liturgy

The Ancient Greeks had a nominal system of taxes and tithes that helped promote trade and kept the polis able to operate on a day-to-day basis (compare to Rome whose wealthiest oligarch, Pompey the Great, accumulated all that treasure by owning the city’s fire department and extorting), but the financing of extraordinary expenditures—like emergency repairs to roadworks or bridges, a new amphitheatre, public festivals or even defensive actions fell exclusively to the super-rich to shoulder as their public duty and social obligation.
Not only were the wealthy eager to pay a progressive tax that needed no enforcement, theirs was also the oversight and execution of the liturgical (λῃτουργία, meaning public-service) tasks that they took responsibility for. The best technical counsel and artisans would be employed to make sure that their benefaction and charity optimised the welfare for all, since those whom delivered inferior public-works were as roundly condemned as those who were perceived to be tight with their money and horded wealth for its own sake. If one donor was feeling particularly put upon and suspected his fellow associates were poor-mouthing and shirking their duties, the former could issue a challenge: the later either take up the liturgy or submit to a tribute to determine who was richer—failing to answer that summons would result in the two parties exchanging estates. What do you think? The received representative democracy is certainly very different from the politics of the agora but maybe technology has advanced sufficiently to manage all the voices crying out to be heard without falling into mob-rule and disorder. I suspect, however, that we still need saving from ourselves. Such a voluntary taxation regimen seems appealing, but I do wonder if the same template could be applied without the engagement and participation of every single citizen and whether we’ve not—considering the mutual levels of distrust and distaste for politicians (professional or otherwise)—already to a person been designated denizens and guest-workers for the ruling-class.

munakata or men’s spaces

Similar to the monastic Greek island of Mount Athos, the Shinto maintain a remote and isolated brotherhood on an island in the East China Sea between Fukuoka and Busan, South Korea—which is strictly off-limits to women.
Since the fourth century, the waters where the group of islands which includes the sacred Okinoshima are found have been vital trade routes and the tradition of prayer for safe passage, invoking the three Munkata sea goddesses (the Virgin Mary is the only female that can be in the monks’ company on Mount Athos), and economic prosperity has continued unbroken since. Women are banned from the island at all times and under all conditions (though there’s no word if they have the same strictures for female farm animals, like Mount Athos), but even male outsiders are just barely tolerated, allowed to visit on one day in the year in remembrance of a tragic 1905 naval battle that took place nearby, and not allowed to talk of their experience. Since 2009, there has been discussion of inscribing Okinoshima into the UNESCO World Heritage registry and perhaps the island, with its ancient temples and vast collection of offerings ferried from passing ships on to its shores for a millennia and a half, will be so honoured but not without detractors for the place’s practises of exclusion, which some consider not in keeping with the principles of the United Nations. What do you think? Maybe boys should be allowed their clubs, but such traditions can also be used as leverage for institutionalising and justifying misogyny in other contexts.

moisture farmers ou puit aerien

Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long.  Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the département of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.

true colours or sensus communis

Via Dark Roasted Blend, we’ve known for some time that instead of the gleaming white marble beauty that frames the highest æsthetics of the Renaissance that formed modern taste and sensibility and that all lovely ruins prior to the neo-classical relaunch must have gone through a period when the gawking public would have dismissed prestige projects as tacky and ostentatious, but it’s always a shock to be reminded how the statues of ancient Greece and Rome were painted like gaudy mannequins.
It’s a bit of a let-down, on the order of trying to reconcile the fact that dinosaurs had feathers. Like with having to imagine the twitterpation of the velociraptor, one almost wishes that museum curators had not been able to tease out the traces of pigment that adorned their otherwise sedate and solemn figures to tell us that the Ancients wanted to see their gods and heroes with flesh tones, hair colour and leggings. What do you think? Do you find this equally incongruous?

