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From Dytopian Homelands.An Essay on N.Calas’ Art-Criticism(1997)
By shedding light both on the decline of European culture, and on earlier stages, like Baroque, Romanticism or Surrealism, N. Calas is in a position to underline aspects (πτυχες) that were and still remain largely unexplored and thus inactive. His shift from literary criticism to painting’s criticism was evidently not accidental. It suggests a turning point and a landmark in his intellectual course. If poetic discourse manages to be identified with the essence of cosmos, as Italo Calvino observes in his excellent essay on precision,6666 the critic who studies poetic discourse in order to illuminate it in its acrobatics, has the right to rise from the depths where the invisible verbal utterance emerges from, and reach the visual surface of the painting, where the visible is bridged with the unutterable beneath, leaving the traces necessary for our pursuit of what it is hiding from us or of what it makes us believe that it can possibly be revealed. Thus, after more than a decade of literary criticism he has exercised in his numerous articles and essays written and published in Greek, on poetry and novel, and being the author himself, not only of Foyers d’ incendie, but also of a poetry that combined estrangement of sensation, black bile , revolutionary irony in the aim to reinforce poetry’s struggle for a new objectivity, Calas turns his criticism on painting, so that he can grasp all that the painter objectifies before or beyond verbal expression. Through this shift from verses to images, criticism does not deteriorate into a mere commentary on the essence of cosmos, but it remains a tool of extraction. Like Leonardo da Vinci who attempted to put mythical or mysterious creatures and objects or his own drawings into words, Calas’s criticism, through its shift from the literary and poetic world to the plastic arts, endeavored to do the same. Da Vinci wondered in amazement: “Oh author, in what words will you be able to describe in such perfection the complete image that the drawing here depicts?”.6767 If the author is capable of doing that, because he focuses his pen on hidden, incomplete or fragmented figures which comprise the real or imaginary world, the critic, urged by ambition to remain authentic and thus as creative as the author, overcomes the need to comment on the latter’s work, and seeks to explore the depth that gushes forth in the painted surfaces, which we have observed, enjoyed or feared, but still have not been able to put their enigma or secret meaning into the right words. And if the reader wished to have a measure for the hard work that Calas is to undertake since 1940 to the end of his life, he would have to remember that the painter who tortured and appalled him was Hieronymus Bosch. However, although the apparent differences in their modes to objectify desire, poetry and painting are not separated by strictly dividing lines imposed by philosophers of art in their concern to correspond to the organizational and educational needs of the academic institutions concerning knowledge. On the contrary, for Calas, in his commenting Valery’s phrase “ I stop saying in order to make”, art is not reducible to a means of conveying mere information6868. The way art weaves and conveys its meaningful message is a complicated and obscure process. For its accomplishment, poetry and painting are interconnected like communicating vessels so that, as Calas says , “ poetry should be seen and not heard… and painting should think”6969. This is due to the fact that they both resort to imagery. In his essay “The Image and Poetry”, written later in New York, after reminding the reader of Wittgenstein’s phrase that “ either an image is in the mind or is not”, Calas develops his iconolatric aspect of poetry by examining the treatment of images by poets and more specifically by poets of Non-Euclidian poetry as he calls Rimbaud, Mallarme or Appolinaire, in whose imagistic experiments, images mediate so that what must be left unsaid for the poem, to be “made”7070 in a picturesque way, by intervening, and mainly by interrupting the primary, linguistic structure of poem. This is true for Modernist poetry, which follows its own different pattern from the pattern of epic, tragic or narrative poetry. As Calas remarks: “{this} poetry, unlike the novel, does not deal with time in terms of events and, unlike painting, does not describe objects outside of time. Consequently , the poet must focus his attention on states of consciousness, more particularly on those formed by series of accidents cut up and reconstructed into new patterns and rythms.”7171 This new patterns in their aim to express states of consciousness, are patterns of ambiguity and the poet by following them in making the poem, has to visualise his reference not to the level of physical reality, any more, but to the level of existential being in its psychic or metaphysical dimensions. In this case, poetic metaphors or structured images do not lead in true or false identifications,as an epistemologist would falsely claim by comparing arbitrarily poetic with scientific statements. Because poetic truth and most particularly, the truth of Modernist poetry, has nothing to do with correspondence to reality, coherence or transparence. On the contrary, poetic images introduced in the linguistic structure of the poem, are valuable only when, by interrupting or loosening the syntax of the poetic phrase, construct pictures of a reality denser than reality usually is for a man of common sense or pictures of reality idealized by sublimation and more abstract than it might ever be for a pragmatist or a realist. The scenes from far- off ( quite often irreal) places or from the (infra-real) irrational, unconscious state of dreaming or agonising pass before the reader’s eyes and make him feel the inherent ambiguities of the real world which remain unseen, unconceived and unsaid by the logic based on the identity principle, in its concern to introduce order where there is disorder caused by contradictions, polarities ambiguities or ambivalences . For this purpose, identitarian logic is bound by the formal laws of typical identity, of non contradiction or of excluded middle which hide contradictions, polarities or ambiguities of the real under schematic dualisms, reductions or exclusions which force reality to conform to logical imperatives and simplify its real context.
