Yonder Lies It

Dear Lisia:

Every now and then I get this sort of melancholy and I come to think of you. I often feel I betrayed you, that in the course of that drink we had, that intoxicating love we shared to the last drop, somewhere, lies were swallowed. Fantasies were lived and I was stabbed by my cowardness in the back. I still think very much of you as you can see by these letters.

Its been five years now, nearly that anyway since I left. I couldn’t leave my children. I have a fractured past you see, I am a fatherless child, my mother an alcoholic that through the years, I’ve come to understand her decision not to be around us. It spared us a lot of pain and probably thought it best that my grandmother was a better home for us. And that is why it was so painful to contemplate the idea. I backed off. Back in Stockholm its only the forest that knows how much pain I came to deal with when we parted, they are the keepers of my unyielding belief in love, I screamed them to deafness.

You might question then that what I expressed at the height of our deep love affair was just the effects of the moment. You penetrated me more than that. I know.

Will I ever go to Gent? Most likely, when? I don’t know, and I won’t just go there to see Jaque Louis David’s Marat Assasiné. I dream of walking the streets you might walk in, the air you breathe, those kinds of things, maybe have a beer, sit down and enjoy the Belgium sun.

I still miss you and often wonder how you are, if you are married and wonder if you have children, those sort of things….

Chris

Bueno, me acuerdo de las hormigas de mi niñez allá por la calle tercera, en casa de Doña Toyana. Nos entreteniamos con las rojitas, unos esquivandoles el paso, otros maltratandolas, causando así­ estragos éticos de que si era ”bueno” matarlas o no. Los más malos hasta aceite o gasolina les echaban para luego verlas quemarse. Pero ver hormigas también era seña de llovia, por lo menos eso nos decian los adultos al pasar por nuestros investigativos entornos. Se escuchaba claramente esa voz de la sabiduria, ”va llover” o si no, ”a’í­ viene la lluvia”, y más si las hormigas train alitas, n’ombre seña segura de ello. Y si, llovia.

Aquí­ en suecia vi una el otro dí­a. Estaba caminado por las orillas de la ceramica de la pared en la cocina común de el dormitorio donde vivo, cerca de un tostador, de seguro era un scout, en busca de azúcar. Iba caminado muy pací­ficamente y me la cache, como decimos en Tijuana, de reojo. Me sorprendio verla. Pues sabrán ustedes el auge del invierno aún no se termina y ver al insectisillo deambular fue esperanzador, pues me dije, ”Ya no tarda la Primavera”. Y si, por estos dí­as a estado soleadito, hasta la chamarra de cuero me estorbo hoy. Aquí­ los periódicos anuncian con alarde que ya es hora de comprarse las obligatorias gafas, para los tres dí­as enteros del año que hay sol aquí­ de seguro, pero aparte de la burla de la ausencia del sol en suecia, ha sido bonito este dí­a, lleno de insectititos y todo. Ojalá y sigan más por adelante.

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Went out for a stroll and decided to take a book with me, so I took David Lodge along. I started reading Consciousness and the Novel (2002) in the beginning of the term. I found it in the New Books section of Stockholm’s Library. Of eleven essays, two I totally skipped, of which the remaining 9 others were succulent pieces. He definitely treats the subject well, that is, how consciousness exists in novel characters.

He has an eye for criticism, for example, I was very much amused and amazed at a critique he made regarding an essay on E M Forsters novel Howards End, titled Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece. He says: ”Some of the purple passages towards the end of the novel sound like George Meredith on a bad day …” I mean, to make that kind of critique you really must be well versed in literature. And he sure sounds like he is. He is one of those novelists that also side job as scholars, like Richard Holmes. He has good, delicious essays on Evelyn Waugh, Kierkegaard, a nice discourse on Philip Roth’s geriatric sexual habits. A topic I only seen touched on by a Swedish writer, Theodor Kallifatides in Seven Hours in Paradaise ( De sju timmarna i paradiset ). Dickens came along as well, and this essay covered mostly things of a nearly biographical nature. Although very informative stuff about his sexual life and the near lack of consciousness in of some Dickens characters.

The soft velvet fabric of the sofa invited relaxation. The bar atmosphere was soothing and not too many people smoked. Chris and Licia sat by one of the sofas, ordered some red wine and began talking. They spoke of mundane things like the horoscope, what they liked, music and so on. A few giggles and laughter were heard. The hours on the clock in the wall tick-toed its way, only witness to the migrating lightness, and the coming dusk. By the third glass of wine, Chris and Licia had became attached to one another so that Chris’s arm streched itself out and began caressing Licia’s ear lobe with the tip of his fingers. Then everything stopped, body language could be seen. Their eyes met. He let his fingers slide, feeling intensely how Licia’s gentle skin gave an inmense pleasure as they moved slowly through the lines of her cheek bones. I could see how carefully the tip of the fingers from his hand made their way through her neck and how Licia moved her head sideways so as to make more room for Chri’s caressing touch. Stopping at the cleavege of her blouse, he aproached his head to hers so as to place his lips by her cheeks, gently gliding, barely touching the surface of her skin. Surely pheronomes were about this time dispelling scents that only they could detect provoking untold desires in them. They stopped for a moment, looked at each other, seriously, in approval, with penetrating looks. They seemed infatuated, unaware of the world outside their enchanted affair.

Bueno, el ejercicio este de escribir diario algo tiene sus resultados, el flujo de las palabras se me salen sin mayor esfuerzo, ahora sólo tengo que controlar las teclas. Si viesen los errores que cometo antes de corregirlos, es una verdadera lata esto de presentar bien un texto. Aunque tiene sus recompensas porque si leyeran lo que escribo tal y cual sale entonces ni se molestarí­an de seguro.

Bueno, hoy me levanté un poco tardecillo, casi a las ocho, pero estudié un poco, lingíüí­stica, se me va la imaginación cuando leo eso. Me gana, estoy leyendo y por más que me concentre no logro poder concentrarme más allá de 5 minutos a la vez porque si no ya estoy alucinando con otras cosas. Es una verdadera fastidia.

Siento que me hace falta mi cultura, siento que necesito estar entre los mí­os, escuchar el habla castellana, la mexicana por supuesto, ver sus rostros, oler sus olores, sentir su calor, pero no. Heme aquí­, a regañadientes, entre este gíüererio, sin sonrisas, casi no se rí­en, y frí­os, frí­os como el clima. Me hace falta mi gente. Lo mí­o. No hay como sentirse si en medio de los suyos, es refrescante, lo añoro, hay que cargar las baterí­as pronto, porque si no me voy a volver loco aquí­ en escandinava y si no me muero de frí­o me muero de ansias de volver a mi tierra.

I’ve read thus far in this term several auto/biograpies/memoirs from the Victorian period, Edmund Gosse, Robert Graves, Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Florence Nightingale, Oliphant, Autobiography. Ed. Elizabeth Jay, and Virgina Woolf, “The Art of Biography”, “Sketch of the Past”. Its strikes me as curious how all more or less come from the same middle class background and how much importance they attach to their acquaintences. Its filled with what we nowadays call name dropping. Their relations with the upper echelons seem to make them who they are regardless of their chores in life, they belong to one and the same innercircle. The name they bare sets them aside from blokes, say, like me. Therein lies the difference, as far as I can see between Brits and Americans, while I haven’t read any memorable autobiographies, biographies or memoirs of Americans I know the value system in the States are different, because I know that what is valued in the US is the ability to exceed above your deficiencies, society will reward this. About the only thing worst frowned upon in America is the Nouveau Richie. This class is seriously out in a limb there but they seem to love a story of the poor farmer who made it to the top.

The metereologist had predicted sunny weather with partial clouds during and only in the afternoon. The city’s only meteorologist had a reputation to keep and almost all of his weather instruments, financed by the city’s coffers, were up-to-date, state-of-the-art technologies. He had a Perception II stand-alone weather station plus hand-held wind speed indicators and a handy weather forecasting quick reference card and not to mention a brand new Vantage Pro weather station for monitoring barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed and direction. So whenever the prediction failed, the mayor would get an ear-full of calls from angry residents demanding were had their tax money gone to and wondered out loud whether he hadn’t favored his crony friends at the time of the bidding for the equipment. Everyday the mayor would follow the day with the prediction in hand and reports from other local agencies as the day went by, gladly enough, today the prediction fulfilled its job and the mayor busied himself with other businesses that demanded his attention.

At the other end of town, a happy sunbather had just finished basking in the sun, content that the sun had come out and that finally he could show off his male bikini to the neighbors across the street who were only too willing to see what he was up to these days. Rumor had it that he had won the lottery somewhere else in the county and his lifestyle certainly fed to that gossip. Nobody knew exactly where this fellow had come from, only that one early week in May a moving van had pulled up in front of an abandoned house known to the locals as the Old Murray residence. About three weeks thereafter a classic Mercedes-Benz SSK (1928), designed by Ferdinand Porsche, drove in to the garage much to the bewilderment of the tight community. What did he want in that middle class neighborhood with a car like that and a servant at his disposal was the hot query in the mouths of much of the populace there.

He talks about being a puritan and a Catholic at the same time, and while he has puritan behavior he is a catholic. The real mother and father of the likes of him, an orphan whose real mother shuns. Brown is understandably a book about the many myths that permeate his persona and the beliefs that hold the fabric of the beings we are, we do not know, concludes in his conclusionless book, whence cometh we. He lauds the mestizaje, the Chicano, and reunites himself thereby, his own way to the only community where he matters, the Chicano Community.

Why otherwise would he run over a snake in a so an American truck? To assert himself? and why did he describe the mexican man with the snake hanging around his neck? ”don’t tread on me” is the legend most Americans like when there are times of trouble. He ran over one, didn’t care; another mexican, just like him picked it up and placed around his neck, laughing, joking about it, as a trophy, a cohort, a partner in crime. They smashed it, both, and American legend, they mulled the snake and both went back to gloat about it, showing little remorse, he didn’t even look. He is a defiant Chicano in his middle age.

One of the things that most amazed me, is that after he tells us that his father was an orphan he still buys the mythical myth that all Mexicans descend from some sort of Spaniard and indigenous racial intermix. It is a near blind belief in that which he denies he is, “my mexican father” he tells us, and then proceeds to pack the cultural luggage that permeates the fabric of mexican culture, this, despite the fact that he will deny, in your face that he hasn’t any cultura. He lacks a sense of belonging and takes by association that which he all along has questioned, his mexicanness.

As I read this book I often wondered how whites read this book, there is so much in that book, that lacking the appropiate cultural baggage, one is surely to miss gaps tantamount to the Grand Canyon.

In 1988 I came across a sort of music that to me was new but which by then it was already old. The genre was Industrial Yet those who made that motley crue bickered over semantics. I came to it as industrial and therefore it stuck to me as industrial music. I remember I went to the record chainstore Tower Records in San Mateo CA. Maybe it still there, and I bought a cassette, Skinny Puppy, at the then exorbitant price of $10.99 US bucks. A song called VX Gas Attack brough to my atention Irak and the kurds. The song stood there, like a petrified tree. In the tape, or Mp3 if you can find one, [the computer age isn’t that advanced to link to mp3’s yet] you can hear the voice of N.OGRE tell of these accounts. Then, I felt with that ’we’ which decried how impassive the government was at the attrocities Irak committed.

Thursday 13 mars 2003

I sit in the kitchen, drinking french wine, eating avocados, tomatos, some ICA fish sticks (they’re cheaper) and Findus Broccoli Mexicana (500 g), I heated some flour tortillas and brought out my chipotle sauce. I spread out Dagens Nyheter and a translated essay calls my attention. A certain Micheal Walzer waltzes into my life. He says: No to war, Yes to Saddam, it isn’t too late for a peaceful solution. However, those who will hinder war must also be ready to pay the price for peace.

Hence the Skinny Puppy anecdote.

Little wonder democratic governments are schizophrenic.

Since last monday Jean Paul Marat has been in my head. In particular the painting Jaque Louis David did of him titled Marat Assasiné . I first came across him through a book by Peter Weiss that I must of surely found in a second hand bookshop back in the states. I must of liked the cover, it had the painting mentioned above, and then became enthralled by it because I do remember that I read it right away. The title of the book? The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade– more commonly known as Marat/Sade. ( More pictures ) I loved it and ever since there there are two quotes which have lasted within ever since:

Act one, Conversation Concerning Life and Death:

Marat: The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes.

and

Act one, Continuation of the Conversation between Marat and Sade:

Marat: I never believed the pen alone
could destroy institutions.

Well, that’s what has been haunting me since last monday.