Mother, courage...

Though as the years passed Mama did indeed stay the same (...).
She had seen Mama at the time the way a child sees an adult, but now
the roles were reversed: Marketa was the adult and (...) Mama appeared to her
small and defenseless as a child. (...) Mama had relinquished the marshall's
baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world. 

in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

My first day of work in Lisbon was memorable. After all, memories with a negative stamp to them seem to linger crispier than others in our brains, surely as one of our evolved survival tools. 

I got late to work after missing an earlier train. The alarm clock had rung at the right time. I did get up and got ready also on time. What delayed me was crashing an old Renault 4L against a tree at low speed while fetching for a lighter. And then, minutes later, halfway to the train station, the clutch cable of an old Mini Morris snapped by itself---I know! It does seem I was in an old car competition of sorts. 

The two cars belonged to my mother’s new companion, and he wasn’t happy about it. Not even after I paid for the mechanic. 

At the time, my mother was pressing me to leave the childhood nest, after her new companion moved in. And that was all understandable and fine. I also wanted to move out. I just hadn’t b€€n abl€ to back th€n. Then Sofia came into my life, and I went to live with her and Bernardo, her four-year-old.

Going back to the farm a few days later to pick up my scant possessions, I was received with such hostility that I stopped talking to my mother gradually, and then not at all for almost a decade.

Then I met my wife, with whom I married just to satisfy her world-view. Indeed, my dears, marriage is an outdated institution, although I still think monogamy to be as good as democracy: Imperfect, but we haven’t figured out a better system yet.  And Ruxandra insisted for me to re-establish communication with my mother, which I did. We met in Lisbon, we cried a little, we hugged, and we kept in contact sporadically. I mean, I did. Ruxandra talked to her frequently. 

Two decades after that, I find myself living with my mother again as a temporary arrangement until I find a new home. And with this new daily contact I came to the realisation that my mother was stuck in time. She didn’t evolve as a person. Sometimes I can’t even avoid being paternalistic towards her as I’m forced to be grandpaternalistic instead. Not only that, but she is already receding “into a different world,” as Kundera puts it. 

However, I didn’t see that happening to José Saramago, a person devoted to the intellectual life. And my mother was married to someone also devoted to the life of the intellect. What happened was that she has devoted herself exclusively to the material aspects of life: Feeding, and clothing her children; cleaning after them; feeding the farm animals; keeping the farm wild vegetation in check. And her emotional landscape is more ridden with rancour, unsolved issues with people she met, than with happy memories. At various times, she’s proven to be mean, vindictive, jealous, and envious. Other times, her ignorance of the world around her is painful to witness. To top it all, and as a consequence of having lived with a buffoon for decades, she makes up stories about other people she has no clue about. Yet she suffers when she cannot participate in a conversation as she lacks the codes to decipher it: Ignorance is only bliss when we’re surrounded by ignorance alone. “A different world,” is where she’s living already. 

Perhaps some of us will also get to experience first-hand that slow transformation from parent into frail child who progressively begins to inhabit a world of his own creation. And in those cases it’s probably better to subtract the negation from those famous lines of Dylan Thomas’ poem to come up with this instead: (...) go gentle into that good night.

I saved a life, but did I save a life?

To readjust my finances, I sold my apartment in Lisbon and went to live in a farm with my mother, sister, and youngest niece. This is a temporary move while hunting for a new den in which I can settle my pillows.

The new arrangement involves a thirty minutes walk to and from the train station that I gladly embraced, missing as I was those walks which owning a dog entail.

One night, around 2 A.M., I was returning to the farm on a bicycle. The headlight began to flicker on this barely lit stretch of road. The batteries were running out but yet I could made out something lying on the other side of the road. It was apparently a drunken man whose lights went out on his way back from a nearby brothel.

As I checked my phone and noticed its batteries were running out as well, I heard the roar of a speeding car approaching. There is a blind road curve just before that spot where the man was lying. I started to wave frantically at the driver to come to a halt. The car braked, swerved, and was able to stop only a bit past the unconscious body.

“Man! If you weren't here I would have rammed that poor bastard!... Thank you! Thank you!” said the driver as he came out of the car, his eyes wide open at the realisation of what could have had happened to him, and to the drunken man.

The driver backed his car to lit the fallen man, and also to protect the latter from another speeding car, an ambulance was called, and I excused myself and proceeded home. My curiosity wasn't enough to beat my fatigue, and my priority had reverted to hug my pillows.

The following day I realised that the train had arrived late due to some impromptu tracks maintenance. And that I wouldn’t be there at all that night had I managed better my finances.

So I didn’t save any life. A series of coincidences did. And I cannot even know if the man was better off dead, as there's something already slightly defunct about passing out drunk and alone on the middle of a road after a night in a brothel.

How lucky was that poor drunken bastard?

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.

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...

I get it now

I get religion now.

I get even self-flogging.

We all want to be loved. Deeply.

We all need to be loved. But deeply.

And if we don't get it, we'll create it.

And if we don't, we'll suffocate.

And if we do, we'll suffocate?

Love or a surrogate,

a threshold we didn't set,

and this life is a quest

for a key,

for there's sorrow,

for there's a gate.

Bring on your whip!

All we have is blood to give.

Two Duets - A Quartet

On Children

by Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

The Universe

for Jennifer


The Universe was born out of a singularity and
is composed of but one lonely verse. 
It is expanding in search of another Universe.
Then, as a Multiverse, they might merge one day. 

In the Universe we also find stars and planets all alone. 
Even those that have the company of debris or moons
cannot touch them or by those be touched.
This is a scenario of a certain gravity.

Comets and meteors provide orgasms
when they crash into a celestial body.
The larger the crashing object the greater the spasm.
Material spread out in circles of pain, later pleasure. Or even life.

We too are a by-product of this truly divine sex.

Planets ova; comets sperm.    




___________

Photo by the astrophotographer Miguel Claro
(The Milky Way above Lake Alqueva, Portugal)