This is a chapter taken from The Barbarian Review, a collective writing project done by various
foreign people in Athens: a few persons passing through a brief period
of time, in a very special city. This is a very interesting collection of writings, well worth a visit.
A Kaleidoscope of Memory-Images
Not a theoretical directive from a bureau
pretending to direct affairs, but rather another voice added to a
chorus, another emanation in addition to all the others.
*
We are sitting in the Parko, drinking beer as usual.
– Yeah, I know what you mean, he says – Like starting from here we can change the world.
Exarcheia comes from the heart.
*
Rakomelo in the cafe to celebrate the end of the world in 2012.
– Maybe it really will end, we confide with half-hope to one another,
almost coughing over the warmed-up liquor. The barman calls back to us
our claim about the end of the world in yet another toast.
– No, no, interrupts an old customer in the back, clacking his worry
beads as he slowly rises with effort and shuffles over to pay. – No, it
is the end of paradise, he says somewhat cryptically. With good humour,
the barman tries to correct him, but he is adamant: it is the end of
paradise, not the world. And with that, he somewhat unsteadily goes out
the door into the night. Yes, we reflect, he is in the right: the end of
the working class paradise, the neoliberal paradise, the middle class
social-democrat paradise, the scientific progress paradise, all the
variations of the Christian heaven come down to earth. We are here at
the vanishing of paradise: the social contract, the welfare state,
democracy and all that. A new toast:
– Goodbye paradise, hello disaster! little glasses go up – To the catastrophe!
Yes, let us have a toast to this, our new era of storm clouds!
*
Merkel comes to visit. Athens is waiting. The sky is gray and
apocalyptic: not the apocalypse of imagination, thunder and lightning,
but the gray mournful waning of the world in its own banality. There is
besieged Syntagma surrounded by its riot police, the shops all shuttered
and closed, the walls covered with graffiti, and a hateful, angry
feeling in the air. The surveillance camera on its gigantic concrete
pole is watching the events with silent malevolence. There is something
universally ugly, almost frightfully shabby about the scene: Athens is
not a beautiful city any more, the riot police are standing there with
tear gas at the ready representing the governmental views and projects,
the shoppers have all retreated for a brief time, the leftists are
chanting their meaningless slogans while slowly trying to filter away
from the fighting, and meantime we are collecting chunks of marble and
stones. All together now: the riot police are forced back aways under a
hail of projectiles, hoots, and derision. More tear gas is the response.
Clashes start to spread around the big mob in the center of the square.
It was not even such a big riot, so far as
Athens is concerned, and yet anywhere else in Europe it would be
sensational. Even so, it was special for the vision it distilled: here
is the contemporary world, the modern era, that of a barely functioning
coalition government determined to end the hedonistic apathy that was
its only real support. When materialistic doctrines underlie a society,
as they have only just done for the past two centuries in the West,
there is no love possible between ruler and ruled, no organic connection
in the society. This emptiness was especially evident on that day: this
is what is left of all the fantastic promises of the past two
centuries- a young mob throwing rocks at the universally despised police
forces on streets littered with debris and ever-renewed tear gas, the
leftists desperately trying to call an uncaring elite to old promises
extorted from them under threat of civil war, and this same elite
determined to annihilate its own society to save itself. And above all
the vacant surveillance camera watching over the fray, the promise and
practice of a new totalitarianism but one that is finding its
pretensions and power everywhere falling short of its own mad desires,
that finds everywhere only a lack of respect and consideration. Empty
streets and running rioters, police hurriedly tramping along, Maalox and
stun grenades, leaving behind them deserted, smashed storefronts
surrounded by chunks of rubble: Welcome to the 21st century.
