Tras haber creado mi anterior blog cecilmundo varias personas, muchos de ellos mis alumnos, me sugirieron que creara una secciòn dentro de cecilmundo para publicar mis obras de docencia de idiomas. Dado que la cantidad de documentos de explicaciones, ejercicios y exàmenes de inglès son muy numerosos porque tengo màs de 30 años del ejercicio de la docencia, preferì estrenar blog con mis alumnos a como ellos realmente merecen. En este blog planetcecil no solo iràn mis documentos didàcticos de inglès, sino tambièn la producciòn literaria de varios alumnos que se destacan en las letras. Tambièn darè oportunidad a aquellos que tienen excelentes obras pero que no han logrado publicarlas ya que en mi paìs Nicaragua todo se mueve por la marrana polìtica, y si una no pertenece a determinado partido no verà jamàs publicado su opus. Tambièn tenemos la desgracia de contar con seudoeditores quienes al no conocer verdaderamente de literatura se convierten en mercenarios de la imprenta solo para llenarse ellos mismo de dinero y fama a costillas de los escritores. Todos aquellos que deseen participar en este blog, denlo de antemano por suyo. Aunque lleve mi nombre en un arranque de egolatrìa, yo soy sencillamente vuestra servidora.Cecilia

Las alas de la educación

Las alas de la educación
La educación es un viaje sin final.

La lección de física

La lección de física
Casi aprendida

lunes, 21 de julio de 2008

Games we play



24 entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook

Born on the 21st of July
1804 Victor Schoelcher Guadeloupe, abolished French slavery but not racism Could his ghost come back to free me from the slavery of following my own adrenaline?
1816 Paul Julius Baron von Reuter founded Reuters news service, one of the most prestigious
1899 Ernest Hemmingway Oak Park, for whom the bell tolled., specially for his sexism, reputation as wife-beater and one of the most most boisterous war correspondents during WWII.How he won on a Nobel in 1954 many of us still wonder, and among his drinking follies once he wanted to walk drunkenly into a working turbine. Handsome diabetic and homophobe, I can forgive him because he loved cats as much as I do.
1920 Isaac Stern Kremenetz, Russia, violinist , one of the greatest virtuosos, Jewish,of course

Events
1588 English fleet that had been assembled by gutsy and redheaded Elizabeth I betas the shit out of the Spanish armada just because stupid bigoted Philip II of Spain had said in his religious folly,”God will provide.”Apparently his god was looking the other way.Philip`s unbathable men were too busy barfing due to the rotten water stored in barrels that as a result of too much haste had not been allowed to age.
1831 Belgium gains independence from Netherland, Leopold I made king, and he sought to justify it by trying to gobble up Africa too.
1898 Spain cedes Guam to USA, although ceding is hardly the Word when you are getting arm twisted behind your back. That was just one more territory wolfed down by the ever hungry gringos.

