Σφραγίδα

Ψαχούλευα την ψυχή μου πάλι
σαν φτωχός
σαν άστεγος από ζωή
με βρήκα να χώνω τα δάχτυλά μου στις νύχτες που με φτάσαν οι σκέψεις.
Μύρισε κάποια μυρωδιά παλιά αφημένη σε 
κάποιο κρεβάτι σκεπασμένο από χρόνο,
από απόσταση ανθρώπινη, από εκείνη των ματιών
που μουδιάζει τον άνθρωπο
που κρατάει το σώμα να κοιτάζει τη  ζωή 
σαν χάρτη 
και να χάνεται στη φαντασίωση του χαρτιού, 
που τη βαστά ενωμένη.
Η σιωπή 
Χαρήστηκα γαλήνη και αναρωτήθηκα τότε
πώς βρέθηκα σαν από αγάπη, άνθρωπος
πως γεννήθηκα από θάλασσα, νερό που βρέχει τους κόκους 
και με βασταει η αμμουδιά μέσα του
ζωντανεμένη.

Σταμάτησα εκεί.
Ένιωθε η σκέψη εκείνη 
σαν να βρέθηκα στο μοναχό απάτητο σημείο του κορμιού του σύμπαντος.
Ήταν οι ώρες τέτοιες που δεν χώραγε ο νους μου άλλη αγάπη.
Έσπρωχναν τα νύχια τη σάρκα να πιαστεί ο έρωτας
απ' τ' ανοίγματα , τις πληγές της
μα ο έρωτας μ'αφησε μ'αναπνοή βαριά να τον κοιτώ
να στέκεται και να μετράει τα λόγια που ήθελα να πω 
και κράτησα.

Και ξανάρθε η νύχτα, και ξανάπε η ψυχή μου το έλα
το ακούμπα με
κι εγώ υπάκουος 
μεθυσμένος απ' τη βοή που κάνει ο έρωτας οταν τον αγκίζω
με το νου κατρακύλισα στα πόδια της άμμου
να με πνίξει το ρεύμα
μήπως και γεννηθώ ψάρι τελικά
μήπως και παρασυρθεί ο παράδεισος που ζει εντός μου 
και βγεί να σε ψάξει.

Στάση.
Μια παύση όλα. Μια παύση το ποίημα.
Μια παύση η ζωή.
Να δω πως γεννήθηκα ξένος απ'την αγάπη που με ζητάει 
στρατιώτη.
Αποστάτης 
απ' τη ζωή που με ζητάει παρόν.
έτσι μόνο μεγαλώνουν οι λυποτάκτες
μεσ'από στεριές ατέρμωνες άκρες να στριφογυρίζουν 
σ' έναν μόνιμο αλοπρόσαλο περίπατο
στον ήλιο.
Κι έτσι που με βρήκαν οι σκέψεις χωρισμένο με τη ζωή.
Δεν είχα παρά το  μολύβι που μου δωκε
σφραγίδα το θάνατο
μήπως μπορώ να ελπίσω.

Spaces Indefinite

We are the silences of uninterested lovers

You are the pleas of a man

I am the force dragging the pleas closer

A relationship as such

Mathematical

We are the pains of unrequited desires

Me the bedside lamp that remained shut

You the homeless night that lay beneath it

A connection inevitable

As a noun strong and absolute:

Relationship

A physical one

Like that of water to steam

Maybe if one heats you up they will get me.

Or we are a relationship logical

One is one or the other

But not both

Then one cannot be one with another.

Maybe we are the silence and the tear paired in one evening hug

A relationship antithetical.

Or we have that of the air

We find ourselves in one room of the house today

We are breathed in another

Out in the streets

Inside the cupboards air staling tomorrow

Like atomless atoms we know our mass

We know our speed

But not both.

normally distributed around moments, first moments

second

a relationship negative like that of pride and together

a hypothesis tested

     inconclusive

Is this then a relationship causal?

If not in our petty minds

in the soul that lives between our fingers tense

Found against each other athirst for time

As if they were touching before they touched.

A relationship complete and injective

defined over indissoluble proclivities.

You are the partial disambiguation of my soul.

