'If the desire is a desire for death, how shall it be written?'

The past speaks in incomprehensible voices, which only reveal
the impossibility of being anywhere else  except in the present.

 I return to this blog after a long absence as someone who returns to a locked, dusty apartment that was abandoned in a hurry. Instead of the usual pile of old bills and correspondence, I find this half-finished post:

I have been working on this PhD for three years now. Five, if I take into account the time when the idea for this novel, ignited by a novel by Sir Walter Scott, was gestating into my head - two years before I submitted the PhD proposal. During this time, much happened and much didn't. I promised I would write about it and I did not, not really. No consistent updates of progress, no long harangues about how hard it all is, or gushing posts about how enjoyable it all is, or thoughtful, measured accounts about how much effort it all takes. Only hints, glimpses, the occasional crack in the taciturn mood. Silence seems to be the mode I have been adapting myself to, in empathy with the silent ones in my life, those who died, and those who will not utter words in comprehensible voices.

I wonder if this state of silence, which sometimes feels like a choice and sometimes a necessity, has anything at all to do with my engaging with the past for so long (a lustrum no less) that it has supplanted the present and has made it look irrelevant and distant. But no. This cannot be the case. I have been researching the First Crusade (it was not called that then, but the expedition, the pilgrimage, the liberation of the Holy Land, etc.) and its aftermath in my fiction, exploring the lives of three main characters (and a number of others) in the twelfth century in Europe, Byzantium (it was not called that then, but the Eastern Roman Empire), and the Middle East. In the course of this exploration I have filled a considerable number of notebooks with observations about the everyday life and experience of the people who lived then. But what I read when I go over the notes is perceptions of the past by a twenty-first century person. It is impossible to see the past with the eyes of the past.

The present is inescapable, even when PhD research is all about the past. Particularly this kind of present and this kind of past - that of the First Crusade and the situation in the Middle East today, inextricably linked in an uncanny chiasmus, in which the twelfth century reverts to the twenty first - 12 to 21 - in a way that would make hermetists prick up their ears and begin to sniff the air for more clues, more signs that this is not accidental, this is meant to be, planned, dictated. A huge reenactment operation, but one that takes itself so seriously that it is for real. And since history is the ultimate study of death, its reenactment can only be an exercise in  

The lines above were written over a year ago. I had left my final phrase unfinished. What had I meant to say? What urgency stopped me from completing my final sentence? And where did the title of the post come from? Was it mine? Was it by something I was reading at the time? And what was it? I read a great deal during that time; about twenty pages of Bibliography in my completed PhD thesis. If even my own, recent past has the potential to become such a mystery to me, what are the chances of being able to access anyone else's? 

And yet, this is precisely what had to be done, and it was done. My PhD was granted its happy ending, and it is now examined, passed, amended, and at the printer's for the final, hardback-bound, gold-lettered copy for the depository - all in less than three weeks' time. After the long years of research and writing, it all felt too fast, too dizzy. Meanwhile, I am in that strange post-PhD limbo, pulled between past and future, still hanging around the haunts of the last five years, inhabiting the present like an uneasy ghost.

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. 

Yesterday it was my birthday.

Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created

The River Kelvin, flowing. On Thursday 19 February 2015.

things, and drowns them in the depths of obscurity, no matter if they be quite unworthy of mention, or most noteworthy and important, and thus, as the tragedian says, ‘he brings from the darkness all things to the birth and all things born envelopes in the night.’ But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and to some extent checks its irresistible flow, and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away in to the abyss of oblivion.

Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, trans. Elizabeth Dawes

Post-festive.

The holidays last too short a time, alas, as the good and pleasant things are wont to. Although term does not begin before Monday 12, I must be back at the office to take up the work which feels too old and sooo last year. 


Aristides the cat enjoying a sunny winter's day
in Thessaloniki, Greece.

But it was a good break, with beloved family and friends I had not seen for a very long time. And a glimpse of the Northern Lights on the flight back home (by the bye, the ambivalent position of the immigrant has its perks: you're flying home both ways. Or its downsides: you're flying away from home both ways). This holiday also reminded me that there's nothing like being in the physical presence of those one loves most. And that a well rested worker works best (a piece of wisdom that Aristides, my sister's cat, is well aware of).

What do I expect for the New Year? Nothing, really. A very wise man - the wisest I ever knew - taught me not to look beyond tomorrow, or next week at most. I hope to take everything as it comes day by day, and to be able to bask in every available moment of sunshine. Quoting Aristides the cat, once again.





A great writer of our times.

The first time I ever heard of Marilynne Robinson was way back, in Nick Hornby's book column of The Believer. He was praising Gilead to the skies. Intrigued, I got it and read it and I've been in love ever since. I now own and have read all Marilynne Robinson's books - and three of them signed copies! I was lucky enough to see her last year in Edinburgh, in a New College lecture, and then again yesterday in Edinburgh, in a packed Assembly Roxy at an out-of-season Edinburgh Book Festival event. There is nothing I can say in praise of her books myself that hasn't been said before. In such cases, the pleasure of reading them oneself cannot be equal to anything anyone might say about them.  

Marilynne Robinson and devoted fan.

Yesterday she was asked many questions, and she answered them all, within the constraints of the one (only!) allocated hour. I understand that we, the reading public, are a bit cannibalistic, and would not spare our favourite writers, who are, after all, human beings and do get tired and cold and hungry (and bored), like everyone else. But I would have liked a bit more time to ask her to elaborate on some of the things she said, particularly about her surprising (but was it?) statement that she rarely rewrites, that everything comes to her pretty much as it ends up in the page, and that she give a lot of thought to things before writing them up. 

The queue for the book signing was very long, and I can't imagine anything more tedious than sitting down and writing your name over and over again in people's copies, in a cold and lofty building made of stone (which increases the cold) in a dreary (dreich is the lovely, perfectly descriptive word) November afternoon in Edinburgh. Ian Webster from Waterstones was kind enough to take this picture on his iphone and even kinder to send it to me. (Thank you, Ian - I consider every penny I've ever spent in Waterstones well-spent after this!)

When I left, she, kind and patient, was still there signing, signing. And the queue was still long. Outside it was misty, and hazy blurs of light were popping up in the falling darkness.  There was that particular feel and smell of Edinburgh in the air, the excitement of the city getting ready for Christmastime; people in and out of the shops holding red-ribboned gift bags (5p each with the new - and correct - regulations); decorations already on some windows. By the time I arrived at Waverley Station to catch the train back home, it was properly dark - just before five in the afternoon. As the train moved westbound, I could discern strings of festive lights in Princes Gardens. All the way to Glasgow Queen Street station, I was reading When I Was a Child I Read Books,  still dazed. 

Back to work today. Tomorrow at 1pm I'm giving an Insight Talk on Enchanted Places at the Hunterian Art Gallery. More info on my official Hunterian project blog historyfictionfantasy.wordpress.com. And that (sort of) concludes my personal appearance obligations for the project. Finally, I'll be able to concentrate on the blog itself, once all that - not unpleasant, but distracting -  stuff is out of the way.