Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Motionless, I stay and go: I am a pause...

Octavio Paz

Between going and staying

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painting: When I was in my younger days, I sailed...

Umberto Saba

Ulysses

When I was in my younger days, I sailed
The coastlines of Dalmatia. Isles appeared
In bloom along the billows where sporadic
Birds hung in intent hunger over prey.
Those algae-slippery isles were glittering
Emeralds in gold sunlight. When a high
Tide and the night extinguished them, sails slipped
Leeward to deeper waters to evade
That perfidy. Today I am a king
Of no man's land. The harbor light is lit
For other men. I turn once more to sea
Impelled by an indomitable spirit,
By an excruciating love for life.


Umberto Saba (1883-1957)

Work

Once
my life was easy. The earth
gave me flowers fruit in abundance. Now I loosen ground that is dry and hard.
My spade
bangs against stones in the underbrush. I must
excavate far down. Like someone searching for treasure.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks...

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven...

Friedrich Hölderlin

In My Boyhood Days

In my boyhood days
Often a god would save me
From the shouts and from the rods of men;
Safe and good then I played
With the orchard flowers
And the breezes of heaven
Played with me.

And as you make glad
The hearts of the plants
When toward you they stretch
There delicate arms.

So you made glad my heart,
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your darling,
Holy Luna.

O all you loyal,
Kindly gods!
Would that you knew how
My soul loved you then.

True, at that time I did not
Evoke you by name yet, and you
Never named me, as men use names,
As though they knew one another.

Yet I knew you better
Than ever I have known men,
I understood the silence of Aether,
But human words I΄ve never understood.

I was reared by the euphony
Of the rustling copse
And learned to love
Amid the flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.


from In Lovely Blue

Like the stamen inside a flower

The steeple stands in lovely blue

And the day unfolds around its needle;

The flock of swallows that circles the steeple

Flies there each day through the same blue air

That carries their cries from me to you;

We know how high the sun is now

As long as the roof of the steeple glows,

The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;

Up there in the wind, where the wind is not

Turning the vane of the weathercock,

The weathercock silently crows in the wind.


Quotes

What has always made a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven.

We are nothing; what we search for is everything.

Man is a god when he dreams and a beggar when he thinks.

We were eager to have done and trusted to luck.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: I Had Been Leaving Coast of Misty Albion...

Marina Tsvetaeva

I Had Been Leaving Coast of Misty Albion

"I had been leaving coast of misty Albion."
How divine they are - this sadness and this height!
I see the dingy waves fall down and rise on,
The dingy firmament... I know that all by hart.

I see the youth that leaned upon the high mast's rope,
As beautiful as if he were by fairies born,
Wrapped in a coat. O! Let every virgin sob!
Cry, manhood! Cry, my misty Albion!

It's done! He is alone between these sky and flow!
There is a school for you who have been ‘gainst schools all!
And in a fatal heart, pierced with a star's arrow,
There enters in the king of fatal winds - Aeoll!


The roar of dingy waves is making the new ballad
Of wonderful his death from stars that libeled him on
Cry, Youth! Cry, Love! Cry, World! O, sob my dear Aellad!
Cry, little Ada! Cry, my misty Albion!


Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

The Seafarer

Rock me down, o starry skiff!
My head tired from waves, so stiff!

Very long I look for abode, –
My head tired from passions, hot:

Laurels – hymns – hydras – heroes, brazed, –
My head tired from senseless plays!

Lay me down mid leaves and grass, –
My head tired from ceaseless wars.

From Mirror's Plane Where...

From mirror's plane where clouds flow
In a dreamy way
I tried to force a path you go,
The final quay.

I see a mast in salty breeze --
You stand by side...
You go by train -- a dusky heath
Yields evening plight...

The evening heath is set in dew,
Crows are bold...
I bless you: let you go to
Four sides of world!

Comments & Greek artists, painters: The appeal of the artist...

Art and truth. Art and human nature. Art and temperament...

The appeal of the artist...

Joseph Conrad

About the work of art
from the preface of The Nigger Of The 'Narcissus'

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should
carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined
as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to
the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one,
underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in
its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and
in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and
essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth
of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist,
seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the
world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence,
presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our
being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They
speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to
our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our
prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism--but always
to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their
concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and
the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions,
with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious
aims.


Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

It is otherwise with the artist.

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within
himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be
deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is
made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which,
because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out
of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the
vulnerable body within a steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more
profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. Yet its
effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations
discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist
appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to
that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more
permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder,
to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity,
and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all
creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that
knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity
in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in
fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all
humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can
in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which
follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few
individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the
simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the
belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of
splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only
a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to
justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply
an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here--for the avowal is not
yet complete. Fiction--if it at all aspires to be art--appeals to
temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like
all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable
temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events
with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere
of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an
impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made
in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective,
is not amenable to persuasion. All art,' therefore, appeals primarily to
the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words
must also make its appeal through the senses, if its highest desire is
to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously
aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to
the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts. And it is
only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of
form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged
care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to
plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be
brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface
of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless
usage.

