out in the open

This is just what one needs after two months of keeping with stupid army duties, while at the same time looking for a flat (or rather sympathising with Demetra who was actually doing it). A couple of days out in the open, where one may still pretend to face nature at its purest, unspoiled form.

At the highlight of the trip we found ourselves, Demetra and I and a couple of friends up on the edge of a cliff with the gorge of Vikos spreading -eternal and generous- before our eyes. My current status allows no more lyricism, so I am not going to say that it has been like a revelation. No overwhelming feelings or mezmerized eyes in front of this wonderful view. Just the realization that at the side of all the superfluous, insubstantial obligations that life is burdening us with, there still exist aspects essential and genuine, that remain tangible even from the height of seven hundred meters.

Greece of the Greek Christians (?)

On December 30th I am to receive guests from abroad. Two really good friends of mine are planning to visit me in Athens for New Year's eve and spend a week or so in the "cradle of civilisation" before heading back to Spain. While in Greece, they will have the chance to "live their myth" as the Greek Tourism Organisation's slogan will undoubtedly urge them to. This includes the Acropolis, museums and ruins, greek hospitality, great food and walks around the center of an -otherwise- ugly-ish city.

For us Greeks that live here however, the ones that have chosen to come back and make a living and the ones that will carry on living here after my friends are gone the "myth" is somehow more complicated. That is because we'll have to keep living in a country where 60% of the population describes himself as conservative and where people have a better opinion about "neoliberalism" than the "left".

The Greek "myth", in the form of the Greeks' ideological Atlas was published in yesterday's Kathimerini and can be found here for the Greek readers who care reading it. The non-Greeks should not feel bad about it, for various reasons. One one hand it's true that they are not in the position of reading Euripides or Plato from the prototype but on the other they don't have to live in a country where more than half of the people would like their religion to be declared on their official documentation. Where 65% still consider "marijuana is bad" but somehow manage to smoke in every single restaurant, bar AND hospital. Where every parent is trying to get his dear son out of the army but where an outstanding 66% is in favour of keeping the military service compulsory. Trully, my friends cannot appreciate Aeschylus or Thucidides but neither do the Greeks, who read on average 1.1 books per year, and who are so fond of "knowledge" that 7 out of every 10 demand that the teaching of religion (the ONE religion) in schools be kept mandatory.

Yes, my friends are more than welcome to live their myth in Greece. A country of warm, smiling people, who prosper under an eternal sun. What the Greek Tourism Organization forgot to mention in the ad is that 60% of these warm, smiling Greeks does not agree that the rights of the ones charged (which means NOT convicted yet) with terrorism are to be respected. I just thought I should warn them.

the greatest book ever written

"I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement".

There are still things to appreciate while in the army, in fact one thing only and this is -I 've said before- time. Time to undertake tasks that would otherwise result too demanding for one's usual 24-hour day. The army provides you with countless hours of idleness, which in turn offer the opportunity for some serious reading. A lot of reading.

Thus, I have grasped this opportunity to delve into a number of unread pieces of my bookshelf, especially the most fearsome ones, those that remained obstinate on the upper shelves resisting me, mocking me for my lack of time and/or daring to bring them down and wonder through their pages. Since there's not much that is really demanding while in the army, this is how I ended up finishing the "Magic Mountain", "Rayuela" and "Light in August" while serving my country at the same time.

The last in this series of great books though, requires a special mention. And this is because it is probably the greatest book ever written. The Waves, by Virginia Woolf.

I know such an aphorism may sound odd to many, especially coming from someone who's not an expert in literature. There is however something so haunting in this book, something unstructured, diffuse and yet profound that urges me to call it thus. Because there are books that give you pleasure, there are the ones that make you want to read more and the ones that make you want to become a writer. And then there comes a book that makes you realise, the one that conveys at the same time the sadness of everything that is worth having been written already and the enormous joy of allowing you to discover it anew.

"The Waves" is not a great story. But it is at the same the greatest of all stories, the story of everybody's life. It is more of a poem than a novel and less of a poem than a play. It transverses all norms and crosses literary barriers that weren't even existent at the time it was written. Most importantly, it resolves the eternal question between content and form with a sublime indifference. In the "Waves", form IS the content. The book's internal rhythm is what matters most. The marginal plot develops at the background forming the bed to the characters' stream of conscience. But it the characters conscience, their thoughts and pondering, their doubts and certainties that makes one feel he is doing something more than reading this book. He is living it.
Above all, the book's greatest achievement, what makes it so inexplicably important is the fact that each phrase belongs to that special powerful kind, the one I have discussed before here. Each phrase in this book gives the impression that it is exactly what needed to have been said.

And I cannot escape admitting that this book is what I needed to have written.

things you tend to miss in the army - staying cool

People who know me can assure you of one thing. I am known to be a relaxed, calm person. Or at least I used to. Because people who know me a little better may bother informing you that of late, I have not been as calm or as relaxed as I once tended to be proud of. I am losing my cool.

The biggest problem is that lately I am also noticing it myself. Which deprives me of the -lame- argument of denial. I cannot but agree with my peers that I tend to be more abrupt in reactions, more straightforward in quarrelling and less patient while judging. Under such circumstances I cannot but resolve to the last refuge of a mature man. Look for excuses. In my case the way out is clear. The army is to be blamed for everything.

In fact, this -blaming the military service and its inconveniences for my bad temper- is something that people tend to accept rather light heartedly. Which really strikes me if you consider that others are willing to justify my mutation on a series of minor changes in my everyday habits. Having to wake up early, not being able to listen to music while working, doing useless night-shifts while your friends are out in some party, all form part of my great excuse to having become a slight bit more unbearable than I used to.

The thing is that by having tried to base my initial defence on such an excuse -and having seen it succeed- I now refuse even more to take it for serious. Being in the army is not an excuse. Yes, I hate waking up early and yes I detest this feeling of utter idleness when one can only read books one after the other being unable to discuss about them with others. (During my time in the army I have only met three -number 3- people who knew who Virginia Woolf was). Yes, it is hard to deal with the absurdity of the most bureaucratic of all bureaucracies, yes it is tough coping up with the laziest and most unproductive representatives of the Greek public servants as superiors.

And yes I am counting every day until I am once again able to stream the suppressed creativity of my 32 years towards something more meaningful than standing attention. But this is nonetheless no excuse for losing oneself. To this test one has to stand with the firmness and will of an Edmond Dantes (they say army is like prison but I don't need to stress, that the circumstances are of a much lighter nature).
For the sake of my friends and for my own sake, I have to go back to being the calm and relaxed person I once was.

a hidden universe revealed - early day commuters

It strikes me just to look at them. All these people...Where do they go? All these people...What are they doing at the edge of the night? Because it is still night at 6.00 am in the "morning", the time I get on the subway on my way to the Athens general military hospital, on my way to my last 9 and a half weeks of compulsory military service.

I have to stress "compulsory". Because there is no other way someone would get me out of my bed and onto the streets at 6.00 am on a weekday. These hours were unknown to me before joining the army. Or perhaps they existed once in an obscure and distant past but only as "coming back home time". These are brutal, savage hours, during which the body is too stiff to work properly and the mind not meant to be working at all. These are useless, worthless hours, whose only eventuality is keeping people frustrated, tired and under-productive so that they can be perpetually blamed upon at the office at daylight and fall eternal victims to TV rubbish at twilight. These are hated hours because they only serve to keep people unhappy.

I am unhappy. Riding the subway at 6.00 am on the way to work must be the definition of unhappiness. Or something very close to it. But all these people? All these people, who are not obliged to show their devotion to their country by waking up at 05.30... whom are they obliged to? What have they devoted their lives to? What have they sacrificed their mornings to? Don't they care to see their children wake up, the sun rise, have breakfast with their beloved? Which kind of work is so important? Which kind of work requires them to be the drowsy card-punchers I pity every morning instead of the active workers they could have been. If they only woke up two hours later. If they had only spent the evening out at the cinema instead of falling asleep in front of the TV.

They are unhappy. Worse than that, some don't even know they are. I am unhappy. Mostly for them. Because after these 9 and a half weeks are past, I am going back to being myself. My happy, active, smiling self, having had coffee at 8.00, reading my newspaper on the subway at 09.00, listening to my happy music, ready for another glorious day at work.

ideas live for more than 101 years

...because there is no substantial difference between the zoologist or the botanist that classifies a recently discovered plant under the name of Elephantopus spicatus Aubl., (a name already provided to him by a system) and an Omaha priest that defines the objective conditions, which will assign the social status of a new member of the clan, by granting him the available name of "old-hoof-of-aged-bison".
In both cases, they know very well what they are doing.

Claude Levi Strauss
La pensee sauvage

things to appreciate while in the army - Time...

It's 8 pm on a Friday evening. Having just finished my afternoon shift I am wandering around a deserted basketball court surrounded by parked cars. On one side the windows of the dorms where I am to spend half of the night (until my early morning shift starts at 3.30 am). Right opposite, a three-meter wall that separates ours (the General Military Hospital) from the one of the National Air Force. Facing westwards I can make out the sound of cars in the not so distant avenue and the fading lights of a city that is about to start the weekend. Then I turn and look towards the east. Just a few meters outside the wall, there lies the Institute of Biomedical Research of the Academy of Athens. A brand new building made out of a mix of robust yellowish bricks and grey double windows, a proud specimen of that arrogant architecture, reserved for newly-founded research institutes and post-modern bank mansions. Down here I am left with my solitary walk, trying to stretch a bit before my early night sleep, bound to be interrupted at 3 am. Up there, young (and perhaps some not so young) scientists are probably adding the final (and for some not so final) touches to today's experiments. And the fact that their lights are all lit at this time of day doesn't surprise me at all.

Less than a year ago, I was one of them, spending Friday evenings in the cosiness of my milky-lit office, trying to put stuff in order so as for my week not to appear completely lost. Less than a year ago, it looked like there was never enough time. Time for working things out, time for getting the calculations right, time for having a new brilliant idea that would change the course of a stagnating project, sometimes not even time for having a drink before going to bed. Less than a year ago, I hated my job (and I have some really angry posts dated from back then to prove it). Less than a year ago I was thinking of my military service as a way out from a way of life I thought I was fed up with.

But last night, while walking up and down that empty basketball court, listening to Explosions in the Sky's powerful medleys of appeasing and awe-inspiring melodies, the unthinkable happened. Suddenly, I wanted my old life back. Despite all the burdens of it, despite all the load that made me hate my job back then. Last night, I would gladly take off my uniform and join the people on the other side of the wall, take up their problems, read the papers they would hand me, allow their problems to bother my little mind. Despite of all the time they would be lacking, the stress and anxiety of getting things done before Monday's group meeting, I would gladly offer to take their place. I realized that all the things that seemed meaningless and boring, less than a year ago, had regained their old electric-like aura.

And I knew that because there, in the middle of that stupid basketball court, in that incredibly uncomfortable uniform, with "Explosions in the Sky" on my headphones and all that time on my hands, all I could think of doing, all I could do, was to take out my small pocket notepad and write down, single-handedly what appeared to be my next "brilliant" idea.

just breathe...

...or so it seems. Like you are just breathing.

Then you turn to look back and realize that six months have passed within a single breath. You feel like everything travels at the speed of light, while you are sitting still in the middle of a plain, left in ruins by a storm that grows distant. You find yourself banished, deserted in a world where all which makes sense belong to others, where time is harvested by everyone else except you. You are stranded in the place you really belong. This is your exile. And you just breathe. Life is what takes place in your absence.

You smell the air, trying to follow the path of your own breath. Desperately trying to comprehend the turning of the wind, to grasp what -you think- lies obscure and hidden, absurd in essence, only relatively pragmatic. You realize the passing of time with a sudden blow. You force yourself out of a comfortable limbo. This melody, played backwards, is the only thing real.
You ought to sing along.

"See the path cut by the moon...
for you to walk on...
See the waves on distant shores...
Awaiting your arrival."

things to appreciate while in the army - Breaking dawn

There is a number of responsibilities that one finds himself burdened with while in the army. Most would agree that those inferring sleep deprivation are the most tedious. It so happens that the great majority of what might prosaically be considered as "army duties" simply constitute of long meaningless hours of vigil.
To my content, the concept of such "army duties" (as well as more or less everything else) is greatly relaxed at my current unit. Staying guard is only loosely connected to the watchful national guards we were in Chios. And those that are to be vigilant guards inside the barracks -the so-called "room guards"- are nor guards in essence, neither vigilant, as I realized last night.

During my first on-call duty at the 401 General Military Hospital of Athens, I merely had to stay awake for a number of hours and make sure that during those hours my on-call colleagues would wake up on time for their shifts. This proved to be somehow chimerical for various reasons. One: nobody preceded (or succeeded) my shift, which resulted in my waking up accidentally five minutes before my shift started. Two: nobody really cared about being woken up so I actually had nothing to do apart from chatting with my friend Tassos, who was the one who woke me up (for having someone to talk to I guess).

Then Tassos left for his own shift (a useless patrol around the hospital) and so I found myself sitting at a lonely desk at 6.00 am with the company of a sadly boring book by Steven Pressfield, which instead of keeping me awake with its (assumed) engaging plot, brought about drowsiness in constant waves. To this my only escape was standing up, strolling up and down an empty, humid corridor until I eventually made it outside the building in the foggy dew-covered courtyard. There I saw it.

It was about 6.30 and a late autumn dawn was breaking above the Athenian skyline. It was nothing spectacular, given my position, surrounded by the tall buildings of the hospital, the time of the year and the rainy weather. It had little to do with vision and was more of something that appealed to the rest of one's senses. The smell of the soaking leaves on the wet soil, the sound of distant thunder and the chilling morning cold which I suffered with an inexplicable satisfaction in my summer uniform. I could not help thinking that it was not the dawn itself I was enjoying, but simply the approaching end of my shift, (which also suspicuously coincided with the beginning of a four-day leave). Still I tend to believe it was a mixture of all that, the sense that there are some brief moments (as all moments are) that one can only appreciate while being in the army, a series of little things that harm noone, while at the same time one would never bother doing.

Staying up all night and watching the dawn break, even a dull, urban dawn like today's is one of these little things.

coming back to life

It's official. I am back in Athens. From today on, I will be able to walk down alleys like this one whenever (or almost whenever) I want.

As my army gear and clothes are soaking in a bath-tub filled with scalding hot water, which aims at eliminating any trace of bed-bug I might have brought back as a souvenir from my stay at the barracks of the 96th Sanitary (?) Regiment, I take two days off to retrospect.

