Under the Waves

The startling wave of temperature—twenty days later I no longer remember if it was hot or cold—as the radioactive dye was injected into my veins to give the MRI more contrast. The loud clicking roiling of the MRI itself. The wave forms of the x-ray in two CT scans. The undular emotions of the diagnosis, brain tumor, and the decision, joyful, to live.

(in case you missed the news… May Day in an NHS Hospital )

My friends got me on a bus and out of the city the same day I got out of the hospital. Out of the country the night before they crowned their ridiculous new king. Whom, I learned, they call King Sausage Fingers. Say a little benediction, may his reign be as ignominious as the first of his name. Send some love back over my shoulder to the NHS nurses on strike (little love is due their unions though, from what I heard), the doctors and orderlies and cleaners and techs who also took care of me, the friends who visited me, the folks who came out to the event the night before the seizure, the comrades from the bookstore…

As we crossed the night meridian I was on a boat across the North Sea, bound for Hoek van Holland.

Boom

As I look at this onomatopoeia, I realize it’s also the word for tree in Nederlands (Dutch, but we only call it that because the English, ever worldly, didn’t know the difference between their Nederlands- and Deutsch-speaking neighbors across the sea). And Amsterdam is a city with some beautiful trees, vivacious, expansive, deep rooted elm, plane, and poplar. Fitting then, in an easy metaphor, the deep roots the anarchist movement across the country still maintains, despite decades of some of the most resourced social democracy and then neoliberalism in the world, a particular counterinsurgency one-two that has knocked cultures of popular resistance on their asses the world over since the end of World War II.

A war remembered in plaques, but few useful lessons. Like: the Netherlands had relatively high death rates among Jewish and other targeted populations during the Holocaust despite an active and well organized partisan movement, a weak presence of fascists, and very low incidence (relative to the shameful European norm) of antisemitism before the war. Why? Because they had one of the most advanced bureaucracies, the framework was already in place for tracking people, whether to give them social benefits and education or to ship them off to slaughter. For bureaucrats these are literally the same actions.

Never Again needs to also mean an awareness that every capacity in the hands of the State—every kind of State—is a weapon against our survival.

Memory, don’t fail us. And here it might be coming back, against the dominant trend. The oldest anarchist gathering in the world, going on a century with just a few years’ gap for the aforementioned war, has been happening in Friesland, in the northern Netherlands, and my friends have been telling me it’s been taking on new life. Stop by if you’re in the area.

But no, trees and roots and gatherings in the forest aside, what I actually meant to name was boom in English, like the explosion.

A comforting story when you’re just out of the hospital with news about your own survival, and the collective house that takes you in is a former squat that survived its own ordeal. An old squatter, depressed, tired of life, opened up the gas, lit a cigarette, and awaited the rendezvous, a simple exothermic reaction that would solve his problems, or at least rearrange them on another plane. The corner he was in was the only one that survived the explosion. He lived, and looked for life somewhere else. They rebuilt, managed to keep it as collective housing in a gentrifying city, and named the new building after his lucky corner.

Alive!

The Baltic off the coast of Helsinki is probably two degrees that morning (35 for you ‘mericans). We throw ourselves in anyway. Or actually, for that very reason. I stay in long enough to swim a few kicks out from the rocky shore of the island we’ve crossed over to, dip my head under, turn, swim, climb out. I am full of fire!!!

My body doesn’t leave a single space of doubt, my heart pumps the message through every vein and artery. I’m alive!

The Finnish friends say, in all seriousness, that our dip should be followed by the sauna, but this island strangely enough doesn’t have one. We’ll just have to repeat this again some year (the implication, it’s recommended that I survive my brain tumor), even better in the winter. A hot sauna next to a lake in the woods with a hole in the ice for periodic plunges, though in the winter you’d know never to dip your head under, and then back into the sauna. Nothing better for working through the hard things.

And the hard things abound. More and more friends with chronic health problems diagnosed, worsening, or refusing to improve. Some friends killed in one war or another, others full of anguish after coming back, still committed, or wondering what it was all for. One friend with an indomitable smile, though I can feel it beaming out more freely than last I saw him. He’s gotten more adapted to exile, though one of those wars has not abated in ravaging his home and a way out seems harder to imagine these days.

