Liberating Spaces

The legend says that when St George killed the dragon to save the princess of Lydda, a rose tree grew from the blood of the dragon. St George gave the most beautiful of all roses to the princess. On April 23, St George’s day, patron of Catalunya, a tradition started long ago in which Catalan men give a rose to the woman they love. Then during the Renaixença catalana, a XIX century cultural movement to recover the Catalan heritage, the act of offering a book on the same day as a reciprocal gift for the rose was established as part of the “Tradició de Sant Jordi” (St George’s tradition).

La “Diada de Sant Jordi”, April 23, is for most Catalans the most significant and beautiful day of the year. My memories of Sant Jordi are of sunny skies, people everywhere roses in one hand, the hand of their lover in the other and looking at books on the street stands that bookshops put for the occasion. Living outside of my country, it is the one I remember with most fondness as being the most beautiful day to be in Catalunya.

This day also represents a reality I’ve been talking about in some of my latest posts. The continuity and complicity of reason and emotions. The book is the reason and the rose the emotions. They are both inseparable. Today, books and roses are exchanged indistinctly, to lovers, family and friends. The word and the flower become tokens of love expressing our complex nature of logic and feeling. A symbol for the emotional revolution.

This week is ending. I’ve been (still I am) in Moscow for a week of teaching at the MGIMO, as I do every six months. On the academic side, no big changes or problems – well, besides a drunk student who told me in front of the rest of the students that “this year everything is changing”, for I will have to start teaching in Russian (!), because he couldn’t understand English and my subject interested him very much (ignoring the fact that there was very good simultaneous translation!). I took it as a funny anecdote anyway, similar to the email I got last year from the worst-translator-ever, who was complaining that he got fired because of me.

The big news for me are that while I was in Russia, I could do politics in Spain. I could participate as a blogger and citizen in the massive online protest against the surreptitious provision included at the end (and some say in the last minute) of Prime Minister Zapatero’s new Ley de Economía Sostenible (Law for a Sustainable Economy), currently being read by the Spanish Parliament. This provision modifies the Spanish Information Society Law passed in 2002. It creates a new Commission for Intellectual Property (Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual) in the Ministry of Culture. And, according to the interpretation I concur with, it gives to this Commission powers to shut off a website or online service infringing intellectual property rights without judicial intervention. This set off a viral fire on the web in a matter of hours. Twitter was the main conduct through which this increasingly candescent political momentum ran. The morning after the law proposal was presented to the Parliament, a (still) unidentified group of “journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators” had written a Manifesto for the defence of the rights of Internet users (Manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en Internet).

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