today

"There remains however a difference even if one takes into account the fact that the scientist never carries on a dialogue with nature pure and simple but rather with a particular relationship between nature and culture definable in terms of his particular period and civilization and the material means at his disposal. He is no more able than the 'bricoleur' to do whatever he wishes when he is presented with a given task. He too has to begin by making a catalogue of a previously determined set consisting of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, which restrict the possible solutions."

Claude Levi-Strauss
La pensee sauvage

the -almost- greatest moment ever...

There are a number of reasons for which I love football.

Most of the times football is beautiful to watch, like a nice film, only that you witness it taking place right there in front of your eyes. In striking contrast to people considering scientific results as "exciting", football IS exciting. In fact it is more than that. It is fascinating in a sense that it lights up passions and allows reactions that would otherwise be considered inappropriate for adults at my age. (For those who disagree, try about imagining the members of a certain "scientific" community celebrating their latest "exciting paper" in the streets).
Most important of all. Football means bonding, football means roots, in the sense that we all support a team that carries at least a distant connection to our social, national or familiar background. I support the team of my home town, the team of my father and my late uncle. It could not and should not have been otherwise.

The "greatest moment ever" is the title of the chapter that Nick Hornby devotes to his dearest memory as a football fun in his -great- book "Fever Pitch". Last night, in the loneliness of a half-full pub named Palace, somewhere in the Born, I was lucky to live my own greatest moment ever during my days in Barcelona. The "loneliness" stems from the fact that I was the only one passionately watching the game of Inter against Panathinaikos in one of the two screens available. The rest of the people were either boringly glancing at FC Barcelona thrashing Sporting Lisbon or indifferently having a beer while chatting. It was in the midst of this sort of surrealist atmosphere, when at the 68th minute a sudden scream of joy pierced the pub from end to end. "Yeaaaaaaah"! The rest of the people only momentarily turned my way to look at my blushing face, swollen with a slight embarrassment and a great deal of pride. My friend Julien, who "high-fived" me and the nice barwoman, who shouted "Happy hour!" in solidarity, were my two sole companions in that joyful moment. But I did not care. We were about to beat Mourinho's Inter and take a great step forward to qualify for the last-16 of the Champions League.

There is one reason, for which I hate football, though. And that is excess of love.

Which meant that the twenty-five minutes to follow were -as expected- an agony with no end. There is one thing in trying to achieve victory -or in my case, watching your team trying- and a whole different one trying to hold on to it. As the minutes were passing by with the scoreboard still the way you see it in the photo on top, my nerves were becoming more and more fragile. I hated football or I hated myself for loving it and I wished I was one of these indifferent people that only hear about results on the news and say "Really? they won in Italy?"

Now I know that I cannot be one of them. Simply because once you experience the uplifting effect of a great footballing victory, you can never go back to being a bored "couch-fun". Games like yesterday's are to be seen at the tip of your toes. After all, this helps you jump around more freely once the final whistle is blown.

a thousand splendid suns

"A thousand splendid suns" is the title of a book by Khaled Hosseini, which refers to his native city of Kabul. It is a direct reference to a poem by 17th century Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi, entitled "Kabul", which talks about the city's beauties. A certain couple of verses -loosely translated into english- talk about:

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"

Living a few thousand kilometers far from Kabul, I have had enough time to appreciate Barcelona's uncountable moons. On the other hand, I have been somehow missing out on its splendid suns, an accidental negligence I only realized this morning. In a city like Barcelona, the sun is more perceived than actually seen. One simply knows it's there but never manages to directly look at it. Except of course if he tries to do so very early in the morning. Which brings me to my main point.

Wednesdays are always difficult to start with. Stuck right in the middle of the week, too far from the weekend, but with an already accumulating weariness, they become even worse when I remember the lab meetings, scheduled every Wednesday morning at 9.30. To my bad luck, it happened that today, Barcelona's coldest day of the year so far, this time was pushed half an hour earlier, which meant I had to set my alarm for sometime around 7.30. Coming out of bed was as difficult as expected but I finally managed a few minutes before 8. As I was preparing a coffee-to-go and while getting dressed as fast as possible, I realized something of which I was subconsciously unaware until then. The fact that 8am is a quite reasonable wake-up time -for some people.

It was more like discovering an unseen world. As I was trying to be as quiet as possible, I noticed Giuseppe already having breakfast in the living-room, welcoming me with a rather ironic smile. I was in the shower, when glimpsing outside the bathroom window, I saw people already at their desks in the building next door. As I came out, hurrying for the bus, thinking I would find myself in a dark, deserted town, I saw people walking their dogs, reading their newspaper while having coffee, some of them having even finished their morning jog. A new, unknown world, lived and breathed under Barcelona's splendid sun, the same sun I came face-to-face with as soon as I turned right on Carrer Braille. A glorious sun rising out of the Mediterranean horizon, waving good morning to us all.

And a good morning it was. On the bus, the driver let two homeless people ride without a ticket.

Pessoa's trunk and some useless papers

I mentioned Fernando Pessoa in a previous post and I got bombarded by comments about him and his work. (Most of the comments were communicated orally so don't bother to look for them here, most of my readers are either too shy to write or too direct to come and talk to me in the face).

Then I got into a conversation with one of them about the legendary trunk, where the great inventor of his own antonyms kept most of his work, unpublished until after he died. Apart from the obvious appeal old, wooden trunks may have on everybody, recalling treasures kept in wooden chests, there were connotations -for us "informaticians"- of storage, memory and registries. The mythical literary treasure, which you can actually see in the photo above contained 25,426 items (a precision that our "informatician" reflexes highly appreciated), which have still not been fully catalogued. Parts of this material have been incorporated in the Book of Disquiet, a fragmentary collection of texts Pessoa must have been writing throughout his life, taking notes on envelopes, back sides of old manuscripts or even pieces of carton.

It was then, when I thought of my endless efforts to present my -mediocre- scientific work in an appealing way for a journal editor, all the attempts to start, complete and most of all to wrap-up a scientific paper. For a moment only, I committed the sacrilege to see my incompetence as an analog to Pessoa's shyness or introversion. I imagined a trunk in my bedroom filled with pieces of paper of various sizes, colours and shapes, carrying all the unfinished abstracts I have started to write, the summaries I never managed to expand, the brief reports that never made it to become real papers, last but not least a couple of papers I have actually finished but which I doubt will ever make it to an editor's desk, due to various reasons, not necessarily relevant with the quality of the presented work.

Then I realized, that I should not take it so personally, that probably every scientist on the planet could have his own trunk full of failed or incomplete attempts to communicate his work, to send a message out there, to become heard, noticed and accredited. It is all a matter of exposure in the end, it is the same exposure dreaded by Pessoa, that we are longing for. It is thus inevitable not to fill drawers, hard disc drives or even trunks with all our fruitless endeavours. Only that, contrary to the case of Pessoa, there is the additional fear of becoming obsolete, that is in plain words, forgotten. In fact, the constant fear that drives scientists is the fear of their work being forgotten sooner or later, in the worst case -of the papers that fill trunks and never make it out- being rendered unnecessary, forgotten before it could even be remembered.

It is this fear, which marks greatest difference between works that actually matter -like Pessoa's-, works whose persistence against time and oblivion cannot even be bent by deliberate attempts to withhold and work that doesn't really worth any mention apart form in posts like this one. All we can hope for is that during our wonderfully, joyfully mediocre lifetime we have the luck to produce a couple of papers that would be remembered at least for a while and be worthy to be held in a "cultural arc" like the one of Pessoa, only much, much smaller.

today

Θα 'ναι δύσκολο τώρα να βρούμε μια γλώσσα πιο της κερασίας,
λιγότερο δυνατή, λιγότερο πέτρινη,
τα χέρια εκείνα που απόμειναν στα χωράφια,
ή απάνου στα βουνά,
ή κάτου από τη θάλασσα,
δεν ξεχνάνε.
...

Δεν χρειάζεται να θυμηθείς.
Η φλέβα του πλατάνου έχει το αίμα σου.
Και το σπερδούκλι του νησιού κ' η κάπαρη.

Γιάννης Ρίτσος
Ρωμιοσύνη

my own personal "third circle of Irrigation"

Some few weeks ago I remember warning my friends about my intentions to switch my working mode into the one of a Greek civil servant. It was to be considered as warning since Greek civil servants are not exactly famous for their commitment and devotion. In my case, however, it had more to do with a sense of a lack of objective and an increasing decline of interest. You see, in my mind, working as a civil servant is less about lack of commitment and more about lack of goals. People think civil servants are not working enough, I think they are simply doing meaningless work. Instead of working for something, they are working for someone. In the end, they have been obliged, or have simply accepted to channel their efforts into something other than what they would like or consider fruitful.

As my main research project was growing to be more and more like the boring job of a ministry clerk and my main focus was shifting from doing something original to re-doing all the things other people have been publishing before I was allowed to, I started to feel like the life of a civil servant would be more suitable for me. I saw myself in a grey office, with piles of papers all around, in a world somewhere between that of Kafka and that of Pessoa. It looked less and less like my sunlit desk at the side of the Mediterranean and more like the one in the photo.

