55th entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on September 29:
1511 Michael Servetus Spain, physician (Christianism Rostituta), could he cure dismay?1755 Robert Lord Clive, founded British empire in India, and sacked the resources of this country1758 Horatio Nelson Burnham Thorpe Britain, naval hero at Trafalgar, one of the greatest military heroes, but also a great egocentric cad
1901 Enrico Fermi Italy, physicist, gone fission (Nobel-1938)was he an egghead!
1931 Anita Ekberg Sweden, actress (La Dolce Vita, War & Peace), one of the sexiest fatties of all times
Deaths which occurred on September 29:
1895 Louis Pasteur dies, and we remember him for his sterilization process of liquids and his anti rabies vaccine,father of microbiology
1978 Pope John Paul I, venid his mysterious smile lies the grimiest secrets of the church
1829 Scotland Yard formed in London… it was so badly needed
1936 Radio used for 1st time for a presidential campaign, fit for a president in a wheelchair
Birthdates which occurred on September 30:
1627 Robinson Crusoe according to Daniel Defoe, born to have a great adventure
1908 David Oistrakh Odessa Russia, violinist/prof (Moscow Conservatory),listen to him, his playing is analgesic
Deaths which occurred on September 30:
1955 James Dean killed in an auto collision at 24 near Cholame California, died while still filming Giant with Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson
1791 Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" premiers in Vienna, while people laugh at Papageno and Papagena 1846 Anesthetic ether used for 1st time (Dr Wm Morton extracts a tooth),thank you thank you thank you
430 Death of Latin Father St. Jerome, ca.75. Converted at 19, Jerome spent the last half of his life rendering the Scriptures into the contemporary ("vulgar") Latin of his day -- hence the "Latin Vulgate" -- as well as preparing commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible,great translator,Patron saint of Masaya
The sugar coating of Magic
Every bitter pill carries a sugar coating, so we can swallow it less painfully. A few years ago, while an unwanted visit poisoned my Holy Week holidays, I fled to my typewriter and started giving that keyboard hell, writing a short story about Simon de Montfort, the medieval villain who went to kill the Cathars during the AlbigensianCrusade, reborn as a sensuous woman in Nicaragua. This main character wanted magic, because sex without it was just a ridiculous pretzelling of limbs and her opinion was similar to that of Queen Margot of France who used to say that in order to forget someone you simply had to possess him. Now, after a hard day`s work, I ask myself the same crazy question.What about the magic? Did it become biodegradable like some tissues? Even Mozart `premiered his opera The Magic Flute on a day like today. Magic? Suddenly it absence, not the magic itselfm glares at you in the eye and you realize it was never there. You invented it, or someone did it for you. You were wooed, bullied,kicked, licked and rubbed into believing there is really a genie inside old Aladdin`s lamp. But the hand is empty. The heart is void. It is a crystal heart.Nothing inside. The image you may have put inside it was in your retina, but not fit to be touched. It went up in thin warm air,a mirage, an eerie feeling of goodbye packed into nothingness. Ether in question.
Humans have always wished to be fooled, make no mistake of it. We are the masters in delusions, doctors in disappointments. Ether, paper, celluloid, webcams, internet,all can stand whatever you wish to put into it. Suicide attempts are always more dramatic and colorful when you grab a webcam and you threaten the other person zillion miles away that for love, you will cut your life short then and there. The office which is not by an oil rig spins insanely, past the window,past thedoor, past the desk. I know the trick. Then you see the person with a pen, or anything edgy or pointed that will do the trick. Two drops of blood can do the trick and you scream,or write NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO because at that moment you are naïve,gullible, silly putty. It can be a circus when the show ends and you analyze it.You date it, choose a date,September 19th?August 32d if it could exist? Ether, ladies and gentlemen. After that you chastise yourself mentally, you have made someone tear down their defenses. You have breached the Magnot Line of feelings,that swift and weak line that didn`t prevent the Bosches, as French call the Germans, to stream into France during World War I. The minutes tick down, a trickle of white blood in the body of age, and you learn,but on the way the numbness settñes in and you notice it slightly,at first. Then it progresses. A coat of indifference is starting at your elbow, or from you big toenail up.
The loving feeling has been evaporating,steam after heavy rain in the tropics. But is goes,way up into the sky which not always is touristically aceeptably blueeeeeeeeee as you wish it would stay.
Hard everyday reality always has a bland taste, but life is more than spicy weavings of a great romantic novel. Soap operas are true while onscreen. In everyday life, time clickety-clicks is own inexorable pace, the step of iron heels walking on your hall of chores, snapping twigs of dreams that were left behind after the tree of hope had been cut down. The skin of belief peels off, like the remnants of a sunstroke, knowing you will not hit the jackpot, nor find a golden rope chain astray on the sidewalk, or getting a raise from the boss who seethes every time he sees you. We are animals of habits, creatures of customs. It must be a true cataclysm that rips a world apart,somewhat Jurassic in nature. Routines are never shattered by ethereal illusions that don`t even look like those who originated them. It is discovering that eventually some of Van Gogh`s paintings do smell a bit like shit when you are allowed to moisten the surface, because he incorporated feces into his ochres…if you ever get the chance of doing that in a museum, for goodness`sake.
My basic French rationalism, learned even before I was weaned by my mother, my hard skepticism eaten along with Zeno and Marcus Aurelius, floats to the surface after I have committed an attempt to drown it. I feel like Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral who had serious misgivings about attacking Pearl Harbor but nevertheless went ahead and did it anyways. I know it is no use. I try to make a rosy wave under my skin and end up not recognizing what I wrote nor what I meant. I remind myself that Tchaikovsky`s diary shocked even me, and anyways he died of cholera after downing a glass of unboiled water,this most probably done on purpose. I have to shake myself out of a hazy fuchsia dream, wake up, shake the m,ud from your boots, Anne Frank did die in Bergen Belsen, didn’t live to reap copyright money from her diary. Oda Nobunaga was the general buried by flames while he prayed in a temple. Was it of some use to pray? I don`t do it. All of us have a different way of practicing the subtle and fine art of nonsense, because it is an art.It is the most sublime of masturbatory practices, because at the end, nevertheless, we are in the same hell that a burst bubble leaves behind.
Life, sorry to say it, is a bitter pill which we insist upon coating with that thin,ephemeral coating of sugar. We apply dream powder to it, we festoon the pill and dance around it.
Things are, according to the crystal through which you use to see them, larger or smaller optical illusions. The Hungarians call them delibab, like the ghostly images seen on the lonesome, extensive steppe they insist on calling the puszta. Clouds of self-deceit, curtains of gossamer we hang next to windows not yet created. Maybe that is the basic ingredient for atheism, knowing you walk on a tightrope with no special shoes and not a single net or cushion to catch you if you happen to fall. Navigating towards Antarctica
With only a crew of penguins aboard.
The great consolation is feeling the wholeness, the completion of yourself by yourself on on yourself.Not tied to any raft to take you through an imaginary Bermuda Triangle.
All contact with shores lost, the owl from the moon winks an eye at you. Everywhere, black water surrounds you while you silently float, soundlessly,endlessly, maybe getting agitated a bit while you berate yourself for having been so stupid once more, once again, while you try to remember the full lyrics of a song by Westlife that says you can`t be a fool again. It all makes sense. Magic. We chase it all our life while we know it is just a lion figment of your cat imagination, sparks in the middle of the evening while there was no comet to let you have thm. No, a weariness seeps into your bones, fills up the holes in your marrow and you feel your moonsuit gripping you tightly, firmly. Can you imagine standing there, next to a total stranger, gaping into his eyes and not knowing anything else to say but Who are you? In a tremulous squeak? Or looking across the table to the person who asks you to pass him the butter please, and you ask yourself and only yourself,never out loud in ordr not to trample on real toads from imaginary gardens, who the hell is this person sitting over here, with whom I brought another stranger into this godforsaken world? And this beauty in front of me?is there a rule that states firmly that you have to expect to get along with someone just because you brought that person into this green valley of red tears? Is that person grateful to you for having brought him or her here? Could he or she smack you as reward for having done so? What happened to that cobweb of sticky magic that supposedly binds kindred hearts?The heart is a pump, that is all,sorry. Thank your pheromones for the impulse, not a pump that any moment stops and leaves you groping for the last strings of life.
