fim do ano

Entre ano e ano
formam o anel.

Agora faz fim do ano:
finda o ano,
                         funda o anel,
                                                 funde o anel.

O final do anel
forma o aro do ano
e fica rodando o ano
                                                até o arco final.

Entre ano e ano
o arco anual;
entre arco e arco,
-entre anjo e anjo-
...
       um apocalipse qualquer.

Coloquio chileno de los ángeles

Congregáronse los más indicados
allá en los cielos nublados:
Gabriela, Vicente, Pablo.
Y desde allá convidaron
a Nicanor, uno más de este lado.
Y se pusieron a disertar
de los ángeles, esos seres alados.

"Tú, antipoeta," preguntó Vicente, "¿por qué perdiste
tu primera serenidad?
¿Qué ángel malo se paró en la puerta de tu sonrisa
con la espada en la mano?"

"Pues es que yo," respondió Nicanor,
"con un angelorum
sin querer me hallé.
El me dio la mano,
Yo le tomé el pie.
¡Hay que ver, señores,
cómo un ángel es!
Angel más absurdo
non volveré a ver."

"Tengo dos ángeles," precisó Gabriela.
"El ángel que da el gozo
y el que da la agonía,
el de alas tremolantes
y el de alas fijas.
Sólo una vez volaron
con las alas unidas:
el día del amor,
el de la Epifanía."

"¿Alas?" musitó Pablo. "¡Las mías!
Dios, muerto para siempre,
amenazó a los hombres con su espada encendida.
Para mi corazón basta tu pecho,
para tu libertad bastan mis alas."

Y así, el análisis acabado,
los ángeles se zarparon
pues eran y son seres alados
Vicente, Gabriela, y Pablo,
dejando al antipoeta matemático
caído, y emparrado.

Fragmentos de Altazor (Vicente Huidobro), "Sinfonía de cuna" (Nicanor Parra), "Dos ángeles" (Gabriela Mistral) y La espada encendida y "Poema 12" (Pablo Neruda).

Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas [...]

Of the Delectable Engagement with Ideas Experienced in Attentive Reading and Creative Writing, 

together with further Droll Observations Related to Language and Art

“Well,” said Don Quixote, “and does she not accompany and adorn this greatness with a thousand million charms! But one thing you will not deny, Sancho. When you came close to Dulcinea, did you not perceive a certain perfume, an aromatic fragrance, a delicious something for which I cannot find a name, I mean a redolence, an exhalation, as if you were in the shop of some skilled glovemaker?”

“All I can say is,” said Sancho, “that I did notice a little odor, somewhat mannish. She must have been sweaty from all the hard work, which has toughened her up, by the way.”

“It could not have been so,” Don Quixote protested. “Surely you were suffering from a head cold, or else you simply smelled yourself. For I know well how she smells—that rose among thorns, that lily of the field, that liquid amber.”

“Maybe so,” replied Sancho. “I often get from myself the same odor that seemed to come from her grace the lady Dulcinea. But that’s no surprise; one devil is just the same as another.”

(adapted from the Ormsby translation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 1:XXXI)

“Things are not always as they seem,” my sixth-grade teacher, arms akimbo, would intone frequently and dramatically, thus imparting one of life’s great lessons to the eleven-year-olds of the tiny town in West Virginia where I lived in the late 70s and early 80s. By that point in my schooling, I had already tapped a deep enthusiasm for books: for Kipling’s The Jungle Books, for Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, for any books I could devour on mythology, history, or animal behavior. I had been winning creative writing contest ribbons consistently since third grade, and in sixth grade I sped through the voluminous color-coded comprehension cards of the SRA Reading Lab. 

In retrospect, I know that I was already cultivating my fascination with the secret rhythms of words, the craft of constructing sentences, the constantly revised agreement between writer and reader that invites us to scan across the text and emphasize or anticipate something—a syllable, a phoneme, a pause, an entire paragraph—in the same way that the hurdler negotiates steps and strides between obstacles to avoid tripping or slowing down. A pacing example from Bradbury's The Halloween Tree: 

For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints and hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.

“A pumpkin tree,” someone said.

“No,” said Tom.

The wind blew among the branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly.

“A Halloween Tree,” said Tom.

And he was right.

Without the breath of the wind between Tom’s lines above, the assertion in the final sentence would fall flat; it would lose the sense of inevitability that the wind’s intrusion animates for us. A great writer, too, challenges readers’ pacing, pushing the hurdle perhaps just a few inches, enough to alert our awareness if not completely break our stride. 

The writer’s tools are words, not colors, clay, or chords. They are the same tools used by most of us every day to express our thoughts, which means that creative writing and also language-learning are both strongly and essentially linked to our capacity to articulate and manipulate our perceptions about art, life, and perception itself. I am fortunate to have engaged in the study of these tools we call words in four languages other than my native English during different periods of my life: French, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese. A familiarity—or better yet, intimacy—with other languages opens many new doors to metacognition: the awareness of how it can be that we think what we think, and the ability to conceive alternative modes of thinking and of expressing thought. 

Approaching my senior year at William & Mary, I decided to read Cervantes’s masterpiece in the original language (not without the acquisition of a hefty Spanish-English dictionary). The dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho, sustained over two volumes published a decade apart in the early 17^th century, is, for many readers of the original and of dozens of accomplished translations, the greatest manual on friendship ever written. What these readers discover, alongside the addled knight-errant and his earthy squire, is a straightforward but profound apprenticeship in effective communication. Don Quixote relishes his search for a signifier that eludes him (not just Dulcinea in general, but also specifics like the aroma “for which I cannot find a name”) while Sancho, though quick to “call a spade a spade,” nonetheless provides a humbly diplomatic description of body odor. As they journey on together, Sancho becomes more imaginative while Don Quixote resigns himself to more realistic expectations, and the core of the work is exactly this process in which both learn to accommodate, in masterfully varied contexts, their own perspectives among the competing voices, strategies, and objectives of all the characters. 

The lady Dulcinea, or the peasant Aldonza? Windmills, or giants? Shaving basin, or golden helmet? Both, of course, and many other things besides. Things are not always as they seem, or smell. Like all good creative writing, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha exposes the artistic opportunities, and pitfalls, that lurk between the signified and its arbitrary signifier, between what we perceive, what we think, and what we can contrive to express.

“No hay de qué maravillarse; que un diablo parece a otro.”

Los interlocutores ideales

Un diálogo que diseñé hace tiempo para un examen, con el motivo de la práctica de cierto vocabulario temático y también las conjugaciones del presente perfecto y del perfecto del subjuntivo. No pude resistir la incorporación de estos interlocutores ideales, con todo y la necesidad de que Sancho utilice la forma de Ud. para con el ilustre caballero.

Escriba la forma del presente perfecto o el perfecto del subjuntivo, según el contexto, del verbo subrayado en la primera parte de cada oración.

Una conversación entre don Quijote y Sancho Panza

DQ: Sancho, vi un hotel allá en el camino. ¿Tú lo __________ también?
SP: Lo que yo puedo ver es una pensión. Dudo que Ud. __________ ver un hotel.
DQ: Claro está, amigo Sancho, que tú no sabes nada de hoteles. Digo que es un hotel de lujo, y no lo que tú __________.
SP: Repito que es una pensión, y mientras más caminamos, mejor veo que es sólo una media pensión. ¿No __________ lo suficiente como para ver que tengo razón?
DQ: Que eres tonto, es lo que yo veo. Leí que los caballeros siempre encontramos hoteles de lujo. Es lástima que tú no __________ más libros de hotelería.

o pesadelo do cotovelo

o pesadelo
           do cotovelo
é se quebrar:
coto o braço alheio,
mas o antebraço velo

o pesadelo
                 do tornozelo
é se quebrar:
torno a pisar com o pé
mas o peso da perna zelo

posso cotar, e coto
posso velar, e velo
posso tornar, e torno
posso zelar, e zelo

mas dai o pesadelo
cotado e zelado
em sonho tornado
dá para andar em pêlo
de corpo desvelado

de cada articulação
o significado
exposto, quebrado
só para ser
rearticulado

La Rueda del Sol

Going through old files I found this design I made for a class activity in a Hispanic cultures course:

The iconography represents a sun with the Mexica "Piedra del Sol," the Tiahuanaco "Puerta del Sol," the Iberian "sol y sombra" of the bullfight, and an aerial view of the southern Spanish "Costa del Sol." Looking at it again after almost fifteen years, I'm rather amazed by the effort I attempted to put into its detail, knowing full well that I'm no artist. I recall that the design was for an elaborate "missing information" activity in which the students needed to go find facts in the library. The design concept (if not its execution!), with its totemic animals and puzzle fit, was no doubt better than the activity.

Abóboras das Américas

Verdes, amarelas, brancas, ou cor-de-laranja; enormes ou pequeninas; lisas ou ásperas, as abóboras americanas têm um papel fundamental não só nas tradições alimentícias mas também no folclore do hemisfério. Sabemos por evidências arqueológicas que foram cultivados diversos tipos de abóboras há dezenas de séculos nos Andes e em Meso-américa, e que através do tempo as abóboras têm complementado o regime básico de feijão, milho, batatas e pimentas. Nos principais idiomas americanos de hoje, os nomes das variedades são múltiplos: pumpkin, zapallo, abobra, squash, porongo, gourd, sem esquecer os primos calabaza, cabaça, e calabash, mesmo que estes últimos não aludem ao mesmo fruto.

No folclore americano a família das abóboras é associada à origem do mundo e também ao ciclo da vida. Por exemplo, segundo a mitologia taína, Deminán era o filho de Yaya, espíritu divino. Deminán fez cair, do teto da barraca de Yaya, uma abóbora que continha os ossos do irmão mais velho dele. Quando a abóbora rompeu no chão, nasceram dela os rios, os lagos, os mares, e dos ossos do irmão nasceram todos os peixes. Com certeza as sementes da abóbora parecem peixes!

Também na cosmologia maia do povo quiché, na estória dos gêmeos heróis do Popol Vuh, a abóbora tem um papel importante como metáfora plurivalente. Um dos gêmeos utiliza uma abóbora para substituir a cabeça do irmão, morto por um morcego que lhe tirou a cabeça. (O pai deles tivera perdido a cabeça, que foi pendurada numa árvore e de onde produziu saliva-sêmen que engravidou a mãe dos gêmeos.) Com a cabeça-abóbora, os gêmeos enganaram os Senhores de Xibalbá, o Lugar dos Mortos, no jogo parecido com o futebol que era típico dos povos meso-americanos. Depois os gêmeos converteram-se na Estrela da Manhã e na Estrela da Tarde (Venus). Quer dizer que a abóbora forma um elo unindo uma série de imagens relacionadas cosmologicamente: cabeça, balão, estrela, e as épocas cíclicas do universo.

Aquilo de subsituir a cabeça por uma cabaça é um motivo repetido na célebre lenda norte-americana, escrita por Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." O fantasma do cavalheiro degolado leva uma abóbora como se fosse cabeça, a que atira e atinge no amedrentado Ichabod Crane no caminho desolado de uma noite de outono. Fica claramente implicada aqui a tradição do jack-o'-lantern, costume que praticava-se na Irlanda entalhando o nabo para fazer uma lanterna vegetal mas que, uma vez transplantada aos Estados Unidos, assumiu o rosto da abóbora.

No Brasil também abundam abóboras, e outros frutos da mesma família genérica (como o melão e a melancia), nas lendas que implicam o ciclo da vida de várias fontes indígenas (como o nascimento, de um melão, da serpente-via láctea). Segundo Câmara Cascudo, a origem da personagem da "cuca" pode ser no fato de essa palavra significar, em algumas regiões do país, a abóbora quando perfurada para desenhar olhos, nariz e boca. Neste dia de Halloween e temporada mexicana do Dia dos Mortos, fica cristalizado--naquele sorriso de caveira que tem o jack-o'-lantern--o melancólico perceber, no contexto americano, do ciclo da semeada e da colheita, da vida e da morte.

Calavera Carlos Fuentes

Calavera a la mexicana aludiendo a las obras del célebre autor

En toda la Terra Nostra,

la región más transparente,

se lamenta la noticia

del narrador que fenece.

Al que el Nóbel no le dieron--

no consultaron sus fuentes--

del jugo que iba a sacar

los sabores no aparecen.

No se reveló la causa.

La falta se hizo patente.

El origen del pretexto

sólo en sus textos se atiene.

Parece que le dio un aura--

un mal de tafeta verde--

que cuando quieres que venga,

no viene porque no quiere.

Ningún consuelo le dio

ver que esta bruja que muere

tarda más en fallecer

que él, cuando mero fallece.

Mas ahí no muere la cosa,

sino que rejuvenece:

en sus prosas y en sus cuentos

--que los lea quien se rete--

mitos, estatuas, y dioses

cobran vida nuevamente.

Tláloc, Chac Mool se confunden

las lluvias con sus papeles

y los años con los díaz.

Un cristo nonato pierde--

puesto en el trono del águila

del nuevo mundo valiente--

los cinco soles de México,

el Escorial y el retrete.

Cien fuegos arden en lo alto,

alguien en la cruz padece:

despedazado el arte alza

en medio al rico vejete.

No es lo mismo que lo mesmo,

la eutanasia que la muerte,

pero su buen gringo viejo

tampoco la muerte teme.

Eso sí, sus muchos libros,

numerosos como peces,

llegan a ser terminados

por los sabios que los leen.

Al gran final luego llegan:

que al pie del naranjo entierren

este caballero-espejo

que a la ignorancia arremete

en sus novelas y ensayos.

Que de su vida, estos queden.

The Day of the Race

The Day of the Race or, better, Day of the People, is a pretty silly moniker for a concept both superficial and alarmingly deep.

It was October 12, 1492 that Columbus and his crew made landfall in the Bahamas. In the US this commemoration has become Columbus Day, one of those push-it-to-the-nearest-Monday holidays beloved of those people who need so much love: bankers. While the Italian-American community has appropriated the day as a celebration of national heritage, and the Hispanic-American community regards it as an appropriate closure for Hispanic Heritage Month, some US  states have renamed the day "Native American Day," or let it be called both names.

In Brazil the date is widely ignored, since, as famed singer / songwriter Caetano Veloso elaborates in his memoir Tropical Truth (translated by Isabel de Sena):

"As children we learned that Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvarez Cabral on April 22, 1500. All other American nations consider it enough to have been discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492" (3).

Veloso highlights this fact as the beginning of a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism, and develops it to accommodate conflicting geographies of Brazil as island, continent, and nation. The slight has also to do with frontier finagling prior to the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the rejection of Columbus's financing needs by the Portuguese king João II, whom the admiral had visited before soliciting Fernando e Isabel in Spain.

But in the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, whose conquest and colonization were most directly linked to Columbus's meanderings financed by the Spanish monarchs, the day has taken on a polyvalence encompassing touchy subjects like nationhood, ethnicity, and race. In Mexico, especially, the day is linked to the masterfully succinct wording on this plaque at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, itself a site of incredibly mixed messages due to the 1968 massacre of Tlatelolco:

EL 13 DE AGOSTO DE 1521 / HEROICAMENTE DEFENDIDO POR CUAUHTEMOC / CAYO TLATELOLCO EN PODER DE HERNAN CORTES // NO FUE TRIUNFO NI DERROTA / FUE EL DOLOROSO NACIMIENTO DEL PUEBLO MESTIZO / QUE ES EL MEXICO DE HOY

Post-revolutionary Mexico's take on re-evaluating and promoting its indigenous heritage retains its strong link to the writings of José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), philosopher, politician, and education reformer whose 1925 essay La raza cósmica exalts mestizaje, or ethnic mixing, as a Latin American essential quality with the potential to redeem the other, less mixed "races." Fraught with difficulties, imprecisions and aporiae, and even having been interpreted as inherently racist itself, the concept of the "cosmic race" nonetheless continues to affect thinking about what it means to be Latino, Latin American, Hispanic, etc. vis-a-vis the wider world; witness the name of The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), "the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States."

Curiously, though, even in Mexican official discourse the celebratory idea of the "raza" is not always mestizo. The Monumento a la Raza, on the Avenida Insurgentes not far from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in northern Mexico City, recasts the Mesoamerican pyramid and crowns it with the cactus-perched eagle--the "sign" that the Mexica sought in order to found Tenochtitlan.

MONUMENTO A LA RAZA, AVENIDA INSURGENTES, CIUDAD DE MEXICO

In this iconic imagery, "raza" would appear to be exclusively indigenous. The monument's construction was completed in 1940, during the heyday of indigenous re-imaginings by artists such as Rivera, Kahlo, Siqueiros, Orozco, and Tamayo.

Perhaps the best name would be "Mutual Discovery Week," with days for Africans, Native Americans, Southern Europeans,  Polynesians, Northern Europeans ("Leif Erikson Day," already October 9)... But no more "bank holidays," please!

Synesthesia for Polyglots

Blessing, curse, or as much of either as it is to simply be alive? If you're synesthetic, you assume everybody else is too. Then you learn that most people aren't, and even those people who are also synesthetes have colors that clash with yours.

Whether a consciously crafted poetic effect or an unconsciously formed sense filter, synesthesia is a crossing of the senses. It's been on the popular radar since the late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets, among others, strove to replicate it in their works. Lately there have been a number of interesting psychological and neurological studies showing that (1) yes, it exists and people aren't making it up (although some people try to fake it) and (2) it is often inherited (the condition / ability, though not necessarily the particulars of it). For some synesthetes, sounds have shapes, tastes, or textures. But for a majority of synesthetes, what happens is that words have colors. 

I love colors. I love words. So did Rimbaud, so did Nabokov, so does the character Mia in A Mango-Shaped Space, a wonderful YA novel about synesthesia by Wendy Mass. For me, words tend to have the colors of their starting letters, unless a very strong visual component of another color associated with the word overrides it. For example, generally words starting with A are bright yellow, but apple is a reddish yellow--the color, in fact, of many apples--since the word is so often associated with the color red. D is a standard crayon green, such that danger flashes green for me, not red. Magic, miracle, marvelous, mystery, mischief, malevolence all share the smoky crimson of M. But then, so do the names Marcos and Marilyn. And Débora and Doug are green. Not the people, not their auras - just their names, when I think of them. But the name association "colors" perception of the people, like a faint watercolor.  

I've wondered if synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon begins to happen as one is learning to read, meaning that it is more rooted in a visual association, or if it starts to occur before learning how to read, meaning that it is more rooted in aural stimuli. The vowels, for me, tend to show the least defined hues, which I interpret as evidence for the latter assertion. The synesthetic condition may well begin before learning to read and then intensify after learning to read; however, another purely phonic example from my case is that B and P both are shades of blue, D and T are shades of green, and G and K share a brownish-orange spectrum. Somehow my synesthetic ability captured these phonically related pairs in color, long before I became aware of them structurally through the study of linguistics. Only many years later in graduate school did I learn that B and P are voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound, with D/T and G/K as further examples. Not only did the related sounds take on related colors in my synesthetic scheme, but in each of these pairs, the voiced consonant, which is a stronger sound, holds the deeper hue!

More evidence, from my personal case, for this kind of synesthesia being rooted in non-visual senses, is found in the days of the week. Monday, for instance, has nothing to do with smoked crimson M. It's a kelly green, and fingernail-pink Tuesday (nothing to do with spring green T) follows it on the left, as if seen from the inside of the calendar. Fire engine-red Saturday and somber black Sunday trail off and down to the left at the end of my week. Apparently this kind of spatial overlay is a not uncommon element of synesthetic renderings. The months for me also have colors, but these tend to follow their initial letters or else the colors of associated holidays, and they have no spatial arrangement in my conception of them. Numbers have colors, barely. The numerical association was never strong in my synesthesia, and even the alphabetic association is not as strong as it was when I was younger.

What happens when you're multilingual? Are you a multisynesthete? In my case, books, in the abstract at least, are a bright royal blue, but livros and libros are lemon yellow. Sometimes serendipity strikes: love and amor (Spanish) and amor (Portuguese; same spelling, different pronunciation) all share the same joyous range of yellow. Hunger, hambre and fome find themselves viscerally pink: the fresh wet shine of gums for F, the sullied pink of a pig's hide for H. (When I learned that often the H of a word in Spanish corresponds to an F in the Portuguese, it made perfect visual sense to me.) Majesty, majestad, and majestade glow with the smoky crimson of M, but the K of king has a rather sandy, wooden look to it, and the Q of queen is precisely periwinkle, while rey, reina, rei and rainha lie and vie in the rolling reach of R's red wine hue. Fork, garfo, tenedor: three tines of three colors. Imprecise translations can sear and trace across idioms: the S of saudades radiates an orange ember glow that tinges longing's L a dusky yellow and roasts the nut brown of the Ñ in añoranza. I studied Hindi during an intensive summer course as a teenager, but I don't remember enough, unfortunately, to know whether I had transferred shades to the Devanagari script, or how exactly synesthesia played a role. Yet Portuguese, Spanish, English, and even Hindi are all Indo-European languages; perhaps synesthetes who speak languages from different linguistic families experience wilder, splashier interactions.

Some non-synesthetes learning about synesthesia are jealous. Others are indifferent. Some few are concerned for my well-being, convinced that it must be a debilitating condition impeding everyday thought processes. On the contrary - because it's with you from a young age, you grow up with it, and you take it into account in the same way as you do other abilities. Like most anything else, it has advantages and disadvantages, but I know that if I somehow had the option to eliminate it from my life, I absolutely would not. It's an essential part of my being-in-the-world, an internalized rainbow that weaves languages together even as their colors blend to create, literally, new patterns of thought.

Independencia

in - dependencia
ou seja a não dependência
pero ¿qué tal si lo que se siente
é uma coisa tipo co-dependência?
¿De qué dependo?
Do que penduro?
Tenho uma divisão em mim,
una división en mi dependencia,
do verbo "dividir" que significa não só "separar"
sino también da el sentido de "compartir":
coitado daquele que tem uma pátria só,
porque yo tengo tres.

Quando estamos na hora de celebrarmos
el día de la independencia
dependo, pues, de mi afiliación mexicana
tanto quanto a minha afiliação brasileira
septembrinas, las dos,
entanto
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America

¿De qué dependemos?
Do que somos independentes?
Depende.

A Dança dos Elementos

Água, terra, fogo e ar:

dançava Dora Vivacqua.

Dançava ela, Luz del Fuego:

terra e ar e fogo e água.

Dançava a mulher heróica,

nua vivia e dançava.

É que na verdade nua

atuava e acreditava.

Só vestia duas cobras -

com duas cobras dançava:

sua sinuosidade e

sua pele ressaltavam.

Pioneira do nudismo

no Brasil, criou com fama

o éden, a Ilha do Sol,
Baía de Guanabara.

O nome artístico dela,
de origem quotidiana
num batom argentino, com
o outro nome faz mandala:

Dora: de ouro, vem da terra.

Vivacqua: vai vida d'água.

Luz: ondas vibram no ar.

Fuego: calor cor das chamas.

Na dança dos elementos

o corpo despido fala

com a naturalidade

plena que é da vida humana:

O nu se deita na terra.

Toca a areia, sente a lama.

A nua corre na brisa.

Curte o ar por toda a área.

A nua recebe o fogo

do sol que doura e abraça.

E o nu que banha no rio

mergulha, bóia e nada.

Pede estar nu nosso corpo

que nos elementos dança.

O contato inteiro, cheio,

completa a nossa mandala:

Água, terra, fogo e ar:

dançava Dora Vivacqua.

Dancemos todos despidos:

terra e ar e fogo e água.

