My Ithaka

George Seferis, the Smyrna-born Greek poet admirer of C.P. Cavafy, wrote:

"As you are writing

The ink grows less

The sea increases."

When creative energy is high, the "real" world around me - the window full of morning sunshine, the hum of the computer, the keyboard under my fingers - disappears. I inhabit my inner world completely and there the sea surges to blasts of tropic sun, the breeze startles, the sand enraptures. For the real world to an artist or writer is what he or she has in her mind. Nature as we know it belongs to the domain of science but experience is the nature he or she mines.

In Theodoros Angelopoulos' 1998 movie, Eternity and a Day, the protagonist, an old man and poet, Alexander, tells the story of how Dionysios Solomon whose poem, Hymn to Liberty, became the words to the newborn Greek nation's national anthem, used to buy words from the locals to write his poems. Born of an Italian father, he wrote in Italian until deciding to move to the Ionian island of Zanthikos when Greece fought for and won its freedom from the Ottomans in the late 1800s. I employ the same maneuver because while I write from my inner world it often takes an external impetus - a movie, a poem, a book - to trigger the creative process.

One of the words that the old man bought from his "friend-for-a-day," an Albanian child he rescued from the Thessaloniki police, was "xenites," meaning an outsider, a stranger, an exile. We are poets, writers, moviemakers because in a sense we are all xenites. We live in our inner world and only by concretizing its denizens to share with others do we make that connection that lessens our loneliness.

The DVD of Angelopoulos' movie contains Cavafy's poem, Ithaka, one of my favorites.

"Keep Ithaka always  in your mind.

Arriving there is what you're destined for.

But don't hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you're old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you've gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now."

Finding the way to externalize my inner world where lie my most precious treasures is my own journey to Ithaka.

I took the image above from inside the tourist bus taking us from the port of Bari to Matera in Central Italy in 2007.