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Our Lady of Guadalupe by Francisco Serrano
A real experience of magical realism, anyone? This actually is a true story of what happened to me some years back in Tijuana, Mexico. Some time following, I wrote this poem:
THE VISION
It happened in Tijuana
When I took the train down from San Diego
On the day off from my publishing meeting.
It was a cold, winter day and I wore only a light sweater.
After an hour of walking the narrow streets of Tijuana
Where vendors sold everything to tourists,
From leather jackets, peanuts and piñatas,
To ladies jeweled dresses and maracas
I began to feel feverish.
A few more minutes of walking
And I knew I had to act fast.
As a first step I bought
A wool red and white poncho
From a street vendor and asked him for the location
Of a church.
I figured a church was a good place to lie down,
And Mexico being a strong Catholic country
Would have many churches.
I wasn’t wrong.
The Mexican vendor pointed to the next street
And told me to turn right and go down three blocks.
Being Thursday I thought I’d have
The church all to myself.
Boy, was I wrong.
The church was jammed packed.
Mexicans not only filling the pews,
But Mexicans
Standing tight together all over the place.
Well, I had a fever and had to do what I had to do.
I squeezed through the crowd
Until my back was against a pillar.
I slid down the pillar so
My rump was on the floor,
Knees to my chest, back and head
Resting against the pillar.
Instantly I fell asleep.
After what must have been an hour
Covered in sweat, I slowly started coming out of sleep,
And could feel my fever breaking.
Still with my eyes closed and still mostly asleep,
I could hear singing
Sounding like the voices of angels.
I was so disoriented I thought I passed from my body.
So this is what the afterlife is like, I thought.
Still with my eyes closed
I saw the vision of a glowing goddess angel
Framed by angelic singing.
Slowly, very slowly, I started to open my eyes.
I could see the back of many legs.
I looked up and saw a white and gold ceiling.
It all came back to me:
I didn’t die after all,
I had a fever,
I entered this jam packed Mexican church.
I squeezed my way to this pillar,
I sat down and fell asleep.
I remained sitting.
Still listening to the music, remembering my
Vision of the gold and white goddess angel.
It felt good to sit and rest.
I couldn’t get over the packed Mexican church
On Thursday!
Mexican teenagers on their tiptoes,
Straining to get a glimpse of the priest;
Smiling, well-dressed young men handing out programs.
Men and woman packed next to one another.
And everybody so excited. What is all this?
After I rested some more,
I made my way to my feet and squeezed back
Out of the church and walked back down the street
To where I bought the poncho.
I asked the Mexican vendor
Why the church was so packed.
He said, “Today is a big celebration;
Today is the day the Virgin Mary
Appeared in Mexico
Today is the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
I used my head and didn’t tell him about my vision.
For I reasoned that if I did all those excited Mexicans
Might nail me to a cross and parade me
Through their narrow streets,
Me of all people, a goofy non-Catholic gringo tourist,
Having a clear, ecstatic vision
Of their Lady of Guadalupe.
5.0
A real experience of magical realism, anyone? This actually is a true story of what happened to me some years back in Tijuana, Mexico. Some time following, I wrote this poem:
THE VISION
It happened in Tijuana
When I took the train down from San Diego
On the day off from my publishing meeting.
It was a cold, winter day and I wore only a light sweater.
After an hour of walking the narrow streets of Tijuana
Where vendors sold everything to tourists,
From leather jackets, peanuts and piñatas,
To ladies jeweled dresses and maracas
I began to feel feverish.
A few more minutes of walking
And I knew I had to act fast.
As a first step I bought
A wool red and white poncho
From a street vendor and asked him for the location
Of a church.
I figured a church was a good place to lie down,
And Mexico being a strong Catholic country
Would have many churches.
I wasn’t wrong.
The Mexican vendor pointed to the next street
And told me to turn right and go down three blocks.
Being Thursday I thought I’d have
The church all to myself.
Boy, was I wrong.
The church was jammed packed.
Mexicans not only filling the pews,
But Mexicans
Standing tight together all over the place.
Well, I had a fever and had to do what I had to do.
I squeezed through the crowd
Until my back was against a pillar.
I slid down the pillar so
My rump was on the floor,
Knees to my chest, back and head
Resting against the pillar.
Instantly I fell asleep.
After what must have been an hour
Covered in sweat, I slowly started coming out of sleep,
And could feel my fever breaking.
Still with my eyes closed and still mostly asleep,
I could hear singing
Sounding like the voices of angels.
I was so disoriented I thought I passed from my body.
So this is what the afterlife is like, I thought.
Still with my eyes closed
I saw the vision of a glowing goddess angel
Framed by angelic singing.
Slowly, very slowly, I started to open my eyes.
I could see the back of many legs.
I looked up and saw a white and gold ceiling.
It all came back to me:
I didn’t die after all,
I had a fever,
I entered this jam packed Mexican church.
I squeezed my way to this pillar,
I sat down and fell asleep.
I remained sitting.
Still listening to the music, remembering my
Vision of the gold and white goddess angel.
It felt good to sit and rest.
I couldn’t get over the packed Mexican church
On Thursday!
Mexican teenagers on their tiptoes,
Straining to get a glimpse of the priest;
Smiling, well-dressed young men handing out programs.
Men and woman packed next to one another.
And everybody so excited. What is all this?
After I rested some more,
I made my way to my feet and squeezed back
Out of the church and walked back down the street
To where I bought the poncho.
I asked the Mexican vendor
Why the church was so packed.
He said, “Today is a big celebration;
Today is the day the Virgin Mary
Appeared in Mexico
Today is the day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
I used my head and didn’t tell him about my vision.
For I reasoned that if I did all those excited Mexicans
Might nail me to a cross and parade me
Through their narrow streets,
Me of all people, a goofy non-Catholic gringo tourist,
Having a clear, ecstatic vision
Of their Lady of Guadalupe.
All The Living and The Dead by Joseph Kenyon
This past month I read this recently published novel written by the American fiction writer, Joseph Kenyon. I took my time as I wanted to really savor the subtle poetry of the story. Here are five reasons why I judge this novel a real find and why you will want to consider adding to your summer reading list:
The Unfolding Drama
Autumn Gilhain, student and founding member of an artistic society, embodies what Friedrich Nietzsche termed the passionate spirit of Dionysius; Quinn Gravesend, seasoned composer and professor, lives according to reasoned Apollonian coolness. Autumn and Quinn are the novel’s two main characters and the interplay and clashing of their personalities infuse the novel with serious drive and momentum.
The Setting
North American University of Fine Arts – If you are dedicated to the creative life and artistic genius, as are the men and women in this novel, what better environment that a school completely and totally dedicated to the arts?
The Societe de l'Espirit Artistique
Autumn Gilhain and her group of young artists, writers and musicians devoting their energies to artistic genius reminds me in a way of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.
The Language:
The objective third-person narrative voice is clear and crisp, flowing with elegance and grace, as if we are listening to an accomplished classical pianist performing a sonata.
Timeless
Although the first date cited is 1999, the story has a timeless quality unfolding page after page. I have purposely kept my review short so as not to spoil any of the discoveries a reader will make from beginning to end.
5.0
This past month I read this recently published novel written by the American fiction writer, Joseph Kenyon. I took my time as I wanted to really savor the subtle poetry of the story. Here are five reasons why I judge this novel a real find and why you will want to consider adding to your summer reading list:
The Unfolding Drama
Autumn Gilhain, student and founding member of an artistic society, embodies what Friedrich Nietzsche termed the passionate spirit of Dionysius; Quinn Gravesend, seasoned composer and professor, lives according to reasoned Apollonian coolness. Autumn and Quinn are the novel’s two main characters and the interplay and clashing of their personalities infuse the novel with serious drive and momentum.
The Setting
North American University of Fine Arts – If you are dedicated to the creative life and artistic genius, as are the men and women in this novel, what better environment that a school completely and totally dedicated to the arts?
The Societe de l'Espirit Artistique
Autumn Gilhain and her group of young artists, writers and musicians devoting their energies to artistic genius reminds me in a way of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.
The Language:
The objective third-person narrative voice is clear and crisp, flowing with elegance and grace, as if we are listening to an accomplished classical pianist performing a sonata.
Timeless
Although the first date cited is 1999, the story has a timeless quality unfolding page after page. I have purposely kept my review short so as not to spoil any of the discoveries a reader will make from beginning to end.
On the Way to Satori by Gerta Ital
In the tradition of Zen Buddhism, satori is an immediate direct seeing into our own true inner nature. And through the experience of satori, our entire outlook and dealing with the world takes a radical shift. When hearing such language, many of us imagine a monk meditating in silence. However, as curious and unbelievable as it may seem, such a sharp, abrupt, instant opening in our mind can happen anywhere, at any time. Case in point, my first satori happened in the most unlikely spot in the world - a college locker room before running out for football practice. Some years ago I wrote a poem about my sudden shock (I changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent).
THE TROLL
“Every time I lose a game
I go right away to the bathroom and puke.”
This is what head coach Jock Tallum said
Down in Moosetown Southern at the start of
His pep talk one muggy, sticky September afternoon
In the locker room before a Tuesday practice.
“When I lose a game I just gotta puke.”
