A great artist has left us. What can we learn from him?
This Thanksgiving, I'm filled with both sadness and joy.
One of my lifetime heroes, Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, died just a couple of months ago. At the same time that I mourn his passing, I'm filled with thankfulness that he lived and that he indirectly influenced my life.
Theodorakis certainly influenced Greece! When he died this September, the prime minister declared three days of national mourning—and thousands stood in line to view the composer's casket.
The Record on the Wall
The name of Theodorakis came into my life in the summer of 1969, when I was visiting Dr. Evangelos Afendras, a Greek former linguistics-teacher of mine who lived then in Quebec City, Canada. One wall of Evangelos' apartment had a small niche in it, containing only a seven-inch, 45 rpm record in a plain, brown paper sleeve.
"Evangelos," I said, "what is that record?"
He answered, "That's Mikis Theodorakis. He's a classically-trained composer who writes songs for ordinary people to sing. After all our struggles since World War II, he's helped make us proud of being Greek."
I looked more closely at the 7-inch disc. The circular label had what looked like hand-stamped Greek letters on it.
As I stared at the home-made looking record, Evangelos filled in the story:
The current dictatorship in Greece banned Theodorakis's music when they came to power. They put him in prison, but were afraid that he might die there—and that might lead to a revolution.
I blinked in amazement. A musician whose death in government custody might lead to a revolution?
Evangelos continued,
Theodorakis is under house arrest now. Occasionally, a journalist is allowed to interview him there, but they're forbidden to bring a recording machine.
One BBC journalist, though, smuggled in a small tape recorder. Theodorakis's family "accidentally" dropped dishes and pots as they washed them in the kitchen, to make it hard for the army guards to hear what was happening in the back room—where the journalist held the recorder up to Theodorakis's mouth.
Theodorakis softly sang some new songs he had written—purposely to give heart to exiled Greeks like me.
That record you're looking at contains those songs!
An Artist Activist
Over the following years, I learned that Theodorakis never stopped making music with the purpose of giving heart to his compatriots. First, after Greece's wartime occupation by the Fascists (followed by a civil war between fascists and communists), Theodorakis wrote music to build up pride in being Greek. His goal was to write songs that would be sung by the common people—not just symphonies that would be listened to only by the wealthy.
Theodorakis succeeded! In time, he and singer Melina Mercouri, along with other musicians, playwrights, poets, and artists of all kinds, created a renaissance.
To this day, I am told, you could walk in Athens and whistle one of Theodorakis' many great tunes—and a stranger is likely to sing along with your whistling.
Theodorakis was an artist who made a difference for his people. In fact, that was his intention since his youth.
His music went a log way toward uniting his country. At a time when Greece was impoverished, he gave Greeks pride and a sense of both common experience and common purpose. By setting to music poems by Nobel Prize-winning poets from Greece and abroad, he gave them a sense of the high aspirations that were possible for them as a country.
I Am Thankful
I am grateful, first, for Theodorakis's effect on my life: he modeled what a socially active artist could do. And I haven't given up on the idea that storytellers could find a role similar to the role that Theodorakis and others created.
So, in this Thanksgiving week here in the US, I celebrate a great artist.
Beyond that, I call on all of us to think: Are there ways that we storytellers can also help people remember their big selves—what's possible, what we might do if we set our sites high?
Can storytellers help all of us remember our goodness and our strength?
Can we remind each other of that goodness and strength, every time anyone hears one of our stories?
That's a dream worth being thankful for!