Gara’s Weblog

Hace unos días fui a un concierto de Mariza. A los conciertos de fado voy sola, lo primero porque no hay en mi círculo habitual nadie que comparta esta afición conmigo, y lo segundo porque los fados hacen llorar mucho, y es casi mejor hacerlo entre desconocidos que disimuladamente, o sonoramente entre amigos azorados.

Entiendo a los amantes del fado que dicen de ella que no es una fadista pura, pero verla en directo, con ese chorro de voz y esa presencia escénica tan potente -a la que sin duda añaden los vestidos de alta costura, siempre negros y larguísimos, y los tacones interminables que  lleva debajo y que sólo se dejan ver durante los contoneos de los fados más animados-, creo que vale la pena. Este concierto, sin embargo, fue menos redondo que otros: le faltó hondura y le faltó saudade, y me pareció que el repertorio no estaba muy bien enlazado.

Me tocó en suerte, sentado a mi izquierda, un portugués de camisa rosa y ondas engominadas al más puro estilo ibérico-derechón (hasta las modas políticas traspasan las fronteras en estos tiempos de globalización), que apestaba a perfume de tal manera que resultaba difícil meterse de lleno en el ambiente de recogimiento que requiere el fado. Detrás de mí había un grupillo de cuatro chicas españolas que hacían comentarios durante las canciones a pesar de mis repetidas miradas recriminatorias. En fin, lo cierto es que vistos los espectáculos sociales que ofrecen el cine y los teatros en tantísimas ocasiones, es tentador quedarse en casa a escuchar tranquila y concentradamente un buen CD o a ver una peli. Nada puede superar, sin embargo, a la pareja que comía pipas sin parar durante el concierto de Leonard Cohen. Claramente, son dos actos irreconciliables que evidencian a) una pasmosa falta de respeto por la gente a la que se tiene alrededor, y b) una absoluta falta de sensibilidad, puesto que ver a Leonard en directo y entregarse con fruición al acto de pelar y comer pipas es contradictorio en sí mismo: no se pueden pelar pipas con la boca abierta.

Mejor que todo esto hubiera sido el tener la oportunidad de escuchar a Amália, la Rainha do fado de precioso nombre, cantar en cualquier casa de fados de una callejuela cualquiera de la Morería lisboeta, vaso do vinho en mano y recuerdo de bacalhau en el paladar, pero una nació tarde para eso.

Mariza siempre interactúa con el público en sus conciertos con una simpatía que tiene mucho de impostada, y en esta ocasión se dirigió a una pareja que estaba sentada en primera fila. “Yo os conozco”, dijo, “¿a cuántos conciertos míos habéis venido?”. “A cuarenta y dos”, dijo él; “Yo sólo a treinta y ocho”, respondió ella. No era un montaje. Yo me quedé alucinada pensando en que alguien que puede dedicarse a seguir a un cantante por el mundo sólo puede ser millonario, muy devoto (está claro que el cantante en este caso es el sustituto del dios), y probablemente inglés, puesto que se trata de una excentricidad en toda regla. Me los imaginaba después durante la cena posterior a cada concierto comentando las flaquezas y los logros del recién terminado evento: “¿No te pareció, cariño, que en la segunda estrofa de Primavera ha estado algo más floja que en el concierto de Budapest?”, “Quizás tengas razón, my darling, pero creo que ha mejorado claramente respecto a la última versión de Estranha forma de vida, ¿no te parece? A ver qué tal la canta la semana que viene en el Olympia”. Puff. 

En cualquier caso, tiene que ser complicado el ser vista como la heredera de alguien con el peso artístico e histórico de Amália Rodrigues, y a pesar del claro divismo de Mariza, uno no puede dejar de compadecerla por eso. Sí, está muy encumbrada, pero siempre con la sombra de la gran reina encima.

Así que para terminar, os dejo aquí un par de vídeos para que juzguéis por vosotros mismos. Ay, si hasta los fadistas lloran con sus fados, ¡qué no habremos de hacer el resto de los mortales!