He even mimed puking.
I’m sitting there in the locker room
Thinking this is one of the
Ugliest men I’ve ever had the misfortune of
Being around.
And this is one of the ugliest group of people
I’ve ever been around.
And this is one of the ugliest situations I’ve ever
Been in.
The whole scene jolted me,
Slapped me in the face,
Hit me over the head.
I woke up, woke up enough to remain seated
When all the players and coaches rushed
Out to the practice field.
“I just gotta puke.”
I got up, walked over to the equipment room,
Took off my pads, handed them
To the equipment manager and told him
I quit.
One of the smartest things I’ve ever done.
The next morning I had a class in the humanities
Where the professor spoke about the beauty of
Classical music and played a piano sonata by
Frédéric Chopin.
Ah, how refreshing.
How uplifting.
How exhilarating.
Such beauty, I reflected, is what I would like my life to
Be like from now on.
During the following week,
When a few of my college buddies asked
About me quitting the football team
I told them about Jock Tallum’s
Puking and said I certainly don’t want to do anything
That would cause him to puke after a game.
I still could see short, fat Jock Tallum
In his baseball cap and T-shirt and gym shorts,
A disgusting little troll,
Miming how he would puke.
Never again.
Never again.
Never again.
5.0
In the tradition of Zen Buddhism, satori is an immediate direct seeing into our own true inner nature. And through the experience of satori, our entire outlook and dealing with the world takes a radical shift. When hearing such language, many of us imagine a monk meditating in silence. However, as curious and unbelievable as it may seem, such a sharp, abrupt, instant opening in our mind can happen anywhere, at any time. Case in point, my first satori happened in the most unlikely spot in the world - a college locker room before running out for football practice. Some years ago I wrote a poem about my sudden shock (I changed the names to protect the not-so-innocent).
THE TROLL
“Every time I lose a game
I go right away to the bathroom and puke.”
This is what head coach Jock Tallum said
Down in Moosetown Southern at the start of
His pep talk one muggy, sticky September afternoon
In the locker room before a Tuesday practice.
“When I lose a game I just gotta puke.”
He even mimed puking.
I’m sitting there in the locker room
Thinking this is one of the
Ugliest men I’ve ever had the misfortune of
Being around.
And this is one of the ugliest group of people
I’ve ever been around.
And this is one of the ugliest situations I’ve ever
Been in.
The whole scene jolted me,
Slapped me in the face,
Hit me over the head.
I woke up, woke up enough to remain seated
When all the players and coaches rushed
Out to the practice field.
“I just gotta puke.”
I got up, walked over to the equipment room,
Took off my pads, handed them
To the equipment manager and told him
I quit.
One of the smartest things I’ve ever done.
The next morning I had a class in the humanities
Where the professor spoke about the beauty of
Classical music and played a piano sonata by
Frédéric Chopin.
Ah, how refreshing.
How uplifting.
How exhilarating.
Such beauty, I reflected, is what I would like my life to
Be like from now on.
During the following week,
When a few of my college buddies asked
About me quitting the football team
I told them about Jock Tallum’s
Puking and said I certainly don’t want to do anything
That would cause him to puke after a game.
I still could see short, fat Jock Tallum
In his baseball cap and T-shirt and gym shorts,
A disgusting little troll,
Miming how he would puke.
Never again.
Never again.
Never again.
How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek - Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic and all around Marxist bad boy. You might not agree with his philosophy or politics but one thing is certain - he has the uncanny ability to explain difficult theories and concepts in vivid, comprehensible language.
Since one of my own areas of interest in Jungian psychology, I thought it wise to gain at least a basic understanding of another major theorist in the world of psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan. To this end I tried reading an introductory text but had no luck since technical, obscure language filled the pages right from the first chapter. So I tried this introduction by Slavoj Žižek. Bingo! I enjoyed reading the entire book and now I have at least a modest grasp of the great French analyst’s thinking. To share some of the flavor of Slavoj Žižek’s instruction on how to read Lacan, here are several quotes from the book coupled with my comments:
“Lacan started his ‘return to Freud’ with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best-known formula: ‘The unconscious is structured as a language.’ The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic philosophy of life and has nothing to do with Freud.” ---------- To illustrate this point, Slavoj Žižek gives the example of how there was a factory worker accused of stealing every evening when he left the factory. Night after night, the guards would very carefully check the wheelbarrow he was pushing to make sure he wasn’t hiding anything belonging to the factory. But then one night the guards finally got the point – he was stealing wheelbarrows. “This is the first thing to bear in mind about the way the unconscious works according to Lacan; it is not hidden in the wheelbarrow, it is the wheelbarrow itself.”
“For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something like ‘reality’ constitutes itself in the first place." ---------- Perhaps this is why nowadays Lacan is encountered more in academic departments of philosophy, linguistics and literature rather than actual clinical practice: his theory isn’t about curing sickness or improving people’s ability to function in society; rather, his psychoanalytic framework can provide a more penetrating approach to the ways in which we construct the building blocks of our perception and understanding of the world.
“For Lacan, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is not the patient’s well-being, successful social life or personal fulfillment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary coordinates and deadlocks of his or her desires.” ---------- This statement gives a hint that Lacan is not overly optimistic about the human capacity to have all our desires satisfied – at best, we reach a more complete awareness of the structure of our psyche and why our dissatisfaction is a very human reality.
“In order to unlock the secret treasures of Freud, Lacan enlisted a motely tribe of theories, some from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, through Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, up to mathematical set theory and the philosophies of Plant, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger." ----------- Slavoj lets us know right in his introduction that he will not delve into the details of linguistics or anthropological theory as it is used in psychoanalytic treatment. He takes a different tact, linking a passage from Lacan to areas we are all more familiar, such as film and current day politics. This is the beauty of this introduction – you learn a good bit about Lacanian theory and have fun along with way.
“It is clear that none of these versions (of toilets) can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement that comes from within the body is clearly discernible in it." ---------- Here Slavoj is talking about the difference between a French toilet, an American toilet and a German toilet and how each culture betrays its ideology and vision of life with their respective design of this bathroom gadget.
“When a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words than in thee direct reality of the person of that judge; if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. . . . What is missed by the cynic who believes only his eyes is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures reality.” ----------- Slavoj Žižek provides a lucid explanation of how a society and nation’s legal institution with its body of law forms this ‘effective symbolic fiction’ to make sure the judge’s words have much more punch than simply those pronounced by a single individual. The author also ties in this example with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
5.0
Slavoj Žižek - Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic and all around Marxist bad boy. You might not agree with his philosophy or politics but one thing is certain - he has the uncanny ability to explain difficult theories and concepts in vivid, comprehensible language.
Since one of my own areas of interest in Jungian psychology, I thought it wise to gain at least a basic understanding of another major theorist in the world of psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan. To this end I tried reading an introductory text but had no luck since technical, obscure language filled the pages right from the first chapter. So I tried this introduction by Slavoj Žižek. Bingo! I enjoyed reading the entire book and now I have at least a modest grasp of the great French analyst’s thinking. To share some of the flavor of Slavoj Žižek’s instruction on how to read Lacan, here are several quotes from the book coupled with my comments:
“Lacan started his ‘return to Freud’ with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best-known formula: ‘The unconscious is structured as a language.’ The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic philosophy of life and has nothing to do with Freud.” ---------- To illustrate this point, Slavoj Žižek gives the example of how there was a factory worker accused of stealing every evening when he left the factory. Night after night, the guards would very carefully check the wheelbarrow he was pushing to make sure he wasn’t hiding anything belonging to the factory. But then one night the guards finally got the point – he was stealing wheelbarrows. “This is the first thing to bear in mind about the way the unconscious works according to Lacan; it is not hidden in the wheelbarrow, it is the wheelbarrow itself.”
“For Lacan, psychoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence. It does not show an individual the way to accommodate him- or herself to the demands of social reality; instead it explains how something like ‘reality’ constitutes itself in the first place." ---------- Perhaps this is why nowadays Lacan is encountered more in academic departments of philosophy, linguistics and literature rather than actual clinical practice: his theory isn’t about curing sickness or improving people’s ability to function in society; rather, his psychoanalytic framework can provide a more penetrating approach to the ways in which we construct the building blocks of our perception and understanding of the world.
“For Lacan, the goal of psychoanalytic treatment is not the patient’s well-being, successful social life or personal fulfillment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary coordinates and deadlocks of his or her desires.” ---------- This statement gives a hint that Lacan is not overly optimistic about the human capacity to have all our desires satisfied – at best, we reach a more complete awareness of the structure of our psyche and why our dissatisfaction is a very human reality.
“In order to unlock the secret treasures of Freud, Lacan enlisted a motely tribe of theories, some from the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, through Claude Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, up to mathematical set theory and the philosophies of Plant, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger." ----------- Slavoj lets us know right in his introduction that he will not delve into the details of linguistics or anthropological theory as it is used in psychoanalytic treatment. He takes a different tact, linking a passage from Lacan to areas we are all more familiar, such as film and current day politics. This is the beauty of this introduction – you learn a good bit about Lacanian theory and have fun along with way.