'merica and mobile vulgus

Given the over-abundance of shrillness and inanity that we’ve been subjected to already, one could be excused for forgetting that the US presidential campaigned season has not officially kicked off yet until today.
It is a little inexcusable that I didn’t read this excellent primer from VICE—dismissing it as more strident boilerplate rather than anything with civic-value—and am certainly glad that I did, in order to better appreciate the travesty and hopefully the opportunity. The antiquated ceremony and vetting process are really highlighted in the first state caucus’ rather monolithic demographics and relative isolation—which are arguably the biggest head-start any bloc of voters is afforded for dashing away from the “real America.” The baffling complexity and the buoying media sentiment are the sleight of hand and window-dressing of democracy—rather ochlocracy (the marching protesters in Athens with their OX! signs are not identifying themselves as members of an angry mob but rather saying no to further austerity measures), pandering to the majority and dispensing with minority protection.

trivium and hoi polloi

I’ve really been enthralled with my latest podcast discovery in Doctor William Webb’s Heritage Podcast project (thanks to a hale and hearty recommendation by Sharyn Eastaugh, creator and hostess of The History of the Crusades, to get on board with the syllabus before the ambitious project gets too expansive to catch up on back episodes) and had a welcome reminder on the virtue of a Liberal Arts degree—not just one in name but one that’s true to original core curricula as it was expounded in ancient times.
With participatory democracy burgeoning and society becoming more hierarchical but also urban, leaders of the Polis recognised the need for a basic civics education requirement to attract and retain individuals with the ability to distinguish philosophy from sophistry and developed a three-pronged prospectus called the trivia—grammar (the basic rules of communication—stringing together λογος), rhetoric (the art of persuasion and articulacy and perhaps the training to wield it for one’s own ends) and logic (the faculty to soberly judge the validity and truth of argument and perhaps keenly peer beyond grandiloquence). Once the tradition of active and engaged citizens started to be supplanted by feudalism and the fealty of labourers and the political man became a subject, his affairs rarefied and to be managed by hereditary kings, as the Classical World came to an end, basic education was something seditious and there was no demand for an informed and potentially rebellious under-class. Of course, the institution of the Church—with its own vested interests in sustaining a community of inquisitive and engaged members—was the mainstay of continuing-education—augmenting the trivium with four additional disciplines: mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy.
Perhaps these subjects smack of something a bent a bit toward the practical and vocational, their coursework—as with the unfolding of word, language—however, can be expressed as the germination of number, leading to number in space, number in time and then with astronomy, number in time and space. Perhaps we’ve again entered a time when a liberal education (the motto of my alma mater—which evolved out of a preparatory school and is rather a singular beast in higher-education is a Latin malapropism “facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque”—I make free men from children by means of books and a balance) is something to be disdained as a superfluous luxury or even a liability when the plebiscite is expected to keep its collective head down and not stint the ceremony of elections with engagement and activism that goes beyond party-membership and reinforced believes. Being schooled in a little bit of logic seems especially vital now for countering the techniques in the media and politics that present the fallacious and specious as something incontrovertible, and something (regardless whether one becomes a charismatic or not—I think one can’t truly start believing his or her own deceits if discovered through honest means) for disabusing ourselves of our own biases. Despite the tenor of the age, there’s no excuse for letting one’s faculties atrophy. Don’t let it rest on the President’s desk. Q.E.D.

