His songs took us by the hand
Source: in-cyprus.com
“Where does the artist go when they die?” wondered Greek journalist Kostas Giannakidis some years ago. “We will rise like dust from the world, yet the artist will remain behind for much longer, and at their finest moment”.
Nevertheless, the death of Dionysis Savvopoulos saddens us. It’s not just the death of a person that saddens us, but also because with him it’s as if our own moments from other eras are dying too.
These moments already belonged to the past, but the death of the creator of all those lyrics and sounds that formed the background to our moments finalises the end. It’s a strange feeling we experience each time an artist whose work marked our path to adulthood dies.
Savvopoulos’s lyrics expressed things we wanted to say. They showed us a path and released our own emotions, sometimes with anger and sometimes with tenderness.
“Art, however you see it, songs, books, films, these are the corners where we arrange to meet and encounter each other, the threads we grasp and weave relationships with, often the great occasions we search for in our lives,” wrote Giannakidis in that 2017 article prompted by the death of another artist.
“They are also the markers we place to find our way to the past or to the inner sanctum of our world. What happens when artists we loved die? It’s as if pieces of our life’s scenery gradually disappear. One hand lifts them away and another replaces them with new pieces that might be beautiful, might be interesting, but don’t carry the same emotional weight for us. And as you grow older, the pieces change and you end up living in a world that, even if familiar, you don’t have much to say to. Perhaps that’s why old people fall silent. So where do artists go when they die? Inside us, of course, into the melting pot of our minds, becoming fertiliser for ideas and an ingredient in memories. They get mixed up with other things, of course, and you realise this when you try to remember who sang the song, how the lyrics went, in which film you heard it. But however it may be, we host the second life of artists. They remain alive within us and will die again with us”.
The songs will continue to exist, but it won’t be the same. They were written under certain conditions and expressed an era which is not the same as today’s. After all, “the years run loose, and we give them a shape”.
The original article: belongs to in-cyprus.com .
