TAKE IT ON HOME

Seferi is elusive in that he has a low light. He carries a low light that refuses to get any brighter, even when you get yourself close to it. That is just him. I wish I had an ancestor who shined up bright, but Seferi is just that way, as any Greek who reads can tell you. I could care less that the American cousins who are Greek don't know his name or him. It is a grievous loss because he has most of the answers. He is the one person who could get them through the American maze. The one and only. Dear, dear Seferi. Uncle George Seferi. His vision is so profound. He reminds me of a laser beam, of the Armenian poet, Paruir Sevak, of Charlie Burchfield and a few other American artists. Like Stettheimer and Reg Marsh. Like Cadmus. Of the French photographer, Eugene Atget. This last who peddled his photos to all as documents, as one would sell postcards to strangers. All the time knowing he had great art in his hands that he knew his customers would never recognize as art.

The above, all-quiet, careful type persons, doing what they do, unmindful of the big picture. Just doing quietly.

The really greats don't ever shine up bright. Maybe it is an artist like Jessica Lange, a movie star, or an invisible who designs the latest Absolute vodka ad. Or it is the force behind the newest American or foreign movie we rent at Blockbuster and just figure we had it coming. We paid the three fifty and doesn't that entitle us to great art? Say, DeBroca's masterpiece just come out, "The Greenhouse." We just consume the stuff and clamor for more like mewling pups at the mother's breast. We do the Romulus and Remus act. Suck the breast and demand more as our right, our just desserts. The art is around us and we just take it for granted. Well, we do. Gianni Versache gets shot and we line up another one to take his place. To grace our magazines with yet another spot of true genius.

The modern engine is that way. We live amid the greatest outpouring of sheer genius and beauty and don't even know it. Instead we focus of the negative and avoid the beauty, because we have not learned how to feel.

We have not learned how to feel.

You have to feel beauty, touch it and smell it and only when you do this, might it come on home to you too. I do it and so can anyone else.

If they read Seferi, or go to him at Delphi, to hear his translated words, as he communicates with the little boy, the one we call the Charioteer. I think Seferi just senses the old way and can greet us with its message. He picks up the heat of the statue, observes coolly its point. How the artist or artists shaped him. How they created this thing that was buried for some centuries a hundred years after it was created. How it remained clean and pure, as it lay under the dirt for the long centuries, until someone discovered it. How lucky we are that it didn't leave the Greek soil, and we have the little boy to regale, to talk to us.

Seferi is the medium. He explained to me what I cannot see. I have been to Greece, saw and felt very little. I think if I went to Delphi, I would just wonder what's for lunch and worry over how much the drachma is worth against its also, the dollar. I know I don't see a damn thing. I hate it when Henry Miller reminds me of how limited my purview is, when he writes about the mountains that are the homeplace. But it seems I see little and need the guides to explain what I cannot ever see. Please to hear the master, Senior Brother, Major Philosopher, Elegant Scribe, Seferi.

"I mean this grace at its peak, this power, this modesty and the things that these bodies symbolize. This vital breath that makes the inanimate copper transcend the rules of logic and slip into another time, as it stands there in the cold hall of the museum."

He speaks of a motionless movement. How the statue vibrates to his sight. How this happens is a mystery. He says he stayed near him for a long time.

I think there is always the same thing. The water is the same. The matter is the same. We go for dust and come back as child. The water we drink is the same as the water of old. The point of Seferi for me is that the river goes on, call it history. It flows as the old man contemplates it in one of the master's poems. It is all the same and this is the main point to know.

Whatever is was, and whatever was is. The thing of life is constant and we do not have the faith in life to know that. Seferi knows that and tells us between the lines and within the lines. It is no big deal, but he reminds me, amid the horror of our 1997 society, that one need have faith to survive the thing we call this life.

The little fellow, the statue-boy, says something to Seferi. About the marbles Lord Elgin took home for the museum in London. About the mall up to Natick at the Christmas season now on us and how we look silly rushing about so. He speaks on to the poet. About Seferi himself and his role, his "kathikon," obligation to our people. I guess that is what is on my mind. How the Charioteer spoke to the ear of Seferi and how it effects action on my part here, on a snowy Sunday in late November. How can I hear what is desperate for me to be hearing?

One looks to the small for deliverance. Seferi says, "This slightest thing is the gift of God." He speaks of his early life in Paris away from the homeland and muses on how wonderful it all was. "Even the broken guffaw of the most wretched whore."

That is the key of course, although one might bore oneself with excessive enumerations of what is so wonderful as to evince god, in the list we create. The whole wheat cheerios box on my refrigerator waiting for me to open it and on the side is this woman piggyback on her man's shoulders, she with a look of ecstasy on her face. Is that god's simple evidence in force in my very kitchen? I don't know. So where is the godly in the simple things of life? Well, the answer is wherever we wish to find it, according to the little lost boy, the charioteer who can't find the horses whose reins he holds, yet deigns talk to the philosopher, Seferi, who talks to me.

What is the message, than the attitutude of the ancients? That is the key, Seferi says. The old things of honesty, humor, kindliness, modesty and grace. A concern for the past and what it teaches and a love of our Greek language and habits. That is all the little boy says to Seferi. I know that and sweet Seferi does too, so what is this essay about that will perhaps carry me to 1998? I'm reaching for the answer.

Let me go a way further with Seferi. "We have to believe in these ancient indications as we find them-placed in their locations; to believe that each possesses its own soul." The key for me is to note he says "locations" because when the ancient indications are out of context, they lose the ability to convey the meanings the land they stand on provides. Out of Greece and away from their homes, the temples, the urns and statues and the columns too, are but shells. Seferi states this openly and I believe him. I take it on faith.

One must see I am in a different situation here in America. I am away from my source of spirit and have to locate it amid the trappings of an alien, albeit lovely place. The palace here is commercial, and fine for being commercial. The meanings are a little bit hidden.

The ancient billboards call me.

The energizer bunny, the clairol woman who has flowing hair, Kramer, the comedic figure of Seinfeld. Beauty carries in the suitcase. We are the Greeks of the suitcase. The valitsa. I am certainly a valitsa Greek. I know no home than the spirit. I have no job. Not any profession. No known religion, so I can go churching on Saturday evening or a Sunday morn like today. To get a little solace for my lonely way. No office with a telephone, so I can call someone up.

I have nothing as companion, yet I have Seferi. I can think. A flagrant and wooly mind that runs full-speed when I don't have any idea where I am going. Most of the time I am out of control. I try to communicate with mates by vid and more recently by letter, but there is only an echo, never a reply. Few persons ever answer my letter. This happily is what Seferi promises the artist, the one who makes such a claim as to practice an art. Aloneness and a daft reaction to it by the self-proclaimed artist. Why bother?

Well, I may be an intellectual, and I take my task seriously. I have to try to understand and change the American culture I live amid. The job is job One, as they say. Just do it, as the Nike ad instructs. I have nothing much else to do. My jobs for money are mundane and repetitive and don't provide any food for my mind, so I will just go forward and say what I see with not much adornment for the ones who follow me to ponder, should they care to look. Which is unlikely as I have to admit that I have no secure platform from which to deliver my heavy pronouncements. The video format is ever likely to go the way of erasure, like me and my most deeply felt needs.

Seferi explains at his visit to Delphi that he wishes to locate the soul of the ancients in the marble so he can chat them up a bit, to pass the time. He puts it he " will be able to strike up a conversation with them, doing so not amid hordes of tourists all worked up in different ways, but, if I may say so, ALONE mirroring the soul at his disposal in the soul of those blocks of marble together with their earthen ground."

He does a kind of soul-talk. I like, that he has a conversation, as a pilgrim to a shrine, he tells us elsewhere. Perhaps we should adopt such a posture to our worlds and not care much about how much sense it may make. Divinity is where it belongs. At Delphi and in small things every place else. At Bob's parking lot in Revere, in a smile up to Walmart's on the face of a worker who feigns friendliness for 6.80$ an hour. Wherever.

One must begin to see that the oracle is the thing. We need to have voices like Pythia's to instruct and more, to amuse us. This is Seferi's concern; that we realize Pythia can no longer reach us and that we need new voices to do so. So we may survive more than just to stay alive. That we survive and thrive as humans, as Greeks, or as African-Americans or some other thing.

The poems of Seferi are the things for me that are my oracle. His poems and his prose and the works of the other thinkers who ponder on his meanings. They provide a sense of the future for me, where I may carry my tired body for a bit of rest and sustenance. The culture I live in now is overpowering, and yet I find I can put it in a perspective, if I recall the old voice of the oracle.

It says, "think clear and straight and nothing will be impossible." I can thus go to the mall in Natick and discover the daily divinity I am always talking about.

I take the guy driving the Riverside trolley along with me and motor about the never-land, America, the place I call "sweetland." He is my unknowing guide, as Seferi would mount a boat with his late grandfather as the captain, and travel the islands he knows.

This Greek oracle that passes its message down from Seferi, is nothing abstruse or mystical. It cannot be, or I would not get it. I cannot do the mystical thing because the mundane is where my head is at all times, feasting on faces, cows, shopping malls, advertisements, cars, town halls and now my latest fascination, the post offices of the towns near mine. The everyday is it. That is why I love Atget so much. He is but a documentary, neighborhood artist, we find out. My life and role are that, the same as Atget's. That is how I locate salvation and it is enough most of the time. Sometimes I just despair, but seem to come out of it, in time to do the next visual document of the life and times around me.

