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.

reflections of a scyscraper window cleaner

What thoughts may come to him, while looking through the window?
Staring at us in our warm and comfortable cubicles, protected by rain and wind behind a curtain of soapy water and a soundproof glass shield. He might consider us fortunate, for being able to chat on the phone or with each other with our mugs filled with hot coffee, so inviting, next to the keyboard. He might even consider us worthy of this secure working place, blaming himself for not having been able to be considered capable of a job as dully secure as ours.

On the other hand he may not be thinking of us at all from this aspect. Perhaps the reflecting window and the prismatic layers of lather are not sufficient to hide our weary faces after Wednesdays' meetings. Or the way we look back at him, pretending compassion simply to hide our guiltily envying him for being able to whistle while working.

When the only thing we can do is jokes about computers...

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PS. This post owes its existence to a conversation I had with Flip looking at one of the window cleaners of our own building and its title to Elbow's brilliant "Loneliness of the tower-crane driver"

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hrönir

or
[On the uncertainty of a past to be invented]

While reading Umberto Eco's "On Literature" (on loan from Valentina) it is impossible not come across a number of references to my beloved Borges, who is after all one (if not the one) of Eco's main influences. I ended up spending half of last Saturday reading Eco's essays in parallel with re-reading some of Borges' finest pieces. And then I reached "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", one of his most important works and my personal favourite.
I am not going to be the first, and certainly not the last to point out the number of ways in which Borges has acted as a "prophet" of modern science (hypertexts, www, reference networks are only a few examples). Nonetheless, there is -to my opinion- something really original in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Here Borges describes the conspiracy of some of humankind's greatest minds to create a fictional world whose foundations are based on completely subjective and anti-scientific concepts. The planet "Tlön" is an ultra-platonic universe, whose founding principle is an indisputable, extreme idealism and whose classic culture comprises -according to Borges- "only one discipline: psychology".

The most remarkable of all things "Tlönian" though is the fact that -here comes the best- "centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality". Enters the astonishing concept of the "hrönir". These are objects which literally come to existence once someone laboriously tries to imagine them. A guy loses a pencil, starts to look for it persistently imagining where it could be, ends up in finding it on his desk, but we are no longer talking about the pencil he lost. That one is still lying on the bus seat, having fallen out of his pocket. Apart from other aspects (which Borges fails or avoids to mention) the "hrönir" have provided invaluable service to Tlön's archaelogists who are in the position to better interrogate as well as to modify the past, sometime making it as unpredictable as the future.

Leaving Tlön and coming back to the cynical Earth, it appeared to me that there is a striking similarity between the production of the hrönir and the results of my scientific research (or even worse, everybody's scientific research). You see, more and the more often I find myself trying really hard to make something appear, where it once not existed. Data are just too stubborn to corroborate your elegant predictions and hypotheses. As time pressure and lack of money renders the repetition of their natural production (that is the experiments) impossible, they simply need to be re-invented.

But as Tlön only existed once(?) and only(?) in the all-too-powerful borgesian imagination, I find myself unable to produce some convincing, hrönir-like results to support my work. It seems that my way of thinking is either too materialistic (an abominable sin in Tlön) or that I am so unbearably romantic to keep hoping that the day will come, when the numbers will add up, the plots will fall into place and the statistics will need no fine-tuning.

But then again, the inhabitants of Tlön also have a name for the objects that come to existence out of hope. They call them ur.

today

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain

that could hold you dear lady from going insane

that could ease and cool you and ease the pain

of your useless and pointless knowledge

Bob Dylan

Tombstone blues

the symmetry of age

Given the fact that I just came back to work one week ago, I should consider it a success that during the same last week I had the chance to read two short novels that two friends of mine had individually suggested. I decided to read them back to back as a small project on age and how it is developed from two opposite points of view. The outcome of this so-called "reading" project was a bit unexpected and that is the reason of writing a post about it.

I started with "Everyman" by Philip Roth (suggested by Faidra), which tells the story of an old man struggling against a failing health and the bitterness of reminiscing the splendour of a lost youth. Over the last years, I have been reluctant to read anything by Roth and I guess this had to do mostly for not wanting to submit to the Roth-mania, stirred by all literary media. At the same time I have always been reserved against prolific writers with an ability to publish a best-seller every two years. 

Nonetheless, I found "Everyman" quite rewarding. More of an autobiographical sketch of old age, it transmits a certain optimistic feeling without taking it too far. While it is supposed to be a book about death it ends up being one about life without resorting to easy and simplistic euphoric messages. In the end it is an honest book by an honest writer and even though it starts off with a funeral and ends with a death, it leaves you with a sense that what lies inbetween is -like life- trully worth going through.  

