through europe

Fleeing

 

As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.

 

I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.

They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?

Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.

They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.

 

If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)
Ernest Renan, lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.

This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the spiritual goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and in many other people’s case in God’s absence. The City of the Dead reveals more than a vernacularized classification of death or the cultural appreciation of idol worship - regardless of being urban or rural. It is also a place of mutual habitation between the living and the dead where people live, cleaning the family house: the Leichenhauser. That habitation is mirrored, anchored, by the collective memories of people and amnesia, trauma and other emotions. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage an aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation or religion. The migrancy of people from the countryside to a necropolis might not be borne out of a desire to participate but socio-political pragmatism, or human despair- and motives that are also prone to migrate and change.

When the Justice Secretary Chris Grayling recently announced his intention to reform the British  prison system, I couldn’t have agreed more. British prisons are badly in need of reform. Since their ‘privatisation’ – that is, the wholesale of buildings and inmates to G4S, – prisons on the island have become even more overcrowded, insulting of the dignity of the inmates, and completely oblivious of any rehabilitating function that they might be supposed to have. Much like in Britain’s motherland, the US, the prison system seems to have reverted to the gruesome pantomime of a Medieval vision of hell on earth. While the British government keeps waving the supposed superiority of Western culture uber alles, its prison system has completely lost touch with those Enlightenment ideas of human dignity, that have contributed so much to the most decent aspects of our Western civilisation.

 

One would have expected Grayling to meditate cautiously on his role, possibly to read a book or two by people like Beccaria or Voltaire – Foucault might be too much for a Tory MP, – and finally to burst out in a beautiful announcement on the priority of human dignity over everything, even over the stiff rigour of the law. One would have expected Grayling to comment on the despicable regression of British prisons towards a Victorian model of workhouses, or on the highly dangerous passage of the most controversial of all State powers – the power to kidnap and enslave civilians, legally defined as ‘imprisonment’ – from the hands of the State to those of a private commercial company. In short, one would have expected Grayling to follow the claim of the Latin poet Terence that ‘I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me’ – and to act consequently.

 

If 'the world is our oyster' why are they so expensive? Shakespeare's formulation, that a poor man denied money may open the world like an oyster instead, takes on a very different meaning when the cheap food of the poor becomes the delicacy of the rich. Perhaps the shifting fortunes of the oyster are simply the most obvious example of a culinary and cultural refinement which has seen the pots of the many emptied on to the plates of the few. The crumbs from the master's table, 'authentic' and 'honest', have been plucked from the mouths of the poor who have been sold instead a pale imitation of the original loaf.

 

Oysters comfortably adorn the plates of the highest haute cusine and the stalls of the saltiest salt-of-the earth artisans, yet it is no secret that they were also once plentiful fare for the English poor. Originally popular with England's Roman invaders who set slaves to work collecting the delicacy from the shores of the English Channel, these native delicacies were transported as far as the empire's capital. After the Romans left oysters fell out of favour but were popular again as early as the 8th Century and by the 1400's were consumed in great numbers by both the rich and poor. For the less well-off they would appear on 'fish days', during which no meat was eaten and which fell as often as Wednesday, Friday and Saturday in order to bolster both the fishing industry and the number of seafaring men available to the royal navy.