Nemesis

I am in a noodle-shop off Silom Road with Alexandros G. It is April 2011. Alexandros is an artist, he is in Thailand for one of his projects – at this point his work involves journeys that take him through Iran, India and Thailand. He writes texts and creates photographic images, which he draws on and colours, with ballpoints and felt pens. The work is witty and whimsical – like him. When Alexandros heard from my aunt Pinaree, also an artist, that I have a Greek connection, he wanted to meet but I thought, “damn it, don’t I have enough Greeks in my life already.” Fortunately Alexandros. was persistent, so here we are. I like him a lot.

The restaurant is a narrow shophouse, its entrance open to the noisy, deeply shaded street, it has a high ceiling, neon strip-lighting, dirty green walls done in glossy paint; a few rickety fans rotate above, the breeze catches our hair, and makes us feel even more sweaty. It is nothing special.

Alexandros is saying that Thai culture is impenetrable, just when you think you have a handle on it you’re proven wrong; it promotes and repels mysticism in equal measures. He picks up the menu, it lists in Thai: rice or egg noodle with or without soup, added shredded chicken, duck and red pork. “I mean look at the script. It’s all magical; don’t you find that the letters are talismanic, all these squiggles and circling vowels, intended to block you out?”

He’s not wrong. There is a direct connection between the Thai alphabet and a sacred script called Khom which is used to create protective charts. As we sit there, comically gazing at the noodle menu, a shadow passes over us. We both fidget before Alexandros speaks again, “When I talk to you I feel like I may trigger a spell that will end your life. I mean just uttering these things in Thailand makes you feel like you’re bringing down a hex on yourself.”

It is really Thai, and somehow Greek.

The sense of caution, when dealing with otherworldly matters, evokes hubris – not so much in terms of pride, but in taking lightly what pertains to a higher force. According to Pliny the Elder, Greeks of the Roman era used to touch a finger to their lip and then behind the ear, in warding off Nemesis. Modern Greeks make the sound of ritual spitting, ftou ftou ftou, against tempting Providence. In Thailand malign forces are not so abstract. Spirits and witch-craft swirl around and might be attracted to someone good-looking or soft-hearted; the remedy for upsetting a ghost or deity is to pay respects, often via a supplicant bow, or to place trust in the efficacy of an amulet, or sacred thread.

Where we sit, off Silom Road, had been the edge of a war zone just one year earlier. From the centre of town, at the intersection of Rajadamri and Ploenchit Roads, right at the powerful Erawan shrine, a large encampment had sprung up. The Red Shirt protest site spread out to corner of Silom. When the government cracked down it started with a sniper bullet to the head of one of the Red Shirt leaders, it culminated in the dispatch of Armoured Personnel Carriers, which crashed through the bamboo fortifications of the camp. There were pitched battles on the streets, the protestors hurling volleys of molotovs and homemade incendiaries, the military using automatic rifle fire; after a few days there were about 200 dead, while acts of arson had gutted several large buildings in the centre of town.

It was a throwback to scenes from the 1970s, when Thai students first took on the military regime, and won, and were later massacred by paramilitaries, after two years of rising tension.

In this context, the pairing of Athens and Bangkok is neither random nor subjective. Both strategically important, their stories are threaded together by the Cold War. In Greece as in Thailand, at the end of the Second World War the US and Britain made a very troubling calculus. They needed to stave off Communism, and the people who could do it were the ones who had worked with the Germans, and in Thailand’s case, the Japanese – essentially the Fascist collaborators. People who had run the resistance against the Germans and Japanese, respectively, were killed off. In the fight for freedom, military rule was deemed better for stability than unreliable liberal democracy. Napalm, synonymous with the Vietnam War, was used at scale for the first time against communist held areas of Greece, by the US and British supported government. The Greek Civil War was the first Cold War conflict, and Thailand was integral during the big later ones, the Indochina Wars. I must simplify, but you get the point. Just as the Thais were under a military regime by the late 1960s, so was Greece. When the Greek Students made their stand at the Polytechnic in November 1973, they draped banners reading Tailandi, Thailand, pointing to the recent success of the Thai students in helping to topple their Junta.

But I am wary of pushing the analogy closer. I cannot speculate about different outcomes. It is likely that Greece would have been communist if not for intervention, but it’s a big stretch to see Thailand going that way in the 1940s. The conditions and challenges of the post-war period are not the same as those of the 70s, and later.

It has been painful watching Thais pulling each other apart for five years. The rounds of protests and counter protests that led up to the battles of 2010 got going in 2005, just after I moved to Bangkok from Athens. Whereas I had marched and opined in Greece, where I was a foreigner, I have chosen to keep quiet in Thailand. It may sound like a cop-out but I had a hard time seeing these politics as a solution. In Bangkok I knew people on both sides who I respected and loved. I just wished they could find a way to talk to each other without going mental. Athenian marches felt more ceremonial, pretty much everyone agreed with each other. I am torn between my social conscience and Pythagoras’s line, “We are put on earth to observe the heavens.”

April–May 2011, Alexandros and I listen to Yovan Tsaous, a Greek musician of the 1920 and 30s, and cook kotopoulo lemonato, using his mother’s recipe. We have dinner with a critic who talks about having rough sex with policemen in the 1970s when he was new to Bangkok. Alexandros takes me to see his favourite drag show on Silom soi 2, “you really must come, it’s amazing. I mean the show is just exquisite.” I am not convinced. Apparently the performer makes the clothes by hand for each and every night. “Can you imagine the dedication and the labour?”

