It was not what I was after. What I wrote yesterday made me feel too light, too one-eyed, like a cyclop with no peripheral vision. Being funny, if I was funny at all, is easy. Or at least, it isn’t hard. But after I wrote, I felt I had betrayed something. I had condensed the experience, taken things out of the flux, out of the unordered order in which they happened, out of the context or landscape or way in which they existed when I first encountered them. I made a list, and took out the feeling out of each thing on the list. I regulated the temperature, I established one climate, and one climate only, because I’d decided it was easier that way.
I chose one side, when the truth is that I could always see two, three or more sides at once. This choosing one side made the writing sound unlike me, and more like some Lonely Planet whore, like someone who has an audience in mind.
When I write explaining things to myself, everything comes out very differently than when I write picturing a person, or several persons, reading. I am already having a dialogue, or a three-way conversation when I’m explaining things to myself. I ‘m already presenting things this way, and then that way, and then juxtaposing that other view from that third angle. But when I get outside of me and try to find a point to focus on, to make it easier for that imaginary reader, I lose all the other points.
And why, why did I look outward, write outside of me, try to make it easier for that imaginary reader? Why did I slot myself into a predictable narrative? Yes, perhaps I have a clue. Writing about what I went through, and what I’ve been going through, with no particular order, or goal, was becoming uncomfortable, it was starting to itch, and so I interrupted the unplanned, unexpected flow of things that were appearing. I created a diversion, I interrupted because it was too much. Plunging inside one self and inside the world and inside god knows what was just too heavy.
And here is, after all, finally, at last, what I felt, often, in my first few weeks here; with not much comic relief to soften the disorienting blow of culture shock. I felt: moving to Brazil: like opening a great, terrible Pandora’s box.
There was no going back, I had unleashed all the scary demons, or rather, opened the door to another world, huge, larger than everything I’d ever known, unknowable, overwhelming, ungraspable. I would try to teeter on the edge and hold on for dear life, not wanting to fall into the vortex, the whirlwind. The immensity of Brazil, of Sao Paulo. This feeling of being about to be buried alive. Tall buildings congregating around me, high above me, pressing me against the ground, the endless streets and avenues pulsating with the insect-like traffic. The multiplicity of realities, types of people, consciousnesses.
At times I realized almost with horror that it would have been easier to stay put, in London, in Europe, and not have opened up this door to this crazy world. And not just to this crazy world, but to that past that insisted on slipping away, in metamorphosing into a dream.
It was becoming clear and evident that I would be changed by my experience here, by this place. And there was a feeling of wanting to hold on to who I was, or who I had been. I did not want to be transformed. Things that I had known to be true, values and ways of being that I considered real, were discarded or discounted here. It was painful to let go of the known; the desire was to hold on for dear life, to the self and to the ways that I knew, that I was familiar with. But these so-called familiar ways… These were recent ways; I had known Brazil a long time ago, but I had lost it. I didn’t know it anymore, but perhaps I could know it again.
The truth was that stepping into Brazil felt like stepping into an adolescent world, an adolescent way of thinking. With all its intensity, and impatience, and innocence, and stubbornness, and contradictions, and lack of experience, and arrogance, and know-it-all attitude, and appalling lack of reference points and wisdom and experience. I wanted to set the clock back to my world, to the supposed adulthood of Europe.
But I was wrong to think of the country and its life as adolescent. The old world and the new world were not on the same timeline. I used to think that Brazil was merely Europe a few years or decades behind. Then it became clear that Brazil was on a different path all together, and that it would never join up with Europe’s path. They had crossed perpendicularly a long time ago, and then the whole graph had exploded and the timelines and paths had gotten sucked into a vortex, got whipped up in a tornado. And each path was stubbornly walking its own way. Could I have a foot in both of them, in both realities?
As a matter of fact, the two realities co-existed, or were the same reality on two different sides of a two-sided mirror. And I was in the mirror. No, I was the mirror itself, separating and joining and reflecting both realities.
quinta-feira, 17 de julho de 2008
What I always wanted to know about Brazil but was afraid to ask/find out…
Since my last few entries have been rather melancholic, their mood heading increasingly downward, and the slope of nostalgia becoming dangerously steep for a blog, and to avoid going into a series of flashbacks that will have me wondering what the heck I’m still doing in Brazil, I thought I’d go back to a more light-hearted tone, and comment on a few disconcerting things I discovered during my first weeks in Brazil…
- Newspapers have an incredibly high number of ads for high-rise apartment buildings, (as a matter of fact, you will find fewer news articles than ads), complete with pools, palm trees, 3 bathrooms per bedroom, ground –floor fully equipped gyms with bullet-proof panoramic views of Champs Elysees-style landscaped gardens, and hundreds of miserably-paid labourers to make this whole Disney-type garden of eden operate.
- If you’re me, you will learn to match name of high-rise building to decade and style of architecture. Above-mentioned buildings will usually have spanky Americanitis names like Coral Gables, Wall Street, Flamingo Towers. You will try to decide whether you prefer these names to the multitude of 80s and 90s architectural monstrosities with more sophisticated European names like Grenoble, Montpellier, Cap D’Antibes, Amalfi, or those Mediterannean, sophisticated Italian-renaissance style buildings with names of Italian renaissance artists, Mansão Da Vinci etc. Or you might just settle for 60s buildings with indigenous names like Ubiratã, Maiara, or 50s buildings with names of women like Maria Estela, Solange, Valentina and so on. My personal favorite is an ugly, blackened 40s building called Poesia. Apparently they had a sense of irony in the 40s.
- Water: you will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy buying and transporting water as it’s so hot everyday that you will suffer from constant dehydration- resulting in parched mouth, bad hair, and more eye wrinkles. Better call one of the countless little shops that offer the indispensible service of "water delivery": huge water dispensers brought to your front door, with men earning slave-labour wages transporting six or seven of these 20 liter-dispensers on carts and bicycles up and down steep hills, bringing one right inside your kitchen, and still giving you a smile when you realize you’ve got no change to reward them for their hard work.
- And while we’re on the subject, When it rains, it pours. You must never forget to shut all windows before you leave the house, lest you come home to huge puddles of water, wet clothes you left draped over the chair by the window, and flooded keyboard when your computer is by the window. As well, never buy cheap umbrellas from street vendors as they are programmed to self-destruct within fifteen minutes of opening. And finally, never decide to get on a bus, or head downtown in you own car when the rain starts. You might never return home again. Seriously.