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: Throughout the course of the generations men constructed the night....

Jorge Luis Borges

History of Night

Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
thev sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhuastible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Under the brown fog of a winter noon...

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon...

T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land
to Ezra Pound, "Il miglior fabbro"

(from) III. The Fire Sermon

The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc'd.
Tereu


T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
'This music crept by me upon the waters'
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers

Weialala leia
Wallala leialala

Comments & Greek artists: We understood the private catastrophe, The personal loss, the general misery...

Greek landscapes & Greek artists, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Ships in Thessaloniki's Port, oil on canvas

How how can I ever return, to the soft quiet seasons?
Night stay with us, stop sun, hold season, let the day not come,
let the spring not come...

T. S. Eliot

Murder in the Cathedral

Chorus

Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.
The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and outselves are defiled with blood.
A rain of blood has blinded my eyes. Where is England?
where is Kent? where is Canterbury?
O far far far far in the past; and I wander in a land of barren boughs:
if I break them, they bleed; I wander in a land of dry stones:
if I touch them they bleed.
How how can I ever return, to the soft quiet seasons?
Night stay with us, stop sun, hold season, let the day not come,
let the spring not come.
Can I look at the day and its common things, and see them all smeared with blood,
through a curtain of falling blood?
We did not wish anything to happen.
We understood the private catastrophe,
The personal loss, the general misery,
Living and partly living;
The terror by night that ends in daily action,
The terror by day that ends in sleep;
But the talk in the market-place, the hand on the broom,
The night-time heaping of the ashes,
The fuel laid on the fire at daybreak,
These acts marked a limit to our suffering.
Every horror had its definition,
Every sorrow had a kind of end:
In life there is not time to grieve long.
But this, this is out of life, this is out of time,
An instant eternity of evil and wrong.
We are soiled by a filth that we cannot clean, united to
supernatural vermin,
It is not we alone, it is not the house, it is not the city that is
defiled,
But the world that is wholly foul.
Clean the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone
from the stone, take the skin from the arm, take the
muscle from the bone, and wash them. Wash the stone,
wash the bone, wash the brain, wash the soul, wash
them wash them!

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: We walked beside the sea, After a day which perished silently of its own glory...

Seascapes & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Port, Thessaloniki IV, oil on canvas

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A Sea-Side Walk

We walked beside the sea,
After a day which perished silently
Of its own glory---like the Princess weird
Who, combating the Genius, scorched and seared,
Uttered with burning breath, 'Ho! victory!'
And sank adown, an heap of ashes pale;
So runs the Arab tale.

The sky above us showed
An universal and unmoving cloud,
On which, the cliffs permitted us to see
Only the outline of their majesty,
As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!
And, shining with a gloom, the water grey
Swang in its moon-taught way.

Nor moon nor stars were out.
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night's nor day's, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence's impassioned breathings round
Seemed wandering into sound.

O solemn-beating heart
Of nature! I have knowledge that thou art
Bound unto man's by cords he cannot sever---
And, what time they are slackened by him ever,
So to attest his own supernal part,
Still runneth thy vibration fast and strong,
The slackened cord along.

For though we never spoke
Of the grey water anal the shaded rock,---
Dark wave and stone, unconsciously, were fused
Into the plaintive speaking that we used,
Of absent friends and memories unforsook;
And, had we seen each other's face, we had
Seen haply, each was sad.

Comments & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists: Joy of night, oh sonorous lights...

Greek poets & Greek artists, modern Geek artists, painters


Yannis Stavrou, Nocturnal, oil on canvas

Time approaches visions
on tiptoe...

Nikos Karouzos

Poem on a Tape Recorder

Joy of night, oh sonorous lights,
marvelous evening
the colored noise of the city
divided up my loneliness, sometimes yellow,
orange, blue, and now red
dyeing my gait pure green.
Love had white marks.
Stop. Rewind.
The turmoil bore the white marks of the world.
The clouds invisible.
No.
The angel radiates like marble
in the deserts of the moon, in the honeysuckle white
death is duped and the night
is amused with shooting stars.
No, no.
Time approaches visions
on tiptoe.
Greed!
I should have further submerged
the grief within my soul.
No.
The cricket ornaments expanses.
The night comes down the stairway of darkness
sits on the passion of Mary.
All alone the busts breathe in the gardens.
Stop. Everything is erased.
I want to escape from words.
I’m sick of it.
Better it would be to listen to what on the next balcony
two perennial old ladies are saying;
sitting there by the hour.

comments & Greek artists, painters:The ship swayed under a cloudless sky...

Ships & Greek artists, contemporary Greek artists, painters


Yannis Stavrou, On Waves, oil on canvas

The ship swayed under a cloudless sky,
like an angel, dazed by radiant light...

Charles Baudelaire

A Voyage to Cythera

My heart like a bird was fluttering joyously
And soaring freely around the rigging;
Beneath a cloudless sky the ship was rolling
Like an angel drunken with the radiant sun.