I emerge slowly from the pool of my dreams, and there are just the cats in the kitchen,commenting in their hairy language about cockroaches, moths and spooks that don`t exist. I walk on my poor, wretched, torn and so often accidented feet, the same flat paws that have been snake-bitten, trampled on, broken, and my extremities take me to the bathroom, to the solidity of my toilet bowl, my ass finds its place and I function properly. That is the magic-less reality of waking up at midnight. The normalcy of my bowel movements, the singing rivulet of waterfrom the sink, the bright colors of the toothbrushes. The corner of the dream has just climbed on a dark chariot to return under my eyelids, where supposedly are the peels from my magic memories. It was all false, I am safely empty, full of my own life force that doesn’t admit futilities. I return to the safety of my old pillow, the whir of the fan, and I am complete. I am not missing any pieces, because in first place I had nothing extra. My mind continues to be a fiction writer even while asleep, and I am thankful for it. Those nightmares have been converted into short stories, and not by magic but by effort, language proficiency, talent and hard work have become short stories, and upon being sold, money. All concrete things, not the Solid Objects by Virginia Woolf in her story of the same name.
Magic,to be sure, has been overrated. When lies, delusions,dreams or false hopes, shake hands with everyday reality, curtains are ripped apart, whether they be only gossamer or not. It is hard to wake up, whether we do it brusquely, gasping for breath and happy it was only another nightmare, or whether we slowly drift upwards like the diver, slowly because if you too it too fast oxygen bubbles in your blood and the bends get you.
I am aware many things made a generous contribution towards this entry. I am thankful to the pieces of circumstances that added themselves one to another to form these paragraphs. Life is still better than any Sorbonne or Harvard.
We hate to mention the sugar coating the bitter pill of life has. We don`t like to expose ourselves, but we swallow it once too often. I take the ghost of the gun with me as I go home,because I cannot do anything else. The bullets of facts will not hurt me anymore. I want to be an alchemist, but I am only a philosopher bile-coated into soldier, or whatever.A writer who will always question things even though it is easier to shut your eyes and keep on pretending everything is okay. Pieces have been wrenched from me by the firm iron grip of magic, and through the pain this causes I have styed alive long enough to denounce that magic will exist while we insist upon believing in it.Same as churches and religions, which exist because we have created the delusion of a deity or gods just in order to wallow in belief as an antidote for our own undigested solitude.
Birthdates which occurred on September 29:
1511 Michael Servetus Spain, physician (Christianism Rostituta), could he cure dismay?1755 Robert Lord Clive, founded British empire in India, and sacked the resources of this country1758 Horatio Nelson Burnham Thorpe Britain, naval hero at Trafalgar, one of the greatest military heroes, but also a great egocentric cad
1901 Enrico Fermi Italy, physicist, gone fission (Nobel-1938)was he an egghead!
1931 Anita Ekberg Sweden, actress (La Dolce Vita, War & Peace), one of the sexiest fatties of all times
Deaths which occurred on September 29:
1895 Louis Pasteur dies, and we remember him for his sterilization process of liquids and his anti rabies vaccine,father of microbiology
1978 Pope John Paul I, venid his mysterious smile lies the grimiest secrets of the church
1829 Scotland Yard formed in London… it was so badly needed
1936 Radio used for 1st time for a presidential campaign, fit for a president in a wheelchair
Birthdates which occurred on September 30:
1627 Robinson Crusoe according to Daniel Defoe, born to have a great adventure
1908 David Oistrakh Odessa Russia, violinist/prof (Moscow Conservatory),listen to him, his playing is analgesic
Deaths which occurred on September 30:
1955 James Dean killed in an auto collision at 24 near Cholame California, died while still filming Giant with Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson
1791 Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute" premiers in Vienna, while people laugh at Papageno and Papagena 1846 Anesthetic ether used for 1st time (Dr Wm Morton extracts a tooth),thank you thank you thank you
430 Death of Latin Father St. Jerome, ca.75. Converted at 19, Jerome spent the last half of his life rendering the Scriptures into the contemporary ("vulgar") Latin of his day -- hence the "Latin Vulgate" -- as well as preparing commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible,great translator,Patron saint of Masaya
The sugar coating of Magic
Every bitter pill carries a sugar coating, so we can swallow it less painfully. A few years ago, while an unwanted visit poisoned my Holy Week holidays, I fled to my typewriter and started giving that keyboard hell, writing a short story about Simon de Montfort, the medieval villain who went to kill the Cathars during the AlbigensianCrusade, reborn as a sensuous woman in Nicaragua. This main character wanted magic, because sex without it was just a ridiculous pretzelling of limbs and her opinion was similar to that of Queen Margot of France who used to say that in order to forget someone you simply had to possess him. Now, after a hard day`s work, I ask myself the same crazy question.What about the magic? Did it become biodegradable like some tissues? Even Mozart `premiered his opera The Magic Flute on a day like today. Magic? Suddenly it absence, not the magic itselfm glares at you in the eye and you realize it was never there. You invented it, or someone did it for you. You were wooed, bullied,kicked, licked and rubbed into believing there is really a genie inside old Aladdin`s lamp. But the hand is empty. The heart is void. It is a crystal heart.Nothing inside. The image you may have put inside it was in your retina, but not fit to be touched. It went up in thin warm air,a mirage, an eerie feeling of goodbye packed into nothingness. Ether in question.
