The South Wind

a little bonus of brevity from a long-winded writer

The South Wind

The last newsletter was a little… long—I’m noticing just now the Substack website offers an estimate of reading time and Under the Waves clocks in at 33 minutes. I tend towards extremes rather than middle ground (stereotype, medical condition, existential reality of my spot on the mental health continuum?) but when it comes to writing and speaking, I just tend towards long.

The other newsletter I’ve been most excited to share over the last few months, On Being Nice, clocks in at 19 minutes reading time, I’m told. Twelve of you slogged through enough of that to like it (and I hold out hope imagining one fastidious reader, committed and critical, who didn’t like it but still read through to the end, a serious reader far closer to my heart than a read-a-paragraph-like-and-move-on devourer of content even if we lack affinity, tend towards diverging conclusions, even if, and this is hard for me to say, they don’t use Oxford commas…).

I did write this one thing that barely outweighs a haiku, and I’m still committed to publishing an Argument to Go Around every month or two, a 1-3 page exposition of a basic anarchistic argument designed to be easily digested, shared, plagiarized.

I do love silence, and listening, but the truth is, once I open my mouth or put fingers to keyboard, I love to explore tangents and chart connections until all the depths are plumbed. One of the fondest memories in my life is when I was on tour in the US with two friends from Athens, presenting our huge ass book about the insurrection in 2008 (a collective experience that opened up truly revolutionary directions for struggles there, a book full of history and collective learning and contradictions to be explored, and one that received far less attention than the slim, contemporaneous manual even the New York Times ended up plugging that on balance has been little more than a cult guide for academic crypto-authoritarian philosophers to manage movements but no I’m not throwing any shade).

Early in our trip, we were advised by some helpful American with experience in these things that a book talk should be forty minutes at the most, because “the human brain is incapable of focusing on any one thing for more than twenty minutes.” The Athenians nodded passively, which was a great sign because when they care about something they are cantankerously engaged, and I could already feel them tapping into night-long assemblies in the occupied universities, full days spent in the contemplation of burning police stations and commodities, months long meditation retreats.

In our private conversation afterwards, the three of us hatched our real plan for the book tour. T summed it up: “We will make every talk three hours minimum, re, but we will do it so full power, that not a single person will leave!” And over dozens of events in the next two months in early 2010, we largely accomplished that, speaking at anarchist spaces from New Orleans to San Francisco to Portland about how to turn our responses to police murders—responses strategic and loving and enraged—into insurrections that challenge all the interrelated forms of policing and move us from being captured by reform towards opening paths to total freedom.

It was a beautiful time amidst the tragedy, the conflict, the loss, a time for learning that maybe we can change all this…

But now my prologue about brevity is about to hit 33 minutes long, and really the whole point of this is to say, here is an extract from the last newsletter, one little chapter you might find poetic and engaging and short enough to read on the bus.

Here you go! I hope in a week or two to have the next Argument to Go Around.

The South Wind

extract from Under the Waves

The relationship with the wind, in maritime territories, is an intimate thing. Cultures that live off the sea, or that have recently enough to remember it even after migrations inland, name the wind, pay it attention and homage, augur in its voice. And things we name, we tend to know as multiple. There is not one wind for peoples who have, in memory, based and risked their lives on taking boats out into the sea.

But there is often one wind more infamous than all the rest. A wind whose name coastal peoples—and even their atrophied cyborg descendants, beings so alienated and artificially stimulated they will literally look for the weather on the screen of a device of plastic, copper, lithium, and cobalt coming from vast and toxic holes in the ground somewhere else that they never even think about, rather than looking out the window and using their goddamn bodies and their memories and their relationships to feel the weather, cyborgs who will literally tell you it is raining because their devious little pocket God told them it is when you are looking at the sky and can see that it is not, sad little orphan children who will tell you at the beginning of a day or a week what the weather will be with such a high degree of precision (20% chance of thunderstorms starting at 12) and every single time fail to remember how seldom the accuracy matched, they’ll just do it again the next day, rinse and repeat—ahem, I’m doing just fine, I was talking about... a wind whose name coastal peoples always remember.

In Catalunya, since people are not free, since they are dependent for their livelihoods on working for Volkswagen and Amazon and Airbnb and the government, they can be forgiven for forgetting the Xaloc and the Migjorn in a way the old fisherfolk could never afford to. And maybe this will get me cancelled or maybe you’ll agree that this distinction gets to the root of the difference between the liberals who keep denouncing and reproducing genocides and the anticolonial radicals actually trying to stop the misery: the loss of the xaloc and the migjorn are a part of the genocide, they are also murders, they are also forced disappearances.

But who, of all the people fortunate enough to have grandparents, to remember conversations with their grandparents, has forgotten the Tramuntana? The wind that sweeps across the mountains from the north, an altering wind, a crazy-making wind? That wind is a fucking legend.

On the Dalmatian coast, the only wind we heard named and spoken of, fearfully even, with respect, was the south wind. Jugo. Not the same in its effects as the mind-altering tramuntana of my home for the last sixteen years, nor identical to the also disruptive southern originating migjorn, the jugo is its own creature.

And the day before we have to leave, the locals start to talk: the south wind is starting up tomorrow.

For starters, this means we have to get up around 5:30. There’s a heavier boat with a more powerful engine that leaves the harbor at dawn. The older ferry, which comes and goes at a much more comfortable time, lies flat and heavy in the water and will probably be cancelled once the chop gets rowdy.

The day starts deceptively calm, as these days often do, and there’s even a bit of sun and puffy cloud on the horizon. Navigating the channels between the islands, it almost seems like we fell prey to an abundance of caution. M points out an old Nazi submarine bunker drilled into the rock at the waterline, an older fortress from the Ottoman days, a strip of modest houses anticapitalist workers a century ago built and organized as a communal beachfront resort for the lower class so they could also enjoy the vacation days they fought so hard for.

But before we get to port in Š---, we’re noticing the chop, even in our big modern boat. The waves shake our passage, they start to do weird things a depleted cyborg like myself doesn’t have the words for. Safely at harbor and walking around town looking for breakfast as the sun rises higher, we notice the wind, fierce and then absent, playful, troublesome. When M and S find a place not meant for tourists but a just a regular spot that doesn’t go out of its way to support the occupation, a gust no one feels until it’s too late takes a cup of coffee out of the veteran hands of the waiter and throws it quite literally onto Raechel. Who is someone who very much needs a strict morning routine, whose own health has been much taxed and tried by what is happening to me and by her own chronic problems and by having to travel through other countries amidst it all* when being back home at a time like this would obviously be the most comforting possible thing. She takes this morning coffee to the face with supreme grace. But then, she also understands the wind can be a person.

And it hounds us inland, once we’ve recovered the little car from its free parking spot way up the hill. And it knocks down the sign announcing a road closure and detour, so we drive half an hour out of our way before we finally get to the closure that forces us to turn back around. And the south wind might even have sabotaged M and S’s car, because that starts to break down too.

But the penultimate misfortune is one of those magical coins that appear ill-fated but has actually landed lucky side up. Because for much of the drive, the engine has been more vociferously announcing that it is not doing well. And this is a stressful thing for all of us.

Raechel and I had been planning to go onward to see friends in Greece by taking the Balkan trains, one of the things the socialists did well, that rail network. But three decades of neoliberalism have destroyed it, and now the trains only run in the tourist months, which start in June. And my week in the hospital pushed things back, we don’t have time for other modes of transport, we have to take one of those goddamn short flights people these days take for granted. Leaving that night from Zagreb.

(Not many people know about my third book anymore, but it’s an embarrassingly and naïvely romantic tale of the first year I was living in Europe and the arrest that caused me to stay in Catalunya: before jail I was travelling around exclusively by bicycle and hitchhiking. These airplane/time portals that zip you from one place to another obscuring the connection between them feel psychologically unhealthy to me, and the planet might agree.

Anyways here it is. Sadly the original version with all the photos and protest flyers might be lost. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-to-get-to-the-other-side-a-journey-through-europe-and-its-anarchist-movements )

And in fact, insisting on the slower country roads proved to be the right decision. Because in a little village M found a real person (no, Google is not a person, Google is the Devourer of Worlds) to inquire after a mechanic, and that person directed us to a little shop we never would have found on our own, where a person not normalized within the new borders, a Serb by M’s estimation, the supposed enemy in the last war, also proved to be a damn fine mechanic. He spoke to us for a couple moments to see if he liked us or if he’d make us wait for service until later in the week like all the other cars he had waiting around. He liked us. Within a couple seconds listening to the engine, he knew exactly what was wrong, a connection on one of the cylinders. There was a part we could buy, somewhere else, to replace it, or he could just fashion a working seal from scrap that would hold until whenever the car needed to be properly serviced. It was done in a few minutes and he said we didn’t have to pay anything, though of course M pushed some money into his hand.

You would never find a mechanic like that on the modern toll highway. Also, human complexity that gets glossed as trope, he had a big ole titty calendar picture hanging up over his workshop. To be fair to his complexity, though, he addressed himself equally to M and to S, rather than just to him. And Raechel got a big kick out of the titty calendar. So, another win for complexity I guess.

*In case it sounds insane that I went travelling around for a couple weeks after getting discharged from the hospital with a fresh brain tumor diagnosis, yes, but also, the doctors said I needed a few weeks for the swelling to go down for the next step to be possible anyway so some holidays might be just what I needed. My plans were already made, and in hard times or when you’re about to move far away or and when there’s also something growing inside you that eventually won’t leave any room for you, what better medicine than to visit friends, to hold people close and say I love you and I will see you again.

Also, jeepers, I’m starting to understand more of what our chronically disabled comrades have been shouting from the rooftops for a long time, that it’s not just the State that requires us to be poor to receive assistance. I’m already dialoguing with an expectation that I should be experiencing this thing from a place of scarcity. This expectation is not coming directly from any of my own friends or comrades fortunately, but still a voice of society creeps through every day and insinuates that just because I’m on the dying/surviving continuum in a new way—a way that is legitimized with attention, unlike the mental health difficulties that almost proved fatal to me several times but is a part of the survival continuum aggressively ignored by our society—I should be preparing for a life of less, I should be tightening my belt, I should not be thinking about abundance and joy.

Fuck. That. Noise.