Yes, I went to watch it. It’ one of those things one has to do- cross the line and join the enemy, in order to understand it. Enemy is a big word, though- I had nothing much against Avatar except from the fact that an obscene amount of money has been spent on it, and that people were raving far too much about it, so I kind of knew what to expect.

Visually it’s beautiful, and the amount of work behind just amazing. You sit there wearing those funny glasses and you don’t cease to be amazed at the images. But (there had to be a but, since it’s me writing ;) I was annoyed by part of the message, and I will explain why.

The plot is simple, as simple as it can be. It has all the elements of a Hollywood super production which is designed to trigger our most basic emotions, and there’s the good and the bad, in the typically manichean Hollywood way, and it has the classic love story in it, which of course is never explicitly sexual- this is Hollywood, and it’s rating is 12A, so you know, we are allowed to show violence here but absolutely no sex because that’s baaad (although the bonding with the hunting birds is a very clear reference to penetration. Or am I imagining things here?).

In any case, there are two worlds represented in the film: that of the humans, and the one inhabited by the indigenous. The first one is presented as a civilisation which has pretty much collapsed and is just eager to destroy yet another world after already having destroyed their own, and the second one is the fantastic version of a paradise, a world covered in green, rich in natural resources, in which the inhabitants live by a sense of morality in which nature is the god from which you just borrow, but you don’t take.

Up to here, it’s all absolutely fine- I have no problem in a fictional representation which presents us as the destroyers of our own natural heritage, which in fact we are, but the problem lies in the way it’s depicted: humans have abandoned all sense of spirituality, they are obsessed with science, and in order to reach their target they are ready to destroy whatever lies in their path, including lives. This is a civilisation which has evolved into this monstrosity; the other is still as rich as it can be because the indigenous maintain a set of beliefs that revolves not only around the respect for nature, but also around very primitive (the politically correct term would be “ethnic”, but I will not use it) ceremonies, a firm belief in spirits and an energy (here we have that word again…) that holds the world together and should be respected.

It really annoys me, this line of thinking which rules out the possibility for the feeling of spirituality, of awe, of deep appreciation of nature, of amazement before the world, from the minds of those who have chosen to believe only in science as the explanation for this universe (so the comic strip above), and pairs wisdom and goodness with the executing of ceremonies and the belief in the esoteric and the unknown. There is no such need, and religious skepticism and spirituality (in a very pagan way) are not contradictory.

So it’s not only the typical Hollywoodian structure and the emotion-triggering tricks which is so appealing to the audience, but also that back-to-the-origins kind of thing I’m always going on about (you must excuse my insistence- we all have our weaknesses…), that sense of communion, that gregarious “togetherness”. The hero wouldn’t be the hero if it weren’t from his desire to join “The People”, and the “The People” wouldn’t have such a world if it weren’t for that clan-like organisation (which, of course, we know is a very effective means for preservation, but that’s a different story and I won’t digress). Individuality is here let out of the equation, very clearly. And the world that is doomed is the one which has chosen the path of science and skepticism, while the world of those who have been “chosen” is the one which has preserved the primitive beliefs in the unknown all along. So of course, of course it must be appealing.

“A Fang friend of mine once insisted that he had seen a gifted shaman perform an extraordinary feat. The old man had stuck a finger in the ground in his village and had made it re-emerge in another village several miles away, by just telling his finger to get there! When challenged by derisive sceptics in the village (“How can you claim you saw it if it all happened in two different places?”), the narrator conceded that he had witnessed only the first part of this dramatic event; but the re-emergence of the finger had been reported by very reliable sources.

[...]

Psychologist Nichols Humphrey has documented this dogged pursuit of the paranormal and the miraculous. Heroically stubborn reasearchers explore all the possible evidence, exchange masses of information on documented cases, design even more clever techniques to discover supernatural causation. The sad fact that experiments never demonstrate the intended effects -or do so only when they are not properly controlled- does not in any way dash their hopes. They lose every battle but expect to win the war. The main reason for this unbridled optimism is that there is a strong motivation here, that people really want such claims to be true”.

(Religion explained, Pascal Boyer).

