Entry 76 to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
Birthdates which occurred on November 25:
1845 Born in Portugal Jose Marìa Eca de Queiroz on the wrong side of the blanket(his parents weren`t yet married),author of Cousin Basil and TheCrime of Father Amaru.
1970 Kimitakè Hiraoke,more known under his pen name of Yukio Mishima,great Japanese novelist and show off, commits sepukku in public before lunch in Tokyo.He almost got a Nobel prize,was the author of Patriotism,Sea of Fertility and Confessions of a Mask
Born on November 26th
1607 John Harvard England, clergyman/scholar, major benefactor to Harvard University (library & half his estate), tried hard but Robert de Sorbonne did a better job in France
1912 Eugene Ionesco France, dramatist (Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano),considered the father of modern theatre of the absurd
Deaths which occurred on November 26:
1883 Sojourner Truth abolitionist, women's rights advocate, dies, even Lincoln admired her so much1939 James Naismith Basketball inventor, dies, that was a shot he couldn`t avoid1970 B O Davis Sr 1st black general, dies at 93 in Chicago, it was about time a black had been in charge of troops1973 Albert DiSalvo Boston strangler, stabbed, so die those who slay
WHEN SOMEONE FLUSHES HIMSELF DOWN THE TOILET
Who do we blame when someone literally flushes himself down the toilet? Commits suicide, buys the farm with his own money. It`s funny that we are always ready to criticize, swashling around the mud of our western principles, Christian based hypocrisy, saying it was a sin against god, god who has so many crimes to his name because many people wreak havoc on his behalf. Yukio Mishima did it on November 25th,while so many housewives, including his own spouse, prepared lunch unaware of what was going to happen..I am so familiarized with suicide, people. Not because I have ever made an aim at it, nor do I think I will ever plan it for myself. Not for me, folks,no my cup of tea. My poor mom had enough trouble getting me into this world, almost dying herself in the effort, for me to waste her endeavours by doing myself in. I try to get into the slightly yellowish hue of Yukio Mishimàs alabaster skin that fit his muscles like a silken glove. I was a pre-teenager when I saw his head separated from the body, with a hachimaki around his forehead, on the cover of a famous magazine,with some blood under the head. My dad showed it to me,and my mom screamed. She said he was a barbarian showing that to the little girl. Did I ever had childhood?Was I really a kid when I saw that? Good questions I make,dearest reader,while I wonder if not seeing you would be pallid excuse for anyone to ask me to think seriously about disenboweling myself or poking my head into the gas oven my kitchen doesn`t have. Not Sylvia Plath, frustrated wife of poet ted Hughes, not Anne Sexton, either. Shit, I am not even a poet to merit the gas from my oven!
I guess I had a crush on Yukio Mishima from the first day I read his short story Patriotism. I was about 8, always precocious,always poking my nose beyond my age. I started collecting his pictures,specially those where he is working out at the gym to convert what he considered his slender body as ugly. My dad had approved my reading his works,and soon managed to get them all translated into French or English. Food for his literary genius in embryo. So what a shock when Yukio, in his last protest against the occidentalization of his beloved Japan, decided to go with some of his beloved soldiers of the Tatenokai(his private army)and take over General Mashita`s bunker just outside Tokyo to make his last grand show. Of course his gay lover and student was there, and would follow him to death. There is one illogical,insane nucleus of my inner brain that understands him. I have many things in common with him, the love of a good show, the narcissism. Hey wait, get your glasses back on and don`t glare at me like that.I haven`t said I will follow his footsteps, I am not issuing a departure ticket out of this filthy world the way he did. But I guess I know what was rolling through his head when he went there,read a speech while the soldiers booed or cheered,and then got down to his fundoshi,took out the sword and finally his lover decapitated him. November 25th. In Nicaragua, we honor that date with the absurd name of Day Against Wife Battering and violence against women. Just the name lets us know we have a sickly absurd society in which we women are abused,verbally,physically or psychologically. We get llosened teeth, passwords stolen in the name of family stability and marital fidelity, our webcams are shattered, our salaries gobbled by a man who doesn`t love the workingwoman who works hard for the money so you better treat her well as Donna Summer once sang. What would Yukio Mishima have said of the existence of such a day in a country where woman hitting is more of a national sport than gossiping, baseball, bastard-production and boxing. Would Eugene Ionesco laugh and say that when he created the theatre of the absurd he meant it only onstage and not offstage,in the small black cameras of our households?
But let`s get back to Mishima and suicidal people. Japan, where seppuku is an accepted form of leaving this world after your honor has been sullied, never got over this suicide.
Mishima left everyone shaking in his shoes. It left me so too. How often do you blame yourself when someone does himself in?Shizue,Yukio`s overabsorbent mother who was always his best accomplice, laid all the blame at the widow`s door.She never liked her daughter-in-law.Welcome to the family Yoko, I know lots about this,my lady. When my best friend Oscar Cortez did himself in Hemingway-style(bullet in the head)I blamed his wife too. That couldn`t take away the pain,the anguish,the loss. It was Yukio`s suicide again, although I never sang to Yukio or loved him as a close friend. My Oscar departed in July 1996,and still less than one year later, while I was the blazer-clad,stocking-footed flamboyant spokeswoman for the Ruben Darìo National Theatre, I chose to pull Yukio out of my closet and clean up his skeleton. That is why I wrote the short story Kim The Samurai Angel while I was so olympically unhappy as the spokeswoman of the maximum temple of culture ion Nicaragua. This story was brought upon by several consecutive nightmares, in which Yukio, wearing only his fundoshi and smiling sweetly, would walk into my kitchen to ask me for a dish of breaded shrimp I was cooking. He would eat and then ask me,please,pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease kitten,a short story for me,you said you loved me,prooooooove it. So I wrote Kim during my office hours, feeling I was ripping off my people because I was a public servant but I was using time paid from the taxes my people got bitten off to write.Crime.Fraud. But Kim was written this way, and the same day I ended it, Yukio came back to eat more imaginary shrimp and thank me. I have seen him again in my dreams, inevitably, but never with the intensity of those days in 1997. Three months later I would quit that awful fake job and feel free. Kim had been written in captivity.
As I have been aging, I feel I understand Yukio MIshimàs sense of alienation better.
The perspective is totally different ,but the comprehension is there. I have come to share many characteristics with him ,like the love I feel for photography, the sense of giving a good public face, not so the homosexuality nor the inclination for suicide. My literary production has grown more open-minded, and now I am not afraid of broaching any subject in my short stories or here in my own non fiction scrapbook. I somehow understand why Yoko was never enough for him, through a wry smile I acknowledge that. I wish I weren`t an atheist, so I could invent a heaven or hell where Yukio and my best friend Oscar discuss their suicides from a philosophical perspective. But it is just fantasy. One place you surely go to after death is the cemetery. Yukio was reduced to ashes. I want the same, so I can be thrown over my beloved San Juan River. Yukio and I also share an absurd sense of patriotism that irks you beyond measure, but I cannot extricate it like I cannot live without my almost useless pancreas.
The 49 year old matron I am now is still vexed over the blow Yukio gave me as a child when he did himself in. The responsible, dutiful housewife I was when my best friend shot himself in 1996 got herself another punch that still hurts. When someone you love decides its better to go off rather than live with a shadow of the time you can give him or her, it is time to think. I don`t mean the cheap drama of a manipulator who tries to scare you by punching a pen into his wrist ifn front of a webcam so that you feel forced to do what he wants, too much Egyptian soap opera without reaching the greatness only Om Khaltoum could sing in her songs. I mean the real emptiness, the body no longer harbouring that warmth you so loved. No dear reader, there is no pain like that. I hope you never feel it. When someone chooses to flush himself down the toilet of life, we realize something is awfully rotten in the sewages of this society,and we may carry this guilt like a weighted sack for the rest of our lives, even if we learn from the experience.
Birthdates which occurred on November 25:
1845 Born in Portugal Jose Marìa Eca de Queiroz on the wrong side of the blanket(his parents weren`t yet married),author of Cousin Basil and TheCrime of Father Amaru.
1970 Kimitakè Hiraoke,more known under his pen name of Yukio Mishima,great Japanese novelist and show off, commits sepukku in public before lunch in Tokyo.He almost got a Nobel prize,was the author of Patriotism,Sea of Fertility and Confessions of a Mask
Born on November 26th
1607 John Harvard England, clergyman/scholar, major benefactor to Harvard University (library & half his estate), tried hard but Robert de Sorbonne did a better job in France
1912 Eugene Ionesco France, dramatist (Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano),considered the father of modern theatre of the absurd
Deaths which occurred on November 26:
1883 Sojourner Truth abolitionist, women's rights advocate, dies, even Lincoln admired her so much1939 James Naismith Basketball inventor, dies, that was a shot he couldn`t avoid1970 B O Davis Sr 1st black general, dies at 93 in Chicago, it was about time a black had been in charge of troops1973 Albert DiSalvo Boston strangler, stabbed, so die those who slay
WHEN SOMEONE FLUSHES HIMSELF DOWN THE TOILET
Who do we blame when someone literally flushes himself down the toilet? Commits suicide, buys the farm with his own money. It`s funny that we are always ready to criticize, swashling around the mud of our western principles, Christian based hypocrisy, saying it was a sin against god, god who has so many crimes to his name because many people wreak havoc on his behalf. Yukio Mishima did it on November 25th,while so many housewives, including his own spouse, prepared lunch unaware of what was going to happen..I am so familiarized with suicide, people. Not because I have ever made an aim at it, nor do I think I will ever plan it for myself. Not for me, folks,no my cup of tea. My poor mom had enough trouble getting me into this world, almost dying herself in the effort, for me to waste her endeavours by doing myself in. I try to get into the slightly yellowish hue of Yukio Mishimàs alabaster skin that fit his muscles like a silken glove. I was a pre-teenager when I saw his head separated from the body, with a hachimaki around his forehead, on the cover of a famous magazine,with some blood under the head. My dad showed it to me,and my mom screamed. She said he was a barbarian showing that to the little girl. Did I ever had childhood?Was I really a kid when I saw that? Good questions I make,dearest reader,while I wonder if not seeing you would be pallid excuse for anyone to ask me to think seriously about disenboweling myself or poking my head into the gas oven my kitchen doesn`t have. Not Sylvia Plath, frustrated wife of poet ted Hughes, not Anne Sexton, either. Shit, I am not even a poet to merit the gas from my oven!
I guess I had a crush on Yukio Mishima from the first day I read his short story Patriotism. I was about 8, always precocious,always poking my nose beyond my age. I started collecting his pictures,specially those where he is working out at the gym to convert what he considered his slender body as ugly. My dad had approved my reading his works,and soon managed to get them all translated into French or English. Food for his literary genius in embryo. So what a shock when Yukio, in his last protest against the occidentalization of his beloved Japan, decided to go with some of his beloved soldiers of the Tatenokai(his private army)and take over General Mashita`s bunker just outside Tokyo to make his last grand show. Of course his gay lover and student was there, and would follow him to death. There is one illogical,insane nucleus of my inner brain that understands him. I have many things in common with him, the love of a good show, the narcissism. Hey wait, get your glasses back on and don`t glare at me like that.I haven`t said I will follow his footsteps, I am not issuing a departure ticket out of this filthy world the way he did. But I guess I know what was rolling through his head when he went there,read a speech while the soldiers booed or cheered,and then got down to his fundoshi,took out the sword and finally his lover decapitated him. November 25th. In Nicaragua, we honor that date with the absurd name of Day Against Wife Battering and violence against women. Just the name lets us know we have a sickly absurd society in which we women are abused,verbally,physically or psychologically. We get llosened teeth, passwords stolen in the name of family stability and marital fidelity, our webcams are shattered, our salaries gobbled by a man who doesn`t love the workingwoman who works hard for the money so you better treat her well as Donna Summer once sang. What would Yukio Mishima have said of the existence of such a day in a country where woman hitting is more of a national sport than gossiping, baseball, bastard-production and boxing. Would Eugene Ionesco laugh and say that when he created the theatre of the absurd he meant it only onstage and not offstage,in the small black cameras of our households?
But let`s get back to Mishima and suicidal people. Japan, where seppuku is an accepted form of leaving this world after your honor has been sullied, never got over this suicide.
Mishima left everyone shaking in his shoes. It left me so too. How often do you blame yourself when someone does himself in?Shizue,Yukio`s overabsorbent mother who was always his best accomplice, laid all the blame at the widow`s door.She never liked her daughter-in-law.Welcome to the family Yoko, I know lots about this,my lady. When my best friend Oscar Cortez did himself in Hemingway-style(bullet in the head)I blamed his wife too. That couldn`t take away the pain,the anguish,the loss. It was Yukio`s suicide again, although I never sang to Yukio or loved him as a close friend. My Oscar departed in July 1996,and still less than one year later, while I was the blazer-clad,stocking-footed flamboyant spokeswoman for the Ruben Darìo National Theatre, I chose to pull Yukio out of my closet and clean up his skeleton. That is why I wrote the short story Kim The Samurai Angel while I was so olympically unhappy as the spokeswoman of the maximum temple of culture ion Nicaragua. This story was brought upon by several consecutive nightmares, in which Yukio, wearing only his fundoshi and smiling sweetly, would walk into my kitchen to ask me for a dish of breaded shrimp I was cooking. He would eat and then ask me,please,pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease kitten,a short story for me,you said you loved me,prooooooove it. So I wrote Kim during my office hours, feeling I was ripping off my people because I was a public servant but I was using time paid from the taxes my people got bitten off to write.Crime.Fraud. But Kim was written this way, and the same day I ended it, Yukio came back to eat more imaginary shrimp and thank me. I have seen him again in my dreams, inevitably, but never with the intensity of those days in 1997. Three months later I would quit that awful fake job and feel free. Kim had been written in captivity.
As I have been aging, I feel I understand Yukio MIshimàs sense of alienation better.
The perspective is totally different ,but the comprehension is there. I have come to share many characteristics with him ,like the love I feel for photography, the sense of giving a good public face, not so the homosexuality nor the inclination for suicide. My literary production has grown more open-minded, and now I am not afraid of broaching any subject in my short stories or here in my own non fiction scrapbook. I somehow understand why Yoko was never enough for him, through a wry smile I acknowledge that. I wish I weren`t an atheist, so I could invent a heaven or hell where Yukio and my best friend Oscar discuss their suicides from a philosophical perspective. But it is just fantasy. One place you surely go to after death is the cemetery. Yukio was reduced to ashes. I want the same, so I can be thrown over my beloved San Juan River. Yukio and I also share an absurd sense of patriotism that irks you beyond measure, but I cannot extricate it like I cannot live without my almost useless pancreas.
The 49 year old matron I am now is still vexed over the blow Yukio gave me as a child when he did himself in. The responsible, dutiful housewife I was when my best friend shot himself in 1996 got herself another punch that still hurts. When someone you love decides its better to go off rather than live with a shadow of the time you can give him or her, it is time to think. I don`t mean the cheap drama of a manipulator who tries to scare you by punching a pen into his wrist ifn front of a webcam so that you feel forced to do what he wants, too much Egyptian soap opera without reaching the greatness only Om Khaltoum could sing in her songs. I mean the real emptiness, the body no longer harbouring that warmth you so loved. No dear reader, there is no pain like that. I hope you never feel it. When someone chooses to flush himself down the toilet of life, we realize something is awfully rotten in the sewages of this society,and we may carry this guilt like a weighted sack for the rest of our lives, even if we learn from the experience.
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