Tonight's entry is very short. Really, I just mean to wish every mother a Happy Mother's Day.

We tend to look at a day like today as one of celebration and remembrance of the woman who either gave birth to us, or adopted us, the one who held us when we hurt and made us feel tall when nothing else seemed to. She took us by the hand and led us to ourselves, moving only as fast as we, their children, could go.

There is another piece of Mother's Day that no hallmark card wants to explore; that of pain, and then forgiveness. At some point in our lives we begin to see our parents through the lens of our own adulthood, one to which they had at least some part in leading us (as I said, by the hand). We lose our innocent adoration of them and start to look critically at all of the bits of us that we don't usually share, the memories of their human subjectivity and fallibility that we cannot want to accept. Nor can we grasp at it, as it resides only in a past told through our subconscious whose face we see in terms of its imperfection and what we like to qualify as their outdatedness. In effect, we do not want to live with the side-effects of being someone else's children; as such, we strike out at it. This becomes even more acute and defensible as our parents age, becoming more rigidly the people they were, or changing into people with whom our affinity may not be as apparent.

I won't get into details about why this occurs here, at least not in my own case. It should only suffice to say that the idea of forgiveness becomes paramount when we move through, then past, this phase of our adulthood. Yet, the forgiveness goes both ways; we must forgive them, and we must forgive ourselves for the guilt of having felt this way in the first place. When Dickinson says "the heart asks pleasure first / and then, excuse from pain" she is not just speaking of the love we all assume; she speaks of any love, any time when we adore, then challenge, then hurt, then beg forgiveness. In this vein, when we move through all of the motions and emotions of days like today, we need to make sure we can live with the past, the present, and the most hopeful future of who we are and who they are to us.

So, in that spirit, Happy Mother's Day; may you love, forgive, and treasure what your hearts asks and what their's have given to you. Good night / boa noite / buenas noches.

Absence and forgetfulness ... two excuses for not having returned to this page in over two weeks. Perhaps they tie into something deeper, or maybe we could write them off as part and parcel of a heavy schedule and the kind of exhaustion which makes TV seem that much more meaningful at eleven pm.

Tomorrow, April 14th, is my 38th birthday. I had not really put much thought into it, given the first three words of this post, at least until last Thursday when a colleague and friend asked me about it, for reference sake. I knew it was coming; over time we project onto ourselves and most likely onto everyone around us the sort of emotional bond with aging that ignore when we're younger because, frankly, we have that option. Not that I am that old, either - the average age of most Associate Professors (in Britain we would be called "Senior Lecturers") is a bit higher, a fact not lost on me nor on my fellow "youngins," as our elder colleagues humorously refer to us.

It would be at this point that this exploration should really begin: the poetry of youth and aging can take us to that "something deeper" I had hinted at above. Some of my favorite bits of verse on the topic come from Gloria Fuertes and her "poemas infantiles":

«Para felicitar un cumpleãnos»

Esta mañana temprano
cantaban las codornices
y en su cántico decían:
¡que los cumplas muy felices!

Here the joy and innocence of youth as a function of nature's beauty and apparent simplicity come to bare. Yet this happy, almost mythical, quartet stands in ironic contrast to another short poetic treatise on the contradiction of death's approaching caress:

«Lamento En La Montaña»

Aún te veo, río de mi vida,
con los ojos que miran las montañas.

...

Soñé... te quedarías a mi lado,
como un lago sin cisnes,
para siempre,
acunando mi ansia.
Qué locura más loca
enamorarse de un río una montaña!

In these short excerpts, the poetic voice remakes the natural pantheon into a force of love and destruction, as it is the "río" (river) which both carves the valley from the "montaña" and receives the latter's "ansia" (longing). (I should note that this is one of those rare glimpses into a Spanish form of what the Portuguese call saudade, although without the sea's presence among other subtle differences, as would be found in the works of many Lusophone poets of Fuerte's generation). The dream in which the mountain rejoices from the river's presence utilizes a traditional vision of the river as the symbol of life moving ceaselessly toward death and reunion with all others who have died (from Jorge Manrique's "Nuestras vidas son los ríos / que van a dar en la mar / que es el morir") and turns it ironically in on itself, creating a beautiful new space in the process. This space, an empty one filled only with the loveliness brought about by the river's constant and minuscule engulfing of the mountain, makes one forget that its creative force also must destroy its matéria prima.

Where one life starts another must give to it; where one life ends another takes from it. One begets the next, as we move forward in the time and place granted us. Let us make something beautiful from it all.

So in absence and forgetting, as in lifting our heads toward the sky to enjoy the fresh Spring air and birdsong, I invite you to consider this ageless interlude, and I wish you good night / buenas noches / boa noite.

Tonight's entry is about pain, "dor", illness, "doença", and beauty, "beleza".

One of my favorite poems begins as such: 

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

When Fernando Pessoa (ele mesmo) wrote these lines it was not to confuse us. Rather, his "heterónimo" meant to open us to a novel way of conceiving of our world.

Our world. That term takes on new meaning when you have a cold, or, if you are like me, you have a cold that goes to your left ear. As a left-hander (zurdo, canhoto) I have an inclination toward to left side of the body. Even my hearing and sight are stronger on the left than on the right. So when hearing in my left ear becomes at all impeded, the universe in which I live loses some of its flavor - a paella without azafrán, a bitoque without the egg. In not perceiving the more sinister side of my ontology in the way to which I am accustomed, I feel somewhat lost. This is not the feeling of Andresen's "Jardim Perdido", although there is an element of lost love in the mix (the love of perception, perhaps). It is the pain of sudden change. It is the novel concept of the world which I am forced to accept that makes me beg within myself to take it away, not because to my person "é dor / a dor que deveras sente", but because it is the "fingidor" who convinces me that I cannot survive without.

Yet there is a loveliness to the new epistemology of the swollen ear canal that takes me back, full swing, into a reality of healing. This afternoon it snowed (yes, in late March, in Georgia) for around 20 minutes. This is highly unusual for this region. At the time I was cooking and attempting to listen to a song my daughter was listening to; once I realized I could not hear it well enough to make it out, I turned to look out the window. In other words, if not for one sense being temporarily impaired, I would not have allowed myself the opportunity to become so taken with what was happening outside. I may never have seen it at all; we may never have called to our daughter to come take a look at "a neve de Março lá fora".

Even the pain of a slight loss can bring beauty to illness / Até a dor duma perda leve pode trazer à doença a beleza. I wish a healthy week to all - good night! / Boa noite! / ¡buenas noches!

In our profession there tend to be various types of personalities, some of which see us as more of a business. Universities make money by selling intellectual growth as a commodity which various "stakeholders" purchase for various prices. I have never subscribed to this commercialized philosophy, and today I had a reminder of why. 

When I was a graduate student instructor someone in a position of authority over me told me that with my "sotaque feio e inútil" I would never find a job. This was, of course, the day after I had successfully made the switch from teaching only Spanish to teaching Portuguese during the academic year, then Spanish in the summer. Perhaps it was my non-nativeness which drove this particular person to continue reminding me of how easy it would be to change accents, "tente, você vai ver!" I'm sure that Bakhtin would have reacted very differently to this situation than Lacan, and that both would have gotten a good laugh out of the whole thing anyway. I eventually learned to, and performed my duties rather well.

Still, when it came to my "lado luso" I found myself at various moments on the defensive, linguistically speaking. When I graduated and took my current position I thought that would end; yet, somehow, periodically I would hear comments such as "how could you teach Portuguese and not sound Brazilian?," or "you cannot build a program speaking an unpopular dialect," and the like. I did my best not to take offense, remembering that not everyone understands the nuances of sociolinguistic politics or rudimentary dialectology. Here I have built a program based on the notion that the language belongs to, and expresses, a world of cultures and perspectives (whether for good or bad I dare not say; some would have it either way - we present ourselves and our students with the difficult questions of who, why, how, and para quê). Olavo Bilac makes a case in his poem on the language:

Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela,
És, a um tempo, esplendor e sepultura:
Ouro nativo, que na ganga impura
A bruta mina entre os cascalhos vela...

Amote assim, desconhecida e obscura,
Tuba de alto clangor, lira singela,
Que tens o trom e o silvo da procela
E o arrolo da saudade e da ternura!

Amo o teu viço agreste e o teu aroma
De virgens selvas e de oceano largo!
Amo-te, ó rude e doloroso idioma,

Em que da voz materna ouvi: "meu filho!"
E em que Camões chorou, no exílio amargo,
O gênio sem ventura e o amor sem brilho!
(in Perin dos Santos, http://www.infoescola.com/literatura/analise-do-poema-lingua-portuguesa/)

Love and death, tenderness and longing, tears and family ... the universality of the Portuguese language unifies with caring and a bit of resentment, it defies the logic of other languages. The literatures written in Portuguese may not surpass all others, but its prosaic, theatrical, musical, cinematic, scientific, historical, and poetic voices are second-to-none. I see one of my professional duties to be the fomenting of an appreciation for the language, the people who speak it, and all they've suffered for and achieved. (This is not, of course, to say that my "lado castizo" finds no home in my heart; indeed, this will be a topic for another day). For this reason I have begun co-leading an effort to make a wider outreach in this area as part of a larger institutional program.

We cannot dwell in this utopian epistemology for long, though; the reality of misunderstanding and reductiveness can catch us too quickly. Today, when I learned that there are those wanting to reduce the complexities and beauty of this endeavor to one of Public Relations and fundraising with a very specific and limited set of parameters (many of which would simply undo Bilac's ideal of what "A Língua Portuguesa" means), I found myself on the defensive again. Kennedy once said we need to perform great deeds and become greater than our pre-conceived limits, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." Selling is easy; educating is hard. Buying into a brand is easy; growth and daring are hard. So, caros amigos e colegas, I ask you to consider which one you choose.

Tenham uma muito boa noite / Pasad unas muy buenas noches / Have a great evening!

It had been twenty years since I had run competitively. I was pretty fast before. Apparently that has change only by degree, not in principle. I ran five kilometers in 22 minutes and 45 seconds, coming in 7th overall and 1st in my age group. It was a really good day that made the month of training worthwhile.

So many of us have used exercise, or food, or other helpful or harmful pastimes to escape some other issue we did not wish to face. We have to ask ourselves, though, if running can be something more than just running from. Here I believe that yesterday it was running to.

I'll write more on this idea in my next blog entry. For now, have a calm and inspiring evening - I will leave you with this poem:

A Aluna:

Quando a aluna foi para a cama,

Os deveres feitos e não feitos,

A prova pronta mas a mente não;

A aluna sentiu-se aos dezanove anos,

Lá para ver a continuação dos colegas

Enquanto se achava pendurada no portão;

Quando a aluna foi para a cama,

Não era para viver nos lindos sonhos,

Mas para fazer-se uma tela de noite branda.

18/II/2014

Acworth, GA

Tonight's entry is about poetry and flowers. 

Yesterday I found myself staring at the ceiling in our townhome. This is not an unusual
occurrence, as I have always appreciated the pattern someone made when they first laid down the drywall, years before we bought the place. It is a flower-like pattern, very common in this area of the United States, made by pushing a large, dry, round brush into soft and wet drywall finishing. You observe the end result as a circle with non-standard lines pushing concentrically from the center toward an empty, white space. It is easy to do; even I have done it before. Yet having performed the act never took the magic out of the experience of gazing into it in the afternoon.

That day, though, something felt a little different. I could not tell what it was, the sort of converse effect of what Feijoo called the "yo no sé qué" (back before I spoke enough French to know from where he had taken the phrase); without better clarity I could not move intellectually from that spot.

I then remembered something I had written in my first short book of poems:

Through the street we walk, you and I,
Talking of strange things, holding hands
While the red lights and their merchandise entice us

As would the nicotine in the walls of an old bar
Whose darkness and four-sides enclosing me chill my mind,
Or as would the silence of novocaine on your lips
That makes skin tingle and sensation die
While the red lights and their merchandise cry out to us.
(New Poems from the Airplane and Graveyard, 12)  

When I first wrote these verses, back before I even know this house existed, I meant them as a comment on how the spaces we have occupied can freeze us in a single moment, not allowing us to escape. Such a place in memory keeps us from moving forward, even making love sour through not letting go of the past.

Yet when I re-read these verses today I realized that I had, even the day I wrote the words, lost the duplicity of their meaning. The connotation of enticement is a negative one; we need not of the thing that entices us. The red lights, in fact, were a reference to a brief stay in Amsterdam ... I was more than taken by surprise with what windows showing red lights were actually selling. An effect of the numbing sensation in the poem is that the poetic subject no longer desires to walk among those red lights; in a related way, what could trap him may actually free him.

Tonight I looked up at those repeating patterns again with silent delight. I was glad I could again smell the flowers.

Para esta noite não vou demorar muito nos vagares filosóficos nem nos neologismos nos quais tenho costume de me desviar. Aliás, ao rever os discursos das duas últimas semanas apercebo-me duma outra carência que, por desejar evitar a aparência de egoísmo (um ponto mesmo difícil de lograr dado o facto deste ser um blogue pessoal sobre temas pessoais num contexto individual e / ou ao redor de assuntos de família, etc), ignorara na hora de compor estes textinhos, como se fossem curtos ensaios sobre a arte de ensaiar.

Dali, uma série de pensamentos dirigiram-me até a uma relacionada, a ser esta a noção do poder das decisões. Pode-se-nos ou não gerar um certo constrangimento interno quando a confrontação das opções que nos são apresentadas no dia-a-dia chega ao seu momento crucial. Hoje, por exemplo, estava a caminho da oficina à qual tinha levado o meu carro fazer uma revisão do pára-choques (sofrera um pequeno acidente na semana passada e, embora o terapeuta me tivesse declarado em perfeitas condições físicas e não houvesse danificação visível alguma ao carro, resolvi levá-lo para lá por via das dúvidas) fazer compras quando lembrei de repente que a pequerrucha gosta sempre de me acompanhar nas aventuras frutíferas dos Sábados de manhã (entre outras de tipo carnívora ou duma sorte de busca das especiarias inefáveis que somente se acham, às vezes, na penúltima secção do Wal-Mart). Telefonei então à casa, e ao contar o meu plano de ir buscá-la para ali ouvi um forte grito a dizer que "sim"! O meu coração encheu-se de alegria, não por ter de dar mais uma volta e meia para conseguir voltar ao lar-doce-lar mas sim por ter surpreendido a minha filha com a possibilidade dalgumas horas de atenções dedicadas. Padeço mesmo dum fraquinho pela felicidade duma munchkin.

Nesse caso a decisão foi dupla: aquela de compartilhar a experiência vital e essencial das compras com alguém, e outra de outorgar um contentamento inesperado a uma pessoa para quem o mundo ainda é um acontecimento sempre por acontecer. Como dizia Platão, as boas acções sempre ajudam a resolver as aflições dos outros, como se a nossa sala de estar fosse a cova ... mas também não ia indagar em questões de egoísmo ...

Portanto, da decisão de manhã surgiu esta da noite, de lhes contar uma história um bocado mais íntima e de menos citações críticas indiretas, na nossa língua tão simples e bela de casa, e de compartilhar convosco um poema meu dos últimos dias. Espero que gostem, pois, fala mesmo dos temas da decisão e da memória. 

Parceiros da rara espécie:

Uma borboleta

Passou pelo jardim

Embora do jardim

Tenhamos removido

Ou, melhor, moído

As folhas atraentes

Às asas a chiarem

No lindo sol da mente

Passou pelo jardim

A minha borboleta

19/II/2014

Boa noite a todos / Buenas noches a todos / Good night to all!