OK, so I’m clearly obsessed with this question of belief, and reading this book, among others, I hope will help me reach to the core of the origin for such inclinations. It is clear that people are fond of beliefs and too often resort to them to explain all sorts of scientifically provable facts. But generally they will not turn to science, because tales are much more appealing to our minds, and certainly less brainy and more comforting in many ways. There are countless ways to illustrate this fact- a very simple one is to realise that being an atheist makes dealing with death a lot more difficult: if your loved ones die, you are convinced that that’s it and you will never see them ever again. If you are faced with a cancer, it is surely a lot harder to struggle with the fear of dying when your expectations of another life are nonexistent.

At a lower scale, esoteric beliefs of every imaginable sort seem to be spreading like the ultimate 21st Century plague. It goes against centuries of scientific research, rationality, and of course against the French Enlightenment and all the rest of currents of thought which have fought the war against superstition, trying to advocate that reason should be the primary source for authority.

But they lost. All around me I keep hearing, more and more often, esoteric explanations for purely natural facts of life: deaths, pregnancies, births, work, love- our main sources of happiness and unhappiness are now consigned to the realm of fairytales and darkness. This -I am more convinced about it every day- will not cease to spread and will undoubtedly create a civilisation in which science will be finally pushed into the background.

The reasons for belief are many; the scary fact is its blind acceptance as a given fact, as an undeniable fact of life. But, apart from that, the whole matter is fascinating from a cultural, but also from a biological, point of view. I personally tend to explain most things as part of a cultural heritage, and I still strongly believe that our desires, thoughts, needs and even feelings can very much be explained and have been mostly shaped by our social environment. Still, it is shocking to see siblings who have been brought up in the same household, have gone to the same schools, have pretty much been around the same people, and have complete opposite beliefs. I’m still very much in the process of looking deeply into this, but it could very well be that the chemical configuration of our brain could lead us to be prone to being religious or not. Now, that would be a disaster on the basis that almost anything could be explained or excused by resorting to that answer (as it also very much happens with cultural-based explanations), which once again would leave will power and overcoming of issues and problems alone out of the equation, common as this is.

Anyway, this interest has recently lead me to not only reading about the topic, but also to asking around, and I have unsurprisingly found that most people simply take their beliefs for granted, without worrying too much about them or giving them too much thought (and this is obviously reinforced by a society which more and more tends to find questions about any kind of belief -be it political, religious, or whatever- far too challenging and/or intrusive); others have admitted that they have chosen to live with them because they make their lives more bearable; the least have stopped to give themselves some time to really think about it. But the funny thing is, none of the people who had esoteric beliefs had ever chosen to have their thoughts questioned by reading about, say, physics, or anything that could possibly challenge their ideas. Which, again, shows us how we all, in many ways (and some more than others), just choose to read about whatever we want to have reinforced, rather than trying to understand the other side: we are leftists and we buy The Guardian, we are tories and we buy the Daily Telegraph; we are atheists and we read Richard Dawkins, we believe in the power of crystals and we read The complete guide to crystal healing (I just made this one up on the spot, but I’m sure it must exist).

And I often think we should ideally do both, but there’s so little time and so many interesting things to read, and quite frankly I don’t like to waste my time on some crap… http://kristenbelieves.wordpress.com/

Estas dos fotos las saqué hace hoy justo un año en Mumbai.

Doce meses que parecen haber pasado como si nada, pero si me paro a contar todos los acontecimientos que han tenido lugar entre un enero y el siguiente, me parecen años.

Hay años que parecen inútiles, completamente prescindibles, y otros que parecen ponerle a uno encima varios años de repente. 2009 ha sido uno de esos para mí, y por exceso de emociones fuertes querría que éste que empieza fuera todo lo contrario: tranquilidad, sosiego, quietud. Un año casi plano, de emociones contenidas en lugar de exacerbadas.

Hace doce meses sudaba por las calles de Mumbai y me echaba cubos de agua fría encima para tratar de mitigar el calor; hoy estoy sentada en una oficina en pleno Londres, con los pies helados y las manos enfundadas en unos mitones negros. Dos polos opuestos, casi dos vidas distintas en una misma persona.

Ay, qué extraña y fascinante es esta vida.

Yes, I do, I try to see other things.
I know there is a bird
singing on that tree,
those immense clouds,
the breath-taking peaks,
the calming
but still furious sea.

