Under Maintenance

M  A  I  N  T  E  N  A  N  C  E

Maintenance of the brain, a muscle, which thus needs to be exercised. Of the limbs, of imagination. Of the herd, or the garden. Of peace, of the weapon. Of friendships, of each ship. Maintenance everywhere, all around us. 

Maintenance is the humdrum of life, and without it there would be no life not even in a cell. Even in a monk's cell.

I have been not very good at maintenance, and I don't know if I ever possessed such skill. To realize the dimension of my ineptitude, all I need is to examine my home which has lately been maintained by me alone. It cries out for maintenance. I'm either deaf or enjoy the melody of its wailing walls.   

What if my brain is likewise in need of fresh paint, plaster to cover its cracks? 

Could I just disguise decrepitude with classic statues of missing limbs? Keep foreign music playing so that the visitor's brain is too distracted to notice the ruin? Glue newspaper clips onto the walls distracting the visitor even further? Leave poems on the rafters or boards that need to be replaced? Place olive oil scented candles in every room? And the sex scented candle, should I put it out?  

All I know is that this was written under maintenance.

Open letter to the next armed mass murderer

My dear fellow human being,

For various reasons and lack of, which I strongly believe are not entirely your fault, you came to a point where you want to take your life but also want to take some others' lives with you for the ride. 

That is all very well, but spare me a bit of your attention and I promise you you won't regret it. 

You have a lethal gun or more and easy access, also, to ammo. So going down to a random place such as a school, or a church, where people are most likely unarmed or have extreme difficulties to thwart your plans, namely by being unable to fight you off, is, and you'll agree, quite the coward act. Do you want your last action on Earth to be just that? A last cowardly and attention seeking goodbye? Besides, shootings in schools and similar pacific locations are so common place that you would be only one more unimaginative armed mass murderer.

Now, I'm your friend even though we might not ever meet, and I think you deserve better than that. 

Imagine the challenge of storming into a NRA championship and trying out your skills with people who could fight back?  You'd have others helping you with the firecrackers and fireworks for free! Wouldn't that be less lonely a farewell party? Remember, the better armed you are the more memorable you can make that occasion. And those who would march with you to the afterlife would be fellow gun wielders and most likely as paranoid as you. So much more to talk about for eternity...  

Instead, if you want to be sure you take some friends with you, then your venue of choice should be a NRA meeting. The seconds it will take for any participant to be able to fire back at you are enough to take down a few of them. And one last idea: don't the organizers on the meeting stand seem like sitting ducks or common head and torso targets? A chance to honey your skills and be remembered for that. 

As I said, I'm your friend and thus need to tell you the whole truth. My pitch above has the goal of changing some people's views on gun control after going through a strong emotional process, such as your farewell party would be. That's because logical arguments don't seem to be as effective. Put simply, emotion trumps logic all the time. And you'd be the one who left us but made a real change.

Yours truly,

Emo Trumps 

Of Chicken and Arrows

for Jennifer and Jack

Apollo

The deeper the bond the mightier the loss.
A mother surrenders her child to the world. 
Then, tossing and turning in bed, 
The mother's fears are unfurled.

This scene's a repetition, as old
As the dilemma of the chicken and the egg.
But for the mother and her child, a first
Step into the marvelous, untold. 

How come this little chick 
Became such Hen, or such Cock? 
They stride on their own now
But the mother's still in shock. 

With a void beneath her wing
By the shape of her chick deformed,
The mother swings in between pride
And doubt: did she do her lot?

If Gibran was right, parents are the bow
And their offspring living arrows.
The mystery lies in the Archer, 
To whose force we must bend.

The Bow is left to witness the flight,
The Arrow depends on its fletchings alone
While outside winds shape its aim 
And gravity exerts its pull.

As the mother looks to her side, 
The quiver is nonetheless empty. 
Therefore the quivering lips.
Therefore all this repeated show.

Patience – a virtue

Are you patient, she asked.