What is this black, gloomy island? — It's Cythera,
They tell us, a country celebrated in song,
The banal Eldorado of old bachelors.
Look at it; after all, it is a wretched land.

— Island of sweet secrets, of the heart's festivals!
The beautiful shade of ancient Venus
Hovers above your seas like a perfume
And fills all minds with love and languidness.

Fair isle of green myrtle filled with full-blown flowers
Ever venerated by all nations,
Where the sighs of hearts in adoration
Roll like incense over a garden of roses

Or like the eternal cooing of wood-pigeons!
— Cythera was now no more than the barrenest land,
A rocky desert disturbed by shrill cries.
But I caught a glimpse of a singular object!

It was not a temple in the shade of a grove
Where the youthful priestess, amorous of flowers,
Was walking, her body hot with hidden passion,
Half-opening her robe to the passing breezes;

But behold! as we passed, hugging the shore
So that we disturbed the saa-birds with our white sails,
We saw it was a gallows with three arms
Outlined in black like a cypress against the sky.

Ferocious birds perched on their feast were savagely
Destroying the ripe corpse of a hanged man;
Each plunged his filthy beak as though it were a tool
Into every corner of that bloody putrescence;

The eyes were two holes and from the gutted belly
The heavy intestines hung down along his thighs
And his torturers, gorged with hideous delights,
Had completely castrated him with their sharp beaks.

Below his feet a pack of jealous quadrupeds
Prowled with upraised muzzles and circled round and round;
One beast, larger than the others, moved in their midst
Like a hangman surrounded by his aides.

Cytherean, child of a sky so beautiful,
You endured those insults in silence
To expiate your infamous adorations
And the sins which denied to you a grave.

Ridiculous hanged man, your sufferings are mine!
I felt at the sight of your dangling limbs
The long, bitter river of my ancient sorrows
Rise up once more like vomit to my teeth;

Before you, poor devil of such dear memory
I felt all the stabbing beaks of the crows
And the jaws of the black panthers who loved so much
In other days to tear my flesh to shreds.

— The sky was charming and the sea was smooth;
For me thenceforth all was black and bloody,
Alas! and I had in that allegory
Wrapped up my heart as in a heavy shroud.

On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!

(William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil - Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Un Voyage à Cythère

Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux
Et planait librement à l'entour des cordages;
Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages;
Comme un ange enivré d'un soleil radieux.

Quelle est cette île triste et noire? — C'est Cythère,
Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

— Île des doux secrets et des fêtes du coeur!
De l'antique Vénus le superbe fantôme
Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme
Et charge les esprits d'amour et de langueur.

Belle île aux myrtes verts, pleine de fleurs écloses,
Vénérée à jamais par toute nation,
Où les soupirs des coeurs en adoration
Roulent comme l'encens sur un jardin de roses

Ou le roucoulement éternel d'un ramier!
— Cythère n'était plus qu'un terrain des plus maigres,
Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres.
J'entrevoyais pourtant un objet singulier!

Ce n'était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères,
Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs,
Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs,
Entrebâillant sa robe aux brises passagères;

Mais voilà qu'en rasant la côte d'assez près
Pour troubler les oiseaux avec nos voiles blanches,
Nous vîmes que c'était un gibet à trois branches,
Du ciel se détachant en noir, comme un cyprès.

De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture
Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr,
Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur
Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture;

Les yeux étaient deux trous, et du ventre effondré
Les intestins pesants lui coulaient sur les cuisses,
Et ses bourreaux, gorgés de hideuses délices,
L'avaient à coups de bec absolument châtré.

Sous les pieds, un troupeau de jaloux quadrupèdes,
Le museau relevé, tournoyait et rôdait;
Une plus grande bête au milieu s'agitait
Comme un exécuteur entouré de ses aides.

Habitant de Cythère, enfant d'un ciel si beau,
Silencieusement tu souffrais ces insultes
En expiation de tes infâmes cultes
Et des péchés qui t'ont interdit le tombeau.

Ridicule pendu, tes douleurs sont les miennes!
Je sentis, à l'aspect de tes membres flottants,
Comme un vomissement, remonter vers mes dents
Le long fleuve de fiel des douleurs anciennes;

Devant toi, pauvre diable au souvenir si cher,
J'ai senti tous les becs et toutes les mâchoires
Des corbeaux lancinants et des panthères noires
Qui jadis aimaient tant à triturer ma chair.

— Le ciel était charmant, la mer était unie;
Pour moi tout était noir et sanglant désormais,
Hélas! et j'avais, comme en un suaire épais,
Le coeur enseveli dans cette allégorie.

Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Comments &Greek artists, Greek painting: as night falls in autumn...

Autumn landscapes & Greek artists, Greek painting, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Autmn Landscape, oil on canvas

Miltos Sachtouris

Autumn

What’s the girl looking for
in the darkness of the chair?
quickly
as night falls in autumn
she undresses
with clouds before her eyes
with the rain inside her head
with the needle in her heart
she removes the stockings
removes the flowers
discards the halo

outside the time’s leaves
are dyed in blood