marginalia or many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Having taken more than three hundred fifty years to prove since the claim was first coyly presented and in fiction and popular culture, the final, mysterious conjecture by poly-math and number theorist Pierre de Fermat probably did not strike the mathematician himself nor its originally prompter as particularly significant. Fermat’s Last Theorem, as it has come to be known, was inspired by a book of lemmas by an ancient Greek mathematician called Diophantus of Alexandria. For this scholar, considered the father of algebra (not a terror-organisation and ought not to be intimidating to the public like one) for inventing variable notation and despite his monumentally new paradigm of recognising fractions as legitimate numbers, Diophantus (at least in his surviving books) did not break with the traditional penchant for finding whole number solutions for problems.
Finding a nice round solution is much more satisfying and resonates far more—I think, even given computational power that masks the ugly, irrational bits. The book of Diophantus that Fermat was reading, the Arithmetica, was rather a conversational, speculative investigation that proffered that right angled triangles (following the Pythagorean Theorem, a² + b² = c²) exist where the sides of the triangle work out to be whole numbers: 3² + 4² = 5² or 9 + 16 = 25. There seemed to exist as many solutions, however, where the answers were not so tidy. Seeing this, Fermat wondered if the application could be expounded to higher exponents (and thus dimensions—something squared is a flat surface as opposed to a three-dimensional cube) and running with it, asserted that no whole number solutions can exist for a³ + b³ = c³ or higher powers up to infinity. This assertion was scribbled, coyly, in the margin of Diophantus’ ponderings with the aside that there’s a nifty proof for this necessity but not enough room to write it here. Perhaps Fermat felt that the problem was not so pressing and never again returned to that particular problem, leaving generations to wrestle with it after his notes were discovered. There’s a whole cosmos of unsolved equations that might pose more appreciable and immediate significance if explained, and while there’s no obvious application in understanding why what Fermat declared is ultimately true, the insight and techniques developed in trying to find the answer have propelled mathematics forward and have enabled all sorts of progress in understanding and has shaped the modern world. I can’t claim any understanding of the famous proof and my brain starts to hurt from it, but I wonder if it also shows, for this celebrated and veteran conundrum, why it’s the case—that whole numbers are not transcendent.

the fabulists or animal farm

As a freshman I can recall, in anticipation of reading the Platonic dialogues, that young, new students were warned off early on from drawing parallels of the trial and execution of Socrates and the judgement and crucifixion of Jesus—the comparison disdained as something obvious and sophomoric and rather a dangerous path to pursue. I of course was immediately drawn to the forbidden subject—completely new to me and probably nothing that I would have formulated on my own, but—wisely, I suppose, I kept that to myself.
Academics have come to recognize countless other messianic proceedings, both popularly and privately, and does tend to discourage reading too much into these dockets. One rather indulgent biography, with legendary portions and a lot of embellished and contradictory details of exploits and called a romance, addresses the life and career of a slave in Samos called Æsop, whose fables with personified foxes, lambs, donkeys and other characters are so ingrained and indoctrinating that one would be pressed to fail at making the allusion. The talking animals explore power-relationships and this allegorical device is the only way a slave could possibly mock his social betters in a highly hierarchical society and hope to keep his head—though the allegory is a thinly-veiled thing and I always wondered about listeners not getting the subtext. No tyrant, however flattered and deluded, would exclaim, I think, “what do you I’m not the innocent little rabbit?” The life and times of Æsop outside what is revealed in the fables is not really considered a reliably scholastic piece of work, there being too many versions and it’s mostly just lurid and with a lot of crude humour and misogyny, but the life of Æsop is surprising similar to the two exemplars above—Socrates (also considered endearingly ugly) even composing fables in the style of Æsop (many others have continued this tradition of the past three thousand years) as he’s awaiting his punishment, perhaps thinking that the direct-approach was the wrong way to go about things.
Most versions of the romance agree that Æsop was born into slavery and sold to a wealthy sophist on the Ægean island of Samos and was an extremely physically repulsive individual. Mute and without the power of speech at first, after showing kindness to a temple priestess, despite her being terrified of this ugly man offering help, the goddess Isis (figuring large in Greek culture also at the time) granted him not only the power of speech but also of eloquence. Glossing over the lewd episodes, Æsop’s parables saved him in many situations and allowed him to show up the professors at the philosophical schools. The slave who was never allowed to purchase his freedom in the traditional sense but nevertheless enjoyed much respect and autonomy was himself put to death—on trumped up charges of slander, by being made to walk off a cliff in Delphi after having supposedly slandered Apollo. The gods, echoed by Socrates, have a tendency to mete out their own punishment without human help, and a slighted Apollo did not let offending mortals off that easily.

ulysses or hocus-porcus

By its nature, mythology does not admit to definitive versions, although the fables and folklore of the Greeks, once committed to paper by Homer and Hesiod and countless others took on an air authority that was not a uniting theme in the tradition of story-telling. Although different accounts circulated long afterwards and inheritor traditions continue to build on that unstaid corpus still, lore, variation and invention is sourced to the Heroic Age—those who fought in the Trojan War, and abruptly ended with that diasporic, lost generation afterwards.
Maybe it was because those stories were written down and the winningest narratives became the prevailing ones—competition continued among poets, championing their own character-analyses, morals and retribution and it’s now hard to imagine as the readership that there were opposing legends presented to audiences, amok-time scenarios where Electra and Œdipus had normal families and lost their place in the popular imagination to the racier, received versions. One of the very last myths constructed, a lost epic that seems groundless morose but somewhat reconstituted, by the Greeks is called the Telegony and dealt again with re-deploying veterans and the homecoming of Odysseus, but told from the perspective of the seductress and enchantress Circe. During Odysseus’ captivity on the exile-island of Aeaea—Lošinj, Croatia—(Circe was banished to this remote location to keep her out of trouble), Circe became pregnant and bore Odysseus a son after his departure, the eponymous Telegonus, whose name meant born far away due to his father’s distant home. Athena urges Circe to reveal to her young adult son—juxtaposed with the massacre and funeral service for opportunist suitors of his wife, Penelope, whose advances she solemnly rebuffed for the two decades’ absence of her husband that open the story—who his father is. Telegonus resolves journey to Ithaca to find Odyssey.
Why Athena, as Odysseus’ constant champion and protector, encouraged this reunion seems impenetrable and without the entire story—that’s just been teased out of a few lines and other myths referencing the Telegony—the goddess’ motivation will remain a mystery, I suppose. Before going on this long and dangerous voyage, Circe asks the blacksmith of the gods to craft her son a supernatural spear with the poison tip of a string-ray to defend himself. Just as Telegonus arrives in the Ionian Sea, he is visited by a terrible storm and disoriented, does not realise that he has already arrived at his destination. Though the trope seems rather predictable to us thanks to the tragedies of Sophocles, Telegonus poached one of his father’s cows and was ambushed by Odysseus and his men. As he deftly defends himself, Telegonus strikes down Odysseus, fulfilling a prophesy that the wily hero who satisfied his charge with burying an oar in a land where they never had heard of the ocean that stated he would meet his demise from the sea, and recognizes, too late, that he is his father. Beside himself with remorse, Telegonus takes Odysseus’ body, widow and half-brother, Telemachus (meaning “far from the battle-field” also unborn when Odysseus went off to war) back to Aeaea in the Adriatic. Circe’s magic was unable to restore Odysseus to life but is able to make the landing party immortal. Telegonus marries his step-mother, Penelope, and Circe, Odysseus’ lover, marries Telemachus. I wish we had the whole story in order to make this outcome seem plausible—the classic myths were hinged together in such a way where one could always suspend ones disbelief and accept that a character was fated to be transformed into a tree or flower or would be forced to experiment with the lesser-evils and impossible choices. I wonder if this outline could be expanded.

