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.