The taste of another woman

He stood there wide open
his eyes wide open
his arms ladders to his lips
a pair that meant so little then
and so much now
so much in time units
so much quantified by the gravity of the human ticks of the clock
the sunrises together and the sunsets
the darkness together separated by the light grabbing itself from the edges of the bathroom door
light left lit to see the edges of your wondering eyes
light stumbling to leave you bottom lip bitten naked

For a moment an ocean was lying there with us
between me and his arms where 2 inches and an ocean
and I looked at it wondering
if this is the sea I will dream or drown in
if this is the time to float or swim to the shore
and if the waves will break me on those edges
surronding his chest uncovered.
I tasted his lips
and there it was.

Something inside me was left dancing in the true colour of his eyes
I felt my numbing mind lying on the meeting of his mouth where the words had come from.

The horse and the sunset, the place where the words had been
the square coming to me from that opening
like an abyss in the midst of a river.
Across,
the words that bit the skin off my fingers whenever they touched him
In this choreographed drowning,

I found myself on some street
I found myself to be the man on the window watching
some ignorant strangers' way home
when they stab their finished cigar
on my doorstep.

Atlantas

Lying on my bed, that's after all where most of life happens, between those two stops out of the main road lay my thought. Stop one was the paper, the other was the dream.

I keep thinking about people. I keep coming back to them as if in some mysterious litany of salvation, as if I am the God waiting for humans to crucify me again, and through their holding of my hands, and the warmth of their fingers holding me together with the cross waiting to feel the love that longs my heart to be saved from the numbness of happiness.

This is where my thought had been. This is where it was born this afternoon. I lay down with it like a lover betrays his love, for the body, like a lover finds his own love unbearable to carry, I lay down and the thought lay on me like a foreign body. And I was not the God in this world that came to me. The people whose thought brought me there were not asking for forgiveness, the carrying of the sins was for them I found, some sort of obligatory exercise of empathy. Those people stayed silent, it is a praying and ordering, it is an imposing crowd I live among,  this world was wanting me to stand on my two feet, some mere exercise that its unbearableness can stand there with me, the foreign body hanging from my chest dead and me dying with it. And lying there with the body spreading over me still the evening found me still too, physically alive while some soul inside me screaming for the cross.

It is me who asked for these thoughts I know. I ask for them when happiness withdraws into some miserable search for causality. Some fingers on my hand moved, almost as if it was someone else's hand hanging on the side of the bed. I stayed, I let the cross fool me, dishevelled into some idle comfort of sadness.

What a weakness it was that I let myself dream for a moment the room full of doors opening, I dreamed the sound, I smelled the shoes walking in drenched in the rain and the weight meeting the eyes wondering where is it that my surprise was coming from. Is it surprise of affection reciprocated? Is this surprise of affection reciprocated in the same way, for it is only in those comfortable similarities that man understands a man. I thought the eyes of the man opening the door and the misunderstanding put me in that chair tied up, light blinding me and the blindness made it known that I knew what I wanted from the hand who got me there. The search brought him to the meeting of the eyes . It is not affection, that surprised me, the bringing of the feet and the hand to my doorstep seeking some fox's eyes, it was the feeling of the door opening and affection finding itsself incapable of lifting the weight that had me there, the instand urge to keep the door shut in the fear that she would find its way there, and realise it's insufficiency.
In the absence of love,
I was the Atlas.
For isn't love the wanting to lift of a human's weight? Or is it becoming the Atlas for wanting to lift the weight love wants to lift for you?

It dawned on me that in the absense of love I had to lift my own weight
It dawned on me that in it's presence I shall by now know that love is wanting to lift my own weight still.

Sounds of drowning

A child running alone hungry for the hand of a stranger
my love, abandonment in a house of mirrors, still
fascinated by one’s own reflection, a drinker
of paradise.

I put paradise between us.

I put paradise into small perfume bottles.

I spray them on my naked skin and lie in bed enjoying the radiant feeling of them soaking in

like thoughts of hands

tangled against each other.

The drink poisons me in some glorious fantasy of illusions, and I become a queen I become a beggar and I become a starless 4 am gazing out your bathroom window. In that dream, I feel the carpet first caressing my back and toes then I feel it pinching 

as the weight lies above me.

How do I love? Words failing, words wounded lying everywhere. There must be words to document this. Are there words to make you feel it? I feel a writer. When I fall in love. The insignificance of everyday tortures becomes glasses full, 

drops running on the sides of my lips 

I hold them clumsily. I write about me. Not me the person.
Me the idea of a thousand clicking belts getting undone, of myriad fireflies stumbling in the garden dirt, of too many closing of the eyes to enjoy the thinking of us. 

Squeezed voices are coming out of the glass and I lie there murmuring them at a million rhythms.