We go to Lumpini park, where Alexandros likes to run. “I have to be in my body, it’s painful, and exhausting running in the heat but it feels so good.” At the park, crowds bounce along to aerobics, instructors calling over the pumping music. I gaze up at the high-rise buildings, mindful of Michaelangelo Antonioni, the way he reveals a character’s inner life by association with objects and buildings – he throws out film laws, like the 180 degree rule, meant to orientate the viewer, reverses thriller tropes, and eschews story for disquiet.

Alexandros says, “I’m going to run this way, it’s a big loop so, if you keep on this path I’ll meet you eventually.” He dashes off and I get lost looking at people framed against backgrounds: the statue of king Rama V, street geometries, men asleep on benches hemmed by muddy water, foliage and soaring shards of glass and steel.

When I come out of the trance, I can’t find Alexandros but more importantly he can’t find me, because he’s kept going, expecting to bump into me. “Where were you?” He calls me later, “I almost died running around the park so many times.”

Seh Daeng, the Red Shirt leader who was assassinated at this corner of this park, was said to have turned rebel after being put in charge of the state-run aerobics sessions. He felt it was a grave insult, or so goes the story. A year later he announces that he’s for the Red side, and gives them military instruction. During the protest, Seh Daeng was being interviewed by the New York Times correspondent, he was out in the open and the sniper’s shot went past the journalist and into his forehead mid-speech.

Austerity

My Athens is not a place of reverence for the good students to hang out in. It has a terrifying poetry. Did you know that Athena had the head of Medusa on her shield? That’s not a decoration, it’s a monster that freezes your blood: what’s the most terrified you’ve ever been?

Consider the word Sparagmos, it means “tearing apart”. It’s a common theme in mythology: a fate for men who have been disrespectful, don’t believe in a god’s power, or they see something they shouldn’t have – all three of which apply to King Pentheus, who is ripped apart by Dionysos’ female devotees, which include his own mother.

This is a land of intractable rules. That is what is behind the evasiveness of modern Greek life: if you want something, qualify it, “I’d like it but if it doesn’t happen that’s fine too,” or shrug it off, “I’m not concerned if it doesn’t happen,” or in slang, insist, “I’m not stuck on it.” The rule is: don’t be too attached because if you are it’s likely that it’ll backfire. The expression, “We’ll see,” is used a lot. Plans are fluid, life is contingent on fate. I am not suggesting that Greece’s is a place of inertia, it’s just tempered by a long tradition of unforeseen outcomes. The Thai mantra, similarly is, “it’s all impermanent anyway.” But in Thailand there are countless ways to try gaming fortune, by accruing merit, observing special calendars, by pilgrimage, and magic. Thailand is abundant, Greece is rocky and austere.

In Greece you never say that you’re doing really well – try not to be excessively joyful, avoid boasting. A child who been running around smiling is soon on their knees crying. It sounds silly, but this is the folklore. Of course there are people who make a habit of showing off, and bragging – and this has a macho air about it: I’m so tough and clever that I couldn’t care.

Alexandros goes back to Greece after Thailand, and sends messages about the state of things. In 2011, the country is insolvent, the economy collapsing.

“Athens is pretty amazing these days, the feeling of sinking is intense, and it’s like we can hear the subtle and distinct being-swallowed-by-the-swamp-of-bankruptcy sounds. Kiss Bangkok for me in the few clean spots.” (10^th of June 2011)

“Our Prime Minister said to the foreign press that he is leading a country of corrupt people, which is such a terrible remark to make even if it’s true. It’s just not the kind of thing you want to say in public about your own country being its Prime Minister.” (15^th of June 2011)

“I suspect Greeks have a difficult time being part of this western European model of economy and social structure, because our nature tells us something completely different, enjoy and relax, work as little as possible just to have enough to eat, let the gentleness of our nature do the rest, and the beauty, my god, it pierces the soul.” (29^th August 2011)

“Here amidst crazy shit with the economy, the atmosphere is heavier than anywhere I have ever been before… It’s like we are sunk in sticky black oil, and can’t move properly.” (12^th of December 2011)

“I think the more pain we feel the better it will be for all of us here in our gorgeous country. Only the pain will make us look again at the sun and thank this most beautiful sun of the world for its presence in our lives.” (16^th of January 2012)

As you get to know it, the Greek manner of navigating fate, lends a sombre air to the land’s joys. It is a frugal, precarious place. The history has been one of setbacks and hardships. When the economic crisis hit, people said, “unlike the other calamities, the Second World War, the Civil War, and this one is truly of our own making.”

The most famous philhellene is Lord Byron. He is seen as the martyr, the Romantic figure who gave his life for Greek independence. This is partly true. He died of fever in Missolonghi, without actually fighting in the war. But it’s that sense of sacrifice, being given to something – even more apparent in Kevin Andrews, who arrived in Greece to research the Frankish sites of medieval Greece, during the Civil War. He wrote a book about his experiences called The Flight of Icarus, and then stayed, falling deeply in love with the country, eventually he took up Greek citizenship. His book Athens Alive or the Practical Tourist’s Companion to the Fall of Man, is an ecstatic collation of writings on the city, from ancient to modern; and his line, the “peppery gracefulness of Athens before the war,” is bound to me, giving off a cascade of images. He drowned swimming off Kythera in the 1980s.

Love Greece, just don’t get too complacent, or something unspeakable will knock you on your ass. And remember that there’s only so much to go round, so if you’ve been taking, time will come to give back. I couldn’t help thinking that I had been given a lot by Greece, but I also lost a bit too, my mum, friends, places. This is what I felt when I pondered the connection between beauty and pain, it’s a binary; they are never too far apart.