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, 2 de agosto de 2008

Philippe



August 2d, 31st entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook

1696 Mahmud I Ottoman sultan, fought Austrians & Russians 1754 Pierre Charles L'Enfant France, architect laid out Washington DC, which is why this place is so elegant
1884 Ròmulo Gallegos Venezuela, novelist (Doña Bàrbara, Pobre Negro,Canaima), president (1948)
1924 James Baldwin US writer (Another Country,If Beale Street could talk)
1654 Philippe D`Orleans II, regent of France after his uncle Louis XIVth died
Lhard worker, a womanizer and multitalented beauty of a man
Kicked the bucket
1923 Pres Harding dies at Palace Hotel, San Francisco, a purported heart attack but some said his wife poisoned him for having so many affaires1934 Paul Von Hindenburg dies at 86, Hitler takes over presidency, yuck
What happened?
1492 Jews are expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand & Queen Isabella, they had been notified 8 months before to get lost but without their money, which was used to pay the lice-infected Columbus to come to look for our riches in America
1776 Formal signing of the Declaration of Independence, before this date it was said that whoever signed would be accused of treason and everybody wet their pants in fright

Ton Petit Corbeau Noir
“I love it when you are silent, as if a kiss were sealing your lips,”said a verse by Chilean Nobel-Prize winner Pablo Neruda, and that was repeated to me by one of my prize students. I told him I was at that moment with my favorite Frenchman in my imagination, the Regent of France after King Louis XIV th had died, Philippe D`Orlèans, who was born a day like today. Philippe had been a patron opf the arts, a womanizer, excellent military and an atheist in times where anything could happen to you if you confessed something like that.
He was unorthodox to the point of laughter or fright or both, could compose, cook, dance,play tennis and write poetry. A Renaissance man who called the love of his life,Madame Therese de Parabère his small black raven ,”mon petit corbeau noir.” I was so obsessed by him that when I was a student in France I tried on his coat of mail and somehow I fit into it, but when I tried to get out of it something stuck around my hips and I couldn`t be rid of the thing until 1 hour later, when a specialist, bathed in his own sweat, finally plucked me out of the Regent`s metallic armour.
When he died at age 49 on December 2d, the duc d'Orléans' heart was taken to the Val de Grâce church in Paris and his body to Saint-Denis Basilica, (about 10 km north of Paris), the necropolis of the French kings and their family. The official funeral ceremony did not take place before February 12, 1724 and some people had the temerity to sing obscene lyrics allusive to his womanizing habits when the coffin passed by.The heart of the duc d'Orléans, Regent of France, is now at the Chapelle Royale de Dreux, the necropolis of all the members of the Orléans family, built in 1816 and finished during the reign of his great-great-grandson, Louis-Philippe, King of the French. I had been there at this church to take a bouquet of thirteen red roses for this man who has always had a particular hold over my heart. Which brings me to this idea: what questions could this very handsome and multitalented nephew of the Sun King would have asked in he came back from his death, maybe in the form of alien cat from Venus or the star Antares? How would he have observed our customs and rituals that make us acceptable in this world we insist on calling globalized, although we know the real globalization may have started ages before internet, when Alexander the Great went to fight King Poros of India or when Marco Polo brought the Chinese oranges with him coming back to Italy.
Take it for granted that only a crazy historian like me could answer his questions, taking off his wig because his own hair is much sexier…I love men with long hair, you know that. I want Philippe to sit next to me and call me his Petit Corbeau Noir. I have earned it.I wrote him a long tale some years ago, and I feel I have treated him well with my pen. I deserve to hear his questions. Let him land in my lap as a fat angora cat, if he wants.And let him stretch, meow loudly. Dig his nails into my knee. Before he starts wondering at our foibles and gadgets, and from his new point of view as a cat let him wonder why we humans are so crazy that we put the meat to dance in a microwave when we are defrosting it. I know I will find him ion top of my bed even though he now as a cat can criticize that we sleep on big bouncy tables and that instead of being on top of the tablecloth we nestle under a thing called blanket. He will not quite understand why us women spend so much money on loose powder to smoothen our faces, but we complain when the dust, which is also brown, coats our furnitures after a dust storm, making us scream at the maid like my father`s first wife used to do (even writing in her tentative ungrammatical Spanish AKI AY POLVO, LINPIARR, please here is some dust clean up) on the dirty surface of a mirror. As a sideral cat with one green eye and the other on as hazel as my own, Philippe wil question me why is it that men go nuts and chase the skimpiest-dressed sexy gal only to impose upon her nunnery garments and repression once they have nabbed her for keeps. He will say it is as absurd as buying a long blond wig just to cut it shorter, dye it in black and then wear it so.I can hear him chuckling, thinking that when we get married we are asked to be one sould divided in two bodies, and he laughs because it was not so wuith his awful cousin-wife with whom he had to sire 8 kids without loving her, and he may tell me that if a married couple is two people in one and two sould joined, why don`t they pour both bodies into a giant blender like the one I have in the kitchen and just grind the two people together? Because he wasn`t ever happy in his marriage, and neither quite with his main mistress, Ma.Therese ds Parabere, because one day it dawned upon him that she was having other gys too and he grabbed her by the neck and said it would be so easy to remove that charming little head from those white shoulders and his “petit corbeau noir” just fled in panic never to be seen again near him. Is that what love is about?Loving someone to pieces?
Love and war are akin to each other. In both,everything is valid. Philippe knew it,so he will ask me what the next big war will be about.Not land anymore.Over water.Apremonition of it came when Bayezid Yildrim I of the Ottoman Empire had his men dying of thirst in the Battle of Ankara just because he could not access the water,where Timurlenk`s elephants were drinking. And speaking of elephants, Philippe in cat form will ask me why humans are so mean, that they must involve horses, donkeys, dogs, pigeons and camels and elephants in war, to die with them. Philippe has an answer to each question, now that he has been dead for so long and reincarnated into this lazy cat I have here on my lap. He will tell me that no matter how much you love, it is useless and fun at the same time, dearest reader at times out of reach. War and love will be our constant curses, if we dare to call them like that. After World War II the United Nations was created to stop all wars, and they have been able to do nothing about it.It is when we have had more wars! Philippe would be laughing smack in their faces, the way I do when someone who has never seen me asks me to be a brood mare because women are only for that and I have the perfect genes to be the mom of his child, who will be born with a beard and turban like the cover of Khalil Gibran`s book The Prophet. Eugenics, for Marx`s sake please! Not even like that could we produce the human who refuses to go to war.
I ask Philippe to lower my lamp a bit. Was it a scorpion bite on my wrist that brought out again my shield and armour? I laugh at the idea, as you will too. But I have been thinking about Philippe D`Orlèans all day. I am his petit corbeau noir.The cat gets off my lap and like Silvio Rodrìguez`s lost Blue Unicorn, fades into the horizon of my slumber. Thoughts are a wisp of smoke from our life force.We have them,dream them, cry a bit over them if broken .And we move on.

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