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Overview
Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living and the Dead, as well as a hybrid memoir, The Book of Jon. Sikelianos directs the creative writing program at the Universityof Denver.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566893602 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Pages: | 126 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
You Animal Machine
(The Golden Greek)
By Eleni Sikelianos
Coffee House Press
Copyright © 2014 Eleni SikelianosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-360-2
CHAPTER 1
THIS BOOK IS PART OF A LONGER FAMILY HISTORY, a circulatory system that encompasses morphine and heroin addicts, refugees, Ionian counts, one of the richest families in the United States who exhausted their fortune attempting to revive the ancient Greek theater, Lithuanian Jews, a half-dozen musicians, a painter, several poets (one a Nobel nominee) and lesbians, opium-runners, forgers, waitresses, tavern entertainers, a burlesque dancer called Melena the Leopard Girl (one of her many stage names), and a dwarf (one of her five husbands), all landed, eventually, on the coasts of our American homeland. It begins in lands and times we do not know—on the amber plains of Anatolia, under the golden light of Attica, in the shadows of the Black Forest, with ship-farers and wags—and snakes through the early reaches of recorded history on this continent, runs through Greek hash dens, Bohemian Europe and America, and crashes right into the average story of all those happy family plans gone awry.
* * *
I see the lines of our ancestors laid out in filaments looping here and there, bifurcating, disappearing; there are breaks in the thread and dead-ends into the dark where this or that sister took a boat from Greece and was lost forever from the fold; men and women who found each other or for reasons of circumstance were thrust into each others' arms, radiating out along the great line in pairs; for however much they loved each other or same or other sexes or lived apart, always in this long arrow stretching back to our first humans hunting in the bush somewhere on a far continent in an inscrutable time, it was and is a man and a woman, two by two, each representing a small electrical hyphen of human intelligence and endeavor illuminating the path that leads to me sitting here—; men and women, each with eyes lit up for at least one moment in their lives; loving each other in the dark before the advent of writing; or a brief encounter, maybe forced, that led to the continuation of a line; these packets of genes waiting, and that uncontrollable animal urge toward making things—love, babies; the ranks moving forward and forward, branching, fucking, splitting, until they reach the edges of history; and forward, farther, till they hit the periphery of family lore.
Thus begins the tale before human time but in human terms, and stretches far beyond us into a future we cannot imagine, except, perhaps, that it will not contain us as walking libraries. It matters that there are holes in a family history that can never be filled, that there are secrets and mysteries, migrations and invasions and murky bloodlines. In this way we speak of human history.
The first portion of the tale was about my father, Jon.
This portion of the tale is about the other side: my grandmother, the Leopard Girl, the Golden Greek.
* * *
These stories were always in the room with us, vapory house gods seeping up from the carpet, flitting around the cupboards and corners, sparking off fingertips like flammable ice, an aura crackling and chuckling around the skin; our lares familiars, our deep inhabitants.
Story is not the right word. History is too vague. This is a net of family giftings, woven in darkly luminous filaments, the shirt daubed with Nessus's blood that scorches the skin, wounding the susceptibilities. But what is the key that turns the lock of the poison dress? Who is us? (Me and my mother.)
* * *
Three dreams:
We're driving through large rolling hills in a big soft sloppy light toward the origin of family history. In this version, beautifully built barns straddle the road and we drive right through them, airy modern masterpieces open to and cleansing the heart and mind.
* * *
What was that wolf chasing the sheep running up the grassy hillside, and I'm watching from the left of the scene saying to my daughter, Look at that wolf! It's hunting a sheep! Being the watcher and also the place I'm watching from is what's important.
* * *
M: I do not dream I am dismembered. I never dream I am dismembered.
NAMES AND ALIASES
Helene Pappamarkou (birth certificate)
Eleni (her father called her)
Elaine (her mother called her)
Elayne (her mother called her)
Elaine (at death)
The Golden Greek (stage name)
Marco the Cat Girl (stage name)
Melena the Leopard Girl (stage name)
Melanie the Snake Dancer (")
Melanie the Mexican Mobster (")
Marko, "the exciting uncensored dance delineator"
Melaine Marko, exotic
Elaine Marko, sultry exotic
(secret name)
(secret name)
Yagurete ("true carnivorous beast")
what is her girl name (maiden)
what is her girl name (maiden)
The Feral Child
THAT WOMAN in the leopard suit practically walked out of a burning city and into the hands of the Mafia; but it was her father who leapt into the harbor from a town in flames. The heat from the blaze was so great that even the ships docked a few miles out had to back off. Cargo falling into the sea: boxes, pianos, and overloaded donkeys tumbling from the wharves through the clear green water. The slow cascade of a weighted body through liquid, the bubbles kissing the body then rising, making their escape to the surface to join their kind in oxygen.