PLAY

Get a guy or girl in a girdle as a child and he will never be fat as an adult, right? Wrong.
So I didn`t play as a child. Like my own compatriot, bard Rubèn Darìo, I learned to read and write at age 3. Ever since I have never stopped reading and writing. My dark red Abyssinian with Angora cat Torta and I would curl up in a chair, listening to Verdi, Mena Vivaldi,Mozart, Dvoràk and Tchaikovsky, she to sleep, I to read. No time to play. The first actress of Nicaragua,doña Pilar Aguirre, used to come to my grandmother`s house for tea twice a week, and she worried herself sick over the fact that she never saw me playing. Playing for me, at an early age, was a surefire signal that you were inferior. Afraid of being labelled as an ordinary kid, I never played. I was always reading, or helping my mom in the kitchen learning the secrets of the exact amount of olive oil in a homemade mayonnaise, or the crisp touch to give fried chicken before it gets a dry sandy feeling. Play ?You bet I never did. Not that I was anti.world, of all readers the closest to the heart that can still long to be an iceberg. I want you to understand this because now, as an adult 48 years old, I feel the urgent need to play. We all play, you do too. Too diplomatic to admit it. I am not a diplomat. If I ever were ambassador I would get my darling homeland in endless wars.
Well getting back to playing, I never played with dolls. Maybe an electric train would capture my attention, or a new truck or a small rifle. I played with boys`toys, as traditionalists say.
I remember my mom assumed that two Barbie dolls per Christmas season were good. She tried to follow the Christian ritual of celebrating Christmas, for her own havoc because she had all the cooking to do, and my father would consent to all this idiocy although he was Jewish-born perhaps because he enjoyed the stuffed hen and all delicacies the season brought with it. So my mom would give me dolls which I loathed, because they were a symbol of what women should be for men(receptacles of pleasure)- The dolls accumulated untouched at the bottom of my closet, left severely alone in the unopened boxes. Until one day for Christmas they got exhumed from the graveyard of oblivion and they were headed straight into the hands of 70 little girls from low income homes during a Christmas campaign, and they finally found who would play with them and love them. Of all my toys, I only fell in love with the stuffed toys. My Bengal tiger whom I named Rabindranath after India`s most famous bard, the Tramp from Disney`s dog saga The lady and the Tramp, Tiger baby brought to me from Spain along with the Andalusian guitar with which I learned to play. I was so gifted, in the sense that I had so many toys to play with, and I didn`t really do it.
Perhaps I lived in my own strange world. For my fourth birthday I had the smallpox, and the least I wanted to do was play with all those kids that had been invited to my grand party. I felt so strange, looking at the enormous cake my mom had prepared, a full copy of Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror`s gardens in Istambul. She had even gotten me a copy of a scimitar so I could cut the birthday cake, which I, in annoyance cut violently sprinkling everyone in the process. No humour for play. Who were all those smiling faces at that birthday party? I was too busy feeling sick, with my faithful cat sleeping next to me in my sickbed.
Lack of play in my childhood has made me eager to play now that I am an adult. In 1986, when the army reserve battalions of engineering machines were building the Olof Palme Convention Center In Managua on weekends, I would ask the crane operator to wing me on the demolition ball at a certain altitude.I know you will say it was dangerous,but nothing ever happened. I learned to love playing chess with my dad. That game would turn out to be very helpful for me. Now I play chess with my life and sometimes this queen ends up feeling like a pawn for a few moments. Imagine a colonel in her uniform,going up the mast of a ship, while the breeze at San Juan del Sur waves at her hair,she loses the cap and almost, her balance. I still need to play sometimes, because I would rather laugh than cry, because my own adrenaline demands that I do it. I played sometimes while recovering in the long and painful hours of rehabilitation, trying to learn how to walk again at the therapy center at he military hospital. A smile learned to play with me while I felt the excruciating pain of trying to act Jesus to my dead Lazarus limbs, shouting to them Lazarus rise and go!
Truth to tell, I was alone in that process and I recovered the joy of playing-perhaps because my instinct of mere survival so demanded it. I need to play now, I do it with my cats, I need to be a sloth hitting the branches of her tree softly.
This same book in which I write a daily entry came to be through a process of playing with words. By now it has become a self-motivated monster, losing its original axis because sometimes muses tend to play with others and they don`t care if the flirting goes on for writers and not commonfolk. I play chess with my verbs, poke around the ribs of anglicisms, I trap the flying football before it breaks the nose of my syntaxis. I am free as the cub of the purple lion that I am. In the middle of my skepticism, of my reaffirmed pragmatism, of this holy innocence that comes from not believing in anything at all as poet Antonio Machado said, I romp and jump and turn the somersaults that my broken column really can no longer stand. I climb into the treetops of my imagination,shake free the medlars and grapefruits and tangerines of my exhuberant garden of similes, I am at the top of a navy ship`s mast,while the sailors ask themselves whatever got into my head, if this is a symptom of premenopuase, or have I gone beserk? I feel strange talking about playing when my physical body doesn`t agree with a game session, my menstrual cramps demand I go to bed, my salty sweat asks that I get to rest. But I continue to romp and play like kittens with a ball of yarn, because prose is the ball of yarn I can handle.
Tell you this, I continue playing knowing that you might not understand me. Why not, you also play.
But playing can also be scary. Playing with others, in the dark attic where the coat hangers still await me on a stormy afternoon and the wind blowing the curtains of my traumas. Playing can also hurt you, like when accidentally, while playing , I broke my best friend`s nose. People, hearts are not soccer balls. No Ronaldhino goals please, as I once asked a bearded gentleman who suddenly lost his perspective. Don’t yell me down, I`m not your punching bag. Never forgot that from the Animal Planet, sung in country-style twang. I still repeat it in the dark shadows of this twilight where we can meet and pretend the world will go away and let us do crazy things. One day the bubble can burst. Pop goes the weasel. Does the weasel cry? That is what they never tell you. Today my pet student, the one who reads my mind and tells me why sunflowers re fat, reminded me that you cannot lend your heart, the skin of your senses to coat a basketball, or the body`s pump so it can be kicked by someone who thinks he is Maradona or the last frozen Cocacola in the desert. When playing and bantering turn into a knife brawl the only way is out.
It depends what you play with in order to get what you wanted as a score.
Look at Hemingway, he played with cats but also with guns nd booze and ended up doing himself in, leaving a house full of cats in Florida.
I now want to play with the possibility of disbelief. I want to play all proposals, weigh them against one another, and perhaps decide that I didn`t need them in first place.
Sometimes I know I need no ambiguity. I have taken the steering wheel of my IFA military truck knowing this time I won`t go over a cliff to break the wrists of my writing. This time there will be no fractures because I am not going to allow them. This time I am in command, free to play if when I want, not dictated by anyone`s whims or moods. I am out.The field is mine. Today I will even best Zinedine Zidane when he goaled in 1998.
Because now the ball has been handed to me in my hand by you and all those who can believe themselves to be referees of anyone`s life while they laugh or amaze themselves. Now I shall play, win or lose, but set my own rules. Because sooner or later, there will be points to be scored while I have miles before I go to sleep, as Robert Frost once said.






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