You won't forget me

The music is soft and milky. Like being swallowed by a soft mouth.
No, it is not easy to forget. To get for, what am I going to get for this?
The jazz passes through my hands, drips, contorts, squirmishing.
No. I will not forget. I say over and over.
But the music wont let me go.
HOw much do I want to forget?
How deeply I want to let go, to extend a blank slate in front of me, my brain fuzzing a little bit, cleansing.
But no.
I will not forget you.

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog's voice over still rings in my ear.
Along with the eerie sounds of seals calling each other, and the voices of the inhabitants of the McMurdo station in Antarctica.
A bright red worm living in the anus of some sea creature. Sea urchins. Baby seals. A linguist turned indoor gardener. The descendant of an Aztec royal line.
A penguin that decided to go the other way, nobody standing on his way. Somebody moves out of the way so there is nothing between this strange strange bird and his inevitable death, some kilometers away.
But, above all of it, the light: the sun changing, self-reflecting.
The ice is a mirror, and the sun is Narcissus. The sun moving slowly all summer long, never disappearing. The perennial ice of the surface, and the moving underworld. Everybody there is just passing through. never staying.
All the workers, scientists and not, of McMurdo are outcasts "no strings attached, so we fell from the world, to the bottom" says one.
Another one, too traumatized to speak of how he got there, shows how to be ready to go all the time: a backpack that would allow anybody fit enough, to start a new life any second, anywhere in the world.
Survival.
Survival.
Survival.
For humans and plants alike, the life in Antarctica is all about survival. Every single second of those 100 minutes, the palms of your hands sweat with the tingly feeling that somebody or something might just not make it.
Truth is: nobody will make it.
The geologists, the vulcanologists, the biologists there, all agree on something: we are not much more than an error over the surface of an odd planet. Our days are numbered.
Like with Belshazzar, it is written in the wall, Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin
Our days are numbered: our deeds have been measured, and we have been found guilty.
And yet, the urge of knowledge: what is there? what is that? how big, how small, how deep, how hot or cold? when did this happen, when will it happen again?

We will vanish soon, but not without knowing.

Chachalacas

Leo, con mucha tristeza, que las maravillosas dunas de arena de Chachalacas, Veracruz, lugar de no pocas vacaciones familiares y, años después, escapadas con amigos y desconocidos, están en peligro de desaparecer debido a un nuevo proyecto "turístico" en la zona...
Las grises montañas de arena en mi mente están ligadas ineludiblemente a episodios que cambiaron de golpe el rumbo de mi vida: la separación de mis padres, rompimientos y consolidación de amistades.
En una de las infinitas pozas que se forman en el mar que las bordea vi por primera vez un erizo de mar, y tomé un cangrejo en mis manos.
El mar de Veracruz ha sido la marca de agua en mi vida: fue el primer mar que vi, el primero que toqué, el primero que casi me mata, espero que algún día se convierta en la última imagen en mis pupilas.
Cuando era niña, la palabra Chachalacas estaba asociada a agua de coco fresca, a pescado a la talla, a un traje de baño de una pieza azul con blanco, a mi padre corriendo en la arena conmigo sobre los hombros.
Cuando, años después, volví, el aroma nocturno de la playa, los sonidos del amanecer y el viento que constantemente cambia la forma y ubicación de las dunas se fijaron en mi mente, entonces perturbada, como una metáfora de lo caprichoso del corazón: algo tan inasible como el viento mueve una montaña de arena, si esta no está fija.
También aprendí, o mejor dicho, reaprendí, el valor de viajar sin nada más que yo misma.
La fotografía la tomé de este set.

Vostorg vs. vdokhnovenie

Leo el Curso de Literatura Europea de V. Nabokov -si bien no alcanza las alturas de análisis y la profundidad del Curso de Literatura Rusa, es una lectura que abre nuevas perspectivas sobre cómo se lee a los ahora considerados clásicos (recordemos que entonces hablar de Joyce era hablar de prácticamente un contemporáneo).
La lista de autores incluye a Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka y James Joyce. La acusada anglofilia de la lista podría deberse no sólo a la anglofilia del maestro, sino también a que las clases eran impartidas en las universidades de Wellesley y Cornell, en Estados Unidos.
Sus análisis de obras no-rusas evidencian una falta de paciencia con algunas sutilezas de los idiomas que le eran extranjeros. Mucho se ha hablado de su maestría en el manejo del inglés, cosa que nadie pondría en duda a la luz de sus novelas; noto, sin embargo, una torpeza al achacar a los autores faltas que, a fin de cuentas, quizá sólo se le podrían achacar a la lengua misma. Como en el análisis que hace de Ulises, en el que, sin más, sugiere que se lea "por encima" un capítulo que a él le parece no tiene la fuerza suficiente. Si bien ese tipo de juicios sumarios son también frecuentes en sus lecturas rusas, en el caso de Joyce, y de Flaubert, en otra ocasión el análisis se siente vago, como si se tratara de una pasión personal, de un gusto/disgusto propios, más que la reflexión pausada de, por ejemplo, sus críticas a Gorki.
Lo que me lleva al ensayo penúltimo del libro, "El arte de la literatura y el sentido común", en el que hace una genial apología de la ruptura con el sentido común que hacen -consciente o inconscientemente- los artistas. Lo que me interesa destacar de este ensayo es el siguiente párrafo:

La lengua rusa, aunque relativamente pobre en términos abstractos, define dos tipos de inspiración: vostorg y vdokhnovenie, que pueden parafrasearse como "rapto" y "recuperación". La diferencia entre una y otra es sobre todo de intensidad; la primera es breve y apasionada, la segunda fría y sostenida. Hasta ahora me he estado refiriendo a la pura llama del vorstog, al rapto inicial, que no se propone ningún objetivo consciente pero que es importantísimo a la hora de conectar la disolución del viejo mundo con la construcción del nuevo. Cuando llega el momento y el escritor se pone a escribir su libro, confiará en la segunda y serena clase de inspiración, la vdokhnovenie, compañera fiel, que ayuda a recuperar y reconstruir el mundo.

Dos apuntes aquí sobre la traducción: el "rapto" que nos regala Ediciones B es, en el inglés del original, casi con toda seguridad, "rapture", cuya traducción más exacta podría ser "éxtasis"; en cuanto a ese "recuperación" no se me ocurre de dónde pueda venir en inglés, sin embargo, al hurgar en el ruso вдохновение, nos encontramos con que está relacionado con вдохновля́ть (respirar profundamente), lo que hace que el largo examen que hace a continuación de ambas formas de la inspiración cobre mucho más sentido. Se me ocurre que a Nabokov le hacía falta, en su crítica literaria, hacer caso de su propio consejo a la hora de escribir: escuchar con paciencia a esa profunda inspiración y dejar que el éxtasis tomara su lugar allá, en la cima de la irracionalidad.

Losing II

I was four, maybe five. I was "helping" my parents do grocery shopping. Truth is: they didn't want to leave me with the neighbors while they were out. Don't ask why. My "help" was basically to stay put in the toys section of the supermarket, I guess they weren't worried about men stealing little girls (I wonder if they worry now). But, of course, I wouldn't, and my brother, barely one year older than me, later was heard saying: "what, am I the guardian of my sister?", mom answered, "well, but of course, she is a girl". -Do you think he still feels guilty? After all, I got lost.
I wandered away from the dolls and the pretty colors; and skulked behind a tall shelf, with a book in my hands. Time passed by. My parents, busy with their own stuff, shopping, the horrible financial crisis, and a supermarket full of families, forgot I was with them. They grabbed my brother, thought, well, that's it, let's go. One of the security guys of the supermarket found me, asked where were my parents. I said shopping. Somebody called my name from the speakers. I was grabbed and yelled at. They were already heading home when they remembered I was still back there.
That was, as far as I remember, the first time I got lost.
Not even knowing it. Somebody lost me. Like I was a thing, without will. Where do we go when somebody loses us?
In which alternate universe we hide when somebody is desperately looking for us, nowhere to find us, and they feel their chests struggling to breath, anxious?. And we, the lost ones, are just there, standing just across the street, just behind a windowpane. We might as well be in another universe.

In the beginning there was play...

...and the word was subjected to it.
What do we do with words? How do we use them? How do they become our own identity?
First we learn to play, we learn to be through playful and innocent games we invent to make ourselves present in the world, to state, more than to say: Here I am, and I play.
Ludo ergo sum.
Isn't playing our first language? Our first code that we throw like a line, hoping to be saved from the self?
Then the little tricks we invent: dada, huhu, mama, tata become words due to our contact with this world, the one that we were trying to reach: we discover we were not alone, after all, that everybody else is hungry, too, for milk, for touch, for love; we discover that all those other beings also know the pleasurable pain of piss and shit.
And that discovery is painful, too, for there is not I, but we. We become a part of something bigger, something we do not understand. And that's why children laugh so much: they are going back to that prelanguage and safe state of playing.
As we grow up, however, we lose the ability to make that regression, and we invent the joke, a sad attempt to laugh again with the same intensity, with the same meaningful force that we learned to play... alas, a joke is merely, as Nietszche said, "an epitaph on the death of a feeling..."
We end the meaning of our own feelings making puns and jokes about them, in an attempt to convey some meaning to the pain, and the sorrow we feel because we have forgotten how to play.

Stratum Corneum

I find a very fine irony in the fact that the stratum corneum, the outermost layer of human skin is composed of "horny" cells; that is, horny as in callous, not as in hungry for sex.
Actually, up to a few years ago, doctors believed that this layer was not sensitive at all, they deemed it to be some kind of protective sheet of dead cells only; recently, however, research has showed a much more intricate structure and function.

Horny, etymologically related to corneum, and to horn, to a stiff material, something rigid, something unmoving. And yet, this layer is the one that is never the same, like that river, that could never be crossed twice.