But we take the plunge, and we take it together, and we are alive, and we are alive, and we are alive.

The World Eaters Must Have Their Fill

No one else on the bus but the two drivers notice the German asshole in the Tesla who almost causes a van to veer into us on the highway out of Split. They take it in stride, but for a hairy second on the narrow winding road I caught that sharp intake of breath you never really want to hear from the person behind the wheel. The environmentalist, a Frankfurter by his plates, was impatient to pass another couple Germans on their driving vacation, going 20km below the speed limit on those narrow roads but refusing to let anyone pass. Both cars intent on enjoying the sights on precisely their own terms. [Sorry to be a jerk while already being a jerk, but this concept of “letting drivers pass” will be novel to many readers from a certain corner of the globe; unsurprisingly, I’ve already published a rant about it because I am a bad and bitter person: Fuck American Drivers ]

Curled next to me, Raechel has managed to sleep somehow. Buses make her nauseous and this highway doesn’t help. I try to breathe through my anxiety, worried this latest wave of hard feelings could be vibrating loudly enough to wake her.

Behind us, the four wretched Americans are still nattering vapidly. In the hour I have to share their company, I (never one who tends towards judgment) learn everything worth knowing about them. One of them calls herself Irish, but I know what the friends she’s just visited in Dublin say about this pretension when she’s gone. All of them have come off a cruise that has stopped in Split and they’re on a day trip recommended by the travel company, a visit to a pretty little fishing village from which, curiously, no more fishing boats embark these days.

They are very disappointed with Split and its few attractions, and fully oblivious to the fact they are sharing this opinion loudly enough for the drivers and the locals sitting behind them—all quite possibly from Split—to hear them. Yet they clearly expect everyone around them to be able to speak English, because one of their first complaints upon entering the bus is how poorly the person in the ticket office spoke English. And how rude she was. They are probably unaware they are in a Slavic country, and certainly unaware of the cultural norms in what they just see as some universal service industry. I’m trying to imagine the equivalent level of naïveté a visitor to the US might have, never having heard of the country before, seeing it mentioned in a few paragraphs and color photos in an online travel package; what could they come and expect to receive on their first day in New York that would be more futile, more ridiculous, more oblivious and insulting towards an entire history..?

Expecting the person at the ticket counter in Split to be loquacious and friendly. I chuckle.

Next they complain about the prices. A classic move, demanding more training and more affective labor from the arrays of waiting servants, but for lower wages. And being aggressively unaware that that’s what they’re doing.

Throughout the next hour of dull news and addenda to the litany of complaints, there are only two cities they sing the praises of: Venezia (they call it Venice of course though I’m sure at least one of them identifies as Italian) and Dubrovnik. Venice, let’s just call it that, it is after all a conquered city, is mostly depopulated at this point, at least the old town. It has been turned into a museum for tourist consumption. Dubrovnik, on the Croatian side of the Adriatic (perhaps too expensive, but cheaper than Italy), is nearing the end of its own siege and forced emptying. I wonder if at this point the city has lost a greater proportion of its inhabitants than it did during the Nazi occupation that rained hell on this region trying to stamp out one of the most effective partisan movements against the Reich.

The American ideology carries on its merry way sowing unmarked cemeteries forgotten even before they’re planted with bodies of absence, and the vacationers keep on nattering until they get off at the perfect little photo of a fishing village.

“Firing squads are not anarchist, firing squads are not anarchist.” I turn it into my mantra, try to breathe more deeply, try not to think about what I cannot forgive, try to remember that my life is for caring for the things I want to survive and attacking the things that are truly at the source of so much misery, and hope that Raechel can sleep a little longer.

Island of Cats and Partisans

Her foremost delight awaits her when we finally arrive on the island of K---: kitty cats! Kitty cats on old stone walls, kitty cats hanging out in a little olive orchard, kitty cats riding on old vintage tractors, on this small Dalmatian island that doesn’t have any cars.

This is very good news, because the trip has been a hard one for us. Starting a relationship across an ocean isn’t easy, learning how to love and care when people who have loved you or been responsible for your care have been hurting you for your whole life, this too is not easy, and it’s not made any easier if one part of the team—who grew up knowing patriarchy’s name because he had a feminist mom and has done the reading about masculine socialization and has had amazing, radical queer friends since C in high school—decides over the prior decades he can do all the healing work on his own because he’s sooooo smart…

Deciding to trust someone who has hurt you because you have seen that they know the love is love only if you commit to healing the hurt. Knowing they are grappling with the same decision. Deciding to leave the home you thought would be your home forever, to choose a life in which for the first time ever you can actually imagine healing. Going to a new territory on another continent for an unknown future. None of these are easy things.

So already we had our work cut out for us when I took my leave, one last time, to go a month and pack up my life, say goodbyes, and then meet her for a few weeks of travel, to share with her a few beautiful people and places and histories I needed her to know because they’re a part of me.

And that’s when the seizure came, and the brain tumor showed up on the scan, and still with twelve days left before our rendezvous. When we finally met in Split, this little island on the Dalmatian coast we were headed to and the two dear friends waiting there to meet us, were the nearest refuge we had ahead.

I was a ball of stress coming off the bus fifteen minutes before the ferry was to depart (German vacationers and highway construction having conspired to delay our arrival a whole hour). The kind old man with a shock of white hair and a little white dog and an aura that bespoke a life in the discos over the prior decades let me cut in front of him when he sensed it, even after he’d offered to take us to the ferry himself since he too was going to that island. Clearly he was blessed, this old disco veteran in a polo and a windbreaker with a little white dog, clearly in his care we would have arrived soundly, and clearly I was not in a place to recognize those things. So I went first, and I asked for a ticket, got my appropriately brusque reply, and off we went over the subtle waves of the bay.

M and S were waiting for us on the dock with their own dog. How many years had it been? They wrapped me in warm hugs and embraced Raechel in greeting. Even before news of my hospital visit, they’d made plans to meet us on the coast, intuiting that a peaceful stay on the island would be just the sanctuary we’d need after these last few years of absence and anxiety that’s been showing up, it seems, in everyone’s lives. For them, that meant closing up the bookstore for an unorthodox mid-May vacation.

M and S run the sweetest smelling anarchist bookstore possibly in the world, Što Čitas, in Zagreb. It enjoys this superlative in part because a friend of theirs is a maker of soaps whose aromas fills the store. Beyond this, M and S are artists, and lovers of books, and their selection bears the aroma of wooden stalls in secondhand markets, eager hands searching just such a volume, their own editions lovingly designed, and the artisanal workshop in which they do some of their own printing, binding, and cutting on old iron machines built to last centuries.

S grew up in the nearest town on the coast, and her mother had gotten an old house on K---. The island is one of the last before the open Adriatic, has a single village with a single store, and a hillside of houses and pastoral walls built of thick blocks of the sharp white calcite the island itself is made of. Half the houses are politely fixed up to the point you can inquire, guess, or mind your own damn business as to whether or not they’re abandoned. Just so. Another part definitely abandoned, and still quite a few, especially closer to the harbor, proudly inhabited and prettied up.

K--- is an island of fisherfolk, and several of them still go out for each morning’s catch, but now they depend more and more on German and British and Italian yacht vacationers to come through. There are a couple-three bars and restaurants anchored at the auspicious points of the harbor to catch that fickle high tide when the euros come through, and not be left dry when the occupiers go and it’s only locals again.

It’s because of this violence that I don’t share the name of the island with you, and why I ask everyone who truly hates capitalism to keep such secrets like the treasures they are: when in another land and someone from a place of beauty, a place not yet fully occupied, shares it with you, keep it like a secret, an intimacy. Retell the story without coordinates, because capitalism also moves in networks and there is a direct chain from our name dropping on vacation stories in social media to AirBnB and travel sites and tour offers and evil Americans on buses and occupation and desolation.

(I gràcies a Bernat, guerrer, estimat, per a ensenyar-me això, per a insistir en aquests principis mentre insisties en compartir lo més bonic de la teva terra amb mi, sempre!)

