Eros in Crisis (following Theodor Adorno in four quotes)

Someone has to take a risk.
But that needs courage.
What if you have courage, but no hope?
– do you need courage for hope?
It depends on the risk, I guess,
on how much you want to risk
what you don’t have.

1) “Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking strength.” We were having a conversation about relationships when Christina quoted Theodor Adorno’s line. It sounded like an awkward translation, but it seemed, besides a way to talk about vulnerability, a way to describe the generally sadistic treatment of Greece’s economic fragility by its lenders. There was certainly no love in this union, despite all the rhetoric of salvation – the crisis in Cyprus proved as much, if there were still any doubts. The troika’s priorities has been to assert economic power that seems to grow exponentially to the shrinking economic and social viability of the nation, or economy, being “saved” – or more to the point, dominated. Assumptions of superiority and entitlement were nowhere more blatantly demonstrated than when the troika et al, with no forewarning decided on a 10% cut into all savings and bank accounts in Cyprus to avoid default (a decision that was only stopped by the Cypriot parliament’s unanimous vote of “No” on March 19, 2013. Even if the troika finally did come into the picture because Russia closed the door on any lending (after firm chats with Berlin), it was a passionate and devastating effort on the part of the people, and those in government to withstand the overnight leveling of the economy. We were at Christina’s listening to updates from Cyprus over speaker-phone since Christina is Cypriot and her family was giving us on-site accounts of what was happening. Pensioners announcing they were willing to give up their pensions, or most of it, “to keep the troika out”; a woman saying she had lost her children to war, “given them to the nation” she said during the 1974 Turkish invasion, and didn’t want that sacrifice to go in vain. The troika’s blatant interventions into the economic sovereignty of nations, demonstrates its appalling presumption of entitlement as much as its flagrant disregard for people’s lives and the consequences to them as a result of these interventions. So we were having a conversation about love in the midst of the politics. Or eros. I was remembering Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, two novels that deal with eros, among other things, during the Soviets’ domination and invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague spring of 1968.“There is no eros without crisis, it is the definition of crisis” Christina said at some point. It was certainly what went on in the Kundera novels. Is it that combination of vulnerability and then, simultaneously the need to connect (because of vulnerability?) that becomes eros, the overture in the moment of dissolution? Adorno’s quote was poignant, and (for some reason) impossible in the context of the present crisis that seems more and more pathological, a power play for economic control over the other (i.e. the weakened PIGS) as opposed to any show of empathy and true aid.

2) “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality” is a clearer expression of austerity and its current sadomasochistic paradigm, more like a Sadeian plot than scenarios from a Kundera novel– as the troika refuses to revisit an agenda that is proving punitive rather than therapeutic.  So what does anyone do who is caught in this noose – I suppose recognizing it for what it is, is a small source of sanity. The other thing, too, is that the measures are forcing many of us to try and articulate what we feel strongly about, and defend the principals even if we can’t change the politics. I have a friend who has not been paid in 9 months. She manages because she lives with her boyfriend whose pay has been slashed but he still has a paycheck. She has not managed to pay any of the solidarity taxes for 2013 as a result. When she went to get her salary statement to submit this year’s tax statement she was told she had two choices. Either she could get a statement saying she had been paid the past 9 months (which risked never getting the 9 months of salary still owed), or she could get a statement saying she had only been paid for 5 months of 2012 and have to nevertheless pay a penalty for the outstanding taxes. In this relentless downward spiral the focus is ever becoming what ultimately gives us some connection to what we care about, the things that make us “us” or at least recognizable to ourselves as the troika’s measures continue to “other” the eurozone’s weaker members. They are not “within sniffing distance” (economically and socially) to use Elizabeth Ames Staudt’s phrase in her brilliant post on empathy and its discontents regarding the Boston marathon tragedy. Friends have taken on a quiet defiance, gathering for shared meals and drink on the weekends, helping each other out when and where possible. One of my students said “even if it’s my last 5 euros I’m going to spend it out with friends.” This need to be near and for one another is marking and shaping our lives.

3) “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” My tattoo is not an expression of an uncommitted crime, but it is a small artifact with an aesthetic produced of some pain. I have been thinking of reactions to it, and that any tattoo is a marking. Several people asked if I was comfortable with its permanence, what I felt about having it with me, on my body “forever.” This is one of its attractions for me; that it is a marking of permanence, a metaphor of flesh damaged to become something else. I think of tattoos as a way to love our markings, the scar as a part or precondition of beauty. My tattoo is an olive branch, something I have wanted for some time but only decided to have done when one of my students told me her cousin was a tattoo artist. Alexandra said, “what if you leave Greece or don’t want to think about Greece at some point…” I answered that I wanted to “have it with me,” olive trees wherever they happen to be are my favorite trees, and I adore olives. It’s not just about Greece, it’s about what you want to be, or are, marked by, and how we are inevitably marked by what we love. Recently the former Prime Minister George Papandreou was asked to appear in Athens to speak to the fact that nothing was done during his tenure with the names on the “Lagarde list” of potential tax evaders. He said he had nothing more to say than what he had stated in a letter to the committee. He wasn’t brothering to come back to Greece, obviously he too was marked in the drama of Greece’s crisis but he was still refusing his and his government’s responsibility in the saga. Now geographically removed he is also proving himself out of “sniffing distance” of the country’s trials, more of crimes than art, to paraphrase Adorno, will inevitably mark his place in its history.

4) “Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar” — I wanted this post to be about the idea of eros as an overture out of damage, how we use the marks to our bodies, and psychologies, to become something else, something that transcends the tragedy, or transforms the ugliness. J was telling me that now that there’s no money some of the administrators in the national theatre where she works are withholding payments. It was like Elina’s story. She was sure “some money existed” but they didn’t give it to the people it was owed to. Another S&M scenario in which people are being held hostage in forced dependencies. “It’s pornographic” I said to Elina, when she was describing the “choices” she was given regarding her salary, or lack of it. She shook her head. “Pornography needs a confidence of power,” she answered. Pornographic was what was happening with the troika and their viewing of cultures outside their own; looking at spreadsheets and numbers as opposed to the human costs of those spreadsheets and numbers. “We’re just castrated” she said. “There’s no confidence of power here, not with us or any one in our government.” We agreed that pornography is about the decadence of power, its narcissisms. “So no one falls in love in these times?” I ask. She smiled, “Yes of course they do but the lover is…” She was thinking. I said “tender?” She shook her head, “No, not tender, not tender at all. Things are a lot more cerebral now. It’s about being smart more than tender.” I laughed. She was still smiling; it was a playful and sly smile. In the brutal world, which is the world of sustained austerity, the idea of tenderness probably sounds sentimental if not absurd. What one hoped for was recognition, recognition of the absurdity, the intelligence to understand this. It required the ability to articulate that “we know” what is happening to us. The smile says: “we see what we’re up against, even if we’re following the rules”; this is the tension of eros. “You have to be attuned to your partner,” Costa tells us as we learn our tango steps. Tango is a dance of intuitive understanding, “the dance of the street,” Costa explains, one that was never learned formally.” We were having our Monday night class. “If you’re not attuned to your partner…” Costa was demonstrating the role of the “cavaliero” who always leads, “she won’t move with you. You could push her here or there but she won’t have the soul to move with you.”

RETHINK: Re-build…Be Positive… Sustain!

 – by B. Kondilis

The buzz of energy is around us everywhere! In the “positive psychology” movement the belief is that if one focuses on the positives and is able to reframe a negative situation — it changes one’s brain chemistry resulting in better mental and physical health.  In this context, architects, engineers, environmental specialists know how important “space” is for both individual and community well-being. For the past year, we have been seeing buses in the city with the logo “Rethink Athens”  — the European Architectural Competition for the Creation of a New City Center in Athens organized by the Onassis Foundation. The recent exhibit of results held in Syntagma square (pictured) from March 14^th – March 26^th was a beacon of positive energy, adding excitement for the onlooker and hope for a better and more sustainable city center.

The idea behind the project is to transform Athens’ center by the year 2016, extending it from Amalias Avenue and Syntagma Square to Omonoia Square and the Archaeological Museum, making these areas public space where citizens can meet in both commercial and leisure activities. The implementation of this competition involved a legal agreement with the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, the former Ministry of Transportation, Infrastructure and Networks (currently renamed the Ministry of Development, Competitiveness, Transport, Infrastructure and Networks), the metro of Athens (Attiko Metro S.A.) and collaboration with the Attica Prefecture and the Municipality of Athens. All the projects were winners in my book as each added an interesting perspective ranging from facing current challenges, being resilient, building a more accessible and vibrant city (First Prize winners) to a utopian neighborhood (Utopian Proposal Award). The exhibits included the use of eco-minded materials, modes of energy (including emphasis on improving eco-mobility), increasing more “open” and green spaces.

Along the same lines, other initiatives such as Ecomobility ( see photo) featuring over 10 years of ideas by young people, like the Ecofans Club of the Hellenic American Union that holds various environmental education events for younger children including sharing their vision for a greener, more hospitable city (see photo featuring their “dream city”). The Greek company for reusing and recycling materials, EEAA, started their social marketing campaign in the city’s metro on recycling properly “Say Yes and Begin Recycling Properly” (πες ναι και ξεκίνα να ανακυκλώνεις σωστά – see photo) and (finally!) the mass media is catching on! SKAI   is now doing several socially-minded events over the past years (ranging from tree planting to medicine gathering in various communities throughout Greece), and now ANT1 too has turned to the more positive psychology of campaigns, such as that centered around the “Best Things in Life”  — see photo of metro poster calling for us to “Have a Positive Thought at Each Stop” – κάνε μια χαρούμενη σκέψη σε κάθε στάση) where one can upload one’s own images and videos. There is also an upcoming media focus on “Heroes Among Us” (οι ήρωες ανάμεσά μας) where one can suggest a local “hero”…. 

 

It is time to “Rethink” beyond and further than Athens, to all of Greece and into the next decades; but these initiatives in Athens have indeed begun the focal point of actions toward creating a sustainable environment; one that is more socially responsible, involving positive individuals for a more positive nation. As the Greek adage goes “hope dies last” (η ελπίδα πεθαίνει τελευταία): the key as always has been to have faith and continue to hope. Giving “possibility” is what we need in these times of challenge. As the English philosopher and logician Bertrand Russel (1872-1970) said “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” We need solutions in Greece, not more problems, and not more negative energy: “Don’t you see the glass half full rather than half empty?”

