Vassilis Vassilikos - ...And Dreams Are Dreams

He explained various problems to us,

confidentially. Times were very hard, as always in this country, which we knew as well as he did. Then, taking a paternal interest, he asked us about our movement: where did we feel its success came from?

To what did we attribute this success, and did it contain elements that he, as a governor, could promote?

“Unfortunately,” I replied, “dreaming could never become an affair of the state.”

“I’m aware of that,” he said, “but I would like to know whether you have any concrete demands with which we, as a socialist movement, if not as a state, could help.”

“Unfortunately,” I repeated, “we grow in power as you lose yours. It’s simple: not having any place else to go after abandoning you, people come to us, where they are given nothing more than the right to dream, which is the right to hope for better days.”

I used his campaign slogan on purpose, as if to tell him that people felt their expectations had been lamentably betrayed, and that the responsibility for this failure lay, if not with him, then with his colleagues.

“They’ve declared war on us on all fronts,” he said.

I responded that for me politics was like human relationships: unless you offer the other person a vision, a horizon, a prospect, it won’t work. Otherwise, however large a gift you may give a worker, he will not respond. He will accept your gift only as a tiny bright spot in the general darkness. But if you offer him a prospect, then even a slap will seem like a caress. In this case, heavy taxation weighs on him less than a tax exemption with no horizon. That’s what had happened to the movement during its second four years in power. It wasn’t working, because it had no dream, no vision, no prospect. The sacks of Aeolus had deflated. Of course, I was quick to admit, as I saw his face grow dark, a lot had been achieved. Undeniably.

Things that no one had even dreamt of. And yet — and I explained to him that I was speaking from my experience as a printer — the most beautiful page can seem stifling without a margin. Dreaming makes life wider, the same way a frame gives another dimension to a painting. It is the border, the shade. The depth of the world.

He listened to me thoughtfully. He was the modernizer, the renovator, the restorer, the reformer. I told him so. And immediately I added that we were not competitors in any way. We would like him to view us as complementary. My partners and I worked a system of buying and selling that didn’t hurt the economy.

However, like the parallel economy that thrived in our country, our system was beyond state control. As an economist (and once quite a famous one), he could surely understand that if our dream drachma was unshakeable, it was because it had a celestial clause.

There are transferable dreams, washable and exchangeable, like in primitive societies where commerce was a bartering system; floral dreams like Kyra Katina’s dress; Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, 1000

cc dreams that explode in the corridors of your sleep; flagship dreams, fire ship dreams, and others that last for years that seem as unending as the dictatorships of Franco or Salazar: suddenly you wake up in the midst of a revolution with carnations or a regime with democratic processes but under which people are only interested in porno dreams that escape from the security of dreams. Clandestine dreams in which you have to show your counterfeit passport to pass through the security gate and you’re afraid they might discover you; dreams that have failed their exams; experimental dreams, in the test tubes of your memory; fickle dreams, tousle headed, grumpy or stormy; kidney dreams, transplant dreams, with cellulite; reprehensible dreams, unvoted-on dreams, parliamentary, figurative dreams, and dreams that drop like unpicked figs and explode like hand grenades on the sheet iron, muffled; dreams of your brain damage, brackish dreams that border on the ravines of the sea, dreams that burn like dry branches, and others that won’t light no matter how much pure alcohol you soak them in, until the room fills with smoke and you wake up choking. “I don’t dream” means “I don’t live”: “I dream” means “I exist”; not I, but the legendary bunch of so many keys to doors you never opened, houses you never lived in, loves that you never took even though, at one time, they offered themselves to you in profusion. Dreams with freckles, flooded, with zebra stripes on their bodies, lashed by the sun; and dreams, caryatid, dreams of kouroi sculpted in marble, supine; dreams where you experience the anxiety of the goalkeeper before the penalty kick, strictly confidential, bottled in fruit juices, without preservatives. (“I drink fruit juices and dream of fruit.”) Newspaper-eating dreams, engraved in stones; constrictor dreams; fuchsia, psychedelic dreams, of Moluccans, flying; Siamese twins who marry themselves; critical dreams, dreams that ratify bills from the presidency of the republic; beautiful-ugly dreams, chained bears dragged along by gypsies, delphic; dreams from which you finally wake up richer, because they have charged your batteries with the energy of the life-giving sun.

I don’t know what the prime minister did

afterward, because meanwhile I died and became a dream of myself. I died on the exact date I was born; November 18, Scorpio. It was the same day that the big guys weren’t able to come to an agreement in Geneva. So nuclear war was just a matter of time.

What I mean to say is, I dreamed I died, since it was the date of my birth. Since birth is the death of a dream, death is an opportunity to be reborn. So at last I found myself living in my dream, from where I am writing to you, happy, because truly, when life becomes a dream, then the dream also can become life.

Postscriptum dreams and warning dreams exist; they blossom on the steep slopes of Mount Olympus; mountain climbers, tightrope walkers try to reach them without always succeeding, and they wake up soaked in sweat, screaming, as they fall into the void of the ravine that is illuminated by a dream moon that was conquered but not abolished because they still haven’t been able to figure out its biocomponents. Spaceman dreams are the ones where there is no severing of the umbilical cord of communication between the spaceship and the spaceman walking on air, certain that the rope of mother earth will someday bring him close to her.

— 1-

Plasterboard and Fiberglass

An attractive title, for sure, because we have four things joined into two: plaster, board, glass, and fiber.

The same way it happens in marriage, where two individuals create a new species: the couple. Thus we say, “the Artemakises,” even though the Artemakis couple consists of Yuli Prokopiou and Pavlos Artemakis. In this case, plasterboard was a new building material that could replace the old rafter or the iron tube or the brick, was serviceable and strong, even quakeproof (insisted Pavlos, who manufactured it in his factory), but which was not preferred by building contractors because they simply were not aware of its existence. But Loukia, the young architect, knew about it from England, where she had attended college. That was how she got to talking with the industrialist who, like most of his kind, was a daddy’s boy.

The other members of the group traveling on Elias’s yacht were listening to the conversation without contributing, since they knew nothing about construction and building materials.

The young industrialist, who until then had presented a stony face, impervious to the moods of this disparate assembly, suddenly became animated and the doctor saw that his face, normally pleasant and indifferent, blazed with an inner flame as he fixed his liquid eyes on the young woman and explained the difficulties he had come across trying to introduce this new product into the market.