Humans have always wished to be fooled, make no mistake of it. We are the masters in delusions, doctors in disappointments. Ether, paper, celluloid, webcams, internet,all can stand whatever you wish to put into it. Suicide attempts are always more dramatic and colorful when you grab a webcam and you threaten the other person zillion miles away that for love, you will cut your life short then and there. The office which is not by an oil rig spins insanely, past the window,past thedoor, past the desk. I know the trick. Then you see the person with a pen, or anything edgy or pointed that will do the trick. Two drops of blood can do the trick and you scream,or write NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO because at that moment you are naïve,gullible, silly putty. It can be a circus when the show ends and you analyze it.You date it, choose a date,September 19th?August 32d if it could exist? Ether, ladies and gentlemen. After that you chastise yourself mentally, you have made someone tear down their defenses. You have breached the Magnot Line of feelings,that swift and weak line that didn`t prevent the Bosches, as French call the Germans, to stream into France during World War I. The minutes tick down, a trickle of white blood in the body of age, and you learn,but on the way the numbness settñes in and you notice it slightly,at first. Then it progresses. A coat of indifference is starting at your elbow, or from you big toenail up.
The loving feeling has been evaporating,steam after heavy rain in the tropics. But is goes,way up into the sky which not always is touristically aceeptably blueeeeeeeeee as you wish it would stay.
Hard everyday reality always has a bland taste, but life is more than spicy weavings of a great romantic novel. Soap operas are true while onscreen. In everyday life, time clickety-clicks is own inexorable pace, the step of iron heels walking on your hall of chores, snapping twigs of dreams that were left behind after the tree of hope had been cut down. The skin of belief peels off, like the remnants of a sunstroke, knowing you will not hit the jackpot, nor find a golden rope chain astray on the sidewalk, or getting a raise from the boss who seethes every time he sees you. We are animals of habits, creatures of customs. It must be a true cataclysm that rips a world apart,somewhat Jurassic in nature. Routines are never shattered by ethereal illusions that don`t even look like those who originated them. It is discovering that eventually some of Van Gogh`s paintings do smell a bit like shit when you are allowed to moisten the surface, because he incorporated feces into his ochres…if you ever get the chance of doing that in a museum, for goodness`sake.
My basic French rationalism, learned even before I was weaned by my mother, my hard skepticism eaten along with Zeno and Marcus Aurelius, floats to the surface after I have committed an attempt to drown it. I feel like Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral who had serious misgivings about attacking Pearl Harbor but nevertheless went ahead and did it anyways. I know it is no use. I try to make a rosy wave under my skin and end up not recognizing what I wrote nor what I meant. I remind myself that Tchaikovsky`s diary shocked even me, and anyways he died of cholera after downing a glass of unboiled water,this most probably done on purpose. I have to shake myself out of a hazy fuchsia dream, wake up, shake the m,ud from your boots, Anne Frank did die in Bergen Belsen, didn’t live to reap copyright money from her diary. Oda Nobunaga was the general buried by flames while he prayed in a temple. Was it of some use to pray? I don`t do it. All of us have a different way of practicing the subtle and fine art of nonsense, because it is an art.It is the most sublime of masturbatory practices, because at the end, nevertheless, we are in the same hell that a burst bubble leaves behind.
Life, sorry to say it, is a bitter pill which we insist upon coating with that thin,ephemeral coating of sugar. We apply dream powder to it, we festoon the pill and dance around it.
Things are, according to the crystal through which you use to see them, larger or smaller optical illusions. The Hungarians call them delibab, like the ghostly images seen on the lonesome, extensive steppe they insist on calling the puszta. Clouds of self-deceit, curtains of gossamer we hang next to windows not yet created. Maybe that is the basic ingredient for atheism, knowing you walk on a tightrope with no special shoes and not a single net or cushion to catch you if you happen to fall. Navigating towards Antarctica
With only a crew of penguins aboard.
The great consolation is feeling the wholeness, the completion of yourself by yourself on on yourself.Not tied to any raft to take you through an imaginary Bermuda Triangle.
All contact with shores lost, the owl from the moon winks an eye at you. Everywhere, black water surrounds you while you silently float, soundlessly,endlessly, maybe getting agitated a bit while you berate yourself for having been so stupid once more, once again, while you try to remember the full lyrics of a song by Westlife that says you can`t be a fool again. It all makes sense. Magic. We chase it all our life while we know it is just a lion figment of your cat imagination, sparks in the middle of the evening while there was no comet to let you have thm. No, a weariness seeps into your bones, fills up the holes in your marrow and you feel your moonsuit gripping you tightly, firmly. Can you imagine standing there, next to a total stranger, gaping into his eyes and not knowing anything else to say but Who are you? In a tremulous squeak? Or looking across the table to the person who asks you to pass him the butter please, and you ask yourself and only yourself,never out loud in ordr not to trample on real toads from imaginary gardens, who the hell is this person sitting over here, with whom I brought another stranger into this godforsaken world? And this beauty in front of me?is there a rule that states firmly that you have to expect to get along with someone just because you brought that person into this green valley of red tears? Is that person grateful to you for having brought him or her here? Could he or she smack you as reward for having done so? What happened to that cobweb of sticky magic that supposedly binds kindred hearts?The heart is a pump, that is all,sorry. Thank your pheromones for the impulse, not a pump that any moment stops and leaves you groping for the last strings of life.
I emerge slowly from the pool of my dreams, and there are just the cats in the kitchen,commenting in their hairy language about cockroaches, moths and spooks that don`t exist. I walk on my poor, wretched, torn and so often accidented feet, the same flat paws that have been snake-bitten, trampled on, broken, and my extremities take me to the bathroom, to the solidity of my toilet bowl, my ass finds its place and I function properly. That is the magic-less reality of waking up at midnight. The normalcy of my bowel movements, the singing rivulet of waterfrom the sink, the bright colors of the toothbrushes. The corner of the dream has just climbed on a dark chariot to return under my eyelids, where supposedly are the peels from my magic memories. It was all false, I am safely empty, full of my own life force that doesn’t admit futilities. I return to the safety of my old pillow, the whir of the fan, and I am complete. I am not missing any pieces, because in first place I had nothing extra. My mind continues to be a fiction writer even while asleep, and I am thankful for it. Those nightmares have been converted into short stories, and not by magic but by effort, language proficiency, talent and hard work have become short stories, and upon being sold, money. All concrete things, not the Solid Objects by Virginia Woolf in her story of the same name.
Magic,to be sure, has been overrated. When lies, delusions,dreams or false hopes, shake hands with everyday reality, curtains are ripped apart, whether they be only gossamer or not. It is hard to wake up, whether we do it brusquely, gasping for breath and happy it was only another nightmare, or whether we slowly drift upwards like the diver, slowly because if you too it too fast oxygen bubbles in your blood and the bends get you.
I am aware many things made a generous contribution towards this entry. I am thankful to the pieces of circumstances that added themselves one to another to form these paragraphs. Life is still better than any Sorbonne or Harvard.
We hate to mention the sugar coating the bitter pill of life has. We don`t like to expose ourselves, but we swallow it once too often. I take the ghost of the gun with me as I go home,because I cannot do anything else. The bullets of facts will not hurt me anymore. I want to be an alchemist, but I am only a philosopher bile-coated into soldier, or whatever.A writer who will always question things even though it is easier to shut your eyes and keep on pretending everything is okay. Pieces have been wrenched from me by the firm iron grip of magic, and through the pain this causes I have styed alive long enough to denounce that magic will exist while we insist upon believing in it.Same as churches and religions, which exist because we have created the delusion of a deity or gods just in order to wallow in belief as an antidote for our own undigested solitude.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario