The Prelude

Greek fires kill 60 but spare ancient Olympia

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2543062320070826

By Vassilis Triandafyllou

ANCIENT OLYMPIA, Greece (Reuters) – Firefighters saved the temples and stadiums of ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games, from forest fires which razed nearby villages and took the death toll from Greece’s three-day inferno to 60.

Dozens of blazes, from northern Greece to the tip of the Peloponnese peninsula in the south, have blackened hillsides, destroyed forests and raced through towns and villages, causing unprecedented destruction.

Hundreds of houses have been burned and thousands of people have fled the fires, seeking temporary refuge in schools, hotels and regional health centers.

On Sunday the government offered rewards of up to a million euros ($1.36 million) for help in tracking down arsonists who it suggests have played a major role in Greece’s worst forest fires in decades.

Thick black smoke billowed over the well-preserved ruins of Olympia, on the Peloponnese. The blaze crept up a hillside, engulfing surrounding pine and cypress woods.

“With self-sacrifice, firefighters fought ‘trench battles’ to rescue these sensitive and important sites,” Public Order Minister Byron Polydoras told reporters.

Fire scorched the yard of the museum at Olympia, housing famous classical sculptures such as Praxiteles’ Hermes, but planes, helicopters and scores of firefighters beat it back.

Some 60 firefighters and six trucks remained at the site to battle any flare-up, the fire brigade said.

Ancient Olympia, which hosted the Olympics for centuries from 776 BC, holds an Olympic flame ceremony every two years and is among the most popular tourist sites in the country.

“Here it is, the contrast: ancient Greece gave the world civilization and modern Greece gives it destruction,” a resident of ancient Olympia told Alter TV station.

Towering walls of flame have cut a swathe of destruction through the southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia near the capital and swept across other regions, prompting Greece to declare a nationwide state of emergency on Saturday.

“The destruction is of biblical proportions,” Nicholas Orphanos, a volunteer firefighter in the Peloponnese, told reporters. “There are villages we want to go to and we cannot because the roads are blocked. In 30 years, I have never seen such destruction.”

The fires have covered Athens in thick white ash that swirled round the temples on the Acropolis, and the smell of smoke permeated the city.

REWARD OFFERED

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, who has called a snap parliamentary election on September 16, has suggested arsonists are behind the fires, and the government has offered a reward for information leading to their capture.

“The reward is set between 100,000 and 1 million euros for every (act of) arson, depending on whether death or serious injury occurred and the size of the damage,” the Public Order Ministry said in a statement.

Many local mayors have accused rogue land developers of setting fires to make way for new construction on virgin forest and farm land. So far, police have arrested two elderly people and two boys on suspicion of starting fires deliberately.

The first fires broke out on Friday and others erupted in scores of places around the country. The death toll rose to 60 and health officials said it could increase as many villages remain cut off.

“We will all burn tonight,” a resident of Matesi village told Mega television on Sunday. “Where will we go, we are trapped everywhere. Are we all going to burn like mice?”

The overstretched fire brigade threw reinforcements from Greece’s EU partners into action to fight blazes stretching over 160 km (100 miles) across the Peloponnese, the island of Evia and northern and central Greece.

Two French and one Italian firefighting plane dropped water on burning hillsides and 60 firefighters from Cyprus joined the fray. More help was expected from at least 11 countries.

Villagers used garden hoses and buckets in futile efforts to save their homes. Others jeered politicians, including Culture Minister George Voulgarakis who visited ancient Olympia to assess the damage.

The government has been criticized for reacting too slowly to forest fires that killed 10 people earlier this summer and the blazes are sure to become a central election campaign issue.

Revisited Revised

Another catastrophe, one we never imagined,
sudden, precipitous, falls upon us,
and unprepared — there is no more time — carries us off.

How can I make myself not read this allegorically? How can I make myself not take this literally?

Is this poem timeless, or has history rendered it time-less?

This was around the time Cavafy had given up on symbols.

Myth, to him, is “depoliticized speech” … poetry with no context, the personal detatched from the political. Could this be right???

His poem has a personal tone, a tone of defiance. Defiance, but not complete disregard for an audience. Not disregard the sense that the audience has to empathize.

He must overcome the trappings of myth, precisely through the very trappings of myth: language, poetry, abstraction, allegory.

Only then can his work be set free. But freedom never comes. Freedom is besides the point.

