Hurry

Hurry, I need a little rage

and a little war to blow my stillness away,

a severe detonation to colour grey matter,

to trigger off a neuron or emotion

or to move from this month to May,

for if Earth stopped its life would wither,

and if for no other reason,

I need a little dance, love — it’s Saturday.

 

But, damned be, wisdom demands a full stop,

calmness to judge what's going astray,

and the quietness of its voice to lasso a child

hyperactive showing off life in its full array.

 

To live, then, is to suffer from bipolar disorder,

a deadlock which key lies in what is to be,

for I die to live, hooray!

 

 

 

 

Puzzle in L major

Maybe almost all were born

under the sign of a Puzzle:

“love”, “to”, “make”, “me”.

She was, no matter how

I reorder those words.

 

"What's cooking?"

As Richard Wrangham, an antropologist, is connecting the human species’ evolution to cooked food (which takes less calories to deal with because it’s softer, and would finally contribute to make us these unusual animals that we are), I’m wondering about what benefits such food will bring or already brought to the mammals who live closer to us, namely dogs, cats and rats.

 

Link to the article on Wrangham’s theory here: What's cooking?

 

 

The sad lives of the Memonon

     The Memonon * are a curious species I am only aware of recently. There are always too many events going on, or my easily distracted disposition fails to perceive the obvious for a long time.

     I know that life is experimental by nature, and we can admire it superficially in human faces, when by their observation we’re reminded of fish, dogs, birds, hopefully not while gazing at a mirror. But the Memonon… why did life bother?

     And how could we’ve not noticed them before? I googled them out and found none to have been reported online. So we need some hints to hunt them down and begin their documenting.

     One of their most common phrasing is, “Life is short.” They can produce such an utterance since their teenage years up to their last breath on earth. Evolution seems to have endowed them with the inability to remember every second they lived until each moment they’re considering their lives to be short.

    That one might be a good trait. Let’s imagine that a male Memonon could at, say, 23 years of age remember his entire past life. It would take him exactly 23 more years to relive it all in his memory. By the end of that experience, the average Memonon would be 46 years old. Would he still feel like saying that, “Life is short,” or, “What the heck have I been saying”?

     According to the latest studies on neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology I’ve been reading, the Memonon will most likely keep on behaving the same way even after reading this short account of mine. It’s in their genes. But at the very least some of us will realise what we’re not part of them, and praise our brains for condensing our past memories into a feeling that will not transform itself into the "life is short" fallacy.

 

__________

 

 

* Word coined out of memory, moron and non. 

 

Piazza de Fiore... - by Natália Correia

V

Piazza de Fiore     

Hungarian fingers

were spelling out mimosas on my nape.

The windows had plump arms.

With golden spoons, the sky was having the broth

of the tiny alleys. Soprano fountains

were playing the city’s ‘Do.

Violin of yellow leaves,

the Tiber was opening the afternoon's peach.

On the day’s metallic surroundings

(the grinding of teeth of my sensations)

the sandpaper of goodbye was polishing

aeroplanes’ hooked nails.

Oh, the carnivorous smile of cities

which the lovers swing

on white public benches!

The farewell: a bird stuck

in an aluminium tear.

________ 

in Natália Correia’s «Motherland»

translated into Antonish by yours truly

An absorbing thought

As Mitch Sogin found sponges

to be at the base of the animal kingdom,

my doubt increases with the insight.

 

And we have spongiform brains,

and spongiform lungs.

 

Conceivably we’re allowed to absorb

and expel at last with neither guilt

nor remorse. 

 

 

Dear Flawed Diary - What else I’ve been doing

Last month I got to attend to a round table on the topic of “Is it still worth being a Francophile?” It took place in Fernando Pessoa’s House – the last building the man lived in, which now holds a library, several memorabilia, concert and conference rooms, etc.  

 

Talking there were a journalist, four literary academics (one of them a man of sciences also) and a publisher. The conclusion they seem to have reached was that French literature, like any other in the world, is suffering from a depression. That we’re crossing an arid period. That there’s no Faulkner, no Proust in sight.

 

Well, it makes some sense, even if they’re wrong. Wrong because it’s impossible to read everything that is being published nowadays. Or so I think, if we’re talking of reading properly, with time to think about what we’re being fed with, or even to check out the allusions made to other authors, as one example. At least it must be impossible without developing some sort of schizophrenia, of that type that we'll develop if we want to become a top politician, having to deal with crushing amounts of information, deal with the media, deal with the public and still find some time to rest. Is it possible such rest after each epic day? Are all our top politicians on sleeping pills? How will that affect their judgement and decision-making?     

 

But, yes, we're depressed by climate change, by economic pressure that generates too much stress, by ineffectual or doubtful politics, by contaminating plastics, by no drastic measure to change its production, by collections of nasty events called news-flashes, by too many strangers around whom we have no time to meet, by the increase of crime-rates (surely associated to economical fluctuations), by everything I don’t want to spend time thinking about right now, and by the glorious etc. The inventor of et caetera should be awarded some sort of posthumous prize. 

 

It’s difficult not to get depressed under those conditions. Literature would thus reflect it. Unless you’re a lucky bastard who was born with a genetic combination that promotes a positive attitude towards everything, including towards a bucketful of bulshit thrown at your face on purpose. Or unless you drink some red wine and put some music on. If you’ve the money for the wine, or for the audio device, not to mention for the place to enjoy those in.

 

Time then for the comical relief: I’m going to host later this month a CouchSurfing Global Ambassador. She is a North-American working in Munich. A vegetarian by the name of Brie. No jokes about French cheese here, please. And she’s also a lover of moose. So much so that she thinks she was one in a past life of hers. To the extent of her apartment being also known as the mooseum.

 

Thoughts for hermits

As I stumbled upon this provocative article and got much pleasure in return, I decided to draw your attention to it, expecting that your multitude, which is better known as you, gets at least a little kick out of it.

 

Aperitif:

 

Leibniz never married. He had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Fontenelle

 

(…)

 

If today's gal proudly proclaims her independence, the bachelor remains hopelessly reliant on the fairer sex. "Single men are not in general very good at life,” maintains Gilder. “The key to the singles failure is the profound biological dependence of men on women—deeper than any feminist or male chauvinist understands."

 

 

in Christopher Orlet’s “Bachelorhood and Its Discontents”

 

 

Full article here:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/22098/sec_id/22098

 

 

 

 

Hüzün

The following is an excerpt from Alberto Manguel's book review of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul: Memories and the City

___________

All happy cities resemble one another (as Tolstoy famously observed of families) but each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston, share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy. According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is hüzün, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” For the Sufis, hüzün is the spiritual anguish we feel because of not being close enough to God; for St John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire. Hüzün is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of hüzün that causes the sufferer distress. “It is the failure to experience hüzün,” says Pamuk, “that leads him to feel it.” According to Pamuk, hüzün is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. “What I’m trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, “is the hüzün of an entire city: of Istanbul.”

(...)

There is a past tense in Turkish that does not exist in English, that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay and that which he has seen with his own eyes: “when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.”

___________

The full review: http://www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/documents/PamukMyCityinRuins.pdf

Alberto Manguel's column in Geist: http://www.geist.com/author/manguel-alberto

Autumn and Home

Autumn advertises each winter vividly,

and one touches the damp earth,

feels sunrays fading power —

a light too cold or clean to be real,

the longer shades of sadness —

while migratory birds mock from above,

and countries' borders become physical.

 

 

After the trees strip off their shame,

snow will claim its fields back

with self-enforcing purity.

 

 

Even prior to the human genetic map,

it's clear life couldn't spring from this land;

Kaplinski was right and we’re not home,

therefore the longing.