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

sábado, 26 de julio de 2008

When Wrath makes us into a tossed salad



26th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapboook


On the 25 of July,
1593 France's Protestant King Henri IV converts to Roman Catholic.which was okay one way or the other because in reality he was an atheist 1670 Jews are expelled from Vienna Austria, boy hasn`t everyone given us the kick in the ass? Only to beg later that we come back!
1799 French-Egyptian forces under Napoleon I beat Turks at Battle of Abukir, but anyways there were a few who still would think that Bonaparte was bon-a-rien
1822 Gen Agust¡n de Iturbide crowned Agust¡n I, 1st emperor of Mexico. Mexicans must have been missing Moctezuma II so much to accept this fellow as an emperor
1943 Benito Mussolini dismissed as premier of Italy during WW II, what a blow to his syphyllitic ego
1944 1st jet fighter used in combat (Messerschmitt 262) and ever since we have been flying into pieces
Costa Rica : Annexation of Guanacaste province Day,when the Costa Ricans snatched away OUR province of Guanacaste from Nicaragua, now they want MY San Juan River

26th of July were born
1856 George Bernard Shaw Dublin Ire, dramatist (Pygmalion-Nobel 1925) , he had a sharper tongue than mine when he opened his mouth1874 Serge Koussevitzky Vishny-Volotchok, Russia conductor (Boston Symp) ,good thing he married a rich lady,so he wouldn`t be a starving musician1875 Dr Carl Gustav Jung Switzerland, founded analytic psychology, oh did he mess our minds so well
1908 Salvador Allende Gossens Chile's last elected president (1970-73)
Committed suicide inside the Casa de la MOneda when he saw no way out, sorry folks, but that is the sad end to this kind of political fairy tale, now his niece is abusing his name to get herself success
1952 Eva "Evita" Peron Argentina's 1st lady, dies in Buenos Aires at 33, of uterine cancer. Never able to have a child, she was the workingmen`s mom and a clever stateswoman
Events
1775 Benjamin Franklin becomes 1st Postmaster General of what will be USA.Wonder how he would have controlled emails?
1603 James VI of Scotland was crowned King James I of England. He then 'authorized' an English translation of the Scriptures, first published in 1611 and known since as the' King James Version' of the Bible. That was done when he wasn`t busy with his minions.

