On guilt

No one wants to feel guilt. What is more existentially urgent is that nobody deserves to feel guilt. If we ascribe to a religious grounding (which we might later refute), human existence if based on dualities. The one that rules them all is the dichotomy between good and evil. The mere fact that we live by opposing forces: male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, black and white, sad or happy, obliges us to traverse life constantly making choices. The one that rules them all is the option between sadness and happiness. And if we ascribe to the rules of nature, all living things push towards harmony, which indicates that naturally all human being aspire to happiness. Our main goal in life (the paths have become as countless as the number of individuals in this planet) is to find joy someplace and always. It is therefore rational to understand why men struggle a lifetime to flee dissatisfaction and discomfort. Guilt is a discomfort and none of us want to feel it. Failed attempt because a guiltless life has become like a world with no religion: impossible. The latter claims it helps us to battle guilt by helping us repent by giving up all our riches, all our vanity and our identity for the Lord. Worshipers spend a lifetime praying to be forgiven for an original sin they did not commit, but that is reflected in all the other sins that they, in their own lifetime, have committed. It all seems completely logical and necessary really. There are many serious interrogations behind these claims, that unfortunately for the common citizen have become second–nature.
Because the human race has always known guilt, it is very difficult to trace it back to its origins. For the religious of course this moment is clearly marked by the original sin, which to the best of mine and possibly the majority of the population of this earth is where it all started. Understandably, this is where it all started for everyone then; even for the non–religious. These use the religious theory (Nietzsche for example) to present the first important case of the powerful against the slave in order to obtain silent submission. The population of Israel, later extended across all continents needed to obey to certain rules and in order to do so had to conform to an ideal that could not be questioned. The word of the Lord is one of them. The notion of a higher and mighty power created fear of punishment and therefore fear in general. However, because by nature we are all conflicted beings, sin was, despite the “rules”, inevitable. And so the concept of guilt was born.
But guilt is undesirable because it obstructs our tendency towards harmony.

Furthermore, although not an expert in psychology or the study of the human mind, I understand from observation and experience that the more the individual is confronted with an idea or a situation, the more the knowledge acquired in that field, but also the higher the possibility of being enwrapped with it. This is in a sense a counter argument to the famous saying: “ignorance is bliss”. Just as someone who does not know that shampoos exist would not instinctively desire to wash their hair, so ignorance of the existence of guilt would allow us to live guilt–free (this does not rule out the possibility of invention, of course). This is unfortunately but quite obviously impossible. As second nature we are raised by and with rules, a minor version of commandments, which should be unbreakable but will not be because man cannot control his impulse to be naturally free. So guilt prevails when it should not. So churches, so families, so communities , so governments, are building and encouraging, by the mere struggle to overcome it, the production and the imprisonment of the human soul in guilt. Nietzsche proposes as a solution the anniquilation of guilt through forgetting. The inconvenience with that is, because we live in a dualistic world, something must counterbalance that. And that is memory. Memory can be filtered, like guilt can be filtered. We are however stuck in this duality of the world, in this burden that God or deep within nature has bestowed on us. We are puppets unable to cut our strings.

: 14 Aug 2006 01:17 |  Tags: Journal Nietzsche |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

La Generala

She rocks like Sunday on a hammock,
anticipation fanning out the weak of her eye–brows.
Recipes of heroic relatives stay silenced in her throat.
A telephone call from her sons: “no, not today mom”,
hang grandmotherly stories out to vanish from her mind.

“Los quiero”, she says, unconditionally loving, not
expecting a fluff of her pillow or an ear to her past –
yet wanting it. The Lebanese princess of San Juan de
La Maguana, once visited by religious citizens and nuns,
appeasing communal fear with her lemon custard tone,

prays alone: for her boys José Joaquín and Juan Francisco
untouched by the jealousies of their jobs; for María
Estela, her daughter “may the Lord bless your mind with
laughter”. For Teto, asleep forever two September ago,
love and eternal companion, sitting in peace by Christ. For
Oliver, Gabriela, Fernando, Jose and Sarah.

As she rocks like Sunday on a hammock,
loneliness sits by her. They sip tea together like friends,
for those that have company. Life overflows her memories
of lilies in her childhood garden, her first car, her marriage.
No one calls her ‘La Generala’ anymore, affectionate byname,
stern. She sleeps like Sunday on a hammock, back and
onwards towards those too many she once already let go.

: 12 Aug 2006 05:12 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

In waiting for someone to die

In truthful memory of my grandmother, passed away 9th August, 2006.

It is this waiting that kills. This thing that makes the seconds extend and the minutes multiplicate abnormally. The day becomes a freefall in which the jumper is blindfolded and is ignorant of when he will hit the floor. And that floor can be the ring of a phone or a knock on the door; the look on the news bearer’s face. All that is imminent, all that becomes certain is that death, preluded by the announcement of that last moment. And you dread it and you crave it and you cannot help it. You are living that person’s final hours for them, because they can no longer live them for themselves. Their life is reduced to the diminishing pumping of blood into their brain. And as the hands of the clock make their way around its round universe, so does the universe of that person tick and drain away with the dripping of that blood. And still you wait and there is nothing more than that wait. A slow death damages both the remaining and the moribund. The latter is fighting to stay, the heart will not give out and the remaining are fighting to stop everybody’s pain; their own mainly.

It is sad and it is frustrating to loose a dear one slowly. Sit in front of a flower for a week and you will see your emotions deteriorate along with the flower’s life. You become dependable on the fleeting and you hold on to their dying hand because you refuse to let go. But you want to let go. You want to let go because you cannot wait to put an end to your own misery. Because it is the waiting that kills not them, but you. Disease and complications kill the moribund. Waiting kills you. Your routinely normal life becomes disrupted, intruded by the veneration of someone finishing theirs. You believe you want to be part of it because you care but running away from the upcoming pain and regaining a hold of normalcy is what you really desire. That is why you are down too. The mind is occupied in its majority by these thoughts, hunted by the idea of death and the understanding of someone dear dying. And there is nothing you can do about it and guilt overcomes you for all the other thousand thing you need to move on with and cannot bring yourself to do because you convince yourself that this –this death, this landmark of your life– is important.

And it is important. However its unexpectedness makes it unwanted. The love you feel for that person makes it unwanted, but it is your human selfishness that makes it utterly unwelcome into your universe. The bottom line is that the sooner you overcome your pain, the sooner you can retake control of your life –work, study, lunches, parties– the sooner you will reacquire the reassurance of normality that men so adore. No one likes to be sad and everyone –even the most masochistic– long for a way out. The problem is that in cases like this one, there is no proactive way out. Time is the enemy. Time is a dictator. So you conform yourself to a perpetual feeling of guilt produced by the second nature sense of duty we are taught to have and the guilt behind having left all your personal dealings aside to venerate someone that can no longer appreciate it. It isn’t a time for guilt because veneration should occur while the recipient can appreciate it, not once they have gone, for others to admire your compassion and bravery for being corny.

: 12 Aug 2006 05:10 |  Tags: Journal |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Recycled love

What happens with this love for you that keeps getting recycled? In moments of retrospective, I feel like a thermometer abandoned outdoors in UK weather, one that is everchanging, unsettled. My mornings are for the image of your face incrusted in my head always. Fixated, you and your long hair, as if my visual memory was left stuck in the first few months of our relationship. And despite that, I fear that as the mornings keep piling up one atop the other, away from you, I can progressively only recall rough traits. I can see the length of your hair, but I cannot she it shine; I can see the colour of your eyes, but I cannot feel its intensity when looking into mine; I can visualize the length of your nose, but I cannot see how far. And the touch of your skin. I have forgotten the touch of your skin. As my mornings only give me the figure of your face, I will soon forget the rest of your body, giving you a balloon head and a midget structure. Cartoonish almost. As the day advances in recollection of moments in our relationship’s lifetime, I begin to feel and my heart to pump stronger. I can detect with an invisible touch, the pulsations above my left breast. It is not true that I can put you behind me. It is not true that I can forget you. I cannot. I still feel that between us exists the normalcy of what is meant to be…forever is as uncertain as the existence of God, but the same faith that allows me to believe in a spiritual cosmos, makes me believe in us. And so forever was not in the commitment to a social idea of a future, it was forever in all the meaningful moments. Those that I cannot accept that we can no longer live through. Our interlacing, interdigitating was/is unique. I had never felt it before. This is what leads me to refuse and reject the possibility of letting something so good and beautiful go. With you, it was always spring. It rains in spring and it poured on us sometimes I know, but we had a blossoming garden with all–year–round flowers and trees adorned by rainbow butterflies and insects. Our love was that pretty.
So what happens now with this love that keeps getting recycled? As the days dawn into navy blue, my thoughts and emotions of you continue its erratic crescendo. My only wish is to speak to you. Hear the voice I cannot remember on my own, so the sound over the auricular can guide to putting back a smile on that blurry face my mind depicts. This is what happens every time the love for you gets recycled. Everyday.
So what do I do with this love that keeps getting recycled? Do I throw it into the ocean and stop feeling it? Do I send it away to those –hers– that would put it into better use than me? Do I keep hoping that one day you will pick it up and do something with it? I want us to attend to it together…and mend it, rebuilding it to start over again.
But what do I do with it, this love? What do I do?

: 12 Aug 2006 05:05 |  Tags: Journal |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sucked in!

I was searching some poetry by Gwyneth Lewis to understand her poetics for a presentation I have to do for Practice of Poetry. The first poem I read was in Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times and it was a small section from her sequence poetry book: Zero Gravity. Although I appreciated it for its poetical and linguistic qualities, I could not easily figure out what the underlying meaning was (I understood the whole astronaut bit though). Then I read some things in her website: www.gwynethlewis.com that I didn't really like that much, partly because they seemed to be assigned poem about special Welsh National occasions. But then, (!) I found this! and I was blown away. The language is powerful and tight, very vibrant, with strong images. He uses the Spanish extremely effectively, in a way that I could only dream of doing…at least til I have a go at imitating her! I just wish there was more information available about her, and more poems online and in the library.

Enjoy the poem in the meantime, hopefully as much as I did.

Happy Flamenco

Don’t tell me when to be happy.
I’m losing my mind. No loss,
you say, because outside
oranges ripen in the cold,
to make bitter marmalade. I pray
I’ll be put back together in a larger way.

Now that you’re with me, back from the dead,
(I didn’t turn round! I didn’t
turn round!) my heart’s
gone missing. It beats like the band
that meets to rehearse by Delícias Bridge
for fiesta or carnival. The bugles are loud
but, for all their practice, they’re getting worse.
This is as well as my heart will ever be.

I thought you were gone. But the Guadalquivir
swells each day with a fifty-mile tide
that brought low galleons of New-World gold
to the quays, then didn’t. This time round
I’ll remember everything and lock it all
in the Toro de Oro of my inner eye.
My body’s an empire importing only you.

I saw you drifting on the evening ebb
in a tiny dinghy, no engine, no oars,
under dark eucalyptus. I called
until the herons flew
but you didn’t hear me. Don’t you know
how strong is the current, how the greedy sea
takes everything to it – dead horses, old shoes,
tree trunks and you, and it won’t let go
no, not even when you might have reached
Sanlúcar de Barrameda and the wrecking bar?

Mist covers the river’s body like a ghost. Our life
goes through us. You are the bull
I dance with. I no longer know
who leads, who follows but I flick the cloak
as though – Olé, olé –
love weren’t the ultimate lack of style,
the skill of ensuring that the other survives
in the wet sand, panting to the bullring’s roar.
A crimson switch in the back of my eye
and I charge at the lights, at a swordpoint’s star.

You say you can’t dance, but your blood cells can.
Lymphoma flamenco, full of passionate verve,
technique and duende. Deep in the bone
you need a different rhythm now
uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinquo, seis,
no tarantella, but the writhe of a snake
tuning the mesh of your DNA,
a Sevillana, with viper hands,
stamping on cancer.
Now’s the fiesta. Eso es. Ole.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Gwyneth Lewis has published six books of poetry in Welsh and English. Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage was published in May by Fourth Estate. She is Wales's first National Poet since April 2005.

: 25 Feb 2006 00:00 |  Tags: Practice Of Poetry Ratings And Things |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Plays and Objectivism

On the light of the two plays I've seen in two days, I wrote these two little, somewhat "school-ish" poems. They are trying to imitate (perhaps – surely – very poorly) the style inherent in Objectivism, in which Louis Zukofsky sustained and practiced the predominance of Objects, Music and Shapes in poetry.

The two plays I watched were:

– Women Beware Women by Middleton

– Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn (I know, I know, it's Shakespeare), but this was the Incidental Music Mendelssohn composed first in 1823 (he was just 17!) and then completed in 1843. It is a masterpiece really. Everyone should see it or listen to it.

Concert-play

when the music starts
all is

quiet
in the hall

the actors play.
the silk on stage
floats

and waves
through their
wrists.

an orchestrated play

is a midsummer
night’s
dream.

Bianca

she screams

then dies
on stage.

There is blood on her face

from his face.
she screams, she screams
and shows sorrow.

But there is none.

Really.

for she an actor
and in this

dream
sounds the victim
when she is

powerful.

: 23 Feb 2006 01:06 |  Tags: Poetry Poetry Portfolio Practice Of Poetry Shakespeare |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Writing about the Self

W.B.Yeats (1865–1939) in A General Introduction for my Work begins by stating this:

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always phantasmagoria.

Now, slightly cryptic guys, we can see that, but there is something that really annoys me as well. Once upon a time, I used to agree with the first half of his statement, completely. I found it very difficult not to write about the self, I still do, but I had convinced myself that writing about the self died in the Romantic Period with Coleridge. It clearly hasn't. And so I wonder if this urge to depart from what I am and what i want to say about myself is not actually wrong and impossible.

I am convinced that everything we write is at least in a minor way linked to us and our experiences. If we didn't know about it, we wouldn't write about it. But if the urge is to write about me me, then why pretend like I have always longed to tell the world? Indeed, I would like to tell the world but a world seem through my eyes and how I live it. Is that wrong?

: 08 Feb 2006 12:49 |  Tags: About Poetry Personal Project Writing Poetry Portfolio Quotes |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Poetry and Movement

This week we were asked to mimic Sharon Olds use of movement in "The Race". I have written a less successful interpretation of this, but at least I had the opportunity to work with different rhytms you can obtain with words. It's still a bit rough, but I think it has potential. hehe.

The way to work

Squished in a carro público, I travelled Luperón Street,
La 27 de Febrero down to La Duarte. It was routinely
early at 7:07, unusually late for work. On the middle back seat,
between the unmarried boyfriend and his pregnant
girl (she smiled their happiness at me in mid-
conversation about the price of plantain), a chubby cook,
the smell of fish, shrieked: “Parada chofer!”.
We stopped
at the next corner street, g l i d i n g
in front of a fiat and an SUV, a golf and
a jeep. The chubby cook excused his stepping
out now but could the loud man sitting on his right
by the door let him get on
with his day. The door of the biónico opened into the sidewalk.
Seven minus two is five, but the loud man got back in, monopolising
the front seat. A mother, her pigtailed child and a naked
rag doll firmly hand-gripped waited
on the side of the street. They had to get in
the car as well, it was good for business the driver said, but how? – the question
loomed on the rest of the passengers’
heads – It was so crowded already. The driver
intervened: Tú in the back with the huge belly by la puerta get out
and sit in the front with don Ramón here so the lady and the child
can sit in the back side by side. Lady, child and doll sat
next to girl from the couple, next to me
next to the boyfriend from the couple
next to the guy by the right door. Six in the back, three at the front,
tilted forward, the car still rolled on
La 27, half-way to work and crammed in. The news was on
the radio and we could all hear the new puente had collapsed, leaving
four casualties behind – the senate yesterday
voted new amendments to the constitution in an extraordinary
hearing – petrol sube by 20 pesos – the president met up this weekend with Bill
Gates and the population wonders –
What where they talking about? Pigtail girl started
to cry because she was hot and she didn’t want to go to school and this car smelt.
The driver stopped.
The new Jesus Christ, long hair and all, was flagging
down the car and the driver must have been scared to see him
by El Provocón this early in the morning and thought maybe
we all need a miracle. No space for one but in the front; we were ten
in the car now. His name was Cedric he said and ee vaz French, back-packing down
to South America. It vaz so
‘ot in ‘eere ‘ee said, and the loud man was not pleased.
I reached out
my three pesos and told
the driver to let me out at the next stop. Pero
you have to tell me where, because I can
stop anywhere you want linda, he said. Déjame en la Máximo Gómez
or where the sidewalk ends.

: 02 Feb 2006 00:46 |  Tags: Poetry Poetry Portfolio Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Confessional poetry

These are the questions to be thought about in regards to confessional poetry:

*What is so seductive about the confessional persona?

*How do we know that the confession is sincere or is this irrelevant?

*What responsibilities does writing confessionally entail?

*Does confessional poetry always have to be miserable? Remember Germaine Greer's statement in Slip-Shod Sibyls that 'To be cured of the misery is to be cured of the poetry'.

*Is confessionalism solipsistic or necessary?

*What happens to poetic persona when the poet writes confessionally?

*Do you agree with Adrienne Rich that 'we have had enough suicidal women poets'?

*How have more contemporary poets reinvigorated the confessional poem?

: 31 Jan 2006 23:01 |  Tags: Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Markov

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

I need to be able to remember to use this sometime as well…

: 31 Jan 2006 22:51 |  Tags: Practice Of Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem