A Metoikos in Manhattan: 2004 A.D.

A Metoikos in Manhattan: 2004 A.D.

He was a man without a culture.
A despised wanderer in a foreign land,
surrounded by barbarians.
Like the Grecians in Magna Graecia
intermingling with the Tyrrhenians,
slowly losing their language,
steadily assimilating in 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 bouzoukia dancing
and his incessant jaunts to the gymnasia
to willfully fashion his life from a forgotten era.

He was a man without a culture.
And as he examined the prevailing one
with 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 three hundred
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.
And 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.
Partly-Italian – Partly-Grecian and Partly-American:
he constantly chided himself
for not learning modern-Italian
demotic Greek
and Attic Greek.
For if only he could accomplish this,
he could attain his Wish,
of renouncing Manhattan
and London:
The twin capitals of Modernity -
setting himself in self-exile in Rome
like the great Roman Payne 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 a fraud, a charlatan, a poseur:
A ripe target for a pursed-lipped New-Englander.

He was a man without a culture.
So today, he swore 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, Marcus Antony,
he played the part of the Dionysian Divinity
joining wholeheartedly
in the ongoing Bacchic revelry.

Though it is worth mentioning
that in the midst of this mythic debauch,
he did promise himself that on the very next morning,
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-flown Sensual Pleasure.

-Pietros Maneos