...And Dreams Are Dreams

“The idea of a novel cut me like a knife….

Mentally, I was killing a bear.”

Yiannis Skaribas, Figaro’s Solo

— 1-

How a White Bear Ended Up in Athens

The white bear was wandering around the streets of Athens, searching for its lost master. Who is this white bear?

Who is its lost master? That is the topic of our story today.

But let’s start with some background information.

Which Athens was it wandering around? What did Athens of that period look like? That period of crisis, of inflation, of renewed devaluation.

Do economic terms, terms that are detached from the action and the character of its heroes, have their place in a story? What is the difference between the myth and the mythified?

All questions that demand an answer. But we, readers, are not about to mythologize. We are enlisted in the struggle for a better tomorrow for the world and for ourselves, we are fighting for better days to come.

And they are bound to come, there’s no doubt about that. All bodes well in this better-than-all-possible worlds.

But before we even start, we have to obey a narrative convention that wants the bear to be of neutral gender, because since childhood we are used to referring to a bear as “it,” unless it is specified as a Papa or a Mama bear. In any case, we have no other choice but to work with the materials available. And these materials are, for the most part, determined by chance.

Let us not try to make head or tail of something that has neither. If we had an organized life, a timetable, a position that gave us precise authorities, whether constitutionally guaranteed or not, we might proceed according to a gradual, well-thought-out method. But when everything is on the verge of chaos, when everything marches on in the dark (inside power, in the center of its center, in its main core, there is a dark nucleus), everything is possible, every beginning is good, nobody is forcing anyone: I am not forced to tell the story of the bear that got lost in Athens during the holidays, nor you, much less you, reader, to listen to this story, which, alas, is in danger of becoming a boomerang coming back to hit me in the gut, making me, once again, throw up all the disgust and joy I get from life.

The important thing is that, up to this moment when I am sitting down to write, even though I smoke a lot, I have yet to suffer a heart attack, which would scare me and make me give up or cut down on my smoking, roll up my sleeves, and start writing only about the important events of my life, leaving a sort of heritage testament to posterity. I am still now (knock wood) perfectly healthy. I have not burdened others with insurmountable worries. When Aliki and I broke up, we both cried a little of course, but this took place within reasonable, human limits. She flew off to stay with a friend to alleviate her solitude, while I buried myself in the anonymous crowd that was traveling by plane, in order to retire into my own solitude. Of course, I am still damp from Aliki’s touch, from her virginal freshness against my cheek, her lust for life that nothing could injure. I think of her, I want her; that girl tore me to pieces. I’m like a schoolboy when I’m with her, but I like this state she often put me in.

On the whole, therefore, I am well. Amidst the general misery of my country and my people, I am still behaving relatively optimistically. Proof of that being that I’m still in the mood to type. The required amount is at least three pages a day. Let us get to three pages to start with, and then we can move painlessly to five, eight, sometimes even ten, on those days when inspiration fills my sails, a wind that tears itself against the riggings and masts, a nor’wester, as it’s called. A moment will arrive, during this digging up of feelings, when I will identify with the universe, with the deeper path of life, when I will surpass myself and then, as gambling people say, I will have hit the jackpot. I will feel like a writer worthy of his mission. But until then, I must walk a long, joyless, monotonous road, overgrown with nettles and thorns. The peaks are few.

And precarious. And the road that leads to them seems interminably long!