Is It Possible?

      Is it possible to have too many thoughts and ideas? I'm really starting to wonder. When Sandy first suggested I try blogging - well the first thought was really to wonder why I would do anything like that since it seemed that boring yet self impressed people wrote blogs that seemed like navel-contemplating drivel that nobody who wasn't as impressed with the blogger as the blogger was with her or himself could possibly be interested in. I have a feeling I just wrote a grammatical nightmare. I think I might be afraid to look. Anyway, back to the question at hand. It does have to do with when I started writing this. I thought it be about textile-related things, and I've hardly mentioned them. The whole idea of windings was that it made me think of yarn being spun. It makes me think of writing as well - how words and thoughts wind themselves around each other and turn into sentences (sometimes incredibly lovely ones) that tell stories - fiction or non-fiction ones. Gosh, that's a gorgeous image.

      Gees. This question is turning out to be a slippery thing. The reason I'm wondering about it is because I seem to have too many. They stop me from writing this. I don't think they'd stop me from writing a big project that required more discipline, but I dropped my serious project after my computer ate six to eight hours of research on a book I still hope to write. I haven't quite been able to make myself get back over to Western to start on that six or eight hours of research again. But, I have so many Ideas I'd like to explore, just for myself, through this medium. I even wrote some of them down, but I don't seem even to get back to them. I seem to become fascinated with a new idea to the point of near paralysis. Do I hear somebody suggesting that there's a diagnosis and a prescription that goes with that? Probably. I haven't even thought about how to write about the trip to California to help Angela with her dissertation. Actually, that's not true. I wrote some pages with a pen on paper, but I didn't even get a good part of it down that way.

      None of this is anywhere near any kind of big problem, but it seems to annoy me and keep me from getting much writing done.

More Poetry.

    Probably my favorite photo of my favorite city. One I wish I'd taken, but Dan Heller at http://www.danheller.com/quito-bw.html did. I still dream of scanning the hundreds I took while there.

     Some more poetry, this time some I wrote myself. My heart longs for Ecuador, Quito's high (according to Wikipedia, the central square is at 2,800 meters. Decidedly high enough to give me a case of altitude sickness after a trip to Otavalo where it's much lower.) I love the parts of South America I've seen. The huge, crumbling stones, the music, the geography, social and political systems, and history. I find it fascinating that liberation theology could come from Central and South America, almost as fascinating as that it could come from the Catholic Church since I think most people would likely not think of that as a source of liberation. 
      And I think so much about the music. That haunting odd sound seems to be wrapped around my soul. Surprising to me since I certainly wasn't raised to appreciate anything like that. Maybe it's just the opposite of the indigenous who were so taken with European music when the Spanish and Portuguese went in to found the missions and search for Eldorado (looks better to me as El dorado, but the computer prefers one word). There's a line in "The Mission" (gets my vote for one of the best movies ever; I highly recommend it.) That says (my paraphrase) that if the Jesuits had gone in with an orchestra, they could have conquered the whole continent. Another great line from that movie, "If might is right, then love has no place in the world." I'm only a bit influenced by the fact that the incomparable Jeremy Irons says it to the nearly as incomparable Robert DeNiro.

“If m

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Quito in the Rain--A Love Song

Bawdy, ferocious, violent, obscene town of

riches, beggars, and thieves.

Come, rain, wash the

smell of machismo

urine into the filthy rivers;

run, try to purify, regenerate

those waters over rocks and

shreds of refuse.

Wet cobblestones glisten, old,

shine with mold from

rain, urine, and tears; watch

children play and work--sell

Quito’s wares--pure wools from

Otavalo and postcards of Galapagos tortoises.

Rain, drench those cobbles and

graffiti of political elections and corruptions.  Knives

flash, slashing into tourists’

hidden dollars and sucres, carried

to trade for Quito’s wealth.

Sun, set on the bustling streets full of vendors,

paupers, thieves, and child laborers.

Set on the violence, the horror, the pious churches

crying for liberation theology--on

            Quito.

 

Otavalo’s Market 26 February 1996

Babies and children suckle as

merchant mothers sell tapestries

woven in colors spewn and

dredged from Otavalo’s earth--

            purples, mauves, rusts,

            siennas, taupes, and grays

or woven bags bearing

birds and fish in screaming

            reds, yellows, and black.

Ten-year-old entrepreneurs

bargain, call me amiga want

me to buy blouses in Joseph’s

            many-colored stripes.

            sweaters knitted from

            pure wools of lamb and alpaca.

Three Indians in a pyramid--as

much a symbol of Ecuador’s

markets as any other flag

bring buyers, shoppers from

all over the world to Otavalo’s

market where a beggar woman, national

costume but with only one eye and

part of her nose, begs incoherently,

begs for sucres, food--from locals

or tourists, carries garbage in a

pail.  I blanch hoping it’s not her

lunch but only a comfortable

companion--something to soothe the

rejection from those who have so

much--even both eyes

and noses intact.

 

Mother Love

            “I have seen death without weeping

              the destiny of the Northeast is death

              Cattle they kill

              To the people they do something worse”

                                                -Anonymous Brazilian singer (1965)

Alto do Cruzeiro, shantytown, dry and hot

summer following Brazil’s military

coup—eery quiet settled over a market

town fractured by the ring of church

bells marking baby’s deaths.  Town of

mothers and daughters pregnant

in tandem, zone of neglect in

the shadow of economic miracle.

Tattered sugar-sacks replaced by store-

bought clothing—modern vestments to cover

tradition of feudalism, exploitation, dependence

on institutions failed.  Shantytown life—reasons

for death innumerable—death the expectation, life

in question, Mothers seem indifferent to

tiny, anticipated deaths—aversion

to life in babies better off dead.  Part of learning how

to mother becomes learning to let go of children who

want to die or who have no taste for life.  Mothers

need emotional detachment from all the

death in order to live—high fertility and high

mortality waltz in a grotesquery of a tail-spinning death

dance.  Babies divided into chronic cases, those

weak and passive, those deathly pale,

with no vital force, barely sucking or

crying.  Acute cases, left alone, die violently after

convulsions, head banging, foaming at the mouth,

stigmatized by relation to epilepsy, madness, and

rabies; tiny, wasted famine victims.  Catholic mothers

understand this as following God’s plan, and children

bury children on Alto de Cruzeiro as tiny processions carry

babies in cardboard coffins provided free to join multitude

others.  Fresh flowers may be scattered on the grave, but

no tears shed, no stone or wooden cross in memorial.

                                                                               Alto do Cruzeiro – Crucifix Hill

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      And I can't resist sharing some more Neruda:

 Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood  

maybe at least partly because I heard on the BBC today that the Chilean Communist Party has asked for exhumation of his body because his chauffeur said Neruda had been walking and talking normally on the day of his death then said he'd been given an injection that the chauffeur suspects was lethal. Interesting to me. 

      Guess I hadn't thought about this too much lately, but the Chilean coup seems like such a crucial thing for some reason is the only word that comes to mind. Maybe because I was in Sweden at the time, and that made everything so different and, therefore, so big seeming to me. It feels as if it's part of my history of that time as well. It isn't, maybe; I know that. I wrote a story that took place then and there, and Chileans asked me how much time I'd spent there. I have never been. I'm looking for some way to finish this, but all it does is make thoughts spin more in my head. Jason, for some reason you telling what lists do for you comes to mind, and I see myself making one. Then I wonder why (even this is all just imagistic) I'm using time that way - especially because lists have a different function for me. They become the focus, as if I can use them to keep me from what I really need just to do. 

      Okay. This is starting to feel too amorphous even for me, so I think I'll sign off with feel better quick, Sandy. Being on antibiotics that long would kill me.