But because of the same violence it’s complicated, which is why most of the locals would want the name of their island to be shouted far and wide, because then the euros would come, and pounds and dollars and renminbi, and then the island would be lost, and the village would be lost, and vacationers on a cruise would be saying it was a beautiful spot but the weather wasn’t ideal and the person renting the snorkels wasn’t very polite. Because that is what capitalism does, it enlists us in the war against ourselves and against all life. And that’s why principles are difficult, not the having of them, but applying them. What are they worth if they’re not applied in the worship of life, and life is always moving, always full of contradictions.

For their part, M and S respond with a Slavic grace, joking that we should act more like tourists instead of trying to lubricate daily interactions with Serbo-Croat, so that everyone on the island will think that S’s mother has lured the first renters of the season to her little stone cottage, making her neighbors jealous and thus winning the most coveted prize in the true island economy, the older one.

And there we are, exhausted but suddenly safe as my two friends take us under their wings and lead us up the main road, right to the top of the hill, and already a weight has been lifted off us and Raechel is ecstatic with all the scrappy island cats who hop out on limestone walls or lift their heads from naps atop old tractors to watch our passing.

And that day and the next and the next and the next, almost enough to lose count, we start our mornings with coffee and end our nights with hours of food and talk, and the time in between we fill with walks in a rain that funnels down the stone street. When the clouds are lighter we hike around the island, the aroma of rosemary, of memory, never far off. In the half hour when the sun appears, a plunge from a little indentation of sea shells cupped by the coastline of sharp rock, one of the beaches where no one will mind if you’re naked and you can swim out towards the islands on the horizon. And we do work on the old house, assemble a bed, paint the wall above the stairs. M weaves a net that looks good hanging there and I work out a quick fix, squatter style, to keep the rain puddles from the rooftop balcony from funneling back into the house. We all fight the fight of those strange human creatures with their idea of houses to keep the elements out of the home, and the leaks will take a proper stone mason to address but for now we can assuage, we can pay homage, we can mop and dry, and every few hours I do the rounds of the drying racks, so most of our clothes are mostly dry by the time we have to get up that dawn and roll down to the port to catch the ferry back.

But there’s so much to share before then, so many stories to tell, much of it grounded in those who came before us, in the catastrophes that bookend the history of this place. In this old partisan stronghold on the Dalmatian coast, that inevitably means the conflagration our parents’ parents lived through, though the elders of M and S lived through something much different than my grandparents did. Three of M’s grandparents were partisans in the war against the Nazi occupation, fighting the Germans, the Italian fascists, the Chetnik royalists, the Ustaše fascists (Croatians so committed to the nation they scared the Germans, insisting the killings should be carried out with knife and axe to cultivate a deeper love of the homeland and hatred of its enemies). His grandmother carried a machine gun and killed an officer with a knife, an anecdote we can experience as extremely bad ass since letting the Nazis win was not an option and for a partisan struggle to defeat them required sustained heroism, or we can experience it as extremely sad since engaging in interpersonal violence is actually traumatic and history has forced us to repeat it so many times, or simply as a commonplace, since Yugoslavia was occupied by an enormous coalition of fascist armies and an entire generation had to choose sides. S’s family was with the partisans too, with many of them also taking up arms. Incidentally many of the earliest antifascist partisans were anarchists, some of them just back from Spain, but in a pattern common to the 20^th century, the risks inherent to being the first line of assault and the kinds of support coming from the USSR (despite the general independence of Tito’s socialism) meant that not many of us survived.

Most nights our conversations stray more recent, like the civil war in the ‘90s M had to fight in and desert from, anti-militarist and anti-nationalist organizing since then, feminism in the Balkans, punk, great novels, mostly in English since S in particular is a voracious reader of the masterpieces that scare away most native speakers, whereas neither Raechel nor I have read the canons of Yugoslav literature. In an increasingly accumulative context in which publishing is a priori not just tied to but designed by profit, with AI getting a piece of the game and writers being downgraded to correctors (a change that started earlier in translation, which was my prior legal field of income), it is so refreshing to be around people who care about books. Like, really care. Who read them, who want to know what’s being written about, who learn how to design, print, cut, and bind using the older, far superior technologies, and who also learn how to print using the more recent, inferior modern machinery that has a quantitative edge and is useful for getting good works into more hands. And who run a bookstore to make sure there is a home for the books and the people coming to find them.

Što Čitas, incidentally, is Serbo-Croat for what are you reading?, in this context an eloquent expression of curiosity. And Serbo-Croat, if I may be permitted to mirror one of the tangential shifts that characterized our nightly conversations, is a pluricentric language that the various nationalist interests are trying to shift—first through the dishonesty of pretension, then through the psychologically violent intervention of government standardization—into four different state/national languages. Really it’s one language or a thousand languages, like all language is before the State and against the State.

But now it’s a new project for the nationalist corpse vendors who rose to power in the institutions of Tito’s declining socialism, another rendition of the universal history of socialism in the 20^th century that a whole new crop of atrophied dreamers,hyped up progressives, and would-be revolutionaries are now ignoring even though we can still talk to the people who lived through it from Chile to Vietnam to Yugoslavia, can still see it moving into aggressive new phases in China…

M, S, and I disagree about the distinction between national liberation and nationalism, at first so vociferously Raechel gets a little scared, until being reassured about the Balkan style of (lovingly) raised voices and very direct opinions. I think special emphasis needs to be placed on the kinds of cultural and linguistic oppression that anti-state and especially anticolonial movements address, with nationalism understood as a state-building project that will use cultural and linguistic oppression as the artificial unifier for a new state and thus new borders and thus new forms of cultural and linguistic oppression against new minorities, since that’s all a state is capable of doing. Therefore, there needs to be a distinction between nationalism and national liberation, as many anticolonial movements have argued.

S and M provide a hard rebuttal: that may be, but national liberation, every time, has been a failed strategy to achieve that aim. Look at all the anarchists in the early 20^th century who threw themselves into national liberation struggles around the world. By the end of World War I, nearly all of them were declaring it a huge and tragic mistake.

I couldn’t refute that. The theoretical need I feel is a different one, and one that is not felt as acutely in the Balkans, with its ongoing history of bloody nationalism and civil war: for the anticolonial struggle to be realized, colonialism cannot be understood as something peripheral, but as something central and ongoing to the project of capitalism and whiteness. Colonial relationships to language, culture, and territory are being reproduced and reinforced everywhere, and most intensively in the centers of whiteness where categories of nationhood and the validity of borders seem to apply naturally.

It’s an open question for me, but I guess this is a good thing: an invitation to curiosity, and to listening.

The South Wind

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: To Get to the Other Side . Sadly the original version with all the photos and protest flyers might be lost. )

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.

Just Over the Next Hill

Athens greeted us in a depressing state. The epicenter of one of the most powerful insurrections against State and capital of our lifetimes (https://www.akpress.org/we-are-an-image-from-the-future-the-greek-revolt-of-december-2008.html), in 2008 before the economic crisis hit (as much as the willfully confused materialists insist on forgetting so they can preserve comforting models of cause and effect) people across the country rose up to say never again after the cops murdered a young anarchist. For a month they burned everything—police stations, shopping malls, government buildings—and the State in all its forms was powerless to stop them, they were even afraid of sending in the military because soldiers were organizing too. For the next few years, the social movements could do so much and get away with it: occupy buildings and rededicate them from profit to life (to housing, to art, to free medicine); occupy vacant lots and turn them into gardens; take back the plazas and the squares for the neighbors, away from the wretched tourists and the logics of privatization; revitalize the free spaces like Exarcheia Square, like Strefi, like the Polytechnic, semi-free spaces that were the victory of earlier struggles.

This is why the pacifists declared and clandestine are the enemies of memory and freedom, why they are the lackeys of forgetting and obedience: because it is the fight that brings us out into the street and lets us know ourselves, because we need all the tactics that do not turn our movement into a Party, into the State, but if we cannot fight back against the forces of repression effectively enough to liberate territory, we will not even have the space to plant a single goddamn seed.