Avoiding the memory anchor that every personal question makes us drop in the exclusive deep sea of what is being asked—which makes us forget that that are more seas, with other storms, and other lulls, that we endured or are yet to witness, or to experience—I put the question in a small boat and patiently kept an eye on it to see how it fared on different times of the day during a few days, which currents took it and to where.

I can tell you this: at night, Patience sleeps soundly and quietly. And we’ve to wait for it to wake up to continue with our observations, to further update our log.

From the Talmud to Nietzsche—and I can’t think of better opposites here: the hot blooded Hebrews and the cold headed German—patience comes out as a virtue. But it is also a word. In such quality, is it one those that have a translation in the de facto world?

For the patient reader who navigated through all those marine images above and is now reading this, a reward: those images had a reason, as the first example comes from the sea.

The female anglerfish, at the floor of one of our seas, patiently waits for her lured prey to come close enough to suck it into her stomach. That requires a seemingly substantial amount of patience, and also a tolerant disposition to eat what the sea brings. It requires immobility too. Then a more active male anglerfish will eventually find her, bite his way into her, his body will dissolve into hers, leaving behind but a pair of gonads—bags of semen. And she can collect many pairs from various males. So there’s some lesson here: patience and pain, at least the ability to withstand the latter, seem to walk hand in hand, or at least swim fin on fin. As Aristotle put it, “Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.” Or salty, depending on how we cook our anglerfish.

The more active predator is blessed with choice. And which better predator to teach us that than us humans? Supposedly our ancestors were weak and had to resort to tools to hunt down larger preys, which in turn would feed more properly the group that was needed to hunt those same preys. Yet their spears, as one example, were unlikely to kill instantly a large animal. Enters Patience: the patience to follow the wounded animal's tracks until it laid down, bleeding to death.

What lessons can we learn from this couple of examples? That patient ones might be just waiting to eat you alive or to injure you to death. It might be no coincidence that the word patience is also related to suffering.

That’s maybe why the late Christopher Hitchens’ take on the subject of patience is the most dear to my still beating heart:

“Your least favourite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

There’s No Biz Like Showbiz

“We live in a show business society and we must take it as a revelation or scientific truth – each one will decide according to the way one is in this world. All is show business, from the religious acting to the political one, from the images of a train wreck to those of a concert.” Pilar del Río wrote in an issue of Blimunda, a magazine published by José Saramago’s Foundation.

Donald Trump seems to adhere to that view and is now the Republican front-runner for the next American presidential elections. And he has some credentials for this: he is a businessman and an expert in shows, having graduated in that area of human knowledge the old way, that is, after a few seasons as an apprentice.

Most recently, Mr Trump played out an old card from the political deck: he claims that as some opponents don’t have experience of running a company as he does then they are less prepared than he is to be president of the most powerful economy in the world. (Trump also says that he wants to make America great again, but when did it stop being so?)

It sounds like he has a point, at a first glance. But is a government really like a company? Do companies run specifically to try and better the lives of their employees? Do employees pay their companies a sum of money so that the interests and needs of all of them are taken care of? Or, in a reverse glance, is making a profit a government’s goal?  Sure, there are similarities in both enterprises. However “government is like business” is a textbook example of a false analogy.

In an analogy, two objects (or events), A and B are shown to be similar. Then it is argued that since A has property P, so also B must have property P. An analogy fails when the two objects, A and B, are different in a way which affects whether they both have property P.

Examples:

1.Employees are like nails. Just as nails must be hit in the head in order to make them work, so must employees.

2. Government is like business, so just as business must be sensitive primarily to the bottom line, so also must government. (But the objectives of government and business are completely different, so probably they will have to meet different criteria.)

Sorry to have to hit this nail in the head and into your brain, Mr Trump. You didn’t invent the use of false analogies in political discourse, nor outing you on this use will end such practice. After all, even without you, “the show must go on.” And on, and on, and on. Over and out.

As Jon Stewart showed a few times during his last appearances on The Daily Show, there’s no candidate as entertaining as Donald Trump. He’s a guilty pleasure of ours, hopefully only for a summer’s worth of entertainment: the silly season run by the truly silly. The way he trashes out his opponents reveals not Trump's brilliance but rather how poor his opposition really is.