Sick Bodies

“No one ever imagined such a situation. No one expected it. And the political class never warned the common people of such a trajectory. This is a serious political crime. There was widespread political silence until the crisis blew up. And suddenly the people felt that they were robbed of their recent past of a few decades ago.”     Christos Chryssopoulos, author of  The Destruction of the Parthenon

 

For days the word “bruised” was on my mind, the color as much as the tenderness of skin, the vulnerability of hurt flesh, its beauty as flesh as much as its human fallibility, skin and body always exposed and prey to what can mar, and destroy it. The idea was there because the days again collapsed into a series of unexpected events. The unexpected has come to be synonymous with kinds of bruisings, whether these be announcements of people being laid off, or notices of taxes – the ongoing “Xaratsi” (Solidarity Tax) – the bills that seem always inflated even if we barely turn on the heat or the water heater. Worse, the economic reality has also, maybe inevitably, affected the number of people now physically ill. The bodies on the streets, bodies on the subways announcing their illnesses as the afflicted hold stamped papers from doctors verifying their ailments, many terminal.

But the sickest body is that of the state and its continuing inability to hold itself accountable, as it mandates that the people follow prescribed “cures” for the ailing economy. The first prescription came, of course, in 2010 when the George Papandreou government tried to  “save” the country from the spreading disease of economic fallout. So it was not with little disgust that I read an email from someone close to the body of that government, writing of GP’s choice to introduce “the support mechanisms” (the troika’s austerity package) as a way of “saving Greece” and avoiding Cyprus’ sudden, unprecedented 6.75% — 9.9% government tax on all bank deposits: http://www.counton2.com/story/21649237/cyprus-to-seek-russian-contribution-to-bailout

The email read:

Τώρα καταλαβαίνουν πολλοί τι γλύτωσε η Ελλάδα το 2010…

Γ. Παπανδρέου, Βουλή, ομιλία για την ένταξη της Ελλάδας στο μηχανισμό στήριξης, 6/5/2010: «Και δεν άκουσα και δεν έχει ακούσει κανένας εναλλακτική λύση -πολύ θα το θέλαμε. Πέστε, εξηγήστε τι θα συμβεί, αν χρεοκοπήσει η χώρα, αν κηρύξει στάση πληρωμών. Τι θα γίνει με τους μισθούς και τις συντάξεις, που όλοι κοπτόμαστε κατά τα άλλα; Τι θα γίνει, κύριοι της Νέας Δημοκρατίας, με ένα κράτος, που δεν μπορεί να δώσει τίποτα; Τι θα γίνει με τις καταθέσεις των κόπων του ελληνικού λαού, σε μια οικονομία που θα καταρρεύσει;»
 
Ο Σαμαράς δεν τον στήριξε – καταψήφισε με περισσή σιγουριά το νομοσχέδιο εκείνο το βράδυ. Ο Τσίπρας τον κατηγόρησε για “επικοινωνιακή και οικονομική τρομοκρατία”. Τα ίδια και η Παπαρήγα. Γενικά, ουδείς είχε αντιληφθεί το διακύβευμα. Ουδείς είχε αντιληφθεί τον άμεσο κίνδυνο που διέτρεχε η Ελλάδα. Αντίθετα, και εκείνο το βράδυ και μέχρι τον Οκτώβριο του 2011 τον κατηγορούσαν ότι τρομοκρατούσε με παραμύθια τον κόσμο για να περάσει σκληρά μέτρα. Αυτό έλεγαν εν χορώ, επί μήνες, όλοι: κόμματα, εφημερίδες, ραδιόφωνα, κανάλια, πρωϊνάδικα, καθηγητάδες, οι πάντες.

Το πόσο “παραμύθια” ήταν όλα αυτά, όλα αυτά που γλυτώσαμε από το 2010 μέχρι σήμερα – με βαρύ κόστος, αλλά τα γλυτώσαμε χάρη στον Παπανδρέου και την κυβέρνησή του – φαίνεται τώρα στην περίπτωση της Κύπρου.

Οι εξελίξεις είναι ραγδαίες. Θα επανέλθουμε.

 In summary, we, and it is a national “we” that is being addressed, were “saved” from what just happened to Cyprus in what Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup meeting of the 17-nation eurozone’s finance ministers, called a “unique measure” that has sent Cyprus reeling (to say nothing of the geopolitical consequences of this). I was amazed at the utter absence of mea-culpa regarding the economic tragedy – GP’s inertia and inability to deal with tax evasion and slash inflated public sector privileges, to say nothing of outright corruption rampant in the public sector – I forwarded the email to various people. The following responses express some of the outrage.

• “What a shame! How does he dare?! To say that everyone else has tried to fool the people, while GP was saving the country!  How can we forget Papandreou’s infamous “lefta uparxoun” [“money exists”]. I want to vomit! Okay, Tsipras is an idiot, incapable of articulating a decent, coherent discourse. I’ve never thought the contrary. But I have been in favor of a solution closer to the Irish one. Taking the example of Cyprus to claim that the Greek solution was the best, another silly way to put the blame elsewhere, to excuse his crime. If the Papandreou family believes that history has revealed its ultimate truth, then leave them in their delusion and keep the irony!”

• “Here is what I thought after I read this email:

btw.. (what level of ignorance is he assuming, whoever wrote the email that          is?)

Once again we are presented with an argument that leaves people, politicians    and institutions highly powerless and not in a position to control their fate. The social actors *again* are the markets and the economy. So this argument is no different than the quoted Samara’s claims in the sense that they both enact the same rhetoric.”