Let me get off the train and meet the quiet, white donkey, the Isuzu Trooper I command, grazing there for me at the Riverside station. The point is not to despair constantly. To complain, to be self-absorbed like most of my countrymen and women, as they rattle on about their current or past physical trials, or the patriots, or the commute that day, or how they are too fat, or what they are going to have for lunch. Get one American started about their jobs or careers and the talk is endless. Boring, to be on about oneself and one's needs. Better to look out at the art and nature about us and talk about that, instead.

To fall into the long line of the progons, the ancestors, and see the world through their clear and passionless eyes. Realistically see the world, and not get hung up in what one feels about the commute that day, or the fact that the office is too hot or cold or has paper fleas that continually disrupt your train of thought.

As Louis Sullivan, architect of America said to me , "make it live. Bring it alive man." And this boy of Boston designed his Chicago skyscrapers with vines and grapes and columns and faces, so one can just look and smile at his genius. So many thanks to the brother, Sullivan. Who would I have been without him to brighten up my day? I mean, I never spoke to him. I read it. He is long dead, as are some of his buildings destroyed by time and progress, but he lives, like the little boy Seferi talks to, as the Charioteer with no horse.

Seferi is known among the experts as having an alchemic streak. For a man of reason like him, this is interesting. The technical term is, he is chthonic. He sees the dark and makes it come to light. He takes evil like world war two and squeezes good of it. He takes his own depressions and forges beautiful Greek words. Fear, goes to be knowledge. This is important, as I am so wracked by fear. Of everything. If only I can transform my fear, to be a contribution to the world, of some sort.

If only I could cough up one great video that would make me feel fine. How fine I need to feel I will now say. I so admire the pictures Beatrix Potter drew for the so-called children's stories she is famed for . If only I could do one vid that would give me the sense of pride I feel when I look at one of her pictures. Pride, and exilaration that I am friends with the work and being of one Beatrix Potter. I feel kin to her. That I am in company of greatness and joy in its light. If only one of my vids could someday give me a comparable feeling. I mean, my work thrills me but Potter's bunnies and flowers thrill me more. I just wish my work were better. Maybe it means I have to work harder. There wasn't a harder worker than beloved, graceful and mysterious, Beatrix Potter.

To take darkness and make it light. To forge understanding out of hate. Love from fear. Beauty from dross. From fear. The bigger the negative, the larger the possibility for turning it around for good.

This all is the teaching of Seferi, of the oracle, the little boy, and what he whispers to the pilgrim, George Seferi. There is the history, the skeleton of the fish, and we need to make the fish live and see it separate the waters of the Aegean pond effortlessly. That is a hard thing to do and our imagination is too weak for the work. We have not the gift of sight. Our blood has the messages in it but it does not reach our lips somehow. We stumble in a dark room and try to see this thing we call the Greek culture.

We are on two shores. The here and the there. The light and the dark. The U.S. and the Greece. That is our lot; to live schizophrenic. It is our way, the Greek way, to engage the spirit. To enter the dark and make it live. To take a mute look and turn it to a smile. To make the folk around us, see there is no need for alienation. The river runs, the Riverside trolley goes on at this very moment, if you will go to where it is. What was, is and what is, will be. The things of this world go thus to the next, and return anew. Nothing is lost. We gain everything once more, as the wave of life washes over us.

Sappho says to Seferi and to me. "Come divine lyre;speak to me; take voice."

The old philosophers, poets, architects, sculptors, who inhabit Greek land chat up amiably and intensely with Seferi. They just do. Why, I don't know, other than he's earned their attentions. He has kept the flame live, throught the horrible world war and the civil war that followed in his country. He is not of my country, but I claim him because I just need him so badly. I need filmaker,Yimou, to tell me Chinese stories and Mr. Bean and Philippe de Broca, and Robert De Niro. I need. Need. So badly just to keep afloat.

Seferi is an industry for me. Like Microsoft. I must to finish. To muster up the courage to visit the Natick Mall at this Christmas time of year, to understand where my America is leading me. I will munch a bagel with my diet soda, as I ease the Isuzu out of the driveway and head cautiously to capture the moment at the mall. My Olympus junior camera will click at the things at the mall and then I will add the photos to these words and see how they make sense of my world.

Seferi looks on the lovely boy, the innocent child, who survives history. He was, after all, buried a mere hundred years after he came to life, and was found only recently, after being in the rubble a long number of centuries. Seferi. "One feels the awe of a wounded life that struggles in order to breathe, as long as it still can, in the light and rejoices that it is dawn and the sun is rising."