It’s still not enough.
What breeze? Oh, I see-
it does smell like it,
but still not enough;
still not here with me
among my sheets,
whiter than those clouds you praise,
far better-smelling than the sea.

That breath was better,
that holding me tighter,
seeming stronger than the wind.
Don’t go away from me, stay still.

I used to rejoice in nature,
but now I can’t even see
that haughty tree,
those honey bees,
the mist curling around the peaks,
the round meanders,
and the bright, brightest green
on the green meadows
of the bright Spring.

And the fiercest nightingale
that sings around me
as if to bring me Spring
when it’s not Spring,
is so offensive-
as if it wanted
to bring me him.

But there’s no comfort.
Still I won’t see
that there are choices,
far simpler deeds,
which should be better
to help with sleep.
But they seem so far off,
so hard to see,
just so impossibly out of my reach.

I wouldn’t bother-
they’d make me sink,
and again this darkness,
again no sleep,
just hours of longing,
no trace of him.

And then I fall
into this dream-
the air unbroken,
the morning kiss,
the stinky pillows,
the tangled feet.

Not just this space there,
under my chin,
looking for somewhere
to rest and breathe
that longed-for odour,
those hungry teeth,
his furious wrestling
under my sheets.

Please let me sleep.
Don’t let me wake
until I find it-
that scent of his
I can only find here,
and shall be over,
painfully over,
after my dream.

Hearts don’t heal. It’s a lie as much as it is to say that love lasts forever. Life is an ever-changeable thing, and experiences accumulate in ourselves rather than being erased by a new one, unless one has been lucky enough to be born heartless, in which case the myth could indeed be reasserted.

In Onegin, Martha Fiennes’ film based on Pushkin’s versed novel, this fact is well illustrated and exemplified (I apologise to the readers who already know the story, in which case please just scroll to the end of this post). It tells the story of Eugeni Onegin, a noble Russian gentleman, bored of the fancy Petersburg life, who inherits a large country estate from his dying uncle. There he meets Tatyana, a young, rather unsophisticated but well-read girl who falls in love with him, and bluntly declares her undying love in a letter. Onegin reads this letter and responds to it in person, explaining to her why he cannot possibly correspond her feelings, and arguing why and how her love for him will with time die away and feel almost like a dream. Life has made of him a cynic, and he points out how a love declaration would only lead to a kiss, a relationship, an engagement, a wedding, and finally to adultery. “Is that the kind of future you imagine for yourself?”, he coldly asks. “No”, she replies, simply. Her heart is still young, her romanticism untarnished, but she’s far from being a fool and has a stronger idea of reality than he can imagine: she is stronger in her love (you see, the idea that undying love is a weakness should, in my opinion, be removed from the collective consciousness).

The years pass, and Tatyana marries a man of high society. Onegin sees her again, unexpectedly, at a ball, and love hits him. Regardless of the fragility of his position, he makes his way to her mansion, where he finds her sitting alone in a hall, reading a book. As he walks in, she asks him for the reason which took him there. “I have to see you”, he answers. “Why, why do you pursue me in this way?”, she asks, managing to hold herself together. “Because I love you”, he replies, “and in seeing you again, I saw myself”. She gets up, visibly annoyed, but touched, and reminds him of the words he said to her all those years ago: “You told me that my heart would heal”. “And has it? Has it healed, Tatyana?”, replies he, with a half smile of triumph in his face. She finally breaks down: “It hurts”, she mutters. “And why, why does it hurt?”.
Her answer is straight, blunt, horrific in its unchangeable truth: “Because you are too late, Eugeni”.

I only told this story to remind us that sometimes we fail to recognise love when perhaps only its seed is there. Onegin played the skeptic and he lost, because love is not love only with love- unfortunately other elements also play a part, and specially the timing has to be correct. If it fails, the whole structure collapses. And because we won’t heal, one has to know how to recognise it when it’s there, and grab it. Grab it while you still can.