One Mic, Two Tongues

KARAOKE, Japanese word for "sing your heart out"? I don't know the etymology, but I do know that I've been to six gatherings at four homes within the past few months where karaoke was the main event. And these have all been gatherings with a mix of Spanish-speakers, English-speakers, and bilinguals.

There are several karaoke products on the market, most of them made in Asia, that can plug into your TV. They all seem to provide alternating-line lyrics over random shots of landscapes, and they give you a "score" at the end ostensibly based on how well you matched the rhythm. Many of the products include several languages beyond English and Spanish, but they vary greatly in the number and variety of songs per language they offer.

So at homes of Colombian, Mexican, and Mexican-American families and friends recently, I've been swimming in 80s rock one moment and 90s norteña the next. Billy Joel and Luis Miguel. Pandora and Queen. The Eagles and the Beatles and the Trío Los Panchos. Boleros, rancheras and rock anthems. Something like this:

Sing us a song, you're the piano mony mony el día que me quieras, vuelve que sin ti la vida ain't nothin' but a hound dog cryin' all the canta no llores who ya gonna call? Ghostbésame, bésame mucho I'm just a poor boy from a poor family probablemente ya de mí te has olvidado turn around every now and then I get a little caimán, se va el caimán, se va para Jack and Diane, two pencas nuevas que al maguey le brotan, vienen marcadas, con rock and roll, we built this city on una piedra en el camino, me enseñó que Billie Jean knockin' at my door, usted es la culpable, de todas mis angustias, que ya no como ni duermo, sigo pensando sólo en tu uptown girl, she's been livin' in her whitebread world, solamente una vez, amé en la vida, eres tú como el agua de mi dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, hey Jude, don't let me down, you have found Penelope, con su bolso de piel marrón, sacó sus pistolas, tiró dos balazos, y me dijo: KARAOKE!

El oro, el sol, y el más allá

El Museo de las Américas Gilcrease tiene ahora en exposición "To Capture the Sun: Gold of Ancient Panama" hasta el 15 de enero del 2012. Es una muestra muy bien diseñada de sólo una parte de lo que se conserva en las colecciones Gilcrease de objetos de orfebrería y también cerámica de la región Gran Coclé, al suroeste del actual Canal de Panamá.

La mayoría de los objetos articula una iconografía animal y ritual de los pobladores del área entre 700 y 1500 DC. Abundan sapos, tortugas, diversas aves, murciélagos, cocodrilos, monos, y un memorable caballito de mar. Hay una vasija en forma de un tejón. Los textos que acompañan la exposición nos informan acerca de esta iconografía zoológica que, por ejemplo, los cocodrilos, murciélagos, y aves de rapiña se veneraban porque se asociaban con las características del buen guerrero.

La exposición ostenta una serie de pantallas de toque interactivo que agregan información en cuanto a la geografía e historia del área del Gran Coclé. De la Universidad de Tulsa colaboraron los departamentos de artes, informática, y química, con los conservadores y demás personal del museo, en la organización y creación de la muestra. Inclusive fueron esculpidas tres figuras humanas que llevan reproducciones de joyería dorada: una mujer en reposo, un hombre en la actitud del cacique El Dorado, y otro hombre representando un entierro.

No puedo dejar de escribir de la exposición sin destacar los textos de acompañamiento, los mismos que, me imagino, formarán parte del libro basado en la exposición que saldrá en octubre. Estos textos son modelos de lúcida composición concisa, entre ellos una serie que ilumina el proceso de orfebrería llamado "moldeo a la cera perdida." Especialmente los escritos hacen hincapié en el hecho de que estos objetos de oro pertenecían a una distinta conceptualización estética, "An Aesthetic of Brilliance." Lo brilloso del oro y otros materiales semejantes indicaba, según lo que podemos saber de los habitantes del Gran Coclé, la presencia espiritual del sol. Por eso su valor era más místico o religioso, un punto de vista que distaba de la conceptualización casi netamente económica de los españoles. Aun así, tanto para los indígenas como para los europeos eran objetos de gran valor codiciable, sólo que para sus creadores indicaban el poder y la proximidad a lo divino.

massagem semântica

urgente a estimulação do sistema circusimbólico
as musculáusulas precisam de serem apertadas e acariciadas
para liberarem o ácido léxico
os nódulos linfonéticos ficarão
com melhorada fluidez
e toda a superfície etimodermológica
com maior comunicacão conotativa

tem várias técnicas de massagemântica:
crucigramassagem, dicionatsu,
acupontuação, referexologia,
drenagem filológica
e a básica prática tântrica da leitura
(outrora metodologia de preferência,
hoje de poucos adeptos)

a malhação da língua
agora é campo de profissionais

Howlers

A review of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Primate behavior haunts The Lacuna. Specifically the work treats aspects of primate group dynamics--control of resources, composition of tribal groups, sexuality and its consequences--as almost-but-never-quite-surpassed foundations underlying issues related to the funding, distribution, and censorship of the arts and writing: manifestations that ostensibly separate humans from the other primates. Undoubtedly the novel is also about the cultural history of Mexico and the United States from approximately 1930-1950. But, as the novel's opening words state, "In the beginning were the howlers."

Over the course of this beautifully written book--read on for some of my favorite descriptions of Mexico from the novel--the "howler" evolves into a polysemantic allegory of communication among primates, including humans. First we learn of the "howlers" who are imagined to be demons shrieking at the dawn of tropical Mexican morns until the protagonist Harrison Shepherd, as a child, learns that they are in fact monkeys. Later the term takes on the meanings of "lies" and also the "liars" themselves, usually reporters or, gulp, book reviewers, who, just like so many simians, renew their racket of choral cacophony every morning. Humbly facing them down is Shepherd, always on the line between what is and what is not, who builds from bread-making to plaster-mixing to canvas-curating to novel-writing, struggling to assume and to creatively express an identity that is uniquely his but always uniquely other. The son of a Spanish-heritage Mexican woman and an Anglo-Saxon-heritage American man, long since separated, Shepherd grows up in unstable circumstances on both sides of the border. He writes, "the world paints its prejudices boldly across banners, and somehow I walk through them without seeing" (316).

Shepherd's ability to immerse himself in languages and cultures develops as an extension of his early boyhood experiences of immersion in the sea, with its reward of views to another world linked to penetration, sexual pleasure, and the rhythm of the tides. Passage through an underwater cave or lacuna, risking death by drowning, provides the growing boy Shepherd with insights literally unique to him alone. This knowledge of immersion and silence, in which the underlying arbitariness of language is exposed, sparks Shepherd's desire to write things down--to share, or perhaps to keep hidden.

Friend and comrade of Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky--and student of their experiments in art, government, and sexuality--Shepherd writes three novels about ancient Mexico from his abritrarily chosen home in Asheville, NC. Frida has warned him of the terrible power of words: the first two novels find wide appeal, but the third is buried under the repression of McCarthyism. When the suspiciously xenophilic Shepherd, whose cats' clever Spanish names seem to be willfully misunderstood, is finally summoned for inquisition by Richard Nixon and the other howlers on the Special Sub-Committee of the Committee on Un-American Activities, we read in the hearings transcript his impassioned and spontaneously sincere defense of art and its engagements: "The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit, or pay a surgeon's bill. Or both, really. It can help a person remember or forget. If your house doesn't have many windows in it, you can hang up a painting and have a view. [...] Art is one thing I do know about. A book has all the same uses I mentioned, especially for the house without enough windows. Art by itself is nothing, until it comes into that house" (488-89). 

Shepherd's life, he claims, has been devoted in various ways to transporting some of Mexico's abundant art to America, country of hope but house in need of windows: "I decided to try my hand at making art for the hopeful" (489). Indeed, readers who love Mexico's "color and songs" will relish Kingsolver's descriptions, such as this one of a small-town zócalo: "The girls wore striped wool skirts, lace blouses, and their narrow-waisted boyfriends. The mood of the fiesta was enclosed in a perfect square: four long lines of electric bulbs strung from posts at the corners, fencing out a bright piece of night just above everyone's heads" (8), and "They stopped to watch the mariachis on the platform, handsome men with puckered lips giving long kisses to their brass horns. Trails of silver buttons led down the sides of their tight black trousers" (10).

Kingsolver's mastery of women's perspectives in Mexico runs deep: the earthy, salty worldviews of Frida and Salomé (Shepherd's mother) help Shepherd's voice to balance his romanticized longings with a whiff of acrid reality: "Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime" (393), and "Here life is strong-scented, overpowering. Even the words. Just ordering breakfast requires some word like toronja, triplet of muscular syllables full of lust and tears, a squirt in the eye. Nothing like the effete 'grapefruit,' which does not even mean what it says" (393-94).

We never read Shepherd's novels of Mexico, only Kingsolver's, filtered through Shepherd's surprising assistant Violet Brown's resuscitation of his journal entries. But it is through this triple narrative voice of Kingsolver/Violet Brown/Harrison Shepherd that the triply layered historical context (pre-conquest Mexico/1930s and 40s US and Mexico/present day) gains a wondrous harmonic resonance or polychromatic illumination in which echoes and photons bounce around the heretofore hidden lair, where the howlers cannot go, just beyond the lacuna.

Miscelânea Manauara

Dez dias em Manaus! Um ótimo mergulho na cultura amazonense quanto ao teatro, performance, à vida literária e cultural da capital do Amazonas! Meus agradecimentos profundos aos que tanto me ajudaram: Jorge Bandeira, Gislaine Pozzetti, Leopoldina Couto, e mais outros da Faculdade de Artes e Turismo da Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, e Tenório Telles da Editora Valer! Valeu!

O Rio Negro e Manaus

Medição do nível do Rio Negro - atingiu no máximo no 2009

A entrada do Parque Municipal Jéfferson Peres e uma enorme bandeira amazonense

Vista do Teatro Amazonas com a Igreja de São Sebastião

No Museu Amazônico: a Luva das Formigas, rito de iniciação

Beco que dá ao Teatro Amazonas

Paisagem amazônica com arco-iris após a chuva

Paisagem amazônica ao entardecer

Monumento da Abertura dos Portos, na Praça do Largo de São Sebastião

Não é Copacabana, não! 

Pavimentação da Praça do Largo de São Sebastião, mais antiga do que os mosaicos do Rio

Na Cidade Maravilhosa

Eu nem acreditei
no número de dias de construção da ponte
no custo projetado das reformas para o Maracanã
e muito menos na chegada dos antigos fenícios a deixar um rosto enorme
esculpido no Morro Dois Irmãos.

Mas,
lá em Ipanema,
eu vi o coqueiro insólito.

Pois é, eu fui testemunha de que um coqueiro,
só um da fila larga à beira da avenida movimentada,
girava de vez em quando,
dançando de capricho,
para a alegria geral dos transeuntes.

Eu vi o coqueiro girar,
e fiquei acreditando em tudo acontecer
na Cidade Maravilhosa.

Um Diálogo Drámatico sobre As Artes

Uma pré-estréia da palestra que vou dar em julho em Manaus, na Universidade do Estado do Amazonas!

Fico grato pelo convite!

Breath, Not Blood

Sacrificed Sun slides across the sky.
Slowly a steep arc he circumscribes.
Breathe, don't bleed; breath, not blood; live, don't die.


Blood he demands for this trail to lead?
No. It was wind blew him forcefully.
Breath, not blood; live, don't die; breathe, don't bleed.


Wind creates movement; it makes and does.
Motion and change come from mouth and tongue.
Live, don't die; breathe, don't bleed; breath, not blood.

(Based on an alternate Nahua version of the birth-of-the-sun myth, in which the newly created sun's refusal to move is remedied by the wind--Quetzalcóatl as Ehécatl--rather than by the sun's demand for the other gods to sacrifice themselves as he had done.)