A Red Cross boat stuffed with the living tumbled across the ocean circa 1922, and on it was Yiannis Pappamarkou, soon to become John Diamond. To leave your birthplace by force and find yourself in foreign lands; to set sail from the shores of the Aegean, from the sunlit regions of the Tigris and Euphrates, from Kurdistan or Armenia; to set forth from Paradise, the suburbs of Smyrna, and arrive in a land frozen at the heart. In the great Exchange of Populations, when the Greeks failed to take back Constantinople and reestablish Alexander's empire, 1,222,849 people set out, each with a box, bag, trunk, or with nothing, and made their way to a motherland most had never seen. They walked through the mud and dust, through fires and knots of armed soldiers, to set up roofs of tarred felt, huts built of planks and oil cans and burlap bags in fields at the outskirts of towns or leaning against warehouses or on the hillsides that form a ring around Athens. Some were housed in schools, churches, army camps; others found homes in the town's theater, one family to a box, the mezzanine brimming with trunks and laundry lines strung up for privacy. Some never arrived, but died of fever or flu, TB, malaria, went blind with trachoma, were taken prisoner, or were otherwise annihilated along the way. They were crowded onto boats till one could not sit but had to stand on the open deck for days, without food, unable to sleep or piss or shit in private, crawling with lice, blistered by noontime sun, arriving in Athens in stinking rags. In some republics, history has taught us, the stranger is a stain, and that stain's disappearance is beneficial to the state.
The Greeks call it the Great Catastrophe, the Armenians the Great Calamity; the Assyrians call it the Year of the Sword. Someone invented the word genocide to describe it. In those years, an Ottoman officer could buy a Greek girl and take her home permanently for about eighty cents.
In the great, gray port of Piraeus, where the big brightly lit ships come in and pull out at all hours of the day and night, the old Greek rembetes were living it up in the tekes, carefully placing coals into the narghilés, sucking up the hash smoke and beginning their songs. The refugees arrived with wailings embroidered in a whole new Eastern grief, and a cacophony started up, syncopated by the sheep-bladder drum.
It was the days of the three-stringed bouzouki, before the big crackdowns, when men still knew how to really play the santouri, when it cost money to break plates, but not a month's salary. It was the days of zeibekiko (Zeus-bread) and hasapiko (the butcher's dance) and hash, before the rise of bouzouklouthes, and American money. Rembetika boomed out of Athenian jukeboxes in metallic voices while men with half-closed eyes danced a slow dance, beads of sweat collecting in the immobility of evening. Like the ancient chorus, which marked the dancing foot, the music, and the human voice, this song was made for a three-part mode (dance, instrument, word). There is Hades, Elysium, and Life on Earth, and the infidel sang to Charon, asking if he could transport just a little chunk of hash down to dead friends.
Rembete: lowlife, refugee, drug user, convict, pimp; see manga
Rembetika: the music of the outcast and damned
Tekes: hash dens
Narghile: water pipe
Santouri: the "fiendishly difficult" Greek zither or hammered dulcimer; John Diamond's instrument
Bouzouki: stringed instrument with roots in Byzantium and Persia, similar to a mandolin; can also mean the music itself
Bouzouklouthes: bouzouki girls
Tsifteteli (from Turkish, chifteteli): belly dance
The 4/4 tsifteteli winds up and drifts out into the port. John Diamond (Diamond John) is there, waiting for the boat, his santouri carefully wrapped in ragged felt.Was he a refugee in the great migration, from that city razed by fire, in the days when the Turks killed eight thousand Armenians in forty-eight hours and booted out the Greeks? (A psychic once told me he was a forger, a trafficker, a dangerous man.) And into the heartland of a distant country he burrowed with not a loose dime in his pocket. America: wide streets with ice that whispered when you walked, the glowing lights of boomtown Detroit.
Hid low on a farm in the American Midwest was Bertha, a woman of German descent prone to darkened fits, sprung from a line of prizewinning dahlia growers. Do you know how hard it is to grow a dahlia in dirt that freezes through each winter? Things that grow are gifts from the ground, where the dead are hidden. Only Black Demeter can give them, handouts from the buried world. Bertha waited, curled into the colorless flower of Wisconsin like a pale chafer worm. They met. They kissed. The ground chasmed under her. They married. Soon John taught her all the Greek blues he knew. It was the music played by refugees, hash-house denizens, desperadoes, men and women haunted by the police, drug addicts with prison records, humans risen up from the half-dead. Everywhere I look on this side of the dock, these are the men and the women of my history. Lowlifes.
Some songs recorded the year they married:
Lowdown Doll
Why I Smoke Cocaine
Hashish Harem
Open the Graves
Hipster, Hit the Road!
If I Were the Hem of Your Skirt
Bordello Blues
I've heard rumors of a black '78 with Diamond John and Bertha's recordings. If it existed, it has long since been lost to trash heaps and house fires.
THE FIRST GREEK known to have set foot on the American continent was Don Theodoro, who traveled here along with Cabeza de Vaca on the Narvaez expedition. They were beset by hurricane, disease, attack, malnutrition. Of six hundred crew members, four survived. Don Theodoro, having been taken one day by Indians to seek water, never returned. (Cabeza de Vaca wandered the desert naked for nine years, sometimes enslaved, sometimes a healer, a child of the sun.)
In 1768, Greeks from Crete, Smyrna, and the Mani settled in New Smyrna, Florida. All trace of them has been lost.
In 1864, the first Greek church on American soil was built in New Orleans.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, Greeks founded over six hundred diners in and around New York, the equivalent of one diner every other week for twenty-five years. What does a Greek say when he meets another Greek in the new country? [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; Hey, wanna open a diner? (aspirate the H heavily if pretending to be Greek).
The first Greek to settle in Cleveland, Panayiotis Koutalianos, was a circus strongman. In my mind he looks like Fellini's Zampano and bursts thick metal chains from his chest while Giuletta Masina, the woman with the most living sap under her skin in a thousand years, sheds a crystal tear.
The first Golden Greek was Jim Londos, a pretty Greek not too good at wrestling who hailed from Argos, a city favored by Hera.
I cannot say what year my mother's grandfather arrived, or from where; he came wrapped in the ragged dark, with the stealth of someone with everything to hide. The secret is ink-scratched on the bones of his spine. He burrowed up under the map like a mole and burst the topography, shredding the paper, blasting a man-sized hole in the earth at his exit point—a hole in which no daughter can hide. Since he is a lost man, everything in this book is speculation.
HE SPOKE in the language demons understand. Bazagra, bescu, berebescu.
He learned the voces mysticae from the curse tablets placed with the dead to keep the Turks from moving their bones.
He tried to appeal to the gods (Charon, Hermes, Hecate, Persephone), but everything he spoke turned to lead not gold.
"Bind the speech of ... bind [bind] the tongue ..."
He forgot to write the love spells. He possessed no special knowledge. He put his daughter on the wrong side of her magic. Let him listen to Diamanda Galas till the end of time.
* * *
ONE BY ONE CHILDREN WERE BORN, then the Spanish flu hit; Bertha was too sick to care for them. Someone dropped them off at the orphanage.Why were they never picked up?
(Liberty went smashing through a window when the train she was riding slipped off its tracks.)
(Beatrice or Audrey stumbled through thin winter ice outside the orphanage and disappeared.)
Helene was born after the epidemic, and was kept (her talent for dancing helped).
(She found her brother, another Theodoro, forty years later in the desert, where he built windmills by daylight and gambled all night. Later his son tried to grab my crotch in the pool when I was eight, and at night shoved his tongue down my throat.)
Of the others, she found no trace or story. What were their names? Where did they go?
Give each a beautiful name and beautiful life. Calliope, Penelope, Alexandras, Persephone, Dimitra—gods and goddesses all.
but if pimp is the god is the devil is the pimp is the dad is the pimp is the god is the devil
bring him out into the light
give him the paradox hex around loving give him the x axe
In the Greek tavernas of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, John Diamond played the santouri and Helene rattled the tambourine and moved her hips and feet, collecting coins in the stretched skin with its jangling metal disks. Bertha singing the Greek songs that, like their American blues counterparts, require the wound that opens once you've brushed mass death.
* * *
if you want to know what happened to your daughter, ask the Sun (all things happen under the sun if they do not happen in the dark)
to keep from losing your daughter in a gaping wound
dirt gash
keep corn seeds hidden in the ground
suffer not the seed to grow
who best understands a woman's work
who knows what happens in closed rooms
don't let the corn-mother catch you pulling poppies, pulling corn-flowers
don't let her catch you rye-mother barley-mother
beat those sheaves and drive that corn-mother out!
thresh it, dress it up, strip the corn-puppet-mother, place it on the pyre
All we know of the one useful goddess (her vegetal service matched by her suffering): worshippers were shown "an ear of corn which had been reaped in silence."
* * *
IN THE SETTLED HOURS, between gigs, Bertha wrote astrology columns and read the cards, advising her readers to "be still and wait for your lucky star." What card is missing? Taraka (Arabic),"to leave, abandon, omit, leave behind." She is not lacking the Devil (as in the nineteenth-century deck), not the Tower, not the Money's Horse (missing in the Visconti deck). Father/Fool: Zeus is too busy receiving feasts from humans to hear his daughter's screams. But when the earth gives no more fruit or flower or grain: what will they have to feed him?
No bird of omen came to her as a truthful messenger
For so long hope charmed her strong mind despite her distress
The goddess of anyone grieving a daughter
goddess of anyone gree
No bird of o
No o of no tru her strong mind her di s
Bertha drank ink, hoping the lead would finish it.
Can you die from drinking ink?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from You Animal Machine by Eleni Sikelianos. Copyright © 2014 Eleni Sikelianos. Excerpted by permission of Coffee House Press.
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