hello.

i’ve been writing in many websites, so i decided to have a personal website to write instead. it doesn’t mean i’ll stop any of my other projects, it just means i’m trying to separate personal texts from project specific texts.

so what is this philosopher bagpiper thing about?

i chose to connect both my online story and my offline story. though i’m originally from lisbon, part of my family is from the northeast of portugal (picote, miranda do douro). lost somewhere in the family stuff, i found an old bagpipe that belonged to manuel sampedro, who was known as the philosopher bagpiper of travanca.

how did this come to be? how was such an item lost and abandoned? i asked my grandpa if it was being used or not. it quickly moved from a lost item to the likes of a legendary artifact, as my grandpa loves to create historical mystique around family history.

my mother’s family lived in picote for some years, during the construction and following work of the hydroelectric plant. in fact, it was where my grandpa met my grandma, during a workers ball in the improvised worker town. in those days, building a dam would include building a city for the workers.

in 1970, in an effort to preserve my mom and uncles’ cultural identity, my grandpa went back to miranda and sought a bagpipe from manuel sampedro. as the story goes, he got up to his place and said “hello, i want to buy a bagpipe from you”. “no, you can’t buy one”, manuel said, “you buy me a goat and a glass of wine, i’ll kill the goat, make the pipes out of the goat, and drink the wine to summon «the spirit of the wine»”. and so it was. the pipes were made the ancient way, in manuel’s own style (that also included being drunk while building the pipes), and when they were done, he played for my grandpa, dipping the reed and the stocks in the wine to keep air from leaking.

so, fast forwarding to 2008, my grandpa said that he would give it to me, but only on a special occasion. the family got together to celebrate my grandparents’ 50th marriage anniversary at the same chapel they married in. this chapel was, precisely, in picote, in the same worker town. coincidently, the craftsman and bagpiper ângelo arribas now has his bagpipe workshop there. so the remains of the bagpipe were given to him for restoration, thanks to my mom and grandpa’s funding.

soon it was ready, but in a clunky way. by then i had decided to take on learning the pipes, to add to my ethnic mystique in a globalized world, and took it to apedgf, of which i’m a member and a student. but the people there said it wasn’t an appropriate fix. my naivety for not wanting another animal killed for the bag meant a rubber bag, which turns out is very damaging for the pipes. the reeds were also not very appropriate, so between hands i got the contact of vitor félix and mário estanislau and requested a repair.

it took over a year to go from dusty artifact to fully working pipes, many craftsmen and stories. but now it lives again, and plays both the ancient and the new songs. i’m happy to see the dead goat shouting again through these old pieces of wood and bone, over 40 years after its death.

how about the philosopher side?

with the pipes side settled, i would take refuge on the fact that the word itself bears the answer (i am a passionate lover of knowledge), but i would compliment it with 2 mandatory years of philosophy in school (we still have it in portugal), a philosophy teacher mom and scientist dad (who taught me the great gift of critical thinking), and an obsession with reading, mostly about science, sociology and philosophy. so this might be the weakest side, unless you consider science part of philosophy, which would allow me to add my years of electrical engineering and programming to the mix.

that is my everyday job, programming, but my alter ego is the philosopher bagpiper. these are my stories.