Residence Time
The first three graffitis: No Dreaming / ANOTHER MINDSET / time is only mo– vement,
The impasse of my last letter hangs heavy in Athens, low clouds over blue hills. The light changes fast at dusk; other things, more slowly. More even than in Berlin, where the condition of more time than work is often a choice rather than an imposition, the impression that many people do not have much to do.
Waiting in Greek is periménō from perí, all-around, encompassing, and ménō, to remain or abide; so, to stay steady within an atmosphere, or endure surrounding difficulty. At the present moment, the Greek people have endured eight years of austerity, and are waiting perhaps for new elections, perhaps for a departure from the union, while their creditors continue to be expectant.* The refugees and migrants who have made it this far, which is not far enough, experience the deferrals of state bureaucracy, and the lack of agency that comes with lack of residence. And the incomers from Northern Europe or the US — who form, because of their outside income and balconist position, the category of expatriate — may benefit from other planes of slow time; the pacified tick of the southern clock, that may be elongated for wide thinking or durational work. For me too, such stretched time is a luxury, but impasses are only generative when accompanied by relative freedom.
Why, in general terms, do Northern Europeans enjoy the spirit of Southern Europe so much? Because, closer to the sun, it resisted (though was eventually made subject to) the capitalist order for longer. Life was less structured according to the Protestant ethic of salvation through work plus delayed gratification. The deferrals of accumulation did take over, but this was in conflict with the less regimented time of Mediterranean pre-modernity.** Now, there is little economy left, and for most, thriftiness is of necessity, nothing to do with hoarding. (I need more local history lessons, but here’s one idea of the story.)
In the city, this manifests as a feeling of desertion: abandonment of property, but also of people. The absences of the arcades, buildings with barely any lights on, incremental changes to facades once under development, thanks only to the wind. If I say, on many side streets there’s an empty quietude that easily turns to disquiet — lychen green staircases leading up the hill where only the stray cats roam — I’m not romanticising. If I said that on some streets the way that every wall, column, door, grill is covered in graffiti makes me feel like I’m a lone wanderer in a post-apocalyptic game, where every rendered surface has been applied with a spray-paint texture, I would be.
In the hidden pockets of Mount Lycabettus park, and on the benches in the Plateia, men sitting. Inside the bar playing backgammon or outside the bar with frappes even though it’s February. Because open-air intimacy still exists, this country-wide depression does not preclude localised events of joy. The grandfather play-wrestling with his grandson on the threshold; instructions on how best to cook wild greens at the market; introductions to local geology while walking up Strefi Hill. The street dogs playing football with the teens while the one-eyed cats watch and me. As Hannah Black writes in her recent piece on the collapse of conceived realities: “In place of a world, there is the disorganized and proximate texture of the everyday. There is the particular body. There is this room.” And as Etel Adnan wrote in 1973 (when things also seemed to be collapsing): “What remains? The account of a space that has yet to be born, a square space, like a bed or a clearing, and windows.”
There are makeshift grills outside storefronts making smoke down the street — I thought first, riot fire, but it’s the tsikna of Smoke Thursday (tsiknopempti), one stage in the three-week pre-Lent preparations of Apokries (Apo-kreas, bye-to-meat) or carnival (from the Latin carne, meat + vale, farewell). The last chance to devour charred flesh in worship of Dionysus, god of ecstasy and fecundity, before a period of fasting, so that winter can end and through rituals of renewal spring can be born again. The pagan melds with the Christian melds with the practiced contemporary, and though meteorological spring has advanced ahead of the cultural calendar in Attica, there is little living flora where I have come from.***
The persistence of carnevale, with its performative stages of leaving party for / withholding from / re-embrace of pleasure, shows the resilience of longer arches of time. Like Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of erotohistoriography, which speaks of how non-synchronous time is carried in the repetitions of bodies: “a model of dispersed but insistently carnal continuity” — here role-played with each generation, in spite of a failure of capitalist narratives of progress. Its span across eras subsumes the measurable units we live our lives by — why people still want to get lost in the celebrations. At Monastiraki, crowds of Greeks dance and chant with stuck on mustaches and rolling-pin phalluses, some also in black face, while the South Asian souvenir sellers look on. Then, what passes as tradition clashes with the present day.
Freeman quotes Cesare Casarino who writes that “time must be lived as fully incorporated”, in a bodily rather than business sense. But it’s not that this is an imperative choice: the body is in time and time is in the body, incorporated yes, but inescapably so. If the structures of time do violence to the body, something approaching conscious embodiment is about having the chance to re-piece sensual selves, through what feel like autonomous actions, within an impasse of slowness.
Time is the fire, Etel Adnan writes in her “Account of the Future”, bringing the warning that given air, fire slows down for no one. It burns behind us with a temper, even as some of its practices live on.
[Tomorrow] throws off its sparks and from crown to crown it will build the mythologies that we will burn one after the other, on a race course, with each white horse that arrives.
In our imaginations, time burns before us too, though the future may have always seemed combustible.
On the table next to me, a cigarette left smoking after its subject has gone...
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