Feeding the new fruit of forgetfulness took hard work, great pains, clever public relations, and the blood of many volunteers. At first, the dream lotus with which our readers went beyond themselves and revealed the other sides of their personalities, hitherto hidden away, would only emerge in secret sighs and private confidences, because, as the poet of the avenger dreams says, it takes a lot of work for the sun to turn and become the moon.
That was what we did, we five (four
dreamologists and our Maecenas). We started off unsupported by any kind of substructure. Very soon, however, much sooner than even we ourselves expected, that which existing socialism hadn’t achieved in seven decades was achieved by its utopia, which became fashionable again because it expressed, finally, the deeper desire of people to be outis (no one) in ou topo (no place). Every place ties one to a tomb, whereas the death of the soul is a utopia: no one knows where the soul goes after death. Dreams don’t need land to bear fruit, or plots upon which to be built, or fires to thin out wooded areas; they need instead an inner flame. It was this flame that our fellow human beings, with our initiative, managed to develop. The notaries were the first to pay the price of this transformation, since dreams don’t need to register with the Public Records Office. They don’t need a birth certificate or, hence, a certificate of death.
Contracts were also superfluous. Since the egg that is a dream does not need a chicken to lay it, thus circumventing the age-old question of which one came first (matter or spirit, body, or soul), there was no chicken coop fenced in by logic. Dream railroad tracks bore trains of dreams, unloaded dream passengers; dreams were dropping anchor at seaports, taking off at airports; the farmers of Thessaly organized themselves into dream cooperatives and started managing their dreams themselves; Larissa became the dream of Larissa, and Salonika that of Byzantium; Athens again became the dream of Pericles, who descended from where his biological death had exiled him and was once more among us with Phidias. Then Pericles himself recognized the mistakes of his previous life and no longer demanded a tribute from the other cities of the Athenian league or robbed their treasuries to develop the Acropolis and build the Parthenon, or asked his fellow citizens to make sacrifices for the war; he was dreamy and peaceful, he now said that both men and women, not only illustrious men, can be fittingly buried in any land, because the earth contains the idea of destruction, whereas dreams are indestructible. Thus differences are solved in dream jousts, attacks are met with dream defenses. Two thousand one was proclaimed the first year of dreams, because at that exact time all dreams would come to fruition, would become actions, so that later, people wound be able to accept successfully, with courage, having been prepared for it for a long time, their destruction; they would be convinced that they themselves were just a dream that was coming to its end. After all, it had lasted long enough — a few tens of millions of years — so there went their earthly existence, and that was the end of that.
However, things didn’t happen so quickly. Things never happen as quickly as the simplifying process of our memory would like to present. Of course, in the beginning, I was so involved in the daily occupation of publishing our newspaper, of which I was editor in chief (contradictory though it may seem, dreams do need editing, organizing, and, like a nursery, they need attention and vigilance: in order for it to blossom, a dream needs fertilizing, watering, pruning), that I didn’t have any time to keep notes on the side. But now that I recall the reactions of the press tycoons in this country, I don’t remember them having one good word to say about our paper.
A few days after the first issue came out (number one, of the first volume, of the first year), and after the unexpected welcome it received by people thirsting for something different (that first issue, as the reader may guess, has a special value, now that the State of Dreams has established itself and the Dream Police guard the borders against any enemy violation of our ethereal space), a few days later, there came to Dimitris’s printing office (located in Alimos across from the famous bakery, it was more than perfect, with the latest in technical equipment, built with the money Dimitris had made while working abroad, all of it foreign currency, the dream of the immigrant realized and our Maecenas found, given to us so our dreams too could be fulfilled) an inspector from the Ministry of Labor in order to check — or so he claimed — whether it was operating according to regulations. Mr. Inspector proceeded to observe that the cylindrical machine, a gigantic electronic monster on which we had printed our first issue, maintained a distance of, not two meters from the ceiling, as the law dictated, but only sixty centimeters. This constituted sufficient cause for the removal of the press’s operating license.
Dimitris was puzzled. Recently back from
Australia, he was ignorant of Greek bureaucracy and unaware of Mama Greece’s longing to draw to the very last drop the blood of any immigrant who made the faux pas of being repatriated and bringing back, like seamen do, all his foreign currency. He didn’t know that this Greek state of ours, during these two hundred years since its birth, had learned to live not by blood transfusions but by drinking blood like Dracula, so he didn’t pay much attention. But we knew and right away were suspicious. How much had the press bosses paid Mr. Inspector to show up out of the blue?
The printing office had been operating smoothly for the past year. Why was there a problem now and not before?
Therefore, it was the very success of our
newspaper — the first issue never even made it to the kiosks, but disappeared, as happens in dreams, right from the distribution vans — that had worried the smooth operators of the press business (who were used to making and breaking governments) enough to send their henchman just in case, as an initial scare tactic.
“And what law is this?” asked Dimitris.
“A law of 1968,” the inspector replied, and pulled out an official document.
“But at that time, these cylindrical machines didn’t exist,” said our friend, relieved. “This law refers to Linotypes, which indeed, for safety reasons, had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling.
Electronic machines are a different matter. And they weren’t put on the market until 1978.”
“Unfortunately, the law is always the law,” said the inspector, bowing his head.
“But you’re going to ruin us!” cried Dimitris. “We can’t raise the ceiling, nor can we lower the machine.”
“Good heavens, we don’t want to ruin anyone,”
said the inspector. “All we are doing is enforcing the law. If only the law would change, then there would be no problem. But until then, I would advise you to start looking for another place. And do it quickly.”
Of course, I think to myself now, if only they had been able to imagine the success of our Almanac, which became a daily paper within a few months, the press tycoons would have acted differently. That same day they would have kicked us out onto the street, thus drowning the yolk in its own shell. Dimitris would have sold everything and gone back to Australia. (It’s not uncommon for an immigrant to be forced to take that road again, because of the deep hatred every wretch who stayed home shows toward the successful repatriated immigrant.)
And who knows what the rest of us would be doing now? However, progress is accomplished in life thanks to the establishment’s predictable inability to deal with the threat of novelty. After all, isn’t that the way it happened in czarist Russia with the revolution?