La capital de Latinoamérica

es Miami. ¿Qué duda cabe? Es allá donde existe la probabilidad más alta de que, dentro del espacio de una sola cuadra, se puedan encontrar el mayor número posible de los ingredientes de la sopa de letras latinoamericana: argentinos, brasileños, cubanos, dominicanos, ecuatorianos, etc. Y las letras de una comida básica del Caribe son también las siglas de Young Urban Cuban Americans. Allá se asoman y se lamen mutuamente las lenguas: el criollo haitiano, el portugués brasileño en toda su gama de expresiones regionales, y el sinfín de variantes del español, para no mencionar alguno que otro idioma indígena, todos aproximándose, entre resistentes y resignados, al inglés.

YUCA

Para el beneplácito de todos, estas lenguas también se tantean y se reconocen de maneras culinarias en las que sobran platos para todos los gustos. Hace unos días, un amigo yo yo tuvimos el gran placer de cenar en el fino restaurante OLA de Miami Beach. Allá probé empanadas como entradas directas al cielo: rellenas de carne de puerco, en una salsa-crema de naranja con chile habanero. Un coctel como para volver a ponerle los pelos en la lengua de Hemingway, con ron DonQ y jugo de toronja fresco. Selección de vinos extraordinaria. Un plato fuerte llamado pionono: algo así como tamales de masa de plátano macho, con relleno de espinaca, pimiento y queso en salsa batida de tomate con frijol negro. Pão-de-queijo muito saboroso e ainda quentinho. Y un postre único, sencillo pero fantástico: pastel de tres leches, de sabor plátano, con salsín de maracuyá y la presencia sorpresiva pero bienvenida de dos ciruelitas pasas. Total: ¡maravilloso!

Pionono at OLA

El día siguiente, en busca de qué comer por la Española Way, mi amigo y yo comprobamos la casi completa saturación de la nacionalidad argentina entre los empleados de un restaurante ostensiblemente mexicano: un ejemplo más del generalmente alegre convivio pan-latinoamericano en la incomparable ciudad y playa de Miami.

 Ocean Drive

Dueto de Mujer y Guacamaya

Con el permiso del artista Ventsislav Zankov, reproduzco aquí una imagen de su obra 

Jena Papagal 

(110x110cm, óleo sobre lienzo, 2003)

composición que me ha impresionado por sus colores y formas contrastantes y por su técnica de iluminación formidable. Desde luego, viene muy en cuenta la presencia de la guacamaya como anfitriona o musa (más que mascota) de esta blog-antología. Para ver más ejemplos de la obra de este talentoso artista búlgaro, inventor de obras en dos y tres dimensiones--además de performance--en las que explora la corporealidad humana entre otros temas, visite su sitio.

 

O Banho de Nezahualcóyotl

"Vá tomar banho!"

A voz divina, sinuosa-e-empenada de Quetzalcóatl pareceu emanar do ar para se anidar no ouvido de Nezahualcóyotl, ajoelhado em meditação no templo.

"Vá tomar banho!"

Então: a fazer, porque quando fala a Serpente Emplumada, a gente obedece, e mais o tlatoani dos texcocanos. Imediatamente começou a desenhar um parque, para lá no morro de Tezcotzinco, porque não poderia ser qualquer banho. O tlatoani teria que emular o banho purificativo e meditativo que tomou Quetzalcóatl na sua existência humana, na época em que foi tlatoani dos toltecas. Banho como rito, cerimônia, nascimento, comunhão, até mesmo apoteose.

Durante uns mêses os lavradores transformaram a face do morro. Tomou forma uma série de trilhas, nichos, aquedutos, jardins, todo se abrindo no panorama espetacular que teria Nezahualcóyotl ao se sentar no banho redondo, sítio do rito. O banho tinha saida de água, reta, que fazia nascer uma pequena cachoeira; desse jeito jamais seria banho de água totalmente estancada.

O tlatoani esperou a primeira noite na que apareceu a estrela da tarde no seu ciclo. Quando caiu o sol, Nezahualcóyotl deixou cair sua manta no chão. Começaram nascendo as estrelas como da nudez dele, sagrada nudez que é a forma de qualquer recem nascido. Ele se sentou na tigela do banho, e a água quentinha, preparada ao fogo de lenha de carvalho, começou a cair, vertida pelos ajudantes.

Outros ajudantes colocaram tochas acesas ao lado do banho, mas ficavam perto demais, e o tlatoani mandou que se afastassem tochas, ajudantes, tudo. Só então, com a tranqüilidade aquática, veio uma inundação de inspirações: idéias, imagens, pensamentos e emoções expressadas como flor e canto. O rei enfim descansou, deixando voar a mente pelos detalhes de alguns projetos de lei, outros jardins e aquedutos a desenhar, um hino a Tloque Nahuaque...

E nisso, subitamente desceu, silenciosa, uma garça, se pousando majestuosamente sobre a água do banho. Nezahualcóyotl, admirado, a viu como símbolo de uma epifania...de que o fundamental artístico é a imersão no processo criador contínuo: se fluirem as águas, a garça virá.

Senhor e ave dividiram o banho uns momentos. Quando a garça  se foi embora, as longas asas brancas batendo poderosamente no ar, Nezahualcóyotl saiu do banho. Rejeitou as roupas que lhe ofereciam os ajudantes e subiu despido ao cima do morro, seguindo com a vista o vôo da garça pelo Lago Texcoco.

Assim voa o pensamento do sábio, o sentimento do artista verdadeiro, pensou Nezahulacóyotl. Com raiz na terra assim como eu, desnudo e limpo assim como eu, mas voando pelos céus divinos com o poder da expressão bem feita. Assim é que nós, coitados filhos dos deuses, podemos deixar mais alguma coisa que sobrevive sobre a face da terra, antes de chegar o momento da morte.


Não por muito tempo aqui na terra. Só um momento estamos aqui na terra.

Rei severo porém democrático, mandou que os ajudantes fizessem como ele: que tomassem banho e que subissem o morro nus. Os cinco homens ficaram no cume ate o amanhecer, na vigília dos sonhos mortais.

Chamizal Dream

Moment of peace
                             overlooking the river,
         changing flow and shifting banks
switching as often as its name.

Monument of peace
        setting a treaty
                        settling a boundary
             tracing a war wound.

Man of peace
          prizing vigilance
                   celebrating synecdoche
                                 chronicling dreams.

Mothers of peace
                                working on this side
                  working on that side
                       working, always working

Moment of peace
                         sweating the desert
                 reading the lines
         gauging prospects.

In Chamizal,
between wound and salt,
between undocumented and legal,
to dare to Act to Dream.


(Obama speaks on immigration, Chamizal National Memorial Park in El Paso, Texas, 10 May 2011, Mother's Day in Mexico)

El "rejistro": Una pedagogía radical

La BIBLIOTECA es

un archivo de conocimientos

y el DICCIONARIO

el Protocolo en que están rejistrados

la Imprenta lleva el rejistro

Poner impedimento á la Imprenta

es anular la Escritura

Prohibir libros nuevos

es prohibir la Importación de conocimientos

Condenar libros conocidos

es desmembrar el depósito

Los Conocimientos son PROPIEDAD PUBLICA

Puede renunciarla una jeneración

pero nó privar de ella á las siguientes

no lea; pero no oculte ni destruya

Me ha llamado la atención como un objet trouvé el breve texto arriba, de Inventamos o Erramos por Simón Rodríguez, edición de Monte Avila, Caracas, 1988, p. 112.

Ortografía y mayúsculas arbitrarias, márgenes al centro, falta de puntación: es así la escritura del controversial educador ambulante Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854), maestro de Simón Bolívar y fundador infatigable de escuelas por toda Sudamérica. Viajó y predicó, además, por los Estados Unidos y Europa durante un cuarto de siglo haciéndose llamar Samuel Robinson. El meollo de su pedagogía--escuelas mixtas abiertas a niños y niñas de todas las clases y etnias, con un enfoque empírico a través del estudio obligatorio de textos originales, de las artes prácticas (carpintería y albañilería, por ejemplo), de las lenguas indígenas por encima del latín, y de la anatomía por medio de desnudos en vivo--indignó a las autoridades civiles, académicas, y eclesiásticas de las recien nacidas repúblicas latinoamericanas. Rodríguez mismo reconoció lo avanzado de su metodología al incluir en su libro los supuestos comentarios de otros: "¡es mucho lo que se ha adelantado!" (104). Y efectivamente, sus bases teóricas junto a sus prácticas, desafortunadamente poco publicadas y leídas en su época, aunque a mí me parezcan atinadas me imagino que aún huelen a insoportables para muchos. Hay que luchar para que llegue la tan atrasada época de Simón Rodríguez.

Nomelodés

Desatinaste
descomunal
desparpajo.
Despapaye tan
despiadado
desconozco.
Desafortunadamente,
despejaste
desconveniencias a
decenas.
¡Qué desmadre!

Chalchiuhcuicatl

I heard a Jade Song calling to me: Let me on stage, I need to speak with my husband. 

And so she came.

(The following is an excerpt from Time for Chocolate.)

TECAYEHUATZIN

[...] Yes, time for chocolate! Sustenance for us, as we, in turn, offer sustenance to the gods! Turn after turn after time after time, the cycle of the sun is the cycle of the heart. Blood! Time for blood! Time--ongoing, without cataclysm--in exchange for blood! It is the blood that inebriates the gods and for which they agree that the sun will rise, the rain will fall, the corn will grow, the cacao will blossom. Chocolate: gift of the gods. Blood: chocolate of the gods.

(Enter CHALCHIUHCUICATL house left with a basket of cacao beans. She scoops the beans and lets them run through her fingers as she speaks)

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

Dear husband, I interrupt you. I remind you that we have many expenses, yet the servant says you told him to double the amount of cacao for chocolate. Why is this?

TECAYEHUATZIN

Dear wife, you know my friends are coming. Must the value of friendship be measured in cacao? If so, then there are not enough trees to produce the cacao needed to m...

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

(interrupting)

To measure the value of your friendship. I know this, dear husband. But the xocolatl does not keep like the dry cacao beans do. The chocolate must be drunk when it's prepared.

TECAYEHUATZIN

And that it shall. The gullet of my friend Xayacamach is as prodigious as his flower songs.

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

Would you allow me to grind up so much of our savings for a gathering of my friends?

TECAYEHUATZIN

(considering)

Yes. Preferably if it were to celebrate your friendship with flower song.

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

Not everything is flower song, you know.

TECAYEHUATZIN

No, dear wife, but ask yourself: are gossip and complaint the best for painting friendship?

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

They are only natural.

TECAYEHUATZIN

And flower song is not--it must be learned and crafted, which is why it is the more precious. Flower song is a gift to please our senses, and to enliven the divine spirit. Through flower song we cast light on our condition, on our knowledge that we are here for only a little moment. As you say, dear wife: the chocolate must be drunk when it's prepared.

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

I hope you also told the servant to add only a little mushroom, only a little morning glory.

TECAYEHUATZIN

You know me as you should. Sensuality without debauchery.

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

I know you as I should. I know you wish I were as gifted in flower song as Macuilxochitl.

TECAYEHUATZIN

There you err, my precious song of jade. As you say, not everything is flower song. I do not wish for more than I receive from the divine spirit: this moment, here with you, here with me.

CHALCHIUHCUICATL

(embraces her husband)

I believe you because I so choose.

TECAYEHUATZIN

Do you hear how wise you are?

[...]

alto astral

ela não voa:

ressoa

o alto astral

descomunal

que ela tem

que ela nem

percebe porque é natural

nela, esse seu vaivém

abarca todo o pessoal

e levanta quem

se sente mal 

ela abre espaços além

do que pode alcançar ninguém
pelos fluxos de luz 
que ela produz

e todos ficamos

alvoroçados

da boa,

como alaranjados

num alvor enaltecedor,

transparente,

transcendente,

numa harmonia de ondas,

umas curtas, outras longas,

que vibrando assim todos fazemos

concerto de cores

conjunto de gemas

e os versos giram em universo

afinado, azul aceso

tudo porque ela decidiu

me saudar e me sorriu

divina graça que ela tem

alto astral que nem ninguém

mas ela não voa:

ressoa