Yet, using a bit of our imagination, we can see Mr Trump being elected. Bush II was elected, for two terms, so why wouldn’t Trump have a chance? The former managed to start two wars which ultimately offered ISIS to the world and the largest number of refugees since World War II. Mr Trump is a businessman, and he’ll deliver at least the double: “A bargain, I say! Four wars for the duration of one presidency! Gather around, folks! What a show I have for you! You’ll never be bored to death again!”

Let’s brace then for some futuristic wars, 

The US-Mexican Walled War I. President Trump built a wall in between the two countries and made Mexico pay for it, which they gladly did to prevent the surge of Americans who were trying to escape their own business, sorry, government. 

The Vag Wars saw all women hunted down and incarcerated in Kitchen-Prisons for decades with the sole purpose of catering food to the troops, and where solitary confinement was replaced by coupleteries in which the inmates were forced to satisfy sexually Free Men for free. 

Canada was annexed after its soldiers were taken by surprise while laughing about what was going on with their neighbours’ government: The Yes We Canuck War.

And, finally, the fierce Hairy Civil War (Fighting at Home is Cheaper!). All males were forced to shave their heads in order to make the president have the best (the only) hairdo in the land. Heavy Metal fans went underground where they let their hair grow the longest possible to defy the authority. They all grew deaf also because their favourite music is more damaging when reverberated off cave walls. Authorities developed listening devices to catch the Metal Moles.

The future will be a true Hell of a show!

     

Relief - a double entendre

We talk on the phone about our pains,

Our victories, our demands,

Absurdities, peculiarities;

About love, about strength,

Hair loss, diets, sex and penis length.

Sometimes we even sob holding the phone as a life line

Invisible, wireless these days.

But we must connect and reconnect,

Regret — and reregret if we’re pathet.

She does all that on the phone with me.

But while peeing. Splash.

And it feels great.

Cruel Love Duel

   How many masks wear we, and undermasks, 
   Upon our countenance of soul, and when, 
   If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, 
   Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? 

in Fernando Pessoa's Sonnet VIII, 35 English Sonnets


Though Pessoa took off every mask
And found but more masking of the soul,
He probably forgot one item in such task:
A Dorian mirror that we must face
Naked and unsure,
Vulnerable as the clinical eyes of Love
Reveal the masks and the masquerade
Our lifes have been.

Then our biological self kicks in:
We either freeze, pretend death, 
And believe in rebirth,
Or we flee the scene,
Or fight against the image obscene. 

Langi

O Langi faleceu hoje de manhã. Deixo aqui então um texto que lhe escrevi em 2011:

Ah, este amor-cão!...

Entraste na minha vida com medo
e eu na tua por atracção.
Apenas um de nós sairá vivo
desta animalesca relação.

Ensinaste-me a fertilidade da merda,
e que o odor exige habituação.
Ensinei-te que da liberdade a perda
nem sempre será um senão.

Lembro-me das ondas, quando as viste
entre forte temor e admiração.
Deslumbraste-te de areia e sentiste
que trincar líquidos o é em vão.

Esta rima tão parva não é um acaso;
é a que melhor serve de ilustração
a um sentimento tão bem animado:
amor-cão, amor-cão, amor-cão!

E quando não rimamos, ouço-te
ladrar bem alto: estou vivo, uivo,
sou feroz, e matreiro,
mordo tudo: sapato, rabo e rato.
Mas no teu silêncio o olho diz-te:
Dá-me comida, por compaixão.

Is Life Short?

Salvador Dalí's "The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory"

It’s almost daily that we hear someone—including ourselves—saying something similar to “Life is short.” And it is. Or is it not? Perhaps it’s both at the same time.

Let's imagine we're thirty years old and that we have the ability to remember each passing second of our lives in between ages five and twenty-five. By the time we'd finish recollecting all those moments, we’d be fifty years old (30+20): That is, twenty years late for dinner. We'd probably also be very angry at the enormous waste of time devoted to thinking about our past.

Luckily and instead, our brains pick up just a few highlights out of all the time we lived, and present them to our conscious self as the past. That extremely edited version of our lives is much less time consuming. No wonder then that it seems to us that time passed so fast, and that “Life is short” is such an adequate phrase for what we've just experienced brain-wise.

It’s a tradeoff in the end. Life seems to be shorter than it really was, time seems to have passed faster than it actually did, yet and thanks to that trait we can stop from time to time and evoke our past without ageing too much in that very process.

Thank you, brain! You dearest traitor...

A ordem natural

Na ordem natural, em desordem a vida.
O cão torna-se velho e morre em espelho;
a mãe, ela segue mas numa via paralela;
dos sobrinhos temos margem de sobra;
e no trilho deles todo o filho. Ou adopte-se.

Dos amantes, dormimos com todo o amante
e eles com todo o nosso, sem beijo ou osso
trocado (o osso) e acariciado (o beijo), 
mas toma lá um postal vírico no verso:
“Poderíamos ter sido nós; não foi”
assim, sem pontuação final ou diagnóstico.

E do juízo, julgamos que o siso nos cresce
a cada menos um dente. Ardendo a madeira
da memória, no fumo diferente a de cada,
em cada, a floresta lida ou, nela, uma sesta,
e cinzas na cadeia do pensamento próprio.

International Kissing Day, 2015

Gustave Klimt's The Kiss

Yes, today's international kissing day. For the rest of the year, only hugs are allowed. And a lot of killing.

My studies in linguistics remind me that first we've to deal with ambiguity here. Is this a day for international kissing, or a kissing day for more than one nation? I chose the first meaning, but you're free to kiss only persons who were born inside the same abstract, controversial, and man made borders as yours. 

Borders that are now being used as safe havens to withhold cash from your economy, extracting cash from your pockets (which has a dire effect on the amount of kissing you may get or are willing to engage in) through higher taxes to those who cannot evade them. Borders that in some cases are likely to be linked with devastation in many forms. And therefore having to do more with killing than with kissing. 

In some instances, however, the absence of borders is what makes conflict more likely, as in the cases of Kurdistan or Euskal Herria (Basque Country), which are single cultures divided by borders not of their own. People there can on occasion be forced to international kissing even if they don't want to. 

I'd be even more of a fool if I forgot to mention that in Eastern Ukraine the majority wants to kiss Russian men on the lips while in Western Ukraine kissing Germans tends to be more trendy. 

The apparently steady rise of nationalism in Europe will most likely hinder international kissing. In Hungary, the extreme right is gaining ground as we saw by the outcome in the last elections, while, in France, Marine Le Pen doesn't want her dose of fatherly kissing any more. 

And if you're still in doubt that kissing is related to borders, here's one last argument: inserting the tongue in your partner's mouth is a question of establishing a bridge in between two different bodies' limits (borders). And if there were no borders at all it wouldn't be called French kissing. 

So wherever you are, whichever is your gender of the six (heterosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, transsexual, or asexual), there are no limits to this international kiss of mine. I particularly nourish the thought of ISIS (Daesh) men French kissing each other today. They are indeed fighting to establish borders where there were none, and their origin is international. Set up the example, boys! And stop fooling around with more borders.

Rodin's Riders

Auguste Rodin's "Centaur"

To ride with and be ridden simultaneously;
pure, coeval, ride and rider:
the very stuff of synchronicity.  

Abandoning self-control, sweaty, 
animal and anima together, 
the longer they trot the more
their minds bloom away disarmingly, 

Then they gallop:

road, dirt;
orchards, colours;
stones, moons;
town, church;
hilltop, silence;
beach, breeze;

Halt! A break: 

a verdant picnic ensues, new smells,
sight scanning the surroundings,
a radar which will bleep only once 
to tell love to home in on the lover
thus beginning their face à face,
coeur à coeur: il faut courir.  

