by Ioannis Andronikidis
“And the sky screen of her passion.”1
There are many ways one could characterise Frieda Liappa’s characters: mysterious, enigmatic, poetic, literary, but not necessarily fictional. Rather they are real, melodramatic and nostalgic for another “erotic asocial body.” In a discussion with Maria Nikolakopoulou, Liappa pointed out this nostalgic sentiment—Liappa would probably call this ‘persistence’—referring to bodies longing for a/their “past body, erotic meaning asocial.”2
In this essay, a proposal to reread the work of an insightful filmmaker, I will explore what feeling nostalgic about an “erotic asocial body” might mean in relation to oneself and to others (the “socialised body” and social relations). For the analysis of Love Wanders in the Night (1981) and The Years of the Big Heat (1991), I will follow the schema “passion – pause – desire,” which I have formed mainly following the chronological order of each character’s positioning in time and space (including steady or abrupt transitions) but also Liappa’s poetic work and the chronological publication order of her poetic collections.3 Along with nostalgia, questions regarding illness, entrapment, and ritual will complement the exploration.
Before proceeding, it is important to roughly define the schema and the terms I will utilise.
Passion here is seen as belonging to the past, something the characters tend to feel nostalgic about, something they attempt to recall or revive in their current lives, since they are in a state of pause.
Pause is traced in the in-between silences, the act—or indeed, praxis—of waiting or longing for something (i.e., the arrival of a past lover, of a relative, or the discovery of truth). It is prominent in the characters’ current state, entrapped as they are in a single place. Pause is also strongly felt through the unbearable heat and the sense of asphyxiation, both accentuated by strange illnesses.
And then comes desire: from the need to care for the other (emphasised by close-ups after dreams and nightmares, instantiations of the erotic) to a strange light juxtaposed by darkness. Desire defines the contestation of the characters’ current state of being (nostalgic for a past erotic asocial body, trapped in the present, longing for truth and change). It is also connected to the ritual: in both films, the script, sound, imagery, and overall atmosphere sustain a mysterious, ritualistic essence.
Love Wanders in the Night
In the opening scene of Love Wanders in the Night, two sisters, Stella (Mirka Papakonstantinou) and Irini (Maria Skountzou), pay a visit to their uncle at the hospital. While expressing his last wishes, he bequeaths a gun to one of the sisters, an act that positions their bodies in a state of in-betweenness, a state of pause: life and death.
As the two sisters leave the hospital—the camera documenting their bodies fading in a blue, murky light—a traditional song sets an ethereal tone for what is to follow, reminding us at the same time of Liappa’s initial inspiration: the exploration of colour in poetry, painting, and film4. Blue becomes night and the murkiness rain. The first literary recounting of a dream—or rather a nightmare—one of Liappa’s leitmotifs, unfolds in a baroque close-up5:
“It was you and our mother,” Stella says, “at our house. It was as we remembered it. Our mother was slaughtering a chicken. My father was holding us tight in his arms. Then we all went to the sea. Stefanos played with a wheel. My head without the body floating in the sea, red like blood.”6
The recounting of the dream, instead of representing it through images, activates the imagination; it establishes a nexus of the characters’ past (family, house, activities, and relationships) and the presence of their cousin, Stefanos, a catalytic figure in the sisters’ lives—harbingers of what is to come, all set against an enigmatic, violent, and yet “dreamy” landscape.
The following day, the two sisters decide to write to Stefanos. They are unsure about the content of the letter, and it is at this moment that we realise an antagonism challenges their caring (or co-dependent) relationship; underpinned by a sense of entrapment looming behind the walls of an apartment overlooking an open-air cinema.7 Stella is attempting to finish a sketch; Irini is suffering from terrible headaches.
Ms Evangelia lives in the same building with her daughter, Daphne, who wants to be an actress. Her mother disagrees. She finds refuge in the sisters’ apartment, and Irini appears to be the one closest to her.
Then comes Stefanos. First a phone call, followed by his bright presence reappearing in landscapes that recognise him; landscapes holding memories, and in them erotic asocial bodies, who struggle to recall their younger selves.8
Stefanos was afraid to return, to be seen as a stranger. As he explains, waking up one day and feeling everything is a lie makes the need to return unbearable and the act of returning inevitable. He and the sisters share that. On the one hand, the need to search for something in the past (passion) and, on the other hand, the flight to something new, the escape from asphyxiation, and thus the materialisation of desire. In the centre of those still lies pause. Even though it is dynamic, this back and forth process (from a past passion to a future desire, or vice versa) assumes at least a momentary suspension of pause; one that comes with Stefanos visiting the sisters in their house.
Reunited, they all drink wine, recall their past, and discuss death, loss, and utopia. “Which European utopia will save us?” wonders Stefanos. When the sisters start to argue over who has had the most successful life, it is revealed that Irini has never been in a sexual relationship. She feels sick; she is taken over by headaches again and goes to her room to lie down.
From the inside of the sisters’ apartment, we now pass onto the bar, another space enclosing feelings, memories, and desires. The heat appears to alter states of being and ways of thinking. It nurtures various conversations: those of cinephiles, of people drinking, contemplating, murmuring songs and lyrics.
Clash by Night (1952) is screened at the open-air cinema a few nights later. Irini is inside the apartment, getting ready to go out; putting on red lipstick, she performatively smudges it against a napkin. But instead, she goes out to the balcony, walks to and fro and overlooks the cinephiles crowding; still struggling to walk out of the apartment, still unable to feel free.
Juxtaposing Irini’s entrapment is Stefanos’ and Stella’s erotic scene in the woods the very next day. It is sunny; their naked bodies suggest passion and recall their past erotic asocial bodies, thus embracing or materialising desire. There is no pause here. Following Audre Lorde, this moment could be a connection of the spiritual to the political by means of the erotic, “those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions […] the passions of love.”9 After that, Irini decides to contest her own persistent pause. She is in the bathroom; she has put makeup on and is drinking red wine. She has broken the glass frame in one of Stefanos’ photographs. She goes into the bathtub, which is already half full of water, and lies in it. She holds onto her brush tightly, combing her hair, staring with wide-open eyes—a pre-climax state.10 The brush touches her body, her aura almost emanating from within it, until she decides to take her own virginity. The bathwater becomes red, reminiscent of her sister’s dream of the sea turning red. She sinks underwater, and everything is settled.
A few days later, Stefanos and Stella are in a train station. Stella’s last phrase, after saying goodbye, is fundamental to the state of pause: “the more I fall in love with you, the more I cling to her.” The latter is symbolically accentuated by a cage of birds Stella holds to her lap as the train departs.
“Nocturnal teenager strolls”
By the time Stella arrives back home, it has become clear that she has had enough. Although she cares deeply for her sister, she feels it is time to leave their apartment.
Stefanos has now gone to visit Lefteris. He tells him he cannot handle the city anymore. Lefteris retorts that he always left at the worst times. After a few hours, an unexpected call in the middle of the night to the sisters’ apartment brings Stefanos there, drunk. Stella goes on to prepare breakfast for Stefanos after he has told her, “But you’re sick, you’re dying, aren’t you dying?”
He looks at the paintings on the wall, artworks created by post-war avant-garde artist Chrysa Romanos.11 “Décollage,” he says, “the moment the catastrophe takes place, the re-creation of a personal visual universe begins.” We cannot but wonder whether this catastrophe has already taken place inside Irini, especially when Stefanos makes a double announcement: he has sold everything bequeathed to them, and he will take her sister away.
It is raining profusely outside. Stella has left Irini without saying a word. She is devastated and afraid. After picking up Stefanos from a party, they go to a hotel, and the following day, we see them descending the stairs of an airport. From there, Stella decides to make one last phone call, but her sister does not pick up. It is time to leave. As they walk, Stella looks worriedly behind her, announcing what is to come. While their bodies are subsumed in the dark, her sister is naked in bed, the gun their uncle gave to her on the floor: a baroque shot approaching Irini’s dematerialising body, a figure fading under a strange light.
The Years of the Big Heat
Blood dripping on sand; Electra preparing a meal; a mysterious musical score revealing the ritualistic essence of the film. An older male figure recounts a story told many times before, yet with an ambiguous ending: “Here, they say, is here, and no one remembers love. They say that everything is erased, but there are still materials for writing. Now the light does not change here, and only those who remember are taken over by the nostalgia of the night.”
He then goes on to introduce the main story, placing it in September 1988: “When the years of the big heat came, I was on the other side of the sea. I was with them, there, and their love story is true, according to my memory.” The older man now gets lost in the heatwaves of a desert-like landscape.
Electra has a place by the beach, a small hotel. She always wants to finish her tasks before everyone else wakes up. She stays there, trapped, waiting for something. “I’m old enough, I want to know the truth,” she utters. And then comes the first recounting of a dream12:
Today I got up as if I had not slept all night. It was a dream: I was in the middle of a dark forest, and suddenly the sky started turning white. A white light without sun. This light was a horrible thing.
A close-up on a starfish diffusing oxygen, breathing, makes a salient point for light being a “horrible thing” for heat and asphyxiation. The radio announces that a strange epidemic is spreading in the country, possibly affecting the centres of memory and orientation. People are not to confuse the symptoms caused by heatstroke with the so-called disease. “Dizziness, mental confusion, instability, …” are announced as symptoms while a woman puts sunscreen all over her body.
Ritualistic sounds rise and fall, cymbals accompany a man dressed in white, holding a suitcase, walking on the sand. He arrives at Electra’s place, dehydrated, seemingly exhausted.
A stranger arrives or returns – just like Stefanos in Love Wanders in the Night feared. In this case, he appears unexpectedly. He asks for one of Electra’s rooms; he splashes water on his face and leaves the tap open as he moves to the balcony and overlooks people lying on the beach.
Electra walks into the room; she is tempted to look at the stranger’s documents, but she does not. Instead, she goes to her apartment and changes clothes. The stranger decides to explore what we perceive as an uncanny scenery, both familiar and alien to him. It is in this instant that we realise the vital role of memory or nostalgia. But how is one to feel nostalgic about a place one is not aware of, or a place one fails to recall?
An answer appears in the landscape and its people, who recognise him. “Pavlo,” an old male figure utters, “so you are here again, eh?”—and thus the stranger’s name is revealed: Pavlos. “I remember and forget at the same time,” he retorts. “It started with the big heat,” he continues, directly pointing to the film’s central theme: unbearable heat, a strange illness. And, as if in a fantasmatic interlude, we are now in the koilon [auditorium] of an ancient theatre, Electra holding Pavlos in her arms, their past and present relationship remaining a mystery.13
A group of young people are also staying at Electra’s. They are on vacation here. Yet, in a peculiar manner, both nervous and lethargic, they await their friend, Nikitas. His not returning means they are currently trapped in pause, in escalating asphyxiation, waiting for something to change. There also appears to be a lack of communication: it defines their pauses, and only allows for ephemeral contemplations on past passions and future desires.
Pavlos is now back in his room. He is a proofreader and editor. A phrase in the manuscript he is working on stands out—“would history have any meaning otherwise?” The phrase underlines the ambiguity of (hi)story; it throws us back to the beginning of the film and the old man’s words: “yet, with an ambiguous ending.” Indeed, (hi)story could be understood here through what was pointed out as a fantasmatic interlude.
In The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan, Todd McGowan makes an argument for a new way of relating to history; one that allows spectators to see “the past not as a validation of the present but as a testament to its failure.”14 The characters seem to understand the former. It is prominent in their oscillation between staying and leaving. They all stay, though; the possibility of truth keeps them stranded. A conversation before a mysterious cave is evocative of their inner selves, and thus their attempt to remember their erotic asocial bodies: “No matter the age, we stay the same,” we hear, to which a young girl with a red hat and an old bicycle responds: “If you stay the same, you are bound to die.” Perhaps, then, the characters understand history as interrogation, as a means to reach desire – that is, if they choose not to stay the same.
Pavlos meets a woman at Electra’s. They take a walk on the beach. After discussing her coming there every summer, she characteristically adds, “from where we cannot go anywhere.” Her words on the way back, though, “You see, some people are clumsy at being happy,” aptly articulate the characters’ state of pause. Could it also be that people lose their identities somehow by not remembering something? Could the characters have lost part of themselves?
In the middle of the night, we find Electra in Pavlos’ room: “it seems you’re sick, you are ill,” she says. Pavlos asks for a woman named Maria and then falls asleep as Electra wets a handkerchief and tries to soothe away his pain, reducing the unbearable heat. Later, we find out that Electra’s mother was named Maria, but their relationship remains perplexing.
The next morning finds them speaking about a traditional feast that has not taken place in years. The young girl with the red hat runs into Pavlos in front of the mysterious cave. They start discovering the area, “Hot wind,” she says; “Simoom,” replies Pavlos, and their expedition unfolds into a ritual. One of the symptoms mentioned at the beginning, lack of orientation, defines their walking in the desert-like landscape, while a snake’s voice and looming presence complement the imminent sound of cymbals.
The impending fear described above is again presented as a nightmarish interlude. The next scene brings us back to Electra, who then drives all the way to the port, waving goodbye as travellers embark on the Milos Express. Guidelines against heatstroke and the mysterious illness are now disseminated almost like ambient sound through the ship’s loudspeakers.
“Digging up the Future”
The sun is setting. Electra and Pavlos take a long walk by the beach. They discuss those who are able to dream: “Have you ever thought that even the dead dream of the living?” Electra asks. A dynamic image is created here, one that foresees a tragic event. “Give me a future, even if it is fake,” she continues. The characters are evidently longing for something to change, desiring a future, even if that would materialise as fake or fantasmatic.
We slip in time. Two phrases build up a ritualistic atmosphere: “The fruit of the olive tree produces a wild olive, the fruit of the pear produces a fruit.” A woman constructs what could be understood as land art. Each rock she positions in the circle attempts to restore and connect “passion – pause – desire”—as if filling in the cracks surfacing in a flaky landscape.15 Each rock summons a gusty, howling wind that ultimately blows away everything, leaving Electra crying in Pavlos’ arms.
The Simoon suddenly recedes inside the sea. It deposits corpses. Electra tries to pull herself together, pleading for Pavlos to take her to the fest.
We are now at the night of the big heat, the narrator informs us. A live orchestra plays “Sea Bird,” a song composed by Thanos Mikroutsikos and Lina Nikolakopoulou, which speaks via personification about travelling the world, looking for a love that would resemble a big mountain, but failing to do so. Perhaps that is why in the next scene we are visiting Electra and Pavlos as children playing on the baize of a billiard table. Their younger selves might be able to discover such love; there might be hope left. What is certain is that the latter scene indeed reveals something about their relationship: their memories and the reasons why they are together in this present pause, which they anxiously try to contest.
“And the end has this ambiguity,” Liappa has said in a similar context.16 In this case, ambiguity meets desire, but also violence, as we reach the end. Electra and Pavlos consummate their past passions into a love scene full of desire. Suddenly, a male figure walks in and first stabs Pavlos with a knife, then cuts Electra’s throat in front of a crying baby in a nearby crib.17
“The world changed, life changed, everything is strange under a strange light,” we hear the narrator say. The camera slides over Electra’s place. Both Electra and Pavlos appear holding hands behind the orchestra; now only musical instruments are set on chairs. There are no musicians, no crowd.
A young male figure is sitting with the first narrator of the film on white rocks, struck by unbearable heat. Some of the thoughts he expresses could be seen as the most eloquent and yet enigmatic descriptions of a strange illness or a spreading virus:
The world around me, disoriented. […] People gather in places where there is still water. […] People leave the cities and then go back. Because only there are they able to deal with the disease. […] Infection is everywhere. […] Nobody knows.
In the mysterious cave, there is a sanctuary.18 Another interlude: “Let the heat go, let the white light go, let the big heat go,” the young girl with the red hat persistently exorcises the evil. Perhaps people need to forget, to let go. We return to the young male figure:
They say that in order to survive, you have to forsake who you were, to forget what the world was like before; before the big heat. I was trying to remember. I was lost, then I found my way, and again, I was lost. […] I wanted to come. I had to come. At Electra’s beach.
And so they all “glided in time,” the narrator says. Some met those whom they had come to find. Some remembered, others forgot, but after “the night of the big heat, they [all] stayed there forever.”
Electra is pregnant. We see her lying on the beach with Pavlos. They stare at the sea waves. They appear liberated, like there is no disease, like they have found each other again. Perhaps they are in the future she wanted him to promise her. And, it might be a fantasmatic future, but it is theirs, and upon that, they are lost in darkness.
An archive of feelings: what about desire?
It is intriguing how the materiality of the bodies is contested at the end of both films: an actual death in Love Wanders in the Night and characters almost floating, their ghost-like bodies disappearing—or better, dematerialising against the sea waves—in TheYears of the Big Heat. If we were to return to the initial schema, “passion – pause – desire,” this moment could be identified as desire or post-desire, by which both some kind of catharsis and melancholia are expressed. As to the latter, Mark Fisher has pointed out that “in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared,” perhaps allowing for what was earlier mentioned as an in-between state.19
However, while the characters retain attachment to space and to their object of desire (erotic asocial bodies), there also seems to have taken place a transcendence or flight from asphyxiation and the previous state of pause.Therefore, dematerialisation, in this case, could be seen as both a contestation of materiality and a form of emancipation (desire), by which I mean distancing oneself from the conditions propagating pause.
We should not deny, though, the role of memory and nostalgia. Svetlana Boym’s conception of “reflective nostalgia” can be conducive to a further understanding: reflective nostalgia, Boym underlines, “does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones.”20 This is precisely what the characters’ emotions are in these post-desire landscapes. But, having reached desire,do their bodies leave any trace behind? That is to say, is desire somehow documented or archived?
Tracing back a few instants in both films can reveal the agency of bodies assembling an archive of feelings21: bodies recounting dreams under a strange light; bodies unfettered, willing to take risks, when it comes to finding out the truth; dehydrated bodies melting under the searing heat, attempting to figure out ways to deal with fluctuating emotional states; bodies in need of a future, even if it is fake22; bodies ultimately longing for a new home, for “passion – pause – desire.”
Notes
- Frieda Liappa, Poems (Syllogos Apantahou Nisioton “Pamisos”, 2016), 100. [Unless otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s.]
- «Η Μαρία Νικολακοπούλου συζητάει με τη Φρίντα Λιάππα» [“Maria Nikolakopoulou discusses with Frieda Liappa”], Synchronos Kinimatographos, no. 28-29, 1981, 25. Emphasis added.
- Although it will become clearer as the films’ analysis unfolds, it is important to note that Frieda Liappa’s poetic work was published in reverse chronological order; that is, her very first collection is the last to be published, and the rest follow that order. Christos Aggelakos notes that “the chronological referents sum up [Liappa’s] understanding of time: a river, like Pamisos, where she swims backwards to reach the spring of her origins.” For an insightful perspective on the above, see Christos Angelakos, «Τα μυστικά της ποίησης, του σινεμά η μαγεία: Για τις ποιητικές διαδρομές της Φρίντας Λιάππα» [“The secrets of poetry, cinema’s magic: For the poetic routes of Frieda Liappa”], in Frieda Liappa, Poems, 147.
- See Nikos Engonopoulos, Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1938-1978 (Green Integer, 2008).
- For the use of “literary” here, see “Maria Nikolakopoulou discusses with Frieda Liappa”, Synchronos Kinimatographos, 26. In specific, Maria Nikolakopoulou says, “There was […] in your script a literary dimension […] Did you ever have to face the problem of how to adapt a literary image in film? […] But you omitted all dreams…” [meaning, their filmic visualization] – to which Frieda Liappa responds: “dreams […] I felt the need to make everything more subterranean, violent and harsh, constricted and desperate. […] I decided that Stella would only recount her dreams and [that I would] not illustrate Irene’s deliriums. All that, which as word [speech, discourse] could work in the script, would attend to the image a pseudo-poetic dimension that I did not want.”
- The “wheel” in the dream could be understood as “hoop rolling.”
- An interesting element accentuating the sense of entrapment is Irini reading Voyage autour du monde, a travel journal written by Louis Antoine Bougainville, documenting his expedition around the world from 1766 to 1769.
- “I haven’t changed. I’ve become tougher with memory,” is a phrase in the film, as well as Stefanos’ struggle to recall his past self: “I think I was never young,” he says. There is another phrase, though, that strongly relates to nostalgia: “But, the body you once dreamed of in puberty, that you can only dream of,” Lefteris says to Stefanos’ wife, who has accompanied him on the trip. A question arising here is whether the latter could imply it is impossible (for the characters) to return to their past erotic asocial bodies; whether, that is, it means they would only be able to fantasize about that return.
- Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic,” in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader (SAGE Publications, 2006), 89.
- Clarice Lispector elaborates an intriguing metaphor around pre-climax: “As for my so-called personal life, maybe it was the sporadic sculpture that gave it a light tone of pre-climax […] Or because of having the experience of patiently wearing down the material until gradually finding its immanent sculpture.” See Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions Books, 2012), 21.
- For the important and polysemic work of Chrysa Romanos, see the 2014 solo exhibition at Breeder Gallery in Athens, https://thebreedersystem.com/activity/chryssa-romanos/ [Accessed: 10 May 2022]. See also Dimitris Tsoumplekas’ Amazonios – We are sailing with a corpse in the cargo, a multidimensional artistic project elaborated on Nikos Kessanlis and Chryssa Romanos’ house and studio in Polydroso, next to the creek of Halandri (Athens), part of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) “Extra Muros” Exhibition Programme, and running from May 6 to July 3, 2022, https://www.emst.gr/exhibitions/amazonios-we-are-sailing-with-a-corpse-in-the-cargo [Accessed: 10 May 2022].
- See previous film, and the use of dreams in Liappa’s filmmaking. E.g., “Maria Nikolakopoulou discusses with Frieda Liappa”, Synchronos Kinimatographos.
- The phrase “fantasmatic interlude” is used here, following Todd McGowan, who, speaking about Alain Resnais, says that “by using the documentary footage as a fantasmatic interlude in the film, Resnais forces us to encounter the failure of our look at the very moment that we see the historical object.” See “Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past,” in The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (State University of New York Press, 2008), 189. [Emphasis added.]
- Ibid.
- The connection drawn here is one inspired by Maarten Vanden Eynde’s Restauration du Lac de Montbel (2003), from whose recent retrospective exhibition I also borrow the title for this subsection. See https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=11&lang=en. [Accessed 28 January 2022.]
- See “Maria Nikolakopoulou discusses with Frieda Liappa”, Synchronos Kinimatographos.
- It is important to highlight that based on this scene, the film was enmeshed in a “indirect censorship scandal,” with the charges ultimately dropped in court. Nikos Vasilopoulos highlights Liappa’s vital contribution in “the female reception of love that remained [however] hovering and was consciously silenced.” See Nikos Vasilopoulos, Το αποσιωπημένο γυναικείο βλέμμα στο ελληνικό σινεμά [“The silenced female gaze in Greek cinema”], Marginalia, no. 08 (22 March 2019), https://marginalia.gr/arthro/to-aposiopimeno-gynaikeio-vlemma-sto-elliniko-sinema/ [Accessed: 28 January 2022]
- The film was shot in Milos, Greece.
- In a section subtitled “Not giving up the ghost,” Fisher goes on to highlight a distinction between mourning and melancholia. Both are about loss, he reiterates following Sigmund Freud, but “whereas mourning is the slow, painful withdrawal of libido from the lost object, in melancholia, libido remains attached to what has disappeared.” See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zero Books, 2014).
- “Nostalgia Svetlana Boym,” Atlas of Transformation, http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html [Accessed: 26 January 2022]
- I am following up on Ann Cvetkovich’s insightful exploration, where one reads: “The archive of feelings is both material and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not ordinarily be considered archival, and at the same time, resisting documentation because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records.” I am arguing for an “archive of feelings” that, in this case, lives and is assembled in more intimate, personal spaces, and by means of both nostalgia and desire. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke University Press Books, 2003).
- Mark Fisher underlines that “the spectres of lost futures […] reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world”, while “the slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” See Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life.