- Never let the lady at the salon who’s waxing your legs and your bikini line come near you with a clear plastic bottle simply labeled “removedor”. This industrial-strength household product will be brought out to remove wax from your bikini or underwear. It smells suspiciously like turpentine (which is normally used to clean up paint brushes and rolls while wearing gloves) and will inevitably burn your “epidermis”, leaving a large patch of dark, papery, purple-colored skin, that will slowly (over a period of a few weeks) detach itself from your lower abdomen, flapping uncomfortably until it simply falls off, revealing a brand new bubblegum-pink layer of raw skin underneath.
- Plastic surgeons offer indispensable services like laser hair removal and face peels. The waiting room is an elegant island of peace, with cream-coloured modern sofas, and a coffee station -- a mahogany buffet with state-of-the art cappuccino machine flanked by two pots of pink orchids. The coffee-table boasts a range of national and foreign magazines, the walls are decorated with rare still-life paintings, the air-conditioning is silent and looks like a giant I-pod. After all, Brazil has perfected the cult of perfection. Saturdays are for manicures, pedicures, hair-straightening, special chocolate moisturizing hair treatments, waxing, lasering away body hair, varicose vein zapping , lymph-node massaging to eradicate cellulite, tooth-whitening, teeth-straightening, jaw reduction, and nose removal.
- Plentiful hired help- Every shop, business, gym, bookstore, English school, restaurant, café, and even sweets stand, will have at least three, if not four, five or six guys wearing an ill-fitting dark suit and tie in 35-degree heat hired to observe the general goings-on in the surrounding perimeter of the said business, to perform some kind of not-quite-defined security function (or perhaps social function: they usually smile at you and say hello and know everything about you after your first two visits); as well as seven, eight or ten less well-dressed guys (called manobristas) earning less than minimum wage hired to park your car in obscure little side streets (as there is no way you’d spend 92 minutes circling the block or the entire neighborhood just to find a miserable parking space). They also seem to perform a shooing-away-street kids function. Every above-mentioned business will also have a batallion of cleaning ladies earning the wage of security man + wage of manobrista divided by 15, who will mop the floor every fifteen minutes, empty waste baskets every 10 minutes, and carry soapy water buckets up and down flights of stairs all day long.
(This comment is not meant to denigrate the work of these people, but rather to call attention to the medieval time/colonial style class-structure/wage difference where 10% of the population needs an army of servants everywhere they step. Unfortunately I am inevitably part of this 10%. I don't know how to rebel against this state of affairs. And by the way, these are invented statistics, but you can look up the real ones on the internet and you'll get my drift.)
- Sunday barbecues in the neighbouring building. The Salão de Festas, complete with the outdoor patio that is attached to every narrow building in the central neighborhoods of São Paulo, exists because people love to throw big parties but don’t have enough space in their 100’000 dollars a square-meter apartments. You will learn to either enjoy, or at least put up with a) the amorphous, high-pitched sound of loads of women cackling and amorphous, slightly more baritone sound of loads of men impressing each other with stories and lots of expletives (caraaaaaaaalho being a favourite); b) pumped up sound system (meaning heavy bass) medley of pagode (sugar-sweet, watered-down samba), bad eighties music, and hits by mega kid entertainer Xuxa; or if the party is a bit more trendy, pumped up sound of hard-core electro, minimal, trance, psy-trance, and other mushroomy variations of electronic music; c) drunken singing along to out-of-tune guitar, after sound-system has gone bust due to insufficient power or generalized city black-out; d) the sound of hundreds of children screeching (actually it will only be a dozen, but as Brazilians loooove children and think that loudness is a sign of happiness, it will sound like hundreds), d) arguments over whether the ball hit the inside or outside of the goalpost coming from the football/basketball/volleyball/skateboarding court adjacent to the patio and salão de festas.
- When you buy your cell phone, which will be not only pre-paid, but (illegally) registered in someone else’s name (the dear best friend) it will inevitably be stolen within at most two weeks. It will probably be stolen when you least expect it, for instance, when you are giving first-aid to a person whose leg has just got hit by a bomb at a demonstration against Bush that’s turned sour. The thief will be someone who looks like a passionately well-meaning, high-morals student, complete with overgrown hair, Che Guevara T-shirt, Palestinian kerchief and Adidas trainers, and who will offer, just when you’re shouting for “an ambulance, a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, what the fuck??!! somebody call the emergency number!!", the guy will offer, as I was saying, to call the emergency number from your cell phone, and will then mysteriously vanish into the panicked crowd, in a cloud of laughing gas, and other types of unidentified “light” artillery, of the "just rubber" type that leaves 1-inch holes in your back.
- If this should happen to you, it is highly recommended that you immediately let the police know, by going online and filling out a form for the BO (meaning, not body odor, obviously, but boletin de ocorrencia.) Stolen cell phones are inevitably traced back to prisons where inmates use pre-paid mobiles to make their plans to take over Brazil and the world. As you do not want your best friend, in whose name you registered the phone, to be accused of being intimately involved with the top bosses of the PCC (criminal mafia prison group), you better pray a lot.
- Newspapers have an incredibly high number of ads for high-rise apartment buildings, (as a matter of fact, you will find fewer news articles than ads), complete with pools, palm trees, 3 bathrooms per bedroom, ground –floor fully equipped gyms with bullet-proof panoramic views of Champs Elysees-style landscaped gardens, and hundreds of miserably-paid labourers to make this whole Disney-type garden of eden operate.
- If you’re me, you will learn to match name of high-rise building to decade and style of architecture. Above-mentioned buildings will usually have spanky Americanitis names like Coral Gables, Wall Street, Flamingo Towers. You will try to decide whether you prefer these names to the multitude of 80s and 90s architectural monstrosities with more sophisticated European names like Grenoble, Montpellier, Cap D’Antibes, Amalfi, or those Mediterannean, sophisticated Italian-renaissance style buildings with names of Italian renaissance artists, Mansão Da Vinci etc. Or you might just settle for 60s buildings with indigenous names like Ubiratã, Maiara, or 50s buildings with names of women like Maria Estela, Solange, Valentina and so on. My personal favorite is an ugly, blackened 40s building called Poesia. Apparently they had a sense of irony in the 40s.
- Water: you will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy buying and transporting water as it’s so hot everyday that you will suffer from constant dehydration- resulting in parched mouth, bad hair, and more eye wrinkles. Better call one of the countless little shops that offer the indispensible service of "water delivery": huge water dispensers brought to your front door, with men earning slave-labour wages transporting six or seven of these 20 liter-dispensers on carts and bicycles up and down steep hills, bringing one right inside your kitchen, and still giving you a smile when you realize you’ve got no change to reward them for their hard work.