An Obligatory Post

Blanchot Vs. Barthes: (Non)Dialectic battle, Round 1 Warmup

Bathes sees myth as a specific kind of speech. “…Myth is a system of communication, that is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form”.  For Barth, myth’s function is “to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.” (Barthes, Mythologies, 1973)

It is unfortunate (for Barthes) that even his choice of words (e.g. “literally”, “reality”, “perceptible”)  points to the inherent contradictions in his argument.

On the other hand, Blanchot directs our attention away from signs and signifiers by introducing the concept of the mythical or hyperbolic cancer. On the surface, cancer signifies symbolizes “the refusal to respond.” But more than this, “it destroys the very idea of a program, blurring the exchange and the message: it wrecks the possibility of reducing everything to the equivalent of signs.” According to Blanchot, this kind of cancer is “one of the rare ways to dislocate the system, to disarticulate… the universal programming and signifying power.” (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980)

But, the experience economy attempts to make the cancer relevant by manipulating its mythical nature. The cancer may not signify within the system, but it is made to exist through the system by cancer’s very attempt to dislocate it. The system validates the cancer, out of fear that the cancer will dislocate it … or out of denial that this cancer has already dislocated it.

>> Jump to Walls for the Match, and take this with you:

Media Reports: Arsonists torched two cars outside a Greek consulate in southwestern France yesterday, scrawling slogans in support of the youth riots gripping Athens, according to an account by the Associated Press. Police found graffiti on a wall opposite the consulate, and on a nearby garage door, reading “Support for the fires in Greece,” “Insurrection Everywhere” and “The Coming Insurrection.”

Cinematic mnemonics

Scene from Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye Lenin! (2003).

East Germany, 1989: A loyal Socialist  living in Eastern Berlin during the Cold War loses her husband to the West. After seeing her son protesting against the Socialists, she suffers from a heart attack and falls into a coma. While she is in a coma, East and West Germany reunite. When she awakes from her coma, her children try to prevent her from experiencing shock by converting their now westernized lives back into an Eastern-Socialist lifestyle…

*                                      *                                     *

The shock of discovery … the shock at discovering that the disaster has come and gone (was it ever here?), and I could not bring myself to its site. The disaster is beyond me, beyond time, beyond comprehension. A film/ a ” reality”/ a fiction/ a myth conveys this feeling better than I ever will.

// Anti // Pro //

English trailer for Die Welle (The Wave, Dennis Gansel, 2008)

The latest re-imagining of this particular disaster experiment. Previous to this there was a TV version and a book.

An example of recycling, appropriating and re-imagining a disaster. An example of turning a disaster experiment into a myth by tapping into the mythologies of the  “real” disaster that never(?) came.  An example of situating the myth within the global experience economy through the film’s promotion and distribution. Film as commodity; film as a mediated experience of another mediated experience.

[The experiment: The Third Wave]

(A California high school, 1967: An experiment conducted by history teacher Ron Jones with his students. The experiment involved recreating the conditions in Nazi Germany and was meant to function as a demonstrative learning experience. ) Pedagogy gone awry. Isn’t this the biggest outcome pedagogy can hope for?

Youtube video: Greek youth against neonazism (posted May 2008)

Anarchy NOW

Anarchists, like the disaster, are situated outside the experience economy. Like some aspects of the disaster, anarchists place themselves inside the experience economy only to destroy it.  The fact that anarchists remain powerless against (and within) the experience economy makes them more determined to find their power outside of it. However, they usually end up becoming part of the experience economy by their very opposition towards it.

Anarchists = otherness. Their/ Our obsession with others.

Example & Application: the Greek Riots

The defacement of public property in large Greek cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki has impacted tourism, a contributing aspect to the experience economy >>> The anarchists have been integrated into the experience economy model through the commodification of their acts: for instance, millions of photographs of the riots and of public property damages have been circulating around the world.  The riots and their aftermath turned the world’s attention to Greece and Europe in general. The apocalyptic overtones attached to the disaster by various global media outlets have placed Greece at the center of it all, only to ultimately decentralize it.

Profit/ credit= e.g. international exposure, profile, capital  ## #

Debit= e.g. impact on: tourism, government, education labor…

Corporate media tend to ignore anarchists, or try to minimize their impact.  The fact that corporate media outlets have been forced to detail the anarchist involvement in these and other struggles in Greece attests to the significance of anarchist activity. Leftists attempt to portray the events in Greece as a general uprising of  “the people,” and this is not inaccurate, since countless “normal” people have participated. However, from the vantage point of anarchist supporters and those intimidated by anarchists, it is the anarchists that have instigated the riots and have remained the most influential force within the “movement”.

