Writing Boot Camp.

The writing boot camp over the last three days, organised by the Student Learning Services of the university, was a much needed escape from the endless news cycle on Greece. I wrote over 8,000 words of new material, finished the first draft of a chapter and the beginning of the next one, and to my great surprise I saw a new character walk into the story and shaking things up a bit. It all went well,  very well; way beyond my expectations.

Reality was lurking just outside the door of the writing boot camp, 

heavy with portents: a room full of European Union reports, and 

a table spread with leaflets on EE institutions, agencies, and all 

sorts of euro-info. At the far end of the picture, right next to the 

door, a map of ancient China.

The boot camp took place in a small room in the Annexe of the seventh floor of the library, in an ambience perfectly suitable for concentration: a small room overlooking slate roofs and gables, with good light for looking at the computer screen, and the ultimate tool of productivity, the lack of internet connection. There were fifteen or sixteen of us, in various stages of their PhD writing, but most of them in the writing up stage. In this sense I was one of the ‘youngest' in the room, being only in my second year (well, the end of it now),  which was pleasant for a change! I work best listening to music: I listened to Handel’s Julius Caesar, Rinaldo, and Orlando, and Lully’s Alceste and Armide. During the entre-acts I went downstairs for a coffee (the cappuccino in the vending machines is surprisingly good - or I was just gagging for coffee!) or I stretched my sore neck and shoulders. I was blissfully immersed into the world of the novel, nine hundred years back, away from the turbulent present.

Lately I have often wished reality could leave me alone for a few hours at a time every day. A writing boot camp was perfect for this. I gave myself license not to care about anything else for those specific hours while I was accountable to myself for the set number of words at the end of them. I was incommunicado, which is a kind of freedom less and less available in our tech-heavy days; still I was not completely cut off, for I knew that at the end of the writing day I could catch up with everyone. I was not distracted by my books nor tempted to go off on another tangent - basically an excuse to waste time amusing myself with things that will never make their way into the book - yet I could bring one book or article with me for reference or make notes for targeted info to look up later. The sight of all those people typing busily into their keyboards was a great inducement to do the same.

No wonder the writing boot camp worked for me. The time and the tools were offered by the university; the motivation and the hard work were mine. For optimal results it takes both sides.

Materials for History.

It is an enlightening experience for historians to observe contemporary events unfold. The information, the facts, the opinions, the polemics, the agendas, the emotionally charged reactions come at them from all directions, crisscrossing, contradicting, cancelling out one another, forming incomprehensible shapes, blinding and deafening, messing up with reason and with theoretical schemata, stirring emotions and subverting (or confirming) preconceived ideas. Then reflection and critical processing and analysis (hopefully) take over and enable historians to see patterns and links in the cluster of happenings, and to gauge their connectedness to other clusters from the past and the present. Eventually, the events will become historical, they will settle down in the pages of a book; by that time, ithey will have probably been disconnected from the emotions and they will have lost their urgency.

Students, particularly younger ones, rarely make a connection of historical events with experiences in their own lives. A common approach to history, at least in my native Greece, is to exploit the past in order to serve agendas of the present, mainly by creating a cult of long gone heroes who achieved a greatness that should but cannot be repeated. Young (and not so young) students of history are also - I have noticed from personal experience, having taught History in the Greek secondary education - eager to pass facile judgment on this or that historical person's or group's deeds, as if it were simple or easy to make important decision, as if the actants of history could see things as simple and clear-cut as we can (sort of) see them with the benefit of hindsight. This tendency to look for heroes and villains in a framework of 'foundation myths' and narratives seeps into the way people form their political judgments, or what passes for political judgment in a world where nuances are overlooked and complications are ignored (with great contribution from the press, or what passes for press these days). At any rate, historical events look like distant, dreary tips of icebergs floating somewhere far from where we are, and we are taught nothing about what they mean and how to use that meaning. This is the case particularly in peaceful, affluent times.

And then hard and turbulent times hit us. Even the most blissfully ignorant must be aware we are now going through such times. Perhaps this is the first time in our history that two consecutive generations, raised in relative peace and prosperity, are confronted with a much harsher reality than the one they (we) were raised to expect as a matter of course. Day by day the world becomes more shaky, shifting towards a shape that would look more familiar to my grandparents and great-grandparents (some of them were refugees). Less stability, more economic hardhsip, more heart-heartedness and selfishness, but also a different awareness, an alertness which only hardship can raise. 

