B. Voices accompanying man on his journey

Voices accompanying man on his journey entail as well songs about love in reference to non-Homeric dreams

A verse about love and pain soothed by tears is like fresh water to clean the soul.

O Homer, how many shields were carried onto those battle fields, where the folly of men drowned in battle cries, mistaken as outbursts of courage, when in fact they retreated behind the nearest bush, only to be bitten by the scorpions. Nestle with wrong things and throngs of pain will remind of the thorns not at all to the liking of naked feet. Bare footed they crossed the mountains and discovered to their surprise another way of life. It seems that hardship can be softened by the sweet tongue of love. A true love alleviates the pain when it matches the love of life itself.

There was a man who unfolded his newspaper and started to read about a conference which took place in honour of Ancient Greece. He understood through this one main article that apparently no one had understood at that conference the spirit of the past. Why is that? Stanislav Lem would say they point to the future insofar as everyone has a computerized number and given three minutes to say everything others would need a life time to comprehend. It is not fair to the spoken word. No one can reflect anymore what thoughts, indeed human substance are behind them.

Indeed, there is a need to restore the faith in the word to start again a human communication process about poetry and philosophy. They began to flourish out of a wisdom. Knowledge became a vessel to be emptied like the water brought from the drinking fountain. Later on glances into the future became distilled water poured upon the plains of simple understanding. The metaphor of a flourishing culture and city and civilization grew stronger by the years. There was a silent coming and going at places where women and children were waiting for the warriors to return. In those countless times the defeats at a distance where counted like ageing without noticing it but one morning life had vanished out of their faces and their glances were empty.

Today hardly anyone waits. There seems to be no time for that. As if no one had taught them the art of waiting. It means become active in the passive mode. What grammatical rules would bend the branches towards that side of the river?

Yet once people are forced to give up their past as they wait for their future to begin when the warriors finally return, they long for that past. By not understanding their need, they end up living in their own tautologies. It is little wonder that no one understands them. It is quite another thing to look peacefully for alternatives, and to live really the truth. They need other dreams!

Love is a strong wind. It is a feeling which takes you on a journey driven by desire. It is temperated by dreams and by an elongation of soft touches pretending to be compromises when they are not, for they are demands to be true to the dreams of ancient thoughts forever travelling with you through the night.

Olympia may be just as well the clothes that you wear even on an afternoon, when you meet a friend, but then there is the wind, the hustle and bustle of people in streets who confuse you, and that is all, what it takes to make you into a different person. It is as if you are talking into a mirror, and remembering Narcissus, startled by self love. The outcome is just. You begin to reflect the truth of your not belonging so easily to the dispositions of others especially when they start to bargain about the price on your head. Usually you do not know what value you have, hence you strike any accord, or discord with the others, although many tend out of lack of knowledge to exaggerate the price.

Then there are those who do not believe in themselves. They end up living in mystified worlds having more to do with the wish to cling to the clothes of dreams than to their true messages. Dreams are like the oracle of Delphi. They need skilful interpretations to decipher them.

At the end of the twentieth century, the ancient, Homeric dream of a life conveyed by richness has become established, too established. There is no longer any distance to go nor any ease by which such efforts to travel back and forth to gather wealth makes any sense, especially when the dialogue between the past and the present is missing. You could find in life if you remember life is something. But although the present still likes to have some water, a piece of cheese and olives to chew on while munching away at freshly baked bread, we are too far removed from that simple truth. Almost gone is the childhood of civilization.

Circumstances do not allow us to show what is happening to love afterwards, that is after awakening to see what man has done to this earth. No more are mortal sins a mixture of pleasure and pain which makes everyone look disjointed in the mirror of love, but we hasten on to quiet our dreams as if we do not want our children to be witnesses of our lost loves in the turmoils of our anxieties.

Love is always the disobedient voice rejecting the usage of power to get things done, for with love there are always other ways of doing things.

Robert Payne would say, we know hardly anymore the Early Songs of Love, but "we can barely glimpse the magnitude of our loss. Of the great beginning of Western song there are only ruins." (in: Ancient Greece, p. 127)

Here then begin the dreams, the dreams about songs of love

left behind, amongst the rocks and rivers, forests still silent,

delicate their voices, tough their dreams of love wrested from years

of waiting like the faithful ones till all return from Hades.

Which voices can make us understand, why nature is there? Which love is to be found once men and women search for truth in life? Love seems to depend upon rivers, but not upon the risks man has to take, in order to obtain wealth. The latter is an old fashioned dream. It explains only the need to travel and what dangers lurk, if both friendship and faithfulness in love are neglected while on the road.

To poets, the important voices are often the forgotten ones, those close to daily life. The true ones are filled with desire to live. It is something all seek, but only few find, for not all means are justified.

To find the true means, man needs contemplative silence. In includes freedom from gossips, or even worse from negative opinions. Only then truth can come to him or to her once a kind of uncensored thinking in silence about the future prevails. These silent contemplations are true even if do not abide with the current loud tendencies.

Homer would add a very important quality to this silence. He simply characterized it as the abode of the Gods on Mount Olympus: "the world in which all the images are hushed in the silence of contemplation" (cited from Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p. 53):

Here is the abode of the gods, the everlasting

Place of their sojourn

This place is never shaken by winds,

Nor is it ever moistened by the rain,

Nor does any snow ever fall there,

But the wide air is made eternally clean and cloudless,

Shining in the light of hovering whiteness.

Homer

Yet if the world of Odysseus was heard more than that of Penelope, starting in the seventh century B.C., Sappho begins to defy more the odds of a woman in agony because of having to wait for such a long time, until her true love would come to her. This returning is a first recognition of what is really the prime mover of life, namely the woman, and equates Homer's contemplative silence with that silent desire for love. Usually the women were meant to stay inside, and face there the man 'bend, round-shouldered as a wheel':

He does not pierce the soft-skinned girl who stays

Indoors at home, with mother, innocent

Of golden Aphrodite's works. She bathes

Her tender skin, anoints herself with oil,

And going to an inner room at home,

She takes a nap upon a winter day.

Hesiod, Works and Days, 519ff or 496-526

However, women like Sappho start in the seventh century to sing songs and define through their voices other tasks which would lie ahead while letting themselves to be guided by just that 'desire':

I love delicacy, and I believe

All bright and beautiful things

Spring from desire of the sun.

Sappho

Due to that strong desire, there are many interpretations and understandings of that ancient past. For instance, Ritsos would see present Greece as a world filled with 'ancient movements' - a woman stepping out of a hut and lifting a jug. He would say, that there is something which makes the sculptures in the village square step down once all have gone home, and no one there to see their craziness of love leaving everyone to lead a life or his or her own. Elytis added to the 'contemplative' the notion of the Christian silence, and tried to let the past simmer through the cracks of the hut: light from Sappho. Cavafy took the metaphor of the voyage to mean the search for the 'self', while Seferis would describe the light as judges on the increase as the years go by and the land as 'topos' remaining closed:

Our land is closed, nothing but mountains

upon which day and night rests the low ceiling of the sky.

We have no rivers we have no fountains we have no springs...

.....................

How did we conceive our children? How did they grow up?

Seferis does not merely refer to when Greece was linked by sea while on land people were locked inside valleys. They did not go further than that. But he means something more. He wants to say when man is without love, then he has no understanding for the present. He is without future because he does not know his past. Ancient dreams, once forgotten, hover in silence between the trees casting ever longer shadows as the sun goes down.

There are many poets singing about Greece. Their voices become sharp images intertwined with the logic of having confounded love by perfection for it is too sharp a contrast with the rocks. Michelangelo called them more perfect than whatever man's hand could make out of them.

(For the train exhibition was shown a video film depicting how poets sing about the Greek landscape. The film was done by Spyros Mercouris and his sister, Melina Mercouri. She understood very well why this voyage has to be undertaken:

Now, as then.

Then, at the beginning of the first millennium before Christ.

Greek youths have set forth on the road of exploration, some named,

others nameless, and have travelled further than every before, youths

in full blossom, to new, fresh worlds, the Archaic smile on their immortal

lips, their marble lips, taking captive the gaze of beauty in their flashing

eyes.

Holding in their hands the art of wisdom and the golden mean.

And the pain of freedom.

Ageless youths, the eternity of the Odyssey in their breasts, the lyrics of

Sappho on their breath, the humanity of Hesiod in their thoughts. Their

bodies swaying to the rhythm of the iambus, of the dochmius, of the anapest.

From the past to the present they have come, conferring new dimensions.

Naked, clothed only in their own self.

Then, as now.

Today, at the end of the second millennium after Christ.

Our memories, our eternal doubts have set forth on the road of 'recognition'

and, some named, others nameless, have travelled beyond dream to this

New World, History alive in their Minds, to illuminate the darkest levels of our

consciousness.

The kouroi and the korai.

In an age of impasse, in a world held captive in the net of its own loneliness;

kouroi of inner self-sufficiency, korai of human grandeur.

In the century of space wandering, the torchbearers of earthly exploration.

To enlighten our perfection and self-knowledge.

Melina Mercouri, Introduction to the exhibition "The Human Figure in Early Greek Art", Greece 1987

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B. Voices accompanying man on his journey