From one perspective, the anarchists – and “anarchy” in its abstract form – function as a political scapegoat. A scapegoat that is used to let the government almost entirely off the hook. A scapegoat that does not point to what is wrong with the System, but serves the purpose [to some] of placing blame outside the system and displacing the flaws outside the system.

If only it were so simple.

Democracy is dead. Long live democracy.

a memory, an image, a trigger

The Berlin Wall.

What was there before ME. I was not there. It never happened to me.

Childhood memory / Child’s fiction

One of my happiest and most idealized childhood memories: a family trip to Germany.

Up to this moment, I never thought of my first visit to Germany as anything else but a blissful childhood memory.

The last vacation we took as a family.

My first time on a plane.

First time in another country.

First time to meet my new aunt.

First time to practice the few German words I learned.  First time to have my accent made fun of.

Exploring the unknown  for the first time …

… and that is where it was located all this time…  buried under happy, ignorant moments.

Finalities

Τελειωμένα

Μέσα στον φόβο και στες υποψίες
με ταραγμένο νου και τρομαγμένα μάτια,
λυώνουμε και σχεδιάζουμε το πώς να κάμουμε
για ν’ αποφύγουμε τον βέβαιο
τον κίνδυνο που έτσι φρικτά μας απειλεί.
Κι όμως λανθάνουμε, δεν είν’ αυτός στον δρόμο·
ψεύτικα ήσαν τα μηνύματα
(ή δεν τ’ ακούσαμε, ή δεν τα νοιώσαμε καλά).
Αλλη καταστροφή, που δεν την φανταζόμεθαν,
εξαφνική, ραγδαία πέφτει πάνω μας,
κι ανέτοιμους — πού πια καιρός — μας συνεπαίρνει.

Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης (1911)

Finalities

Amid fear and suspicions,
with agitated mind and frightened eyes,
we melt and plan how to act
to avoid the certain
danger that so horribly threatens us.
And yet we err, this was not in our paths;
the messages were false
(or we did not hear, or fully understand them).
Another catastrophe, one we never imagined,
sudden, precipitous, falls upon us,
and unprepared — there is no more time — carries us off.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

• Before reading and attempting to comprehend Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster, I would have taken Cavafy’s words at face value (as much as I can bring myself to take poetry at face value).
• However, after reading Blanchot, I revisited this poem and realized that the words had changed. Or was it I that changed? How did I change myself?
• Growing up with Cavafy’s poetry, I was taught by my Greek literature teachers to appreciate the beauty and eloquence of his poetry. I tended to absorb the words but not their meaning.
• But there is so much more. More than I can express or convey, without the fear of distortion.
• How do I force myself to escape the burden of representation?
• Poetry passively acts as a means of approaching the disaster. Approaching but not quite. This is not a paradox.
• The disaster is in Cavafi’s writing. The disaster carries him off as it exists within him. And yet, he is outside of the disaster, just as he is outside of his poetry.
• What stuck with me the most about Cavafy from my high school days is that he was thought to be GAY.

Catalysts

Narrativizing disasters = fictionalizing history = historicizing fiction.

Any account of the disaster attempts to impose coherence and mastery over random or unpredictable “events”.  Myths provide us with ready-made adaptable narratives that resonate within culture at large, and can therefore be applied to any disaster. Myths attempt to bring the disaster – an intangible presence/ absence that escapes cultural logic - inside the culture so as to render it comprehensible and, ultimately, [retrospectively] predictable. As Steven Biel asserts, myths are welcomed by culture because they locate “a disturbing event within routine structures of understanding.”

Although not immediately obvious, the typical structure of myths is based on – and forged through – catalysts. Any myth can be traced back to a  catalyst(s) that not only stimulates the (re)creation/ (re)cycling of the myth itself, but also provides myth-makers with a tangible starting point on which they can elaborate their myth.

An iceberg. A bomb. A plane. A boy.

With this in mind, I turn myself to the identifiable catalyst (or even scapegoat) that is thought to have triggered the Greek Riots: Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

15 year old Alexandros is dead. The only thing certain about his dead is that he is dead.

Alexandros was shot by a policeman.

Alexandros was accidentally killed.

Alexandros provoked his death.

Alexandros is a political scapegoat.

Alexandros’ murderer is a social scapegoat.

Alexandros ……………………………….

This is where most related narratives begin.

“We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.”  Paul Auster