Category: thoughts

Loneliness is not the broken violin,
it is not the worn strings
or the useless bow.
Loneliness is the missing musician.

***

1 –
“Sometimes it feels that your life is a game you play to make me feel more and more lonely” He said with his eyes fixed on something outside the window.
She took a long time to ponder this and then she said simply: “We need more milk…” and then, when he turn to look at her she added: “and butter…”
He stood up, grab the car keys and his wallet from the table, and pick up a couple of fabric market-bags from a hook by the entrance and left the house to never come back.

2 –
His body was found two hundred and seventy three thousand years too late, in a sedimentary layer corresponding to the twenty and twenty first centuries of the first cycle.

Here is my most harrowing tale:
“Once upon a time there was a very sad and horrible story.
And it didn’t end.”

The rainy season is upon us, the people under the skies and the pathos of Vancouver Island.
There is really only two seasons around here: the drier, tempered few days we call summer and the unending years that constitute each winter.
The light dampens, the spirit sinks and the plants first get sickened by rot and the die. Next year we, the eternal optimists that keep a garden in this wheather, will plant new ones.
The few that survive, the ones we call peremnials, are like old friends to us. The winter survival we shared, the little green the gave us in the dreary days, we thank them, and try to repay with care.
So, this is what I wrote last week, under the spell of the rain:

I am waiting for death – not mine.

The death of a garden we nurtured all spring and summer.

Autumn is here.

Winter is not death: it is afterlife.

With its dry air and the utter depth of its emptiness,

winter is a macabre heaven.

Autumn is the dirty, wet, muddled process of dying.

Muddy spring is the incessant fucking of two wild creatures in heat.

We are at the metro station, going south towards sterile,

but we will come out at the other end after a while.

Some trains have a circular route,

some don’t.

“There had been a girl who had laughed with him, the laughter deep inside her throat…” Clifford D. Simak – A Choice of Gods.

Laughing, we are told by Hans Ruesch in his book “Top of the World” (that I knew a long time ago by his Spanish title “El País de las Sombras Largas”; a much more inspired title indeed), is what the Eskimos call making love. Having lived in Canada for 27 years, and having spent some of them in the north, and furthermore having known at least one Eskimo in person (Hey Johnny! I wonder how you are doing these days….) I am no closer to verify that tidbit of information that I was when I read the book all the way back in Buenos Aires, and all those years ago, in my adolescence.

It seems to me that even if it wasn’t true, the concept behind it is good enough to merit adoption. I know, for myself, that of all the passionate moments I shared with my Gabi, those in which we shared a laugh are the most lasting ones. Sharing a poignant, or a dramatic event can tie you to a person – even sharing a traumatic event I imagine can do the same, or so we are told in countless books, movies and TV serials – but sharing a laugh with a person you love gets you closer than anything else ever will. The more you laugh the more you love her, and the more you know her. 

I fantasize about suicide, I fear heart attacks, cancer, acts of agression or simple accidents. Yet I still ask myself constantly “how…?” and “when…?” as if the question didn’t actually mean “why would I ever…” – after all, I am the dreamer.

I am scientific minded, you could say. I do not meant to imply I have special claims to mastering a science, or a long, medium or any-sized actual experience with science. I just mean have a mind that clicks better with the idea of science than with the idea of faith.

I discovered very early that I cannot lie to myself. That is, not if I can see what I am doing  (there is all kinds of lying that we do that we know nothing about, and regarding those I have no special powers).

It was right after my granmother’s death. I was seven years old and I needed reassurance that I will see her again and above all, that that awful thing that just had happened to her wouldn’t ever happen to me. So I turned to God – or I rather tried, because it didn’t take. Even at seven I knew that I was just wishing there was a God, but I didn’t really believed in it. And I knew that without proof I could never believe.

The thing I like about science was never so much the science itself, but its philosophy, its ethos. Don’t get me wrong, from my adult perspective I’d love to have studied physics, cosmology or math; but back when I was a teenager there was this artificial and arbitrary divide between the worlds of arts and letters (to which I thought I fully belonged), and the world of hard sciences. But even then I thought as a scientist as far as the burden of proof goes. Because, mostly, atheistic marxism is very much like science in that aspect, and that was the soup I was cooking in.

By this I do not meant I refused the spiritual world. To this day my favourit stories include a healthy dosis of the supernatural and with it (and without it) a sense of the higher purpose. But just as I do not equate higher purpose with religion, I resent the appropriation of the spiritual world by the spiritual types.

Some of the spiritual things I believed in are: love between two persons -love that is so strong and lasting that it creates a third person that is both of them and more; the incredible affinity between animals of different species such as man and dog – dogs and their unbelievable talent for self sacrifice, us and our constant need for reassurance; the powerful connection to other person’s mind that is reading; music, music, music; the instant surrender that happens when you first see your child… you get the gist, right? I am contending that the powerfully emotional is often akin to the spiritual.

Throughout the years I lived in a sort of divided state. My convictions are fundamental to me, and my convictions on the issue of death are and have always been very clear: we cease to exist as an entity, we decompose and disappear. There is no “energy” or “intangible” that remains behind. No essence of our beings survives other than what we live in other’s memories – but that residue has no awareness of itself. Yet, on the other hand, I detect a mockingly detached part of me waaay in the back, by the shadows, that “knows” that death and annihilation of the self – of *this* particular self – is simply impossible.

I have tried to shut that guy up a thousand times; there is nothing I despise more than false hope. But he refuses to go away. I fear that when I grow old and in all likelihood atherosclerotic, I may give in to him. If that moment ever comes, please shoot me. You have my blessing and absolution.