Since ancient times, the concept of vagrancy has been very significant. “As a dream he wanders by day” (like a dream he wanders by day) says Aeschylus somewhere.
So the vagabonds and vagrants, the wanderers of the universal wanderer, libertarians in love, nonconformists in lifestyle, behavior and dress, are timeless, usually pointed out precisely for this attitude that often led them to balance on a razor’s edge, and more often to break their good youth.
In classical Athens, vagrants were also called beggars, prisoners, and exiles.
We love not the grim and inhuman side of vagrancy, the frenzied vagrancy, the man-eating adventurism, the violent thuggery, nor the vagrancy of politics, of dark offices and inaccessible living rooms.
But the winding path of each one towards his own Ithaca with the expensive cost of the risk of personal choice, of the “open road” against the current, the “young men with swollen feet who were called vagabonds” of Odysseus Elytis who himself was baptized with a poetic pseudonym parodying the “vagabond”, what the poets called “vagabond fate” and “vagabond road”, the “we are vagabonds, chosen children in the market place” of Tsitsanis, and the “wandering life, wandering body” of the same.
Τhe endless “beautiful and brave vagabonds”, like the boys and girls we met on the paths of our personal wandering, and the exquisite vagrancy of art and history, cases such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, Karaiskakis and Androutsos, Frida Kahlo and Joyce Mansour, Bukowski and Burroughs, Theophilos and Halepas, Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, Katerina Gogou and Nicholas Asimos, Pasolini and Genet, Lapathiotis and Papanikolaou, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Vamvakaris and Batis, Jimi Hendrix and George Best, Bellou and Polydouri.
Αll those wanderers who no formality touched and no parchment of glory or accumulation of wealth cracked their authenticity. Those who, following crooked paths, their humanity and wanderings strengthened the essence of their being and enhanced their prestige.
Because their soul was defined by the original and lifelong unquenchable flame of life and love for their fellow man and the worship of their art that they served with genuine passion.