attica or cultural studies

Though best remembered international for stellar performances of roles that were not able to contain her energy and talent, stock-characters in good but less acclaimed films like the happy hooker in Never on a Sunday, the good-time girl-type, naughty nun, or gal Friday in Topkapı, Greek singer and actress of the stage and screen, Melina Mercouri, had another equally impassioned calling as a politician. Finding herself exiled, stateless—her passport having been revoked for outspoken socialist sentiments against the junta government of a cadre of conservative colonels who overthrew the liberal government in 1967, while away on performing on Broadway, Mercouri—along with other prominent members of the Greek diaspora focused attention and shame on the military coup d’état.
Despite tepid support in Greece and an overall laughable platform that no one took seriously, the junta lingered on and on for seven unbearable years—not ousted until their adventures with a one-Greece-policy by invading the Cyprus that was so poorly executed and resulted in the partition of the island nation rather than its annexation. Once Mercouri could return to Athens, this “last Greek goddess,” as she was nicknamed, decided to focus her energies on rebuilding her homeland—which had suffered considerably in the intervening years with dismantling of cultural capital and censorship. When questioned on her credentials for entering politics as an actress, Mercouri retorted by questioning what qualified lawyers to represent the people. Mercouri went on to become the Minister of Culture, and lamenting that it was always just the chiefs of finance that met and that money was not certainly everything—a pretty bold truth to speak, especially in the present atmosphere where Greek financial ministers are characters people might actually recognise by name—and called together, for the first time, all the European ministers of culture and the arts. The legacy of this summit survives today in the rotating European Cultural Capital and the open dialogue it invites with a less rarefied form of diplomacy that everyone can appreciate. Mercouri was also the first voice in a growing choir of protests and calls of vandalism to have the so-called Elgin marbles returned to the Acropolis and for the protection, stopping trafficking and the repatriation of other national treasures.

the swerve or i am the operator with my pocket calculator

Fourth century BC philosophy, Epicurus, whose Athenian salon was referred to as the farm and attracted many contemporary adherents and much, much later through his rediscovery previsioned Enlightenment-thinking and quantum uncertainty as a way of giving free-will through a bit of microscopic called the swerve or deviation chaos a purchase in an otherwise pre-determined Cosmos, once extolled that, “a bit of cheese was enough to turn a meal of bread and water into a feast.”
Blaise Pascal, who is probably best known for his Wager also invented the first functional and patented pocket calculator to assist his ailing father in his job as an assayer and the discipline of probability and statistics by asking how to fairly call a game that was interrupted—it is never a draw—that drive our algorithmic-based economics and world-view, once wondered in his unfinished, draft Pensées how “The beak of the parrot, which it wipes, although it is clean.” I wonder what the contexts of both fragments were—I suspect they are one and the same.

e at delphi or the power is yours

According to legend, the location of panhellenic oracle at Delphi—sacred specifically Apollo but also the whole panoply of the gods—was fixed when Zeus dispatched two eagles in opposite directions to find the geographic centre of the Earth (the navel, ομφος of Gaia, Mother Earth—the name Delphi too is a near homonym for the Greek word for womb). Having circumnavigated the globe, the eagles collided above the slopes of Mount Parnassus and so by this unfortunate augury it was decided. The midair crash makes me think about the silly exchange between the uncatchable Teumessian Fox and the magical hound Laelaps who was destined to capture anything it chased—paradoxical nonsense that Zeus put to a stop by turning both beasts into stone, and setting them among the stars—Canæ Major and Minor. The sanctuary played host to sibilant soothsayers for centuries and attracted the patronage of the rich and powerful, whom for a donation, could entreat the Pythia for a suggested donation amount—all tributes and treasure artefacts of the wealthy trying to outdo one another.
Such gifts were left in hopes of currying favour with the gods and to gain some purchase on their prophesy—one which promised to be duplicitous and if the question was not framed careful, they risked an ironic demise. Not every donation was precious in the traditional or artistic sense, however, and probably the most enigmatic token was a simple letter E carved into a wall of a temple. No one really knows its meaning but Plutarch—a contemporary and friend of the high priestess, a retainer of the oracle—speculates in a rather in depth dialogue about what it could signify. Called E at Delphi (which always made me think of some diner, Eat at Delphi’s), Plutarch’s work underscores the singular nature of this inscription, which appears alongside two other famous dictums—Know Thy Self and Everything in Moderation. The intent already unknown and a bit of a mystery for visitors to guess about, Plutarch’s characters debate suggestions that the E could be the Greek numeral five—maybe a station of the tour and ritual, the verb form Thou Art, declined as an exclamation, or a hale and hearty greeting (pronounced like “aye”) from the god himself.
Despite the elite nature of the site—certainly not open to all seekers and the opening hours were rather restrictive, requiring a Delphic sponsor, a citizen of the settlement that grew up around the oracle, and sessions were only held on the seventh day of the month, Apollo’s day, and during long Greek summer—the nine months out of the year when snowbird Apollo dwelt in Greece before retiring to live among the Hyperborei (maybe the Britons) and Dionysus wintered in Greece—the panhellenic nature of the spot that opposed local patriotism and cults that was otherwise politically pervasive for the Greek people was really novel and Delphi and its traditions functioned in a sense like a central bank, a repository of wealth that was universally recognised. Those walls no longer stand, but other relics from that treasury have survived, scattered, like the bronze serpent column now in the hippodrome of Istanbul, brought from Delphi (in probably a bad choice of war trophies, in a karmic sense) to commemorate an ancient victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Perhaps, though, the E is enduring as well, abiding in a mystery that is as cryptic as the advice of the Sibyl.

