Stones of Dreams

18 januari 2006 As we have seen so far, Nikos Karouzos has been obsessed with music and has outspokenly collaborated with Naught. Naturally, I am not referring so much to any of his nihilistic tendencies as much as to the fact that he wrote poetry in which he opposed Naught with many-digit imaginary numbers. It is a technique that has been used with much success in the past – mostly to the benefit of the so-called applied sciences. From the moment, however, that mathematicians ended up describing the co-ordinates of language in arithmetic phrases of time, it became clear that any noetic weight these parameters may have ought to be expressed in numerical language; in other words, with verbal quantities (Numbers of Language).

Every word, taken as an alphanumeric, becomes the visual representation of the software of the reader in the poet’s memory. I am not entirely conversant with the nature of logarithms, but it should not be ruled out that this is exactly what it is all about. Because, as we delve into Karouzos’ work, we observe that there is systematically at work a Poetic Machine that interlaces auditory matter, and produces torrents of high-resolution intellectual images. (As far as I am aware the first person in the field of Greek painting to create hand-made digital images is Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, though this claim remains to be verified.)

Night has come, and “the bed is the opera of the poor”, as somebody said in some film. Taking into account the epigrammatic dissuasion of Karouzos: “Do not read me if you do not know any pluperfects”, we vaguely filter into a prolonged dream of February, in the present year, where I find myself, in the full moonlit night of a countryside confectioner’s, conversing with an adjacent person who is supposed to have ownership of several pages of the poet’s letters from his youth and is keen to get them published. In one of the turns of sleep, it is revealed that the owner of the valuable manuscripts is a famous actress, only at a younger age. I dissuade her persistently with disjointed yet strong arguments, until, rising resolutely from her seat, she throws on the table a handful of thick green glass shards, possibly broken pieces of bottles smoothed by the sea, and quickly whispers: “This is our correspondence during more than six years”. And then, in a soprano voice, she concludes: “The crystals of Karouzos!”

We are thus transferred in our dream state to the winds of Italy. The balcony of a lyrical theatre with a stage set of Caracalla’s Thermae, where, in clear Greek, an invisible, children’s (?) choir is reciting the “Force of Destiny” (La Forza del Destino – a poem from the 1970s, if oblivion does not fail me), whilst a bemasked baritone appears centre-stage, letting the melody of Loukios Dallas’s Caruso dawn out of his mouth: Te Voglio Bene Assai:

Perhaps on stage the roles are false
but they come alive through the singer’s art and the props
two eyes though so true and so near looking at you
blur your thoughts, make you forget your words
and it all becomes unimportant, even the nights over there,
in America,
the cycles that you are destined to live
like the furrows of a propeller in the water . . .

An aria travels through the tropical flora on the screen of sleep, like Claus Kinski traverses water, wearing a white linen suit – with something of Aguirre in the scaly armour in his eyes now and then – as a German-speaking Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog, where, with Claudia Cardinale’s hard-earned savings, he attempts to build an opera in the depths of the jungle driven by the ambition that Italian tenor Enrico Caruso might one day tread its boards.

Te voglio bene assai
ma tanto tanto bene sai.

And they travel up the river in a boat, launching the crystalline acrobatics of his voice from the gramophone set at the prow through the yellow waterfalls of the sky and the deafening silence of the parrots. Upon hearing the record, the hidden tribes of warriors wrap themselves in foliage and pray to their household gods: Tupa (lord of the waters of and lightning), Karay (Prince of Solar Fire), Takayra (Master of Mists), but mostly to Niamandou (hail, Lord of Words!). And their supplications reach favourable ears in various ways.

The Irish Fitzcarraldo – the auditory successor to the throne of my mind with Dennis Johnson’s Fiscadoro – visualised a melodic machine with which to plunder the riches of rubber from the virgin forests of Latin America and turn it into lyrical wages, technological melodramas, into a staged chlorophyllous ocean.

He failed, precisely because he came up against the fundamental principle of Carousian poetics, which most simply stipulates that a true gentleman does not believe in machines. “What wouldn’t I give to listen to Caruso,” says Miss Mary Jane in James Joyce’s The Dead when she is told a story of how, one evening, in Dublin’s old Royal Theatre, the tenor had been encored five times when he sang Let me Fall like a Soldier, going a C higher and higher each time.

Caruso: a person of alcohol. In Italian it means an apprentice. In Sicily, in particular, it used to mean a labourer in the sulphur mines. Uncle Enrico, an ex-worker in a flourmill, died at an extremely young age, in February 1921. His face even got printed on a Romanian stamp at one point, and his life was dramatised on the big screen by Mario Lanza, likewise an ex greengrocer and lorry-driver.

Five years after Caruso’s death, Nikos was born, in Nafplion (sired by the Argonauts), a few hours before and three centuries after the assassination of 37-year-old Caravaggio. There, too, we can discern an odd alliance with that painter, for Nikos passed away in 1990, but on September 28, the exact date when Caravaggio saw the light of this world in 1573. It so happened that on the same date Melville, Auden and Breton also died. It seems that everyone of us, secretly, defines the language of his or her death.

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.




This essay was published in a special issue of Vivliothiki (a book-review section of the national newspaper Eleftherotypia) dedicated to Karouzos, September 25, 1998.