It was then that in order not to get completely depressed, I somehow subconsciously remembered of probably the most famous of all Greek civil servants of all time, Constantin Cavafy. For those unaware of this great man, I can simply recount a couple of biographical facts. He was Greek, living in Alexandria around the turn of the previous century and he was a civil servant for the Ministry of Public works, a position he held throughout his life. There you have it, your Greek civil servant. What makes Cavafy so special, is the fact that at the margin of an extremely boring life, spent between his desk at the "Third cycle of Irrigation" and his rather small, badly decorated, apartment in Rue Lepsius, he wrote a number of poems, whose number was big enough to qualify him as a poet and whose essence and style so supreme as to qualify him the great of them all.

I reflected a bit about this life of his, which most of his friends and acquaintances would describe as rather dull and ordinary, nothing like the tragically, romantic trajectory of Byron, the glorious magnificence of Goethe, or the bohemian voluptuousness of Beaudelaire. I saw Cavafy on his way home, back from work and I imagined him completely detached from the daily routine, drifting away in his timeless universe of interweaving pasts, the Byzantine emperors, the Alexandrian notaries and the forgotten lovers. To him, being a civil servant was simply a condition of subsidy, the irrigation plans, the daily correspondence and the translations were all but the side-effects of a conventional life he was too coward or too wise, (or perhaps both) to renounce.

I imagined how he could safely steer away from all these conventions and slowly, uncompromisingly head towards greatness. Cavafy, was able to achieve immortality. The rest of us, whose aim is the simple deliverance from everyday frustration and the hope for a meaningful life that takes place outside the office and resumes after 5pm, should know that this hope still exists.

And that anyone may be worth his own personal "Third cycle of irrigation".

agreements of gentlemen

I 'd like to take a deep breath and talk about my father.

Not in the way one talks to his analyst -although my Freudian connection with him is probably more complex than I think. My intention is not to praise or put him to trial. It's just that reading the news that come from my beloved country reminded me of him in a very special way. You see, my father belongs to this post-war generation that relieved from the trials and tribulations of the occupation, hunger and civil war, felt stronger and more courageous to take up any task, no matter how difficult. Most importantly he belongs to the part of his generation, that was not subsequently let down by increasing corruption, lack of meritocracy and eventual disdain for any sort of legitimate effort in order to prosper. Throughout his life he has always remained what John Lennon referred to as "the working class hero", constantly striving within the confined limits of a system that rewarded decency with scorn and cunningness with praise.

For his firm stance he was eventually recompensed with an average pension, which he disgracefully considers slim when looking back to all these years of hard work and shattered ambitions. I would also dare saying that he feels a bit ashamed in front of his family, us, me in particular being his elder and only son. Most likely he is completely unaware of the fact that to my eyes -my 30-year old grown-up eyes and not the ones of a small kid-admirer of his strong dad- he IS the "hero" John Lennon sings about. And of the fact that to me he is the prototype of a gentleman, deserving the greatest respect.

What is so shameful is that his own country doesn't agree with that. At all. As I browse through the greek media on the web, reading about the economical crisis about to hit Greece with the strength of a level-5 hurricane, I hear that the Greek Government is preparing a bill to pass 28 billion Euro to the already "suffering" banks. Moreover, we -the taxpayers and my dear dad among them- hear that this "deposit" is to be done in the most urgent and immediate fashion. This transaction, we are told, is going to be conducted in the form of a "gentlemen agreement", bypassing any bureaucratic obstacles and formalities.

Then I take a moment to think about my dear dad, who throughout my teenage and early adolescent years, has relentlessly opposed my criticism to the system, the banks and our politicians, always giving them the benefit of the doubt. I think about him, sitting on his favourite chair (his back is a bit sensible to armchairs), watching the news and listening about how all these bankers and their golden boys are about to put their "gentlemen" hands on his hard-worked earnings, in order to re-assure him of his savings. And I think about him listening to this "agreement of gentlemen" realizing that throughout his working life, no rule was ever bent for him, no bureaucratic procedure was ever speeded up to assist him, no small letters were ever written to his benefit, no bill was ever passed to make things easier for him. And I just wonder if he -tired and weary as he must be growing in his age- gets the wrong idea and thinks that all of this was never done for him because he is not a gentleman. I am worried with him considering the bloodsucking, mobster-like bankers with their obvious hand-shaking and the behind-doors hand-kissing to be the real gentlemen, while in fact he is more of a gentleman than all of them together will ever be.

There's nothing worse than being deceived at the end of your years and I am worried about my father, too worried that he might be deceived. And I can simply wish they never get to him and that someone gets to them first.

It may be that I am talking nonsense once more, that I am missing the point, that I understand nothing about economy or politics. That I am acting like a small kid who somehow gets the feeling his dad is being treated un-rightfully and is pissed off.
But then again, I think it is very healthy to get pissed off every now and then.