de minimis or new wine in old skins

In opposition to tenants and articles central to keeping the faith, there is the handy Greek term adiaphora that refers to those matters that one can leave or take—like, I suppose the holier-than-thou high-ground, that goes by cafeteria Christianity and related sleights. This originally Stoic concept means indifference—neither good nor bad, accepting of a certain latitude or license in organisation and practise—careful, however, not to pollute the conscious of one’s neighbour by lapsed and liberal behaviour. For something considered optional or neutral, there’s a pretty important lesson behind it—sometimes the law does deal with trifles.

5x5

pastafarian: avatar of the divine flying spaghetti monster spotted underseas

umbrella corporation: a web search engine redefines it corporate profile

hall-tree and hutch: Dangerous Minds explores how sci-fi films require long, branching corridors

fun house: revisiting Lucas Samaras’ 1966 mirrored room installation

baumbastik: a visit to the small Alpine village of Neuschönau and the world’s longest tree-top trail

hand of glory

With the collapse of the banking system in Greece, a threatened haircut for private accounts and even the strict rationing of access to money, much of the affected population is understandably still wary of entrusting their wealth to any such institution. This lack of confidence and the physical lack of a safe place to park one’s money—the tycoons and magnates can be more resourceful and liquid, as the magnificent BLDGBlog inspects has led many stashing their cash and valuables under the mattress, and burglars are keenly aware of this shift.  Meanwhile, residents are resorting to creative methods of do-it-yourself security-measures in order to stave off or at least discourage break-ins.

I think that this practise and trend won’t stop at the borders and there will be an artistic revival in robbery and defense—skills that have very much atrophied as it was formerly more profitably and less risky to seek out victims virtually and at a distance or to simply exploit and abuse under a legal ægis—that, or just making neighbourhoods more gentrified. This scary and traumatic new landscape reminds me of some of the superstitious rites and rituals that I have encountered in my latest reading assignment: the Golden Bough, which goes into ethnographic detail over some of the totems and talismans that both crooks and potential victims employ.  The so called hand of glory—which sounds like a slumber party game, is a corruption of the word for mandrake root, which was also believed to possess paralyzing magical properties, but evolved into the ceremony of taking a desiccated, dismembered hand of some infamous master-criminal (although, like with the lucky rabbit’s foot not really a charm for the unfortunate rabbit, one wonders how the culprit was caught or lost that hand in the first place) mummified and given a candle to hold, which would supposedly render the inhabitants of the dwelling being burgled immobile. Various other gruesome candles made of the tallows of cadavers that met their fate in specific ways make the thief invisible or otherwise impervious and evade discovery or capture. As a recourse, victims could toss a voodoo doll, an effigy into a bramble bush to ensure that the thief would be caught and justice would be served. I wonder if in this new environment, where abstract things like a store of wealth becomes again made real, a regression that some of the sheltered, privileged classes will regard as positively medieval, new amulets and charms will be invented for the inventory of coping.

cytherean

From H’s parents, I received a Venus Flytrap to care for. Although I think we both have been blessed with green-thumbs, I understand that these plants are notoriously hard to care for, and I tried once before but I think I ended up over-feeding the delicate thing, so I’ve embarked on a course of study to improve its chances. I located a very good and comprehensive resource here and will take these lessons to heart, but there’s a pretty interesting story behind these not wholly sessile plants as well. Their native habitat is restricted to marshes in the Carolinas though propagated by fanciers all over the world—with varying success—and after devising the Theory of Evolution, Charles Darwin didn’t exactly call it a day but devoted his attention to the subject of locomotion in these plants—the mechanism and adaptive cultivation still something of a mystery.
And despite their very alien appearance, the plant’s name does not have anything to do with the planet Venus, rather it is the chomping jaws that suggest the clam from which the goddess was birthed. Although adjectival just Venus would, as before science saw the need for terms like Venusian, Martian or Earthling, things pertaining to Venus were unfortunately described as venereal, as Mars was martial. An old-fashioned adjective that’s rarely seen since we have Venusian—to avoid other connotations—comes from the island Cythera in the Ionian archipelago, near where the sea-shell emerged from the sea, buoying up the goddess. Curiously, the plant’s taxonomical name Dionaea muscipula, a daughter of Dione (namely the Greek counterpart Aphrodite) and “mousetrap.”

noble lies oder lüggenpresse

Madame Chancellor is getting quite the armchair beating and baiting lately. Not to say that her response to an unscripted plea was measured in reducing a young girl to tears or that her views of marriage equality—rather matrimony as defined, are either correct or callous, instead those interpretations are reflective (and very much so, I think) of the realities of European Union bureaucracy—unable to act on any resolution without unanimity that failed to address a Greek tragedy that was not inevitable (another source of vitriol, deservedly or not)—and populism, both broad and narrow. For economic reasons, Germany enjoys this strange type of mandate that’s lost on other member governments, whose politicians—despite the will of the public that they represent—are instead beholden to the Union and regimes and coalitions topple over curried-disfavour.
This encounter with a young refugee was unexpected and I believe was conducted in a human and sympathetic manner—insofar as possible, but maybe politicians ought not stop seeking out such photo-opportunities to portray themselves as kind aunties and uncles and instead pledge to do more to build prospects in the places where these asylum-seekers come from, but was constrained by her support-base, the polls. I bet the Chancellor was ashamed of herself but by the way she snapped at the minder, I think she didn’t care much for her image at that moment and did not try to backtrack. In the domestic arena, there would be a revolt among her political partners, not as an excuse or being an apologist for such attitudes, and alienation of a substantial voting bloc if she expressed more progressive views on gay marriage. As with an immigration policy which is at its core quite accommodating and is attacked for being too liberal, the Chancellor’s positive reforms towards greater tolerance and equality have really been in-stead with much of the rest of the world, but some factions become fixated on the word marriage—which the twice-married Chancellor reserved as a matter of choice and to placate her party. The same EU that’s the Sword of Damocles hanging over Greece could also dictate, by the same mechanisms or lack thereof, that marriage equality be universal among members. What do you think? Might does not confer sole entitlement to the exercise of democracy—or the illusion of such—and it becomes the tyranny of the privileged and useful.

