Journey

By Paul Campanis

I have a 2000 calendar whose theme is ships. We Greeks are always on a
journey to a place, real or imagined. The imagery is of the sea, of travel,
or boats. Seferi says, "prosopa karavion katoikon ty zoei mou." Faces of
ships inhabit my life.
Not sailors, or the wave or the smell of the water, but the thing
itself, the boat. The boat is life, has life, is a total meaning to him in
some way.
I think that is why I look at that calendar with stark black and white
photos of ships on it. I don't know why, but I do it for hours on end when
I am doing some other kind of work with my hands. The things stare back at
me, ships at sea, at rest, scenes on the boat.
I believe we never leave a place our ancestors and immediate kin
occupied. We are haunted in a kind of nice way by the old scenes and ways
of life. Seferi notes the boats. He comments too on the effect Greece has,
as a calmative influence. He says our place, our race, our laos, truthfully
has always led us wisely.
"Alythia, panta fronima mas othygeise o laos mas."
We may go to Boston or Chicago but we never leave the home place. I
look out the window of my mother's place at Yiali and see that somehow life
came there from the Middle East five thousand years ago. Europe began there
as at a few other Neolithic sites in Greece.
We grope toward the ancient idiom. It is elusive in the world of Disney
and euros. The old balance, the careful norm, the quiet, the slowness.
One may say that the ancient is an attitude. Michael Lekakis, the
sculptor from Astoria, who lived amid the flower shop his people ran for
years says that the materialism of the world is the issue and has to be
transcended. He did this with his lively and wild scupture in wood. We all
have to just try to look on this matter with some deliberation and care.
So reader, we take care to love the home of all us travelers who never
forget. To mime the bard some more, I may be nobody but I can be whoever
you want. This is Odyseas, but you see we too are he. We intrepid
travelers who dared Boston and Astoria. The Greeks of Mason City, Iowa. We
had the faith to travel and to become other things than our ancestors and
yet we come back to the language the island and the poetry.
The loop complete, the search delicious, the returning divine.
When you first spy the place, coming as you do from Rhodes on the ferry
boat, Nisiro just appears on the water, another green bump in the Aegean,
but it is ours. The spirit always takes in that knowing quietly, calmly.
You imagine docking, the hubbub on landing and it makes you smile as you
think of it and all the wonderful times you have had there over the years
you have been going there. It is nice to come from some place.