by Euripides, Ion, a slave to Apollo, gets to work, says to his broom, let's go and clean the temple floor. He sweeps, chasing off the birds that foul with their leavings. I look to my broom for counsel. Come my broom, says I, and with a few stray birds I get to clean the lot before they open the doors as the ritual of making money starts. Somewhere art is craving creation by some persons in the wrought-iron world where they create art.

I shall go in the store and with son, Paul's pocket knife, a little Gerber,by brand, I slit open the change and put it the registers, having done this for years. The knife, given me one Father's day. I marvel at the nature of the fives and the singles I must put in their slots. Four rolls of quarters, the two dimes, the pennies and nickels. A customer comes up, in a hurry to depart with a plastic container, batteries, kids' books. Art is on my mind. Mine and others'. Art, art, art. Always. Concentrate Paul. Put the coins in the right places.

I read that a great artist like Hopper or Reg Marsh engages in deep seated examination of history. It becomes an object of art through a mundane act of pushing a brush through paint or writing something on paper to do a novel. Their work will speak.

I clean and then I help the store start its little day. The routine is comforting, allowing me freedom to think, which I like to do. I am a philosopher of sorts, unaware of most things that matter, preferring to dwell on unused shores where my Greek kin reside. I have katheikon, an obligation.

I asked Bob at Shady Oaks Farm what he thought and he said the key was he acts as if nothing ever bothers him and second, he said he tried to be like Reggie, his father and have drive, some push. Bob is that way. He was friends with two farmers up the street who taught him not to get upset, but just take it as it lay. I watch Bob over the years, just let it all happen. Financial and physical disaster, trouble galore, and he pokes on, a smile and a joke. The man has such courage. He must get it from the marigolds at the side of the barn, from the cows or the land he has managed to keep from the banks. It comes from somewhere, his greatness. I think about things, I guess.

Goodness is an obligation to those around me. Like Bob I try to be good. I ask what being good means. He tells me. Being responsible. Doing a useful thing day in, day out. Carrying on a tradition that is old. Bob farms as his father did. I get up, work and proffer praise to the world around me.

Community, love, family and a respect for living things matter. History, recent and old matter. I love the artists so because they are respectful and responsible. They paint like Stuart Davis so as to form a timeless American art. It bothered him so much we acted like poor cousins to the Europeans that he determined to create a distinctly American art. He did it with his abstract pictures of jazz music, car horns, and street scenes of New York, all made up into colorful, joyous paintings. I saw it at the museum, put up there in a place of honor at one end of a large modern gallery, as you exited the room or entered, depending on which way you were going. Three large, happy things, bouncing and jouncing, playing music for you alone. Quite on their own, unbidden, but generous in their desire to please. Then I go around the corner, look on the shadows made by the lovely Charles Sheeler pictures. Oh, the room was charming when I went to see my first Davis pictures in person. The artist is the first citizen in the world.

Katheikon is an awareness of the line, the "seira" of humans who parade over the land, leave a little, for the ones to come. The museum has that reality for me. I never could go to museums before. Before it was too confusing and jangling to the nerves. I go to the museum to get some verification for the glorious American culture.

Greek culture offers an idea to fuse on the American odyssey. Life needs suffusing with katheikon. Like the footballer, do our best out there. The corporate heads, the ones on the tv who battle trouble and disease, the people who go out each day to make a living. Some of us are able to do life, face the danger.

For years I listen. At the McDonald's up in Revere on a very early morning the help will chatter as I tried to wake up. They have huge problems. No husband, kids that won't listen, a boss who does not care about them and overworks them, customers who are rude, terrible weather, cars that refuse to run, painful operations, feet that hurt all the time, relatives who are thoughtless and on. It is a miracle they function but they do.

I listen to their talk but I have this song in my mind. Why this endless adventure I hear over the failure noises? I live in the miracle of my Greek culture, my American culture. Complaints pass over my head like the noise of the traffic on Squire Road. I hear the art of my worlds talk to me, the photographs, paintings and the writings of history. I certainly have no-one in my working class world to tell it to.

Our obligation as people is to celebrate the positive, accentuate what is good in us and ours. I claim the artists as my own. It educates in the proper way to be. A positive spin to the world means we look at flowers, good relationships, proper and responsible ways of living. It doesn't mean conformity, but a joyous dipping into life's goodies as one can without hurt. We have to be conformists in making our bread. The secret self will come out and play in the quiet of the home, or the recess of the mind or in the art we commit. That art, the most important thing we do in life, will attach us to the culture, the past, the world around us, to make the ties of humanness closer, more positive, more joyous. It seems the good artists do this so easily and quietly.

I am looking for a means to reinsert myself in a Greek village of some few thousand years ago. Another way of being, based on obligation, love, respect. I go on hearing the people around me make their lives and I just keep on wondering why Cavafy and Seferi seem so crucial to our future as a Greek and American people. Why Stuart Davis went to such trouble to create an American idiom to separate us from the French and European art of his day. I come to the conclusion that what is needed is a sense of responsibility to the old virtues, the ideas of village, communication, simple pleasure and art at a variety of levels. We seek a deeper understanding of human expression.

The way to lead is by creating something tangible. It makes no sense to just think. One must get it down, leave about some little accretion so as to point to a value, a direction that is positive and sane. Endless talk, consumption, noise, is worthless. I saw a Turner of a capsized slave ship, a horrid mess of color on a frightful sea. The British painter left me reeling. Art does that. It must. Imagine our country with no George Bellows, N. C. Wyeth, Florine Stettheimer. Just three folks who painted things with no sense of self-importance, but gave us work that just vibrates so.

I cannot overemphasize to myself how important the art is to defining and leading us. There must be people who will be strong enough to make pictures of their worlds as we move ahead. I don't think the world will be that different. Not like some folks do. The human stays the same, as the environment changes. The writer still has to do it word by word, the visual artist frame by frame, the architect brick by brick. People will form the same wonderful relationships with one the other in the years to come. They will get up and go to work every day as they do now, whether they feel lousy or not, because they have obligations and responsibilities to enact and emphasize.

My friend, Renate at the Regis College library, says the artist is our mouthpiece, a kind of representative as one has in Congress. I feel kin to Bellows when I see his painting of Emma and the two little children in the museum. Certainly I feel close to the painters through their work. A magic transubstantiation occurs every time I go look. I feel it too when I see pictures in a book. Of old locomotives, buildings, products of an earlier period, crockery, all risen from the mind of a person, from deep within. Done for money or love? Does it matter? For who can know? The key is, it is there. The art is unarguable fact, whether it is something you like or don't, and it sprang from someone's loins, a child, a squawking kid. In time it takes on a majesty and someone looks and marvels. Then goes to make art of his or her own. The river flows, the flower blooms, the world goes ahead, amid the murders and slander. Some good amid the bad.

Aeschylus warns, we be good, or else. He warns the sun, the general, the mother, the little flower. We all have a job to do, even the one who cleans the temple with the broom of laurel leaves. Do your job. Just that. Stock the shelves, leave the parking lot clean, smile while you can. Face facts, as they say. It is all you can do. I guess that is what I mean by katheikon. Do what you do. Do what little you can to purify and beautify your universe. Be content with your own conversation. Don't try to make it fit someone else's view of the world. Cultivate your view. Add it to the human equation.

A just universe has to exist for it to be Greek. It seems the Americans have this in mind. The artists of the thirties and the forties extolled the common man and woman. They were decades in profound praise of us as a common, wonderful people. Art is in service of the everyday. It is such great art. The human is grand, fine, exemplary.

We commit injustice in the service of our gadgets. The new technology must harness itself to serve the person, the family and community. The Greek arts that revolve around relationships, comic and tragic, await us. Nihilism, violence, sex freed of responsibility, kicking and punching, are as aimless and worthless as the chatter of the help at the McDonald's in Revere. Nothing gained unless we make a picture, write a line, create a praise poem, tell about an artist of America, Greece or any other place.

I think we can but tell a story and hope someone, anyone gets it. Atget did that. They say his work had few aspirations to greatness. It is ever but a matter of getting a line down and then another and soon a work develops that is ordinary but has integrity, a point of view,a quiet charm, if one is lucky.

The artist is one of the few free people in society, expressing something new when he or she is on. The worlds of advertising, fashion, art, literature , are ever rich because they emphasize the need we have to search for the next thrill, or adventure. As if around the corner lies our salvation, our release from tired, pained bodies. The artist keeps trying and in the process privileges us with pictures that are grand and interesting. Imagine a world without novelty, art, beauty. I can't. It seems so hard to understand where all this art comes from but is so easy to be thankful it is here with us.

The artist enacts in real life or imagination some improbable dream or idea. If art at base, is not impractical, I don't know what is. For it is very odd to me that a human can create a thing that will supercede him or her. Though, that is what art does. It takes on a meaning all its own, a life of its own. We are then privileged to look and be its pal, appreciating its beauty. Sometimes, not often, we too may commit an art thing, and that is nice. It may be, oh so humble a thing we give. I clean the temple and wait for my next art thrill, just around the corner.