Time to Land - Part I

The Plot of the Blind Belivers

Today, on my way back from work, I was called by the sirens from inside a Chapters bookstore and I could not resist the temptation. Bookstores have always been for me a hideaway and a space to unravel. Sad or excited, enamoured or cranky, sick, energetic or exhaust, there is always a book that can match my mental ramblings.

I stopped for a few minutes, just to check if the had a copy of a couple of books that friends of mine had suggested: “Dark Age Ahead” by Jane Jacobs and Alastair Fowler's annotated edition of “Paradise Lost” by Milton. I also wanted take a peek at a copy of “Morpho Eugenia”. My mental ramblings can be quite disorganized.

I was geekly enjoying one of Chapters' state-of-the-art digital search stations when I saw a middle-aged Asian lady standing by my side. I looked at her and she politely asked if she could have some of my time. I immediately assumed she was going to ask me for money, and I was surprised that she had the courage to do it in a commercial environment. But then she said she wanted to give me a letter and, opening a messenger's bag hanging from her shoulder, she pointed at a pack of printed sheets.

She started talking very fast with a strong foreing accent. I have to confess I still have troubles understanding spoken English, particularly if it is seasoned with spices from a foreign land. It usually takes for me one or two sessions with an acquaintance to get used to their accent and understand all they are saying. I always pretend, proudly, that I am not missing a syllable, but my face usually cannot hide what is going on inside my mind. So, looking at my frowning expression, the lady made a pause on her speech and candidly asked if I could understand English.

After seeing me nod, she continued talking in the same urgent fashion. I tried to pay closer attention but I could only understand some disconnected phrases like: “to know were my child is”, “fascist government”, “human rights”, “forced me to work” and “pulled my teeth off”. Saying this last phrase she pointed at a gap in her mouth were the two lower fore-teeth were missing.

I assumed she was Chinese based on her accent, so I thought the lady had been a persecuted Christian or a practitioner of Falung Gong trying to expose the crimes she and her fellow believers had suffered. But as I was not really following her speech, I accepted the letter, said I was very sorry, wished her good luck and looked at the search station screen hinting I wanted to finish the conversation.

The lady did not get the hint and kept talking and showing me her gums, so I started to sense I was being too naive and the lady was just missing a few screws. Feeling very awkward and almost doing a reverence, making a show of taking the letter with me, I wished her luck once again, and moved to a different section of the store hiding behind a bookcase. A few minutes later I could hear the lady on the other side of the shelves talking to different person.

On my way to the restaurant, walking through the Eaton Centre, I perused over the letter and quickly confirmed my suspicions.

Her letter was a collection of ramblings more disorganized that the ones of my own mind, but one could see the lady was no joking when she wrote about them. Her need to write seemed to be so urgent that, even when she had already printed a cleanly typed letter, she added handwritten notes on the borders of the sheet. It reminded me of the classical Chinese tradition to compile comments on already printed books by writing on their borders, some of the writings so insightful and poetic that they were considered works of art on themselves.

The topic of the letter was horrifying. The “fascist government” she was trying to denounce was not the Chinese one, as I had assumed, but the Canadian government. Seemingly suffering from a set of bizarre mind delusions, she is convinced that the government of Canada is set to abuse her and destroy her life by performing a series of nightmarish sadistic actions such as damaging her personal possessions, prohibiting her to drive, forcing her to take jobs she does not want, preventing her from reaching her parents back on her homeland, brainwashing her son and planting on him the desire to leave home, hiding from her his current location, and controlling her husband's mind with paranormal powers forcing him to beat her. She even claims the government has physically humiliated her with horrendous things like pulling her fore-teeth out by using remote beams.

She thinks the government wants to turn her into a “blind believer”, term that she underlines, and of which she is probably very afraid.

The life of this lady was probably a very harsh one, some of the things she claimed on the letter being possibly true – the damaged possessions, the abusing husband, the uncaring son, the parents left behind. Sadness and despair had probably made her pay her sanity as a toll for surviving. By reading the letter one could see she was not an ignorant woman. Behind the disordered and hallucinated ideas, there seemed to be a logical and intelligent mind, even a poetic and delicate character, given that amongst her damaged possessions she mentions her piano and her violin.

Her mention of the violin made me think what could her life have been if she would have had a little bit more of balance. Instead of compulsively talking to strangers, full of pain and despair, she could have been right now at home calmly playing her violin.

If one does not look at the frightening fable and ignore the mind controlling phobias, her letter echoes the letter any immigrant could write, one of those in which the environment is always depicted as a harsh and cold one, and one has to resist not to forget one's own culture, not to be converted into something one is not.

The process of migrating is always a difficult one. Learning everything from scratch with the urgency to survive is not an easy task. For this lady it probably was a particularly rough task beyond the scope of her strength. But reading the frightening delusions depicted on her letter I could not help but seeing myself endlessly ranting, complaining to my friends and family about how hard sometimes things are.

On my complains I always place the culprit on the anonymous other: on the new society, on the new culture, on the new way doing things. On my complains I am often the victim of a cold hearted Kafkaesque society or, if I am feeling particularly vengeful, a viciously predatory one.

Maybe my points of view are also plagued by deluded visions. It is true I have no claimed the loss of any of my teeth but I do have complained about loosing many features my life and my environment had before. Have I really lost them? Did I really have them? Have I lost the ability to tell truth from angst?

Perhaps I should have sat with the Asian lady and, over a cup of tea, tell her about my own delusions. Probably she would have looked at me with incredulity and then have a loud wide open laugh, forgetting she had lost her two lower fore-teeth.

Looking Through Matilda's Eyes - Part I

I

Last night I watched Angels and Insects, a drama based on the novella Morpho Eugenia by A. S. Byatt.

My Apple TV had been suggesting this movie for a very long time but I had managed to ignore it. The predicament of a Victorian naturalist that falls in love with an angelically beautiful flax haired maiden named after an Amazonian butterfly seemed to me not worth paying the $3.99 Apple wanted in return for an hour and a half of (potentially yawning) entertainment.

But I have been recently thinking on butterflies - or moths, to be precise - and I needed something to distract me while doing the dishes, so I finally succumbed to Apple's insistence and rented the movie. I swear I could hear a maleficent little laughter coming from the Apple TV box.

The plot was not as predictable as I though it would be. It was also nicely rendered. So the $3.99 were actually a fare investment. There was one character, though, and its subplot, that particularly caught my attention and made watching the movie worthwhile: Matty the nanny, or to be correct, Matilda, which is the way the character prefers to be addressed.

The character Matilda is designed to look freakish, mysterious and stern during first half of the movie. But on the second half the plot starts to unveil her as a sophisticated, wise and wonderfully gifted woman, a virginal heroine with a vast humanistic knowledge in the tradition of the great free-thinker women such as of Hildegard of Bingen or Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.

We discover Matilda's amazing draughtsmanship skills and her ability to make keen and precise observations of the natural world surrounding her, in particular of the world of the ants. Encouraged by her, the naturalist decides to create a natural history volume, for which she beautifully renders a series of plates illustrating the life of an ant colony.

In Matilda's times they had no Google, or Corbis or Getty Images. If you wanted to know how an ant looked, you had to lace up your boots, get yourself to the fields, capture a real one, and armed with lots of patience and a magnifying glass, take a good look at the little animal managing not to be bitten. Photography had just been invented, so it was outrageously expensive, inaccurate and very inconvenient to use. If you wanted to keep an image of the ant for yourself, you had to resource to your draughtsman abilities and make your own sketch. There was no Illustrator or Photoshop or Corel, so you had to get your fingers stained with ink and watercolour washes if you were serious about immortalizing your ants in delightfully rendered plates.

There is a beautiful scene in the movie in which Matilda helps the naturalist arrange the hand written pages of the book in a very thick folder, daintily labelled by hand. They wrap the folder in brown paper, tie it up with a string and mail it for approval to a publishing house. They touched the package as one touches a beloved object, one that is valuable but also fragile, almost alive.

This scene reminded me of my grandfather papers. He was a poet - an unknown and private one - and he kept his poems, like the rest of his possessions, neatly arranged. They were covered by a plastic bag and tucked away on his wardrobe, under his package of pipe tobacco, behind a wall of soap bars. Our apartment was quite small, so even the wardrobe private compartments had to be shared with more practical possessions.

After his death I went very often through his poems. Some were handwritten some were typed. He was a very fast typist - he was trained as a teletype operator - so his typed pages were as neat as if they would have come out of a press. I always preferred to read the handwritten poems though, because somehow by looking at his calligraphy I felt I could understand better his soap scent and tobacco infused rhymes.



It is not my intention to write a Ludditian apology glorifying a previous time just because there were not enough gadgets at hand. I am myself a sworn geek. I do own an Underwood vintage typewriter, because it reminds me of my grandfather and my childhood, but I also own a Google t-shirt, one of my favourite blogs is just about gizmos and I read the Wired magazine every month religiously. But watching Matilda manually draw her ants made me think on how different the creation process was before the advent of the era of the CTRL and the ALT.

Maybe I am just being a foolish romantic idealizing a very uncomfortable era with a big dose of steam-punk daydreams. But maybe there is a truth behind all this nostalgia. So, just to scare away the sparrows* from my back, today I decided to try to look at the world through the eyes of Matilda, to create something using my own fingers, guided only by my eyes, refraining from pressing any of the convenient buttons that populate our lives.

* In Cuban colloquial language, the sparrow symbolizes melancholy and nostalgia.

The Dance of The Gnomish Magistrates

I

Is there such a thing as a good beginning?

Which events has one to watch so one knows that the propitious time for a good beginning has arrived?

Life can seem very often as a string of events linked by causality in the same way the beads of necklace are linked by a thread. Or better yet, it seems like a series of events as intrinsically dependant on each other as the shape of a post on a balustrade seems to rule the shape of the empty space that follows it, and the empty space seems to determine the shape that the next post will have.

Sometimes it seems that every event in life, or at least its starting, is shaped by the outcomes of the event that precedes it, and that the small window of freedom each event has to unravel its own capricious nature is already shaping the event that will come to follow. It seems that one can safely succumb to the obsessive desire of designing life like an exquisite jigsaw puzzle, the same way Escher carefully planned his tessellations.

Seeing life as a fatidic cause-effect process can easily turn living into a miserable burden, one in which every small step must be obsessively weighed in fear of giving it the wrong shape, spoiling therefore the shape of the next step to follow. Seeing life like this can turn it into a paralysing and overwhelming chore. And a paralysed life is nothing else but death.

II

I remember when I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time looking at the amphora shaped balustrades that can be seen so often in Havana. They are everywhere: surrounding the marble porches of old mansions now turned into schools, walk-in clinics or government offices; sustaining the railings of balconies and stairways; underlining the stained-glass covered arches of the upper level of the cloisters.



I remember I used to enjoy walking along the balustrades letting my finger to run across the posts, feeling the rhythm of their arrangement in my hand, an almost musical rhythm. The faster I walked, the happier was the song that seemed to vibrate on my hand. I remember that after a while I would stop (I was a fat and lazy kid, so I would not run for a very long time) and then I would let my finger slide over one of the balusters, starting at the angular shaped head , following along the short and curved neck, turning to rub the spherical belly and then, following the same path in reverse, sliding it over the upside down neck that served as the curved legs of the post and finishing in the single squared angular foot.




Being a voracious reader of fairy tales as I was, it was not long until these peculiarly shaped balusters started to look to me like mythical characters, although confusingly ambiguous ones. Their head seemed very logical and even severe. In fact, it seemed to have a magistrate's hat sunken down to the chin. From this dignified head emerged a neck that was strong and powerful, that was masculine, but looking at its lyrically curved shape, it was easily seen that it was left provocatively naked, that it was arched and tense like the neck of a lover awaiting a kiss. Towards the shoulders the curve suddenly halted, reinforcing the idea that the neck was naked, giving rise to what seemed to be a thick quilted jacket, or even the breast plate of a suit of armour, forcefully curved into a comical belly that was almost ridiculous. From the waist of this gnomish body cascaded a feminine form that curved gracefully, reminding me the fitted dress of a beautiful Hollywood star, going to languidly land on a sudden cruel squared block.

The gnomish magistrates didn't seem to care for ridicule. Clad in their satin gowns, one beside each other, they kept arching their kiss inviting necks, their eyes hidden and surely closed under the farcical hats, so lost on the melody of their own inebriating music that they never noticed their feet had been buried in molten concrete.

Tending to see life as a perfect mathematical series (a curse that seems to strike the ones who dare to study Math after twelve o'clock at night) I remind myself very often that each event in life might also be seen like one of these characters that puzzled me so much when I was a child: a self contained entranced Universe, full of folly and ambiguity, but also full of vitality. Each one of them grotesquely beautiful and singular, seemingly immobile, yet immensely intense.

Very often the last of the gnomish magistrates was cut in half, because there was not enough space to continue the balustrade. Even for fairy tale standards this probably meant the unfortunate truncated gnome was dead. But still, it did not matter, because it was.

III

After worrying for so long not to tread on wet cement, my rhino soul has finally come to its senses. It has decided to hide its head under a hat, happily arch its neck and let itself dance the dance of the gnomish magistrates.

Let this blog come to life.