Until recently, a majority of young (and not so young) people never had to think seriously about anything beyond their own narrow circle of people and interests; it was the times of idioteuein, of living life only on the private level. Interestingly, this Greek word also means 'to be stupid.' (It is where the English word 'idiot' comes from). But now young people - and older people whose brains have not yet set into a cement-like stolidness - begin to see for themselves how difficult it is to see ahead and to know what's best, how tangled and complicated this supposedly straightforward relationship of cause and effect is, how time is a dimension as important as all the other dimensions of the physical world - only we cannot ever grasp this one. In other words, they (we) begin to see how history works, and how we are all materials for history. 

                                                            ***

I am writing this post one year after the Scottish referendum for independence, when the Scots let fear win over hope - temporarily. In the meantime, another referendum two months ago in my native Greece decided that hope should win over fear, only for hope to be turned into something for which I have no words; the only thing I can think of to describe the situation is Uncle Vanya's bitter and demented laughter, at the very end of Chekhov's play, in a performance I saw in Thessaloniki a very long time ago. It is strange how the sound and tone of that laughter were stored quietly in my memory all those years and have now re-emerged on the eve of yet another election in Greece. It is an unaccountable thing, memory. 

Summer of hopes and fears.

I have been away from my blog for a long time. A hard winter and a busy spring with loads of work, going back to teaching, a conference paper, writing, and reading - tons of reading, and still not enough of it done - kept me away.

And all this time this tree was standing outside my window,
blossoming in beautiful indifference.

Now it’s the heart of the summer and another referendum has come up, this time in my other home, my native one, Greece. It’s funny how I belong to countries whose lives are rife with drama and adventure, to countries  placed at the two diagonally opposite edges of Europe, northwest and southeast, in geography although not in spirit. Greeks and Scots are quite similar in many things: vocal, strong-willed, obstinate people, who have been at different times in their long histories at the forefront of cultural and political innovation, and who have suffered semi-colonial conditions for long periods in their history.

Last year it was Yes or No to Scottish independence. This time it is No (ΟΧΙ) or Yes (ΝΑΙ) to neoliberal austerity imposed on Greece in a frenzy of blind devotion to an economic dogma which by most accounts does not seem to work. Yet history has shown how pragmatism rarely gets in the way of doctrine. A brief look at sixteenth century  religious conflicts is enough to convince anyone. People are willing to go to extremes in order to fight - and punish - those who disagree with them, who believe differently, who propose something else; facts and reason rarely have anything to do with it. 

I cannot go to Greece to vote in the referendum. But from what my relatives and friends are telling me, and from my own observations, the debate is hot and raging, and in many ways reminds me of what was happening here in the months leading to September 2014. People in Greece now are almost equally split between ΟΧΙ and ΝΑΙ, the media and the local ‘elites’ are almost unanimous in supporting NAI (quelle surprise! No, not really), friends and families are fighting one another, everybody accuses everybody else of thinking only of themselves and explaining their own decision as something they do ‘for their children'. There are those who hate the idea of being called to make decisions for themselves, there are those (on both sides) who are driven by secret and not so secret agenda, there are those who fear and those who hope - as it happened in the Scottish referendum. 

But a referendum is always a good thing: it is the very heart of democracy,  it is a moment when a citizen has to take a stand and make a decision. And if people quarrel and split up over this, it only means they are not used to accepting their co-citizen’s democratic right to differ. The only cure for this would be to call for a referendum more frequently in order to get more into the habit of dialogue and decision-making, not to avoid it in the name of a (fake) social unanimity and peace. As long as there is stark inequality in a society - and there is very much of that in Greece right now - it is suspicious to claim that a democratic process is the problem and to be silent about the policies which created this inequality in the first place. 

There are so many things one could say about this referendum. Many people have made the case for OXI very well, among them many leading economists (they have convinced me, but as I said I won’t be there to vote), and there are some points for NAI too, I suppose - if one still believes that a country can offer carte blanche to those people who have proved to be extremely bad managers of its problems so far (I mean the current eurozone leaders and the IMF and the ECB, as well as the former Greek governments of the last two decades at least) to keep doing more of the same, and still be considered an equal partner. Once again I hope that Greeks will dare choose hope over fear as the Scots didn’t; but no matter what, the discussion will not stop there. It didn’t stop in Scotland and it won’t stop in Greece. History never stops happening, and agency is only one vote away.