SPACE TARGETS: ON PRECISION AND COSMIC COSMOPOLITANISM

'It's not rocket science,' I tell a colleague of mine, after having exposed some thought on why culture plays a significant role in the connection between technology and the arts. Culture makes that connection: artifacts are not just artifacts, they create discourse and this discourse is contingent on cultural manifestations, I furthermore say. And then I say something complicated about the self-reflexive paradox inherent in the observer/observed system of relations. One can observe a system without immediately becoming aware of the fact that one is already part of that system. Once that awareness occurs, however, the problem of legitimation begins: who rules over what or what rules over whom? How does one explain what one is doing in a system that ultimately constitutes one? While I try to aim for some precision, I decide that precision has never been my strong point, so I merely say it again: 'still, it's not rocket science.'

I can be extremely precise in certain circumstances and if need be, but my inclination has always tilted towards the obscure. I blame it on language. Unlike the language of a computer, however advanced - which operates with simple terms such as 0 and 1 - natural languages give us the possibility to pun, play, and pester our interlocutors with puns, plays, and other paronomastic palimpsesting.

I think of inheritance. My father was a rocket scientist. He worked in Communist Romania for the military at a unit where they designed rockets and missiles. He was a mathematician there until he died at the age of 39. My mother, au contraire, knew nothing about rockets, set theory, or number theory, but she was good at counting. I have never seen anybody count as fast as she did. She was arithmetic incarnated. This pissed my father off, of course. He kept wondering how someone could be so good without any formal training. He didn't believe in genius, and she didn't mind. They loved each other. Interestingly enough the only person who could challenge my mother was in fact my father's own sister, who was also good at counting. Fast too. This amused my father, even though it was still my mother who would win. My mother was a winner in other competitions too. Like the ones that involve measuring space and distance. When my mother would say, 'yes, we can fit the cupboard in there, as there's just enough space, about 73 cm,' she was always right. I have never seen anybody be able to measure distance and space with such precision and accuracy. Not once was she wrong. We were all amused when she would take people's bets. It meant chocolate for us on the incredulous' account.

What I inherited is a love of precision, which yet I cannot master, and a sense for space, which yet I am afraid of. Although I can also measure distance better than most people I know, I am never as precise as my mother used to be. Alas, she is also dead. One of my top favourite entertainment time is watching 3D movies about the cosmos at some Planetarium, yet it is never the case that I don't get the vertigo. I want to grasp infinity but cannot. In another dimension I fancy being Georg Cantor married to my mother. What attracts me to Cantor's mathematics is his discussion of the concepts of countable and uncountable infinities. Cantor's theory exhibits the proof of countability of the positive rationals and the proof that (0,1) is uncountable. However, my understanding of what's going on in mathematics at that level is reduced to a vague sense that there is something essential to the important concept of one-to-one correspondence. I translate that into my own pocket science: while I cannot count either like my mother or like my father, I can stand on my head like they never could. Granted, there is a genetic relation between my head and theirs, and since they could count, I take that to mean that their heads are therefore countable. Mine I prefer to think of as uncountable. This makes me feel like a cosmopolitan Alice - if not in wonderland, then still in some rational integer.

Alice folded her hands, and began: -
'You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'

HOLY COWS, CHILDREN, AND OTHER ANIMALS

I'm having dinner with a Romanian friend at the newly opened Cafe RUCola on the university's campus. The Weissbier is a good Hoegaarden, and as expected, whereas the so-called Italian food is not so Italian. We talk about children. My friend is on the verge of handing in her PhD dissertation at the University of Warsaw, and tells me that while on her research semester in Denmark, she couldn't understand why all of her Danish female colleagues were on maternity leave. Now she works part-time at Roskilde U, and she has observed that things aren't any different here where the 'have-children-while-studying' phenomenon is concerned. Beats me, I say. When I was a PhD student at the, then, University of Odense, now University of Southern Denmark, my female colleagues were also on maternity leave. Almost all the time, and without exception. I decided then that it was a particularly Danish tradition enabled by the handsome state grant for PhD researchers. During three years of good salary women could in principle squeeze in at least two children. Which most of them did. Except me, but then I am still a Romanian in a certain regard, in spite of what my passport says.

I disclose that I like other people's children, for about one hour at a time, and that I intend to have none of my own. I can tell that she is surprised, but not that surprised. Curiosity takes over. I engage in a quick tirade. While my verbosity doesn't necessarily explain anything about my motives, it says something about my opinion about people with children. I tell my friend that there are three things which irritate me in parents. These things are based on personal experience and on the fact that I have as yet to meet a couple with children who deviates from any of the three: (1) feeling sanctimonious (2) feeling righteous, and (3) feeling sacrificial. People having children often invoke tradition in their defense. In this demurral scheme tradition prescribes that children mark a sacred way of life which one must honour by ensuring that one does the right thing, such as making sure not to contribute to the world's doomsday, so there'll be something left for generations to come. Sanctimoniousness and righteousness are easier to handle as they involve the parents' emotions that are smaller in scope and do not call for the attention of the rest of the world. Parents please themselves by procreating and feel good about being concerned with what happens to their offspring. The third feeling, however, is more complicated as it is something which parents serve not only non-parents, but also their own children. As it goes, in the name of having sacrificed their freedom, parents call for respect from the likes of me, egotistical non-parents (I've been told). And I comply. Respect goes where respect is due: I admire women who want to be pregnant 9 months and then worry for the rest of their lives (imagine some mothers' disappointment when after having decided on their son's 5th birthday that he must study at Lund University, 15 years down the road they discover that all their son wants at the age of 20 is to become a truck driver. This is a real life scenario). Right, my friend says, and then rhetorically asks: isn't the greatest arrogance on earth comprised in the narcissistic thought that (1) our children continue our line and (2) that anybody gives a damn? Right, it's my turn to say, and we both turn to our pasta. I think to myself: it is a fact of life that life is meaningless, hence having or having not any children is hardly going to make a difference once we'll all lay dead in the ground. And the thought that, for once, I'm not accused of being arrogant, makes me humble. I suddenly get optimistic: I'll get myself a cat and train it to eat the holy cows surrounding my life, or at least help me box conventions out of their goatly skulls.