A (Quasi-linguistic) Note on Flirting

Flirting is, in terms of content, highly stereotypical, and undeniably includes an element of the ridiculous. Formally, however, flirting is very different…

A specialized manner of interaction, flirting is composed by a ‘thesis’ and an ‘antithesis’, which are differentiated: only the thesis is actually flirting-proper, stereotypical. The antithesis, by contrast, is unpredictable, variable. In a sense, only one person at a time actually flirts – there is a ‘flirter’ and a ‘flirtee’. The object of the stereotypical utterance by the ‘flirter’ is simply to allow for the formal exchange, which in turn allows the ‘flirtee’ to reveal something about themselves. (Even if invented, it is always a sort of revelation.)

This is the reason we tolerate the ridiculous in flirting. Because flirting is not constantly ridiculous, but only intermittently: it always seeks to reveal something about the other person, to enable us to learn something hitherto unknown or obscure.

This is, furthermore, the reason flirting is only really possible in the very beginning of a relationship. When we have come to know each other fairly well, this particular form of exchange becomes impossible, because the stereotypical thesis ceases to function: the antithesis has nothing further to reveal.

Now you know why what sounded good when first proposed – revitalizing your relationship through ‘reintroducing’ yourselves – seems ridiculous when enacted; when, for example, you actually attempt to ‘date’ a long-term companion. This is also the answer to your bewilderment when something you used to do, to which you ascribed the almost magical quality of having won his/her heart, now fails to arouse the other person, and even provokes an angry, ‘don’t be stupid’ kind of reaction.

(This might look like the beginning of an agony-aunt column in a pop-linguistics journal, or simply a rather un-Chauceresque way to the familiarity-breeds-contempt idea, but there it goes. Tough luck, isn’t it?)

…damn you. Can’t you recognize one of my silences by now? *

So, this blog has been idle for a while. I never intended it to be a full-time job, but long silences are hardly ever a good thing…

You know, when you are very hungry – or gluttonous – and you do not want to wait until the food cools down a little, and you are staring, say, at a sizzling piece of saganaki (that is fried goat’s cheese, so non-Greeks can follow), and you can’t help yourself, so you shove a piece in your mouth, a big, chunky piece; a couple of seconds go by and you realise it is absolutely scalding hot, impossible to bite down on, and you start making sounds like “umrl”, and you are working your tongue around it, you are blowing and you are sucking, one cheek sends the chunk over to the other, and you really wish you could just spit it out in front of everybody, or just swallow it like a pill, but you must stay with it and that’s that.

That’s more or less how it’s been in the last few months. But at last, several things are done. So, now, I will be writing here more.

* Hugo Williams, “Message Not Left on an Answerphone”, Dock Leaves, Faber and Faber, 1994

How to Climb a Volcano in Perfect Comfort

Marooned in Brussels, my thoughts naturally turn to the wonderfully named – for non-Icelandic speakers, at least – Eyjafjallajökull volcano. The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the third issue of Forté Magazine, which will be launched tomorrow. I wrote about Forté a few days ago (I will from now on, thanks to the editors’ kind invitation, be an editor-at-large for the magazine), but what I did not mention in that presentation was that the third issue is themed, though rather broadly, around fashion. So, I woke up this Sunday with fashion and volcanoes on my mind – a strange coupling at first glance, though not so strange, as was revealed after a bit of reminiscing…

Nowadays, I see fashion mostly as this Photoshop process that removes tiny hairs from the arms and cheeks of pretty girls, who have left California to escape competition from taller, thinner and blonder models, and who came to Athens to live in downtown apartments, three or four or six of them at a time, subsisting on half a banana, waiting around the lobby of the newspaper, next to the ATM, hoping for a gig.

When I was about sixteen, though, not aware of any model even dreaming of a gig in Athens, I almost started my own fashion label. Well, not quite, but like many teenagers, I did mostly make the clothes I wore: I tore up my jeans with a flick-knife and then lay them in the bath tub and poured bleach on them, I painted meandering cannabis leaves on my army boots, and so on. But perhaps the creation I was most proud of was this t-shirt: it was just a normal, xl sized t-shirt, and I do not remember what I painted on it, except that there was a peace sign and below that, the words: psycho-killer. What made this t-shirt extraordinary, though, was that I had painted every single square inch of it in acrylic, so when it dried, it was a solid piece of plastic, more like body armour than an item of clothing.

Now, there is quite a beautiful, unique place in the Aegean Sea, called Santorini, an island of the Cyclades complex, quite renowned for its rugged landscape. It is shaped like a crescent, and in the middle there floats a smaller island, which is really the peak of a volcano. This island is, as one would expect, totally dry, just a pile of blackened rocks and red dust, surrounded by sulphur-infused, greenish milky water. It is a sight to see. It is also devilishly hot, the heat oozing from the ground, as if the sun were not merciless enough, and the climb up to the volcano, a rather anticlimactic wide hole with some smoke seeping through, is quite demanding on legs, lungs and sweat glands.

As it happens, I went on holiday to Santorini that summer, when I was sixteen, and one morning, still suffering from a hangover, I put on my tight, bleached jeans, my army boots, and my psycho-killer t-shirt, and went to climb the volcano.

As years go by, I often ask myself: what could have possessed someone so as to make him climb one of the hottest and least hospitable places on earth in a solid plastic breast plate? Does it not seem like torture, something very much designed to inflict extreme discomfort and pain?

The thing is, I do not remember much from that time, but I surely do not remember any discomfort, any pain. So, now, whenever I say how much I hate fashion, I try to remind myself of that climb up to Santorini volcano – a testament to a deep quest for purposeless, perhaps misguided, but all-too-valuable freedom that clothing does, from time to time, inspire in people.