If they had known of the October Revolution, wouldn’t they have, before that in 1905, exterminated the revolutionaries down to the last one, the same way that the Americans, seventy years later, did with the leaders of the Black Panthers, leaving only one of them alive, a zoo specimen?
However, I’ll say it again: fortunately, the old order can rarely see the dangers in something new, and that is why they let innovations take root. We ourselves were almost uprooted, but by then, dreams were too advanced in people’s psyches, and whoever tried to attack us fell on his face. Meanwhile, people had started sprouting wings.
Even so, that first, unimportant little side effect we bypassed — I will tell you how — came very close to shaking us up.
Mr. Inspector showed no sign of leaving. It was as if he were waiting for something. Dimitris understood straight away.
“As you can see,” he said, “we are publishing the Almanac not to make money, but because it’s something we love to do. We are selling dreams. Not feta cheese. And not parliamentary bills. Why don’t you do us the favor, if you believe our effort is worth it, of letting us get on our feet first, and then we’ll move to another building. I promise.”
The way he spoke seemed to be doing the trick.
Because it was the right way. If Dimitris had mentioned something about the laws of the
dictatorship still being in force, his argument would have had the opposite result: the inspector was a career civil servant who had loyally served all governments.
So as far as he was concerned, the determining factor of a good or a bad law was not the political background of the government that had decreed it.
Rather, all laws were either right or wrong, in relation to the laws themselves. Thus, in our case, the distance of two meters could only be contested because our machine was new. The law had been intended to regulate Linotypes; he could not contest the law by the political criterion that it had been decreed under a dictatorship. If Dimitris had used the latter argument the inspector, a man of the right, could say to himself:
“What’s the difference between a socialist government and a military dictatorship?” However, even though Dimitris had played it exactly correctly, the inspector was not convinced.
Bribing him didn’t work either. When Dimitris hinted, very smoothly, about a gift, perhaps a kangaroo from Australia, the inspector snapped that he was no animal lover. He didn’t have cats and he didn’t have dogs. He wasn’t about to take in a kangaroo.
The boomerang effect is well known, especially to someone who has lived in Australia. So when Dimitris began to fear that all these things — bribes, politics—
could end up turning against him, he chose to tell the truth about the dream we four had of publishing a newspaper of dreams, and about Dimitris’s offer, which provided us the means to do it for free. And now along comes the state and says, what? That the bed on which the dreamers lay had to maintain a distance of two meters from the ceiling in order for them to be allowed to dream? With this tack, he touched the Achilles’ heel of every man, harsh bureaucrat though he may seem: that is, the need to express the hidden part of ones’ self, the part that dreams, while the other part acts.
That was how the inspector appeared to me: a certain gentleness came over his face, something seemed to yield. As was proven later on, civil servants, and especially the older ones, are our most loyal subscribers, since they all spend their lives sitting at their desks, dreaming. He said, with the difficulty of a man used to enforcing the letter of the law, and not its spirit:
“All right then, as far as I’m concerned, you’re okay. But you’ll have to take care of this matter eventually.”
We don’t know, from that point on, what that man went through. When after a couple of years I tried to find him at his office, I learned that he had taken a leave of absence. It seems that, during those two years, when we kept stealing readers from other newspapers, the big bosses had taken care of him.
One evening, a month after that incident, the police showed up. The reason: a tenant on the third floor had complained that he couldn’t get to sleep because of the noise of the machine at two in the morning.
It was true that we printed on Friday evenings.
Dimitris had his machines booked up all week long with jobs that brought in some money, and then he would turn them over to us at five p.m. on Fridays for as long as it took.
But that night, we didn’t finish at eleven o’clock like we usually did. It was our fifth issue, and we had made some last-minute changes in the layout. We kept going until two a.m., and thus disturbed the tenant on the third floor. The printing office was on the ground floor of a small apartment building. The floor right above it was used as a storeroom, and then there were three floors of apartments. Never before had anyone complained about the noise. The soundproofing was perfect and the electronic equipment silent. It was only when we printed posters on the two-color Roland that one heard the traditional racket of the printing press. In many respects, the operators of the cylindrical machine looked more like nurses than printers — dressed in white overalls, holding remote control boxes, they made the enormous machine move, with its flashing lights, its dials, and little screens — it looked more like a monster from the Apocalypse than a printing press.
But now we had to face the charge of disturbing the peace.
This tenant of the third floor, as he confessed to us later, had been forced to call the police. He didn’t say who had forced him, but we knew. When we told him what we were trying to do, he turned out to be on our side. He withdrew the complaint. He too found the kind of life that was imposed upon him to be unbearable. He too believed in dreams as his only escape from the dead end they had built for us.
All this is coming back to me, now that people are preparing to celebrate the first Dream May Day. And I recall it all, the same way veteran fighters of a just cause recall the first years, when they were still searching blindly for a way to overthrow the establishment. Because with dreams, we undermined a sham that was suffocating people. How we succeeded in achieving victory, I will tell you immediately: we worked like termites. We ate at the furniture from the inside. We filled it with holes. And when the time came, the furniture collapsed on its own. No violence was needed.
Of course, things had come to an impasse
everywhere. This phenomenon of asphyxiation, of crisis, did not concern Greece alone. Man needs faith to support him. A vision. It used to be religion. Then socialism. And when that too retreated from the visions it had once proclaimed, people no longer had anything to believe in, and thus had no reason to suffer. For better days? Days would never be better; they couldn’t be. People knew that. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, told them that their lives would only get worse. It was inevitable.
After an ideology goes bankrupt, there is always a void before something else comes along to take its place. It was that void that we took advantage of. It was that void that our newspaper aspired to fill.
From the start, we gave a very broad meaning to the word dream. We didn’t refer solely to what people see when they are asleep. Rather, we implied that everything desirable, visionary, spiritual could, with a restructuring of the means of production, become tangible. Just as the accumulation of capital creates capitalism, we proclaimed, so the accumulation of inhibitions creates a new force that is surpassed only by the capacity of man to want something he doesn’t have and acquire it. For us, a dream was every possible and impossible human desire. All was fair, since everything belonged to the realm of the dream.