D. K. TOTERAS, ON THE POWER OF MUSIC, HIS GUITAR AND SPANISH FLAMENCO

Toteras (centre) with Richard and Chester, above

The California Coast

D. K. TOTERAS, ON THE POWER OF MUSIC, HIS GUITAR AND SPANISH FLAMENCO

Excerpts quoted with permission of the copyright holder. 

From a letter from Toteras,  24.12.1997:

“I was a Greek in the Gypsy caves of El Barrio de Albicien of Granada. I lived the life of a Gypsy; I learned the language of the Gypsy; I played their music and I became like El Greco, a Greek at the Spanish court of Grenada instead of Toledo”.

From D.K. Toteras’ stories and fictional writings, 1995:

“Previous to my arrest, I lived a life where excitement was performing on a stage. My greatest fear was that my musical concentration would be off during a concert, or that I would break a string on my guitar in the middle of a performance. I was a musician earning my respect on a concert stage, but as my audience and repertoire grew, so did my seclusion…endless study of musical phrasing and intonations, daily forays into the ever mysterious areas of rhythms. A lifetime spent in the study of musical perfection. The life of an artist requires a different reality than the measurable reality of the external world. Music, like all art, requires an internal, emotional view of existence. A view composed of sympathy, empathy, pathos…human qualities that are religiously guarded in the soul of an artist…My feelings, my intuitions, my inner world needs love to exist. I cannot create music in a spiritual tundra…a note can’t leave my fingertips, a phrase won’t emanate from those six strings. Without love I knew I would die destitute on the street”.

“Being a musician, I knew what music did for people. Music has always been part of mankind’s sexual and religious stimulation. The drumbeats of the jungle. The drumbeats of the Bedouin in his tent. The drumbeats of an army marching. The Byzantine chorale with the mosaic God filling the ears of the faithful in Saint Sophia. The Gregorian chant with castrated little eunuch tenors evoking God in his splendour. The Cantor in the synagogue praising the Lord…Certain rhythms and beats allow the primitive instincts to awaken within you, to excite you, to bring you to an elevated frenzy that could resurrect the dead. I’ve been in churches that could swing their way up to heaven, with beats that drive the most laidback to start speaking in tongues.”

“She’d put on her record player, Afro-Cuban drumbeats, Flamenco juergas, Chicago blues, Indian ragas, Caribbean reggae and jiggle me like a big mama looking for the juju market to sell me. “We’ll work with this one”, she’d tell me, “and then get to more complicated rhythms later. I have to crest…how am I going to jam and mess if you don’t get with it Mr. Maggilicuddy?”

“There is no greater emotional pain than to suspect a person you live with. When you suspect them everything they say sounds like a well planed-out lie. I remember the jive asses that used to hang around the street corners, playing their steel-stringed guitars, singing about a lying mama…If you say up, you know it’s down…”

“Since I was a musician, and the ear was the seat of my art, I couldn’t deny the power of the voice and sound in the pursuit of pleasure”.

“A word has the power to bring things together, to break things apart, to make one remember. A look on the face gives it all the look of authenticity”.

“I had developed a great sense of intuition, an intuition that I had to trust. I could never give it reasonable explanations. It was something I merely felt, I had learned to trust what I felt. My musical career depended on it. I had to feel the crowd when I played. I had to allow myself the freedom of feeling things, while my emotions dictated the texture of my music. My feelings told me what interpretations I gave the musical phrases. My feelings told me what the crowd wanted. My feelings were never wrong. My feelings and my emotions were the tools of my trade. The way I feel about anything is all I have to really depend on, whether it’s music, people, places, or a woman. But was intuition enough to allow me to follow the scent of duplicity?”

“I was starting to feel like the whole world was totally duplicitous. It ran on duplicity like cars run on gas. The art of life was to choose the right mask to wear in order to hide the duplicity”.

“It was late Fall. The early dark nights, the low sun on the horizon, the coldness in the air, the shadowless days. It seemed the right time of the year to ask myself questions as they appeared from the void. I felt a sense of loss. I didn’t have to ask myself if I had picked the right profession in life. My guitar was my inner voice, my emotional release, my canvas that allowed me to paint pictures in sound, landscapes that were made of chords, harmonies, melodies, where one note could roam over a meadow like a hummingbird”.

“Would you like to play us some of your beautiful Gypsy guitar?” Edgar asked me.

I felt like playing, even though there were only two people in front of me. I felt the urge to share my feelings with them, more so than if it had been an auditorium with a paying crowd of unknowns. I had brought my favourite guitar with me, my Reyes. It was created out of Spanish cypress by the master guitar-maker, Manuel Reyes of Cordoba, Spain. It was a guitar that was suited to my personal temperament. It responded to a variety of my moods. In my light moods I played the dance pieces of the Sevillanas, Alegrias, the Fandangos of Jerez. For my medium moods it was Granadinas, Tarrantas, tientos, and for my deep moods I played the canto hondo, the deep songs of the Soleares, the Seguirias, the Serranas. The music that inspired Garcia Lorca to write that the Seguirias needed a cathedral to be played in. I took my guitar out from its case and folded the soft cloth that covered it over my knee. I placed the guitar on my lap and held its neck with the same tenderness that I would hold a beautiful woman. My fingers rested on the black ebony fingerboard, waiting for the command to begin playing. Around 10 o’clock I was moving into my deep moods. I felt it was time to put the guitar down before I expended all my emotions.”

“I picked up my guitar and started to play. The tones were coming from some long-ago forgotten landscape. I lost myself in the sounds of Granados’ La Maya de Goya. I knew the piece well, I had interpreted it faithfully many times, but this time its organization was being developed differently, as if someone else was playing it. I found simple meanings to passages which, at one time, I found difficult to explain. I found myself changing the sequences of the musical phrases, as if the Muses were in control of my fingers, moulding the sounds into a visual order that belonged to a totally different logical system. My guitar was humming or chanting on a single string. The complexities were now reduced to a single note, with the time durations drawn out like a human voice calling me from the past to enter into a universe that had a rhythmical pulsating structure”.

“I needed ecstasy to engulf me, to transport me, to elevate me to a beauty I had never thought possible…Was it that my guitar didn’t lead the way with tones and rhythms that turned into visual symbols and physical sensations?”


Demetrius K. Toteras ©1995,
posted with permission of Nine Muses Press, Occidental, California,
and © The Estate of D. K. Toteras.

Fooling around in Meteora, Ioannina, Dodoni, Delphi, Corfu, 1968:

On D. K. Toteras, by Cindy Franks, from “Absurd Prophets”, SF Weekly, San Francisco, September 18, 1991, Vol. X, No.29.

Trying to shock us from our apathy?

“Visiting a tormented visionary can be an arduous task – especially when his wisdom is patently absurd…I was here to meet Demetrius Toteras, the professor of irrationality, the 56-year-old philosopher, poet and, some would say, prophet...

Born on the Greek island of Corfu, Toteras studied the surrealist poetics of Antonin Artaud and developed the style of a classically-educated street philosopher, frequenting San Francisco’s Broadway cafés during the beatnik 50s while playing flamenco guitar with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. These days his highly entertaining pose is as a self-styled spokesman for the working-class male. But Toteras, a Korean War veteran, is also well versed in law, engineering, carpentry and martial arts. His personal history is immense.”

D. K.Toteras, from an email received on Wednesday, 29 December 1999:

“I’m a prisoner of my own culture, physically, mentally, morally. I am by my very existence proof of a living paradox, a social anachronism. I am Greek with a thin coating of Americanism – like mustard on a ball-park frank. I look like a Greek, I think like a Greek…I love my family like a Greek, I will die for my honour like a Greek…I have survived, like Odysseus, by my wit…I live in the collective time frame of history. I am related to all the Greeks that came before me. A Greek knows who he is; he is a knot on a fisherman’s net. Anything more than that and he is accused of hubris”.

At Bodega Bay