HARIS KALAITZIDIS
war machine
ed. Home page 160

In a world where there is always war, two mutilated bodies, one male, the other female, test their defense mechanisms, the warheads of an internal battle. Dionysus and Ariadne are nothing more than two corpses tormented in agony. Both were twelve years old when they were first physically abused. Dionysus was constantly abused by his father, who was furious about his homosexuality. Escaping the drearyness of the countryside and domestic hell, Dionysus plunged into the night of Athens, leaving his body to the north for the most brutal manifestations of sexuality. Ariadne lived in a house dotted with a labyrinth of dark corridors, which increased her fear, fear persistent and indomitable. He was afraid he would feel more than he could bear. Feelings hurt her. It wasn’t until she scratched her body that “the despair of the sane” calmed down.

First literary appearance of Haris Kalaitsidis (Athens, 1999), who presents himself in an exploration of the endless manifestations of physical and mental abuse. The narration is dominated in all possible versions by the suffering body, the body that hurts, breaks, bleeds, is robbed, is delirious, but also the body that is in ecstasy and trembles in the sweatless ethers. Dionysus and Ariadne are two sides of the same torn flesh, a body cut in half, undergoing martyrdom, split with the world. Their common suffering stems from the body and its intolerance for the blows of reality. They do not know how to exist and therefore indulge in voluntary rituals of destruction, actual suicides. They yearn for the ultimate escape, which they experience fleetingly through daily hallucinations. Aversion to the body, in which sensations accumulated uncontrollably, causes wild sexual delusions in them. Sex was for them a shroud, their self-exile from feelings. The physical violence made them forget about the “knocked out confessions” of their bodies, about their “spots and scars.” They were looking not for orgasm, but for extinction, escape from the body. They longed for the end of the world, the end of things. Dionysus, left in a self-destructive, amorous decline in the depths of the night, tore himself apart with market ties until his skeletonized body bloated in his belly, “creating a dark image.” On the other hand, Ariadne got drunk on pills and pills, fighting “the absolute horror around her body”, mentally begging the world to stop, to end. Two lovers are dead.

There is no doubt that the book of Kalaytsidis strikes with its gloominess and ferocity, which, however, do not hide a young, crazy look. Everything in the book is extremely intense, brutal and heartbreaking, heartbreaking. The paroxysm of feelings results in a tongue numb from pain, numb from pain. Of course, delusional writing derives its intensity precisely from authorial control. The stream of consciousness requires an invisible literary elaboration, not linguistic improvisation, but painstaking, logical synthesis. Kalaitsidis sometimes loses control, dragging the composition into incomprehensible impulses of raging lyrics, “into the black ocean of excess.” These outbursts are offset by the harshness of more sober moments, but the combination of para-aesthetic phantasmagoria with the brutality of awakening does not seem complete. I think, however, that in spite of its paraphrasing and digressions, Kalaitsidis’s book has an undeniable, unsurpassed power.