“It is clear that none of these versions (of toilets) can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement that comes from within the body is clearly discernible in it." ---------- Here Slavoj is talking about the difference between a French toilet, an American toilet and a German toilet and how each culture betrays its ideology and vision of life with their respective design of this bathroom gadget.
“When a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words than in thee direct reality of the person of that judge; if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. . . . What is missed by the cynic who believes only his eyes is the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction structures reality.” ----------- Slavoj Žižek provides a lucid explanation of how a society and nation’s legal institution with its body of law forms this ‘effective symbolic fiction’ to make sure the judge’s words have much more punch than simply those pronounced by a single individual. The author also ties in this example with Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
The Pest by Michele McKay Aynesworth, Fernando Sorrentino
Perhaps the well-dressed sixty-year-old man with his briefcase in Fernando Sorrentino's tale looked a bit like this gentleman. Come on, Al, give us a smile!
Julio Cortázar always had such a youthful look about him, even well into his sixties and even seventies, that when the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes first meet Julio, Carlos thought he was face-to-face not with Julio but Julio’s son. Why not? In an autobiographical essay, Julio wrote how ever since he became a man there was always a little boy playing inside him. And it is that little boy still radiating its little boy face to the world, forever spinning out new, imaginative universes populated by all sorts of creatures, including Cronopios, Famas, Esperanzas and even some creatures looking slightly human we encounter in the pages of Julio’s books.
Likewise, the longer I live, the less seriously I take all the seriousness from the legions of hard-nosed, serious people. There they are with their somber frowns, their knitted brows, their abrupt, short nods of the head, exuding their black bile stinker vibration and uptight, cramped rendition of life as a brutal battle of me against the world. Well, my goodness - all we have to do is use our eyes and give those serious ones with their hangdog pusses and haggard smirks a good once over to see who has already lost the war.
Anyway, it is with the spirit of youthfulness and refusal to take serious folk seriously that we can read Fernando Sorrentino’s tale. Is our young narrator pushing things a little too far? How about that one telling line: "“O.K., then,” he said, eager to speak and without having paid any attention to me at all.” Telling in the sense that people who are all blabber and no attention to others are locked into a self-imposed case of emotional shutdown and a hardening of not so much the arteries as a hardening of the categories. With this in mind, let's turn to Fernando's story. Here goes:
THE PEST by Fernando Sorrentino
The eighth of November was my birthday. I figured the best way to celebrate was to strike up a conversation with someone I didn't know.
That would have been about ten A.M.
At the corner of Florida and Córdoba, I stopped a well-dressed sixty-year-old with a briefcase in his right hand and that certain uppitiness of lawyers and notaries.
"Excuse me, sir," I said, "could you please tell me how to get to the Plaza de Mayo?
The man stopped, gave me the once-over, and asked a pointless question: "Do you want to go to the Plaza de Mayo, or to the Avenida de Mayo?
"Actually, I'd like to go to the Plaza de Mayo, but if that's not possible, I'm fine with just about any place else."
"O.K., then," he said, eager to speak and without having paid any attention to me at all, "head that way" — he pointed south — "cross Viamonte, Tucumán, Lavalle…"
I realized he was having fun ticking off the eight streets I'd have to cross, so I decided to interrupt:
"Are you sure about what you're saying?"
"Absolutely."
"Forgive me for doubting your word," I explained, "but just a few minutes ago a man with an intelligent face told me that the Plaza de Mayo was the other way" — and I pointed toward the Plaza San Mart'n.
The fellow could only reply, "Must be someone who's not familiar with the city."
"Nevertheless, like I said, he had an intelligent face. And naturally, I prefer to believe him, not you."
Giving me a stern look, he asked, "All right, tell me, why do you prefer to believe him instead of me?"
"It's not that I prefer to believe him instead of you. But, like I said, he had an intelligent face."
"You don't say! And I suppose I look like an idiot?"
"No, no!" I was shocked. "Who ever said such a thing?"
"Since you said that the other fellow had an intelligent face…"
"Well, truthfully, this man had a very intelligent look about him."
My sparring partner was growing impatient.
"Very well, then, sir," he said, "I'm rather pressed for time, so I'll say good-bye and be on my way."
"That's fine, but how do I get to the Plaza San Mart'n?"
His face betrayed a spasm of irritation.
"But didn't you say you wanted to go to the Plaza de Mayo?"
"No, not the Plaza de Mayo. I want to go to the Plaza San Mart'n. I never said anything about the Plaza de Mayo."
"In that case," and now he was pointing north, "take Calle Florida past Paraguay…"
"You're driving me crazy!" I protested. "Didn't you say before that I should head in the opposite direction?"
"Because you said you wanted to go to the Plaza de Mayo!"
"I never said anything about the Plaza de Mayo! How do I have to say it? Either you don't know the language, or you're still half-asleep."
The fellow turned red. I saw his right hand grip the handle of his briefcase. He said something that's better not repeated and marched off with rapid, aggressive steps.
I got the feeling he was a bit upset.
5.0
Perhaps the well-dressed sixty-year-old man with his briefcase in Fernando Sorrentino's tale looked a bit like this gentleman. Come on, Al, give us a smile!
Julio Cortázar always had such a youthful look about him, even well into his sixties and even seventies, that when the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes first meet Julio, Carlos thought he was face-to-face not with Julio but Julio’s son. Why not? In an autobiographical essay, Julio wrote how ever since he became a man there was always a little boy playing inside him. And it is that little boy still radiating its little boy face to the world, forever spinning out new, imaginative universes populated by all sorts of creatures, including Cronopios, Famas, Esperanzas and even some creatures looking slightly human we encounter in the pages of Julio’s books.
Likewise, the longer I live, the less seriously I take all the seriousness from the legions of hard-nosed, serious people. There they are with their somber frowns, their knitted brows, their abrupt, short nods of the head, exuding their black bile stinker vibration and uptight, cramped rendition of life as a brutal battle of me against the world. Well, my goodness - all we have to do is use our eyes and give those serious ones with their hangdog pusses and haggard smirks a good once over to see who has already lost the war.
Anyway, it is with the spirit of youthfulness and refusal to take serious folk seriously that we can read Fernando Sorrentino’s tale. Is our young narrator pushing things a little too far? How about that one telling line: "“O.K., then,” he said, eager to speak and without having paid any attention to me at all.” Telling in the sense that people who are all blabber and no attention to others are locked into a self-imposed case of emotional shutdown and a hardening of not so much the arteries as a hardening of the categories. With this in mind, let's turn to Fernando's story. Here goes:
THE PEST by Fernando Sorrentino
The eighth of November was my birthday. I figured the best way to celebrate was to strike up a conversation with someone I didn't know.
That would have been about ten A.M.
At the corner of Florida and Córdoba, I stopped a well-dressed sixty-year-old with a briefcase in his right hand and that certain uppitiness of lawyers and notaries.
"Excuse me, sir," I said, "could you please tell me how to get to the Plaza de Mayo?
The man stopped, gave me the once-over, and asked a pointless question: "Do you want to go to the Plaza de Mayo, or to the Avenida de Mayo?
"Actually, I'd like to go to the Plaza de Mayo, but if that's not possible, I'm fine with just about any place else."
"O.K., then," he said, eager to speak and without having paid any attention to me at all, "head that way" — he pointed south — "cross Viamonte, Tucumán, Lavalle…"
I realized he was having fun ticking off the eight streets I'd have to cross, so I decided to interrupt:
"Are you sure about what you're saying?"
"Absolutely."
"Forgive me for doubting your word," I explained, "but just a few minutes ago a man with an intelligent face told me that the Plaza de Mayo was the other way" — and I pointed toward the Plaza San Mart'n.
The fellow could only reply, "Must be someone who's not familiar with the city."
"Nevertheless, like I said, he had an intelligent face. And naturally, I prefer to believe him, not you."
Giving me a stern look, he asked, "All right, tell me, why do you prefer to believe him instead of me?"
"It's not that I prefer to believe him instead of you. But, like I said, he had an intelligent face."
"You don't say! And I suppose I look like an idiot?"
"No, no!" I was shocked. "Who ever said such a thing?"
"Since you said that the other fellow had an intelligent face…"
"Well, truthfully, this man had a very intelligent look about him."
My sparring partner was growing impatient.
"Very well, then, sir," he said, "I'm rather pressed for time, so I'll say good-bye and be on my way."
"That's fine, but how do I get to the Plaza San Mart'n?"
His face betrayed a spasm of irritation.
"But didn't you say you wanted to go to the Plaza de Mayo?"
"No, not the Plaza de Mayo. I want to go to the Plaza San Mart'n. I never said anything about the Plaza de Mayo."
"In that case," and now he was pointing north, "take Calle Florida past Paraguay…"
"You're driving me crazy!" I protested. "Didn't you say before that I should head in the opposite direction?"
"Because you said you wanted to go to the Plaza de Mayo!"
"I never said anything about the Plaza de Mayo! How do I have to say it? Either you don't know the language, or you're still half-asleep."
The fellow turned red. I saw his right hand grip the handle of his briefcase. He said something that's better not repeated and marched off with rapid, aggressive steps.
I got the feeling he was a bit upset.
