Even the End Has a Smell

By Ben Andoni

Writers usually keep an expression for when they are asked about the state of the world and the nightmarish paradoxes surrounding us. The writer Daniel Kehlmann (also translated into Albanian by A. Kove) mentioned a saying by Dürrenmatt (an author translated by the late A. Klosi) that a story does not end until it finds its worst variant, in an interview of his with the late Greek journalist Anteos Hrisostomidhis. It suddenly came to my mind when, at a panel of the SINTRAK festival (first edition, curated and conceived by translator and author Milena Selimi), I asked the well-known Bulgarian writer and philosopher Todor P. Todorov a few days ago about the time we are living in and how he perceived this time ontologically. A pause followed, then carefully turning toward the audience of the “Puppet Theatre” he said something that shook you: “You must hit rock bottom in order to change”, repeating what I had heard and read before. He fell silent to capture the audience’s impression. And then, with his eyes on them, he added a rhetorical question: “But what is rock bottom?” He gave the answer himself after a few seconds that seemed like hours. “I was talking about a topic in Russia. I repeated this idea and tried to elaborate it, believing I was within the idea expressing how I conceived the end philosophically. At the end of the activity, an old woman approached me and said: Son, do you know what the end is? What end were you really talking about? Have you experienced war? The blackness of bread? Extreme survival? Of course not, the old woman had continued, because had you lived them you would understand that poverty, death and the end you perceive philosophically turns at some point into matter. It seems to be before you and there is a stench to which you can never find a name, because it is horrifying. I hope you never experience this smell, because you will be terrified… you will all be terrified.”

We are making this long introduction for a moment Albania is going through, where no comparison can be found with any other event in the years of its existence, full of dark days. In the first quarter of the 21st century, no one has an answer as to why democratic Albania is so disappointing. There are no explanations. There is not even one justification to explain the evil, the lack of accountability, the gargantuan greed, the avarice, the way the institution is exploited by people whose meritocracy is questionable, and so on. The dilemma grows as this crisis Albania is going through exceeds our sensory capacities and our thinking abilities, apart from the irony toward moral categories that are no longer taken into account. Not only because of the latest scandalous case of SHISH chief Vlora Hyseni and the arrested businessman Agasi (if the leak of the investigations is true); not because of this parliament, ever lower in terms of intellectual and moral capacities; the empty propaganda and artificiality; or vanity; state corruption and luxury that are today part of a cynicism displayed on screens and thrown harshly and coldly in our faces. And, not because we are ignorant and do not understand, but because our very Being has now turned chaotic and appears as the narrative of something absurd that we experience as “normal”. If we believe Heidegger (this is in the literature), the problem is ontological: today’s Being has withdrawn, it has weakened. Today’s Albanian crisis does not come from a lack of knowledge; it is the clash of two ways in which being confronts itself and which cannot find themselves with each other. The first is the one destined to believe the institution, which disappoints it, and the second is linked to what it believes should really be. If you carefully follow the reasoning made in forums by some of the people who inspire the Flamingo Revolution, you understand that the Albanian being has an extraordinary desire for change and deserves it. It seems as if we have suddenly returned to the distant ’30s, when Albanian intellectuals believed in change through young people and the ideas they were to convey.

Today’s crisis, the endless cases of corruption (incinerator, 5D, reconstruction funds, AKSH and many, many others), the wiretaps (the author thinks it is excessive that they be made selective and given to the public in this form), the often useless work of the administration show that it has exceeded our capacities. Many colleagues, who claim to have access to many sources (this too constitutes one of the oddities of our democracy) are convinced that even bigger scandals will follow. This shakes you. When knowledge fails to orient itself, it is a sign that your knowledge is not failing; it is your Being that is showing itself as weak. Today, we are weaker even though we perceive and react. Democracy is stronger than us; we protest and demand, although things change very little. Tirana and Pristina protest, but things are there and look even gloomier. What we called “democracy” for 36 years in Tirana confirms two ideas. The first, what we are often told, that Democracy is procedure: elections are held, parties function (!), EU reports seem respected and really evidence the country’s development. And, the second, democracy as meaning: the concept that those procedures would make us part of the West, would protect us from the cynicism of the history we are living. In fact, we have the paradox: in Albania 97% of Albanians consider corruption a very serious problem in the country (IRI); the abuse of political power is seen as the main factor of this situation by 80% of Albanians (IDM); 59% of citizens declare they are dissatisfied with the way democracy develops and functions in Albania (IRI).

Weak democracy, then, is what we are living now. Institutions exist, but we do not understand their efficiency. Are they ours? Are they captured? Why is there no sense of change?

All this is more dangerous than a bitter end, because the end can even be replaced. But our democracy seems to be taking a kind of end, when people stop feeling that they own it even symbolically. Today’s state, where Rama is everything, no longer needs to stop people from speaking and in fact does not (the protest is proving it), but it has made Albanians feel that speaking changes nothing. Criminals make the law and time is showing they are untouchable, construction permits are taken by the strong and not rarely outside the rules, and your diploma does no work; deputies are often successful businessmen… and Albania is being abandoned. Relentlessly.

Philosophically, this is the end of ontological ownership, the Bulgarian professor would explain that day at the “Puppet Theatre”, once the first Albanian parliament. Perhaps we have not yet felt this end, but its smell is so strong and it seems the changes happening everywhere in Europe and the whirlwinds of war news coming more and more often are bringing it too. The Russian old woman knew this lesson from life, but her lessons “are no longer of use to anyone”. We are destroying the beautiful democratic dream ourselves. Unfortunately not only we Albanians, but everywhere. The smell of the end, the one that stinks, it seems is waiting to reveal itself to us an hour sooner… Except, it will be late. (Homo Albanicus)