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.