That insurrection, and the lessons learned from it, the way it jumped borders and contributed to a strengthening and a learning in other countries as well, in Egypt, in Catalunya, in Hong Kong, in the antiracist revolts against police murders in the US that started to get stronger and more effective around then, also attracted the ire of global power structures. Not just the Greek state but the entire force of the European Union and the IMF turned their attention on Greece with the express goal of crushing resistance. They manufactured an economic crisis and a border crisis, they crushed people with poverty and full spectrum repression, and still the movement responded with grace and intelligence over the next years, organizing access to economic resources and social services, organizing by and with migrants and refugees against racism and for dignified housing and healthcare.

Exhaustion from poverty and repression and fascist attacks took their toll, but it is important to emphasize that democracy was the greatest danger. The democratic government clipped the wings of one of the few actually fascist (not rightwing, but fascist: please dear reader learn the difference) parties in Europe that was making serious electoral gains, proving that they also still understand the difference between far Right politics and actual fascism, and they still understand, mostly, that democracy gives them more tools to stay in power than fascism did. Topic in a future book I might finish next year, if I’m still kicking.

What are some of those tools? In 2015, the general elections resulted in the victory of the most progressive socialist party to ever lead a government in the Global North, possibly since the 1950s, because they promised a referendum to reject the authority of the European Union and the IMF and the crushing bailout those institutions were proposing. Essentially, a ruling party in the West was proposing a referendum to reject the authority of the most powerful capitalist institutions on the planet, and they actually held the referendum. And the referendum won. And guess what?

The politicians lied. Like every single person who has memory knew they would. But millions of people were weak. And all it means to be weak is to be disconnected, to not have memory, for example, because no one is strong alone. None of us. All of us are born the epitome of weak and we only ever survive those first few moments through connection, through the strength of love and solidarity with the world around us. The thing we are often made to forget is that this remains fundamentally true for every following moment of our lives, it’s not just true in the moment we’re waiting for a pat on the butt to get our lungs moving or a gentle hand to cut our umbilical cord.

All of these weak people—including so many anarchists—people weakened and isolated by capitalism, placed their hopes in the promise of a new future that would be delivered to them from above, and not the future they were going through the hard and gritty work of building themselves. And when the promise was betrayed, many of them sank into despair, many of them lost their orientation towards the struggle.

The movement made other mistakes as well, also related to memory, to the loss of a lesson from the armed struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Fighting back is necessary, but a professionalization of violence, instilling revolution with a military logic, only turns us into the thing we’re fighting against, no matter how many black flags we wave.

So now there is despair, and betrayal, and forgetting, and since it seems like people are looking desperately for simpler mistakes authoritarian communism is becoming trendy again. Why not?

And the State advances with more nuanced strategies, beyond just police clubs and bullets. Every remaining free space in Athens is under assault. Neighborhood squares, universities, occupied gardens, liberated theaters, social centers, hilltop parks that have been refuges of unsurveilled space, kept alive by raves and concerts and riots and neighborhood assemblies… the State has been tailoring nuanced repressive strategies to bring each one under control. Full on assault and eviction by police, or benevolently marketed tourist gentrification with offers of renovation and jobs; a new metro station with promises of modernization and access, but that actually results in the enclosure of an important meeting place by construction fences that will probably stay there forever, as well as the theft of an Eros who had been the witness and devious familiar of many a riot and assembly; single use plans appealing to middle class families, like turning a self-organized, polyvalent park into a kindergarten; discourses of hygiene and the supposed need for state intervention in (self-organized) places where poor people and people without papers live.

Every last hill of freedom is under siege. That is the panorama of our long rambling conversations when my friends greet me back to this city of war and reason, city of the owl that only spreads her wings at dusk. Perhaps, when we need her the most.

Morning

Another sharp awakening at 4am—one of the few constants since the hospital is the inconstancy of sleep and the constant adaptation to making do with two to four hours a night—finds me out on the terrace thinking about all our losses and all there is to do, but now the morning swifts ply the pale sky and a thousand doves speak of the kissing and the courtship and the crumbs they’ll spend the day chasing and in this moment somewhere very close to here the sun has just risen, and now again over another hill even closer, and now again, even closer.