Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: The cutural landscape of Greece...

Greek poets & Greek paintings, Greek artists, painters


Yannis Stavrou, Warehouses, Thessaloniki

Life and Death according to contemporary Greek poets...

The cutural landscape of Greece...

Morning and Evening
Miltos Sachtouris

In the morning
you see death
looking through the window
at the garden
the cruel bird
and the quiet cat
on the branch

passing
on the street outside
is the phantom-car
the supposed driver
the man with the broom
the gold teeth
laughs
and in the evening
at the cinema
you see
what you didn’t see in the morning
the joyful gardener
the real car
the kisses with the real couple

that death is not liked
by the cinema

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: with the full moon of contradictions...

Poetry and greek painting, greek artists, painters


Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki V, oil on canvas

HOTEL INSOMNIA
Haris Vlavianos

at night
with the full moon of contradictions
shining on the dome of your mind

you are thinking of changing roles
of finally taking the mask of grief off


yesterday
enchanted by the possibilities of your feelings you wrote:

only love as passion has meaning
every profound spirit needs a mask
– thus the subtlety of its embarrassment demands

today
under this predictable sky
you want to think
that the avenue stretching at your feet
ends somewhere –
to a final resolution of the matter
to a synopsis that will allow you to stand in awe of
the predestined unfolding of the story


your story –

in whose dramatic episodes
you seek to recognize the beckoning of affirmation
the assurance of reward


the light is glaring
“the light is always glaring”

it is late though
to leaf through the moment (life is not an argument)

no one feels like reading any more
neither do you (let the texts speak)
who exhausted by the intensity
of the last hours
pick up the phone

“a double espresso”

(as always the best sleeping pill)

Comments & Greek painters, Greek artists: Lets play the winds...

Poetry & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek fine art


Yannis Stavrou, On Red Background, oil on canvas

Reading greek poetry...

I penetrated matter howling
Nikos Karouzos

Two seas pursue me: life and death

two currents which, damn them, are in my heart . . .
I am trying to find in my dog-drunk head

/second possessive pronoun/

intelligence – can’t be found. I didn’t petrify anything.

Lets play the winds

let’s sweetly play the damned.

What a sensuously-seasoned infant the poem and poor Jesus

wearing orange stained underwear

is hung up every year in spring.

Our art: the ego’s most horrible disguise.

-------------------

From Stones of Dreams by Dimitris Kalokyris:

Issue 2.699 of the 57th year (August 9-23, 1979) of the French weekly literary review of the time Les Nouvelles Littéraires, included a folio supplement with a densely printed tribute to modern Greek art and literature. This six-page supplement was edited by D.T. Analis, who was also responsible for most of the translations. I also contributed to the collection and partially to the choice of the material. Amongst the eighteen authors that were invited to express their personal relationship to writing was, of course, Nikos Karouzos. He wrote the following self-explanatory text, typed in red ink and in the traditional polytonic system:

Nobody asked me to write. Consequently, no mathematical logic is in my favour if I should seek justification. In the end, the way I am adapting to exist as a poet is like a man who is grazing his own personal sheep without being a shepherd at all. Possibly I may exist as a poet because I did not become an astronomer, as I imagined I would as a child, or a philosopher, as I thought about later, absorbed exclusively in philosophical interests. The fact is this: poetry keeps me hanging onto the bitterness that we call life, and life devotes me to poetry. I resent existing, but existing – damn it to hell – has a certain allure, as they say. This contradiction is crushing me. I would say that no, I am not a automobilist of verses, I am a walker of verses; I don’t belong to highways (Pythagoras told us to avoid walking on them); I created my own path by myself, and nobody treads it but love and I. The poet’s drama, in my opinion, is not to express reality, but to overcome it. The true poet creates outstanding business with existence – that’s what I believe – and his vision, a chimera if you wish, is to break the fetters of reality. For me, poetry is an ontological self-illusion, unless the poet meets and achieves the freedom of existence (i.e. the extinguishing or reduction of the ego to the intellect of the heart – i.e. what used to be called holiness) which shatters reality and leads man to the living infinity of universality.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters, Greek paintings: Travel Greece through Greek poets & Greek artists...

Greek culture & greek artists, greek painters, greek fine art


Yannis Stavrou, Still life with Green Apples, oil on canvas

An invitation to travel...

Travel Greece through culture...

Travel Greece through Greek poets...

The King of Asine
Iliad
Giorgos Seferis


All morning long we looked around the citadel
starting from the shaded side, there where the sea,
green and without luster—breast of a slain peacock—
received us like time without an opening in it.
Veins of rock dropped down from high above,
twisted vines, naked, many-branched, coming alive
at the water’s touch, while the eye following them
struggled to escape the tiresome rocking,
losing strength continually.

On the sunny side a long empty beach
and the light striking diamonds on the huge walls.
No living thing, the wild doves gone
and the king of Asine, whom we’ve been trying to find for
two years now,
unknown , forgotten by all, even by Homer,
only one word in the Iliad and that uncertain,
thrown here like the gold burial mask.
You touched it, remember its sound? Hollow in the light
like a dry jar in dug earth:
the same sound that our oars make in the sea.
The king of Asine a void under the mask
everywhere with us everywhere with us, under a name:
“Αsίνην te... Αsίνην te...”
and his children statues
and his desires the fluttering of birds, and the wind
in the gaps between his thoughts, and his ships
anchored in a vanished port:
under the mask a void.

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls
carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence
a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish
in the dawn calm of the sea:
a void everywhere with us.
And the bird that flew away last winter
with a broken wing:
abode of life,
and the young woman who left to play
with the dogteeth of summer
and the soul that sought the lower world squeaking
and the country like a large plane-leaf swept along by the
torrent of the sun
with the ancient monuments and the contemporary sorrow.

And the poet lingers, looking at the stones, and asks himself
does there really exist
among these ruined lines, edges, points, hollows, and curves
does there really exist
here where one meets the path of rain, wind, and ruin
does there exist the movement of the face, shape of the
tenderness
of those who’ve shrunk so strangely in our lives,
those who remained the shadow of waves and thoughts with
the sea’s boundlessness
or perhaps no, nothing is left but the weight
the nostalgia for the weight of a living existence
there where we now remain unsubstantial, bending
like the branches of a terrible willow-tree heaped in
permanent despair
while the yellow current slowly carries down rushes up-
rooted in the mud
image of a form that the sentence to everlasting bitterness
has turned to stone:
the poet a void.

Shieldbearer, the sun climbed warring,
and from the depths of the cave a startled bat
hit the light as an arrow hits a shield:
“Αsίνην te...Αsίνην te...” Would that it were the king
of Asine
we’ve been searching for so carefully on this acropolis
sometimes touching with our fingers his touch upon
the stones.

Asine, summer ´38—Athens. Jan. ´40

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Look back over the past...

Roman quotes & greek artists, greek painters, greek paintings


Yannis Stavrou, Roman Monument, Rotonda, oil on canvas

Do not forget the Romans...

A precious source of knowledge for history, politics, future, humans...

Marcus Aurelius
Quotations

• A man should be upright, not be kept upright.
• A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.
• A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
• Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
• Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
• And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
• Anger cannot be dishonest.
• Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
• Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
• As the same fire assumes different shapes When it consumes objects differing in shape, So does the one Self take the shape Of every creature in whom he is present.
• Be content to seem what you really are.
• Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it.
• Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish.
• Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
• Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
• Confine yourself to the present.
• Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.
• Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.
• Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.
• Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.
• Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
• Each day provides its own gifts.
• Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.
• Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.
• Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.
• Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
• Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.
• Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it... Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.
• He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.
• Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, "This is a misfortune" but "To bear this worthily is good fortune."
• How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
• How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
• I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.
• If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
• It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
• Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
• Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.
• Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.
• Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
• Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.