"It has all the ingredients to feel unreal, but it doesn't"....

...or, 'If this is Sunday it must be Monday'...or, 'If this is Thursday, it must be Friday'...

I now live in a country where the first day of the working week is Sunday, and where it finishes on a Thursday.

It is quite disconcerting. On a Sunday morning when I am getting ready for the first day of the working week, most people I know are either still asleep, because it is a 'real' Sunday, or are just getting ready to go out, because it is a 'real' Saturday. On a Thursday afternoon, whilst we here have the "TFI.." feeling, nobody I know anywhere else has it because it is a 'real' Thursday still. I could take a plane and go somewhere 'for the weekend' but, of course, it wouldn't be a 'real' weekend. I would have to leave on a 'real' Thursday, which for me would be a Friday, and return on a 'real' Saturday, which for me would be a Sunday.

There are various other countries that work like this, but because I don't know anyone who lives in any of them, it's quite...isolating.

At the same time, and because of how it is here, no single day feels like any other day, yet all of them feel like each other. Shops never appear to be closed, whatever day or time of the day it is; the traffic in the city doesn't seem to behave noticeably differently on different days, and these are just two random, banal, examples. I could go on, because I could go on, but there is no point; there is no discernible way in which you could work out what day of the week it is if you didn't already know.

I was recently in The Hague, in Holland, and in Ankara, in Turkey. In both places 'real' Fridays and 'real' Sundays were, in fact, Fridays and Sundays. In The Hague, things closed at 6 in the evening, and in Ankara (what a deceptively intriguing city that is...) everyone was out on Saturday night.

And I was disconcerted.

Or rather, anisyxos.

Baudrillard, I think, must have known this:

“La presencia no se borra ante el vacío, se borra ante un redoblamiento de presencia que borra la oposición de la presencia y de la ausencia.”

I feel a permanent absence of presence and, yet, at the same time, a continual absence of presence.

Philistines and Barbarians

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, 'Philistine' has two meanings:

"O.T. people of coastal Palestine, who made war on the Israelites, mid-14c., from O.Fr. Philistin, from L.L. Philistinus, from Late Gk. Philistinoi, from Heb. P'lishtim, "people of P'lesheth" ("Philistia"); cf. Akkad. Palastu, Egyptian Palusata; the word probably is the people's name for itself."

In the case of the cafeteria in Ankara (above), this, of course, would be the reference.

The other meaning is as follows:

"person deficient in liberal culture," 1827, originally in Carlyle, popularized by him and Matthew Arnold, from Ger. Philister "enemy of God's word," lit. "Philistine," inhabitants of a Biblical land, neighbors (and enemies) of Israel (see Philistine). Popularized in Ger. student slang (supposedly first in Jena, late 17c.) as a contemptuous term for "townies," and hence, by extension, "any uncultured person." Philistine had been used in a humorous fig. sense of "the enemy" in Eng. from c.1600."

From the same source, the following meaning of 'barbarous' is explained:

"mid-14c. (adj.), from M.L. barbarinus (cf. O.Fr. barbarin "Berber, pagan, Saracen, barbarian"), from L. barbaria "foreign country," from Gk. barbaros "foreign, strange, ignorant," from PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners (cf. Skt. barbara- "stammering," also "non-Aryan"). Greek barbaroi (n.) meant "all that are not Greek," but especially the Medes and Persians. Originally not entirely pejorative, its sense darkened after the Persian wars. The Romans (technically themselves barbaroi) took up the word and applied it to tribes or nations which had no Greek or Roman accomplishments. The noun is from late 14c., "person speaking a language different from one's own," also (c.1400) "native of the Barbary coast;" meaning "rude, wild person" is from 1610s."

I was looking, in my previous post (http://anisyxia.blogspot.ch/2012/06/life-in-year.html) for an analogy to try and explain to myself the relationship between the 'voleurs de plantons' and certain things that have happened to me over the course of the past year, and things that have been happening in Greece, Spain, Syria, Egypt...

As soon as I saw the name of the cafe, I think I began to get a glimpse of what the connections might be. Now, of course, connections between such a disparate group of events are highly tenuous, but the purpose of analogies is often to highlight meaningful, or significant, points of connection, to shed light on certain things; the claim is not that X IS Y, but that X shares certain similarities with Y and, by looking at Y, we might be able to learn more about X. That is as far as it goes, of course, but it can be enormously enlightening.

Whatever the motives of the plant thieves, they certainly appear to have demonstrated that they are "deficient in liberal culture"; as I wrote before, the act was not exactly making tremble the foundations of corporate culture, but its negative effects on the attempt to do so were despicable. At the same time, it was also an act of barbary in the sense that it betrayed a lack of 'Greek or Roman accomplishments' in as much as it manifested a lack of respect, care, compassion, understanding of community and showed scant regard for the notion of 'natural law, for want of a better phrase, and by it I mean the fact that, as denizens of this planet, we cannot but live together socially and communally. In its own way, it was an exercise in 'capitalism, red in tooth and claw', an act of 'social Darwinism', and about as barbaric ("wild") as it gets. Perhaps there is a 'good' explanation ('good' meaning fully explicatory), but reasons are not excuses, justifications do not provide carte blanche.

Except, of course, they are all too often used that way. Cf, as the dictionary editors would write, the Greek elections....

A Life In A Year...

It has been a while since I last updated this blog; quite a lot has happened, and quite another lot has failed to happen; I am frequently asked why I even keep a blog, and I suppose the only answer that really counts is 'catharsis.' Most of the people who I know know all about it anyway; those of you who know me but from whom I am estranged for one reason or another get to have an 'update'; those of you who don't know me may or may not enjoy it or learn from it, but will still get something or other from it. For me, however, it is merely a matter of clarifying thoughts and opinions on certain things, of 'emoting'...enfin, catharsis.

Writing also allows distance to be put on things, allows perspective to be gained. I could list the things that have happened to me since the last post, I could offer my thoughts and opinions on things that have happened around me during this year, and such a listing would serve the purpose of allowing me to rank the actual importance of these things, to see whether or not the effect that I think they have had on my life is actually close to the truth or not. It would also allow me to 'clear out my closet,' to paraphrase Eminem.

One of the most difficult choices, however, with regards to beginning this particular post, was the choice of photograph to head it. I have, due to the various changes and upheavals that have happened this year, travelled quite a bit, for work as well as for pleasure; I have been to new places, revisited some that I know very well, and reencountered some that I met a long time ago. I take, like most people who have a digital camera, far too many photos, so the choice could have been prolonged. However, this photo has been on my mind for a while. I think that at the time I took it I knew that it was going to end up being representative of a whole cornucopia of reactions, thoughts, ideas, and symbolic representations of the past year and, I think, so it has proven to be. Even the location and circumstances are in some sense an encapsulation.

Close to where I am now living, a rural location, there are a number of fields, farms, allotment smallholdings and tiny hamlets and villages. A small wedge of land inbetween a number of fields is an allotment where Kevin and his friends grow vegetables organically, raise a handful of small animals (rabbits at the present moment) and, when the sun sets (if it's not raining, which it frequently does here, despite it being June and 'summer'), enjoys the early evening and the sunset with any number of friends, just sitting peacefully staring at the mountain range in the distance, chatting, or putting the finishing touches to some aspect or other of the garden. It's not a big operation (in fact, to call it an 'operation' even is to make grandiose claims for it that it doesn't possess...): I believe the North Americans might call it a 'Mom and Pop' effort and, for the best of reasons, that is what it is. There are a number of such people around here, farmers and smallholders who, for various reasons, are fighting against the hegemony of the local giant retailers who try and buy up all the supplies of everything, and then hold the suppliers to ransom. Actions, ways of being and living more precisely, like those of Kevin, at the same time go hand in hand with a collection of other such actions - a commitment to sustainability, ecology, anti-establishmentarianism, tolerance, liberalism, and so on and so forth. The kinds of things that Slavoj Zizek would hate, but which make life in small, organic communities bearable and pleasant and which, if we could, we would all like to see 'exported.' It is the same ideology that spurred on the 'Occupy' movements and the 'Arab Spring' (what a sign of our age...as soon as something happens, it is given a label so that it can be better explained, academicised, intellectually exploited, controlled and disarmed...but, for the moment, since we are all familiar with the term, here it is, with the equally-typical scare quotes around it...).

I have seen the like of it before, of course; in Beirut there was the Souk El-Tayyeb, the Saturday morning organic farmers' market in (of all places) Saifi Village ('Village'!!), but that was somehow simply surreal, not only because of where it took place, but because of how, as soon as it could, it became yet another 'product' (and spurned its own cookery books, organisation (Slow Food Lebanon), and fixed attitudes to it and lifestyle choices surrounding it). This, however, is not that; it just is what it is.

And what it is is surreal in its own way. This, of course, is Switzerland, and on the border with France, in the shadow of Mont Blanc. "Even here," however, even in this wealthy, prosperous, uber-democratic country, there are people who are marginalised (and many of them self-marginalise - people like Kevin, the 'Okupas' in central Geneva, and so on), although being marginalised in this country (or, more to the point, self-marginalising in this country) is either sanctioned, or comes with a safety net, or is just, well, acceptable and accepted. It's not really dissident, though it is, in the original sense of the word, instructive.

However, "As we all know, times are difficult," as the 'Open Letter' says. "Even here," in this non-European European country, the 'crises' of Greece, Spain, Portugal, the fin-de-siecle political machinations in neighbouring France (Hollande? Socialist? Really?) and Germany, as well as the increasing lurch to the right (politically as well as ideologically) inside the country itself are having an effect. (Some) people are hurting, "even here." So, what sort of person, really, would steal plants (and, as it turned out, not all of them, but just the ones with identification labels on them, leaving the rest of them behind and thus rendering them useless - he can't now offer them for sale, because he doesn't know what they are; he can plant them, and wait and see, but effectively they will be only fit for personal consumption) from an amateur gardener? It's not exactly kicking over the statues of corporate exploitation, so one is left to wonder what personal circumstances the thief was in, or what set of values motivated them.

It's tempting to draw analogies with other things happening around the world, of course. The problem with analogies is that every single variable, or most of them at the very least, have to be the same, otherwise the analogy falls; to argue that something is analogous to something else based on only one point of similarity is, simply, disingenuous. So, I shall try not to be disingenuous (and probably fail...).

To be continued....

"An Englishman in New York..."

Until recently I lived in Beirut, Lebanon (yes, let's do it like the North Americans do it - town and state/country...), and now I live in Athens, Greece (not Georgia...).

In Lebanon, I was usually ignored because I wasn't a US citizen, and that suited me down to the ground; seemingly everybody I met either was a US citizen, or also had US citizenship, or wanted to have it, or aspired to go there, or, mostly, aped US customs, habits, TV-viewing schedules, accents, attitudes...the whole panoply of Americana (oh yes, except when the US did something naughty in the Middle East, when they all became Pan-Arabist...for a day or so, before forgetting that and sashaying off back to Starbucks or the "Mall" to begin practicing being Americans again...).

Well, now, in Greece, I am getting my come-uppance. When the Greeks are not busy demonstrating outside the US Embassy, or firing rockets into it's toilets, forcing it to build a whole new building...five metres behind the old one!!, or sounding-off (correctly) about the pernicious influence of the US in the region, they are mostly busy being rampant Anglophiles.

You know, those of you from the Occident who have ever lived in non-Occidental countries (and Greece is the Balkans, really...), the "5 Taxi Driver Questions" ('taxi driver' is, of course, a metaphor...but it usually is taxi drivers because I take a lot of taxis)...'Where are you from?'; 'Which part?'; 'Which football team do you support?' (you are never allowed NOT to support a football team....); 'How long have you lived here?' The fifth question has options - for men, 'What do you think of Greek women?', or, for either gender I believe, some sort of question based on the assumption, common to many denizens of small countries, that their own country is of course the best in the world. Here it sometimes takes the form of a lecture in disguised question form; the cultivated will lecture me about Greek history, antiquity, the language or the geography; others will, a la 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding', try to assert the supremacy of Greek anything and everything. It's always a disguised question..."pez moy kati...", but it never is a question.

Of course there are variations; there is the 'Proto-Fascist Taxi Driver', the 'Pseudo-Intellectual Taxi Driver', the 'Germans Are Out To Destroy Us Taxi Driver', or, worst of all of late, the 'Economic Bore Taxi Driver.' Yes, there is a crisis; it's big, very big. Greece is a mess, it's going to get worse. People of all classes and ages are suffering, the politicians (all of them) are liars, charlatans and incestuous, and we all basically agree on who and what is to blame...but can we please, please not talk about it...

However, what they ALL have in common is a tedious Anglophilia.

The easiest ones to block out are those who hear "I'm English" and who just use it to go on a lengthy reminiscence of when they lived in/visited/have a cousin who lives in (etcetera) London (usually) (occasionally there is some surrealism: I met a friend of a friend the other day who had spent a year living in Grimsby, which actually did pique my interest...).

Another category of Anglophile (and the next couple of categories are hard to tune out) are those who begin by slating, bemoaning, criticizing England (it's always, only, ever 'England'. I was at a Mogwai concert the other night, and they introduced themselves as being from "Glasgow, Scotland." An Emo standing next to me ("next"? It was packed. It was almost like osmosis...) translated this for her friend as "England"), and will at some point mention the Elgin Marbles if my 'Tedious Greek Anglophile Bingo Card' was created by Lady Luck, before gradually, rhetorically, but permanently, sliding into an all-round eulogy of all things 'English' (university education, tea, London shopping, British customs, politeness, fake amusement with the concept of queuing...you name the stereotype, it is rasied up for praise under the guise of mock amusement.

However, it is the third category of tedious Anglophiles that makes me remember Lebanon. This category is composed of two sets of people. The one is no worse or more tedious than the other; both are unbearable for different reasons. The first sub-category are the expatriate Brits themselves, with their endless gatherings ("a bunch of us like to get together..."), societies and associations (what in God's name is the "Hash House Harriers"???), endless references to them BEING British, to having recently VISITED Britain, constantly bringing up comparisons with, or referring to, Britain at the slightest irrelevant pass ("Souvlaki? Well, you know we have Steak and Kidney Pie, and I tell you English food is not as bad as the stereotypes suggest...."), or endless dull reminiscences centred on Britain, being British and, worst of all, being British IN GREECE. Thank God Christmas is over: all I could ever hear from my British colleagues was talk of mince pies, Yorkshire puddings, the technicalities of Christmas pudding, enfin, an endless litany of nostalgic, pseudo-cultural trivia.

Sub-category two, however, is a different kettle of fish.

I have not lived in Britain for the last thirteen years. I have only visited it once, for four (work) days in all that time. I have no intention of setting foot in the place ever again if I can help it. I had 23 years there, and I think that's enough for any one country. I'm with George Monbiot on this one ("I don’t hate Britain, and I am not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should love this country more than any other. There are some things I like about it and some things I don’t, and the same goes for everywhere else I’ve visited." (http://www.monbiot.com/2005/08/09/the-new-chauvinism/) . I also have a certain affinity with Amin Maalouf (“Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?” ― Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong). I still subscribe to a satirical BBC Radio 4 podcast, but am increasingly missing the references; my browser home page is 'The Guardian', and the same thing goes for that also. I happen to BE British, but that is just an accident of biology and time that has nothing to do with me - it is pure Sartrean 'facticite'...

However, Greek Anglophiles don't appear to get this. A typical conversation might go something like: Me - "I am sick of the rain"; GA - "Doesn't it rain a lot in England"? Me - "I have just moved here after six years in Lebanon"; GA - "Where did you live in England? Ah, you were born in Sheffield! I once visited Rotherham..." Me - "The Greek education system is terrible"; GA - "What, the British system is better?"

It's like being a US citizen in Lebanon, I imagine, except, from what I could see, they were more than happy to take any opportunity they could to talk about it (with notable, beautiful exceptions). I'd rather not, thank you. Is it possible that we could have a conversation that doesn't revolve around what you think I am like, and actually have a real conversation?

That was a rhetorical question, by the way...and you know the Greeks invented rhetoric.....

If This Is Thursday It Must Be....The Hague'? "It has all the ingredients to feel real, but it isn't..."

It has been a bit of a whirlwind few months. It has of course been longer than that, but the last few months can act as a microcosm. Just expand, and amplify...

A few weeks ago I started writing, in situ, “Yesterday I arrived in Den Haag. I’m here for, first, a conference (work), then some more work; then, another few days of work. So, it’s a work trip. Yet I’m in the Netherlands. It’s an interesting city, in a Northern European way. It’s damp, grey, organized, curious, like a well-oiled machine. A week and a bit ago I was in Copenhagen (yes, I’m not getting much done at my new place of work….but more of that later…) for three days (of more work). That was the same as here, but somehow without actually being interesting. I tried to find it intriguing, warm, attracting, or endearing, but I couldn’t. It was cold, it has to be said, which may have coloured my judgement but, in the end, it was just grey. I worked, I saw some interesting things in the evenings. That was all sandwiched inbetween various aeroplanes and airports, and it all became a bit of a blur. It was only a week and a half or so ago and, even though I can clearly picture things, nothing much figures. A friend of mine once said, in the middle of a discussion, something I had to write down (she quizzed me lightly about why I was writing it down, but I just knew it would be extremely pertinent at some future point), which it was,

“It has all the ingredients to feel real, but it isn’t.”

That’s what I thought about Copenhagen. I think it is also true of Den Haag, yet the surreal intensity of the place, the literal and figurative ‘openness’ of the place, marks it out as, for the moment, not being like Copenhagen.

However, it’s also the case that Copenhagen came just a few weeks after a long trip to Madrid (more work…but with a couple of days of not-work either side…) and, ever since I visited it twice last year (April and June), I have fallen in love with it again, almost 25 years after living there for a year, and almost 20 after last going there, save for a day after getting back from a month in Cuba, so Madrid then was a bit like having the bends after deep-sea diving (which I have never done, incidentally, but I get the impression that the experience can be described in such terms…), so it doesn’t count….). After having just moved from one Mediterranean country (Lebanon) to another (Greece), Madrid fitted the pattern. I have, between June and a few weeks ago, spent three weeks in Toytown, Switzerland (actually it’s called Saas-Fee), a week in a town/village in Southern Germany, a couple of days in Paris and a over a week in La Loire, followed by Copenhagen, then ten days in The Hague, followed by another week in Southern Germany, so my references are a little scrambled at the moment but yet, the default sensors are set for warmth, la bonne vie, good food, unpredictability, and a lot less concrete than I am currently experiencing…”

I started writing all of that and, as is often the case, never really got around to finishing it. It’s one of those cases where life, reality (that which has all the ingredients and that which doesn’t….) overtakes, and what one wanted to stay gets lost in the moment….

At some point, I did (have to) stop and take stock of surroundings: three demonstrations, jet-black anarchists and not a few Molotov cocktails on the streets of Athens and, inbetween times, the daily detritus (work, shopping, living…). More or less a month of not travelling, and it all began to feel as if this staticity that most feel as normalcy felt like the most unreal thing in the world.

It’s now Boxing Day, and I find myself once again in Beirut, having had a brief stint in Amman. Back ‘on the road’, as it were. Not exactly George Clooney in ‘Up In The Air’, but remembering where certain things are in airports that one hasn’t been in for a while is unsettlingly settling. I haven’t really been able to catch up with myself in the last few months, and haven’t been able to have anything other than a hyperreal handle on my own life, let alone life itself.

Being back in a place I lived in for so long, after only leaving it a few months ago, is odd. I am trying to find it strange, and I should, but somehow it doesn’t, and I can’t. The metaphysics of it are a little peculiar: it feels like one of those 3rd person ‘X-Box’ games, where one is meant to be the person that one is controlling, but what you are actually visualizing is constantly behind you. You are in control (bar the things that one can never control, of course…), and the life that you are living is undoubtedly yours yet, still,

“It has all the ingredients to feel real, but it isn’t.”

ANHSYXIA...Return To A/The 'State' of Απεργια...

A colleagues of mine said today, "You should update your blog; you're in Greece now." As if the point of this was ever to advertise where I happen to be. 'Anisyxia' is, more than anything else, obviously, an existential, metaphysical state, except the name of the blog, of course, came from the apellation given to a socio-political series of events in Greece a few years ago. Those events were, of course, the physical, social manifestations of an existential, metaphysical state turned outwards. Today (literally today - October 19th 2011, the first day of a 48 hour general strike) what can be seen on this video, what I can see part of from the terrace of the apartment where I now live, and the audible echoes of which I can hear very clearly, were it not for the mass of police and media helicopters buzzing around (I live high on a hill, so they are closer to me than I might otherwise like...), and what I can - literally hear and smell (Ματ (riot squad) tear gas canisters countering home-made Molotov cocktails, chanting on a tediously repetitive scale - it sounds like "Apergia, apergia, apergia dia a dia" which, if so, shows a remarkable and beautiful Greco-Hispanic solidarity, so I must be mishearing), is anisyxia writ large. Tweeters are all over it, of course (have a look at http://teacherdudebbq.blogspot.com, who I have always had a lot of time for) and the hash tags are flying all over the place announcing burning buildings, demonstrations in other, smaller towns and cities; I returned from 5 days in Copenhagen yesterday, and the rubbish still hasn't been collected, and fairly soon it's going to be blocking the roads.



Anyway, for the moment, sit back and watch this. You are, after all, "in Greece now.":

An absence of 'Bliss'

A while ago (http://anisyxia.blogspot.com/2010/11/bliss.html) I wrote about the construction work taking place right behind my house, outside my bedroom window, and about the workers who were 'condemned' to working on this site, and many others like it. Well, suffice it to say that the work has continued apace, without cessation..the digging down into the bowels of the earth appears to be nearing its end, and only the actual construction of whatever excresence still remains to be built. Be thankful for small(er) mercies: experience here tells me that constructing buildings is less noisy (note: not 'quieter', but 'less noisy') than excavating the ground that makes way for them. I only have a month and a bit left to live here, and someone else will then have to put up with the noise. The memory of it will remain, but will fade.

However, I thought it might be time to update the photographic record of what is outside my back balcony. 'Bliss' captured, photographically, what it was like at the beginning of the excavation. Here is what it is like now. I offer no further comment...imagine the noise, imagine the living conditions of the workers, speculate on the fate of the tree...





...or maybe one further comment...from what I can gather, the building to be erected is purely speculative; nobody has bought it, nobody has (yet) paid for it...it appears that it is being built with borrowed money, on the off-chance that, given its location, the chances are that the apartments will be sold. What that says about this country speaks volumes; what that sadly says about those of us who allow it to happen speaks even louder.