March 28th,2009
THE LOST EPILOG FOR THE COLONEL´S SCRAPBOOK
1660 Georg Ludwig German monarch of Hanover who became the famous /King George I of Great Britain after the Stuart line came to dead end,is born
0193 Roman Emperor Pertinax assassinated, he had been luckier as military than as emperor
1881 Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Russian officer and composer, dies on his birthday at exactly 42,from cirrhosis, after leaving us with Boris Godunov, Pictures at an Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain
AFTER ME THE DELUGE SAID LOUIS XVTH
What was that deluge about, I wish I could ask the handsomest king of France. Was there an awful lot of water or just emptiness for you? If people believe god made the world, was this the feeling the deity had after making man? Was he aware of the monster he had created? I sit here, still trembling with rage and chagrin. I´m supposed to be bulletproof, invulnerable, above feeling demeaned by petty things. My mind is reeling with stupefaction.. Is there no end to the silliness of men? I don´t want the make any more questions. I´m the Cheshire cat, smile disappearing in the midst of a windy mist. As I came I go. Not on tiptoes this time but stomping my way out, boots making a lot of noise on the way out. I want to lay claim to my time, to my right to choose and not compromise, to stop leasing the world even if the world is reduced to one single being. Can one person mean the world to someone else? And if that world crumbles at your feet because your idol had feet made of clay and you caught him or her with pants down grunting on the toilet…just like anyone?
I look at my camouflaged uniform,blue and black and light blue,splotches of indigo,and I realize it has been there for so many years and it isn´t until now that notice how well it covers my so many time injured body, this is the first time I see the beauty of its pattern. I´m not wearing a slinky black nightie, not a teddy can compensate for an ugly face, ever. Cheap silk and nylon cling to your body like unwanted sweaty skin, unsexy, undesirable, sticky, yucky. Rather dead in combat than ever being caught in that attire. Why do women want to be so ridiculous? I take out a small hand mirror and scrutinize my thousand ethnias mixture of a face. Still unlined in the year turn 50. “You, incongruously pretty face above a heavy uniform, like a Japanese doll that is so expensive and dear,” said a Honduranian lieutenant colonel to me, a man who sports his grey hairs and wrinkles with such debonair elegance. He sees me, nevertheless, adrift, worrying about my time, there is such a gaping hole in the middle of my painful emptiness. It is so hard to let go. It is so difficult to slam doors and then think about opening them again knowing that you will slam them anew.
I felt like this in July 1996. My best pal was gone, he had committed suicide, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. Unconsciously, I would lift my hand and dial his number, and then I would remember no phone company has been able to connect to our memories…No longer there. His uniforms and shoes still hung in his closet at home, and at three o clock on Fridays my stomach would rumble in anticipation because at that time we would get together for tea. I know the feeling again. My noontime is mine now and I don´t want it. At 5 pm I get skyline anxious, it is like retreating and kicking a drug habit. You still get the heaves, the shakes, the drop in blood pressure. But somehow you know there is no turning back.
I am left with a long awaited babe in arms, and now born, I just want to give it up in adoption, as if once the father is gone there is no reason for his existence. Babes and kittens can be adopted by others properly without any harm coming after, but a book?
I cannot even drown it…not even in my own tears if I have any left. You remember the scene in Francis Ford Coppola´s Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein when the monster played by De Niro drops into Victor´s nightchamber on the doctor´s wedding night, and when the doc turns him away the monster pounces on still virginal Elizabeth and wrenches her heart out ? That is the exact feeling I have when I leaf through this book for which I am writing this epilog. I was aborted by an unknown hand,torn out of my womb but unlike Zoroaster who was said to have been wrenched from mommy´s womb by a monster and then survived for years eating homemade cheese(who made it? Religious stories are so incongruous and stupid sometimes, they offend our natural intelligence), I have no sense of what to do next. I´ll go back to my short stories, good down to earth money makers and providers of the red and black wings of fame that hover above my uniform and grant me comparisons with Choderlos de Laclos, and Dostoyevsky, two officers turned into writers.
I feel the gentle shadow of Modeste, my Modeste Mussorgsky whose music I have always loved so much, up to the point that I gave him a short story about his wonderful heart. He lays a skinny emaciated hand on my shoulder and upon his touch, the anger flows out. He was born and he died at age 42 on a day like this. Like Michel Praetorius too, great German composer of the Renaissance, born and died on his birthday. Is that the ultimate gift from kismet? His shadow in Russian officer´s uniform sits in front of me, crosses his knees and smiles faintly under his mustache.
Mussorgsly says to me in his Russian accent,” I will take you further into immortality, kitten.. My Russian heart tale will always be a reference, who knows if this crazy hooky diary of this colonel you were won´t be forgotten, is there any guarantee that the entries be kept in order by the person who motivated it? Would it be a bad surprise if I told you the dearest reader might as well lose it, or get it deleted, or never mind it just to show his lady friends boasting how crazy and naïve an intellectual can be? I saw something similar in Russia, something which made a laughingstock of old Peter Tchaikovsky with his famous piano concerto no.1 WE sort of had a courteous enmity with him ,for I was a member of the Group of 5 Nationalists with Rimsky, Cui, Balakirev and Borodin and Peter preferred Western style music….You remember Peter had tailored it for the great pianist Rubinstein, a big jerk if there ever was one, pompous asshole, we hated him. So foppish Peter presents his concerto for his so called friend, and the guy listens in silence, frowning ,grimacing. At the end, Rubinstein gets up and tells the poor Peter he hates every note on it, that the concerto is vulgar and crass and sloppy and stupidly sentimentaloid, so Peter just gets up and storms out of the room in tears. Back home, Peter wrenches off the page with the dedication to Rubinstein, and when the German pianist Hans von Bulow premieres the piece, Peter dedicates it to him. Peter had been so slavishly addicted to Rubinstein, and he discovered like many others did, he had been pissing up the wrong tree. It happens. You have a phrase. Shit happens. No kitten, no need to make your eyes water. Not my intention. I´m just telling you it is not the only case in history, I want to make you feel better. Now I want you to don your uniform again, with no apologies, and smile like your colleague Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia mentioned, that it is good to smile because it existed and never mind that it ended. You have something strong in your hands, never keep the grenade. Throw it or it will blow up in your face. Simply an officer to another officer´s good advice.” I glance at the chair and only a ray of sunlight is there, Modeste has left me again. With a cupful of sound and logical counsels in order not to disgrace myself.
Dead is dead said Stephen King in Pet Sematary. I looked into my file for projects in the short story area. I had three lined up and wasn´t going to practice Nicaragua´s favorite sport: procrastination. If I had the time now it was for my use, and I would lay my uniformed shoulder to the weird wheel of producing phantoms. I just hoped I hadn´t lost my touch. If I had gotten out of a wheelchair before, against all odds, I would get out of this post partum depression sooner or later and the best medication was available: more words, more letters, more literature-I wouldn´t be a writer´s block victim or a literary cripple. It may still bother me to remember what the French said that only when the flower adores does it bear the fruit. But still there was the phrase from that lousy husband but great guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, onto victory always.
THE LOST EPILOG FOR THE COLONEL´S SCRAPBOOK
1660 Georg Ludwig German monarch of Hanover who became the famous /King George I of Great Britain after the Stuart line came to dead end,is born
0193 Roman Emperor Pertinax assassinated, he had been luckier as military than as emperor
1881 Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky Russian officer and composer, dies on his birthday at exactly 42,from cirrhosis, after leaving us with Boris Godunov, Pictures at an Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain
AFTER ME THE DELUGE SAID LOUIS XVTH
What was that deluge about, I wish I could ask the handsomest king of France. Was there an awful lot of water or just emptiness for you? If people believe god made the world, was this the feeling the deity had after making man? Was he aware of the monster he had created? I sit here, still trembling with rage and chagrin. I´m supposed to be bulletproof, invulnerable, above feeling demeaned by petty things. My mind is reeling with stupefaction.. Is there no end to the silliness of men? I don´t want the make any more questions. I´m the Cheshire cat, smile disappearing in the midst of a windy mist. As I came I go. Not on tiptoes this time but stomping my way out, boots making a lot of noise on the way out. I want to lay claim to my time, to my right to choose and not compromise, to stop leasing the world even if the world is reduced to one single being. Can one person mean the world to someone else? And if that world crumbles at your feet because your idol had feet made of clay and you caught him or her with pants down grunting on the toilet…just like anyone?
I look at my camouflaged uniform,blue and black and light blue,splotches of indigo,and I realize it has been there for so many years and it isn´t until now that notice how well it covers my so many time injured body, this is the first time I see the beauty of its pattern. I´m not wearing a slinky black nightie, not a teddy can compensate for an ugly face, ever. Cheap silk and nylon cling to your body like unwanted sweaty skin, unsexy, undesirable, sticky, yucky. Rather dead in combat than ever being caught in that attire. Why do women want to be so ridiculous? I take out a small hand mirror and scrutinize my thousand ethnias mixture of a face. Still unlined in the year turn 50. “You, incongruously pretty face above a heavy uniform, like a Japanese doll that is so expensive and dear,” said a Honduranian lieutenant colonel to me, a man who sports his grey hairs and wrinkles with such debonair elegance. He sees me, nevertheless, adrift, worrying about my time, there is such a gaping hole in the middle of my painful emptiness. It is so hard to let go. It is so difficult to slam doors and then think about opening them again knowing that you will slam them anew.
I felt like this in July 1996. My best pal was gone, he had committed suicide, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. Unconsciously, I would lift my hand and dial his number, and then I would remember no phone company has been able to connect to our memories…No longer there. His uniforms and shoes still hung in his closet at home, and at three o clock on Fridays my stomach would rumble in anticipation because at that time we would get together for tea. I know the feeling again. My noontime is mine now and I don´t want it. At 5 pm I get skyline anxious, it is like retreating and kicking a drug habit. You still get the heaves, the shakes, the drop in blood pressure. But somehow you know there is no turning back.
I am left with a long awaited babe in arms, and now born, I just want to give it up in adoption, as if once the father is gone there is no reason for his existence. Babes and kittens can be adopted by others properly without any harm coming after, but a book?
I cannot even drown it…not even in my own tears if I have any left. You remember the scene in Francis Ford Coppola´s Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein when the monster played by De Niro drops into Victor´s nightchamber on the doctor´s wedding night, and when the doc turns him away the monster pounces on still virginal Elizabeth and wrenches her heart out ? That is the exact feeling I have when I leaf through this book for which I am writing this epilog. I was aborted by an unknown hand,torn out of my womb but unlike Zoroaster who was said to have been wrenched from mommy´s womb by a monster and then survived for years eating homemade cheese(who made it? Religious stories are so incongruous and stupid sometimes, they offend our natural intelligence), I have no sense of what to do next. I´ll go back to my short stories, good down to earth money makers and providers of the red and black wings of fame that hover above my uniform and grant me comparisons with Choderlos de Laclos, and Dostoyevsky, two officers turned into writers.
I feel the gentle shadow of Modeste, my Modeste Mussorgsky whose music I have always loved so much, up to the point that I gave him a short story about his wonderful heart. He lays a skinny emaciated hand on my shoulder and upon his touch, the anger flows out. He was born and he died at age 42 on a day like this. Like Michel Praetorius too, great German composer of the Renaissance, born and died on his birthday. Is that the ultimate gift from kismet? His shadow in Russian officer´s uniform sits in front of me, crosses his knees and smiles faintly under his mustache.
Mussorgsly says to me in his Russian accent,” I will take you further into immortality, kitten.. My Russian heart tale will always be a reference, who knows if this crazy hooky diary of this colonel you were won´t be forgotten, is there any guarantee that the entries be kept in order by the person who motivated it? Would it be a bad surprise if I told you the dearest reader might as well lose it, or get it deleted, or never mind it just to show his lady friends boasting how crazy and naïve an intellectual can be? I saw something similar in Russia, something which made a laughingstock of old Peter Tchaikovsky with his famous piano concerto no.1 WE sort of had a courteous enmity with him ,for I was a member of the Group of 5 Nationalists with Rimsky, Cui, Balakirev and Borodin and Peter preferred Western style music….You remember Peter had tailored it for the great pianist Rubinstein, a big jerk if there ever was one, pompous asshole, we hated him. So foppish Peter presents his concerto for his so called friend, and the guy listens in silence, frowning ,grimacing. At the end, Rubinstein gets up and tells the poor Peter he hates every note on it, that the concerto is vulgar and crass and sloppy and stupidly sentimentaloid, so Peter just gets up and storms out of the room in tears. Back home, Peter wrenches off the page with the dedication to Rubinstein, and when the German pianist Hans von Bulow premieres the piece, Peter dedicates it to him. Peter had been so slavishly addicted to Rubinstein, and he discovered like many others did, he had been pissing up the wrong tree. It happens. You have a phrase. Shit happens. No kitten, no need to make your eyes water. Not my intention. I´m just telling you it is not the only case in history, I want to make you feel better. Now I want you to don your uniform again, with no apologies, and smile like your colleague Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia mentioned, that it is good to smile because it existed and never mind that it ended. You have something strong in your hands, never keep the grenade. Throw it or it will blow up in your face. Simply an officer to another officer´s good advice.” I glance at the chair and only a ray of sunlight is there, Modeste has left me again. With a cupful of sound and logical counsels in order not to disgrace myself.
Dead is dead said Stephen King in Pet Sematary. I looked into my file for projects in the short story area. I had three lined up and wasn´t going to practice Nicaragua´s favorite sport: procrastination. If I had the time now it was for my use, and I would lay my uniformed shoulder to the weird wheel of producing phantoms. I just hoped I hadn´t lost my touch. If I had gotten out of a wheelchair before, against all odds, I would get out of this post partum depression sooner or later and the best medication was available: more words, more letters, more literature-I wouldn´t be a writer´s block victim or a literary cripple. It may still bother me to remember what the French said that only when the flower adores does it bear the fruit. But still there was the phrase from that lousy husband but great guerrilla fighter Che Guevara, onto victory always.
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