He was a man without a culture.
A despised wanderer in a foreign land,
surrounded by barbarians.
Like the Grecian Tyrrhenians from a distant age
who had slowly lost their language
and steadily assimilated with the Italians.
Or the colonizing Greeks
in the Diaspora
who moved deeply into sweetly-scented Asia -
eventually losing their native speech
intermarrying with the natives.
…
He was a man without a culture.
Though his body, his mind and his Soul
were still Grecian, still fully Classical.
This however was a matter of personal
Will than sheer circumstance,
as he strived in his Homeric readings
his lively bouzoukia dancing
and his incessant jaunts to the gymnasia
to fashion his life from a forgotten era.
…
He was a man without a culture.
For as he examined the prevailing one -
Its hostility to Passion, to Emotion,
to The Beautiful
to anything Classical,
he vowed to remain apart from it:
Better to be a Nobody like Odysseus
than a lionized King of the Times:
A barbarian idolized by other barbarians.
Far better to be admired by a mere 300
other Aesthetes, Classicists,
and impoverished Romantics:
Also, desirous and solicitous of The Beautiful.
…
He once ventured into the MoMa
or was it The Whitney,
at the insistent urging of one of his many Lovers.
After finally escaping from the Horror,
he had to bathe himself for days on end
in an unending recitation of Keatsian similes.
Just to cleanse the barbarity, the inanity, the absurdity
from infecting him ever again.
…
He was a man without a culture.
Part-Italian – Part-Grecian and Part-American
and he constantly chided himself
for not forcing himself to learn Italian
demotic Greek
and Attic Greek.
For if only he could accomplish this,
he could attain his Wish,
renouncing Manhattan
and London:
The twin capitals of Modernity -
setting himself in self-exile in Rome
like the great Roman Payne has done in Paris.
Or making his new home
in some barely known
Grecian isle.
But until he mastered the languages successfully,
he was some kind of fraud, charlatan, poseur:
A ripe target for a pursed-lip New-Englander.
…
He was a man without a culture.
So today, he swore to himself that he would begin
his studying.
He would soon speak all three
fluently.
But just then, he heard a faint strain of the lyra,
of the bouzoukia,
and being a man who suffered from the Excesses of Passion
he could not resist the temptation,
the sensation of lyrical-Beauty,
the carnal Pleasure of Sensual-Pleasure.
And so like the lover of all things Grecian, Antony,
he dressed himself as the Divinity, Dionysus, and joined wholeheartedly
in the ongoing Dionysian revelry.
…
He promised himself that tomorrow he would begin
his mastery of the foreign tongues
so that he could finally become
who he was truly born to be
A Greek, an Italian
The Son of Aphrodite
A student of Beauty.
Yes, tomorrow, would be the day
given to scholarly discipline,
but today he must give in
to the wayward sins of his sinning-skin
to the decadent desires of his Senses,
to full-on, full-flowering, full-beautiful Sensual Pleasure.
..
