Sirenesang og andet deslige

YERMA.- (Bajo.) Una cosa es querer con la cabeza y otra cosa es que el cuerpo, ¡maldito sea el cuerpo! no nos responda.

-Lorca, Yerma

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-e.e. cummings

[I wish there were someone who made me feel this way but even if there were—someone would think I could do better than him.  Is life then a quest for perfection or for the just good enough?]

“Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.”

-Pablo Neruda, Walking Around

[I know it’s November, but]

There is one thing we love about February—
The light. The sky pulses orange, fades blue
and we let five-thirty in through the cold wall.
The street is stained with snow. In the window
across the way, yellow-butter lamplight melts
through the glass. We arch together like a Hardanger fiddle

and its strings; your eyelashes flutter like notes from a fiddle
pulsing to the beat of each day. February. February.
Too cold for the sound of dirty snow-water as it melts
down the drainpipes, too cold still, love, to dance through the blue
skies of the spring. Red lights flicker feebly through the window.
A siren bites, hungry, through the wall

and behind our heads, through the cracked wall
there is a noise, a cry. I’ll love you forever. A fiddle.
I watch your lips in the glass of the window.
Forever? What is forever—is it February,
an icy, white-faced, snowed-on blue?
A time frozen, hanging, when nothing melts?

Or is forever these days inside, as my soul melts
hearing the blink of your eyes, the fiddle through the wall?
This seems the right time for love, watching the blue
of the sky, struggling to stay light, as the fiddle
plays something from a Norwegian February,
something far from the rooftops out the window.

You press your hand flat against the window,
press it then to my face. When the snow melts
for good, I’ll be happy. You have grown this February.
The protesting light throws your shadow on the wall—
you have the jaw of a man now, a man who could fiddle
til dawn and back, a man who could stand the weary blue

of winter’s end. For I am one who loves this blue,
this hesitant sun through the warped glass of the window.
And I am one who feels like the voice of the fiddle,
happy to sing in this time before the snow melts,
happy to give warmth despite the cold white paint of the wall
behind us, happy to love you, love you and February

and the sky and its blue, and the old snow before it melts
brown down the gutters, dripping down the wall. Through the window
I see us different and one, a bow and a fiddle. I know—forever feels like February.

“Al otro día era domingo y misa de once, la misa de Solentiname en la que los campesinos y Ernesto y los amigos de visita comentan juntos un capítulo del evangelio que ese día era el arresto de Jesús en el huerto, un tema que la gente de Solentiname trataba como si hablaran de ellos mismos, de la amenaza de que les cayeran en la noche o en pleno día, esa vida en permanente incertidumbre de las islas y de la tierra firme y de toda Nicaragua y no solamente de toda Nicaragua sino de casi toda América Latina, vida rodeada de miedo y de muerte, vida de Guatemala y vida de El Salvador, vida de la Argentina y de Bolivia, vida de Chile y de Santo Domingo, vida del Paraguay, vida de Brasil y de Colombia.”

-Cortázar, El apocalipsis de Solentiname

The force it takes to write a short story is as intense as the force it takes to begin a novel.  You see, in the first paragraph of a novel one has to define everything: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and even, sometimes, the disposition of a certain character.  Everything that comes next is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate and solitary pleasure you could possibly imagine, and if you don’t keep correcting the book for the rest of your life it’s because the same iron will that you used to start writing asserts itself so that you stop.  The short story, meanwhile, has neither a beginning nor an end: it happens or it doesn’t happen.  And if it doesn’t happen, experience dictates that most times it’s best to begin again from a different direction, or just throw the whole thing in the trash.

-García Márquez, Prologue, Doce cuentos peregrinos (my rudimentary translation)

I think Americans have a hard time suspending their belief systems, or, possibly, imagining things.  This is strange to me considering our country was founded on such imaginative precepts.  But you hit the average person up with El apocalipsis de Solentiname, say, and they will be like “What did I just read?”  If motives, the who-what-when-where-why-hows aren’t spelled out, people seem to be too beset with confusion to try to wonder about what they just read.  Of course, this doesn’t excuse shoddy writing, but to me, there’s a difference between leaving information out accidentally and omitting details so that the readers can fill in the gaps.

Take, for example, El apocalipsis de Solentiname, which I mentioned above.  This somewhat obscure and very intriguing story by Julio Cortázar has a cryptic and disturbing ending that leaves much to the imagination.  The way I see it—though I’m a Spanish major with a focus on modern Latin American lit, so take my opinions on obviousness in literature with a huge saltshaker—a story you have to work a little to understand is worth more, in the end, than something you comprehend instantly.  To use an example more easy to place in popular culture, my all-time favorite book (Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring) is something that I think creates this sense of ambiguity and lingering uncertainty very nicely.  Chevalier regales us with beautiful images and powerful characterizations and blurs the relationship between her protagonist, Griet, and her employer, the artist Jan Vermeer (not-so-coincidentally my favorite visual artist), just enough so that we never really quite know what happened, or would have happened, between the two of them.  All we can do is imagine, and be glad Chevalier provides us with enough lovely imagery so that we can imagine pleasantly.

Perhaps we’ve really just fallen into a literary rut.

More questions.

If you were to make a movie about a famous person and design a deliciously anachronistic/incongruous soundtrack a la Marie Antoinette, who would it/they be and what musicians would you use?

Obviously I would pick Néstor and Cristina, and my fictionalized movie about them would definitely be set to The Kills.  This sounds weird but if I had the movie-making skills I could totally make it make sense, haha.

I wish more people read this blog.

How about a different kind of post.

Which extremely random and unknown-to-your-friends person would you like to meet?  Who’s a political figure/musician/actor/activist/whoever that you never really mention, but think is interesting for one reason or another?

I think I’d choose Julio Cobos, the current vice president of Argentina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cobos

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi_voto_no_es_positivo

…she couldn’t imagine where the boy was running to.  There really was nothing around, down so close to the south end of the world.  She watched him run to the dark sand where ocean met beach, splash through the waves and duck under the water.  Perhaps it was a trick of the Patagonian sky, the sun shining flat through heavy clouds like light through blind-slats, but she never did see him come up again.