- And while we’re on the subject, When it rains, it pours. You must never forget to shut all windows before you leave the house, lest you come home to huge puddles of water, wet clothes you left draped over the chair by the window, and flooded keyboard when your computer is by the window. As well, never buy cheap umbrellas from street vendors as they are programmed to self-destruct within fifteen minutes of opening. And finally, never decide to get on a bus, or head downtown in you own car when the rain starts. You might never return home again. Seriously.
- Never let the lady at the salon who’s waxing your legs and your bikini line come near you with a clear plastic bottle simply labeled “removedor”. This industrial-strength household product will be brought out to remove wax from your bikini or underwear. It smells suspiciously like turpentine (which is normally used to clean up paint brushes and rolls while wearing gloves) and will inevitably burn your “epidermis”, leaving a large patch of dark, papery, purple-colored skin, that will slowly (over a period of a few weeks) detach itself from your lower abdomen, flapping uncomfortably until it simply falls off, revealing a brand new bubblegum-pink layer of raw skin underneath.
- Plastic surgeons offer indispensable services like laser hair removal and face peels. The waiting room is an elegant island of peace, with cream-coloured modern sofas, and a coffee station -- a mahogany buffet with state-of-the art cappuccino machine flanked by two pots of pink orchids. The coffee-table boasts a range of national and foreign magazines, the walls are decorated with rare still-life paintings, the air-conditioning is silent and looks like a giant I-pod. After all, Brazil has perfected the cult of perfection. Saturdays are for manicures, pedicures, hair-straightening, special chocolate moisturizing hair treatments, waxing, lasering away body hair, varicose vein zapping , lymph-node massaging to eradicate cellulite, tooth-whitening, teeth-straightening, jaw reduction, and nose removal.
- Plentiful hired help- Every shop, business, gym, bookstore, English school, restaurant, café, and even sweets stand, will have at least three, if not four, five or six guys wearing an ill-fitting dark suit and tie in 35-degree heat hired to observe the general goings-on in the surrounding perimeter of the said business, to perform some kind of not-quite-defined security function (or perhaps social function: they usually smile at you and say hello and know everything about you after your first two visits); as well as seven, eight or ten less well-dressed guys (called manobristas) earning less than minimum wage hired to park your car in obscure little side streets (as there is no way you’d spend 92 minutes circling the block or the entire neighborhood just to find a miserable parking space). They also seem to perform a shooing-away-street kids function. Every above-mentioned business will also have a batallion of cleaning ladies earning the wage of security man + wage of manobrista divided by 15, who will mop the floor every fifteen minutes, empty waste baskets every 10 minutes, and carry soapy water buckets up and down flights of stairs all day long.
(This comment is not meant to denigrate the work of these people, but rather to call attention to the medieval time/colonial style class-structure/wage difference where 10% of the population needs an army of servants everywhere they step. Unfortunately I am inevitably part of this 10%. I don't know how to rebel against this state of affairs. And by the way, these are invented statistics, but you can look up the real ones on the internet and you'll get my drift.)
- Sunday barbecues in the neighbouring building. The Salão de Festas, complete with the outdoor patio that is attached to every narrow building in the central neighborhoods of São Paulo, exists because people love to throw big parties but don’t have enough space in their 100’000 dollars a square-meter apartments. You will learn to either enjoy, or at least put up with a) the amorphous, high-pitched sound of loads of women cackling and amorphous, slightly more baritone sound of loads of men impressing each other with stories and lots of expletives (caraaaaaaaalho being a favourite); b) pumped up sound system (meaning heavy bass) medley of pagode (sugar-sweet, watered-down samba), bad eighties music, and hits by mega kid entertainer Xuxa; or if the party is a bit more trendy, pumped up sound of hard-core electro, minimal, trance, psy-trance, and other mushroomy variations of electronic music; c) drunken singing along to out-of-tune guitar, after sound-system has gone bust due to insufficient power or generalized city black-out; d) the sound of hundreds of children screeching (actually it will only be a dozen, but as Brazilians loooove children and think that loudness is a sign of happiness, it will sound like hundreds), d) arguments over whether the ball hit the inside or outside of the goalpost coming from the football/basketball/volleyball/skateboarding court adjacent to the patio and salão de festas.
- When you buy your cell phone, which will be not only pre-paid, but (illegally) registered in someone else’s name (the dear best friend) it will inevitably be stolen within at most two weeks. It will probably be stolen when you least expect it, for instance, when you are giving first-aid to a person whose leg has just got hit by a bomb at a demonstration against Bush that’s turned sour. The thief will be someone who looks like a passionately well-meaning, high-morals student, complete with overgrown hair, Che Guevara T-shirt, Palestinian kerchief and Adidas trainers, and who will offer, just when you’re shouting for “an ambulance, a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, what the fuck??!! somebody call the emergency number!!", the guy will offer, as I was saying, to call the emergency number from your cell phone, and will then mysteriously vanish into the panicked crowd, in a cloud of laughing gas, and other types of unidentified “light” artillery, of the "just rubber" type that leaves 1-inch holes in your back.
- If this should happen to you, it is highly recommended that you immediately let the police know, by going online and filling out a form for the BO (meaning, not body odor, obviously, but boletin de ocorrencia.) Stolen cell phones are inevitably traced back to prisons where inmates use pre-paid mobiles to make their plans to take over Brazil and the world. As you do not want your best friend, in whose name you registered the phone, to be accused of being intimately involved with the top bosses of the PCC (criminal mafia prison group), you better pray a lot.
segunda-feira, 14 de julho de 2008
The other Park
The journey of recollection is beset by traps. Armadilhas. Although I was so happy to have found my park, I had nagging doubts about whether it really was “the one”. What if I were just fooling myself, willing the park to be the iconic one of my shadowy memories? That day when I got reacquainted with it, I walked along its paths and found it familiar and alien at the same time. I saw people (mostly young, possibly unemployed men) sitting on benches, dog-walkers, an abnormally low number of joggers, and a man practicing yoga in a corner by a huge figueira tree. I convinced myself that this was the park. But I had no scientific evidence.
Strangely, I’ve never revisited the park. My most recurring contact with it is when my friends and I drive down one of its bordering streets, Peixoto Gomide, at night when we’re traversing Jardins. At this time the park is taken over by young boys, "garotos de programa" waiting for their clients, lonesome dark shapes waiting for a car to stop. And watching the dodginess of the place at night, I have actually laughed out loud at my absurdly nostalgic bent of mind.
I do still walk past Parque Trianon when I’m running errands on Avenida Paulista. In front of the entrance, there is a massive white statue of a bearded man (I used to think it was Dom Pedro), all oversized, muscular legs and arms, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Everytime I walk in front of it I notice the unreal, exaggerated size of the man’s limbs, its huge, thick stone legs practically bursting out of its stone trousers. I now know it isn’t the monarch at all, but a representation of a brave bandeirante, of a kind of 16th century Indiana Jones that seems to have just emerged from the virgin forest behind him. And indeed, the park is all Mata Atlântica, the exotic and over-the-top vegetation that skirts most of Brazil’s coast and that is supposed to hold more biodiversity than the Amazonian jungle itself.
A stone’s throw away from the gigantic stone man, I always encounter another fixture: a small, weathered beggar sitting on the steps leading to the street, a one-armed figure loitering eternally on the corner of the street. His short stump, his beak nose, his lined face, everything imbues him with a kind of tragic Greek aura in my mind. In the hustle-and-bustle of Avenida Paulista, his immobility makes him hyper-real, it makes him look like a veritable apparition.
The less people notice the one-armed man, the more he stands out for me, like all the other miserable people who sit all year round in that relentless serpent of an avenue. I imagine that after a while, all beggars become statues to passersby. They are part of the landscape. In my most glum state of mind, I can also imagine that perhaps no one would notice if a bunch of dirty pigeons sat on their heads and shoulders.
And if I allow myself to linger in the “Greek tragedy” feeling that often assaulted me, during my first months in São Paulo, whenever I walked down Avenida Paulista, the image that rises in my mind is so grotesque I hardly dare to share it: I see the pigeons turning into rapacious vultures, beaking the beggars to death as if they were the city’s offering to the gods. And people continue to walk by, hurriedly.
Strangely, I’ve never revisited the park. My most recurring contact with it is when my friends and I drive down one of its bordering streets, Peixoto Gomide, at night when we’re traversing Jardins. At this time the park is taken over by young boys, "garotos de programa" waiting for their clients, lonesome dark shapes waiting for a car to stop. And watching the dodginess of the place at night, I have actually laughed out loud at my absurdly nostalgic bent of mind.
I do still walk past Parque Trianon when I’m running errands on Avenida Paulista. In front of the entrance, there is a massive white statue of a bearded man (I used to think it was Dom Pedro), all oversized, muscular legs and arms, his shirt sleeves rolled up. Everytime I walk in front of it I notice the unreal, exaggerated size of the man’s limbs, its huge, thick stone legs practically bursting out of its stone trousers. I now know it isn’t the monarch at all, but a representation of a brave bandeirante, of a kind of 16th century Indiana Jones that seems to have just emerged from the virgin forest behind him. And indeed, the park is all Mata Atlântica, the exotic and over-the-top vegetation that skirts most of Brazil’s coast and that is supposed to hold more biodiversity than the Amazonian jungle itself.
A stone’s throw away from the gigantic stone man, I always encounter another fixture: a small, weathered beggar sitting on the steps leading to the street, a one-armed figure loitering eternally on the corner of the street. His short stump, his beak nose, his lined face, everything imbues him with a kind of tragic Greek aura in my mind. In the hustle-and-bustle of Avenida Paulista, his immobility makes him hyper-real, it makes him look like a veritable apparition.
The less people notice the one-armed man, the more he stands out for me, like all the other miserable people who sit all year round in that relentless serpent of an avenue. I imagine that after a while, all beggars become statues to passersby. They are part of the landscape. In my most glum state of mind, I can also imagine that perhaps no one would notice if a bunch of dirty pigeons sat on their heads and shoulders.
And if I allow myself to linger in the “Greek tragedy” feeling that often assaulted me, during my first months in São Paulo, whenever I walked down Avenida Paulista, the image that rises in my mind is so grotesque I hardly dare to share it: I see the pigeons turning into rapacious vultures, beaking the beggars to death as if they were the city’s offering to the gods. And people continue to walk by, hurriedly.
domingo, 13 de julho de 2008
The Park
I have been hounding this park, I have been hounded by this park. The stillness, the veiled light underneath the trees. The air there is pale green, with stripes, I’m certain. I know it from a dream, I have dreamt of it many times before. I just don’t remember how old the dream is…
Back in October, on my first visit to Brazil, we drove by the park on Alameda Jaú and there was the instant flash, the certainty of déjà-vu. “I’ve been here before, I know this place intimately”. It made sense, it was so near the old apartment where we used to live. I could see myself inside it, being led into its green labyrinth, someone had held my hand and led me inside it. Glossy, dark dark green foliage. I had never seen such dark, petroleum-green leaves anywhere else in my life.
Parque Trianon, somebody told me. Or perhaps I just read a sign the day I finally walked by it. I had never known its name. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t have a name, it need not have a name, its existence was not dependent upon a name. It had always been inside me, nameless, and yet totally real. The park just was. I had forgotten that the park still lived inside me.
A long long time ago, after I’d left it, after I’d stopped going there, it had still pulsated with irregular beats, it had surged forth in my mind’s eye at the strangest moments. But then it had lodged itself deep down inside, just waiting, like a small animal in a cave, for the day when it would be retrieved.
Black and white mosaic paths. I had been delaying the encounter with the park, its dark greenness, the thickness of its canopy, the plants that grew at ground level, below all the trees growing very close together. And then I finally went in, almost apprehensive (will my dream vanish, or will the actual park disintegrate? Only one park can survive, I thought). I knew that I’d been there as a very small child; I must have been two, three, four years old.
I don’t know why I waited so long before visiting it again, even though I’d been living only a few blocks away from it, down by Joaquim Eugenio de Lima. It was only in May, three months after my arrival, that I ventured inside it. Vines wrapping themselves amorously around thick trunks, brown-grey trunks like elephant legs. Stalks with thousands of leaves twisting around the tree trunks, colonizing them. Parasites. Furry green tree trunks. Tall palm trees with their glossy green palm leaves and a jet of brown octopus legs underneath, furry octopus tentacles.
I had been taken down its lanes and its winding paths. In a pram, or holding a giant’s hand. I muttered inside me “I have known this park, I have known this park. I have known this park.” As though if I repeated this mantra over and over again, I could know it again, now.
My park, my dear dear park. You’re mine again.
Back in October, on my first visit to Brazil, we drove by the park on Alameda Jaú and there was the instant flash, the certainty of déjà-vu. “I’ve been here before, I know this place intimately”. It made sense, it was so near the old apartment where we used to live. I could see myself inside it, being led into its green labyrinth, someone had held my hand and led me inside it. Glossy, dark dark green foliage. I had never seen such dark, petroleum-green leaves anywhere else in my life.
Parque Trianon, somebody told me. Or perhaps I just read a sign the day I finally walked by it. I had never known its name. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t have a name, it need not have a name, its existence was not dependent upon a name. It had always been inside me, nameless, and yet totally real. The park just was. I had forgotten that the park still lived inside me.
A long long time ago, after I’d left it, after I’d stopped going there, it had still pulsated with irregular beats, it had surged forth in my mind’s eye at the strangest moments. But then it had lodged itself deep down inside, just waiting, like a small animal in a cave, for the day when it would be retrieved.
Black and white mosaic paths. I had been delaying the encounter with the park, its dark greenness, the thickness of its canopy, the plants that grew at ground level, below all the trees growing very close together. And then I finally went in, almost apprehensive (will my dream vanish, or will the actual park disintegrate? Only one park can survive, I thought). I knew that I’d been there as a very small child; I must have been two, three, four years old.
I don’t know why I waited so long before visiting it again, even though I’d been living only a few blocks away from it, down by Joaquim Eugenio de Lima. It was only in May, three months after my arrival, that I ventured inside it. Vines wrapping themselves amorously around thick trunks, brown-grey trunks like elephant legs. Stalks with thousands of leaves twisting around the tree trunks, colonizing them. Parasites. Furry green tree trunks. Tall palm trees with their glossy green palm leaves and a jet of brown octopus legs underneath, furry octopus tentacles.
I had been taken down its lanes and its winding paths. In a pram, or holding a giant’s hand. I muttered inside me “I have known this park, I have known this park. I have known this park.” As though if I repeated this mantra over and over again, I could know it again, now.
My park, my dear dear park. You’re mine again.
sábado, 12 de julho de 2008
Day -1, February 2007 (the real arrival?)
Yesterday's writing was about my first day back in Brazil. I described my very first impressions, and rereading the entry, I saw that it almost sounded like a dream. It seemed, how should I put it, unspecific? Like the opening scene of a movie that could have been shot by just anybody, including my favorite and least-favorite directors. Even the style of writing was different from what I'd written before, more like fiction. Perhaps that is the way I remember that morning: vague, white, sharp, cool; imagined. Perhaps the scene is a blueprint, a suspended bubble that captures the feeling of many of my arrivals (or returns). But actually, there is another arrival. The real one, the night before.
My plane landed in São Paulo at the end of the day. Lilian had come to pick me up at the airport. She saw me with my trolley laden with just one suitcase and a carry-on bag, and I remember her look of surprise, as she said something along the lines of "that's it?". Yes, that was it. Only 25 kilos allowed coming from London. I had sent two boxes by plane, and four boxes by ship, and the latter would arrive in Santos only a month later.
We hugged. She suggested that we stop by the little cafeteria. We ordered pão de queijo and I asked for guaraná, that childhood drink, and then she went to the bathroom and I was left alone to contemplate the enormity of what I had just done. I'd left yet another country with the intention of settling in a new one (in this case, an old one too).
Lilian pushed my trolley to the parking lot. The air was cool, night was falling, the trees looked very dark green, and there was a slight breeze. "I think I told you in my last email, I saw F... a couple of weeks ago, at a concert," she said. I waited for her to tell me more about him. She didn't have much to say.
"I'm sorry Nat, but I really think you should forget about him, he's just a moleque." A boy. Yes, I knew that in a way. But knowing that didn't stop me from having feelings for him. It was getting darker, and soon we were entering São Paulo. Traffic was already dense, there was less space between our car and the one ahead. But everything seemed to be happening inside the car, in the hidden heart of the conversation. Peering outside while Lilian talked, I didn't feel like I had just landed in this place. I wasn't sure where I was at all.
Actually, there had been another arrival. Four months before. I'd come on vacation, and I'd stayed at F...'s house. I'd experienced this city where I was born, this first return, through the eyes of the guy that I'd met in London, who had introduced me to yet another Brazil.
I couldn't help but feel a growing gap between my two arrivals, my two returns. He'd come to pick me up at the airport, it had been daytime; and everything had felt fresh and warm and good. I remember most clearly the feeling I got when we started driving along the marginal Pinheiros, when the terrible sewage stench had drifted into the car. It was the end of the day, the sky was turning a curious orange (I would later know that it was the pollution tinging everything with a toxic yet strangely appealing hue). And I remember the incredible skyline on the other side of the river, infinite glass towers stabbing the brazen sky. It was a truly apocalyptic scene, as if we were at the very edge of the world. And just when the smell had gotten overpowering, and I'd started thinking, "this doesn't seem real", he had turned to me and smiled. I'd felt giddy, and the whole happy feeling of being with him had mixed with the feeling of being in Brazil, and the two feelings had melded together until they'd become undistinguishable.
Now, the night had swallowed much of what I'd seen back in October. Now, I saw shadows and outlines of things in the dark, and millions of car lights on the road ahead, stretching as far as the eye could reach. And where I'd seen the jagged skyscrapers clearly outlined against the burnt sky, I now saw millions of square lights, rows and rows of lights suspended in the dark horizon. The car slowed down, seemed just about to stop at the street crossing, and then jerkily sped ahead. Passing the red light, Lilian started explaining that she didn't like to stop for long; the kids just came at you, sometimes juggling, sometimes asking to clean your window. Asking for change. Recently, someone had grabbed her arm and held it tightly down over the rolled-down window, haranguing for money. "Things are different, things are worse now", she said. I didn't know what to think or tell her, and kept quiet.
And I felt flat. I wanted very much not to feel flat, and empty, and unable to focus on anything. I wanted that other feeling back. That high, that feeling of walking into one of your dreams, of walking into a painting you'd seen somewhere a long, long time ago. I wanted the exhilaration back. But this second arrival was not like that. It was what it was. It was real, in a dark and mundane way that the other one hadn't been. Had my other arrival been colored by the rosy-glasses that everyone sings about? I didn't think so. Perhaps it had been that special way because it had been the first time. And the second arrival could never be the same. From the second time onwards, you started comparing with the first one, or the last one, or all of the other ones before. And pronto. The whole process of reminiscing, comparing, trying to fit realities, dreams and memories together had started. Nothing could be more human. Man is the animal that remembers. Ad nauseam.
My plane landed in São Paulo at the end of the day. Lilian had come to pick me up at the airport. She saw me with my trolley laden with just one suitcase and a carry-on bag, and I remember her look of surprise, as she said something along the lines of "that's it?". Yes, that was it. Only 25 kilos allowed coming from London. I had sent two boxes by plane, and four boxes by ship, and the latter would arrive in Santos only a month later.
We hugged. She suggested that we stop by the little cafeteria. We ordered pão de queijo and I asked for guaraná, that childhood drink, and then she went to the bathroom and I was left alone to contemplate the enormity of what I had just done. I'd left yet another country with the intention of settling in a new one (in this case, an old one too).
Lilian pushed my trolley to the parking lot. The air was cool, night was falling, the trees looked very dark green, and there was a slight breeze. "I think I told you in my last email, I saw F... a couple of weeks ago, at a concert," she said. I waited for her to tell me more about him. She didn't have much to say.
"I'm sorry Nat, but I really think you should forget about him, he's just a moleque." A boy. Yes, I knew that in a way. But knowing that didn't stop me from having feelings for him. It was getting darker, and soon we were entering São Paulo. Traffic was already dense, there was less space between our car and the one ahead. But everything seemed to be happening inside the car, in the hidden heart of the conversation. Peering outside while Lilian talked, I didn't feel like I had just landed in this place. I wasn't sure where I was at all.
Actually, there had been another arrival. Four months before. I'd come on vacation, and I'd stayed at F...'s house. I'd experienced this city where I was born, this first return, through the eyes of the guy that I'd met in London, who had introduced me to yet another Brazil.
I couldn't help but feel a growing gap between my two arrivals, my two returns. He'd come to pick me up at the airport, it had been daytime; and everything had felt fresh and warm and good. I remember most clearly the feeling I got when we started driving along the marginal Pinheiros, when the terrible sewage stench had drifted into the car. It was the end of the day, the sky was turning a curious orange (I would later know that it was the pollution tinging everything with a toxic yet strangely appealing hue). And I remember the incredible skyline on the other side of the river, infinite glass towers stabbing the brazen sky. It was a truly apocalyptic scene, as if we were at the very edge of the world. And just when the smell had gotten overpowering, and I'd started thinking, "this doesn't seem real", he had turned to me and smiled. I'd felt giddy, and the whole happy feeling of being with him had mixed with the feeling of being in Brazil, and the two feelings had melded together until they'd become undistinguishable.
Now, the night had swallowed much of what I'd seen back in October. Now, I saw shadows and outlines of things in the dark, and millions of car lights on the road ahead, stretching as far as the eye could reach. And where I'd seen the jagged skyscrapers clearly outlined against the burnt sky, I now saw millions of square lights, rows and rows of lights suspended in the dark horizon. The car slowed down, seemed just about to stop at the street crossing, and then jerkily sped ahead. Passing the red light, Lilian started explaining that she didn't like to stop for long; the kids just came at you, sometimes juggling, sometimes asking to clean your window. Asking for change. Recently, someone had grabbed her arm and held it tightly down over the rolled-down window, haranguing for money. "Things are different, things are worse now", she said. I didn't know what to think or tell her, and kept quiet.
And I felt flat. I wanted very much not to feel flat, and empty, and unable to focus on anything. I wanted that other feeling back. That high, that feeling of walking into one of your dreams, of walking into a painting you'd seen somewhere a long, long time ago. I wanted the exhilaration back. But this second arrival was not like that. It was what it was. It was real, in a dark and mundane way that the other one hadn't been. Had my other arrival been colored by the rosy-glasses that everyone sings about? I didn't think so. Perhaps it had been that special way because it had been the first time. And the second arrival could never be the same. From the second time onwards, you started comparing with the first one, or the last one, or all of the other ones before. And pronto. The whole process of reminiscing, comparing, trying to fit realities, dreams and memories together had started. Nothing could be more human. Man is the animal that remembers. Ad nauseam.
Day 1, February 2007 (arrival)
I slept a long, deep, dreamless sleep. Then I woke in a narrow, dark room. Outside, a constant rushing sound. I got up and opened the shades, opened the windows. Ten floors below, there was the constant rushing sound of traffic. Across, a solid wall of apartment buildings with its hundreds of windows looking back at me. A feeling of containment, of being surrounded from all sides. Boxed-in.
I ventured out into the hallway. Checked if Lilian was home. No, gone. I took a shower in her white, white bathroom. Dozens of perfume bottles, shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, sunscreen bottles on her wide marble sink. Piles of sunglasses stacked on the shelf above. I dried off in my room, stared at my belongings on the desk. Toiletries bag, books, notebooks, wallet, passport pouch, camera. My whole life contained in these few things.
I walked to the kitchen barefoot, feeling the cool floor beneath. This was new. After months of London winter, a drafty apartment, and a dirty old carpet, my skin touched the elements -air, stone- in a completely different way. My feet on the hard, cool floor and no cold, no cold at all. Wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, I felt a fresh, new freedom. No layers, nothing swathing your body. Seeing your legs, seeing your pale, pale arms. Seeing your knees, and your ankles, and your toes. Even they looked new, different, almost detached from myself. And there was no cold at all.
The kitchen was large and white-tiled. A bright, bright kitchen, like the one at home in Caracas. Light pouring in. The cold tiled floor beneath my feet. I sat at the kitchen table. There was a newspaper on the table and a basket of bread and a big slab of moist, white cheese in a glass container. I put a pot of water on the stove to boil. No kettle here. I went back to the table, and started reading the newspaper with great hunger.
It was an enormous hunger; I swallowed words whole, gulped down long sentences. I read and read, turned the page and read. A hissing sound came from the stove. I rushed and saw that all the water had evaporated. Just a few drops on the metal surface, slithering back and forth, and the hissing sound. I poured more water in the pot, placed it on the stove again, and went back to the table to read the paper. Ardently, fervently galloping across the pages, savouring and swallowing the words whole. Chuva, alagamento, vôo... This last one a particularly tasty word. Like I was eating the call of a weird prehistoric bird.
I ventured out into the hallway. Checked if Lilian was home. No, gone. I took a shower in her white, white bathroom. Dozens of perfume bottles, shampoo bottles, conditioner bottles, sunscreen bottles on her wide marble sink. Piles of sunglasses stacked on the shelf above. I dried off in my room, stared at my belongings on the desk. Toiletries bag, books, notebooks, wallet, passport pouch, camera. My whole life contained in these few things.
I walked to the kitchen barefoot, feeling the cool floor beneath. This was new. After months of London winter, a drafty apartment, and a dirty old carpet, my skin touched the elements -air, stone- in a completely different way. My feet on the hard, cool floor and no cold, no cold at all. Wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts, I felt a fresh, new freedom. No layers, nothing swathing your body. Seeing your legs, seeing your pale, pale arms. Seeing your knees, and your ankles, and your toes. Even they looked new, different, almost detached from myself. And there was no cold at all.
The kitchen was large and white-tiled. A bright, bright kitchen, like the one at home in Caracas. Light pouring in. The cold tiled floor beneath my feet. I sat at the kitchen table. There was a newspaper on the table and a basket of bread and a big slab of moist, white cheese in a glass container. I put a pot of water on the stove to boil. No kettle here. I went back to the table, and started reading the newspaper with great hunger.
It was an enormous hunger; I swallowed words whole, gulped down long sentences. I read and read, turned the page and read. A hissing sound came from the stove. I rushed and saw that all the water had evaporated. Just a few drops on the metal surface, slithering back and forth, and the hissing sound. I poured more water in the pot, placed it on the stove again, and went back to the table to read the paper. Ardently, fervently galloping across the pages, savouring and swallowing the words whole. Chuva, alagamento, vôo... This last one a particularly tasty word. Like I was eating the call of a weird prehistoric bird.
terça-feira, 8 de julho de 2008
Collage number 1
(N.B. This is not my writing. Check source at the end of posting)
"Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity points to the idea of a self as a storied self, as an entity made up of stories told, indeed, entangled in the stories that a person tells or that are told about her. Yet, this very mundane aspect of human beings is also a profoundly enigmatic element (2). This is because, in Ricoeur, the notion of narrative identity is grounded in an ontology deriving from Heidegger’s (1962) emphasis on temporality as the defining characteristic of human beings. The primacy of time in relation to being has to do with the understanding of being as the entity that questions itself as to its way of being.
(...)
Yet a basic aporia of time is its inscrutability. This may well be because we are encompassed by time, as I have just indicated, so that it is impossible to stand outside it. The avenue that Ricoeur follows is to explore the possibility that narrative is the form in which we can overcome the unrepresentability of time (when we think of it in the singular), and the device by which we express the lived, or phenomenal, aspect of the temporality of being. The underlying idea is that the act of telling a story "can transmute natural time into a specifically human time" (1984: 17). In Ricoeur's approach, the term narrative identity seems to join up two problematics of subjectivity: concerning identity, and concerning the relation of history to fiction in the process of the figuration of temporality. The two problematics are correlated by way of the idea that time, and the way it is lived, provides the common ground for their co-articulation (3)."
from "The future of dialogue: Narrative identity, the exchange of memory, and the constitution of new spaces of belonging"
by Couze Venn
DRAFT - NOT FOR QUOTATION
(yes, I didn't respect the author's wish. I'm not sure what laws protect this guy. If it's just a draft, does it mean it doesn't have a copyright yet? Plus, I found it on the internet, by googling something up...)
"Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity points to the idea of a self as a storied self, as an entity made up of stories told, indeed, entangled in the stories that a person tells or that are told about her. Yet, this very mundane aspect of human beings is also a profoundly enigmatic element (2). This is because, in Ricoeur, the notion of narrative identity is grounded in an ontology deriving from Heidegger’s (1962) emphasis on temporality as the defining characteristic of human beings. The primacy of time in relation to being has to do with the understanding of being as the entity that questions itself as to its way of being.
(...)
Yet a basic aporia of time is its inscrutability. This may well be because we are encompassed by time, as I have just indicated, so that it is impossible to stand outside it. The avenue that Ricoeur follows is to explore the possibility that narrative is the form in which we can overcome the unrepresentability of time (when we think of it in the singular), and the device by which we express the lived, or phenomenal, aspect of the temporality of being. The underlying idea is that the act of telling a story "can transmute natural time into a specifically human time" (1984: 17). In Ricoeur's approach, the term narrative identity seems to join up two problematics of subjectivity: concerning identity, and concerning the relation of history to fiction in the process of the figuration of temporality. The two problematics are correlated by way of the idea that time, and the way it is lived, provides the common ground for their co-articulation (3)."
from "The future of dialogue: Narrative identity, the exchange of memory, and the constitution of new spaces of belonging"
by Couze Venn
DRAFT - NOT FOR QUOTATION
(yes, I didn't respect the author's wish. I'm not sure what laws protect this guy. If it's just a draft, does it mean it doesn't have a copyright yet? Plus, I found it on the internet, by googling something up...)
Day 1, Month: a very dry, polluted holiday month, autumn, Brazil (2008)
My Blog Manifesto regarding writing format (or "what this will look like")
The great thing about a blog is that it allows for an infinite number of structures, forms, and models of writing.
I am hoping that this format will be totally suitable to the fragmentary nature of my writing, that is, that it will offer a solution to my perpetual procrastination, tendency to write random thoughts and descriptions on napkins, receipts and utility bills (all of which are easily lost), inability to finish short stories, intermitant devotion to journal writing, and comfortableness in writing disconnected paragraphs.
I like to tell myself that it is just an "anti-linear thinking" guerrilla tactic, but honestly, sometimes I think it just has to do with the rather unfocused, tired, and slightly unhappy state of mind I've had lately (to be precise, in the last few years)...
*It'd be great if I could just turn my hand to the writing of aphorisms, but even this notion appears to paralyze me. Something along the lines of Adorno's "Minima Moralia", but written by a blond, thirty-something noughties chick who can't seem to settle in any country (or career for that matter). You know, clinically accurate yet hilarious observations on the pros and cons of working in a bookstore versus doing silver dining in a boutique hotel, versus working in show business accompanying insane Mexican pop stars on tour etc.
**I may appear messy (and rather nonchalant about it) to people who look at my room and the inside of my handbag, but really, I'm a total obssessive-compulsive when it comes to organising the inside of my brain.
EXAMPLE: I am a compulsive list-maker ( I make lists of places I've been, shoes and bags bought over one year, men I've spent the night with, favorite people, authors read, things that a guy said to me that would lead me to believe he wants to be my boyfriend, toiletries I'm going to take on my next trip, possible glamorous and artsy careers I would choose had I the talent or were I given a chance, favorite recipes, cities in Asia I've visited, bands I used to listen to when I was 14, etc etc.)
So here's my first list, just so you get cosy with this format...
*******************************************
Types of writing I do:
- I am well-versed in the art of college paper --essay-- writing (lots of sources, quotes, footnotes etc). This is the only type of writing which I seem to have no problem starting and finishing within a short period of time.
-Sorry, let me correct that. I enjoy writing press releases as long as they are culture-related. In this case, my timing is not so bad, since we usually have short deadlines.