An Enlightening Book by Fernando Sorrentino
Conversion of wetlands for commercial development, drainage schemes, extraction of minerals, overfishing and tourism pose a real threat to the environment and wildlife. How would an absurdist fiction writer like Fernando Sorrentino respond to such human insensitivity and stupidity? I think this story (included below in its entirety) is a spot-on answer. A number of features I find particularly appealing:
• The lagoon is encircled by a perfectly well-constructed asphalt road but such is not good enough for tourists who want more direct, immediate contact with the wildness of the lagoon and the birds. And, ultimately, they all get what they want!
• Unlike the usual accommodations where tourists are provided comfortable boats or walkable bridges, these tourists have to use stilts to cross the lagoon. Stilts! Infusing the tale with an absurdist twist: stilts require a good bit of effort and skill, especially if you are using them in a lagoon;
• Although tourists are warned “the use of stilts may lead to fairly serious psychological alterations,” tourists being tourists tend to ignore such warnings, treating them as a joke. Ah, the tourist mindset: Your local attraction is really all about me and nothing can really touch me since I am, well, a paying tourist;
• The birds are empowered to deal effectively with the mindless human intruders;
• There is no direct violence involved; rather, the birds’ weapons are sound and subtle mind control;
• The town’s population keeps on making stilts to fuel the local economy. If tourists are sacrificed in the process, that’s simply the way it goes.
AN ENLIGHTENING BOOK by Fernando Sorrentino
In his brief prologue to Stelzvögel, professor Franz Klamm explains that Dr. Ludwig Boitus travelled from Gottingen to Huayllén-Naquén with the sole purpose of studying in situ the assimilative attraction of the long-legged bird popularly known as calegüinas (this name has almost unanimous acceptance in the specialist literature in Spanish and it will be used here). Stelzvögel fills an acute gap in our knowledge of the subject. Before Dr. Boitus' exhaustive investigations -- the presentation of which takes up almost a third of the volume -- little was known for certain about calegüinas. In fact, except for fragmentary qualitative studies by Bulovic, Balbón, Laurencena and others -- works plagued by whimsical, unsubstantiated claims -- before Stelzvögel, the scientific community lacked a reliable basis on which to base further research. In his work, Dr. Boitus starts from the -- perhaps debatable -- premise that calegüinas' main character trait is its very strong personality (using the term personality in the sense established by Fox and his school). This personality is so potent that simply being in the presence of a calegüinas is enough to induce strongly calegüinas-like behavior in other animals.
The calegüinas are found exclusively in the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon. There, they flourish -- some estimates put the population as high as one million -- helped both by local by-laws, which make hunting them illegal, and by the fact that their flesh is inedible and their feathers have no industrial use. In common with other long-legged birds, they feed on fish, Batrachia and the larvæ of mosquitoes and other insects. Although they posses well-developed wings, they rarely fly, and when they do, they never go beyond the limits of the lagoon. They are of a similar size to storks, though their beaks are slightly larger and they do not migrate. Their back and wings are a blueish-black; their head, chest and belly, a yellowish-white. Their legs are pale yellow. Their habitat, the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon, is shallow but wide. Since there are no bridges across it -- in spite of many representations to that end -- the locals are obliged to make a long detour in order to get to the opposite side. This has had the effect of making complaints to the local newspaper almost continuous but communication between the shores of the lagoon rather scarce. To the uninformed observer it would appear that residents could cross the lagoon quickly and easily by using stilts and even without them, at its deepest point, the water would barely reach the waist of a man of average height. However, the locals know -- although perhaps in a intuitive way only -- the assimilative power of the calegüinas, and the fact is that they prefer not to attempt the crossing, choosing instead -- as already stated -- to go around the lagoon, which is encircled by an excellent asphalt road.
All this has not stopped the hiring of stilts to tourists becoming the single most important part of the Huayllén-Naquén economy, a circumstance that is perhaps justifiable in view of the scarcity of basic resources in the region. The absence of serious competition and the lack of official pricing has made the hiring of stilts a very costly business indeed; inflating prices to outrageous levels is the only way tradesmen can recoup their inevitable losses. In fact, there is a rather limited Huayllén-Naquén by-law stipulating that shops hiring stilts should display a sign, positioned in open view and written in bold lettering, warning that the use of stilts may lead to fairly serious psychological alterations. As a rule, tourists tend not to heed these warnings and, for the most part, treat them as a joke. It should be noted that it is simply not possible to make sure that the notices are read by every single tourist even when, as is undeniably the case, the shopkeepers comply with the by-law punctiliously and place the signs in highly conspicuous places. The authorities are notoriously inflexible on this point. It is true that inspections are not very frequent and are always preceded by a warning sent a few minutes beforehand -- but the inspectors are known to perform their duties conscientiously and it can only be coincidence that there is no recorded case of a shopkeeper being sanctioned under the by-law.
Once in possession of their stilts, the tourists, either by themselves or in cheerful, chattering groups of two, three, five or ten go into the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon with the aim of reaching the opposite shore where they can buy, at very reasonable prices, tins of exquisite fish -- a product that provides the main source of income for the population on that side of the lagoon. For the first two or three hundred meters, the tourists advance happily; laughing, shouting, playing practical jokes and frightening the calegüinas, which, like all long-legged birds, are extremely nervous creatures. Gradually, as they penetrate deeper and deeper into the lagoon, the tourists become more subdued while, meter-by-meter, the density of calegüinas increases. Soon the birds are so numerous that progress becomes extremely difficult for the tourists. The calegüinas no longer run or fly away nervously -- as their numbers rise, they appear to grow in confidence, although their behavior could also be explained by the fact that, by then, most movement is physically impossible. Whatever the reason, there comes a moment when shouting is no longer enough and it becomes necessary to use sticks and hands to shoo the calegüinas out of the way. Even then they concede very little ground. This is generally the moment when the tourists fall silent and the joking and laughing comes to an end. Then -- and only then -- they notice a dense humming emanating from the throats of the thousands of calegüinas, filling the entire lagoon. In its timbre, this humming is not very different from that of doves -- it is, however, considerably more intense. It enters the ears of the tourists and resonates inside their heads, it fills their minds so completely that, gradually, they too begin to hum. To start with, this humming is a poor imitation of the birds, but soon it becomes impossible to distinguish between the humming of the humans and that of the calegüinas. At this point, the tourists often start to experience a choking sensation, they can detect nothing but calegüinas for as far as the eye can see and soon loose the ability to differentiate between land and the water of the lagoon. In front and behind, left and right they see an endlessly repeating, monotonous desert of black and white made up of wings, beaks and feathers. There is usually one tourist -- especially if there is a large group of them on the lagoon -- who perceives the wisdom and convenience of returning to Huayllén-Naquén and sacrificing their prospective purchase of exquisite fish at very reasonable prices from the opposite shore.
But where is the opposite shore? How can they go back if they have lost all notion of the direction they came from? How can they go back if there are no longer any points of reference, if everything is black and white, an endlessly repeating landscape of wings, beaks and feathers? And eyes: two million blinking, expressionless eyes. In spite of all the evidence that returning is no longer an option, the tourist who is most lucid -- or rather, least delirious -- addresses his companions with some pathetic exhortation: 'Friends, let us go back the way we came!' But his companions cannot understand his strident croaks, so different are they from the gentle humming they are now accustomed to. At this point, even though they themselves answer with the same unintelligible croaks, deep down they are still conscious of the fact that they are human. Fear, however, has unhinged them and they all begin to croak simultaneously. Unfortunately, this chorus of croaks has no meaningful content and, even if they wanted to, the tourists would be unable to communicate their final coherent thought: that they are all calegüinas. It is then that the elders of the calegüinas community, who up to this point have kept knowingly silent, begin to croak with all their might. It is a triumphant croak, a cry of victory that starts from that inner circle and spreads quickly and tumultuously through the length and breadth of the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon and beyond its limits to the remotest houses of the nearby town. The locals put their fingers in their ears and smile. Happily, the noise lasts barely five minutes, and only after it has completely stopped do the tradesmen get back to making as many pairs of stilts as tourists have entered the lagoon.
5.0
Conversion of wetlands for commercial development, drainage schemes, extraction of minerals, overfishing and tourism pose a real threat to the environment and wildlife. How would an absurdist fiction writer like Fernando Sorrentino respond to such human insensitivity and stupidity? I think this story (included below in its entirety) is a spot-on answer. A number of features I find particularly appealing:
• The lagoon is encircled by a perfectly well-constructed asphalt road but such is not good enough for tourists who want more direct, immediate contact with the wildness of the lagoon and the birds. And, ultimately, they all get what they want!
• Unlike the usual accommodations where tourists are provided comfortable boats or walkable bridges, these tourists have to use stilts to cross the lagoon. Stilts! Infusing the tale with an absurdist twist: stilts require a good bit of effort and skill, especially if you are using them in a lagoon;
• Although tourists are warned “the use of stilts may lead to fairly serious psychological alterations,” tourists being tourists tend to ignore such warnings, treating them as a joke. Ah, the tourist mindset: Your local attraction is really all about me and nothing can really touch me since I am, well, a paying tourist;
• The birds are empowered to deal effectively with the mindless human intruders;
• There is no direct violence involved; rather, the birds’ weapons are sound and subtle mind control;
• The town’s population keeps on making stilts to fuel the local economy. If tourists are sacrificed in the process, that’s simply the way it goes.