Has it been fun? No -freaking- way. Whatever people may tell you about missing the days in uniform (and whatever I might have been telling myself before getting there), being in the army is the exact opposite of fun. Even if you are lucky enough to enlist in the Sanitary (famous for bearing a "light" load of army-crap). Even if you are lucky enough to meet genuinely interesting people, of the kind you would -and will- be friends with outside the army. Even if you get to be on a Greek island during August and September.
It is still NOT fun at all. Simply because waking up at 5.45 at the yelling of some complete imbecile whose faint attempt to pronounce something remotely similar to speech barely makes it to "Wake up" is not fun. And with this I think I have summed up most of it.

Has it been worth it? Certainly not. There have been a large number of discussions about the necessity of the military service during some long night patrols in Chios. My colleagues -my poor colleagues whom I shamefully admit to have abandoned over there- would agree with me. There is nothing to be gained from army life after the age of 25 (at least). A mature, decent man with a minimal sense of responsibility already knows how to make his bed, be respectful to superiors, kind to women and responsible while doing his job. If we are to assume that the scope of the army is to deal with people who lack these qualities, there are a number of mental institutions that would be up to the task. If, on the other hand, the service aims at making one accustomed to the absurdity of the Greek public sector, its corruptive routine and its infamous drive towards the utmost forms of laziness then "Thanks, but no thanks!".

Would I do it again? You must be kidding me. I have a bit more than a hundred days left to suffer the stupidity of the uniform and deal with the scum of this country (the mentally retarded or/and lazy asses who choose to become inferior officers instead of getting a real job and a life). I am not exactly looking forward to it but I can assure you of one thing. As with all shit in life I can still take some fun out of it over the next 102 days. I can drive them crazy since they did not manage to drive me.

This is my last master-plan for the army to be put forward starting from tomorrow.

PS. This one goes out to my co-soldiers back in Chios. As they struggle with the our most painful responsibility towards the Greek Constitution, my thoughts cannot but be with them.

today

He remembered once when the grass was dump and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it like a book open at a page.
"Think how you love me", she whispered. "I don't ask of you to always love me like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there 'll always be the person I am to-night"

Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the night

vote till you drop

So it is then...

"Respect the Irish vote"

the problem is: Which one?

In the times of "Enforced Democracy" in which we live the only vote to be respected is the last one. That is the one that gives the "expected", "desired" outcome. The Irish were too stubborn not to ratify the Lisbon Treaty -the evolution of the [in]famous European Constitution- through a parlamentary vote. Instead they opted for a referendum which gave a clear "No" last June. (I also had a few words to say back then).

Too stubborn they were, but not stubborn enough. EU policy is "vote till you drop", meaning till you drop the case, your case, till you realize that what you have to say doesn't really matter. What really matters is that you appear to be voting (even if it is time and again), justifying the republican "ideals" of the union.

Whether the Lisbon Treaty is a "step forward" or a "historical mistake" is irrelevant. It is now clearer than ever that the Europeans need not have any worries about whether their choices prove to be the right ones.

Because they actually have none.

PS. Greece is holding a general election today. Isn't it sad to see how similar a feeling of vanity the whole process yields to us Greeks?

busy as a bee

Yes, work -or to put it nicer a great number of activities- is the reason behind the lack of posts. My coming back to Athens is going to be official soon (yeaaaah) and some things need to be taken care of. People also need to be taken care of, and good care that is. So they have been my priority over the last week and I intend to make it -the taking care of them, I mean- even more regular as soon as I am stationed back at my old spot: 401 Athens General Military Hospital.

In the meantime, the pre-election fever has forced me to be reading two papers a day (hard work), catching up with the news and giving a lot of thought into finally deciding what to vote next Sunday. (It's not a real dilemma, I am just considering a slight variation from my previous choices).

Getting back to everyday life in Athens, which means everyday life in Greece with all that comes with it has forced me (yes "forced" is the right term here) to start another, lighter blog of almost entirely greek content (and therefore of entirely greek posting and commentary). Greek readers are to be greatly discouraged from checking it out at
http://koympariomaxoi.blogspot.com
as they are bound to discredit everything they thought they knew about me.

Still I have to say that the aforementioned blog is one more reason for the lack of posts in this one, although I promise to try to keep up both at an equal pace.

ChiosBios #3. Life after rain...

So it is official. I am not gonna get my first permit from my island prison before mid October. We still have one more full month to go, which means I want see friends and family until after I 've spent two and a half months in Chios. Since I was advised to keep a positive attitude I can only say it could be worse. Worse being having broken my foot while patroling the barracks at 3.00 am and while it is raining cats and dogs (which almost happened last Friday). Or worse being having no governement after the coming election, which will mean our permits will be once more postponed until Allah knows when...

So, we are crossing fingers...

Autumn seems to be here for good. Having spent the three last Autumns in Barcelona, where September mostly means rain, I was kind of expecting that. It is hard though to be on a Greek island and face the cloudy skies so early in Autumn. It gets harder when you get to have half of your clothes wet, (because the Sergeant does not allow clothes hanging on the string during the day, as if they were going to dry overnight) and half of them being lost at the drycleaner's (good news, I located them this morning!). Under such conditions, the aforementioned positive attitude becomes a hard to bear task.

But it has happened before and it is bound to happen again. The rain will eventually stop, the sun will rise above the island (third sunniest place in Greece if what the locals say it true), the clothes will finally dry and then mid October will be here and I will be boarding a boat back to Athens, to meet beloved people, catch up with friends and my mom's adorable craziness, see Branford Marsalis live and forget about the army for a couple of weeks.

Come to think of it, it will be hard to come back here in November and it will be probably raining, but then again, this is not positive thinking at all...

today

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denium in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears

William Faulkner
Light in August

ChiosBios #2. Not having a life...

While in the army, I received the -finally- good news of getting a paper published. (Weirdly enough it made it to the cover of a well-respected journal). This would not have happened without the strenuous efforts of my good colleague Hagen and the perseverence of my boss Roderic. This work belongs mostly to them and my name is on it more or less due to an accidentally good idea. (But then again most of the good ideas are purely accidental).

The fact that I choose to post about this -very, very- late publication, to the final acceptance of which I only marginally contributed, can only be highly indicative of the lack of any interest whatsoever in my life, nowadays. Truth be told. Over the last weeks in the barracks I have a reached a point of utter boredom and idleness. Not that I am not doing stuff, quite the contrary. It's just that they mostly consist of activities that could only be described as offending to the the human brain and worst of all they leave absolutely no time for useful thoughts -let alone deeds- that all one can do is to whine about the lack of meaning.

Then again I feel like I am repeating myself over and over and that this post is only here to let me -indirectly- brag about my work (seriously, what has become of me?) and whine -once more- about the army. It's just that, of late people who actually read this blog, (yes there ARE some), were curious about the lack of posts. Not exactly the best way to make them feel I back and active, but still.

Promise to be able to talk about something more interesting next time. After all, football season is on its way.

ChiosBios #1

So this is it then!

The Army starts now! (as a lot of my superiors were fond of stressing out this very morning). As from yesterday afternoon I am part of the 96th Regiment of Sanitary in the picturesque island of Chios (whose beauties one cannot appreciate from a simple look at the map but you can trust me, they 're there.)

Thanks to my very good friend Charis the habilitation process has started quite well. Still the idea of spending some four months in an environment which falls far from being considered idyllic is not very appealing. They say that one can get used to practically everything and I 've always thought of this as a really bad aspect of human nature. Nonetheless it can only prove useful in the army, where letting time pass by is all that one really needs to worry about.

I am still looking for the Holly Grail, that is a way to make army time useful. It looks tricky and has become even trickier here. But then again it wouldn't be the "Holly Grail" if it was to be that easy, would it?

today

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. Lovecraft
The Call of Cthulu

The dark art of wasting time

There is a certain blessing that transcends all races, latitudes and eras of mankind and that is that men, at the prime of their youth hold a firm conviction that they may -one day- change the world. The military service aims exactly at smashing this wonderful -yet dangerous- aspitration.

There are various motives behind such hideous an operation. Superstition, Conservatism, Backwardness and pure, powerful Stupidity to name only a few. But even if one is to accept the inevitability of the nature of things and submit to the idea that his time in the army is to reduce him to a mindless, opinionless, frightened peon -and consequently a burden to society-, there still remain inherent difficulties in grapsing the way this transformation is to take place.

I am writing this on my small notebook, having completed three hours of sitting at an empty hospital waiting room, where I am supposed to stay guard. Gurad of what exactly I am unable to tell, given that it is only 5pm, all the doors are still open, the cleaning ladies have not yet left the building, not to mention my superior officer who is -rightfully?- browsing the net in the office right opposite my post. Over these last three hours, I have grown weary with reading and bored of strolling up and down. My mind has become numb in absence of any possible stimulus and I dread to think that two more 4-hour shifts of pointless guarding nothing await me before dawn breaks over this blessed, military hospital.

I know that people who have already served -or still serving- and are reading this post, will by now attempt to decide between a lawful scorn and an ironic grin. After all, I am -at the moment- serving in my hometown and under circumstances that for the bulk of the Greek Army dwellers would be considered comfortable beyond any possible hesitation.
But that is not the point I am trying to make here -if any point can be made or is worthy of making. What my desperate, silent, solitary cry is attesting is that there is one thing in stripping a man of all his vigour, energy, will and right to become a productive citizen and it's a completely different one amputating him in such a way by deliberately enforcing on him the practice of a deep, unjustified and meaningless nothing.

It's the passivity of this art of time-wasting, that kills all that is good in us. How many books can a man read before he decides to quit reading altogether? How many songs can a man listen before he grows tired of music? How many blog posts can a man draft while strolling up and down for half a day, before deciding to quit his stupid blog once and for all?

But then again, how much more time need be lost before he concludes that if this world was ever to change the military would be the first thing to wipe out?

at the wrong place, at the wrong time

As life in the Army is a constant exercise in the Art of the Redundant one gets used to facing the ancient dilemma. Get utterly bored with doing nothing or get overwhelmingly frustrated with doing something completely useless? Today I confronted secret option number three. Which is doing something that is both useful and not boring but which you would strongly prefer to avoid in its entirety.

While in the army I have been asked more than ten times to elaborate on my computing and language skills and provide additional details on my PhD thesis. After careful consideration of all my qualities my superiors decided that I should better indulge into any sort of possible drudgery, thus providing me with a variety of activities NOT to choose from, which include mopping floors in the barracks (rather dull since it is always dirty), washing dishes in the restaurant (personal favourite) , carry boxes in and out of army trucks (veeeeery dusty boxes) and -last but not least- today's (and tomorrow's and the day after's) task of reorganizing a huge pile of garbage.

The latter, highly demanding mission -therefore the fact that the select group of seven included three University Degree holders- consisted in sorting out a small hill of garbage that contained debris, used hospital material (mostly mattresses) and junk in general into smaller piles of the aforementioned categories. It lasted more than three hours until it was interrupted temporarily due to the unfortunate event of the discovery of two medium-sized wasp nests in the depths of the pile. It is to be continued tomorrow with slightly increased protection measures.

It looks like somewhere on the way, my eagerness to serve the country and my country's needs decided to follow different paths.

today

Through all he said, even though his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted, like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.

But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable for ever.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby

L' enfer, c' est les autres

People who know me can speak for my defense. I am known to be rather tolerant. In the sense that only very, very rarely do I complain about other people and their behaviour in general. I am more than averagely easy-going and I tend to find excuses on behalf of others. Nevertheless, it seems like one and a half month in the Greek army can put this extreme tolerance under extreme stress.

Let's face it. Having to live in the same building with 250 more men, with whom you share a -very moderate- burden of responsibilities is not a simple task. Still, it would be manageable if only the majority made an effort to minimize this burden in a collective way. But they don't. In fact, I have come to believe that the army is the last resort of men (let's just leave women out of this for the moment) against the contagious virtues of solidarity and cooperation. Everyone (or almost everyone) is simply doing their best to avoid doing anything, which mathematically leads to a situation where most of the tasks are carried out by a few men, while the rest of them just sit and stare. Under such conditions, even tolerant people like myself find it hard to go by.

You see, I spent my last week in the Training Centre of the Sanitary Department in Arta working overtime just because most of my colleagues preferred to do nothing instead of the -very little- that we were asked to. The term "working" here needs to be adjusted to army standards, which translates to "unable to have fun outside the barracks". There is absolutely nothing fancy or complicated with army work. In my case, the frustration was only caused by the fact that "the others" were taking such a cruel advantage of the few of us. Thus, although I thought I 'd never say it, I remembered Sartre's famous words that give the title to this post. "Hell; it's other people."

Truth be told, I don't believe it. I just find it appropriate for the barracks (and perhaps not all barracks). I am still positive towards others, most of them, if not all. On my way back home yesterday afternoon, I found myself carrying some 35 kilos of luggage and having to make a 15-minute walk home due to works in the metro station. There I was, in the midst of a hot, Athenian June afternoon, in full garment and sweating like a pig (or like a soldier). A car passed me by, it stopped five meters ahead of me and the door opened.

The kind stranger who was offering me a lift home, came as the proof that in most of the cases "Le paradis, c' est les autres aussi".

Midsummer day's dream

Last Friday after a tiring morning of doing absolutely nothing I finally got my permit to leave the barracks and come home for a short weekend. I rode the bus all the way from Arta, in the Greek midwest, to Athens on a sunny summer afternoon, trying to regain some of the sleep one inevitably loses while in the army. This proved to be more complicated than I thought mostly due to the radiant sunlight and the anticipation of seeing the people I love back home. It was going to be summertime in Athens and there are few things that can match a midsummer afternoon walk on the hill of Philopappoy before heading to Thissio for a couple -or more- glasses of wine.

As the bus was crossing the bridge that connects the Greek mainland with Pelopponese, glancing from my window, I saw the city of Patras, where I spent more than one happy years of early student adolesence back in the late 90s. A lot of nice memories came to my mind. A beach party next to the fortress of Antirrio, dinners with ouzo near the Citadel of Patras, nights out in Vrachneika. It realized that most of these nice memories were summer memories, around this time of the year when long days of study coupled with warm nights of thoughtlessness.

As the bus crossed the bridge and a two-more-hour drive laid ahead of us, I turned to the day's paper to fight boredom. There, at the bottom of the third page an air-company was advertising its new summer destination. It read: "Summer in Barcelona". I could not help smiling. Over the last weeks I had thought a lot about Barcelona, the place I left four months ago and which I had no time to reminisce ever since. Midsummer in Barcelona, with the "Fiesta de Sant Joan", nights in Barceloneta with cold "turbio" wine, sounds of jazz, and that special summer breeze cooling you down.

Then it occurred to me. That the essence of summer is exactly that. That "summer" is not a season but a place. It is THE place you want to be. It is -even more- the sum of all those places. It is the projection of all those midsummer nights in Athens, in Patras, in Barcelona, one cold evening at the edge of Yellowstone Canyon, a warm, humid night looking through a window down on Broadway Avenue, an afternoon up on Kastro in Sifnos, waiting for the full moon. Summer is that special space, the geometrical locus of all the smiles you have cast on the midsummers past.

And on the midsummers to come.

The Kingdom of Rust

Speaking of the army. Again.
The councel I got from all those who have gone through it already is unanimous. Getting through the military service is like going through war. One has to try to suffer minimal casualties. And in the context of a propagation of a series of daily, pointless activities, not suffering casualties simply translates into trying not to be bored to death.
Trying to follow this (easy to say, hard to go by) advice, I am taking some small but important steps.

One is, I am reading as much as I can. And this means a lot. I have always been saving books for my retirement. Tough, thick (and very likely to be boring) books. Books of the kind that everybody talks about but noone has ever read. I am now through with Mann's "Magic Mountain" which had moments of greatness but could have been much, much shorter (except if it is meant to be read during one's military service). I have some good candidates lined up for next. I am talking about "big fish" and not the normal novels. Of those I read one every two days. Regardless of the boredom, this is something I really appreciate about army life.

Second step, I am trying to work a bit.
Scary.
That's why I am doing it in a slow and steady way. A little bit of reading, some thinking, a few notes on the margin of my small notebook, (already filled with stupid army info). It is still kinda fun and lets me think I am still into it. Perhaps it becomes productive in the future. Only time will tell.

Step three. The crucial one.
I need to change mode to be able to do all this. I look back at previous posts and recognize the source of painful nostalgia in the sound of music. Music that accompanied moments of joy, but moments that hold me back.
Punchline: I need a new soundtrack. New melodies to invest everyday life in this newly discovered Kingdom. This Kingdom of Rust.

The Doves sing about exactly one such "kingdom" in their latest album and Patrick Watson talks about a "big bird in a small cage". My case exactly.
So here I am, I take my books, my notes and my new albums by the Doves, Patrick Watson and Sonic Youth and set out to become the King in this new Kingdom. First I have to spend the next two days on guard for four hours every night.

But then again, as a great poet has already said:
Rust never sleeps.

the works and the days

The "Works and the Days" is one of the oldest poems ever written. Its chapters contain a large number of the most popular myths of Greek Mythology. In contrast to his other great work "Theogony", Hesiod chooses the "Works and the Days" to talk about the five ages of men. Therefore the "Works and the Days" deals with the "works" and the "days" of humans, not Gods. It thus states what might now sound perfectly obvious, which is that only humans may undertake "works" and that "days" have meaning only for them, contrary to the eternal Gods who neither have a sense of the passing time and whose existence is self-contained -even if the Greek ones always had a certain tendency for "acts" ( and often rather dubious ones). In this sense, people throughout history have always been meaning to pass their "days" in strong connection with some kind of "work" to leave behind.

In my -humble- case (as this STILL remains a personal blog) my "works" and "days" have been quite disconnected lately. Being in the army is the closest I can think of to being imprisoned, not just because of the obligatory confinement but mostly because of the utter boredom that the repetition of a useless life cycle brings about. In this way one has to face a paradox where on one hand the passing of time is what mostly matters while, on the other hand, the days pass with almost zero production of "work". One has to admit that there is an inherent impossibility for the conduction of any productive, constructive or by any chance meaningful task in the military environment but this only makes the frustration bigger. And which may become even bigger when it is combined with a relative necessity for work, work that cannot be carried out merely because the circumstances do not permit it.

Such were my thoughts last week when I found myself riding the bus back to Arta after a short weekend leave. In front of me lied a bunch of papers containing the comments on one of the papers I had finally managed to submit right before joining the army. And there I was, keeping notes on the margins, replying to some -often suspiciously- mean remarks, thinking over some parts of my work that could be considerably improved, accepting in the end that most of all this was quite useless. I was going back to a place where nothing of what I was thinking could be done, as there are no computers in the army (for the recruits), nor internet access (for the soldiers), or a way to download scientific papers from the web.

In the end I was simply trying to convince myself that my "works" over the last years were important enough to need some more time.
In the end I was deceiving myself with the thought that some "work" of that kind could still be done while in the army.

As I went on turning the pages, listening to Coldplay, I remembered the last time I rode a bus listening to the same album. Some one year ago on the way from Seville to Cadiz, (instead of Athens to Arta), while on holiday (instead of the army), in the company of good friends (instead of on my own), reading a nice book (instead of a paper review). I remembered that back then it seemed that all the "work" could be done in the next few "days", while now it looked like all the "days" I have are not enough, not even for a paper revision.

Most of all, it seemed like the time of the innocence had irrevocably passed by.

Life in the barracks

Scientifically speaking there is an easy and straightforward way for one to grasp the relativity of space-time and that is through a rigorous decoupling of its two components. If one manages to keep space constant, he allows time to clearly manifest its complete set of properties. And this is the kind of experiment I have been running for the last two weeks.

I know that living in the barracks cannot really qualify as a scientific experiment but things are sometimes better seen as something else than what they actually are. It helps. My military service is much, much more easy-going than I might have expected so there is no real reason for me to whine about something that has been suffered by almost all of my male friends. Being in the amry is no big deal. True it can be frustrating in many ways but one should stick to the positive side of things and if the military service has one such, it can be no other than the spare time it provides to the soldiers. For a 31-year old who has already changed home, job and lifestyle three or four times the mere idea that he only has to care about when to eat or sleep is radically liberating. On the other hand, it can also be close to becoming shockingly, painfully boring and in this way I had to devise a way out. My space-time experiment is the best I could come up with (for the time being).

For my first two weeks in the recruit camp of Arta I chose Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain" to be my literary companion. I could have hardly picked anything more relevant to my situation. A young man's semi-voluntary confinement in a sanatorium on the Alps, where "nobody asks about him, and he asks about nobody". It may be somehow depressing to parallel my 9-month military service with Hans Castorp's seven years residence in Berghoff but the one thing I find we have in common is the opportunity to explore the relativity of time in its fullness. So, like Hans I found myself repeating the same routine daily, I tended to think about the importance of time and change and I hesitated on whether I should count time passing by with days, weeks or months. Like him, I am looking for ways to exploit the passing time and like him I find it difficult. Like him I have vigorously reflected on the essence of time. And unlike him I have found that if one keeps space constant, time also appears to slow down.

It thus looks like my experiment has already concluded. Which leaves me some 262 more days to think about other things.

today

One might say that waiting would mean to perceive the duration and the present not like a gift but like an obstacle. To deny and destroy their value, to leap over it with one's own imagination. Waiting, they say, is always too long, but in the end it is not. It is exactly the opposite, it is short, too short and damaging since it consumes time that falls behind unused, un-lived and wasted.

Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain

Depress Mode

Quite sometime ago, while I was still in Barcelona preparing my to-do-before-I-go list (following the wise advise of my friend Sy.) I remember having left one thing out. One thing I had really missed and would have liked to do, if not before leaving Barcelona, at least before joining the Greek Army. That was to go to a big concert, get lost in the anonymous crowd, smell the collective sweat of thousands of people, and enjoy music in a way that would remind me that deep inside we can still be kids every now and then.

Then I left Barcelona and I came back to Greece and a number of sad events reminded me that instead of being a kid I am painfully growing older. And then I was summoned to the Army where I have to present myself next Monday and the clock started ticking again, counting down to yet another series of goodbyes. Suddenly, last Saturday, my sister came to me holding a ticket for a Depeche Mode concert and it looked like the chance had appeared and that I would finally be able to check my to-do list thingy of going to a big concert. They are not so good right now and their last three albums are rather bad but they have once been one of my favourite bands, I saw them once some eight years ago and I remembered having had great fun back then. Plus I was going with my little sister with whom we have been getting closer and closer lately (having gone through some rough times together) and her friends are really funny and the weather was perfect so everything looked like it was going to be great fun.

Before we knew, it was Tuesday night and we were some thirty kilometers away from Athens, in the middle of a nowhere-to-be-found park, us and twenty five thousand more people and I was buying everybody beer, so happy that I was there and having almost forgotten that I am growing old, almost ready to be a kid again and start jumping all around. And then a blond lady came on the stage and a guy with a strong Essex-accent let us know the gig was being cancelled due to “a sudden illness of Dave” (DM’s singer and notorious ex drug addict). And whatever it was, I think I didn’t really care, I was just so let down, that our “mode” had gone from “Depeche” to “Depress”, I was so sad that my little sister was sad and I was so depressed to realize I was suddenly growing old again.

Then we took the long walk towards the car and to the one-hour drive back home, cursing our bad luck. At some point of the way I took a brief moment and tried to enjoy the silence. It sucked.

Absence

One would think of a very solid way to define absence. Someone is missing. There is now a void occupying the physical space that was sometime filled by that someone. There are however innumerable ways for this void to make its existence painfully explicit. Absence, is in this sense, radically different than loss.

No matter how prepared one may be, how incredibly, rationally acquainted with the loss of a beloved person, no matter how bravely he has confronted that loss, or how gracefully he has been avoiding that confrontation, he can never escape being startled by the painful absence that stems from it. And as it usually happens with things related to the beyond, this afflictive awe assumes the most unexpected shapes and sizes.

In my case absence was turning to face an empty chair last night. Ironically at a moment of joy, right after the end of a stressful but rewarding basketball final. It was the moment I would usually stand up from my usual spot on the couch to turn towards the dining table and my father's chair to cheerfully hi-five him and start a series of pointless -but vainly reassuring- congratulations on how good our team has once more proven to be. It was then, facing at an empty chair that the whole reassuring feeling was suddenly gone, the void rutlhessly stood in front of me and I realized how a basketball victory had reduced to so little.

It's times like these when you realize that life is a game you can only hope losing with style. 

coming back...

"Il me semble, bercé par ce choc monotone

qu' on cloue en grande hate un cercueil quelque part.

Pour qui? - C' était hier l' été; voici l' automne!

ce bruit mystérieux sonne comme un départ."

Charles Baudelaire

Chant d' automne

Everything has changed, everything's the same

I look down on my desk to see my two copies of George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". One, a Greek translation was given to me as a present from a dear friend before I left for Barcelona back in 2006. The other, a translation into Spanish with a wonderful cover, featuring a rare photo of Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) himself, was given to me as farewell present by a very good friend right before leaving Barcelona to come back to Greece. Books, ideas and literature transverse time, space and people's minds trying to defy boundaries. The boundaries themselves draw equatorial lines around our lives. As we move tangentially around these boundaries, it appears that our lives are making circles. But they aren't.

I look outside my window and recognize a familiar view. It is like spring in Greece since I came back to Athens yesterday and by 6pm the setting sun, lights up the antena-infested skyline I can see through my bedroom window, with my desk strategically positioned so that I can face outside. The view is nothing like the one I had from the 4th floor Bioinformatics lab until last Friday, the sea is emphatically missing but it could be worse. 

There is a scene in "Howard's End" where one of the main characters, "brittishly" arrogant and genuinely phlegmatic lets out a silly aphorism which goes something like this:

"My father says there's only one great view, and that is the view of the sky over our heads"

Somewhere among some old photos I took before leaving Athens in 2006, somewhere among the published photos of the blog I kept while I was in Barcelona, I found the one that appears at the top of this post. My old colleagues may still be able to see it hanging on the lab wall over my old screen (if Pedro who inherited my desk has not made any radical changes yet). 

As I have been in Greece for only two days, I am still trying to cope with simple things I have become unfamiliar with. Trying not te be run over by cars while crossing the street or getting used to the idea that taxi drivers (sometimes even bus drivers) will smoke without asking any permission. The feeling that you have to get to know your own country after sometime has something charmingly unsettling. One needs a set of references to get by, at least in the beginning.

Looking out of the window it's good to see that the view of the sky over our heads seems to have remained reassuringly constant.

deciamos ayer...

They say that brother Luis de Leon, one of the greatest poets of the Spanish renaissance started his first class after a three year imprisonment (convicted for having translated the Bible into vernacular Spanish) with these words:

"Deciamos ayer..."

meaning "As we were saying yesterday..."

Thus he wanted to state the fact that nothing had really changed over those three years and that everything could resume from where he had left them.

Here I am, having just come back from Luis de Leon's country, back to my hometown after three years (that were nothing like imprisonment), starting anew all these things I once left behind as if nothing has changed (or has it?)

"Deciamos ayer..."

Homage to Barcelona

The photo was taken by Robert Capa in Barcelona on the 17th of October 1938. It pictures the perfect portrait of a man bidding farewell to Spain at the last parade of the International Brigades of the 35th Division of the Spanish Army.

Today I am that man.

I have not fought in a war (yet) but in an ironic way I am bidding farewell to Spain to join the army back in Greece. But today I am that man, in whose eyes I can see the determination of someone who knows he has fought the right war. Thus I am, today, leaving Barcelona after three years and 29 days having no regrets about anything. On the contrary, this farewell post should be a homage to Catalonia's pride capital.

There are so much I can say and so little space. Three years and 29 days would not fit in a post, even if they were completely void of emotions, memories, colours, sounds, tastes and odours. My days in Barcelona, happen to be full of all of the above. But how can one squeeze it all in here? People I 've met, friends I 've made, places I 've seen...
As this blog was created in the first place so that I can treasure the finest (or the most intense) of these moments, it would be a pleonasm to try to sum them up here. A blog is not a scientific paper. Thus it doesn't have to end with conclusions, or future perspectives. This blog could only end with acknowledgments.

Today I am the man in the photo. Speechless, overwhelmed, sad, thankful, I bid "Farewell" to Barcelona, I say "Thank you" to all of you.
If you still like me you should be proud of yourselves. You made me a better man.

You guys know who you are.

---

Barcabios has stopped but life (βιος) goes on. As I move to Athens I will take everything with me here : http://enathinaisbios.blogspot.com
We 'll keep in touch

---

ligero de equipaje

They say it's hard to say goodbye but they very rarely say why. Last Saturday I found out. And it is all right here in a tuft of little papers hanging from a string.

Next Sunday I 'll have to take the plane that takes me back to my hometown. One of the petty things I have to take care of is the size and weight of my luggage. Even though I 'll be taking the trip with the person I most long for to be with back in Greece, I still need to keep it tight and light. No heavy books, no bulky objects, no clothes I have not wore over the last three years but somehow am still keeping in my closet. There has to be a choice of stuff I take with me and stuff I leave behind.

What I could never leave behind is the bunch of little papers you see hanging from my closet. Each paper carries a small goodbye message written on it. Funny or sad, emotional or cool, "goodbyes" and "till we meet again" messages from the friends I made in Barcelona over the last three years. I see it like a small arc of memories and it's what I will most cherish to take with me on this trip back home.

I am just so lucky that memories have no mass. Because otherwise I would have to carry a lot overweight luggage.

leave the keys on the engine

I read this for the first time in an article in the Times and was reminded of the story reading about it again in Greek newspapers yesterday. More than 3000 cars (most of them luxurious vehicles) have been confiscated by the Dubai authorities after having been abandoned at the parking lot of the Dubai International Airport. Stricken by the crisis, their owners had no choice but to leave them there before taking flight from what used to be the Mecca of real estate economy. That was before the bubble burst. Now that it has, all those aspiring entrepreneurs could think of was to abandon the sinking ship leaving everything behind. Most of the cars had the keys on the engine. And in many back seats, there were piles of unpaid bills, bounced checks and overdraft credit cards. A few have even bothered to leave an apologetic note:

"So long and sorry for everything!"

I was thinking about these abandoned cars -as symbols of jobs that remain undone- while getting ready to leave Barcelona next week, leaving a number of pending issues behind (almost all of them work-related). It then occurred to me that I might look like one of those car-owners "abandoning the ship". I even remembered my boss using this exact term in a sudden outburst of poetic despair one day last December.

I don't think of myself that way though. Next week, when I come in to pick up my stuff I 'll have the sense I am leaving as a gentleman and not as a coward. No unpaid bills, no unfinished reports, no traces of latent procrastination in the back seat. Instead of a goodbye note, I will be leaving my boss with 100 pages of well-documented results. I 'll then load 60G of data on my external hard disc drive and clean up my desk.

The car may stay here but I'll be taking the keys with me.

thus spoke the man in the street

---

"What a curse living in a world so damnably orphic, where there is no room for the language of the man in the street. In a world where the man in the street cannot speak, even the poet has to remain silent"

Umberto Eco
On Symbolism

---

I recently read "On Literature" by Umberto Eco (on loan from Valentina), an interesting collection of essays on literature and literary criticism. Although some of them were probably a bit advanced for my literary background, I found most of them quite entertaining and with stimulating aphorisms like the one I am posting above. Apart from its certain appeal to my political views (not to mention my disdain to any kind of elitism) it reminded me of the nicest anecdote I can remember regarding art and its appreciation. I post it below the way I remember it, probably a bit embellished by the passing of time since the first time I heard it narrated by a very good friend.

Here it goes:

Three renowned film directors were once interviewed on a popular radio show. The show host started by asking the first one -known to be a passionate realist- what in his opinion was the purpose of art.

He said: Imagine an everyday scene in a very common place, a small street of a middle-sized city. Now imagine a common man, let's make him a builder or a docker. We give him an imaginary line in the film. What would this line be? In my opinion, what the man on the street has to say is a simple phrase, something as common and ordinary as his ordinary life. Because in the end, the purpose of art is to imitate life.

The host then turned to the second one, a prominent representative of the romantic wave and asked him the same question.

He said: Art is indeed an imitation of life. But life is not always ordinary. Life can be full of surprises. Utter greatness and extreme misery may sometimes be hidden in the most obscure clefts of everyday routine. Art's function is to reveal the unexpected. To clearly state the possibility for every man to rise above the ordinary. What the man on the street has to say? I say put in his mouth the greatest universal truth, the most outstanding, crucial aphorism. Make his words resonate in the souls of your spectators forever.

The radio host was delighted with this exchange of opinions. It looked like he had touched a very sensitive point and was very excited with the way the conversation was developing. He turned to the third director, one that had never been a particular fun of a given art movement and asked him his view on the matter.

Then he said: It is true, life can be ordinary and life can be exceptional. There are people who lead passionate lives, those that weave the same fabric of history and there is the man on the street who passes his ordinary days entangled in this fabric. Nonetheless there is space for greatness in everyone. Each one of us, our docker father, an illiterate man who works in a factory, an uneducated housewife are all very likely to spend our days without achieving greatness. Still, for each and everyone of us, there will come a day, long after we will be gone that someone who knew us, someone who loved us, someone whom we have hurt, will remember us. He will remember something we did or something we said, something that made an impact in his life. It may be a simple joke put brilliantly in the context of a moment, a proverbial curse, or wonderful words of love, nothing that would sound awkward out of our mouths but still something that touched the other so deeply that he still remembers them. Such are the words that make us immortal, and such words would I look for to put in the mouth of the man on the street.

And that was about when the show was interrupted by the stupid advertising jingle of one of the sponsors.

limerick

High-throughput sequenciation,
made Christoforos beg for salvation.
Once a productive young man.
Alas! he was doomed to become
a grand-master of procrastination.

where did all the scientists go?

The following letter is to be published in the upcoming issue of the London Review of Books. It is a brief statement appealing for peace, responsibility and -above all- reason in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Among the undersigned I spotted musicians, actors, photographers, film directors among a number of prominent writers. I could also recognize the names of at least seven Nobel prize laureates for Literature.

The reader is kindly asked to try and spot at least one person even distantly related to science.

He is also kindly advised to make a useful comparison with this document.

(In the photo: Participants of the 2nd Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affaires, organized in 1958 by Linus Pauling, Nobel Laureate for Chemistry AND Peace)

below the letter addressed to LRB by Daniel Barenboim et al.

---

The London Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
'Please Listen, Before It Is Too Late'
By Daniel Barenboim

To the Editors:

Your readers may be interested in the following statement by Daniel Barenboim and the list of those who have supported it.

For the last forty years, history has proven that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict cannot be settled by force. Every effort, every possible means and resource of imagination and reflection should now be brought into play to find a new way forward. A new initiative which allays fear and suffering, acknowledges the injustice done, and leads to the security of Israelis and Palestinians alike. An initiative which demands of all sides a common responsibility: to ensure equal rights and dignity to both peoples, and to ensure the right of each person to transcend the past and aspire to a future.

Daniel Barenboim

Adonis, Etel Adnan, Alaa el Aswany, Dia Azzawi, Agnès B., Ted Bafaloukos, Russell Banks, Tahar Ben Jelloun, John Berger, Berlin Philharmonic, Bernardo Bertolucci, François Bayle, Idil Biret, Christian Boltanski, Pierre Boulez, Jacques Bouveresse, Alfred Brendel, Peter Brook, Adam Brooks, Carole Bouquet, Daniel Buren, Ellen Burstyn, Huguette Caland, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Carmen Castillo, Patrice Chéreau, William Christie, Paulo Coelho, J.M. Coetzee, Roger Corman, Jean Daniel, Régis Debray, Robert Delpire, Jonathan Demme, Plácido Domingo, Umberto Eco, Elliott Erwitt, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Rupert Everett, Michel Faber, Carlo and Inge Feltrinelli, Ralph Fiennes, Filarmonica della Scala, Jodie Foster, Eytan Fox, Fab 5 Freddy, Bella Freud, Martine Franck, Mary Frank, Eduardo Galeano, Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Gere, Gamal Ghitany, Amos Gitai, Edouard Glissant, Jean-Paul Goude, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Haneke, Donald Harrison, Milton Hatoum, Sheila Hicks, Bill Irwin, Steven Isserlis, Philippe Jaccottet, Elfriede Jelinek, Samih al-Kassem, Naomi Kawase, Ya¸sar Kemal, Rachid Khalidi, Edouard Al-Kharrat, Michel Khleifi, Gérard D. Khoury, Abbas Kiarostami, Stephen King, William Klein, Abdellatif Laâbi, Jacques Leibowitch, Jemia and J.M.G. Le Clézio, Stéphane Lissner, Radu Lupu, Yo-Yo Ma, Amin Maalouf, Claudio Magris, Issa Makhlouf, Florence Malraux, Henning Mankell, James McBride, John Maybury, Zubin Mehta, Waltraud Meier, Annette Messager, Duane Michaels, Anne-Marie Miéville, Marc Minkowski, Thomas Mitchell, Ariane Mnouchkine, Sarah Moon, Edgar Morin, Jacques Monory, Fernando Morais, Jeanne Moreau, Georges Moustaki, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Nouvel, Kenzaburo Oe, Orhan Pamuk, Clare Peploe, Michel Piccoli, Maurizio Pollini, Christian de Portzamparc, Simon Rattle, Alain Resnais, Claudia Roden, Arundhati Roy, Moustapha Safouan, Walter Salles, Susan Sarandon, Fazil Say, Elif Şafak, George Semprun, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Pierre Soulages, Wole Soyinka, Ousmane Sow, Staatskapelle Berlin, Salah Stétié, Juliet Stevenson, Meryl Streep, Elia Suleiman, Peter Suschitzky, Tilda Swinton, Sam Szafran, Zeynep Tanbay, Uma Thurman, Desmond Tutu, Shirley and Charlie Watts, Abdo Wazen, Jacques Weber, Wim Wenders, Debra Winger, Daniel Wolff, Neil Young

a thousand days and three months

On the last Saturday of January 2006 I arrived in Barcelona after a three hour flight over a rainy and windy Mediterranean. Maria and Fernando were kindly waiting to pick me up from the airport and so around 10pm I entered the flat located on the third floor of a renovated building on Carrer de la Merce, number 6. I went to bed early as I had nothing better to do and I slept my first night in Barcelona in the company of the sound of the rain on my window. The next morning I woke up to find out the day was as rainy as the previous night. I called my parents back home to reassure them I was fine. Then I watched #1 ranked Federer win the Australian Open and spent the whole day in front of my computer. At night, I watched Isabel Coixet's "La vida secreta de las palabras" winning the Goya award for best film.
Before going to bed I posted the first ever post of barcabios, whose name was decided mostly on the availability of a term combining "Barcelona" and "bios" (which is Greek for life). It had this same photo of Parc Guell on a cloudy day on top and was entitled "Intro".

There is a number of reasons we remember some days in detail. One of them is that some days are more special than others simply because they are radically different or because they signify an event of a certain -subjective- importance. First day at school, graduation day or -for that matter- my first night in Barcelona. Another reason for this memory-imprinting is that some days assume a latent character of periodicity. They tend to be recurring, most of them annually. Birthdays, anniversaries, the final of the Champions League, or -in this case- the last weekend of January.

Comparing that weekend three months and a thousand days ago with the last one, would be of no importance or purpose if it wasn't for yesterday nights insomnia. In my desperate attempt to finally fall asleep, I ended up thinking what happened inbetween days since January 2006.

Some things never change. The last weekend was as rainy as that one back in 2006. Perhaps not as windy as then, since the wind only came one week too early this year. I still call my parents every Sunday, still to reassure them everything is fine.

A number of things have changed. For instance, instead of having nothing better to do than going to bed on Saturday nights I have to fight for my right NOT to spend the whole night out going from dinner, to concert, to party and back. It's normal. Back then I knew nobody. Today I know some people. And they are so good to me that they never stop inviting me out. Even when I am as anti-social as possible.
Other things have changed too.
Federer is no longer ATP's top seed. In fact he lost the Australian Open's final to current #1 Rafa Nadal. Isabel Coixet is now considered to be the most promising Spanish (or I sould probably say Catalan) director. Nonetheless she has done only one film in the meanwhile ("Elegy" starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz), which was not exactly great.
Barcabios has now 167 posts in addition to that distant, lonely "Intro"(ductory) one. It still has more or less the same number of readers (somewhere between three or four people I would say).

As the though came to me that the last weekend of January 2010 will probably find me in military uniform somewhere in Greece, I suddenly fell asleep.

a day in the life of Francois S.

But not just any day. A particular Tuesday, September 9th 2008.

Early in the morning of said Tuesday, Francois S. enters the bakery "El Pan" in a poor neighborhood of Badalona. He has not slept well. The night before it rained for the first time after many weeks and he had to seek shelter under a nearby bridge. He is weary and starving as he goes into the bakery past the cashier, reaches out, grabs a baguette and attempts to leave without paying. The woman at the cashier also reaches out and manages to grab the other side of the baguette. She doesn't let go until Francois S. threatens her in french, pushes her away trying to take the bread out of her hands. As she holds firm, the baguette is broken in two and Francois S. flees the bakery with only half of the bread. Later on the same day, upon being arrested by local policemen he still has some crams of that half baguette all over his ragged shirt.

Two days ago, Francois S. is under trial for having stolen half a baguette. He is tried in absentia as the authorities had no way to locate the bridge under which he is currently sleeping. With or without him present, the public prosecutor asked for the maximum penalty to be imposed against Francois S. Eighteen months for the violent robbery of half a loaf of bread.

It could have been a mockery of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" with Francois as Jean Valjean and with the attorney playing the role of Javert. Only it is a true story and you can read about it here.

In case the prosecutor has not read the book, he may want to know that in the end, Javert commits suicide
by jumping from a bridge into the Seine. And although the river Besos, flowing through Badalona, may not be deep enough to serve for this purpose, he may end up meeting Francois S. still sleeping below one of the bridges.

the greatest of all ideas

It is perhaps my greatest ambition, if it qualifies as one, to be able at some point to reconcile the worlds of art and science (in that order). It goes without saying that such an ambition is -in my case- to be undertaken at a passive level, that of the receiver and not the one of the transmitter.

On today's El Pais, in a very interesting article , Antonio Muñoz Molina came to encourage this ambition of mine, by comparing Darwin's "Origin of the species" to the works of Dickens and Balzac. It's been a long time since I read the "Origin", mostly out of curiocity than out of literary or scientific interest. Back then I was a young student of chemistry with no particular interest in literature or biology. Therefore, I am not ashamed to admit that I never noticed the special style that Molina is talking about.

Almost a decade has passed since then, I now hold a PhD from a biology department, I have grown more interested in literature and forms of art other than football, I have read a number of books, among them "The voyage of the Beagle", Darwin's log of the most famous journey in the history of science. I still cannot admit being able to perceive what Molina sees in Darwin that reminds him of Flaubert or Verne, or Tolstoy. Nonetheless I agree that the pleasure we get out of a great idea is very similar to the spell cast upon us by a great book.

And in this sense, the austere simplicity of Darwin's greatest idea, its development and final conclusion and the influence it still has today, can only be compared with the finest of prose.