• “The inclusive plural of the narrative implies a common victimization and at the same time a common responsibility towards what it represents as an unavoidable choice – the paradox of the expression included. The impersonal “the country” necessarily involves both government and people – I would rearticulate the metaphor as follows: the country is a crippled person: there are no miracles to make “it” let’s say, walk, but there is a wheel chair, and we have to choose the most effective one, otherwise the country will atrophy, die of “stillness.” The deceptiveness of the narrative lies in the fact that it avoids specifics around that “wheelchair choice.” I would say it’s also a question of aesthetics: opt for a different type of death!”

The email’s “justifications” of the crippling effects of austerity that GP voted in add insult to injury, further bruising that leadership’s already damaged reputation. But if there’s blind (or willed) ignorance, and arrogance, here – there’s another body forming as a result of our alienation, a collectivity that has grown among those bearing the effects of these measures. I went to the electricity company again, shocked to see that I had another very large bill, after paying installments on the various taxes. The woman (we were now on a first name basis) in charge of the installments told me that my electricity was about to be cut. I was speechless, and then said, “But I’ve been paying the installments. And I thought I was finished with them?” She had opened the computer to see my statements. “You missed the February installment,” she said, “and there were more taxes added.” By now I was blurting, “What is anyone going to do?” It must have sounded like a refrain. She nodded, “That’s what we all say. We’re not going to have money for the supermarket soon.” I looked at her, still trying to think of how I was going to deal with this. “Why doesn’t anyone just dismantle the system!” She nodded again. I couldn’t help thinking if I was having this outburst in the States I might have been arrested. But she smiled, “Why doesn’t it happen?” she repeated in agreement, then suggested that I pay 175 Euros before the end of the day, and fax her the receipt from the ATM. She would make sure my electricity wouldn’t be cut off. I would pay this for the next 3 months. In May there would be a new bill. I was numb. These stories are no longer surprising or exceptional. What is exceptional is that I have a second job, and can still manage to pay.

The Greek writer Christos Chryssopoulos says in an interview with Pierre Jassonge: “For me, the European symbolism of a destroyed Parthenon means that, even if the crisis is eventually overcome and Europe remains “united,” even if we are led to a more “federalist” union as it is often said lately, we already live in a very different EU than the one we had associated with the “European example”. Democracy, social justice, protection against poverty and inequality, equal opportunities for culture and education, human and work rights, social welfare etc., all seem to be under serious threat.” http://www.sens-public.org/spip.php?article1019&lang=fr

Historically the Greeks are not a people afraid of sacrifice – from Sophocles’ “Antigone” to the heroisms of World War II, to more contemporary expressions of it, the Greeks have risked for their ideals. It was to rid the city of plague, to right an injustice, not to further destroy an already dying body. I suppose that’s the ideal of sacrifice we want to salvage.

“Το τρίο της συμφοράς” με αγάπη

Maelstorm

The rooms are chilled. The heat is off or at low temperatures. A says they are keeping their stats at 16 degrees centigrade. The chill is sometimes “to the bone” as the expression goes. These are the homes I’ve gone into since being back. I’ve kept the heat in the apartment off too, as often as I can, but I’m not home much anyway. Some have not turned on the heat at all this year. The fact that the gas and oil bills are foreboding means people decided to (literally) weather the weather. It’s a month now since I’ve been home, and while I’ve wanted to write something, the maelstrom, as T put it, has been unrelenting.

The last days of January: I didn’t realize the protocol for our annual road tax (the sticker that used to go on the car) was now done online. I’m a week late, even though the deadline was extended. The woman at the tax office says I’ll have to pay double. I’m there with my passport and show her the dates I was away. “The law doesn’t foresee situations like this,” she replies. I ask to see her supervisor. He is polite and tells me “can’t some of the women there help you out?” I repeat what they say about the law. “Then call the Ministry,” says the supervisor to one of the employees. “She could risk it,” says someone else in the office, “until her number license plate comes up as unpaid, and then she could negotiate to pay in installments.” I say I want to pay in installments now (since I have to use my car). But this hasn’t been “foreseen” by the law either. “You mean you’re suggesting I drive around illegally until I get the notice that I am illegal?” She shrugs. “I can’t think of anything else.” The supervisor tells me they’ll figure something out if I can’t negotiate a way to pay in installments. All the banks I go to say that after the deadline they won’t accept payment. I feel frustrated but also, strangely, comforted by the discussion in the tax office. All of the four people behind the counter are trying to figure out how I can find a way to pay my tax.

There’s a similar scene at ΔΕΗ, the electricity company. I am there with what feels like the rest of the city, negotiating installments. Our new “χρατσι” taxes have come in and mine is near 500 euros. There’s a long line here even though it’s early in the morning. The two women who are doing the readjustments are overwhelmed but also matter-of-fact. One is talking to a woman over the phone who I assume has cancer since she keeps saying, “she’s having chemotherapy sessions? Tell her she can have her daughter come in…” She gives practical advice, focused on ways to accommodate a difficult situation. “This is like being a doctor in an emergency ward,” I say to the woman in charge, “… the things you must be dealing with..” She nods, and says, “It’s worse.”

What feels comforting in the maelstrom? The unapologetic subjectivity of it all; if the thefts and investments siphoned out of Greece into Swiss bank accounts has not come back into the economy as a result of politicians’ and businessmen’s criminality and indifference to their country and its people, small moments in the middle of this mess express the opposite — people are trying to help, even to find solutions, absurd as the circumstances continue to be.

“Take them, they’re mine,” says the man at the open market. I have a eruo and forty cents, and then a 20 euro bill. The radishes and cucumbers come to 2 euros. He shakes his head when I ask him if he can break the 20, and takes the euro, forty and adds a few carrots too, since, as he emphasizes, they’re his.