ANGER

Just to think that in the nineteenth century the Costa Ricans had the temerity to snatch away the whole province of Guanacaste from our Nicaraguan territory makes me see purple and red. Anger, rage, wrath. You are pissed off, wrathful, cross. Annoyed, irked, vexed, with a bee or seven of them in your bonnet. Adrenaline courses through your bloodstream, your heart plays tango to mazurka beat, sweat flows out. Kill. That is the only thing you have left on your mind. You slam doors on people`s faces, shut the messenger in anger leaving the other wondering what went wrong, although later you will apologize that there was a disconnection ,whatever. Most of the crimes in the world are committed while shaking with the lascivious and bile filled bag of hatred is being ripped apart inside our bodies. We smash, growl, drink and blame on someone else the humiliating hangover you may get, roll around, tear at our hair, piss or shit in our pants. What a mess!
Most cherished of readers, we should fear our own wrath more than we could be afraid of any monster created by Mary Shelley on a stormy night, when she was just nineteen, still no legally carrying the last name Shelley. Frankenstein is nothing compared to the monster we harbour in our bodies and when this monster is unleashed, beware whoever is near. We all harbour one of these, or several, monsters. He feeds on jealousy, abuse, greed, and is the one to answer for all our tantrums of which we may repent in the future.
How do we take back those angry words that haunt us even beyond the grave? How do we unkill the animal of innocence whose skeleton we shattered against the wall of rage? How do we put back into the tube all that tubepaste that shouldn`t have been squeezed out. We spray people like skunks protecting our poor wounded heart, whether the slight we have on hand is imaginary or real.
We fear rejection, so we build a coat of mail around our feelings, fearing the arrows of a nonrequited crush. It is so easy to be on the defensive, supposing you are not taken into account, feeling alienated from everyone. You carry a stick on your shoulder, which is right above the heart you used to wear on your sleeve. WE snap at people because they have the duty to tolerate everything,we are so arrogantly indispensable until we realize the other person is not a punching bag and we are not beautiful Muhammad Ali, and one day yu find yourself alone in the middle of an emotional nowhere and find yourself going to hell on your own two feet. There is nothing as bitterness as the hangover of remorse that the awful liquor of anger leaves behind. I may be quoted for this by future generations, who hopefully won`t be as violent as we are. But I have a reason for saying that.
Let me tenderly draw back that tendril of your long hair that hangs over your left ear, and I will curl against you neck to whisper you a little secret, because it is something I have kept for myself. When my mom died in the plane crash in 1989 in Honduras, she had been angry at me still. The night before I had screeched at her on the phone,telling her I would not go and see her and my dad off because they were travelling against my will. I was a married woman already, with a ten-month old baby. My parents were going along with my uncle Jean to Miami,where they planned to set up my mother`s catering business before the totalitarian government of Daniel Ortega would finish swindling all their property under the name of confiscation. Even though I understood that they had to seek for a place where to invest their last cents, I had been dreaming all through the week about death, seeing them walk through a murky red lake with fire on their backs. I had told them about the kind of nightmares I had been having, reminded them that I had already dreamt people dead and then they had died, like in the case of my assassinated grandmother or my dearestteacher Salvador Cardenal.
My mom had told me her husband was her own, and she was taking him with her because she owned him(my dad was her perpetual love slave) and that even though I was Jewish I shouldn`t be playing at being Nostradamus with them, and even spat at me to look after my own philandering husband and to try to get him in bed so he could make the male child she wanted as a grandson. That ignited me. That was when I yelled at her to go to hell although she was already there being a domineering demon, and I vowed to stay at home and not see them off. Those were the words she last heard from my mouth. Bo use tearing my tongue out now, no use crying and wondering what would have happened if she had heeded my advice. On Saturday October 21st,1989 my parents and my uncle Jean took that fatidic SAHSA flight and never returned. My mom had been fuming when she climbed on the plane, as their driver the faithful don Alberto,would tell me after their death. Where did all my anger know when I was told the plane had crashed against the slope of Cerro el Hule near the Honduranian airport at Tegucigalpa? All my wishes to keep them safe, alive,hale and next to me, had failed. Now there was the wrath that my parents, who hd never done anything nasty to anyone, were dead, and the only two survivors from the crash were a filthy capitalist and his wayward wife. That is when I started believing that god had poor taste and that he was a lousy capitalist like those who had survived. The rage is still with me,and sometimes I wonder if this last chance I gave the deity to show me how powerful it could be was his deletion from my books.
My dad suffered from temper tantrums until tragedy cured him once and for all. In 1957 he caught his eldest daughter having morning sickness and questioned her. Fazed at the girl`s answer that she was pregnant and knew not which of her 7 lovers had knocked her up, he flew into a rage. He blamed his first wife, Susan, for never doing anything about the girl and sent both of them packing to stay for a few days over at a relative`s farm while his indignation and fury died down. Both of them were scared and taking one of the family cars, they rushed head first into the back of a gas cistern in Granada. The explosion was so big it set several neighboring houses on fire and there was nothing left of the two women and the baby one of them carried. My father was flabbergasted and would forver blame himself for the demise of his first wife, eldest daughter and first grandchild. His rage had taken him to nowhere but to tragedy and tears. One year after their death, he married my mom, who ended up being his second consort. As Henri IV of France, the king who converted 6 times in his life and swivelled between Catholicism and being a Huguenot, used to say,” Rage is the coach that leads you to shame and tears,and if you are lucky,to the cemetery.” He was bound to be killed by a monk in a rage, Ravaillac, on May 14th,1610, paying that way for having signed the truly enlightened Edict of Nantes which his own grandson Louis XIVth would revoke so many years later to appease his prudish morganatic wife Madame Maintenon`s outbursts of rage.
I will never forget that cloudy afternoon when I was studying for an algebra test which promised to be a serial killer. My mom was in the kitchen,as usual since she was a chef, and I was struggling with two things in my bed: my ocelot Charles de Gaulle who was trying to much off all my Hershey kisses(he was a chocoholic like me, like mother like son) and those disgusting binomials. She started calling me and I refused to answer. Finally she yelled so I shouted back at her what the hell she wanted that she was only bugging. 3 seconds later she came up to my room with a tray of petit fours, Venus`nipples, King`s Bacon rolls and meringue nests she had been making just for me.She had liquid eyes but didn`t cry in front of me. She just put them on the dressing table and said,”Eat them before your Charles gobbles them up, little bitch.” Then she exited and went to lock herself into her room. I know she went in to cry. She was anot a particularly sentimental mother, no kissing nor hugging nor any kind of cuddling tat mothers usually do to their kids. She simply had to time for that, and was a pragmatic woman who said love was having a full fridge, ironed clothes,school fee paid on time and no stupid smooches. So knowing that such a hard, practical woman was able to cry but never in front of anyone else really floored me. Now,after nineteen years since she died, I wouldn`t mind if she appeared for 5 second to me,even with her alligator belt with which she would hit me across my arse when I was naughty. Shit, it would be an honor if she came back only to hit me, and being hit by her again would feel like heaven`s delights all served to me at the sme time. Where did that bitchiness, sudden irritation, momentary burst of the bubble of anger, take me? To writing these lines with remorse while I still struggle to get the tears back into my hazel eyes if which she was so proud. Nothing heals old wounds like these, I tell you while I know you too are getting a big lump in your throat, a lump as big as the Taj Mahal.
Rages,oh my! How they hurt afterwards. Imagine it in our times, love in times of internet and again I beg,Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez,pardon me for paraphrasing your best novel Love In Times of Cholera which was just torn apart in a movie made by the Hollywood garbage machine. Look at what can happen during a chat. Wrath attacks,adrelanine levels rise and since it is okay to mistreat women al most nowhere, the gentleman turned now into a ranting cad gets a bee in the bonnet he isn`t wearing. The cam was closed instantly, but not before a glimpse of something like liquid tears was going slowly down the face of the person he said he loved so much. Does love have to hurt? No anesthesia when you are being inoculated? The tips of Cupid`s arrows no longer have any xylocaine, like modern penicillin shots? When the fury dissolves slowly, the emotional welt comes up. There, trapped, is blood from the heart`s innermost core. Uneasiness, anguish, remorse, repentance. Too late. It is always too late when we realize what kind of damage has been done. Love curls like a hurt koala inside the mind`s pouch.You vow to yourself you will never be vulnerable again, although at this moment you are so frail and small it is embarrassing.
Anger takes us nowhere but to the core of the hell we may be living in. It is a pouch filled with the coins of tears and the diamonds of longing. Don`t forget the bile,too,it is there. That is what turns our emotions into a Molotov cocktail, or a bomb inside the truck as we slam into the embassy of someone else`s feelings and dignity. We die in the process of tearing at someone else`s heart ,laying it bare and open and gaping like in the amazing scene from Francis Ford Coppola`s movie Mary Shelley`s Frankenstein, when an outraged monster tears the heart out of Victor Frankenstein`s adored new bride.Next time you feel like Napoleon marching into Vienna ready to subdue and humiliate the Habsburgs, or like Richard the Lionhearted during the Third Crusade wading through Maronite children`s blood, think about it, Stop, saying things you may regret is the best passport into hatred`s ugly realm. The person who receives your harangue may forgive you. But you will never forgive yourself and that is the most tragic part of the deal.

No hay comentarios: