Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM (Official Audio)

Charlotte Gainsbourg - I'm a Lie (Official Music Video)

Anne Carson en Autobiography of Red

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a diffi-cult interval for a poet. Born about 650 B.C. on the north coast of Sicily in a city called Himera, he lived among refugees who spoke a mixed dialect of Chalcidian and Doric. A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen. Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do. Stesichoros’ words were collected in twenty-six books of which there remain to us a dozen or so titles and several collections of fragments. 

La libertad de un blog.

About originality:


I am not an original person. What a shame. 

As she traveled deeper into her own solitary state, she came to understand viscerally what she had before considered only with her reasoning. She had always known that the bonds of human connection are fragile, subject to time, circumstance, and the mystery of slowly altering sympathies, but she had never before doubted that making connection was the norm; it represented a defining trait: the need of intimacy. To make connection was to be in a state of normality. Conversely, to find oneself alone, an isolate without steady or permanent attachment, was –and this, too, she had never doubted– to lay oneself open to the one thing people were pathologically ashamed of being charged with: abnormality. Now, suddenly, it flashed on her that it was loneliness that was the norm. Connection was an ideal: the exception, not the rule, in the human condition. 

 

Much in her life might have contributed to this insight –a disappointing marriage, friendships that had run their course, a passion for motherhood that had also run its course– but more than any of these experiences it was this one, the irreversible separateness she now felt within the ranks of her own movement that supplied the emotional proof: not only is no attachment reliably enduring, but when the most intimate and solid-seeming are dissolved, we experience a sense of aloneness that, surprisingly, is not alien; it is almost as though we feel ourselves returned to some earlier condition. It strikes us then-and this was the revelation –that we are embarrassed by the “return”. It marks us, in our own eyes, as failures at doing life. We shrink from confiding the embarrassment to a living soul, even the nearest of intimates. The reticence creates a distance between ourselves and all others. Inside the distance in the innermost being, we remain solitary. As we grow older, the solitariness increases. Staton looked hard and what she was seeing, and she thought, How unspeakable, then, that worldly arrangements should contribute to the forlornness of one’s natural state! Politics is meant to mitigate the misery to which the human condition consigns us, not add to it.

Vivian Gornick about Elizabeth Cady Staton 

 

Desde niña tengo este sueño recurrente: me persiguen. Zombies, secuestradores, asaltantes, robachicos, narcotranficantes, la policía, etc.  No mencionaría esto si no llamara mi atención que también todo este tiempo di por hecho que todas las personas soñábamos con lo mismo, Hasta que, últimamente que he platicado con amigxs acerca de sus sueños, he notado que no es así.

Con la edad, me ha sucedido que ya no puedo ver a corta distancia. Cuando me acercan a los ojos la pantalla de un celular para mostrarme algo, tomo distancia con el rostro y con la mano lo alejo hasta enfocarlo.

Recuerdo que mi mamá empezó a hacer lo mismo cuando tenía la edad que ahora yo tengo, y fue progresivo. En mi caso, también ha sido progresivo, cada vez necesito mirar desde más lejos. En distancia y en tiempo.

Hoy, dos notas:

Algo que las personas podemos hacer muy bien es viajar en el tiempo. Yo lo hago con frecuencia. Me gusta volver al pasado, transitarlo, revisarlo desde distintos ángulos. Acceder a él sin etiquetarlo como recuerdos: ¿qué diferencia tiene del presente? si ambos son sistemas complejos de representación que nos fabricamos para entender lo que sucede en el mundo; si ambos tiempos son imágenes en nuestra mente, películas instantáneas en las que convertimos los estímulos que alcanzamos a codificar del mundo que nos rodea. 

*

Las fotografías no son los recuerdos. (Pero los recuerdos sí son imágenes, no solo visuales). Algo muy perverso que hemos hecho con la fotografía es usurpar con ellas el lugar de los recuerdos.  Las fotos de bodas, de graduaciones, cumpleaños, quinceaños,  los asados en el jardín, etc. son solo fragmentos diminutos de algo. NO son los recuerdos.