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The Master’s started with a bang! Textual explosions, expansions of perspective and new avenues of thinking were being opened every week in the “Theories of Modernity” class with Professor Graham Allen – through the exploration of texts by Habermas, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Freud, Derrida – which seemed to me as intellectual leaps, taken within a period of five weeks, influencing and altering my way of studying and writing, accompanying me until the end of the MA. To assist the potential reader in navigating this text, I will divide it into two chapters, each for my two most important and on-going blog posts.

Chapter 1 – The Falling Tower

The Post-structuralist, Intertextual approaches, as well as the difficulty of some of the texts such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1874) and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966) led me to start my blog with a narrative which would allow me to explore the difficult theories of historical thinking, of deconstruction, and of post-modern techniques in a playful manner. Therefore, I started writing the on-going story “The Falling Tower”, subtitled “A Story Under (Ceaseless) Construction or; A Way to Come to Terms with Nietzsche and Derrida”, which I continue adding to it, up until this point, constantly informing it as my understanding of all the theories develop and expand. Here is an excerpt of this story:

This text’s central axis is a falling tower. This text can be thoroughly represented by this said construction; its Paragraphs being its walls and its floors, its battlements, and its foundations; the Title its little roof. Throughout the text there will appear parentheses, square brackets etc. which will assist us in the re- / de- construction of the dilapidated building, like ladders and scaffoldings are being utilized in genuine structures. Different colours will finally be used to indicate the period in which the writing took place, to signify thus the passage of time.

22/09/2022 – 05/11/2022

06/11/2022 – 03/12/2022

10/01/2023 –

[…]

Sitting on a stone wall, having the luxury of time and the tranquility of an early morning, I began to meditate upon the falling tower. Of its heroic past, many tomes have been written, overflowing with names and dates, battles, coats of arm, strategic schemes and architectural designs. The more spiritual – or some would say superstitious – of them wanted apparitions having a claim to the place, then and now, and unworldly lights illumining its black windows in the night. This idea prompted me into visualizing some of its more recent residents; those that did not have to do anything with a knight’s gallantry, a siege, or the politics of the fiefdom, and were probably not endowed with much, or any of the region’s history whatsoever; the only thing concerning them being their survival and prosperity. [Does this final remark assist the argument or perplex the thing?]

These people, my flickering creations, found their way to this desolate – apart from the tower – place and, weary as they were, thought that it would serve them as a good spot to set camp for the night. Out of respect – or out of plain fear – they did not try to step into the tower. The tower protected them from the wind in the night and it provided its thick shadow during the day. Thus, they set into building their little village around it. The ancient monument provided them with stones, which they found scattered around it. [historical fragments] They were gathering them with their eyes cast to the ground and they were thanking the tower for its benevolence. They soon grew into not fearing the tower; they built their houses close to it, identified themselves with it, took pride on it and marveled on its height and elegance despite the fact that it was crumbling to pieces. They even created their own myths surrounding it. It reminded them of old, grandiose times, and that’s why they respected it; it provided for the present and was furnishing their future and they venerated it. Through its loose, dislodged old pieces, heavily laden with history, it created the present, provided for the future, while retaining its past.

Does it really, though, in the situation described above, manage to retain its past? Many would claim that the unsophisticated peasants who found the opportunity to build their hovels and pigsties around the tower, ignorant of its former magnificent history, having on top of that the impertinency of creating absurd myths around it, are not to be taken seriously since they lack significant historical facts. Some would say that it is through – and only through – these solid factualities that we are able to recount the past, assess the present and, possibly, predict the future.

[Can talk about someone coming at telling them the official history of the place; what would have happened then? Would they dispel their own myths? Would they embrace only the official history or try to mingle it with their own myths with which they are more familiar with and they appreciate and probably identify themselves with and through these myths their whole identity and behaviour is reflected/projected?] -->

--> See now this old, lanky fellow approaching, his knee-bones producing a snapping sound with every step he takes. His shoulders seem to be extremely hunched forward and the paleness of his skin would excite many ghost stories enthusiasts. His black, long coat flutters in the morning breeze as he treads clumsily among the ferns, dragging behind him an unyielding poor donkey which, carrying a huge load of crates and square packages on its back, has sat down in its hindlegs in protest. He abruptly stops, fixes the round spectacles that sit upon the tip of his bird-like nose and, stroking irritably his goaty beard starts giving a long lecture on the subject of impertinency and the importance of duty to the rebel creature. Now this man is a historian, on his course to one of his monumental pilgrimages. He visits this imposing historical artifact and will eventually find out that, not only the plebeians have turned the area around the tower into their home, but they have on top of that defiled its historical significance by distorting the facts and interposing their pagan beliefs, creating an imprecise abstraction of intermingling notions of history and myth. Driven by his instincts – endowed to him by delving so much into the past – he will now definitely be repulsed and will try to correct the wrongdoings they have done to the historicity of such important a place.

A cow; somewhere in the distance; munching grass. It looks at the historian approaching the villagers and senses the tension building between them. For a flitting moment the film that obstructs her vision falls apart, and she feels the urge to say something to them; to reconcile them. As she opens her mouth to utter her single word of wisdom though, her memory fades away; the fog returns, and she feels blissful in her own realm of forgetfulness. She nods her head, and tears from the ground another imbued with the morning dew lump of grass.

[…]

One sunny afternoon, while the peasants were gathered around a great oak to rest for a while from ploughing the fields, the historian, grabbing the opportunity, surrendered again into one of those trance-like states – which were so common now to every bystander – talking incessantly and with fervor about the importance of history. Now, something amidst the crowd slowly commenced making its way towards the historian and the peasants, perceiving that movement, hurriedly made way. A short, hunched old lady, garbed in gray robes and having her pure white, long hair loose on her shoulders appeared from the opening amid the crowd and, balancing herself on a wooden stick proceeded towards the rambling lanky figure of the historian.

‘And what about Dave?’ said the old lady with a croaky voice, but the Historian, lost in his visions of grandeur did not hear her.

‘What about Dave?’ shouted again the old crone but still the Historian did not hear a thing.

‘Oi! Lanky!’ said the old lady, now evidently outraged and poked the Historian on his ribs with her stick.

The Historian’s twaddle stopped abruptly, and he turned – a disdainful look on his face – to meet the calm, slightly aggravated face of the old lady.

‘What!’ he asked, apparently irritated.

‘What about DAVE!’ said again the old lady and with a chorus the peasants joined her: ‘Yes! What about Dave?!’

‘Who in the Nine Circles of Hell is Dave?’ returned the Historian to the crowd and he immediately recognized his mistake. The peasants’ faces glimmered as they finally understood that the seeming all-encompassing wisdom of the Historian is limited. In the Historians features – although he resolutely tried to hide it – you could see the reflection of the awareness of his imminent defeat […]

The old lady now is carried by two young villagers and put on top of a rock; and from up there, where everyone could see her and she could see all, she started narrating the story of Dave the Wizard:

“It was during the years of the Great Turmoil when the shape of the Earth as we know it was still not thus formed; when parts of it fell under the dominion of Chaos, and amorphous, palpitating territories still existed. It required someone accustomed to the workings of entropy, someone who possessed high arcane knowledge to approach these realms where the forces of Chaos ruled to subdue and finally mold them into material; logical to the human perception forms. That man – if a creature as he can be called thus – was Dave, the Wizard. He approached the border of this throbbing mass and, while straining to keep his mental state intact, engraved runes on the ground and by uttering a powerful incantation he created matter out of Chaos. On these newly-claimed grounds he wanted to build his abode. Thus he mustered our ancestors and with their strength and his guidance they built this magnificent tower. There Dave the Wizard lived and prospered for a very long time; and with him the builders of the tower, who decided to stay in this newfound land and make it their home, thrived as well, since the magick of the Wizard made their crops to flourish and their cattle to grow in numbers. Until one day, claimed by this powerful urge to create more and more – which grows as a fever to human beings possessed by extravagant powers, and can sometimes lead them to demise and sorrow – Dave left the tower and his subjects; vanishing one day into thin air. From that time our people were roaming the continents, looking for Dave and for a meaning in their lives until – futile as these wondering turned out to be, returned again to our initial dwelling, to wait here for our patron's return”.

‘Absolute drivel!’ exclaimed the Historian but, seeing around him the eyes of the villagers looking with sheer joy at the old lady and realizing that they never looked at him that way, he got so angry, partly with himself and with the whole universe that he kicked a Doric column that happened to lie down on the grass near him so hard, that he sprained his ankle.

See him lying now on a pallet in the old woman’s house; bunches of herbs hung to dry dangling from the ceiling above his head, filling his oversized nostrils with mingling aromas. His unfortunate foot rests on a stuffed cushion but his hands move frantically as he is writing notes upon notes on his parchments. The old lady’s slippers are heard screeching on the wooden floor as she appears from around the corner, enthusiastically talking and carrying a steaming bowl of carrot soup which, placing it on a stool next to the Historian, goes along to her working bench and commences grounding herbs in a mortar, continuing with her narration without losing her train of thought. The Historian seems to have made a big discovery. The old lady seems to have discovered something as well. Let’s leave them for a while to savour their newfound bliss…

[The peasants start recognizing in themselves the Power of shaping the Present and therefore (to some degree) the Future through the utilization of knowledge which they continuously acquire, construct and deconstruct and finally incorporate into their actions, not having to entirely depend on others’ opinions and “established facts”. Most importantly though, they have discovered the method of reshaping the Past by incessantly reassessing it in the Present].

[Now, if my flittering creations finally became greedy and unappreciative – some would say dissident or profane – they would tear every single stone apart from that imposing structure, (as my ancestors did), leaving no trace from it apart from fragmental pieces of stone around their homes and walls encircling their fields and pastures. Would there be any past then? Would the history of the tower continue its course, not as a single entity – as an epicentre – but as a refraction of many histories projected on each stone; a fragment on a barn, a wall, a cottage].

[ENDING: I see a crow carrying a worm going to a recess on the tower where its nest is and feeds its little ones. Continuity, utility in future. Where is man in that? Must be part of it? P.B. Shelley would say yes; Mary would say Nope (?)].

Chapter 2 – Fragments of Ireland

Coming to Ireland from Greece was a new and life-changing experience for me. Since the first day that I came here I tried to keep a journal because I felt the need to keep a record of all the new places, the people, and the experiences of my new and – at least for myself – exciting adventures. The blog created for me a marvelous space to write and share my thoughts and it also acted as a prompt to keep me writing. As the texts in my journal were growing quite dense because of the various things happening so fast, I needed to condense them, both to be more straightforward for the reader and easier for me to keep on writing them regularly. The idea of the “Fragments of Ireland” came to me after I saw Professor Graham Allen’s ten syllable one line per day poem “Holes” (http://www.holesbygrahamallen.org/), which I reappropriated to match my humble literary skills. These fragments were a fun way to narrate my new experiences to some of my friends and professors back home and it helped me to keep on writing and thinking about all the material we studied, incorporating them into a text of mine, and into my everyday life. Here are some of the fragments:

Fragments of Ireland

Idea shamelessly stolen and vulgarly reappropriated.

Thessaloniki, Greece 02/09/2022

With every step I took, they became smaller; and as they became from small to tiny, a dark lump kept growing in my chest. Lost them behind some Duty-Free bloody perfumes.

Cork, Ireland 17/09/2022

A Capitalist Paradise and I’m running about with nothing but a fig leaf.

Cork, Ireland 18/09/2022 I always had an urge to write. But every time I pressed my pencil on the paper there they were, springing out like some ghastly caricatures of Gilray’s prints or like ludicrous cartoons out of “MAD” magazine, laughing their heads off hysterically, pointing at the page with their crooked fingers, blabbering nonsense. Nietzsche, riding the horse, has come to the rescue!

Cork, Ireland 30/09/2022

She keeps doing that. She pops her little head out of the wallet every time I open it and makes me smile.

Cork, Ireland 02/10/2022

“Only one month in Ireland and you’re already drinking the black stuff!”

Cork, Ireland 05/10/2022

The coffee at home tastes the same as the Orwellian “Victory Coffee” must have had tasted. I need to find a job.

Cork, Ireland 13/10/2022

Derrida kicked ass in that conference, didn’t he?

Cork, Ireland 14/10/2022

So cold in this library! Bob Cratchit in Ebenezer’s office. Rubbing fingers, breathing on them, pencil sliding off of them.

Cork, Ireland 18/10/2022

‘Here’s the tall garden wall’, he said. Then showed me to a breach between the stones, through which I had a glimpse of the magnificent garden. Then he said, ‘Go and gather some wood and I will help you build a ladder’.

Cork, Ireland 19/10/2022 From Transhumanism to Alchemy to Renaissance Occultism to Hermeticism to Coincidentia Oppositorum to the Decadent Movement to Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poems; and now a chilling premonition that H.P. Lovecraft is lurking in a dark corner, waiting for his turn.

Cork, Ireland 21/10/2022 First money from the restaurant; 22,50 euro tips. That’s close to the basic allowance in Greece. Big breath for mum. Kettles and cutlery and glasses and pans are boiling and banging and clattering in my room while I’m sleeping.

Cork, Ireland 28/10/2022

Keats fell into the soup of the day.

Cork, Ireland 03/11/2022

“Dennehy’s” Pub. Best Beamish in Cork!

Cork, Ireland 05/11/2022 I don’t know why I keep on bringing “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” with me at the restaurant. It oddly comforts me. Like the teddy bear I used to drag around by the throat in kindergarten.

Cork, Ireland 02/12/2022

Friday night in Washington Street; a feast for the seagulls.

Cork, Ireland 16/01/2023

Everyone is looking up, smiling, bumping to each other, giggling, looking up again. Wintry dust on dark eyelashes.

Cork, Ireland, 23/01/2023

But if it was not for his turning back to look at her – the fool! – thus condemning her forever to wander among the asphodels, he would not, and she would not – unripe as they were – find within them the fervor to conjure up such words, such sounds, such images; to form heaven out of hell, hell out of heaven.

Cork, Ireland, 14/02/2023

A brushstroke of flour on a ruddy cheek.

Conclusion

Overall, I have structured my blog in a way that it can be considered as being personal and academic at the same time. Since I find it difficult to distinguish life from philosophy, literature and the theories I am studying, my blog has a tendency to reflect this attitude of mine, mingling those two aspects of myself. Apart from providing me with a space to express myself, to explore and share ideas, it also made me realize how my way of thinking and my writing style and abilities have rapidly developed throughout the year during my Master’s. Going back to my old posts, I can definitely notice great improvement in contrast to my more recent ones. Since I am considering applying for a PhD this year, I firmly believe that I will continue using and improve the blog in whatever new paths my academic and personal life will take me.