L' enfer, c' est les autres

People who know me can speak for my defense. I am known to be rather tolerant. In the sense that only very, very rarely do I complain about other people and their behaviour in general. I am more than averagely easy-going and I tend to find excuses on behalf of others. Nevertheless, it seems like one and a half month in the Greek army can put this extreme tolerance under extreme stress.

Let's face it. Having to live in the same building with 250 more men, with whom you share a -very moderate- burden of responsibilities is not a simple task. Still, it would be manageable if only the majority made an effort to minimize this burden in a collective way. But they don't. In fact, I have come to believe that the army is the last resort of men (let's just leave women out of this for the moment) against the contagious virtues of solidarity and cooperation. Everyone (or almost everyone) is simply doing their best to avoid doing anything, which mathematically leads to a situation where most of the tasks are carried out by a few men, while the rest of them just sit and stare. Under such conditions, even tolerant people like myself find it hard to go by.

You see, I spent my last week in the Training Centre of the Sanitary Department in Arta working overtime just because most of my colleagues preferred to do nothing instead of the -very little- that we were asked to. The term "working" here needs to be adjusted to army standards, which translates to "unable to have fun outside the barracks". There is absolutely nothing fancy or complicated with army work. In my case, the frustration was only caused by the fact that "the others" were taking such a cruel advantage of the few of us. Thus, although I thought I 'd never say it, I remembered Sartre's famous words that give the title to this post. "Hell; it's other people."

Truth be told, I don't believe it. I just find it appropriate for the barracks (and perhaps not all barracks). I am still positive towards others, most of them, if not all. On my way back home yesterday afternoon, I found myself carrying some 35 kilos of luggage and having to make a 15-minute walk home due to works in the metro station. There I was, in the midst of a hot, Athenian June afternoon, in full garment and sweating like a pig (or like a soldier). A car passed me by, it stopped five meters ahead of me and the door opened.

The kind stranger who was offering me a lift home, came as the proof that in most of the cases "Le paradis, c' est les autres aussi".

Midsummer day's dream

Last Friday after a tiring morning of doing absolutely nothing I finally got my permit to leave the barracks and come home for a short weekend. I rode the bus all the way from Arta, in the Greek midwest, to Athens on a sunny summer afternoon, trying to regain some of the sleep one inevitably loses while in the army. This proved to be more complicated than I thought mostly due to the radiant sunlight and the anticipation of seeing the people I love back home. It was going to be summertime in Athens and there are few things that can match a midsummer afternoon walk on the hill of Philopappoy before heading to Thissio for a couple -or more- glasses of wine.

As the bus was crossing the bridge that connects the Greek mainland with Pelopponese, glancing from my window, I saw the city of Patras, where I spent more than one happy years of early student adolesence back in the late 90s. A lot of nice memories came to my mind. A beach party next to the fortress of Antirrio, dinners with ouzo near the Citadel of Patras, nights out in Vrachneika. It realized that most of these nice memories were summer memories, around this time of the year when long days of study coupled with warm nights of thoughtlessness.

As the bus crossed the bridge and a two-more-hour drive laid ahead of us, I turned to the day's paper to fight boredom. There, at the bottom of the third page an air-company was advertising its new summer destination. It read: "Summer in Barcelona". I could not help smiling. Over the last weeks I had thought a lot about Barcelona, the place I left four months ago and which I had no time to reminisce ever since. Midsummer in Barcelona, with the "Fiesta de Sant Joan", nights in Barceloneta with cold "turbio" wine, sounds of jazz, and that special summer breeze cooling you down.

Then it occurred to me. That the essence of summer is exactly that. That "summer" is not a season but a place. It is THE place you want to be. It is -even more- the sum of all those places. It is the projection of all those midsummer nights in Athens, in Patras, in Barcelona, one cold evening at the edge of Yellowstone Canyon, a warm, humid night looking through a window down on Broadway Avenue, an afternoon up on Kastro in Sifnos, waiting for the full moon. Summer is that special space, the geometrical locus of all the smiles you have cast on the midsummers past.

And on the midsummers to come.

The Kingdom of Rust

Speaking of the army. Again.
The councel I got from all those who have gone through it already is unanimous. Getting through the military service is like going through war. One has to try to suffer minimal casualties. And in the context of a propagation of a series of daily, pointless activities, not suffering casualties simply translates into trying not to be bored to death.
Trying to follow this (easy to say, hard to go by) advice, I am taking some small but important steps.

One is, I am reading as much as I can. And this means a lot. I have always been saving books for my retirement. Tough, thick (and very likely to be boring) books. Books of the kind that everybody talks about but noone has ever read. I am now through with Mann's "Magic Mountain" which had moments of greatness but could have been much, much shorter (except if it is meant to be read during one's military service). I have some good candidates lined up for next. I am talking about "big fish" and not the normal novels. Of those I read one every two days. Regardless of the boredom, this is something I really appreciate about army life.

Second step, I am trying to work a bit.
Scary.
That's why I am doing it in a slow and steady way. A little bit of reading, some thinking, a few notes on the margin of my small notebook, (already filled with stupid army info). It is still kinda fun and lets me think I am still into it. Perhaps it becomes productive in the future. Only time will tell.

Step three. The crucial one.
I need to change mode to be able to do all this. I look back at previous posts and recognize the source of painful nostalgia in the sound of music. Music that accompanied moments of joy, but moments that hold me back.
Punchline: I need a new soundtrack. New melodies to invest everyday life in this newly discovered Kingdom. This Kingdom of Rust.

The Doves sing about exactly one such "kingdom" in their latest album and Patrick Watson talks about a "big bird in a small cage". My case exactly.
So here I am, I take my books, my notes and my new albums by the Doves, Patrick Watson and Sonic Youth and set out to become the King in this new Kingdom. First I have to spend the next two days on guard for four hours every night.

But then again, as a great poet has already said:
Rust never sleeps.

the works and the days

The "Works and the Days" is one of the oldest poems ever written. Its chapters contain a large number of the most popular myths of Greek Mythology. In contrast to his other great work "Theogony", Hesiod chooses the "Works and the Days" to talk about the five ages of men. Therefore the "Works and the Days" deals with the "works" and the "days" of humans, not Gods. It thus states what might now sound perfectly obvious, which is that only humans may undertake "works" and that "days" have meaning only for them, contrary to the eternal Gods who neither have a sense of the passing time and whose existence is self-contained -even if the Greek ones always had a certain tendency for "acts" ( and often rather dubious ones). In this sense, people throughout history have always been meaning to pass their "days" in strong connection with some kind of "work" to leave behind.

In my -humble- case (as this STILL remains a personal blog) my "works" and "days" have been quite disconnected lately. Being in the army is the closest I can think of to being imprisoned, not just because of the obligatory confinement but mostly because of the utter boredom that the repetition of a useless life cycle brings about. In this way one has to face a paradox where on one hand the passing of time is what mostly matters while, on the other hand, the days pass with almost zero production of "work". One has to admit that there is an inherent impossibility for the conduction of any productive, constructive or by any chance meaningful task in the military environment but this only makes the frustration bigger. And which may become even bigger when it is combined with a relative necessity for work, work that cannot be carried out merely because the circumstances do not permit it.

Such were my thoughts last week when I found myself riding the bus back to Arta after a short weekend leave. In front of me lied a bunch of papers containing the comments on one of the papers I had finally managed to submit right before joining the army. And there I was, keeping notes on the margins, replying to some -often suspiciously- mean remarks, thinking over some parts of my work that could be considerably improved, accepting in the end that most of all this was quite useless. I was going back to a place where nothing of what I was thinking could be done, as there are no computers in the army (for the recruits), nor internet access (for the soldiers), or a way to download scientific papers from the web.

In the end I was simply trying to convince myself that my "works" over the last years were important enough to need some more time.
In the end I was deceiving myself with the thought that some "work" of that kind could still be done while in the army.

As I went on turning the pages, listening to Coldplay, I remembered the last time I rode a bus listening to the same album. Some one year ago on the way from Seville to Cadiz, (instead of Athens to Arta), while on holiday (instead of the army), in the company of good friends (instead of on my own), reading a nice book (instead of a paper review). I remembered that back then it seemed that all the "work" could be done in the next few "days", while now it looked like all the "days" I have are not enough, not even for a paper revision.

Most of all, it seemed like the time of the innocence had irrevocably passed by.