[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
believed great, for impersonal greatness existed for you and need
not be questioned. You once said, There is no question that Bach
believed in God.
No mystic, you, more Aristotelian than Platonic, and I more
Platonic than Aristotelian though, given you were Eastern and I
Western, I would have expected the opposite to be true of us. Your
impulse was to point downward, to find in the world love absolute,
to find it in your love for me; and mine to point upward, beyond
the world, and perhaps beyond you. You believed love rose from the
body ( I love your body ); I, a debased Plotinus, believed love was
disembodied ( I love your soul ).
How confused I become thinking of you and me as one, wonder-
ing how much of you I have made mine, how much of me I have
made yours combining in us both mind and soul, as if these two
were one, and Aristotle and Plato, too.
the pure lover 77
Perhaps because reason so dominated your thinking, and your
feeling, too, you were drawn to Greek surrealism, a mode of poetry
with deep roots in Greek peasant songs, as irrational as clouds of
sheep, or the moon-street on the sea, or it s raining chair legs.
You liked a Greek folk poem, which you said originated in the
deep tradition of native Greek surrealism, and in which kisses turn
lips red, and when the lips are wiped on a handkerchief the hand-
kerchief turns red, and the handkerchief when washed in a river
turns the river red, and the river running into the sea turns the sea
red, and an eagle drinking red water becomes red, and the sun and
the moon become red.
If you ever thought of me as an idealist and you as a realist, you
were right, even though you did sustain ideals insisting that they
be aspired to temporally, in politics, in culture, in love, in your
poetry, and even in religion. And I, the true idealist, believed
ideals were realized only in eternity. I could pledge you love for-
ever, whereas you could pledge me love at 4:15 P.M. next Tuesday
a true sign, according to W. H. Auden, of love.
You told me to convert to Greek Orthodoxy.
You started a lecture on Some Sources of Modern Greek Poetry
with a recording of a fifth-century Greek Byzantine Friday Lenten
Service of the Akathistos Hymn, Salutations to the Virgin:
Awed by the beauty of your purity . . .
78 david plante
In your purity, you were able to use words I, impure, could
not you as pure as the young man, the Archon of Plateae, who
wore white and for a year did not touch iron, the culmination of
the procession to the heroes tombs where he poured out libations
and prayed.
You used the word purity, but would you have tried to define
the idea of purity? No, and certainly not as dogma, which you saw as
tyrannical. You used the word this way: he is pure, animals are pure,
the scent of lemon blossoms is pure, the taste of lemon is pure, the
sunlight is pure, music is pure, and kisses, too, are pure. And this,
the most undefined preposition: love at love s brightest is pure.
All throughout your poetry, you used such words that I found
foreign, you a Greek, I now an Anglo-American. You used the word
antinomy, in Greek ±vĹvo¼¯±, and in your poems worked to bring
together all oppositions of one law to another, all contradictions
between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable, or
necessary, and resolve them in the purity of your poetry.
The antinomies in you were from deep in your history: your
belief in Classical freedom and your need for Byzantine order.
Parmenides believed that reality is one, Heraclitus that reality
is infinitely many; Parmenides believed that nothing can come to
be or pass away, and Heraclitus that everything comes to be and
passes away.
the pure lover 79
In your thesis, for your MA at Denison University, you wrote
about Emmanuel Kant: In his philosophy, the aesthetic dimen-
sion beauty occupies the central position between sensuousness
and morality the two poles of human existence.
In the same thesis, you quoted Nietzsche: Beauty is therefore,
for the artists, something outside of all order or rank, because in
beauty antitheses are bound together.
Nietzsche s books, you argued, all together cohered, not logi-
cally as philosophy, but formally as in a work of art, the form
containing an infinite number of inconsistencies. Nietzsche s
form was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each
repetition an elaboration.
In the slow evolution of Greek, back further than Homeric Greek,
¹´± meant not idea so much as form, so, back then, the idea of
the body was the form of the body. And so, to reason for you
was to reason in forms.
Pindar describes a beautiful athlete ¹´± ĵ º±»Ìv, rendered
into English beautiful of form, making idea form, good beautiful.
You wrote in a poem, I love your body, as if love was for you
embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an
enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense.
80 david plante
Though you published two books of poems in Greece books
that were not noted because, you said, you would not play the Greek
game of ingratiating yourself with the critics you did not even try
to publish in England. But you were asked from time to time to give
readings, which a friend, the art historian and artist John Golding,
attended, writing later in your obituary in the Times: What Nikos
sought from poetry throughout his life was formal invention, not
simply for its own sake, but at the service of delving into new ways
of perceiving reality and conveying depth of feeling. And: His own
poetry has about it a lyric plangency, as if he was trying to recapture
scenes, states of mind, relationships, all glimpsed but never fully
seized. I would say: never fully revealed, for what most conceals
in your poetry is the plangency, which seems to draw the reader
to see through the plangency to the sensitive intelligence behind,
but which entrances in itself. And so the tension in your poetry,
the antinomies of the concealed and the revealed, the mysterious
concealed and the to-be-revealed essential purity of your thought [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl chiara76.opx.pl
believed great, for impersonal greatness existed for you and need
not be questioned. You once said, There is no question that Bach
believed in God.
No mystic, you, more Aristotelian than Platonic, and I more
Platonic than Aristotelian though, given you were Eastern and I
Western, I would have expected the opposite to be true of us. Your
impulse was to point downward, to find in the world love absolute,
to find it in your love for me; and mine to point upward, beyond
the world, and perhaps beyond you. You believed love rose from the
body ( I love your body ); I, a debased Plotinus, believed love was
disembodied ( I love your soul ).
How confused I become thinking of you and me as one, wonder-
ing how much of you I have made mine, how much of me I have
made yours combining in us both mind and soul, as if these two
were one, and Aristotle and Plato, too.
the pure lover 77
Perhaps because reason so dominated your thinking, and your
feeling, too, you were drawn to Greek surrealism, a mode of poetry
with deep roots in Greek peasant songs, as irrational as clouds of
sheep, or the moon-street on the sea, or it s raining chair legs.
You liked a Greek folk poem, which you said originated in the
deep tradition of native Greek surrealism, and in which kisses turn
lips red, and when the lips are wiped on a handkerchief the hand-
kerchief turns red, and the handkerchief when washed in a river
turns the river red, and the river running into the sea turns the sea
red, and an eagle drinking red water becomes red, and the sun and
the moon become red.
If you ever thought of me as an idealist and you as a realist, you
were right, even though you did sustain ideals insisting that they
be aspired to temporally, in politics, in culture, in love, in your
poetry, and even in religion. And I, the true idealist, believed
ideals were realized only in eternity. I could pledge you love for-
ever, whereas you could pledge me love at 4:15 P.M. next Tuesday
a true sign, according to W. H. Auden, of love.
You told me to convert to Greek Orthodoxy.
You started a lecture on Some Sources of Modern Greek Poetry
with a recording of a fifth-century Greek Byzantine Friday Lenten
Service of the Akathistos Hymn, Salutations to the Virgin:
Awed by the beauty of your purity . . .
78 david plante
In your purity, you were able to use words I, impure, could
not you as pure as the young man, the Archon of Plateae, who
wore white and for a year did not touch iron, the culmination of
the procession to the heroes tombs where he poured out libations
and prayed.
You used the word purity, but would you have tried to define
the idea of purity? No, and certainly not as dogma, which you saw as
tyrannical. You used the word this way: he is pure, animals are pure,
the scent of lemon blossoms is pure, the taste of lemon is pure, the
sunlight is pure, music is pure, and kisses, too, are pure. And this,
the most undefined preposition: love at love s brightest is pure.
All throughout your poetry, you used such words that I found
foreign, you a Greek, I now an Anglo-American. You used the word
antinomy, in Greek ±vĹvo¼¯±, and in your poems worked to bring
together all oppositions of one law to another, all contradictions
between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable, or
necessary, and resolve them in the purity of your poetry.
The antinomies in you were from deep in your history: your
belief in Classical freedom and your need for Byzantine order.
Parmenides believed that reality is one, Heraclitus that reality
is infinitely many; Parmenides believed that nothing can come to
be or pass away, and Heraclitus that everything comes to be and
passes away.
the pure lover 79
In your thesis, for your MA at Denison University, you wrote
about Emmanuel Kant: In his philosophy, the aesthetic dimen-
sion beauty occupies the central position between sensuousness
and morality the two poles of human existence.
In the same thesis, you quoted Nietzsche: Beauty is therefore,
for the artists, something outside of all order or rank, because in
beauty antitheses are bound together.
Nietzsche s books, you argued, all together cohered, not logi-
cally as philosophy, but formally as in a work of art, the form
containing an infinite number of inconsistencies. Nietzsche s
form was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each
repetition an elaboration.
In the slow evolution of Greek, back further than Homeric Greek,
¹´± meant not idea so much as form, so, back then, the idea of
the body was the form of the body. And so, to reason for you
was to reason in forms.
Pindar describes a beautiful athlete ¹´± ĵ º±»Ìv, rendered
into English beautiful of form, making idea form, good beautiful.
You wrote in a poem, I love your body, as if love was for you
embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an
enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense.
80 david plante
Though you published two books of poems in Greece books
that were not noted because, you said, you would not play the Greek
game of ingratiating yourself with the critics you did not even try
to publish in England. But you were asked from time to time to give
readings, which a friend, the art historian and artist John Golding,
attended, writing later in your obituary in the Times: What Nikos
sought from poetry throughout his life was formal invention, not
simply for its own sake, but at the service of delving into new ways
of perceiving reality and conveying depth of feeling. And: His own
poetry has about it a lyric plangency, as if he was trying to recapture
scenes, states of mind, relationships, all glimpsed but never fully
seized. I would say: never fully revealed, for what most conceals
in your poetry is the plangency, which seems to draw the reader
to see through the plangency to the sensitive intelligence behind,
but which entrances in itself. And so the tension in your poetry,
the antinomies of the concealed and the revealed, the mysterious
concealed and the to-be-revealed essential purity of your thought [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]