...And Dreams Are Dreams

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our newspaper started off like one of those small grass-roots movements that go unnoticed in the beginning but get stronger and stronger (like the Greens, whom nobody considered a threat and so they were left alone), little by little, with time, precisely because they represent a deeper human desire: to grow by themselves, without publicity’s artificial fertilization; to take root and acquire depth. All that this process requires in the beginning is a team to join hands and cooperate, while the initiates, few but fanatical, go out among the people, until, once the appropriate conditions have been established, the explosion takes place. In this way, with our little newspaper, we proceeded to win over readers and followers, day by day, almost without realizing it.

We had rented a small office at the foot of Strefi Hill. People would come by every day, because, they said, they found in our newspaper an answer to their longtime problems and thus a sense of hope. It seems our slogan, “Keep the dream alive, don’t let it die,”

made some sense. Then, as election time approached, the big parties wanted us to join them. They each sent a representative to offer us financial help in return for our support. But we refused every offer, because we were after something bigger: the limitless right, in the words of the poet, to dream. “What should interest you above all,” wrote the poet Napoleon Lapathiotis, “is the elegant use of your life and the limitless right to dream.” And then he killed himself. We left out the first half of this maxim, which did not concern us and implied a certain dilettantism, and adopted fully the second half, the limitless right to dream, which hadn’t been included in any party’s campaign promises.

And while the expression “I belong to the branch”

took on a disparaging connotation during the first period of our socialist government, since it meant,

“I’m a card-carrying member of the party in power,”

we rebaptized the word branch, returning it to its original meaning by inaugurating a column in our paper called “Branch Dreams.” In this column, society was viewed as a tree with many branches, and every professional branch was given the podium. We would publish the dreams of taxi drivers, builders, tailors, umbrella makers, pastry makers, upholsterers, book binders, railroad workers, carpenters, sales clerks, printers, tobacco workers. They all had a place: the flour mills, the carpentry shops, the potteries, the olive presses, the soap works, the woolen mills, the textile works, the food factories, the shipyards, the mines. The white collars of data processors and computer scientists, video store clerks and CEOs went alongside booksellers, funeral directors, restaurateurs and waiters, florists, bakers, butchers, travel agents, jewelers, record store clerks, night club bouncers, shipping clerks, cobblers, and milliners. Representatives of all these branches of production began to pay us visits.

Around this time, we founded the first mutual aid fund, based on the cooperative model, for those who believed that dreams need support. The wheels of this mutual aid turned mainly on family ties, neighborhood and village ties; it was the fund used in the case of accident or illness. A dream is always the best remedy.

It’s homeopathic.

— 5-