AN ENLIGHTENING BOOK by Fernando Sorrentino
In his brief prologue to Stelzvögel, professor Franz Klamm explains that Dr. Ludwig Boitus travelled from Gottingen to Huayllén-Naquén with the sole purpose of studying in situ the assimilative attraction of the long-legged bird popularly known as calegüinas (this name has almost unanimous acceptance in the specialist literature in Spanish and it will be used here). Stelzvögel fills an acute gap in our knowledge of the subject. Before Dr. Boitus' exhaustive investigations -- the presentation of which takes up almost a third of the volume -- little was known for certain about calegüinas. In fact, except for fragmentary qualitative studies by Bulovic, Balbón, Laurencena and others -- works plagued by whimsical, unsubstantiated claims -- before Stelzvögel, the scientific community lacked a reliable basis on which to base further research. In his work, Dr. Boitus starts from the -- perhaps debatable -- premise that calegüinas' main character trait is its very strong personality (using the term personality in the sense established by Fox and his school). This personality is so potent that simply being in the presence of a calegüinas is enough to induce strongly calegüinas-like behavior in other animals.
The calegüinas are found exclusively in the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon. There, they flourish -- some estimates put the population as high as one million -- helped both by local by-laws, which make hunting them illegal, and by the fact that their flesh is inedible and their feathers have no industrial use. In common with other long-legged birds, they feed on fish, Batrachia and the larvæ of mosquitoes and other insects. Although they posses well-developed wings, they rarely fly, and when they do, they never go beyond the limits of the lagoon. They are of a similar size to storks, though their beaks are slightly larger and they do not migrate. Their back and wings are a blueish-black; their head, chest and belly, a yellowish-white. Their legs are pale yellow. Their habitat, the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon, is shallow but wide. Since there are no bridges across it -- in spite of many representations to that end -- the locals are obliged to make a long detour in order to get to the opposite side. This has had the effect of making complaints to the local newspaper almost continuous but communication between the shores of the lagoon rather scarce. To the uninformed observer it would appear that residents could cross the lagoon quickly and easily by using stilts and even without them, at its deepest point, the water would barely reach the waist of a man of average height. However, the locals know -- although perhaps in a intuitive way only -- the assimilative power of the calegüinas, and the fact is that they prefer not to attempt the crossing, choosing instead -- as already stated -- to go around the lagoon, which is encircled by an excellent asphalt road.
All this has not stopped the hiring of stilts to tourists becoming the single most important part of the Huayllén-Naquén economy, a circumstance that is perhaps justifiable in view of the scarcity of basic resources in the region. The absence of serious competition and the lack of official pricing has made the hiring of stilts a very costly business indeed; inflating prices to outrageous levels is the only way tradesmen can recoup their inevitable losses. In fact, there is a rather limited Huayllén-Naquén by-law stipulating that shops hiring stilts should display a sign, positioned in open view and written in bold lettering, warning that the use of stilts may lead to fairly serious psychological alterations. As a rule, tourists tend not to heed these warnings and, for the most part, treat them as a joke. It should be noted that it is simply not possible to make sure that the notices are read by every single tourist even when, as is undeniably the case, the shopkeepers comply with the by-law punctiliously and place the signs in highly conspicuous places. The authorities are notoriously inflexible on this point. It is true that inspections are not very frequent and are always preceded by a warning sent a few minutes beforehand -- but the inspectors are known to perform their duties conscientiously and it can only be coincidence that there is no recorded case of a shopkeeper being sanctioned under the by-law.
Once in possession of their stilts, the tourists, either by themselves or in cheerful, chattering groups of two, three, five or ten go into the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon with the aim of reaching the opposite shore where they can buy, at very reasonable prices, tins of exquisite fish -- a product that provides the main source of income for the population on that side of the lagoon. For the first two or three hundred meters, the tourists advance happily; laughing, shouting, playing practical jokes and frightening the calegüinas, which, like all long-legged birds, are extremely nervous creatures. Gradually, as they penetrate deeper and deeper into the lagoon, the tourists become more subdued while, meter-by-meter, the density of calegüinas increases. Soon the birds are so numerous that progress becomes extremely difficult for the tourists. The calegüinas no longer run or fly away nervously -- as their numbers rise, they appear to grow in confidence, although their behavior could also be explained by the fact that, by then, most movement is physically impossible. Whatever the reason, there comes a moment when shouting is no longer enough and it becomes necessary to use sticks and hands to shoo the calegüinas out of the way. Even then they concede very little ground. This is generally the moment when the tourists fall silent and the joking and laughing comes to an end. Then -- and only then -- they notice a dense humming emanating from the throats of the thousands of calegüinas, filling the entire lagoon. In its timbre, this humming is not very different from that of doves -- it is, however, considerably more intense. It enters the ears of the tourists and resonates inside their heads, it fills their minds so completely that, gradually, they too begin to hum. To start with, this humming is a poor imitation of the birds, but soon it becomes impossible to distinguish between the humming of the humans and that of the calegüinas. At this point, the tourists often start to experience a choking sensation, they can detect nothing but calegüinas for as far as the eye can see and soon loose the ability to differentiate between land and the water of the lagoon. In front and behind, left and right they see an endlessly repeating, monotonous desert of black and white made up of wings, beaks and feathers. There is usually one tourist -- especially if there is a large group of them on the lagoon -- who perceives the wisdom and convenience of returning to Huayllén-Naquén and sacrificing their prospective purchase of exquisite fish at very reasonable prices from the opposite shore.
But where is the opposite shore? How can they go back if they have lost all notion of the direction they came from? How can they go back if there are no longer any points of reference, if everything is black and white, an endlessly repeating landscape of wings, beaks and feathers? And eyes: two million blinking, expressionless eyes. In spite of all the evidence that returning is no longer an option, the tourist who is most lucid -- or rather, least delirious -- addresses his companions with some pathetic exhortation: 'Friends, let us go back the way we came!' But his companions cannot understand his strident croaks, so different are they from the gentle humming they are now accustomed to. At this point, even though they themselves answer with the same unintelligible croaks, deep down they are still conscious of the fact that they are human. Fear, however, has unhinged them and they all begin to croak simultaneously. Unfortunately, this chorus of croaks has no meaningful content and, even if they wanted to, the tourists would be unable to communicate their final coherent thought: that they are all calegüinas. It is then that the elders of the calegüinas community, who up to this point have kept knowingly silent, begin to croak with all their might. It is a triumphant croak, a cry of victory that starts from that inner circle and spreads quickly and tumultuously through the length and breadth of the Huayllén-Naquén lagoon and beyond its limits to the remotest houses of the nearby town. The locals put their fingers in their ears and smile. Happily, the noise lasts barely five minutes, and only after it has completely stopped do the tradesmen get back to making as many pairs of stilts as tourists have entered the lagoon.
Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernández
Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."
“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:
THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.
The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.
Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.
The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.
The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.
Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”
5.0
Felisberto Hernández - "My stories have no logical structures. Even the consciousness undeviatingly watching over them is unknown to me. At any given moment I think a plant is about to be born in some corner of me. Aware of something strange going on, I begin to watch for it, sensing that it may have artistic promise. All I have is the feeling or hope that it will grow leaves of poetry or of something that could become poetry when seen by certain eyes."
“If I hadn’t read the stories of Felisberto Hernández in 1950, I wouldn’t be thee writer I am today.” Such a telling quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez highlights the extraordinariness of this little known author from Uruguay. Also included with the collection's fifteen stories is a preface by Francine Prose and Introduction by Italo Calvino, both illuminating, and Calvino concludes his essay with, “Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other; like no European, nor any Latin American. He is an “irregular” who eludes all classification and labeling, yet is unmistakable on any page to which one might randomly open one of his books.” As a way of sharing how irregular, I will focus on one of my favorites from the collection. Here goes:
THE BALCONY
Piano Man: On his piano concert tour, the first-person narrator visits a town, virtually deserted since the population has migrated to a nearby resort. “The theater where I was giving my concerts was also half empty and invaded by silence: I could see it growing on the black top of the piano. The silence liked to listen to the music; slowly taking it in and thinking it over before venturing an opinion.” This passage is vintage Felisberto Hernández: objects, space and even silence possess hidden vitality and aliveness, oblique personalities with an uncanny ability, for those attuned to their subtle vibrations, to slide sideways into human awareness.
The Meeting: One evening, after his concert, a timid old man comes up to him to shake his hand, an old man who has sore, swollen bags under his eyes and “had a huge lower lip that bulged out like the rim of a theater box.” Likening the old man’s bottom lip to the rim of a theater box serves as a premonition for an object granted a major role in the story: his daughter’s balcony. Such poetic, clear, visual images function for the author very much like a brass section sounding a few minor cords picked up by the entire orchestra later in a symphony – again, vintage Felisberto Hernández.
