#7 Things I think about on vacation.
DISCUSSED: Psychoanalytic cities // the unhappiness of being Greek.
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I visited Greece in 2022. I remember most vividly the sun, the tomatoes, the white wine, the anchovies, sore feet, the salty sea, watching many people enlisting their travel companions to take hundreds of photos of them pseudo-casually posing in front of everything from ruins to sunsets to ice-cream shops, my internal sense of pressure to be extremely happy at all times because I was on vacation (more on that later), and a feeling I must surely be in the most psychoanalytic place on Earth.
In Athens, in particular, one can walk past magnificent ancient structures, ugly eighties concrete apartment blocks, and a Starbucks without breaking a sweat (actually, Greece in September is pretty sweaty, but you get what I mean). Even the briefest investigation of this wild, old city reveals layer upon layer of forgotten and retrieved histories, somehow, with each layer standing visible amidst every other. One can track the history of the city by just walking around; a physical, living, interactive developmental timeline, its wounds, defenses, failures, complexes, and triumphs all laid bare.
Athens has been stolen, destroyed and rebuilt over and over again, with each iteration tinted with the influence of the latest invader. Before the second Persian invasion in 480BC, the statues possessed sweet, coy smiles. Afterwards, (after Athens had been burnt to the ground) their faces had a sternness and severity, emblematic of a collective loss of innocence. The Acropolis has been a temple, a house, a school, and a church. The Orthodox Christians turned the loving, sensual Father God Pan into a symbol of the Devil, but one can climb a mountain to a cave where he was worshipped in secret. The historians had their salaries paid by politicians, and so they wove the truth with novellas, casting the armies of their employers as noble and valiant heroes, framing even their catastrophic losses as essential and courageous intervals in the broader unfolding of history. The Romans took apart the buildings and shipped the most expensive, impressive things back to Italy. Gangs of thieves cut open the pillars at the Temple of Apollo to retrieve the iron and bronze.
Maybe. Maybe the stories we have now are misremembered fabrications too.
What’s more, today, when we can stand before two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old statues and ancient frescos that have been retrieved and reassembled in air-conditioned, glass museums, we find that even the stories they tell are just more iterations of an even more ancient history. The ancients themselves were nostalgic for an earlier time, telling stories of heroes and goddesses and battles between giants and the Gods of long ago. Everywhere I turned, through the chaotic intermingled layers of the past erupting from the graffitied, filthy landscape of its bankrupt present, Athens asked me: What does it mean to forget and remember? What does it mean to live with the past in the present? What does it look like to do this ‘well’? Is that even possible?
After a few days of pondering all that (while eating many tomatoes), I gratefully happened upon a tiny, thin treatise called On the Unhappiness of Being Greek by Nikos Dimou. Dimou explores what it means to try and live out a life inside this tangle of memories. He frames the modern Greek as caught in a masochistic bind, cowering in the wake of the unrepeatable glory of their literally mythic ancestors. In Dimou’s words (received with outrage when they were first published in 1975, but seemingly as timeless as ever), the Greeks are denied a real education about their ancient predecessors in favour of “such scholastic awe that it keeps them as glorious and distant as possible”. Estranged from this nevertheless perpetually present past, they cannot carve out any positive, authentic identity, nor bear to acknowledge their entrenched sense of inadequacy in any way that might allow them to move forward in pursuit of a real, fulfilling future. Instead, he points to a national identity defined by financial ruin, listless and resentful deference to external guardians, and a perpetual sense of inadequacy amidst their bourgeois European neighbours, masked by a repetitive and cynical hyperbole it was easy to encounter amongst the locals, even on my brief travels in the country.
Dimou’s fatalistic story of the modern Greek tells of what happens when we do not have the opportunity to properly face our past. As he also reminds us, “…it is not the person who ‘does what she wants’ who is free, but the person who knows what she wants”. We cannot know what we truly desire if we do not know ourselves, and we cannot know ourselves before understanding our history. If we are to fulfill the Delphic motto, know thyself, we must first remember what we have come from.
That being said, remembering is not as easy as it might seem, and not all remembering is created equal. Even those of us who are consciously and chiefly interested in the pursuit of memory - the historians, the artists, the analysts, the psychotherapists - must recognise how heavily incentivised we are to forget, to misremember and distort reality at every turn. We are in many ways organised at a cellular level to do so. In Freud’s words, “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.”
Dimou speaks to one reason for this in the conclusion of his sharp little book:
”The ultimate Greek tragedy: to love life more than you can bear.”
The problem is that if we remember, we will understand. We will know ourselves, our families, our desires and longings, our world, life itself. We will discover and have conviction about what it is we really love. And to love is to love unbearably, for we always love that which we stand to lose, that which is finite, or separate from us, or both - there is nothing else on Earth to love, and Earth is where we live. So, if we love, we love unbearably, and if we love unbearably, we are unhappy.
This unhappiness though - not the unhappiness of sullen resignation, bitterness and denial, but the unhappiness of aliveness, of the truth, of the mourning of the complexity of things, reality, the loss of fantasy; the unhappiness of being in love - offers us a hidden gift. It does not spell our doom, but rather, offers a rebirth, a great expansion, an inner size and spaciousness far more relieving and nourishing than any more easily attained and superficial consolation. If we can know the truth, a new happiness waits in the ruins of our false life, one in which we are capable, like the infant of Melanie Klein’s depressive position, of new kinds of intimacy, creativity and vitality.
More than its succinct, clarifying cleverness, I loved Nikos Dimou’s book because it relieved me of the sense of pressure I felt to be happy on my vacation. I relished in his cheerful resignation, the liberty he took in pointing out the worst of things, the inevitable binds of a human life. I felt him join me in my mockery of those rampant tourists, sentencing their loved ones to the task of taking hundreds of pictures to curate such a false, absurd, sultry, happy narrative of their real experiences. His pessimism relieved me of the duty of effortfully spinning up every day into a constantly fun, joyful, perfect dream and allowed me to retrieve my humanity. To acknowledge the inevitable unhappiness of being Greek (and being human) felt like a real love note to real life, so much more than the filtered, edited, social-media-worthy version I watched hundreds of people around me trying desperately to create.
Which oddly, made me feel very happy.
In love, and the humble pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate