it's the little things

Rossi Braidotti, Nuovi soggetti nomadi (2002)

2010-06-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

The nomad is perforce a polyglot and the polyglot is a nomad of language, constantly living between different idioms. He/she is a specialist of the treachery nature of every language. Words do not remain fixed, they start to wander in their autonomous manner, here and there, along preexisting semantic pathways, leaving behind them acoustical traces written or unconscious...so that, when a book [which has been thought and written across several languages] goes to print, it is already like a translation without an original text, a philosophical work without a referential mother-tongue, made of successive translations and displacements.... Nomadism is not only a theoretical option, it proves to be also an existential condition which expresses itself in a determinate style of thought.

Fatou Diome, Le Ventre de l'Atlantique

2010-01-10T04:41:00.000-08:00

En Afrique, je suivais le sillage du destin, fait de hasard et d'un espoir infini. En Europe, je marche dans le long tunnel de la performance qui conduit à des objectifs bien définis. Ici, point de hasard, chaque pas mène vers un résultat escompté ; l'espoir se mesure au degré de combativité. (...) Alors, dans le gris ou sous un soleil inattendu, j'avance sous le ciel d'Europe en comptant mes pas et les petits mètres de rêve franchis. Mais combien de kilomètres, de journées de labeur, de nuits d'insomnie me séparent encore d'une hypothétique réussite qui, pourtant, va tellement de soi pour les miens, dès l'instant que je leur ai annoncé mon départ pour la France? J'avance, les pas lourds de leurs rêves, la tête remplie des miens. J'avance, et ne connais pas ma destination. J'ignore sur quel mât on hisse le drappeau de la victoire, j'ignore également les grandes eaux capables de laver l'affront de l'échec.

Conversations with Tom Sarr

2009-08-11T04:46:00.000-07:00

From Bertoncello, B. (2009) Du Sénégal à Marseille: migration réussie d'un gentleman rasta. Paris: l'Harmattan.

... c'est cette volonté de partir, de traverser l'Atlantique à tout prix même si après on n'ose pas raconter ce quie s'est passé. Quand je suis à Palmarin, des jeunes me demandent de les aider à venir en France mais je leur explique que ce n'est pas de tout repos. Entre J.M. Le Pen, C. Pasqua et N. Sarkozy, c'est plutôt disuasif ... (rires)! Les jeunes savent, ils entendent parler des cargaisons de Sénégalais qui rentrent à Dakar, la presse en fait écho et ils on accès à l'information internationale mais ils veulent faire leur propre expérience. Ils se disent: "Pire que là où je suis, je ne peux pas tomber". Pour eux dans les pays européens, il y a toujours à faire; il y a des usines, des services ... ils se débruilleront.

(p. 59)

A 66 ans j'ai deux visions de l'Afrique. Je pense à tous les "gâchis" qui ont été faits par les dirigeants de ces pays mais attention c'était dans le context d'une époque, avec les modèles disponibles du moment. Ça n'était pas totalement de leur faute: quand on te donne un outil sans te donner le mode d'emploi eh bien voilá ce que ça peut donner. Les indépendances auraient pu donner autre chose. L'autre vision, c'est l'Afrique d'aujourd'hui avec ces jeunes qui cherchent plus à s'adapter ; ils ont d'autres outils, ils ont compris les mode d'emploi et ils essaient de les mettre en application pour leur propre pays. Là je parles des outils de la modernité, de la communication qui permettent de savoir ce qui se passe ailleurs et de regarder son pays et le monde autrement. Ça aide à se developper tout ça et c'est possible parce que l'éducation et les études sont passés par là.

(p. 99)

Si on sait pas où on va, il vaut mieux retourner d'où on vient.

(p. 111)

Un coup je suis là-bas [à Palmarin], un coup je suis ici [à Marseille]. Vu que ma base c'est le village, j'ai des restes, je peux m'integrer mais pas m'assimiler, je ne peux pas oublier mon africanité. Quand il faut aller à l'essentiel, je vais à l'essentiel: un sac vide ne peut pas tenir debout ... (...) Les Noirs qui parlent sans accent aucun, c'est un peu dommage. Ils affichent leur intégration mais ils sont sûrement déchirés. Quand on est noir, il faut l'assumer. Moi je crois qu'ils acceptent dans le discours mais pas toujours intérieurement.

(p. 125-117)

Etoile errante

2009-03-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

« Je hais bien les voyages ! Comment peut-on prendre le train ou le bateau pour son plaisir! J’aimerais rester toute ma vie au même endroit. A regarder passer les jours, passer les nuages, les oisseaux, a rêver. (...) Quand tout cela finira-t-il ? Il me semble aujourd’hui que je n’ai jamais cessé de voyager depues que je suis née, dans les trains, dans les autocars, sur les routes de montagne, et puis allant d’un logement á un autre, á Nice, á Saint-Martin, á Festiona puis Nice encore, et Orléans, Paris jusqu’á ce que la guerre soit finie. C’est lá que j’ai compris que je ne pourrai jamais cesser de voyager, que je n’aurai jamais de repos. Je voudrais ne plus pouvoir penser á Saint-Martin, á Berthemont. Mamman a dit un jour que ces noms-lá étaient les noms maudits, qu’on ne devait plus les dire. Plus y penser même. (...)

Les nuits son longues, quand il fait froid et qu’on attend un train. Je n’ai pas pu dormir un instant, malgré la fatigue, malgré le vide qu’était autour de moi. Je regardais sans cesse autour de moi, comme pour m’assurer que rien n’avait changé, que tout continuait d’être réel. Je regardais cela, la gare immense aver sa verrière où ruisselait la pluie, les quais dont l’extremité se perdait dans la nuit, les halos autour des réverbères, et je pensais : je suis ici, voilà. Je suis à Marseille, c’est la dernière fois de ma vie que je vois cela. (...) Je ne dois jamais rien oublier de tout cela. Alors, je me redressais un peu, en m’appuyant sur les vieilles valises, et je regardais les corps étendus sur le quai, contre les murs, et les gens qui somnolaient assis sour les bancs, enveloppés dans leurs couvertures, et on aurait dir des dépouilles, des habits jetés. Mes yeux brûlaient, je sentais un vertige dans ma tête, j’entendais le bruit des respirations, lourd, profond, et je sentais les larmes couler sur mes joues, le long de mon nez, goutter sur la valisse, sans comprendre pourquoi elles sortaient de mes yeux. Maman bougeait un peu dans son sommeil, elle grignait, et je lui caressais les cheveux comme on fait á un enfant pur qu’elle ne se réveille pas. Là-bas, la pendule montrait sa face blafarde, sa face de lune, où les heures avançaient si lentement : une heure, deux heures, deux heures et demie. »

From LeClezio, Etoile Errante.

Femme Noire, L.S. Senghor

2009-02-13T15:00:00.000-08:00

Femme nue, femme noire
Vétue de ta couleur qui est vie, de ta forme qui est beauté
J'ai grandi à ton ombre; la douceur de tes mains bandait mes yeux
Et voilà qu'au coeur de l'Eté et de Midi,
Je te découvre, Terre promise, du haut d'un haut col calciné
Et ta beauté me foudroie en plein coeur, comme l'éclair d'un aigle

Femme nue, femme obscure
Fruit mûr à la chair ferme, sombres extases du vin noir, bouche qui faislyrique ma bouche
Savane aux horizons purs, savane qui frémis aux caresses ferventes du Vent d'Est
Tamtam sculpté, tamtam tendu qui gronde sous les doigts du vainqueur
Ta voix grave de contralto est le chant spirituel de l'Aimée

Femme noire, femme obscure
Huile que ne ride nul souffle, huile calme aux flancs de l'athlète, aux flancs des princes du Mali
Gazelle aux attaches célestes, les perles sont étoiles sur la nuit de ta peau.

Délices des jeux de l'Esprit, les reflets de l'or ronge ta peau qui se moire

A l'ombre de ta chevelure, s'éclaire mon angoisse aux soleils prochains de tes yeux.

Femme nue, femme noire
Je chante ta beauté qui passe, forme que je fixe dans l'Eternel
Avant que le destin jaloux ne te réduise en cendres pour nourrir les racines de la vie.

-- image: Isabel Muñoz.

Tolstoy's letters

2008-10-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

The aims of art are incommesurate (as the mathematicians say) with social aims. The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations. If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I might irrefutably establish what seemed to me the correct point of view on all social problems, I will not even devote two hours to such a novel; but if I were to be told that what I should write would be read in about twenty years time by those who are now children, and that they would laugh and cry over it and love life, I would devote all my life and all my energies to it.

Kant on Blackness

2008-09-04T14:56:00.000-07:00

*note: this is a transcription from a text by Kant, i **DO NOT** agree with this statement!!

"[Blackness, the most significant 'proof' of both moral lassitude and stupidity, occurs because] the drying up [by the hot sun] of the vessels that carry the blood and serum under the skin brings about the lack of a beard and the short curly hair. Likewise, because the sunlight that falls through the surface skin into the dried up vessels eats up the reticular membrane, there arises the appearance of black colour."

Mountz (2004)

2008-09-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

The border is indeed a site of identity construction, but those 'sites' are neither unitary nor linear. For the undocumented, the displaced, and the stateless, for people of colour with tenuous legal status, the border is everywhere.

Spivak, can the subaltern speak?

2008-08-31T17:52:00.000-07:00

The reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repressions, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in and by words'. (Althusser. 273-274).

... "the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. To move towards such and accounting one must move towards theories of ideology -- of subjects formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to overlook the category of representation in its two senses [as philosophical re-presentation and as political representation]."

"Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman' caught between tradition and modernization. (...) The case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism would challenge and deconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-of-knowledge (repression_ and mark the place of 'disappearance' with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status. (...) There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak." (306)

McClintock, Imperial Leather (1995)

2008-08-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented and all are dangerous -- dangerous ... in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence.

All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite many nationalists' ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference. No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation state. (...) Yet, with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is implicated in gender power. As a result, as Cynthia Enloe remarks, nationalisms have 'typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope' (353).

[In nationalism] women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking and natural), embodying nationalism's conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national identity (forward thrusting, potent and historic), embodying nationalism's progressive, or revolutionary principle of discontinuity. Nationalism's anomalous relation to time [the modern Janus, "one face gazing back into the primordial mists of the past, the other into an infinite future"] is thus managed as a natural relation to gender. (358-359)

Haraway, Situated Knowledges (1988)

2008-08-31T10:39:00.001-07:00

The problem

So, I think my problem and 'our' problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness. (...) We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies are made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future.(187)

Feminist objectivity

... feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges... only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices. ... feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of a subject and object.

So, with many other feminists I want to argue for a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestatioin, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing. But not just any partial perspective will do; we must be hostile to easy relativisms and holisms built out of summing and subsuming parts.(191-192)

Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and authorship of 'objective' knowledge... the world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity.

Objectivity is not about dis-engagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where 'we' are permanently mortal, that is , not in 'final' control.(201)

The eye that fucks the world

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity -- honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy -- to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. (...) And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.(188-189)

The topography of subjectivity is multi-dimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly (...) The search for a 'full' and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history.(193)

Vision from below

... there is a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their position. To see from below is neither easily learned not unproblematic ... The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical inquiry, The standpoints of the subjugated are not 'innocent' positions.... 'Subjugated' standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the 'highest' techno-scientific visualizations.(191)

Feminist embodiment

Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning.(195)

Feminist embodiment, feminist hopes for partiality, objectivity and situated knowledge, turn on conversations and codes at this potent node in fields of possible bodies and meanings. Here is where science, science fantasy, and science fiction converge in the objectivity question in feminism, turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse.(201)

Feminism and translation

Feminism loves another science: the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood. Feminism is about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision. Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in in-homogeneous gendered social space. Translation is always interpretative, critical, and partial. Here is a ground for conversation, rationality, and objectivity -- which is power-sensitive, not pluralist, 'conversation'.

Boundaries

Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; 'objects' do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies.

Young using Fanon

2008-08-29T16:44:00.000-07:00

... so it is not [only] an issue of removing colonial thinking from European thought, of purging it, like today's dream of 'stamping out' racism. It is rather a question of repositioning European systems of knowledge so as to demonstrate the long history of their operation as the effect of their colonial other, a reversal encapsulated in Fanon's observation: Europe is literally the creation of the Third World'.

R. Young, 1990.

The foreign

2008-08-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

The foreign is not something that has meaning in and of itself, nor is it territorially fixed. It is an unstable counter concept, opposed to the native and constitutive of the human. Our task is to situate ourselves more clearly in relation to the foreign and to justify our positions more rigorously. Such positions ... provide the grounds on which foreign policy is made and on which distinctions between us and them are drawn.

Broneman, American Anthropology as Foreign Policy.

Derrida 1992

2008-08-27T08:12:00.001-07:00

Something unique is afoot in Europe, in what is still called Europe even if we no longer know very well what or who goes by this name. Indeed, to what concept, to what real individual, to what singular entity should this name be assigned today? Who will draw up its borders?

J. Kerouac

2008-08-13T15:10:00.001-07:00

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars

Deleuze and Guattari on Nomadology (1987)

2008-07-31T18:23:00.001-07:00

History is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is Nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of History.

Comparing ...

2008-07-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

Mackinder, 1919:

Who rules East Europe commands the heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

Tolkien, 1937:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Euripides (480-406 BCE)

2008-07-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Oh my children, we are like sailors driven before the storm, who on touching safe shores once more, find that the wind drives us off again. We are thus chased from the soil where we had believed ourselves saved. Alas, why did you charm us, cruel hope, with empty promises?

Michel de Montaigne, "On Solitude" (1580)

2008-07-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Ambition, covetousness, fear and desires do not abandon us just because we have changed our landscape. They often follow us into the very cloister and schools of philosophy. ... [I]t is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession.

Habermas on Europe (1992)

2008-07-17T16:47:00.000-07:00

... our task is less to reassure ourselves of our common origins in the European Middle Ages than to develop a new political self-confidence commensurate with the role of Europe in the world of the twenty-first century. Hitherto, world history has accorded the empires that have come and gone only one appearance on the stage. ... It now appears as if Europe as a whole is being given a second chance. It will not be able to make use of this in terms of the power politics of yesteryear, but only under changed premises, namely a non-imperial process of reaching understanding with, and learning from, other cultures.

Agamben

2008-06-30T14:03:00.000-07:00

One of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside.

Strange Fruit, by Billie Holiday

2008-05-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

From the Poem "Strange Fruit", by Abel Meeropol

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Inspired on the photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (1937).

Ain't I a woman? by Soujourner Truth (1851)

2008-05-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

{Soujourner Truth (1797-1883), born Isabella Baumfree, freed / escaped slave.}

Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

(...)

Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.

Jen's words

2008-05-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

Migration is an embodied expression of desperation and hope in a highly unequal world characterized by disparate economic conditions of insecurity. It points to a rescaling of politics, in which the prevailing political concern is no longer the security of states but the security of persons in social, economic, and political terms.

Security is implicitly a question of scale: security for whom? From a feminist perspective, shifting the focus of security to that of civilian safety and well-being unsettles the state-centric approaches of conventional geopolitics.

Jennifer Hyndman, "The (Geo)Politics of Gendered Mobility."

A night at the Poetry House

2008-05-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

Punk Rock is what you play; punk is what you are.

Having fun is just having reasonable expectations.

Just two sentences savaged from the wonderful destruction stories of Angus Adair, Vancouver.

Quotations from Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks (I)

2008-05-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

Aimé Césaire, Et les chiens se taisent.

Every citizen of a nation is responsible for the actions committed in the name of that nation.

(In the chapter "The so-called dependency complex of Colonized peoples")

Masculinist Epistemologies

2008-05-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Knowledge from the point of view of the unmarked is truly fantastic, distorted, and so irrational. The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practised and honoured is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference.

D.J. Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.

poem

2008-05-05T14:40:00.000-07:00

Qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido!
intensa nostalgia invade mi pensamiento;
y al verme tan solo y triste cual hoja al viento,
quisiera llorar, quisiera morir de sentimiento.

-- Canción Mixteca.

Small things becoming big things

2008-04-28T21:46:00.001-07:00

Like not being able to think without the future tense: if I can't plan, I just can't make it.

Without a net (quote)

2008-04-13T20:25:00.000-07:00

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air?

Virginia Woolf, To the lighthouse.

Tim...

2008-04-08T20:01:00.000-07:00

...And his music.

The grad school of the future?

2008-04-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

"So you got a girlfriend?" Said Jimmy on the fourth day. He'd been saving this question for the right time. (...)

"not as such. (...) Pair-bonding at this stage is not encouraged," said Crake, sounding like a guidebook. "We're supposed to be focusing on our work."

"Bad for your health," said Jimmy. "You should get yourself fixed up."

"Easy for you to say," said Crake. "You're the grasshopper, I'm the ant. I can't waste time in unproductive random scanning. (...) [Here] if you really need to, you can arrange that kind of thing through Student Services," Crake said, rather stiffly. "They deduct the price from your scholarship, same as room and board. The workers come in from the pleeblands, they're trained professionals. Naturally they are inspected for disease."

"Student Services? In your dreams! They do what?

"It makes sense," said Crake. "As a system, it avoids the diversion of energies into unproductive channels, and short-circuits malaise. The female students have equal access, of course. You can get any colour, any age -- well, almost. Any body type. They provide everything. If you're gay or some kind of a fetishist, they'll fix that too."

{Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake}

wish

2008-03-31T18:13:00.000-07:00

i wish i may,
i wish i might,
get the wish
i wish tonight.

Porque escribí, de Enrique Lihn (version completa)

2008-03-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

Ahora que quizás, en un año de calma,
piense: la poesía me sirvió para esto:
no pude ser feliz, ello me fue negado,
pero escribí.

Escribí: fui la víctima
de la mendicidad y el orgullo mezclados
y ajusticié también a unos pocos lectores;
tendí la mano en puertas que nunca, nunca he visto;
una muchacha cayó, en otro mundo, a mis pies.

Pero escribí: tuve esta rara certeza,
la ilusión de tener el mundo entre las manos
—¡qué ilusión más perfecta! como un cristo barroco
con toda su crueldad innecesaria—
Escribí, mi escritura fue como la maleza
de flores ácimas pero flores en fin,
el pan de cada día de las tierras eriazas:
una caparazón de espinas y raíces

De la vida tomé todas estas palabras
como un niño oropel, guijarros junto al río:
las cosas de una magia, perfectamente inútiles
pero que siempre vuelven a renovar su encanto.

La especie de locura con que vuela un anciano
detrás de las palomas imitándolas
me fue dada en lugar de servir para algo.
Me condené escribiendo a que todos dudarán
de mi existencia real,
(días de mi escritura, solar del extranjero).
Todos los que sirvieron y los que fueron servidos
digo que pasarán porque escribí
y hacerlo significa trabajar con la muerte
codo a codo, robarle unos cuantos secretos.
En su origen el río es una veta de agua
—allí, por un momento, siquiera, en esa altura—
luego, al final, un mar que nadie ve
de los que están braceándose la vida.
Porque escribí fui un odio vergonzante,
pero el mar forma parte de mi escritura misma:
línea de la rompiente en que un verso se espuma
yo puedo reiterar la poesía.

Estuve enfermo, sin lugar a dudas
y no sólo de insomnio,
también de ideas fijas que me hicieron leer
con obscena atención a unos cuantos psicólogos,
pero escribí y el crimen fue menor,
lo pagué verso a verso hasta escribirlo,
porque de la palabra que se ajusta al abismo
surge un poco de oscura inteligencia
y a esa luz muchos monstruos no son ajusticiados.

Porque escribí no estuve en casa del verdugo
ni me dejé llevar por el amor a Dios
ni acepté que los hombres fueran dioses
ni me hice desear como escribiente
ni la pobreza me pareció atroz
ni el poder una cosa deseable
ni me lavé ni me ensucié las manos
ni fueron vírgenes mis mejores amigas
ni tuve como amigo a un fariseo
ni a pesar de la cólera
quise desbaratar a mi enemigo.

Pero escribí y me muero por mi cuenta,
porque escribí porque, escribí estoy vivo.

Jean Leloup, Paradis Perdu

2008-03-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

Viendras-tu avec nous, Étranger,
Ou resteras-tu au sol,
Ou resteras-tu au sol,
Habitué,

Il ne reste que peu de temps avant vendredi,
Que tu partes ou tu restes,
Tout est fini,
Nous ne renviendrons plus... du paradis perdu,

Au-delà de la mer il existe un pays qu'on dit impossible,
Comme le paradis de la Bible,
Au-delà de la mer il existe un pays presqu'aussi beau que la folie,

Y vivent des peuples parfaitement sains, parfaitement accueillant,
On s'y baigne toute la journée dans des chutes et des torrents,
Et des cascades et des rivières,
Et l'eau est aussi pure et aussi légère que l'air,

Nul besoin de planter,
le blé pousse à foison, attendant les moissons,
Et à perte de vue court un animal qu'on nomme le bison,
Les montagnes sont couvertes de moutons qu'on les dirait enneigées jusqu'au sol,

Au-delà de la mer il existe un pays aussi beau que le paradis,
Et les filles sont belles,

Viendras-tu avec nous,
Viendras-tu avec nous,
Étranger?

Ou resteras-tu au sol,
Ou resteras-tu au sol,
Habitué,

Il ne reste que peu de temps avant vendredi,
Que tu partes ou tu restes tout est fini,
Nous ne renviendrons plus... du paradis perdu.

Il y aura tout d'abord les épreuves et le vent,
Il y aura les tempêtes, les mers d'huiles,
Il y aura les vagues meurtrières,
Il y aura les récifs les écueils,
Il y aura les requins, il y aura le scorbut, les épidémies,
Il y aura, il y aura les mutineries,
Et plusieurs d'entre nous y lausseront leur vie,
Y trouveront leur destin,

Viendra-tu avec nous?

Et puis un jour nous l'apercevrons la terre promise,
Il faudra faire attention en accostant,
Plusieurs se jetteront à l'est et se noieront,
Il y aura les marais, les sables mouvants,
Il faudra être patient, trouver l'estuaire,
Au-delà de la mer il existe un pays aussi beau que le paradis,
où vivent des peuples aussi doux que la folie,

Alors en arrivant, il faudra peut-être tuer les soldats,
Et sûrement le commandant et cet imbécile de missionnaire
Enfin il faudra tué tout ceux qui croit en moi,
Il faudra ensuite couler le navire et ne plus jamais revenir,
Du paradis perdu.

Fragment from Sula, by Toni Morrison

2008-03-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

It was while he was full of such dreams, his body already feeling the rough work clothes, his hands already curved to pick the handle, that he spoke to Nel about getting married. She seemed receptive but hardly anxious. It was after he stood in lines for six days running and saw the gang boss pick out thin-armed white boys from the Virginia hills and the bull-necked Greeks and Italians and heard over and over, "Nothing else today. Come back tomorrow," that he got the message. So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man's role anyhow that made him press Nel about settling down. He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. Deep enough to hold him, deep enough to rock him, deep enough to ask, "How do you feel? You all right? Want some coffee?" And if he were to be a man, that someone could no longer be his mother.

Spring

2008-03-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

Blood that throbs
and feet that step
on a hill that's wet
with leaves and slugs.

Uncle Vanya, dialogue.

2008-03-14T23:11:00.000-07:00

Do you love her?

... No. We're just friends.

Already? You're fast. A woman is first an acquaintance, next a lover, and only then a friend.

(Dyadya Vanya, by Andrei Konchalovsky)

You can call me sharky

2008-03-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

Percy Norman Pool, 3pm. Finned man approaches woman in a blue swimming suit.

You swim like a shark.

Woman in blue looks at finned man through her goggles, confused. "Is that a good or a bad thing?"

Mais non, c'est bon!! Les requins savent bien nager!"

"Donc ... merci, Monsieur!!

Y la mujer tiburon se alejo, aleteando contenta.

lion spell

2008-03-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

in foreign lands you will remain
one more month, so far away!
thus i though i'd send you some
of luna's spells, as hard as bone.

The first is this, listen to me:
use if a lion faces thee --
mane completely out of form,
shiny teeth and roar of scorn.

"Mister lion: away from me!
for those your hairs are at peril:
and if you touch me, even sneeze,
she will come and end your glee.

doubtless he will proudly stir
much secure will try to appear.
"Describe that human!" orders he
"who my kingdom threaten will."

"short of height, scarce of hair,
she talks funny but seeks no threat,
though if you touch this little nail
she will get you, and make you scared"

(and when these last words you say,
show your teeth and shake your head).

"she will jump and hold your mane,
bite your neck and ride you straight,
then you'll know you can't complain,
for it's just fair that she should care."

He will nod his mighty head,
turn around, lower his tail --
and you'll come back, whole and safe
to arms that without you, ache.

a regular friendship

2008-03-09T22:53:00.000-07:00

I'm going to my ten year reunion for high school, this summer.

Really?

Yup.

Mine is next year. Sure they all will have kids.

Not you.

Not me. Although I still have time, it only takes 9 months, you know...

Plenty of time 'till your reunion then. (silence) Do you want to have kids?

I dunno ... I want to adopt kids, tons of them -- tons meaning ... two? (giggle). What'bout you? Wanna have kids?

Yes: huddles of them little Michaels running 'round the place. Gotta find a good woman that wants to educate them though, 'cause I'm planning on raising them real bad and show them this is all bullshit.

Maybe you should have them yourself then, and not care 'bout no woman.

Yes ... haven't figure out quite how though ... think I need a woman for that. (silence) So when are you gonna start having those little babies?

No idea. Wanna take care of'em when I need a break?

No way man! You have'em you care'em!

Well, let's do one thing: you take care of mine, I take care of yours.

Deal.

Deal.

G'night.

See you tomorrow. Michael.

{foto de Isabel Muñoz}

intro

2008-03-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

it's the little things that keep us going
when we cross the doors of our desserts
pushing air into our lungs, and out.

pequeñas cosas
las que nos mantienen vivos:
un recuerdo, un olvido.

the littlest steps fabricating the longest journey:
tiny spider hands knitting, knitting.

pequeñas cosas que se recuerdan,
sin saberlo.