In a sort of counterpoint, I went on to read "Youth" (suggested by Filipe), the second part of JM Coetzee's autobiography, describing his life as a young wannabe writer in the London of the 60s that ends up working as a computer programmer. Although this was supposed to be the "optimistic", "young" side of the project it proved to be quite the opposite. Coetzee uses the dullest of colours to paint the pictures of his youth, the proze evokes a feeling as gloomy as the style, everything is grey like London. The book also ends in an abrupt way with no resolution or even a catastrophe that would signify -at least- a partial closure. Throughout its 170 or so pages we see a young man struggling against his own incompetences without being able to feel any sort of pitty for him. This man grew up to win the Nobel Prize for a number of great books, of which I admit to have read none. "Youth" is certainly not one of them. To me it appeared more like its creator's self-punishing apologee. 

I am not a book critic, neither do I like writing or talking a lot about books. It was just the fact that these two books, both suggested by friends, both written by well-respected writers. What I found interesting is that the one talking about old age is the optimistic one while the one referring to youth is the darkest. The one that talks about dying makes you want to live and the one which talks about living makes you doubt if it is really worth it. 

In the end, the pretty banal point I am trying to make is (apart from the obvious that appearances can be misleading even when it comes into simple book-reading) that there appears to be a sort of compensating symmetry between age and the way we reflect on it. While young we tend to think everything is worthless. Then we reach a certain age to appreciate everything that has passed us by. As in most of human activites we tend to disregard the grace of some simple things, cherishing them only upon their inevitable loss.

But then again, this is nothing new.

today...

He has a list of words and phrases he has stored up, mundane or recondite, waiting to find homes for them. "Perfervid" for instance: one day he will lodge "perfervid" in an epigram whose occult history will be that it will have been created as a setting for a single word, as a brooch can be a setting for a single jewel. The poem will seem to be about love or despair, yet it will all have blossomed out of one lovely-sounding word, of whose meaning he is as yet not entirely sure.

John Maxwell Coetzee
Youth

once the bombing has stopped...

...the siege will still continue.

"On 13 November production at Gaza’s only power station was suspended and the turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs. Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts."

Sara Roy,
The London Review of Books, Jan 1st, 2009

on freedom of speech (and other demons)

Let's say tomorrow I wake up and go to work to give my lab meeting seminar, wearing a T-shirt like this one. What will the reaction be? Some may look interested, others might congratulate me for making a statement, there will be the ones who will find it a bit irritating. Will anyone care to fine me with 3000 euros? I guess not.

Nonetheless, this is what happened to Frederic Kanoute, FC Sevilla's striker for showing off his T-shirt after scoring a goal against Deportivo La Coruna in last Wednesday's Spanish Cup game. Even worse, Kanoute just escaped a fine of 30.000 euros since the message on his shirt (reading the word "Palestine" in multiple languages) "bore no direct references to violence"! It seems absurd that such a penalty comes directly from the penal code of the Spanish Football Federation in accord with the one set by UEFA. T-shirts with political messages are strictly forbidden, and of late even players taking off their shirts in celebrations are to be shown a yellow card. Such is the mind of people who run world football nowadays.

It seems that according to them, football players are only to score silent goals, they are to keep their opinions to themselves and they are to be severely punished if they choose to defy the shameful "omerta" that fines a T-shirt reading "Palestine" as much as tens of fans firing flares against the visitor crowd (it happened in Espanyol-Barcelona last October). The reasoning is as simplistic as is false. Football players, they tell us, as all athletes, are role models for young people. Their image comes in every home through TV. They simply cannot be allowed to transmit messages of any sort. What they don't tell us is that it is perfectly normal to transmit a number of messages, ALL strangely related to buying sponsored products, during the same football games, while the players are to perform silently and in accord with carefully spelled out instructions. Neither do they tell us that the TV broadcasting of football games is by far the greatest source of profit of all footballing federations on the planet and that on top of making millions out of the football players' efforts they claim the right of dictating their "politically correct" behaviour.

But should it be this way? Would you keep working for someone who would fine you if you wore a T-shirt with a political message? And what limits are there to freedom of speech? Is "Fight global warming" acceptable and "Kill all hippies" punishable? It just seems unfair to me that football players are free to wear T-shirts that read "Jesus Saves" but a message like "Save the people of Palestine" gets a fine of 30.000 euros!

But UEFA's bright minds should have known better. And as football fans throughout the world are something more than numb morons destined to buy PlayStations and Heineken six-packs, over the last two weeks, messages like "Free Palestine" and "Stop the War" have been appearring more and more often among the crowds in all great European stadia. It looks like we, football-"consumers", have already been contaminated by dissident voices like Kanoute's.

Or perhaps, we have never needed to.

and the circus leaves town

since the "circus" will apparently stick around for a few weeks more, I am posting this as a reminder, more to myself than anyone else...

Soon barcabios will transform into athensbios (and then probably to wherever life -and the Greek army- takes me). It will be hard to take off after three years in this wonderful city, but on leaving and the inevitable feelings this will bring about I shall talk when the time is ripe.

for the time, this is to remind me that I am here and well, ready to start posting about stuff that I like (sometimes) or that annoy me (mostly).

So stick around. I am not through with it yet.