hella throughput

One other state assess to undergo privatisation, despite protests and public sentiment is the historic and busy port Piræus in Attica, one of the largest in the world and fount of Greece’s thalassocracy—a sea-going empire and later shipping tycoons and trade magnates and island-hopping around the archipelago. Piræus also happens to be the name of our second favourite Greek restaurant—having been recently unseated by a new favourite called Athen, being the German form of the great city Αθηνα and it strikes me as curious how different name cases come across in different languages with different conjugations and declinations, Athens sounding something akin to, “Let’s go to Walmart’s.”
Having the public relinquish a controlling stake in this venture is really torturous and I wonder how the past and the future will judge this decision.  Piræus is also known as the Lion’s Port—referencing a monumental fountain that stood at the harbour’s entrance from the third century BC to the late seventeenth century, when it was looted along with other spoils by invading Venetians during the War of the Holy League, the belligerents being Western Europe and Balkan rebels against the Ottoman Empire of the east. This ancient lion, somewhat defaced by the graffiti Nordic mercenaries excited over their war trophies, was delivered to the Arsenal (shipyard) of Venice—where it still stands along with other captive lions. The sobriquet is also still in place, despite the lion’s three centuries of absence, and I wonder if Greece has asked for it to be returned.

meanwhile, back at the agora oder unsichbares hand

I fear that the Greek people are being saddled with a curse that will survive many generations, sort of like predatory pay-day loan storefront lent legitimacy by central banks’ underwriting that traps people down on their luck in a vicious and unending cycle, pushed into a coup d’Etat. The most optimistic estimates predict, I heard, for repayment—just getting back to zero and being broke again (the condition that most countries cling precariously to) and not in arrears or receivership—is at best a hundred years and that is contingent on a period of peace and stability that has not been enjoyed in a long, long time.

The Greeks, of course, have a term for such hegemony already in their philosophical quiver—though in a different context—namely, Frankocratia, the period of rule by the Germans and the French (the Franks) with the mission-spill of the Crusades, and while I think it behooves one to have an abundance of caution when assigning blame, not because the affairs awash with pure intentions, but pointing the fingers at a an obvious villain tends to deflect attention from the real Putsch and even absolve the corporate interests behind everything. The Invisible Hand of the market. Meanwhile, Athens is in the process of readying a fire-sale of its heirlooms and heritage as collateral just to have permission to re-open their banks—including institutions that were profitable for the state, like the national lottery, airport administration and even becoming more restrictive to public right-of-way and beach access. Who knows what’s to follow? The privatisation process will be overseen by Germany, which has some experience in this field, having had established the so-called Treuhandanstalt (trust agency) to administer the transition of state-controlled industry into to the capitalist system after the reunification and four decades of East German pension funds and business paradigms had to be integrated. This programme has not been without its contentious detractors, hardships and heart-ache as well.

grexit, stage left

Naturally the chorus of international observers and lenders bemoaned the Greek referendum up until the last moment after the polls closed and the ballots counted, crying that such a move to distance itself from the European Union, notably a political experiment and not an economic bloc primarily, did not behove the country and would not give them a better bargaining position. I don’t know that I would place much trust in any of the oligarchs championing one course of action over the other, since they undoubtedly have obscured agendas and some stand to benefit regardless—or in spite—of the outcome at the expense of others.
Sovereign debt was not what brought Greece to wrack and ruin, and after six years of being in arrears with economic contraction and punishing privations and in an even sorrier state—who could blame the people for vocalising one way forward when a decision was forced upon them, steering towards the sea-monster Scylla and knowing there would be sacrifice to avoid sure destruction if they got too near the whirlpool of Charybdis, like Odysseus and his crew—but rather the world-wide recession is to blame. perpetrated by market bubbles that exposed borrowing countries to faults in EU refinancing mechanisms. Obfuscation also on the part of the supranational banking sector, shoring up Greece’s portfolio for an EU who wanted to hear exactly that—not a Europe without Greece or a Greek state that was only on the periphery, like the other Balkan marches. The parallel is imperfect, chiefly due to Greece’s dues-paying membership in the EU, but a sanguine and constructive comparison is to be found in Argentina’s bold decision, facing bankruptcy a decade hence, to unpeg its currency from another sort of hegemony, the US dollar, and face down months and years of chaos and hardship, to emerge the more robust for the dare—though an opportunity arguably squandered by not undertaking more lasting reforms in the good years. If Greece does adopt this tacking manœuvre after all, let’s hope it does ultimately flourish.