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.