The Border

He visited the western border,

like most western borders,

wild, unruly,

like waves;

and this border’s an ocean.

 

Contemplating an ocean

makes him waver, shudder

and shush, like beauty.

 

He then visited the northern border,

where a language is spoken

with the accent of a split

Gallician family.

 

He then travelled south

and this border was familiar,

the same ocean:

a calmer surface, yet strong

currents underneath,

like diplomacy.

 

Then east, always

from where barbarians come;

ask the Saxons about the Vikings,

ask the American tribes,

the Estonians,

the Greeks, classic or otherwise,

the Finns; ask in Wales,

in Ireland, in Portugal.

 

He thought, returning home,

that barbarians are hordes,

outsiders to his mental geometry.

 

 

 

 

What are the chances?

Some weeks ago, J.S. Porter, an Irish-Canadian future ex-teacher of literature, writer and poet, essayist and critic, father and dog's master, suggested that we both read a book in a way related to a topic the two of us are interested in, that of André Breton’s Nadja. I decided to get a copy in English of that other book so that we would be reading almost the same. I’m positive that when I read something in English I’m not experiencing it as a native speaker of the language would. And I’m also positive that that happens even when two native speakers read the same text. But that is sheer divagation.

Amazon.com.uk was the selected source for getting the book. By chance we ended up by purchasing the same edition. But that is still not the reason for giving such a title to this text.

One of my favourite writers is Bruce Chatwin. He dealt mainly with human restlessness. I’m afraid some of his topic matters will become obsolete as some new scientific data is uncovered. Nevertheless he writes with a smile that he probably lived with. There’s warmth, kindness in his descriptions of even the most ridicule of characters. I still haven’t read Chatwin’s biography so this is perhaps just pointless guessing.

Some months ago, I lent my favourite work by Chatwin, The Songlines. Knowing not if I’ll ever get it back, I decided to order at Amazon.com.uk a copy of an edition that included three of his best novels, along with Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant — the book we’re supposed to read together but that has nothing to do with anything here, except for the fact that everything is interconnected. Considering only The Songlines, this is the third time I buy a copy. The previous two were lent and lost, lent and lost.

The copy I ordered was used but in excellent shape. Or was it? On the first page after the cover there was a dedicatory:

I’m still not sure, but I first read:

For Pupa

From Pupa

                        Amorzinho

The loving name of the person who offered the book at a first sight to himself or herself could also be Pupam, Pupum — I can’t figure it out for sure. Amorzinho is Portuguese for little love but, unlike most of the Portuguese nouns, it reveals not the gender.

It could have been written by any citizen of a Portuguese speaking country or even by a person who simply knew the language. I checked the package in which the book came. It was sent from the USA.

Today, while browsing the book, I found something stuck in between page 434 and 435, already a chapter of The Songlines:

It is a ticket from a movie theatre in Lisbon. Its price in the previous Portuguese currency, Escudos.

So tell me, if you please, what are the chances of ordering an used book in English and getting one shipped from the USA that was in Lisbon already and witnessed a love story even if one of self-love?

Quoting notes

In Aranda Traditions Strehlow contrasts two Central Australian peoples: one sedentary, one mobile.

The Aranda, living in a country of safe waterholes and plentiful game, were arch-conservatives whose ceremonies were unchangeable, initiations brutal, and whose penalty for sacrilege was death. They looked on themselves as a 'pure' race, and rarely thought of leaving their land.

The Western Desert People, on the other hand, were as open-minded as the Aranda were closed. They borrowed songs and dances freely, loving their land no less and yet forever on the move. 'The most striking thing about these people', Strehlow writes, 'was their ready laughter. They were a cheerful laughing people, who bore themselves as though they had never known a care in the world. Aranda men, civilised on sheep stations, used to say, "They are always laughing. They can't help it."'

 

in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines

Quoting

If every newborn baby has an appetite for forward motion, the next step is to find out why it hates lying still.

 

Penetrating further into the causes of anxiety and anger in the very young, Dr Bowlby concluded that the complex instinctual bond between a mother and her child – the child’s screams of alarm (quite different to the whimperings of cold or hunger or sickness); the mother’s ‘uncanny’ ability to hear those screams; the child’s fear of the dark, and of strangers; its terror of rapidly approaching objects; its invention of nightmarish monsters where none exist; in short, all those ‘puzzling phobias’ which Freud sought to explain and failed, could, in fact, be explained by the constant presence of predators in the primaeval home of man.

 

Bowlby quotes from William Jame’s Principles of Psychology, ‘The greatest source of terror in childhood is solitude.’ A solitary child, kicking and yelling in its cot, is not, therefore, necessarily showing the first signs of the Death Wish, or of the Will to Power, or of an ‘aggressive drive’ to bash its brother’s teeth in. These may or may not develop later. No. The child is yelling – if you transpose the cot on to the African thornscrub – because, unless the mother comes back in a couple of minutes, a hyena will have got it.

 

Every child appears to have an innate mental picture of the ‘thing’ that might attack: so much so that any threatening ‘thing’, even if it is not the real ‘thing’, will trigger off a predictable sequence of defensive behaviour. The screams and kicks are the first line of defence. The mother must then be prepared to fight for the child; and the father to fight for them both. The danger doubles at night, because man has no night vision and the big cats hunt at night. And surely this most Manichean drama – of light, darkness and the Beast – lies at the heart of the human predicament.

 

Visitors to a baby ward in hospital are often surprised by the silence. Yet if the mother really has abandoned her child, its only chance of survival is to shut its mouth.

 

 

in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines

Quoting quotes

"The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world's childhood men were by nature sublime poets...
Giambattista Vico, The New Science, XXXVII

Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful.
idem, idem, LIX"

In Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Vintage, London, 1998, p.269

Rejoicing

Since yesterday, a copy of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines makes part again of my touchable bibliography. The pleasure of rereading it is immense, and Michael Nyman's Film music 1980-2001 (also a result from yesterday's beauty-hunt) is accompanying it superbly. Pity I cannot quote the whole immensity of quotes and notes Chatwin collected (around 150 pages of the book) that you might think are pointless. Pity I cannot play Nyman's music that you might not like. So all there is left for me is to rejoice. And rejoicing I am! Wonderful spiral that rejoicing is, such an happy madness...

At dinner with Diana Vreeland - Bruce Chatwin

Her glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask table-cloth. Beyond the smear of lipstick, a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette.
'What are you writing about, Bruce?'
'Wales, Diana.'
The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees.
'Whales!' she said. 'Blue whales!... Sperrrm whales!... THE WHITE WHALE!'
'No... no, Diana! Wales! Welsh Wales! The country to the west of England.'
'Oh! Wales. I DO know Wales. Little grey houses... covered in roses... in the rain...'



in Bruce Chatwin's What Am I Doing Here, Picador, 1990