bent, not curled (part 2)

continued from part 1


"Only three things in life I've really wanted to do: shooting, writing, and making love."

Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961)

I have this love affair with dead men, very dead men. I also have this love affair with a man almost twenty years my senior, and his birthday is approaching while I always forget exactly how old is is going to be. The thing with the very dead men is that I can shamelessly use their name right and left, and given the nature of our affair, there are no legal complications one way or the other. This is all about caressing each other's ego, or so my muse would whisper in my ear.

My fascination with Hemingway started with reading "For whom the Bell Tolls" when I was in High School. I remember not understanding much of what was going on with the Spanish civil war, I was fascinated by what was happening between the people. It is time to read that book again, I really have forgotten much. I devoured his books, I loved the way that he wrote, and all that remains is the taste of it. He made love to the words, and that is what I remember that it was like when reading his prose. It was poetry, it was making love with the spirit.

I wonder what it will be like to read Hemingway now, more than thirty years later, and myself being a struggling writer that panicked back then  muddled in the confusion of believing that my dreams was nothing that I had a right to.

How do you caress a dead man's ego?

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Albert Camus (1913-1960)

I am thinking of a man who is now in London. He is very alive, and somehow, for all my boisterousness, I still can not bring myself to make public much of what I am thinking about the man. This is good.

While Camus would despair with the confrontation afforded by beauty, I tend to despair with the confrontation afforded me by ecstasy. Here, another alive man, not in London, but then I do not keep tabs as to where he keeps moving his bent toe, and last time that I saw him, also heard him say something wise about learning not to react. If there is one key to freedom, the ability to not react is one, and if there is another key to that same freedom with a taste of serenity, then it is the ability to not react when confronted with ecstasy and beauty.

You try to follow the windy road of my logic, and it is easy to get disoriented. I am constantly touching the walls, and trying to find which way is up, and which way is down. It is a bit like being in a pitch dark bar room full with people, the bartender being blind, he had absolutely no problem dealing with any of it, not even while giving change. I did this once, it was an eye opener. It does not matter which way is down, and it matters even less which way is up.

If I were to ape Hemingway and list the three things in life that I have really wanted to do, then they are writing, writing and writing. The minute that I jot down that idea the image of the runs at the beach in the morning and making love do come into my mind. Only three things in this life that I have really wanted to do: aikido, writing, and making love. Between Hemingway and I there is one huge difference, it is something about shooting, and it runs through my beach right down to aikido. Now, this could really get windy, and I do not know where it would lead to in my bent.

(to be continued)

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the future is bright, it has always been

the future has always been as bright as the fusioning bright sun. it burns brightly all the way to exhaustion. the day of solar exhaustion is far, yet humans tend to worry about nothing else other than their own exhaustion, usually referred to as death.

i dare say, the future is bright.

it has been a while since i have written with this hue of light and confidence. last night we went to see Yasmin at the Kellerkino and then on for a drink -- his cola light and my bitter lemon -- at the Lorenzini Quick Bar. it was surprisingly quiet at the bar, they seem to have done away with the idea of turning it into a club and blaring out music that made conversation impossible, and we did have quite a good chat.

it is like this. my cola-light drinking legal brains friend has quite a tight  scheduled these days that -- finally -- prevents him from jetting around from one place to another every weekend in search of something that he can find at home. he does not know what he is looking for and all i know is that it does not matter. now he got himself in this wonderful bind of besides a full time demanding job, he is also enrolled in an executive master's program in public administration, all the while having a romance going on in osaka, japan. me, the bitter lemon drinking optimist, has announced that the next few months are going to be busy. i have a beach waiting for me in the algarve, and the warmth of a fireplace in the lombardy, italy and to say that somehow i also need to earn a living.

let's stay with me and my business... it has always been this way, i have never know it to be any other way. i have always been very busy, especially ever since i can remember. i do not remember, or do not want to remember much of my own childhood, and what i do remember i am not ready to share, then it was not busy perhaps. otherwise i do however remember always been very busy. i sometimes look back, especially at the times of being a graduate student -- with a small child, husband and a commute -- and wonder how on earth did i ever find the energy to fit it all in. granted the house plants and the marriage suffered fatal ends, but the child and i did well.

today things look a bit different. i have spent the last three years involved in projects that require a fair amount of persistence and tenacity, to say nothing of lots of patience. patience is not one of my endowments, and it is one "skill"  that aikido has taught me most intensely. yes, patience is a skill, if you are born without much aptitude for it like i was, it can be learned. when i look at some of the detailed circumstances of my life and what the official me looks on paper, like most people, i too ask "what went wrong?"

to attempt to answer the question is to avow total ignorance of life. i am not ready for that, although it would perhaps be a rather frank answer. still, my ego is not totally dead, and i am not ready to say that i am totally ignorant. my viewpoint is that nothing went wrong, and that, in the words of one of my long time friends, i failed to conform while trying to conform. eventually such a life plan against all the individual's will, breaks down mercilessly. it did, and what a good thing, it has brought me a lot closer to making my dreams be reality.

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listening to RDP Açores

oh my it is saturday, and i have a working weekend, or rather i have work that has to be finished by monday. yesterday was a memorable day in many ways, however i got no work done that is on deadline.

as is usual on friday evenings, if anything is ever usual in my life, i went to aikido and then to join the physics round table. this was not to happen before i had called a friend from the dojo's shower because his number showed up on my missed calls list while the phone was on silent during training. this was confusing for all, first he had not called me, and i had looked too quickly at the list and missed the fact that said missed call was from earlier in the week... imagine... a phone call from the shower! ok, i was not under the running water and there were no other women in training yesterday.

then after the shower there was the dinner conversant at that totally uncool restaurant near the university. yesterday there was a rare appearance from one of the professors in the physics faculty. the oddest thing is that neither he or i can remember, but the likelihood is rather high that he was one of my examiners for the doctoral exam. clearly, if he was the one, i was neither brilliant, nor a total catastrophe in my exam. if there are notes given, i never bothered to find out, i was just interested in the overall result. for the life of me, we could not figure out who else could have been my second examiner. we did the usual thing, we went through a few well known physics names whom some of us have in one way experienced directly... hey, i still had the pleasure of personally knowing Hans Bethe. there is nothing like a bit of name dropping, and even i, to my disappointment, am not immune to playing the game.

"o som da viola de S. Miguel"

so, here i am listening to an internet broadcast of the RDP Açores. it is a blast! i love the sounds of the various string instruments that they are so fond of playing in the Azores, but i am even much more delighted in listening to the local azorean accent, specially the "u" gets pronounced in a way that sounds to my ignorant ears like the turkish "ü" which for the life of me i can not pronounce. but then pronunciation is not my forte, and i manage to make myself understood, and my diction is not even bad, but my accent in any language eludes all.

"uma no cravo, outra na ferradura"

it is one huge leap from the world of international physics to the azorean programmation on the internet radio, something that i find totally delightful. as far as i can remember i have been in the Azores once, and that was when the flights between New York and Lisbon often stopped in the Azores for refueling and passengers. however now one of my favorite cousins, and only have favorite cousins, is in Terceira working in a civil engineering project, so I am seduced by the idea of going to spend a few days visiting my cousin in the middle of the Atlantic. listening to the local sender is one way of getting in the mood for the voyage.

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