- I have written journalistic articles, but, according to my old journalism teacher, I seem to love the research part a little too much.
-I get particular pleasure out of writing reviews. Especially if they're about Japanese writers, Japanese film, Japanese fashion, and so on.
-I used to write good, laborious (but boring) letters to my Oma (my grandmother- my mother's mother). Nowadays I just talk to her on the phone.
-Some emails to ex-lovers and friends overseas can be fairly interesting, and appear to be a mix of travel log, boring rant and once again, journal.
-I've written about a dozen short stories, but none of them are finished. I expect to finish them and turn them into a short-story collection sometime before my sixty-fourth birthday.
-I once wrote poems, perhaps a dozen (pretty good ones if I may say so), but I gave them all to my ex-boyfriend, who never suggested giving them back to me once we broke up. I've thought about contacting him just to ask for them, but really, I'm still procrastinating...
-I've been writing journals (or diaries, if you prefer) since I was 15. There are boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks, most of them stored at my friend Neelam's house in London. I hate not having access to them as the act of rereading them is great for purposes of reminiscing, entertainment, list-making, self-pitying, self-aggrandizement, etc.
- I wrote my high-school graduating speech, and delivered it in such an already nostalgic state of mind, that I started crying half-way through. People in the audience started clapping, and crying as well. I'm sure they thought it was a pre-planned gimmick to make the whole sentimental ceremony even more memorably mushy. Honestly, it hadn't been planned. Same thing happened when I gave a speech at the office for a departing co-worker. As a matter of fact, for me, writing and giving a speech= crying in public. I am just extremely prone to saudades, I think it's in my DNA. (come to think of it, my dad was also one to cry at the drop of a hat at any important occasion involving recollection of a *lost* past).
-... and so on
(Notice I made this list without any numbers, just dashes, thus making it non-hierarchical. There's no meaning to the order in which I cited the types of writing.)
I propose exploring all the types of writing cited above, plus one I haven't mentioned yet: collage. No, this is not a form of plagiarism. I'm just giving myself the license to "cut and paste" a piece of writing I like, that I find relevant, all the while quoting the source. My next entry will be an example of exactly that... All this in the hopes of coming to my concerns, themes, stories, and anxieties from all possible angles.
The great thing about a blog is that it allows for an infinite number of structures, forms, and models of writing.
I am hoping that this format will be totally suitable to the fragmentary nature of my writing, that is, that it will offer a solution to my perpetual procrastination, tendency to write random thoughts and descriptions on napkins, receipts and utility bills (all of which are easily lost), inability to finish short stories, intermitant devotion to journal writing, and comfortableness in writing disconnected paragraphs.
I like to tell myself that it is just an "anti-linear thinking" guerrilla tactic, but honestly, sometimes I think it just has to do with the rather unfocused, tired, and slightly unhappy state of mind I've had lately (to be precise, in the last few years)...
*It'd be great if I could just turn my hand to the writing of aphorisms, but even this notion appears to paralyze me. Something along the lines of Adorno's "Minima Moralia", but written by a blond, thirty-something noughties chick who can't seem to settle in any country (or career for that matter). You know, clinically accurate yet hilarious observations on the pros and cons of working in a bookstore versus doing silver dining in a boutique hotel, versus working in show business accompanying insane Mexican pop stars on tour etc.
**I may appear messy (and rather nonchalant about it) to people who look at my room and the inside of my handbag, but really, I'm a total obssessive-compulsive when it comes to organising the inside of my brain.
EXAMPLE: I am a compulsive list-maker ( I make lists of places I've been, shoes and bags bought over one year, men I've spent the night with, favorite people, authors read, things that a guy said to me that would lead me to believe he wants to be my boyfriend, toiletries I'm going to take on my next trip, possible glamorous and artsy careers I would choose had I the talent or were I given a chance, favorite recipes, cities in Asia I've visited, bands I used to listen to when I was 14, etc etc.)
So here's my first list, just so you get cosy with this format...
*******************************************
Types of writing I do:
- I am well-versed in the art of college paper --essay-- writing (lots of sources, quotes, footnotes etc). This is the only type of writing which I seem to have no problem starting and finishing within a short period of time.
-Sorry, let me correct that. I enjoy writing press releases as long as they are culture-related. In this case, my timing is not so bad, since we usually have short deadlines.
- I have written journalistic articles, but, according to my old journalism teacher, I seem to love the research part a little too much.
-I get particular pleasure out of writing reviews. Especially if they're about Japanese writers, Japanese film, Japanese fashion, and so on.
-I used to write good, laborious (but boring) letters to my Oma (my grandmother- my mother's mother). Nowadays I just talk to her on the phone.
-Some emails to ex-lovers and friends overseas can be fairly interesting, and appear to be a mix of travel log, boring rant and once again, journal.
-I've written about a dozen short stories, but none of them are finished. I expect to finish them and turn them into a short-story collection sometime before my sixty-fourth birthday.
-I once wrote poems, perhaps a dozen (pretty good ones if I may say so), but I gave them all to my ex-boyfriend, who never suggested giving them back to me once we broke up. I've thought about contacting him just to ask for them, but really, I'm still procrastinating...
-I've been writing journals (or diaries, if you prefer) since I was 15. There are boxes and boxes of papers and notebooks, most of them stored at my friend Neelam's house in London. I hate not having access to them as the act of rereading them is great for purposes of reminiscing, entertainment, list-making, self-pitying, self-aggrandizement, etc.
- I wrote my high-school graduating speech, and delivered it in such an already nostalgic state of mind, that I started crying half-way through. People in the audience started clapping, and crying as well. I'm sure they thought it was a pre-planned gimmick to make the whole sentimental ceremony even more memorably mushy. Honestly, it hadn't been planned. Same thing happened when I gave a speech at the office for a departing co-worker. As a matter of fact, for me, writing and giving a speech= crying in public. I am just extremely prone to saudades, I think it's in my DNA. (come to think of it, my dad was also one to cry at the drop of a hat at any important occasion involving recollection of a *lost* past).
-... and so on
(Notice I made this list without any numbers, just dashes, thus making it non-hierarchical. There's no meaning to the order in which I cited the types of writing.)
I propose exploring all the types of writing cited above, plus one I haven't mentioned yet: collage. No, this is not a form of plagiarism. I'm just giving myself the license to "cut and paste" a piece of writing I like, that I find relevant, all the while quoting the source. My next entry will be an example of exactly that... All this in the hopes of coming to my concerns, themes, stories, and anxieties from all possible angles.
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