How many ways are there to feel the want of you. I think them. I chase them. 

They slip off my mind relentlessly for I am, 

in this very moment, only a small fraction of consciousness at the backseat of your car peering at the back of your neck, escaping that dictatorship of your collar, thinking the vertiginous ride and mistaking it for the sweet emotion of together.

Humming.

I spill myself on that very back seat. I let the fabric absorb me all. I let the me be absorbed by the beams of light coming out of that small back window. Eyes closed to think. I wonder if you will. Will I tonight stain your delirium those 3 seconds of pacing the bridge to sleep. Will you roll in my breasts when I become a bird of paradise and you the feathers that fail me above the seas.

And when in the depth of the darkest ocean,

between two drownings

Will you be the creature to swim past me
and devour the corpse left
by the
burning
of the morning sun? 

Sleepwalker

Walker of corridors narrow
airless
dayless
your clothes know the smell of night
your hands hold scars of hardwood flours
your eyes a thousand boxes
opened at once
with the time that covered them flying
lying in the corners of that small room you call heart
Walker of unsettling sounds
Your walk a prayer to tonight's silence
passing its child's fingers through my hair
Dawn finds your prints lying in some folding of the sheets
Dawn waits
Dawn pauses
Dawn wonders
where have you been sleepwalker?

Blindness

There is no beauty
hidden
here.
Only blindness
Blindness smeared all over the walls.
Blindness still.
Blindness silent
in the script of a made up language
sounding spoken confusion.
Shadows rise up the concrete
shadows climb the words.
One thinks the figures for people
man made names of Gods
calling themselves lovers
making themselves perpetrators
running from syllable to syllable
but finding no beauty to corrupt
but that of solitude, uncorruptable.

Cause there is no beauty here
of that of waiting dawns
of that of drowned ideas
of that firing hands of forgotten peoples
to shame the God we made up together
No
I am now almost certain that
there is
no
beauty here.

Certain
We've hidden from pain so well
dexterous morons
We've hidden
that no happiness finds
us anymore.

We live eternally
flowers growing in cupboards
parasites smiling in the darkness to miss us
missing the darkness smiling back sometimes
cripples of emotion for no eyes can see
so black and pitch is the ill sounding word
for so distant is the human experience

Our gray faces grow scared
our scared minds grow gray

and no beauty is born here
and no beauty finds us
and no beauty stands us
and its been so long since I've felt a man with eyes
that no wonder
no beauty
needs to hide
here
anymore.

Segmentaufwand

Have you ever crushed the fingers of a child
with the heel of your shoe
forced the weight of your body on them
Hear them break under his tears?
hear the symphony of screams?
Has power ever done that to you?
Has power ever made you do it?

It's ok
Du musstest
It happens sometimes
You have to
it is necessary
the kid wronged you
Repeat it again
Then the cracks of the fingers fall into this majestic harmony
Greatness feels that way sometimes:
Disgusting
It is an intrinsic part of helping others
It is a Necessity
that's it.

For one to watch the eyes change from pain

How about thousands of people?
Did you ever have to?
Their dreams and aspirations
An unbearable weight to drag
It creates sounds that weight
As you crack the fingers
The sweeping sound of shoes as they tip off balconies
The silence after a gunshot of freedom
The noise of skin as needles of joy get pushed under it
The loud stomach of children
The loud eyes of children
The sound of chalk as it glides on the empty board

The figures are rising together
Nattumsatze!
All a parody of capitalism

And you who is so good with numbers
And you who is so good with surpluses
And you who is so good with capitalism
Tell me

How much does dignity cost?

TELL ME

How much for a pair of eyes?
How much did you sell them off for?
How much was it until you had to?
Until "I needed it"

Costify me
Angela
Crucify me

For I ll become a martyr
For I ll defuse myself in the water that you drink
For I ll colour myself blue and white in the colour of a coffin
And I ll put my words in it, all the weightless soundless words
For I lie the weight of a nation on your shoulders
For I raise myself to the size of humility
While you become another inkblot "salute"
In the shames of history

The Winners train

Where is this train taking me?

I closed my eyes to drift to sleep

Some passengers advised me that

For numbness they said

Their pains must have been petiter than mine

Because mine were unnumbable as I closed my eyes

My fear fed them larger and I only woke up in the darkness wondering

Where is this train taking me?

I felt thirsty and there was this fear of urgency in me that I might die in this very moment as stranger among strangers

Searched for the windows

The night sky is always beautiful, it lay outside the bounds of the small carriage

And I was only a little man

To stop it

Only a little man

I was about to start worrying again but I quickly became busy with all

those little things that make life’s mountain

Things that bite away those ticks and the tocks and finds you the night you are a sleeper

A dreamer?

So I became busy with them all.

What was the time?

Are my friends… on board, my mother’s smell and my father’s eyes

My life who betrayed me through the people I chose

And the office

That blind jail of a chair that I volunteered myself into

Into this life I think

To get me where I am.

Where am I?

I am knowhere. In a state of perpetual motion one can only have velocity and direction.

things rather hard to make out with all those other questions about what was that answer Cameron gave 3 weeks ago that I was unsure about and did the woman I call “true love” really ever loved me?

The valleys grew and as those little thoughts of a little man kept me busy I thought of the news. What was on it yesterday? I grew anxious.

Like an impatient passenger in the slowest train on earth.

I live in this constant state of urgency

It must be this ride

I am running a marathon every second of my life, and even though the thought of living another second like this feels unbearable I can’t imagine what I would be if I gave up. Who would I be like?

I look outside.

All these things that I have missed. Bloody train.

the question grew silent.

I thought about those days at uni. I wish I was a better man. I could have always given more but something always stopped me.

Getting to the top is never easy is it? What a smile.

What a proud smile that is.

A little boy woke up next to me as the ticket man’s silluete approached.

“I am sorry sir but…

where are we going?”

Oh this is the “winner’s train” my friend. 
said the ticket man.

Then he came up close and threatened. Are you on board with us sir?

Because if not…

we approached the night valleys and the singing oaks

the silence whispered through the creaks of the windows

Are you on board with us sir?

I searched my pockets

I gave him every penny I had

In exchange for a ticket

for one expensive ticket.

For the “winner’s train”

#InvestigatoryBill2015 #OpenYourEyes #IntelligenceIsNotIntelligent

The day Science killed Economics

"What's in the name?" Shakespear made it clear: "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". To Shakespeare the name of things was independent and hence uninformative with respect to their substance. But what if the name of things is not just the carrier of information with regards to meaning but also a catalyst with respect to what that meaning actually is?


Truth and the "Science" Factor

Economics is in most, if not all departments around the world today "named" a Social "Science". Unlike other "social sciences" Economics has the unfortunate capacity of using mathematics to "scientify" and formalize its conclusions. To not completely understate the importance of this capacity I do admit, economics is very much mathematical in some ways. Same as in Engineering, in economics mathematics is a tool, a way to recreate circumstances under which one repeatedly applies certain pressures to a system to see its reaction. Mathematics is in this sense a telescope or a microscope that allows one to see detail, to entertain cause and effect. Unlike engineering however, economics has had a bit more trouble with focus. Unlike engineering, “the engine” that economists have to look into and the “pressures” this engine is subject to depend much more “on the eye of the beholder”. In that way, “economists” are potentially slightly more like physicists. They have to discover the rules by which a system works without being able to  “see” everything, and even worse, unlike physicists, without being able to recreate experimentally situations in a lab. So what the sort of thing economists are looking for is, what the kind of truth they are looking for is, what is its nature: subjective or absolute and whether that truth even exists, are questions the answers to which are, to say the least, ambiguous. For that reason the term “social science” in conjunction with the unfortunate capacity to scientificity has potentially proven problematic not just for the discipline but (looking at austerity and market “liberation” hysteria) for societies as a whole that have to bear the cross of bad economics and the Experts that come with it.

Economics and “the Theory of Everything”

Steven Hawking (The Grand Design), in his attempt to summarize not just the purpose of science but also what we call the “scientific methodology” said the following: “Today most scientists would say a law of nature is a rule that is based upon an observed regularity and provides predictions that go beyond the immediate situations upon which it is based”. Based on observation and on accepting the existence of things such as “natural laws”: relations consistent across time and space within a given “scale” of matter (atoms vs planets), science aims to uncover those laws and compose, like a puzzle, “The Theory of Everything”: A theory that by its composition by “natural laws”, has the power to provide predictions beyond the immediate situation in which it is based.

This is the sort of thinking that underlies the natural sciences. This is also the sort of thinking that has underlied and guided most modern economics. Not only the conviction that certain “natural laws” of social sciences do exist but also that moving from observation to their discovery we can – as “scientists” make predictions beyond the immediate situation on which those laws were based.

This is how economists started asking questions like “Does aid help growth?”, “Does government spending help growth” and other stupid gravity-wide-scale questions. Same as in the realms of physics questions of that “all encompassing” nature are only justified under the premise that “under certain conditions” some consistent and countable relationship between those variables such as aid and growth does exist. One would say at this point: “well yes… but physics has different laws according to “those certain conditions” as well, that’s why we have quantum physics, astrophysics etc…

Economics and the Theory of Nothing

While setting out the appropriate conditions under which a theory: a consistent set of laws, holds is a reality in all sciences, it is probably common sense that the scale of which this takes place is inversely related to the theory’s predictive power. If physics had to device a new set of “natural laws” with regards to gravity and movement of particles for any new building you entered some of that universality would be lost and they’d probably be much less confident in calling them “natural laws”. Only naturally, economics, influenced by its commitment to scientificity, has attempted to find such laws and the set of circumstances under which those theories hold. But what if a theory in economics can only extend as far as the immediate situation in which it was based and hence what if “natural laws” that can make predictions beyond that immediate situation simply do not exist. What if the “circumstances” in the case of economics are for example the particular norms of the area on which the observations were based, the people of a certain demographic, culture, income. What if economic “laws” exists under such a niche set of circumstances of time, space and people that have zero predictive power beyond those particular people and that particular time. What if economics –in contradiction with its crowning as a “science”- can only answer very specific questions like the ones that Banerjee and Duflo (Poor economics) very intelligently set out to do. Questions like: Why did the provision of free bed nets in a given African village did not work to decrease malaria?

Which brings me back to Shakespeare and the violation of the independence hypothesis. The “name”, the obsession with what we believe we have to do as scientists has harmed economic thinking and the progress of economics to the extend that it makes me wonder whether economics has done more harm than good in the past 10 years or even worse whether it has even sought to do good to start with…. Because unfortunately, with labelling something as a science another interesting feature has risen: as to all good scientists so to economists, what has mattered is one’s contribution to one’s science. Hence these days an economist judges another by his/her contributions proxied by one’s publications. A good economist is therefore one who published at Econometrica last May rather than one who helped alleviate poverty in region X of country Y or one who explained why inequality arises as a characteristic of labour market X and redistribution Y in country K.

And it is so large the failure of “economic natural laws” that our conviction to them as economists is equivalent to that of the engineers of a zero gravity planet trying to fire a rocket without fuel on earth just because “by observation” in their planet, floating is possible. The conviction is so tragic that instead of questioning to what extend “gravity of x m/s” is indeed universal, they blame the rocket for not being fired correctly. This is the kind of reasoning that has led to treating the financial crisis as an outlier. An “error”, an element of “randomness” rather than a failure of our assumptions and the laws that come with them a failure rendering the crisis “unpredicted even though predictable” (Dani Rodrik).

The World of 2009 A.E. (After Experts)

As an economist this sort of thinking saddens me. It is toxic not only to our world by the emergence of “expert economists” (as an extension of the notion that economic laws are universal and hence one could indeed be an expert) but it has also held back the discipline from declaring dead ideas as dead, from breaking free and growing past its mistakes to the powerful tool it could be. It is almost as if we live by the cross and the crown of “science” too much to service the people we are meant to be writing about as the reality of the adjective “social” in front of “science” would suggest.

"I almost think we are all of us (economists) ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother (substitute discipline) that "walks" in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs , and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghost all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light" (Henry Ibsen, The Ghosts)

I' ll finish with an example, as every good economics paper should. An example of the toxicity of experts as a by product of this sort of thinking as well as of our inability to declare "laws": niche and our way of thinking: flawed.

Barry Eichengreen came to my university a few months ago to give a speech on austerity and the financial crisis. While I heard several times about the "events" that we missed as economists and the reasons why austerity had been necessary for some, I heard nothing about equity, about lack of appropriate tools to speak about asymmetries: things that make each economy and each society different, things that economist's "natural laws" couldn't by construction have captured. When the floor was opened to questions I asked him about these things. In the minute of an answer I got to the most important question of the discipline he just couldn't get himself to admit that the tools we have, the way we think about things MIGHT potentially be flawed. I wanted him to have said something, anything to admit his own limitations, the limitations not of what he knows but mostly of how he knows. I guess admitting the silliness of the universality in such an intractable, diverse world would reduce the significance of "experts" like himself. In moments like this it scares me that people like that advise todays’ policies and politicians. I guess that is a different issue not of methodology but of responsibility so I’d better stop here.