Newark

for Jennifer


In Newark, a bird landed,
of skies weary, merry its eyes.

An entire continent of humanity
had been under its wings,
incontinent prattle by its side.

Yet, when we move up close,
birds that so gracefully soared
are the embodiment of anxiety.

Mostly so in Spring, nesting,
collecting twig and straw
out of the best tree and field
that while soaring they saw.

Drinking from a nearby pond,
they cool down for a new round
until down the sun goes,
their chirp piercing the dusk
before the tranquil night.

Half the work being done,
soon our bird will fully rest
its bright plumage and breast
amidst the fruit of its toil.

And then, seen from the soil,
secure, a work of much art,
its nest will become a new ark.

To choose is to eliminate

“No no no no no no no no no no no no,” a cute toddler sang without a hint of punctuation. “She’s in love with the word ‘no’,” her grandmother explained.

Perhaps there is simply too much of everything around us, and we have to choose. Or the choice is not even solely dependent on our will. And any choice is a process of elimination of everything else. Or are there superwomen and supermen, these Übermenschen, who can take it all in? Human blackholes, what would become of the information compactly stored within them? Would it be reused in dreams, or lost in faulty synapsing? Would it remerge unexpectedly, uncalled for, to help in the creation of a new work of art? 

“No no no no no no no.”

“Thou shalt not pass!”

Different Walks of Life

The freedom to punch

Pope Francis in an airplane, and Dr. Gasbarri laughing at the prospect of being punched on the face by the former... because he's too weak by now?

«It's true that we can't react violently, but, for example if Dr. Gasbarri here, a great friend of mine, says a curse word against my mother, then a punch awaits him. It’s normal… It’s normal… One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people's faith, one cannot make fun of faith. There is a limit. Every religion has its dignity ... In freedom of expression there are limits.»

Those were the heightened, heavenly words of Pope Francis, specially so for he proffered them while flying in an airplane. Most likely even God Herself overheard him—he was that close to Her. 

Landing a fist on a friend’s face because the latter said something offensive about our mother is not the same as killing a dozen persons because our deceased and supposed Father was offended. So Francis’ argument seems not to take off right from the beginning.

But let’s imagine, for two minutes or a couple of thousand of years, that Francis' argument was valid, which is something we usually have to do anyway when the likes of Popes are talking. 

My father, who, like Muḥammad, is deceased, was a huge defender of the freedom of speech and of respect towards our intellectual opponents’ viewpoints. He even had the nerve to tell his progeny that he wasn't religious, but if any one of us five wanted to be baptized and follow a creed that he would hold nothing against us. 

Setting up limits to “freedom of expression,” as Pope Francis wishes, is no easy task. For instance, who would set those limits? And why those persons and not others?  And what about defining the limits themselves? Is the limit set to when someone is offended or feel that their beliefs are being made fun of? We’re always offending someone: reading the comments that Internet trolls leave on almost every website might help you reach that conclusion. So the complexity of setting any kind of limits to the freedom of speech is huge not to say insurmountable.  And what could the solution to it be? We can always try not to offend people, or accept the fact that our beliefs (and not only) will be offended, as that’s the way of the world, never forgetting that our beliefs are not us, and that beliefs can very well change. 

What I think is that Pope Francis, unless he apologizes for having said that there are limits, offended my father by not respecting his idea of no limits to the freedom of speech, and insulted my belief that religion—like any thing else, I repeat, like any thing else—has no dignity attached to it per se unless demonstrated, item by item. Francis also offended God for She's been thought to be a male for far too long.

And therefore, Pope Francis, according to his own reasoning, should be the first one to admit that I have the natural right to punch him in on the face. As I'm kind, I'll be happy if he just offers me one cheek to slap. Only one.  Only once.

Intimacy - a maturing tendril

for Jennifer


Intimacy is time plus its tempo entwined,
rooted deeply into a soil as black as fertile, 
under which water rushes—

mineral urges—and undermines
all that is past, and turns it into a paste 
by the time and tempo intimacy's vivified.    






_______

photo by backyardnature.com