It happens again in the A &B Supermarket, the woman at the cash register looks exhausted, her eyes seem bruised from sleeplessness. She shakes her head when I give her a bill… I am slightly short of the extra cents, in change. “Never mind,” she says. Once in the states a salesgirl went to another shop to break my dollar because I owed 2 more cents and didn’t have the change. Of course it might have come out of her paycheck otherwise. I am comforted by the fact that money is sometimes treated as secondary to other values, that efficiency is not viewed as a money-value.

In Spain the news is that 500 homes are being “sized” by banks daily. One policeman refused to evict a woman in her 80s, saying “we are supposed to be serving the people.” In Italy Monti lost the people’s vote.

When Mark Mazower gave his talk in Athens on the rise of the political extremes in Greece he made the very simple point that the “purist” rhetoric of the extremes like that of the Golden Dawn fascists, or the Communist party, is not political – politics being messy and impure. Politics being a willingness to deal with the culpabilities and failures of history and the present. Despite the turgid path of Greece’s modernity that extended the traumas of WWII into a Greek Civil War, there was (excepting the period of the Greek junta, 1967-1974) democracy. Democracy is about dealing with impure realities, of speaking “truths” to power, and not being censored.

We are living through a tricky time. We are exhausted, and may need to continue in this way for a long time. T says “we will have to develop new strengths.” Themis says “it’s like a patient who has become immune to the antibiotics, but who keeps getting sick.” The cure (or maybe the diagnosis) wasn’t enough, or was misdiagnosed. Tonight  Jan Blommaert the linguistic anthropologist gave a lecture titled “Strange Words of Power: How democracy lost the economy.” He spoke, like Mazower, of a loss of legitimacy in the political body; how the likes of Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherdlands called George Papandreou’s unpredictable call for a referendum on the Euro a gesture of “democratic games.” As if Rutte had any legitimacy to speak “for” the Greek government, let alone the Greek people. It will begin with us, Blommaert says rather confidently. I wanted to believe him.

Blommaert certainly believes in the possibility of our abilities to reclaim the foundations of democratic government. That it must begin with the people. Not with faceless data sheets run by corporations whose language of “market values” and “investors” alienates society from being actors, let alone participants in a script others are determining. Phrases like “Necessary measures” meant to “improve the economy,” began in 2010 when George Papandreou brought in the IMF to help “improve” Greece’s dire economic situation, promising growth and economic rehabilitation. Today Greece has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe. The homeless are everywhere. No one believes in any of the governing bodies – lists of tax evaders have been systematically ignored – George P. was invited to teach a course on economies in crisis at Columbia and apparently has rented or bought an apartment next to Lady Gaga.

Here, we talk of a coming newness; we’re not sure what it is. We’re not sure who will see it, but we are speaking of it with necessity.

The Lives of Others (title borrowed from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck 2006 film)

“On land the dirt remains, the smoke trails/from the footprints of torched houses, a burnt taste –/this is the blackened bread of memory.” Stephanos Papadopoulos, The Black Sea

Back in New York, at the end of a year that also  began in New York (I had hopes to post before the turn of the year…). The idea to start a blog a year ago came out of conversation about what had been happening in Greece. The intensity of what was happening, at the rate it was happening, left me feeling unraveled and less-than-articulate; a colleague at NYU said, “start a blog.” I didn’t expect it to be as challenging as it was. To speak “in the moment” or “in the ruin” as I’m trying to express it in essays, is a paradox, an attempt to shape what is also unshaping me. The need, too, to make sure I was getting in facts as the unraveling was taking place, made the writing sometimes oppressive. The lyrical essay on the other hand has its fact-less freedoms — the self’s otherness being more liberally at play in the midst of its obsessions & disorientations – what is that “I” in the hybridity of bi-culturalism and various national belongings, where is that “I” as it travels between, and in, space and time?

Just off the plane at JFK I noticed the passport control officers. A woman briskly ushering people with US passports into one line and others into the other line. An elderly Pakistani man greets those of us going into the line for US citizens saying, “Welcome home.” I find this incongruous at first; he speaks in an accent, is clearly of another heritage and ethnicity (I ask where he’s originally from & he says “Pakistan”), and yet he says “home” smiling pleasantly, as we enter a country that greets us with the embrace of belonging even if we don’t, founded and built on an ideology of inclusiveness as it excludes those unable to abide by those assumptions.

The homeless in Athens is a new and still-shocking reality in a city that was until very recently one of the few (one of the last?) in Europe where modest incomes provided sustainable living conditions inclusive of basic health care. It is different in New York where the homeless have long been “a feature” of late capitalism’s brutal inequalities. My daughter describes a couple in Union square, two men, who she sees regularly who don’t or cannot use a bathroom, our bodies finally our first and last home and the spaces they inhabit resonant of our abilities to belong or not.

Part of last semester was spent teaching an American Lit survey at HAUniv, we used Nina Baym’s edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and spoke of cultural inclusions and exclusions, how its discourses will create oppositions — in Greece, one group of “others” is the immigrants, those without papers now unapologetically relegated to “camp facilities” outside the city. Greece is still small enough and our current mess specific enough, that we are able to put names to the corruption and dysfunction. As a friend in Athens said, “Corruption here still has a name and a face,” which has made the tragedy of economic austerity the more unforgiving. As we go into a 6th year of recession, key people who first signed on the troika’s requirements, who promised that such would lead to growth, are silent or absent — George Papandreou himself is teaching a course at Harvard on economics and politics which is analogous to having a surgeon who has lost patients teach Surgery 101. So we are focusing less on the roots of causes, speaking instead of those others now Othered as scapegoats, the kind of rhetoric that has brought Neo-Nazis into the parliament.

One of the things I do my first couple of days in New York is buy junk food I can’t find in Athens. Red licorice Twizzlers. My daughter makes a face as I happily eat the “low fat snack”. I laugh and make note of the logo on various packaging. Under “Nutrition Facts”  I read Twizzlers are “Not a significant source of dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, and calcium.” My daughter says “they all say that.” I say, “.. I think it’s obvious.” My coffee cup tells me to “CAFFEINATE YOUR CONSCIENCE…Our Growers Share Our Commitment To The Environment…” I say these reminders and advertisings are surreal — an invisible “they” is always telling me what’s good for me — as if “they” care. My daughter shares an essay she read for one of her political science classes, Slavoj Zizek’s “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”; it is a potpourri of riffs and interrogations that mixes cinematic instances (The Truman Show, the Titanic, the Matrix) with discussions of the hyper-real, unreal, virtual real and “irreal” (!) in Zizek’s trademark sentences of baroque insight: “Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of the ‘real life’ itself.” But this resonates, “dematerialization” in particular. Coming from Athens where everything is, to borrow a Roberto Bolano term, “viscerally real”. So what is the “desert of the real” I want to know. My daughter explains it to me as she understands it, that our first world perceptions, according to Zizek are “corrupted by Hollywood,” among other media influences and infiltrations. We cannot “see” the “real”, let alone feel it as such — everything becomes Other, in that it is de-familiarized. I guess the danger here is that “the real” or facts and acts of reality — like bodies defecating in the street — are no longer bodies we empathize or identify with, or even “see.” But the alienation can be more subtle, insidious in the ways we justify and excuse it — by how much or how little we see the other in ourselves. Again, thinking of the past year in Athens, the seemingly overnight changes to the city and our lives that included the increase and visibility of the homeless; radio newscasters make regular announcements of ways to help our “synanthropi” (Gk: “syn + anthropi” = with + people). With the exception of the Golden Dawn Nazis there was, and is, a majority that still view the homeless as “ours”. In New York, I watch a woman, maybe she is Haitian, speaking in accented English with French words interspersed in her monologue. She has two large bags of belonging she is wheeling around with some difficulty. She is also cursing. “Paying that money, and I moved in the basement, and still he got the damn nerve.. me in the streit now…” I felt, in another context, in another world? she would be speaking to someone who might help. But she was speaking to herself, and clearly on her own. If I had been less of a coward I would have spoken to her, me in my own bordered space, my otherness.

When Zizek mentions the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix, he uses it as an example of a climax of the “postmodern fantasy” in which everything material becomes virtual. I haven’t seen the movie but my daughter describes it to me with the aside, “the woman reminds me of you 10 years ago mom.” I’m of course curious. “What was me 10 years ago?” She says it was me “wearing black all the time.” I am laughing, thank her for the compliment and tell her I’m surprised she remembers, she was 12. “Her hair’s short like yours used to be and she’s always in black leather.” “Or plastic” I say, still laughing as I’m now detoured into fantasies of an-other “me”, one my daughter seems to remember more vividly, maybe more materially, than I do. She tells me of a bonus-point question on her exam that asked about what kinds of things she would do if she were to found a nation state. She says she wrote of her view of nation states becoming “states” of memory, borderless in the self and its experiences; to remember is also to re-member, to belong.

Such a fraught question, that of belonging, it sends nations to war to defend the borders of one’s belonging, and belongings — it is, I think, very visceral, as visceral as what really (as opposed to virtually) touches us, like what happens to the Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler in von Donnersmarck’s ”The Lives of Others”; while Wiesler listens to Georg Dreyman play “Sonata for a Good Man” on the piano in the apartment Wiesler is secretly surveillancing, Wiesler surprises himself by weeping. Wiesler risks his life and sacrifices his career when he discovers the Minister of Culture’s (Bruno Hempf) abuses. Corruption has a name and a face, but the lives of others are also, Wiesler discovers, his too.

Real & Ideal Lives

I am quietly destroyed –

I am weather, the glean of wet streets,

a personal disaster.

I am quietly destroyed

in the quiet I can’t speak –

the storm, mute, the storm, night-imbued.

I could tell you it isn’t hard

not to speak, to swallow the current

mad wind, become it

in silence, become the silence

quietly destroyed.

A few nights ago some friends turned up after I came home from work so I cooked dinner as we discussed politics and what was happening to our lives. The next day was another teaching day. I was somewhat worse for wear in the morning but once in the classroom I seemed to forget that I was sleep deprived. I realized too, as we were discussing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark” that this dark tale of the perversions of American Enlightenment ideals – the obsession with perfectibility and refusal to admit to the imperfections of our “marked” mortality – had some resonance with the recent troika negotiations and the IMF report on Greece’s financial viability. The viability, that is, of Greece’s unsustainable debt. While the IMF actually noted in their report that the EU (and Germany specifically) needs to consider a cut in the debt, our current government officially made it clear and public that they were “with Europe” on the loan policies. I was quietly, and not-so-quietly, appalled at the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble’s shift from overt Greece-bashing (during the May and June elections in which he and the rest of Europe feared the vote would move left of center) to the covertly patronizing tone he now assumes when speaking of “respecting” the “sacrifices of the Greek people” as the current government dutifully follows Europe, or Germany’s, mandates for keeping our(?) European(?) house in order by taking on yet more unsustainable debt.

Hawthorne’s protagonist, Aylmer, is a scientist who nevertheless “had made experience of a spiritual affinity, more attractive than a chemical one.” That is, in the optimism of America’s 19^th century’s Age of Reason, all seemed possible in that Emersonian marriage of the human with the divine. And, as Hawthorne’s narrator put it, “the recent discovery of electricity, and other kindred mysteries of nature, seemed to open paths into the region of the miracle,” when, too, “it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman.” So Aylmer, married to his beautiful Georgiana, becomes obsessed with removing what he sees as a “mark” on her cheek, what he describes as “the visible mark of earthly imperfection.” Aylmer’s proposal shocks the beautiful Georgiana who says “it has been so often called a charm, that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.” Aylmer though finds that “this one defect” grows “more and more intolerable” to him. Georgiana’s birth mark is, Hawthorne’s narrator tells us, “the fatal flaw of humanity, which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.”

As Georgiana learns to “shudder” at her husband’s gaze and his obsession with “this one disastrous topic” his desire to remove the mark, I kept thinking of the EU’s obsession with keeping Greece’s “contaminated” economy from infecting others. An economy which Europe, and the EU specifically, helped create, nurturing on loans which were mismanaged, misdirected and abused, though the ground for all three of these circumstances were fertile within the loan terms themselves. What in effect has brought Greece to its knees is the reality that it cannot – and was never taught to – sustain itself. The EU had Greece’s various right-wing and socialist governments while importing goods from its northern neighbors at prices which inevitably boosted those economies, also regulated and limited the country’s natural produce and resources, such as olive oil, and indigenous vegetables and fruits. As a friend said, “we were told in my village to bury the lemons and grow asparagus.” Meanwhile the country’s incompetent, and often corrupt, leadership of the past 30 years, in combination with the ignorance and self-interest of those who followed them, continued to buy into an EU agenda invested in ignoring the complexities and imbalances of its own policies. It has all landed Greece, somewhat like Georgiana, at the mercy of the soulless finagling of those who wish to prove the viability of their experiments despite clear signs that living bodies are proving the experiment’s failure. It is tragic and unfortunate that those who might make a difference are acting, like Aylmer, in a psychosis of determination to prove themselves right, and their experiment viable, despite the obvious. IKEA workers proceeded to shut the doors and take over the building some 10 days ago when their employer announced a cut in pay because profits were not what they had been. “They are profits,” a colleague said, shaking his head, “This is immoral… to cut pay because profits are down. We’re in a financial crisis. The company is not talking about losses.” Germany too, and the banks, continue to insist on making money back (and not cutting losses) only a healthy, not a dying, economy can produce.

Though Georgiana senses that the “cure” may cost her, Aylmer is quick to say he’s “convinced of the perfect practicality” of her birthmark’s removal. He tells her “The draught cannot fail,” when she warns“I know not what may be the cost to both of us… Perhaps its removal may cause cureless deformity. Or, it may be, the stain goes as deep as life itself.” Aylmer though, more in love with his idea of a perfect Georgiana than he is with her “marked” reality, will not allow himself “the degrading” of his “perfect idea to the level of the actual.” Georgiana mournfully and dutifully takes the draught in Desdemona-like resignation while Aylmer’s assistant, the primitive Aminidab mutters to himself that he would “never part with that birth-mark” if she were his wife. Aylmer ecstatically watches the gradual fading of the mark from Georgiana’s cheek, convinced to the last that he has proved his experiment right until he notices that with the blanching of Georgiana’s skin is also the fading of her dying breath.

Μαζί με το Λαό

“thanks to our butcher,

who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried barbed-wire enclosure
where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.”

C.K. Williams from “Butchers”

“When you say freedom, what do you mean?”

(HAUniv student question for the June “ΚΑΛΠΙ project”)

Today’s a good day to blog. I canceled my teaching for the day due to the 48-hr. strike after students wrote to say it was going to be difficult to make it to class. The pending parliamentary vote on this 3^rd mind-boggling 13.5 billion tranche loan with its latest slew of “new & improved” austerity measures has shut down the city. No public transportation or public sector venues, like the post office and hospitals, are operating. Much of the private sector is showing solidarity too. Last night, searching for a channel to get a news update on the latest stalemate between the 3-Party Coalition who came together in June to keep Greece afloat, it was, ironically, on CNN that I managed to get the day’s update. After two journalists were removed from hosting a morning news show for reporting on the “Lagarde list” published by Kostas Baxevanis (or Vaxevanis, as the Greek “Beta” is pronounced in English), news channels also went on strike. That included radio channels. I watched the CNN coverage of protest skirmishes, the tear gas and assaults. The CNN reporter went on to note abuses (people being hit by clubs, skin burned by cigarettes and lighters…) the MAT police are being accused of, verified by such groups as Amnesty International. The government spokesperson has denied that such cases have gone uninvestigated. The fact of the matter is that there is a clear sense that the State has not (for a long time now) put the welfare of the Greek people as a priority to keeping Greece “afloat.” These new austerity measures mean yet more slashes into what is an already dying body. Pensions at subsistence levels, if they are that, are about to be cut some more. The minimum wage, now at 580 euros, is still being negotiated. And salaries already reduced by as much as 40% are going to be reduced some more.

Because there was no news on the Greek channels, I watched a documentary on the homeless, and realized I recognized some of the people being interviewed; the man who sits outside of ZARA, another person I’d seen asking for a cigarette. They were all articulate. One spoke of his past career as a music manager. He had helped promote some labels; had a private business, and then had to shut it down. After the continuous tax statements he received over a 3-year period he found himself without the money to pay rent. He described living on the streets. How it felt the first night, then the second, after a couple of weeks, you forgot “basics” like wanting to keep clean, and hoped for some food. There’s an organization called ΚΛΙΜΑΚΑ (loosely, “Climax” … as in the tragic moment as opposed to the pleasurable… in case anyone is wondering), which is helping people to “find their place in society again.” I was as overwhelmed by the poise and matter-of-factness of the way the people running the program expressed their work as I was by the poise of the homeless being interviewed. There was footage too of various events organized by the program directors such as a recent music event in which well-known Greek musicians played pro-bono in a city park and asked that everyone “sleep out” for the night so “we can all experience what someone lives through who is homeless.” There were pictures of people on benches and on the ground, and then the documentary ended with the person who heads ΚΛΙΜΑΚΑ saying he was once homeless himself and repeated the adage: “If you want to feed a person for a day give her fish, if you want to feed her for a lifetime, teach her how to fish.”

It was the end of a long day yesterday that began in the Halandri ΔΕΗ (Electricity) utility offices. Already at 8:30a.m., there was a line. I had received a bill a few days before. It was part of the “XARATZI,” another one of the “solidarity measures.” I had to ask a friend “which tax is this?” Since I was still paying the property tax, which was separate from the solidarity tax. She said “the electricity XARATZI is part of the property tax,” that ingenious idea of the previous (Papandreou) government’s initiative to address the loopholes of tax evasion —  that it connect each household’s electricity to their property tax, so everyone would have to pay it, or be without electricity. I felt like I was in a Brecht play, standing in line as the populace, or “το Λαό,” voiced their part.

I was hoping I would get through the line in the next hour so I could make it to my morning class on time. I asked a young guard if I had to “get a #” from the machine. He asked me what I needed. I said I wanted to pay in installments, he nodded me toward the line, “no # needed he said everyone there is asking about payments.” As I join the line, more people come in, one man asks a slender woman obviously in charge, “I don’t want them to cut my electricity, but I can’t pay right now.” She answers: “No one here is paying.” The young security guy high-fived a man leaving the room; he looked sad. Then he hugs him. A woman on the phone, one of the employees, in bright pink, is earnestly talking, as the rest of us listen. “He just paid. Yes. He received a notice that they’re going to cut his electricity.” She is looking at the computer as she is talking. “The notice of the payment won’t arrive for another 24 hours so I’m verifying that he’s paid. I’m telling you so you can let the company know not to cut the electricity.” On another phone another woman is talking to someone who has called in about her bill, “Repeat it for me again. You’ve given me too many numbers. Try taking out the ‘7’” she said. I’m amazed at everyone’s patience, those of us in line included. It’s not always like this. Or it’s rarely like this. There’s palpable solidarity. A woman standing behind me looks irritated at the person who has just come in announcing loudly, “1950. This is 1950s Greece. They’ve brought us right back to 1950s Greece.” He looks the part of the villager-gone-abroad-returned-with-money. “Why did we want an Athens anyway?” Someone else in line says “Go back to your chickens then.” The man nods, smug. He repeats something about his chickens being just fine, that he was stupid enough to have come back to Greece to buy an apartment when he should have stayed away. Someone says, “Well some of us don’t have villages to go back to.” He has cut in front of a woman just behind me and another man. The man right behind me is attractive; his hair is in a ponytail and his eyes are intelligent. Another man then comes into the room loudly announcing that he can’t stand in line because he has a health problem. The guy with the ponytail says “Ochh,” when the man who’s announced he has a health problem, says “it was cancer.” The guy with the ponytail says, “Now we’re escalating the problem.” I smile. The man with the health issue repeats that he can’t stand in line, adding “Do you want me to show you my scars?” The woman in charge who has been patiently asking people if they are there to pay a bill or get a payment plan tells him, “Ask them” and points to the rest of us. “If it’s okay with them for you to cut the line, it’s okay with me.” The guy next to me with the ponytail shrugs. The man doesn’t wait for anyone to answer and proceeds to sit down at the nearest desk with an employee.

It’s at that point that the woman behind us says, “Why don’t you speak up? I mean people like that… it’s people like that..” but she doesn’t finish her sentence. I’m not sure if she means the man who announced he’s had cancer or the person who says we should have stayed with our chicken coops. But her eyes are tearing behind her sunglasses. “I feel guilty,” she says, “guilty for what the next generation is going to face. It’s our fault. It’s our fault that we didn’t speak up, that we didn’t stand up for …” I interrupt, asking her “what?” She says, “People like that who think everything is owed to them.” I look at her like that rare person she seems to be: someone with a conscience. “We didn’t ask much,” she says, “but we got our degrees, we found jobs. We could afford things like a new pair of shoes, having a coffee with friends.” She is now actually crying when the woman in charge asks what she would like help with. She says the owner of the apartment she rents refuses to pay the XARATZI, but the electricity bill (that the property tax is tied to) is in her name. The previous government had tied the property tax to the electricity bill so people would be forced to pay them, but whoever has a bill in their name is now saddled with the tax even if they don’t own the property. I shake my head. The guy with the ponytail says “Brilliant.” I am thinking if only some of the country’s leadership could share in these moments.