Living on the Balcony: The old man apologizes for his daughter not being able to hear his music. The narrator (in the spirit of the author’s poetic prose and picking up on the first two syllables of Felisberto, let’s call him Felix) muses on the possible reason why this is the case: Is she blind? Is she deaf, or, perhaps out of town? The old man senses Felix’s groping for the cause and explains how his daughter simply cannot go outside, but since everyone needs entertainment, he bought a big old house with a balcony overlooking a garden and fountain, a balcony where she spends nearly all of her waking hours. A few more words are exchanged and the old man invites Felix to come have dinner whenever he would like. Sidebar: Nowadays we refer to his daughter’s condition as agoraphobia. And with this narrative turn, we have yet again another major Felisberto Hernández theme: a writer or musician invited to the mansion of a wealthy eccentric.
The Mansion: Upon entering through a large gate on one side opening onto a garden with a fountain and a number of statuettes hidden in the weeds, Felix walks up a flight of steps leading into the house and is surprised to see a large number of open parasols of different colors that look like huge hothouse plants. The old man informs Felix he gave his daughter most of the parasols and she likes to keep them open to see the colors. If this sounds a bit odd there is good reason – it is odd! And such oddities, even, on occasion screwball oddities, add a distinctive charm and memorability to Felisberto’s telling.
The Color Yellow: Felix is lead by the old man to his daughter's room on the second floor where she is standing in the center of the balcony. She comes forward to meet them and Felix observes, “Backed against the darkest wall of the room was a small open piano. Its big yellowing smile looked innocent.” The innocence of the piano echoes his daughter’s innocence; the instrument’s big yellow smile echoes the color of those open parasols. Indeed, through the author’s dreamy surrealism and unique way of infusing object with human emotion, similar to a repeated passage in a piano sonata or the repetition of those soft, floppy clocks in Salvador Dalí’s ‘Persistence of Memory,’ the piano’s yellowing smile echoes off the walls, down the corridors and through the mindstreams of not only characters in the story but readers of the story. Perhaps this is one key reason Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar, among others, cite Felisberto Hernández as such a major influence.
Finale: What I have referenced so far covers only the first five of the story’s thirty pages. Rather than continuing with events as they unfold, I will leave you in the grand old house, overlooking the balcony with a snatch of Felix’s after-dinner reflection: “A while back, when we were in the girl’s bedroom and she had not yet turned on the light – she wanted to enjoy every last bit of the evening glow coming from the balcony – we had spoken about the objects. As the light faded we could feel them nestling in the shadows as if they had feathers and were preparing for sleep. She said they developed souls as they came in touch with people. Some had once been something else and had another soul (the ones with legs had once had branches, the piano key had been tusks). But her balcony had first gained a soul when she started to live in it.”
Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano
MIRRORS: Stories of Almost Everyone - contemporary Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's collection of hundreds and hundreds of finely constructed mini-tales, two or three on every page, with such titles as: Origin of Fire, Origin of Beauty, Origin of Sea Breezes, Resurrection of Vermeer, Resurrection of Arcimboldo, Mozart, Goya, Venus, Hokusai, Kipling, Nijinsky, Beethoven, Lenin, Invisible Men, Invisible Women, Palace Art in France, Origin of the Croissant, Darwin’s Questions, The Gold Rush and The Insanity of Freedom. Reading this book is like eating peanuts – once you start, it’s hard to stop; not to mention, once you’ve opened your heart and mind, you will want to open even wider.
By way of a sampling, here are several of my favorites, featuring Eduardo’s signature caustic wit and nods to the power of human magical imagination:
ORIGIN OF WRITING
When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written word.
The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes.
Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers.
In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too. Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs.
One of the tablets said:
We are dust and nothing
All that we do is no more than wind.
PELE
Two British teams were battling out the championship match. The final whistle was not far off and they were still tied, when one player collided with another and fell, out cold.
A stretcher carried him off and the entire medical team went to work, but the man did not come to.
Minutes passed, centuries passed, and the coach was swallowing the clock, hands and all. He had already used up his substitutions. His boys, ten against eleven, were defending as best they could, which was not much.
The coach could see defeat coming, when suddenly the team doctor ran up and cried ecstatically:
“We did it!” He’s coming around!”
And in a low voice, added:
“But he doesn’t know who he is.”
The coach went over to the player, who was babbling incoherently as he tried to get to his feet, and in his ear informed him:
“You are Pelé.”
They won five-nil. Years ago in London, I heard this lie that told the truth.
VAN GOGH
Four uncles and a brother were art dealers, yet he managed to see but one painting in his enire life. Out of admiration or pity, the sister of a friend paid four hundred francs for a work in oils, The Red Vinyard, painted in Aries.
More than a century later, his works are on the financial pages of nevewspapers he never read.
The priciest paintings in galleries he never set foot in,
The most viewed in museums that ignored his existence,
And the most admired in academies that advised him to take up another trade.
Today Van Gogh decorates restaurants where no one would have served him.
The clinics of doctors who would have had him committed
And the offices of lawyers who would have locked him away.
KAFKA
As the drums of the first world butchery drew near, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis. And not long after, the war under way he wrote The Trial.
They are two collective nightmares.
A man awakens as an enormous cockroach and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is sweept away by a broom.
Another man is arrested, charged, judged, and found guilty, and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is knifed by the executioner.
In a certain way those stories, those books, continued in the pages of the newspapers, which day after day told of the progress of the war machine.
The author, ghost with feverish eyes, shadow without a body wrote from the ultimate depths of anguish.
He published little, practically no one read him.
He departed in silence, as he had lived. On his deathbed, bed of pain, he only spoke to ask the doctor: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.”
FATHER OF THE BOMB
The first bomb was tried out in the desert of New Mexico. The sky caught fire and Robert Oppenheimer, who led the tests, felt proud of a job well done.
But three months after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer said to President Harry Truman: “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
And President Truman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”
And please don’t simply put Eduardo’s magic mirror down; add a mirror of your own. Here is mine, a response touching on the above themes:
HOW GROUNDHOGS PLAY CROQUET
A psychologist by the name of Brentworth proves the high level of intelligence in animals by teaching a quartet of groundhogs how to play croquet. When the four groundhogs are proficient enough to have a game on their own, Brentworth invites his colleagues to join him on his screened-in back porch to watch as the groundhogs play on the lawn in his backyard. Brentworth chose groundhogs because of the way they can hold their mallets when they sit up on their haunches.
Anyway, the groundhogs are having a good go at croquet, taking their proper turns, hitting their balls through the wickets in the proper sequence. The psychologists sit in a row and watch silently except for one man at the far end, who starts sobbing uncontrollably.
After a groundhogs hits his yellow ball through a wicket from a decided angle and a good twenty feed away, Brentworth shouts, “What a magnificent shot!”
The groundhogs play on. The sobs from the man at the end grow louder and his body heaves. “You all don’t know what this means,” he says between heaves.
After completing their game, as a sort of grand finale, the groundhogs hit all the croquet balls one by one so the balls knock against one another and form a neat row.
Until now, nobody has noticed that a different white letter is painted on each of the seven brightly colored wooden ball. The lineup of balls now spells a word for all to read: ‘CROQUET”.
“How clever, how very, very clever,“ one psychologist says.
The man on the end, who is still sobbing, says, “This is terrible! No one understands what this means!” Everyone turns to look at him and he buries his face in his hands as his sobs grow even louder.
5.0
MIRRORS: Stories of Almost Everyone - contemporary Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's collection of hundreds and hundreds of finely constructed mini-tales, two or three on every page, with such titles as: Origin of Fire, Origin of Beauty, Origin of Sea Breezes, Resurrection of Vermeer, Resurrection of Arcimboldo, Mozart, Goya, Venus, Hokusai, Kipling, Nijinsky, Beethoven, Lenin, Invisible Men, Invisible Women, Palace Art in France, Origin of the Croissant, Darwin’s Questions, The Gold Rush and The Insanity of Freedom. Reading this book is like eating peanuts – once you start, it’s hard to stop; not to mention, once you’ve opened your heart and mind, you will want to open even wider.
By way of a sampling, here are several of my favorites, featuring Eduardo’s signature caustic wit and nods to the power of human magical imagination:
ORIGIN OF WRITING
When Iraq was not yet Iraq, it was the birthplace of the first written word.
The words look like bird tracks. Masterful hands drew them in clay with sharpened canes.
Fire annihilates and rescues, kills and gives life, as do the gods, as do we. Fire hardened the clay and preserved the words. Thanks to fire, the clay tablets still tell what they told thousands of years ago in that land of two rivers.
In our days, George W. Bush, perhaps believing that writing was invented in Texas, launched with joyful impunity a war to exterminate Iraq. There were thousands upon thousands of victims, and not all of them were flesh and blood. A great deal of memory was murdered too. Living history in the form of numerous clay tablets were stolen or destroyed by bombs.
One of the tablets said:
We are dust and nothing
All that we do is no more than wind.
PELE
Two British teams were battling out the championship match. The final whistle was not far off and they were still tied, when one player collided with another and fell, out cold.
A stretcher carried him off and the entire medical team went to work, but the man did not come to.
Minutes passed, centuries passed, and the coach was swallowing the clock, hands and all. He had already used up his substitutions. His boys, ten against eleven, were defending as best they could, which was not much.
The coach could see defeat coming, when suddenly the team doctor ran up and cried ecstatically:
“We did it!” He’s coming around!”
And in a low voice, added:
“But he doesn’t know who he is.”
The coach went over to the player, who was babbling incoherently as he tried to get to his feet, and in his ear informed him:
“You are Pelé.”
They won five-nil. Years ago in London, I heard this lie that told the truth.
VAN GOGH
Four uncles and a brother were art dealers, yet he managed to see but one painting in his enire life. Out of admiration or pity, the sister of a friend paid four hundred francs for a work in oils, The Red Vinyard, painted in Aries.
More than a century later, his works are on the financial pages of nevewspapers he never read.
The priciest paintings in galleries he never set foot in,
The most viewed in museums that ignored his existence,
And the most admired in academies that advised him to take up another trade.
Today Van Gogh decorates restaurants where no one would have served him.
The clinics of doctors who would have had him committed
And the offices of lawyers who would have locked him away.
KAFKA
As the drums of the first world butchery drew near, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis. And not long after, the war under way he wrote The Trial.
They are two collective nightmares.
A man awakens as an enormous cockroach and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is sweept away by a broom.
Another man is arrested, charged, judged, and found guilty, and cannot fathom why, and in the end he is knifed by the executioner.
In a certain way those stories, those books, continued in the pages of the newspapers, which day after day told of the progress of the war machine.
The author, ghost with feverish eyes, shadow without a body wrote from the ultimate depths of anguish.
He published little, practically no one read him.
He departed in silence, as he had lived. On his deathbed, bed of pain, he only spoke to ask the doctor: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer.”
FATHER OF THE BOMB
The first bomb was tried out in the desert of New Mexico. The sky caught fire and Robert Oppenheimer, who led the tests, felt proud of a job well done.
But three months after the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer said to President Harry Truman: “I feel I have blood on my hands.”
And President Truman told Secretary of State Dean Acheson: “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”
And please don’t simply put Eduardo’s magic mirror down; add a mirror of your own. Here is mine, a response touching on the above themes:
HOW GROUNDHOGS PLAY CROQUET
A psychologist by the name of Brentworth proves the high level of intelligence in animals by teaching a quartet of groundhogs how to play croquet. When the four groundhogs are proficient enough to have a game on their own, Brentworth invites his colleagues to join him on his screened-in back porch to watch as the groundhogs play on the lawn in his backyard. Brentworth chose groundhogs because of the way they can hold their mallets when they sit up on their haunches.
Anyway, the groundhogs are having a good go at croquet, taking their proper turns, hitting their balls through the wickets in the proper sequence. The psychologists sit in a row and watch silently except for one man at the far end, who starts sobbing uncontrollably.
After a groundhogs hits his yellow ball through a wicket from a decided angle and a good twenty feed away, Brentworth shouts, “What a magnificent shot!”
The groundhogs play on. The sobs from the man at the end grow louder and his body heaves. “You all don’t know what this means,” he says between heaves.
After completing their game, as a sort of grand finale, the groundhogs hit all the croquet balls one by one so the balls knock against one another and form a neat row.
Until now, nobody has noticed that a different white letter is painted on each of the seven brightly colored wooden ball. The lineup of balls now spells a word for all to read: ‘CROQUET”.
“How clever, how very, very clever,“ one psychologist says.
The man on the end, who is still sobbing, says, “This is terrible! No one understands what this means!” Everyone turns to look at him and he buries his face in his hands as his sobs grow even louder.
The Very Thing that Happens: Fables and Drawings by Denise Levertov, Denise Levertov
Russell Edson (1935-2014) - American prose poet and illustrator
Back in my late 30s, when I first began writing, I could sense my writer's voice wasn't to be found in conventional poetry or fiction. What then? Visiting a city library, I picked up this book by Russell Edson and read Father Father, What Have You Done?. The experience was so powerful I almost dropped to my knees. Right then and there, I knew exactly how I was to write.
I spent the next eight years writing surreal prose poems. When I had my books published by small presses, I sent a thank you note with a copy of each book to Russell Edson. He was kind enough to send me, in turn, Russell Edson-esque letters of thanks.
Here are three prose poems from Russell's book. Also two Russel Edson illustrations. I've also included one of my own prose poems at the very bottom. Thanks so much again, Russell!
FATHER, FATHER, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
A man straddling the apex of his roof cries, giddyup. The house rears up on its back porch and all of its bricks fall apart and the house crashes to the ground.
His wife cries from the rubble, father father, what have you done?
LITTLE DEAD MAN
Onward, little dead man, said a little man passing through a land of butterflies, purple and white, yellow and black, all in flux; they are not told from the flowers they drink, nor are the wind fluttered flowers from those they host.
This is a land of vibrating velvet. Eating itself. Forming itself. This is the land of death. Endless. Absurd.
DINNER TIME
An old man sitting at table was waiting for his wife to serve dinner. He heard her beating a pot that had burned her. He hated the sound of a pot when it was beaten, for it advertised its pain in such a way that made him wish to inflict more of the same. And he began to punch at his own face, and his knuckles were red. How he hated red knuckles, that blaring color, more self-important than the wound.
He heard his wife drop the entire dinner on the kitchen floor with a curse. For as she was carrying it in it had burned her thumb. He heard the forks and spoons, the cups and platters all cry at once as they landed on the kitchen floor. How he hated a dinner that, once prepared, begins to burn one to death, and as if that weren't enough, screeches and roars as it lands on the floor, where it belongs anyway.
He punched himself again and fell on the floor.
When he came awake again he was quite angry, and so he punched himself again and felt dizzy. Dizziness made him angry, and so he began to hit his head against the wall, saying, now get real dizzy if you want to get dizzy. He slumped to the floor.
Oh, the legs won't work, eh? . . . He began to punch his legs. He had taught his head a lesson and now he would teach his legs a lesson.
Meanwhile he heard his wife smashing the remaining dinnerware and the dinnerware roaring and shrieking.
He saw himself in the mirror on the wall. Oh, mock me, will you. And so he smashed the mirror with a chair, which broke. Oh, don't want to be a chair no more; too good to be sat on, eh? He began to beat the pieces of the chair.
He heard his wife beating the stove with an ax. He called, when're we going to eat? as he stuffed a candle into his mouth.
When I'm good and ready, she screamed.
Want me to punch your bun? he screamed.
Come near me and I'll kick an eye out of your head.
I'll cut your ears off.
I'll give you a slap right in the face.
I'll break you in half.
The old man finally ate one of his hands. The old woman said, damn fool, whyn't you cook it first? you go on like a beast — You know I have to subdue the kitchen every night, otherwise it'll cook me and serve me to the mice on my best china. And you know what small eaters they are; next would come the flies, and how I hate flies in my kitchen.
The old man swallowed a spoon. Okay, said the old woman, now we're short one spoon.
The old man, growing angry, swallowed himself.
Okay, said the woman, now you've done it.
Again, this prose poem is mine:
HEAVEN BENEATH OUR FEET
In an upside down world bats hang right side up. They use their radar to fly straight into wooden beams.
The next morning, men walking along the ceiling climb down ladders head first to peel the crushed bats off the floor. There is not one man who doesn't weep at the sight of what he takes to be a host of blessed angels.
5.0
Russell Edson (1935-2014) - American prose poet and illustrator
Back in my late 30s, when I first began writing, I could sense my writer's voice wasn't to be found in conventional poetry or fiction. What then? Visiting a city library, I picked up this book by Russell Edson and read Father Father, What Have You Done?. The experience was so powerful I almost dropped to my knees. Right then and there, I knew exactly how I was to write.
I spent the next eight years writing surreal prose poems. When I had my books published by small presses, I sent a thank you note with a copy of each book to Russell Edson. He was kind enough to send me, in turn, Russell Edson-esque letters of thanks.
Here are three prose poems from Russell's book. Also two Russel Edson illustrations. I've also included one of my own prose poems at the very bottom. Thanks so much again, Russell!
FATHER, FATHER, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
A man straddling the apex of his roof cries, giddyup. The house rears up on its back porch and all of its bricks fall apart and the house crashes to the ground.
His wife cries from the rubble, father father, what have you done?
LITTLE DEAD MAN
Onward, little dead man, said a little man passing through a land of butterflies, purple and white, yellow and black, all in flux; they are not told from the flowers they drink, nor are the wind fluttered flowers from those they host.
This is a land of vibrating velvet. Eating itself. Forming itself. This is the land of death. Endless. Absurd.
DINNER TIME
An old man sitting at table was waiting for his wife to serve dinner. He heard her beating a pot that had burned her. He hated the sound of a pot when it was beaten, for it advertised its pain in such a way that made him wish to inflict more of the same. And he began to punch at his own face, and his knuckles were red. How he hated red knuckles, that blaring color, more self-important than the wound.
He heard his wife drop the entire dinner on the kitchen floor with a curse. For as she was carrying it in it had burned her thumb. He heard the forks and spoons, the cups and platters all cry at once as they landed on the kitchen floor. How he hated a dinner that, once prepared, begins to burn one to death, and as if that weren't enough, screeches and roars as it lands on the floor, where it belongs anyway.
He punched himself again and fell on the floor.
When he came awake again he was quite angry, and so he punched himself again and felt dizzy. Dizziness made him angry, and so he began to hit his head against the wall, saying, now get real dizzy if you want to get dizzy. He slumped to the floor.
Oh, the legs won't work, eh? . . . He began to punch his legs. He had taught his head a lesson and now he would teach his legs a lesson.
Meanwhile he heard his wife smashing the remaining dinnerware and the dinnerware roaring and shrieking.
He saw himself in the mirror on the wall. Oh, mock me, will you. And so he smashed the mirror with a chair, which broke. Oh, don't want to be a chair no more; too good to be sat on, eh? He began to beat the pieces of the chair.
He heard his wife beating the stove with an ax. He called, when're we going to eat? as he stuffed a candle into his mouth.
When I'm good and ready, she screamed.
Want me to punch your bun? he screamed.
Come near me and I'll kick an eye out of your head.
I'll cut your ears off.
I'll give you a slap right in the face.
I'll break you in half.
The old man finally ate one of his hands. The old woman said, damn fool, whyn't you cook it first? you go on like a beast — You know I have to subdue the kitchen every night, otherwise it'll cook me and serve me to the mice on my best china. And you know what small eaters they are; next would come the flies, and how I hate flies in my kitchen.
The old man swallowed a spoon. Okay, said the old woman, now we're short one spoon.
The old man, growing angry, swallowed himself.
Okay, said the woman, now you've done it.
Again, this prose poem is mine:
HEAVEN BENEATH OUR FEET
In an upside down world bats hang right side up. They use their radar to fly straight into wooden beams.
The next morning, men walking along the ceiling climb down ladders head first to peel the crushed bats off the floor. There is not one man who doesn't weep at the sight of what he takes to be a host of blessed angels.
Either/Or, Part I by Howard Vincent Hong, Søren Kierkegaard, Edna Hatlestad Hong, David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson
Either/Or is a two part/two book set; this book is part I, that is, the Either of Either/Or. For those unfamiliar with this work by the Danish philosopher, Either presents what Kierkegaard terms the aesthetic view of life. And since the aesthetic view of life embraces multiplicity and variation, this book isn’t a straightforward philosophical essay; rather, Kierkegaard’s aesthetic individual (herein called ‘A’) writes 8 different papers, each one from a different aesthetic angle.
For example, the first paper is a series of short journal entries, dozens of them, written in a highly polished literary language, covering the wide emotional range of A’s philosophical self-examination. In one entry we read, “I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his house: My sorrow is my castle.”, and in another entry we read, “I have never been joyful, and yet it has always seemed as if joy were my constant companion, as if the buoyant jinn of joy danced around me." If this sounds contradictory . . .well, such is the aesthetic life.
The aesthetic life finds delectable fruit in music. In the nearly 100 page paper “The Immediate Erotic Stages” the author analyzes Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Anybody interested in Mozart and/or music will find this paper highly engaging and insightful. Toward the end, we read, “What It means to say – that Don Giovanni’s essential nature is music – is clearly apparent here. He dissolves, as it were, in music for us; he unfurls in a world of sound. . . . Such is his life, effervescing like champagne. And just as the beads in this wine, as it simmers with an internal heat, sonorous with its own melody, rise and continue to rise, just so the lust for enjoyment resonates in the elemental boiling that is his life.” This passage is typical of what one finds in Kierkegaard’s writing – colorful, poetic, highly engaging and thought-provoking.
One of the most lively papers is entitled ‘Rotation of Crops’ where the author invites us to consider ways to avoid boredom. For example: if you are obliged to listen to the words of a person you find boring, then simply shift your focus, rather than listening to him speak, watch the perspiration on his forehead or nose. Again, another example: if you are bored of living in your current city or country, simply move to another city or country. The trick is learning how to vary your activities and surroundings, to rotate your pleasures the way a farmer rotates his crops.
In the spirit of rotating pleasures to experience novel sensations, the author encourages his own country of Denmark to do something dramatic: “Borrow fifteen million, use it not to pay off our debts but for public entertainment. Let us celebrate the millennium with fun and games. . . . Everything would be free: the theater would be free, prostitutes would be free, rides to Deer Park would be free, funerals would be free, one’s own funeral eulogy would be free. I say “free” for if money is always available, everything is free in a way.” A bit of ironic tongue-in-cheek but, then again, why not, if life is to be lived on the level of an aesthete.
Jean Richepin, the decadent fin-de-siècle French author, wrote a story about a man who took the aesthetic life to the extreme, becoming ‘the dandy of the unpredictable’. This man possessed all the qualities needed to become a great poet, musician and painter, but rejected such things since he saw these accomplishments as too vulgar and altogether beneath him. So, what did this dandy of the unpredictable do? He murdered his mistress, embalmed her, and continued to be her lover. Then, living up to his creed of unpredictability, he confessed his crime and spent the last hours of his life in jail inventing a novel dance-step and creating a original oyster sauce. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic A would understand and appreciate his actions, for, after all, he avoided boring himself and certainly didn’t bore others.
So, the aesthetic life is to live on the surface of things, where one has a need to continually keep changing activities since one has become inured to the simple joys of life. Does all this sound vaguely familiar? Recall how back in the 1970s Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the Western world, in his estimation, would never serve as a model for a free society since it was enslaved to commercialism, intolerable music and TV stupor. In other words, according to Solzhenitsyn, we are an entire society of aesthetes.
Kierkegaard viewed his task to be the Socrates of Copenhagen, to wake us up from our comfortable stupor, to look inward and examine our lives as individuals capable of spiritual depth. This book by Kierkegaard is not only imaginative, vibrant literature but also deeply profound philosophy.
5.0
Either/Or is a two part/two book set; this book is part I, that is, the Either of Either/Or. For those unfamiliar with this work by the Danish philosopher, Either presents what Kierkegaard terms the aesthetic view of life. And since the aesthetic view of life embraces multiplicity and variation, this book isn’t a straightforward philosophical essay; rather, Kierkegaard’s aesthetic individual (herein called ‘A’) writes 8 different papers, each one from a different aesthetic angle.
For example, the first paper is a series of short journal entries, dozens of them, written in a highly polished literary language, covering the wide emotional range of A’s philosophical self-examination. In one entry we read, “I say of my sorrow what the Englishman says of his house: My sorrow is my castle.”, and in another entry we read, “I have never been joyful, and yet it has always seemed as if joy were my constant companion, as if the buoyant jinn of joy danced around me." If this sounds contradictory . . .well, such is the aesthetic life.
The aesthetic life finds delectable fruit in music. In the nearly 100 page paper “The Immediate Erotic Stages” the author analyzes Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Anybody interested in Mozart and/or music will find this paper highly engaging and insightful. Toward the end, we read, “What It means to say – that Don Giovanni’s essential nature is music – is clearly apparent here. He dissolves, as it were, in music for us; he unfurls in a world of sound. . . . Such is his life, effervescing like champagne. And just as the beads in this wine, as it simmers with an internal heat, sonorous with its own melody, rise and continue to rise, just so the lust for enjoyment resonates in the elemental boiling that is his life.” This passage is typical of what one finds in Kierkegaard’s writing – colorful, poetic, highly engaging and thought-provoking.
One of the most lively papers is entitled ‘Rotation of Crops’ where the author invites us to consider ways to avoid boredom. For example: if you are obliged to listen to the words of a person you find boring, then simply shift your focus, rather than listening to him speak, watch the perspiration on his forehead or nose. Again, another example: if you are bored of living in your current city or country, simply move to another city or country. The trick is learning how to vary your activities and surroundings, to rotate your pleasures the way a farmer rotates his crops.
In the spirit of rotating pleasures to experience novel sensations, the author encourages his own country of Denmark to do something dramatic: “Borrow fifteen million, use it not to pay off our debts but for public entertainment. Let us celebrate the millennium with fun and games. . . . Everything would be free: the theater would be free, prostitutes would be free, rides to Deer Park would be free, funerals would be free, one’s own funeral eulogy would be free. I say “free” for if money is always available, everything is free in a way.” A bit of ironic tongue-in-cheek but, then again, why not, if life is to be lived on the level of an aesthete.
Jean Richepin, the decadent fin-de-siècle French author, wrote a story about a man who took the aesthetic life to the extreme, becoming ‘the dandy of the unpredictable’. This man possessed all the qualities needed to become a great poet, musician and painter, but rejected such things since he saw these accomplishments as too vulgar and altogether beneath him. So, what did this dandy of the unpredictable do? He murdered his mistress, embalmed her, and continued to be her lover. Then, living up to his creed of unpredictability, he confessed his crime and spent the last hours of his life in jail inventing a novel dance-step and creating a original oyster sauce. Kierkegaard’s aesthetic A would understand and appreciate his actions, for, after all, he avoided boring himself and certainly didn’t bore others.
So, the aesthetic life is to live on the surface of things, where one has a need to continually keep changing activities since one has become inured to the simple joys of life. Does all this sound vaguely familiar? Recall how back in the 1970s Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the Western world, in his estimation, would never serve as a model for a free society since it was enslaved to commercialism, intolerable music and TV stupor. In other words, according to Solzhenitsyn, we are an entire society of aesthetes.
Kierkegaard viewed his task to be the Socrates of Copenhagen, to wake us up from our comfortable stupor, to look inward and examine our lives as individuals capable of spiritual depth. This book by Kierkegaard is not only imaginative, vibrant literature but also deeply profound philosophy.