Alexandra Deligiorgi
From Valleys of Fear, novel ed. Ekkremes , 2019
That Sunday in September of 2029, for the first time, in all the metropolises and megapolises of the planet from New York to Shanghai and from Athens to Santiago, a multicoloured and then blinding light hid the morning or evening or nighttime sky. Immediately afterwards, bombs exploded in the central squares, painting the pavement red with the blood of hundreds, thousands of victims. In the traffic chaos that ensued, the ambulances were finally immobilized, while many, carrying on their backs the dismembered bodies of the victims, crisscrossed the streets attempting to reach the nearest hospital. Many died in the middle of the road, preventing public and private vehicles from passing over their still warm bodies.
The television crews photographed the horrific scenes with exemplary professionalism. The background of groans and wailing did not disturb the unnatural calm shown by the cameramen, convinced as they were that only a fraction of their footage would be televised, since the extent of their reporting from the multiple points of the planet where the disaster had occurred surpassed the prescribed time limit, and other events, more or less earthshaking, would sweep them aside like an electric shock, since they also had to be televised on time.
As had been calculated with statistical measurements of other –though admittedly less devastating– scenes, shortly the only thing that would still concern world-wide public opinion would be the worryingly increased probability that humanity could, at any time, out of the blue, be blown to bits.
In an attempt to suppress the wave of anxiety that rose to the heavens like a whirlwind and was not followed, in the next few days, by its precipitate fall and dispersal, communications officers acting on the orders of the ministries of Defence organised televised programmes with quantities of information on the manufacture of a low-cost, murderous bomb that could easily explode simultaneously in several inhabited areas of the planet. The topic quickly became the subject of repeated televised discussions and, of course, triggered comments on Twitter, blogs and social media. Everyone felt that it was their duty of be as fully informed as possible, and preferably as authoritatively as possible, about the manner of construction of that diabolical tool of rapid mass extinction, about neutrons and protons, about nuclear fission and so on. Quickly, though vaguely, a feeling became prevalent that it was the duty of citizens to be collectively concerned, sending messages or telephoning to the communication centres of the most popular radio and television stations demonstrating their participation with questions, observations and comments in the relevant programmes, and there was no lack of comments on facebook and pleas, prayers, cries of indignation, even incomprehensible insults on Messenger or on Twitter. Most of those who resorted to private and unofficial sources of information had similar reactions. Strangely, no one wondered, or at least no one was heard to wonder, who and for what reason had decided to drop catastrophic bombs that turned the most crowded spaces of the planet into the prey of colourful fireworks that lit up only to be extinguished the next moment, like toys in the hands of madmen. If it was assumed that mentally ill persons were responsible for the worldwide tragedy and the danger of its being repeated, everyone wondered how these psychopaths could have escaped the intensive screening of the psychiatrists, at the mental health centres that were opening at geometric rates in cities and towns across the world.
And while the newspapers repeated the demands of citizens the world over for the phenomenon to be placed under control, according to the provisions of international law, and because the question was still pending, rumours flew. The construction of such bombs, although low-cost, was extremely expensive or unattainable for the budgets of dependent and monitored countries. Thus, it was not at all improbable that the small number of global powers had decided in common to give the required command, to impress and intimidate anyone who might dare to even think of upsetting the balance that had finally been attained when, with a strong sense of superiority, they chose to oppose each other’s inexcusable mistakes, mistakes that none of the empires in History had been able to avoid, not even the grandeur that was Rome.
The international news agencies avoided naming the likely suspects responsible and agreed to cover only one of the terrorist attacks, the one that had taken place the previous day, probably as a test, and had been filmed by a passing military helicopter, on an island in the Pacific with just one thousand inhabitants, who were all killed, with the exception of one man who had set out to sea early to go fishing.
The comments of the journalist of this reportage on CNB left not the slightest doubt about the hell into which the whole planet was transformed less than twenty four hours later. Someone, probably an actor, read as a kind of conclusion a passage from the Prophet Isaiah’s “Vision in the valley of vision”: …Therefore said I, Look away from me; I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me, because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people. For it is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity in the valley of vision…i
And someone else decided to end with a passage from the Book of Jeremiah: Then said I, Ah Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee…ii
The two passages were heard being read, every half hour, by the steady and formal voice of the actor and the commentator in turn and nobody understood at once what the selected passages were supposed to mean. However, before there was time to upload various interpretations and comments, the internet screens around the globe went black, darkness covered everything and silence was declared until further notice.
As it turned out later, that day was the beginning of a new planetary situation that left behind the known order of things that had been on the point of expiring for years. The spectre of a permanent threat of extinction covered the urban centres of the planet like a shadow, making the passing crowds walk with their heads bowed as if they wanted, forgetting their birth, to exorcise the danger of dying in the middle of the street, at the bus stop, on the train platform, on the edge of an avenue, if they should happen to cross the street or before they stepped off the pavement, if they were not distracted when the streetlight turned to yellow to warn them to hurry, so they wouldn’t lose the chance to cross to the other side before the green forerunner of evil lit up.
As the shadow fell heavily on them and dispelled any desire for small-talk, it took on the colour of silence that is symbolized by darkness. No one wanted to say “I know”, “I think”, “I predict”, “I hope”, “I fear”. Only occasionally, many together would come out of some metro station or march to the large squares, holding placards and shouting all together “I’m not afraid”, “I’m not afraid”, but the voice quickly fell to a whisper, as if confessing exactly the opposite. No one knew. Only the silence knew everything.
Alexandra Deligiorgi
Novel
For Giorgos and Renata, in memoriam
And there was light.
Genesis 3: 25
The denizens of Hades, as we know, are blind
to the present, however, they can see the future
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hopeiii
Contents
PART ONE
1. Valleys of fear . . . . . .
2. A fruitless agreement . . . .
3. Ruins . . . .
4. Dreams . . . .
5. Life starting over . . . . . .
INTERLUDE The sixth notebook: Testimony of a bankruptcy
PART TWO
7. By the grace of fortune. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
8. Home, my home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
9. Dream of a supposed fool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
10. In imaginary time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11. The terrible image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
12. Escape velocity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Valleys of feariv
1.
That Sunday in September of 2029, for the first time, in all the metropolises and megapolises of the planet from New York to Shanghai and from Athens to Santiago, a multicoloured and then blinding light hid the morning or evening or nighttime sky. Immediately afterwards, bombs exploded in the central squares, painting the pavement red with the blood of hundreds, thousands of victims. In the traffic chaos that ensued, the ambulances were finally immobilized, while many, carrying on their backs the dismembered bodies of the victims, crisscrossed the streets attempting to reach the nearest hospital. Many died in the middle of the road, preventing public and private vehicles from passing over their still warm bodies.
The television crews photographed the horrific scenes with exemplary professionalism. The background of groans and wailing did not disturb the unnatural calm shown by the cameramen, convinced as they were that only a fraction of their footage would be televised, since the extent of their reporting from the multiple points of the planet where the disaster had occurred surpassed the prescribed time limit, and other events, more or less earthshaking, would sweep them aside like an electric shock, since they also had to be televised on time.
As had been calculated with statistical measurements of other –though admittedly less devastating– scenes, shortly the only thing that would still concern world-wide public opinion would be the worryingly increased probability that humanity could, at any time, out of the blue, be blown to bits.
In an attempt to suppress the wave of anxiety that rose to the heavens like a whirlwind and was not followed, in the next few days, by its precipitate fall and dispersal, communications officers acting on the orders of the ministries of Defence organised televised programmes with quantities of information on the manufacture of a low-cost, murderous bomb that could easily explode simultaneously in several inhabited areas of the planet. The topic quickly became the subject of repeated televised discussions and, of course, triggered comments on Twitter, blogs and social media. Everyone felt that it was their duty of be as fully informed as possible, and preferably as authoritatively as possible, about the manner of construction of that diabolical tool of rapid mass extinction, about neutrons and protons, about nuclear fission and so on. Quickly, though vaguely, a feeling became prevalent that it was the duty of citizens to be collectively concerned, sending messages or telephoning to the communication centres of the most popular radio and television stations demonstrating their participation with questions, observations and comments in the relevant programmes, and there was no lack of comments on facebook and pleas, prayers, cries of indignation, even incomprehensible insults on Messenger or on Twitter. Most of those who resorted to private and unofficial sources of information had similar reactions. Strangely, no one wondered, or at least no one was heard to wonder, who and for what reason had decided to drop catastrophic bombs that turned the most crowded spaces of the planet into the prey of colourful fireworks that lit up only to be extinguished the next moment, like toys in the hands of madmen. If it was assumed that mentally ill persons were responsible for the worldwide tragedy and the danger of its being repeated, everyone wondered how these psychopaths could have escaped the intensive screening of the psychiatrists, at the mental health centres that were opening at geometric rates in cities and towns across the world.
And while the newspapers repeated the demands of citizens the world over for the phenomenon to be placed under control, according to the provisions of international law, and because the question was still pending, rumours flew. The construction of such bombs, although low-cost, was extremely expensive or unattainable for the budgets of dependent and monitored countries. Thus, it was not at all improbable that the small number of global powers had decided in common to give the required command, to impress and intimidate anyone who might dare to even think of upsetting the balance that had finally been attained when, with a strong sense of superiority, they chose to oppose each other’s inexcusable mistakes, mistakes that none of the empires in History had been able to avoid, not even the grandeur that was Rome.
The international news agencies avoided naming the likely suspects responsible and agreed to cover only one of the terrorist attacks, the one that had taken place the previous day, probably as a test, and had been filmed by a passing military helicopter, on an island in the Pacific with just one thousand inhabitants, who were all killed, with the exception of one man who had set out to sea early to go fishing.
The comments of the journalist of this reportage on CNB left not the slightest doubt about the hell into which the whole planet was transformed less than twenty four hours later. Someone, probably an actor, read as a kind of conclusion a passage from the Prophet Isaiah’s “Vision in the valley of vision”: …Therefore said I, Look away from me; I will weep bitterly, labour not to comfort me, because of the spoiling of the daughter of my people. For it is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity in the valley of vision…v
And someone else decided to end with a passage from the Book of Jeremiah: Then said I, Ah Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee…vi
The two passages were heard being read, every half hour, by the steady and formal voice of the actor and the commentator in turn and nobody understood at once what the selected passages were supposed to mean. However, before there was time to upload various interpretations and comments, the internet screens around the globe went black, darkness covered everything and silence was declared until further notice.
As it turned out later, that day was the beginning of a new planetary situation that left behind the known order of things that had been on the point of expiring for years. The spectre of a permanent threat of extinction covered the urban centres of the planet like a shadow, making the passing crowds walk with their heads bowed as if they wanted, forgetting their birth, to exorcise the danger of dying in the middle of the street, at the bus stop, on the train platform, on the edge of an avenue, if they should happen to cross the street or before they stepped off the pavement, if they were not distracted when the streetlight turned to yellow to warn them to hurry, so they wouldn’t lose the chance to cross to the other side before the green forerunner of evil lit up.
As the shadow fell heavily on them and dispelled any desire for small-talk, it took on the colour of silence that is symbolized by darkness. No one wanted to say “I know”, “I think”, “I predict”, “I hope”, “I fear”. Only occasionally, many together would come out of some metro station or march to the large squares, holding placards and shouting all together “I’m not afraid”, “I’m not afraid”, but the voice quickly fell to a whisper, as if confessing exactly the opposite. No one knew. Only the silence knew everything.
2.
In Athens, the great explosion, which took place in Syntagma Square, served as the landmark of an irreversible decline which could no longer be concealed. Whatever they had experienced up to then, citizens, visitors, tourists, refugees or immigrants, became part of the history, of all together and each separately, that ended on that Sunday, tumbling into the pit that had opened and where it was buried together with the past. They were convinced that from now on, everything would be different.
The new type of bomb, which before the September explosions had been tested on plateaus, highlands, deserts or lakes in various places on earth, on that black Sunday opened a gaping hole that sucked in all three levels of Syntagma Square, Amalias Avenue that connected it to the Parliament building and all the neighbouring streets. Together with the large hotels that lined the square, it swallowed the memorial of the Unknown Soldier in front of the entrance to Parliament, pulling down most of all three sides of it, as well as the buildings on the streets running in the direction of the Theseion or the Concert Hall.
Of the passers-by who were heading towards Plaka and Monastiraki on that fateful day, looking for a bit of air to cool them in the stifling humidity while they browsed lazily through knickknacks, old books, old furniture, mirrors, lamps, china, silver jewellery, if would have been better that no one had survived, since the few who were not killed remained for hours on the ground next to severed limbs, their own and others’. With the awe produced by the inconceivable flash and the wails of panic that accompanied the explosion, a strange silence and stillness spread, interrupted by moans, the sounds of the unbearable pain of burnt flesh of those who, though they had survived, did not know whether they were dead or alive.
Less than five minutes earlier, with the bang of the explosion that rocked the city to a distance of several kilometres, of the vehicles that, on their regular routes, were going in the direction of Omonia Square, Stadiou Street, Filellinon Street or towards Vasilissis Sofia Avenue, the ones that were not blown to pieces were in danger of lifting off the ground with the frenzied braking of the terrified drivers, which resulted in the violent splintering of pieces of chassis and scattered construction materials. Windows, tyres, pieces of metal, air bags, seat cushions and upholstery, backs or seats, springs, metal surfaces, all had been thrown up to such a height that their fall was like a torrential rain of solidified liquids. The few who had survived, drivers, passengers, passers-by, wanted to run as far away as possible and, unable to move from fear and from the streaming blood, fruitlessly searched with their eyes for an escape route. The metro lines Panepistimiou-Syntagma-Akropolis and Monastiraki-Syntagma-Evangelismos had subsided as far up as the Concert Hall, cutting the centre of the city in two and burying those who had entered and had not had the time to exit from the stations.
Few of those who had been in the neighbouring areas at that moment crawled out more dead than alive from the ruins of inhabited buildings, hotels or embassies, not knowing where to go and running to wherever they saw people gathered who also did not know where to go, while some of the calmer or more distraught among them checked out of the corner of their eye that all their limbs were in place and with a split-second glance, like a feather blowing in the wind, reassured themselves that the Acropolis was still there.
Those who lived or found themselves in the Mesogeiavii on that fateful morning looked for salvation in the surrounding hills. Some of them, who couldn’t bear to remain trapped in their vehicles that had formed endless queues on the road to Penteli, Ymittos, Parnitha, and also beyond the borders of Attica, abandoned them in the middle of the queue, forcing others who were trapped in their own cars to leave them and follow them on their anything but heroic trek up the hills and mountains.
Those who lived in the neighbourhoods on the perimeter of the border that separated them from the centre of the city, or happened to be passing through at the time of the explosion, poured out onto the streets, and without anyone stopping to see what was happening formed moving lines like processions of alarmed faithful who instinctively, with absolutely no coordination, all set out for Piraeus. And although the ancient Agora at least was still in its place and would be there if and when they returned, with one accord they ran towards the sea which promised to extinguish the flaming inferno. Their first thought was to board rubber rafts, rowboats, fishing boats, ships and distance themselves from the place of the heinous terrorist attack; a bottomless pit with a radius of several square kilometers in which thousands of people were buried dead or alive.
CHAPTER TWO
A fruitless agreement
1.
If it hadn’t been for the telephone call from the publisher that he used to work for once on translations, proofreading and editing of the texts that at that time, in spite of all the difficulties, he was still publishing, he wouldn’t have left the attic room that he rented in Pankrati. It was Saturday morning, freezing cold, and he was still reading, over and over again since yesterday, lines from a poem by Mandelstam in Russian, from the 1962 edition, looking for the right word to convey precisely the meaning of revolutionary madness, the moment when it breaks out, while the television was broadcasting for the umpteenth time one of the episodes of a high-tech serial, exceptionally successful, given that its popularity had broken all records.
Since he was penniless, with no jobs in sight, and the former publisher insisted, he agreed to meet him at noon in the usual café, on the corner of a side street two block beyond the collapsed Concert Hall. As he had told him over the phone, he was in a hurry to show him a manuscript that had been left lying for some time in his desk drawer and he had forgotten it, given that so many things had intervened since that black Sunday. Who could forget the hole that had swallowed the centre of the city and the thousands upon thousands of victims? And who did not feel the weight of the atmosphere emitted by an unbearable hopelessness that continued for months, like an unending funeral that threatened the living? The lack of money for the support of the victims, for the repair of the ruined metro lines, the reconstruction of the buildings, the roads and the street crossings, was nothing short of tragic; the pit that had opened with the explosion of the new type of bomb of great depth and small diameter and that threatened to swallow the whole city, together with the surrounding settlements, made it reminiscent, mutatis mutandis, of the Open City of Rossellini.
After the repeated explosions that shook the planet that black Sunday, orders for carbon nanotubes had multiplied, so that cities in decline like Athens had to wait for a long time, in fact it was unclear how long, because the price of those nanotubes, that was still climbing a full five years after their discovery, had reached unbelievable levels, with the result that purchasing them was beyond the possibility of the national budget. Aid from more powerful states was not to be thought of for governments of the debt-ridden countries that, with divisions, secessions and border adjustments, were ceaselessly multiplying.
Carbon nanotubes, which had fairly recently been discovered, had the quality of covering holes in the streets with a very small quantity of material compared to the tonnes of dirt previously required for this job. Under the present circumstances, this quality made nanotubes literally priceless. Because the new model atomic nanobomb, constructed in 2026, which after testing and experimentation had become available on the armaments market, destroyed small areas down to enormous depths, making things even worse, because only bridges or helicopters could cross the gaping pits. It is not unlikely that the need to promote nanotubes and their ability to close very deep pits on the international market furthered the construction of the type of nanobomb that had exploded in the central squares of the planet.
2.
Now, two years after that terrible event, Athens was still cut in two, the diameter of the rift, which like an imaginary axis divided and united the Mesogeia with the shoreline of Attica, neither divided nor united them any longer, since the gaping pit together with everything else had also swallowed the mind that could have imagined it. The ruins caused by the explosion crushed the surrounding spaces, as they did the souls of the inhabitants whom the black event had irremediably afflicted. The depth, not only of the rift but also of the psychic trauma that it caused, was greater than anyone could have foreseen. As if commanded to forget the ancient ruins that haunted their memory and their life, the inhabitants waited, awkwardly and sheepishly, for the mind to wake up, so that perhaps with the help of a once unrestrained imagination it could bring back to life worlds that forgetfulness stubbornly and systematically was struggling to erase.
He was there on time and waited with a restlessness made unnatural by the quiet of the café. He was impatient to have another coffee with lots of sugar and the publisher was late. When he appeared, they tried to exchange cheerful good mornings and after finally ordering their coffees, he pulled out of his empty bag a notebook with a blue cover, like the ones used once upon a time by schoolchildren. Then he started to tell the story he had heard from the tall, skinny guy that had entrusted it to him: On that cursed Sunday, a girl who was running beside him at the corner of Athinas and Agias Eirinis streets had thrust it into his hands, begging him to keep it and under no circumstances to throw it away, because she was leaving Athens the next day and didn’t know if or when she would be back. «– “I didn’t have time to ask her anything,” the skinny guy added with his gaze fixed on me, “since as I’m sure you remember, we were jostling each other in the crowd, terrified of a new explosion that would be the coup de grace for us as well.” – The guy, the publisher continued, insisted that the notebook belonged to the father of the girl who had just barely had time to call to him not to throw it away, and as he folded it to tuck it inside his shirt, into the belt that fit tight around his waist, he saw the girl moving away. At the time, he told me, “I didn’t think to run after her and ask for her name and address“, and, as he rose from the edge of his chair, as if he wanted to justify this terrible omission, he added: “anyway, it didn’t matter, in those moments that you remember as if the end of the world had come, all hell had broken loose.”
«And imagine, as he gave me his hand to say goodbye, he was so upset that I tried to calm him down –someone had given him something that he thought was valuable, right?– so I turned to him and said, “To me, at that moment, if somebody handed me some schoolboy’s notebook, it would have meant nothing to me, and seriously speaking, we really know nothing about him.” – He took off like a hunted man, he continued, didn’t stay even five minutes.
«When I eventually came home and remembered the notebook, I opened it and from the handwriting I understood that the person who had filled all the pages including the inside of the back cover was no schoolboy, but an adult, and maybe actually the father of the girl, educated and probably an older man, with clear handwriting by an exhausted hand that trembled. Later, I saw the note “sixth notebook, January 2021?” with a question mark after the date, on the last page, written in thick black marker, most likely by the girl to whom the victim or his friends had probably given it, at his own request».
As he explained, as publisher to editor, naturally enough given his gigantic efforts to rescue his business so that maybe he and his collaborators would be saved as well, he had forgotten it in the desk drawer where it had lain so long. However, now that things had begun to straighten out a bit, he found it again when one morning, in the middle of the deafening noise of the excavators and steamrollers from Panepistimiou Avenue all the way up to Kallidromiou Street, he had decided to organize the boxes and drawers left in the entrance to the office.
«From what I saw», he said to the editor and translator who listened without speaking, «it’s the story of some homeless guy. A very commonplace topic, pages upon pages have been written on it, by now it leaves readers completely indifferent. It doesn’t sell. It’s just that this guy, even though we know practically nothing about him, even his name is probably invented, he’s very personal, very confessional in the way he writes. And that’s original. Do you see anybody writing confessions these days? The way secrecy has become the highest virtue, everybody talks about themselves to themselves, only when they are sure there is nobody else around to hear them. But you never know, there may be quite a few people who would read someone who reveals things about himself and his life that no one would confess even to themselves. A text like that, ever if it’s just five signatures, would sell and I would sell my soul to publish it. Anyway, it reminded me of a little book published some fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have been even twenty then, you wouldn’t have heard of it, you were too young, with the title Anestios, diaries, with a hero called Elias who literally freaked out. It even occurred to me maybe it might be the same person, though I doubt it; unlike this one here who is probably real, that one was most likely imaginary. Have a look, and if you think so, we could publish it sometime this spring. The good thing is», he continued, «it’s short and besides, I don’t have to worry about any author’s royalties and demands and fussiness. So look at it and see if maybe it really is as interesting as it seemed to me».
3.
He put it in his own empty bag, and because the publisher’s optimism was exaggerated, before they drank their water and separated, with the last sip of the coffee, without thinking twice, he told the publisher what he had read on the internet the previous evening. The truth was that at that moment he didn’t much care if it was or was not related to the case of the text that he had been asked to read when he returned home from the café.
«At the first onslaught of the androids, the number of unemployed jumped to over two million», he told him. «Can you imagine? The statistics confirm the very worrying increase in the use of robotic devices and the frenetic increase in unemployment. With the overdevelopment of technology», he continued, «manual and intellectual labour is being transferred from biological humans to mechanical humanoids and the technoscientists, as you know, are doing all they can to develop their artificial intelligence. We have never seen such arrogance, don’t you agree? They are turning over the operating of machines to high-intelligence machines that are capable of designing machines with the highest possible functional efficiency».
The publisher was ready to reassure him that he knew all that, that everybody knew it, but the translator, as if he did not want to inform him but to frighten him with his own fear, kept on telling him that all the designers, regulators, machinists who were losing their jobs and being replaced by androids and robots were already being recorded as dying.
«You understand», he explained, «because of the vertical drop in life expectancy. No one knows what’s coming», he continued. «God knows what will become of all those like us, who insist on working with printing, in a time when, with a brightly lit screen on the table or in your pocket nobody has the peace of mind to leaf through a book. Much less to immerse themselves in phrases printed on clean white sheets of paper and read them». The only thing the readers wondered about –he would swear to that, so he said– was why they left the pages white, either pure white or in tones of cream or grey, and didn’t paint them red, yellow, blue or green. Then, not having anything else to say, he fell silent.
«Everybody knows all that», the publisher told him absent-mindedly, and, when a moment passed with no reaction from the translator, he added: «My friend, you worry too much. Do you know anybody who isn’t dying? Sooner or later, what’s the difference? We have very little time to understand anything and even less to enjoy it. It’s characteristic of our times that we worship death even as we fear it. What do you expect? Stressed as we are, we inevitably live as though we had already died. Listen, and don’t freak out; yesterday on the evening news they said something they had told us before once or twice fifteen years ago, but then they didn’t dare to say it again. They said we should leave History to History! It really worried me, I would even say it shook me. As if they had read Lovecraft, they are pushing us out of ourselves and out of earthly space-time. As if souls, whether in the body or out of the body, are still immortal and flying about, like they did in the Gothic Middle Ages of popes and cathedrals. What am I telling you? Sordidness, squalor, impudence and apathy, my friend! I wish I knew the writer of that monstrosity who set out to represent the world and made our lives hell».
4.
With the last words of the publisher, his desire to return home, eat the apple stolen from the farmer’s market that was still left in the refrigerator and start to read the sixth notebook – sixth, no less! – written by some poor homeless character vanished as if by magic. A feeling of pointlessness, because of impending death, came over him, as if he had once again been invaded by the fear that pursued him as a teenager of it finding him alone in some moment of great pressure, and he would run to find others, if not to speak to them, at least to hear them speak to each other and not his own other that at times spoke constantly inside his mind. All those years, he had been secretly proud of how he had conquered his cowardice and could endure himself in those moments of pressure that unnerved him. Yes, he was proud because he had gotten through many dilemmas and pseudo-dilemmas, relying on his judgment. Whatever self-confidence he had managed to acquire, he owed to that achievement, which permitted him to exercise adult seriousness. Disgusted with the word games invented to revive a communication that had died years ago, he did not feel the need to play with any word. Even a superfluous «and» would spoil his mood. But now, the meeting with the publisher, who hid his bankruptcy struggling to appear calm in the face of the difficulties of kick-starting his business, had plunged him into a sea of melancholy. The knot in his chest, that would come and usually vanish within a few minutes, refused to go away.
Without a second thought, he headed up in the direction of Panormou Street, driven by an intense desire to meet up with the old gang at the ouzadiko that had been their hangout years ago. One or two of them had been fellow students, the others were admittedly rather peculiar even then; partly climbers of buildings and mountains, partly petty thieves, pushers when the occasion offered itself, but for anarchists, as they all were at sixteen, those were titles of nobility, testimonies to their revolutionary attitude. Fifteen or so years ago, the gang was for some of them a part of their life with fluctuating value, always depending on what was happening simultaneously and in parallel around them. But even then, whoever could fall in love would disappear for a while, though it didn’t take them long to reappear, as a couple or alone as before.
He ordered a coffee, his third since that morning, and wondered what had become of some of them that he hadn’t seen since the black days of the ‘20s. It was still early, but he found it impossible to shut himself up between four walls. He had no doubt that he was also one of the dying. As indeed was the publisher, who refused to accept that, a victim of digitalization, he had also become a “former”. The question was how much time they had left. Even though the fat publisher wouldn’t give up and insisted that «any moment now, business will pick up again», he himself seriously doubted that next week, when he had asked him to call him to tell him about the text, the publisher would answer his phone, even if he kept on calling ten times a day. But what could he do? Escape became a necessity once more, aimless wandering was a kind of solution, the hours cut up by the kilometres, as if they were back in the Middle Ages, a hand secretly beating their breast as if every stroke was a «Lord have mercy»; they knew that if they once said «it is finished», «I’m done for», «I give up» and surrendered to motionlessness, the black darkness would quickly swallow them.
Admittedly, however, the label «former» that separated them from the occupations that were their livelihood was in no sense temporary. Nowhere was there visible on the horizon any prospect of himself once again becoming an editor and translator from French and Russian, his fellow a publisher of collections of poetry, advertising pamphlets or short stories of a few pages. And they were not alone. Simply, like all future unemployed, they were going through the stage of the fading hope that something would change. The more monstrous it seemed to them, because it was still the beginning of their having lost their jobs, the more logical it was to hope that their condition would not last forever. Human affairs were by their very nature changeable; something was bound to happen, someone would intervene to change things for better or worse. With the likelihood of better or worse being fifty-fifty, the hopeful mood wouldn’t allow just anybody to come along and like a spoiled child ruin this scenery of cautious optimism. They safeguarded it until expectations ran out, because with one thing and another you get used to things, and what had seemed terrible and shocking at first, in time becomes normal and ordinary. The reasonable thing was to wait until the box suddenly opened and let the hope and the optimism burst out that had gotten stuck on the bottom. When the box was finally empty, something would come along, God or nature or the devil were waiting and preparing. That’s what they wanted to believe; it suited them.
However, in spite of the «something will turn up» that like an «amen» ended their conversations, together with the new normal the certainty was consolidating that just around the corner, the same fate was waiting for them, rake in hand, like the wicked destiny that the old people talked about or like the nihilism referred to by young admirers of Nechayev, Bakunin and the local anarchists who flirted with controlled violence. Those guys, there was nothing to stop them from making mayhem anywhere in the blink of an eye. But what mattered was keeping up a tempo, a rhythm. Tomorrow is soon enough for everything else, they would say, and in fact the ripping up of pavements never ended, as if someone, sometimes at night and sometimes during the day, tacked back on the paving slabs that they had torn loose from the underlying cement. Young people talked of subversion, the word comforted them, but they were not sure what needed to be subverted and what should remain in place. Still others considered both revolutions and subversions to be impossible now. What they had left were protests, but even they became rare when it became illegal to film clashes on the streets, even when they were not as massive as usual or as expected. The most intellectual had dug up old copies of magazines from the last century, with articles by long forgotten sociologists who argued that it was necessary and feasible to rationalise utopia so that the impossible could become possible without magic, conjuring tricks and miracles. In the open seminars organized by closed groups a decade ago, there had been a deep interest in ideas that were hurled like paper airplanes at the future. Unfortunately, very few had understood that the times would no longer support the old methods, as some of them wanted, calling on Lenin, Trotsky, Fidel or Chavez for support, and when they realized that this was just a way to appease their conscience, while the country was going to pieces, a very few went back to the books, to see if they could understand things that persisted in remaining incomprehensible.
They were tired of ripping up pavements and making Molotov cocktails. Most of the cars they set on fire, since they were uninsured, did no harm to the insurance companies, who instead of losing money started making a profit again, as the greengrocer and the fishmonger, the tobacconist and the teacher, frightened at the fines, rushed to reinsure the jalopies. And they were really sick of throwing curses at the establishment. Some people had dared to observe that they, who proclaimed themselves anti-establishment, were in fact super-establishment themselves, since what they wanted was to take power in order to abolish it. But «how do you abolish power with power? Who are we kidding?» they wondered, by the time they reached their twentieth birthday. On the other hand, without power, the world won’t change even in a thousand years. With such reflections, he had stopped going out on the streets with stones, homemade explosives, ski masks. It was cowardice, cowardice and treason to ruin a ruined country that is your own country. As if they had any other, he would tell himself again and again as he walked down Evtychidou Street to take the trolley to the university and found, in the early morning, mainly old men looking through the garbage to find something to eat, even if it was inedible.
Out of the courses that he had managed to take during his ten semesters of putative studies at what was still called Panteio University, what he had left was the passionate desire for the communication symbolized by the amphitheatre when it became a place of questioning, as if it acquired a sacred character with the discussions that flowed back and forth there, because lectures had been abolished by special legislation and their duty as students was first of all to learn how to listen and to speak; dialogue was a sign of civilization, a fundamental civil good, an expression of goodwill and good intentions towards one or several opponents and, ultimately, proof that you were not afraid of the contests whose purpose is to solve the problem that brought them to the discussion table. What they would be able to say and hear, since most of them felt they were illiterate though they wouldn’t admit it even to the homeless curs on the streets, that was something that had not interested those responsible for education, professors, legal consultants, secret consultants, Scribes and Pharisees.
And with the end of the discussions, that had become a way to pass the time, since the system had abolished lectures and adopted a loose policy of degrees without value as professional qualifications, he had left with plenty of material that absolutely had to be worked through in his mind, since there is nothing worse than omissions, ambiguities, confusion. To his appetite for diligence had contributed his only friend during the whole period of his studies, Thodoris, with his hardworking spirit and his clear gaze. Thodoris who had been disgusted at the laziness of their teachers and had organized closed seminars, until he graduated and disappeared into the hinterlands of Macedonia. And while at first their beloved word «revolution» was a sort of guarantee of the authenticity of the likeminded, gradually it became one of the fundamental issues for discussion that concerned everyone, though few were concerned with them. The biggest problem was how society, having fallen apart years ago, let’s admit it, had managed to disintegrate. He thought of Thaleia, his first love, who when he first saw her had reminded him of Mandelstam’s expression «tall as a night without streetcars»viii and it had taken a long time for him to understand why the height of this very tall Thaleia was a harbinger of troubles for anyone who dared to fall in love with her without having the required moral stamina; Thaleia did not at any price want to be different, and that explained the unexpected startling effect that her presence had on him, since she herself did everything she could to appear to be absent. Indeed, she was always leaving, since only when absent did she make perceptible her imperceptible, as she wanted it, presence. He had never felt so hungry as in the months they were together and he had to move in order to return, since a long time ago he had absolutely forbidden himself regressions. By now it was half past one and he had drunk his third coffee waiting for some of the old gang to appear. He moved on his chair to limber up, actually to push away the regressions that always devastated him every time he gave in to their call. The past was not for daydreaming. It was better to recall it to help you understand what was that critical mistake where, if you had acted differently, nothing of all that happened would have happened. Because inevitably, somewhere in the future biding its time, all of this and worse is going to happen again, unless you managed to digest the choices and the decisions that were taking you right back there.
5.
He looked through the windows at the fenced yard that surrounded the café, forming a narrow, circular courtyard with a few tables. He tapped his fingers on the back of the chair next to him and in the middle of his complete idleness he suddenly remembered the notebook. He took it out of his bag and leafed through it: fifty pages, he would need more than two hours to read it and another two days to re-read it carefully, taking notes, to understand the message of the whole text. Who cares about the message of the whole text? Not even the message of half of it interested the readers who leafed through books and the trouble that they took to leaf through them was more than enough to prove that electronic texts were and would remain a stopgap solution, though not a choice. Even so-called critics, and not just readers, isolated certain powerful phrases that were convincing, but the coherence that the text gained when you unravelled the thread of its arguments and their connotations escaped them, since they did not need it. Then the critics said, and the readers who read them said the same, that they were suspicious of books with a message. Sometimes, with so much sophistication, they were the worst kind and at other times they were irritatingly naïve. Compared to the indeterminacy and chaos that reigned all around them and was rapidly intruding inside them, like the necessary inside-out of a piece of clothing that they were wearing or sooner or later would be wearing, messages, they said, when they were not an alibi for propaganda, were speculations by profound thinkers who drove them crazy, but the time when ideas would excite you, inflame you, produce awe or hatred had, as it seemed, passed for good. Because what else could be found to express the same desires all these years? Many said that they could live without ideas, concepts were enough for them. Concepts, at least, they said, were the tools that transmuted what the eye or the ear or the fingers attested to and were useful for any kind of organization. And given the chaos that reigned inside them, the word «organization» encountered no objections, in fact it transfixed them. Science was valuable not only because it sold, but also because it could solve the practical problems created by the rapid ageing of the technology concerning models of appliances, tools, medicines, dietary supplements, heating, air conditioning, heat-resistant utensils, fire-resistant clothing, disposable underwear and so many other things. The only books that were enormously successful although they had no message were the thrillers that stimulated the nervous system and gave readers the feeling that they were more alive than they could bear. But even so, the difficulty for someone who didn’t confuse literature with philosophy and refused to substitute message with style, in this case the style of the text written in a schoolboy’s notebook, was his ignorance of the preceding notebooks, because, since the one on hand had been entitled the sixth, there must have been five others already written. In those five, which were con-texts of the sixth, the author had certainly set up the scaffolding on which to weave a message that would give the hero-victim the possibility, or at least the room to present himself and a bit more, so that we would know not just his name, his nickname, his profession, his family situation, the lineaments of his face, the defects of his bodily form. Now, about this particular notebook, if you except the name of the hero, a victim of moral and social bankruptcy, which might well be an invention of the narrator, he had available none of those elements, since neither the person who brought it to the office of the former publisher, nor the publisher himself, in spite of his volubility, had learned anything about the fate of the previous notebooks. In addition, the date «January 2021?» with a question mark, that someone had written on the back side of the cover, meant very little, and they would certainly have to ignore it when publishing the text, since it was not clear if it was an actual or a fictive date. Because it could just as well indicate the date when the hero concluded his narrative or the date when the author entrusted the notebook to a friend or relative. Consequently, it was debatable whether the «January 2021?» date should be incorporated into the text or put in a footnote at the end of the book. But also, when had he started writing it and how long had it remained unknown? Could the publisher be right when he thought it might be the diary of a homeless person? Go figure! Good luck finding that booklet he had mentioned, printed some seventeen – seventeen, didn’t he say? – years ago. In any case, he had forgotten to ask him. But even so, he needed to read the so-called Sixth Notebook that had been found in the bag of the author or of the hero, guesswork again, and quickly, because he did not have a single euro in his pocket, and he hoped it would be of interest, publishing it would save him, since, in addition to the one hundred for this first appraisal, there would be an additional two hundred bankchips at least for the proofreading of the text before it went to print. Three hundred and fifty in total was an extension of life for about a month or so. Before he could include some old debts in his calculations, he saw his fingers trembling like leaves touched by a sudden wind. Because he was hungry, mortally hungry, a hunger that allowed him to exist without allowing him to live.
6.
It was five o’clock by the time he had to admit that no one was coming. He got up to leave paying for his two coffees, and then the young man who acted as waiter and had been stealing glances at him for some time finally turned and told him that he remembered him from long ago, because he used to play around there when he was little. As a boy he used to see t
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