Some people have the capacity to overcome the dark depths of the first sharp grief after a failure and move on; others choose to hide the pain in some place so deep in themselves that they almost manage to never find it again. Others, perhaps most, quite unfortunately have to learn to live with the wound, and go through existence with that grievance being very close to the skin in Winter, when the nights are long and loneliness bites, and deeper down in the Spring, when the instinct to reborn manages to push it down below. But it’s always there, like an appendix not even a surgeon would recommend removing, because the chance of bleeding to death from the amputation would be higher than that of happily surviving without it. So one has to learn to coexist with it, as you would with a siamese sibling whose head is so close to yours, that you hit it every time you want to turn round.

That is when love turns into a curse.

Because I have been bruised
by time and disappointment
I think I’m unworthy of happiness,
and I indulgently roll around in the mud of my failure.

I don’t think it’s skepticism anymore.
I just seem to prefer
to carry a burden around,
to hardly be able to catch my breath
after I carry the weight
of all of you on me
up to the top of that endless slope.

This weight hurts,
and its hurting is the definite sign,
the only credible sign,
of my being alive.

I collect heavy bundles
that I like to add on to my baggage
until the strap which holds it all together
is finally torn,
never to be repaired.

Siempre me ha llamado muchísimo la atención que la gente hable del aburrimiento como una sensación habitual en sus vidas. Si se les despoja de su ocupación ordinaria, que generalmente es el trabajo, parecen quedarse vacíos, sin saber con qué llenar el tiempo. Me ocurre últimamente que como llevo ya casi un año sin currar, la gente me pregunta constantemente si no me aburro, o me sueltan frases del estilo de: “Uf, yo cuando estuve en el paro ocho meses no veía el momento de volver a trabajar”, o “Yo no sabría qué hacer con mi tiempo”.

Sin pretender dármelas de nada, tengo que decir que yo nunca me aburro. Al contrario, cada día me parece que faltan horas para hacer todo lo que me gustaría. ¿Cómo puede alguien aburrirse en este mundo, tan plagado de cosas por descubrir? Incluso aunque uno decidiera emplear el resto de su tiempo sobre este planeta en el estudio de tan solo una cosa, pongamos como ejemplo la enología, no tendría tiempo para poder abarcar el tema y convertirse en el mejor enólogo del mundo, a no ser que estuviera singularmente dotado a priori, sin saberlo, con una maravillosa nariz de oro.

En los últimos tiempos, muy interesada por esta cuestión a raíz de las preguntas que permanentemente se me planteaban, he preguntado a diestro y siniestro, a amigos y conocidos, y a conocidos de conocidos, si les gustaría dejar de trabajar durante el resto de sus días, o que qué harían si de pronto heredaran una suma de dinero tal que les permitiera el retirarse. Sorprendentemente, tal vez haya recibido tan sólo un par de respuestas categóricas, reafirmadas en el placer (¡tiempo, por fin!) de no tener que acudir a un empleo a diario; el resto de las personas admitían no creer poder permanecer demasiado tiempo en ese estado de repentina libertad, y hablaban bien de trabajar de una forma más flexible (con un portátil desde las Bahamas, proponía una), de montar negocios, o de tener que buscarse una ocupación no remunerada (voluntariados, habitualmente) para así poder construir sus vidas alrededor de ella.

El problema central de la mayoría, cuando me daba por indagar más en sus razones, parecía ser la falta de estructura, de rutina. “Necesito tener una rutina para no quedarme en la cama todo el día sin hacer nada” es una respuesta habitual y a mi parecer descorazonadora, que dice muy poco del ansia de curiosidad, de aprender, de los individuos, y mucho de cómo a la gente le gusta estar domesticada.

Hay indudablemente algo intrínsecamente tranquilizador, e incluso dulce, en las rutinas. A mí me encanta levantarme cada mañana y repetir más o menos los mismos ritos, que sin duda me ayudan a sentirme equilibrada. Pero tanto si la rutina es levantarse para salir a correr durante una hora, o hacer gimnasia durante veinte minutos, o bajar al quiosco más cercano a por el periódico y sentarse a desayunar el mismo café con leche de todos los días, con el mismo croissant y en el mismo bar, las rutinas se las puede crear uno mismo y no tienen por qué ser impuestas desde fuera. O sea, que el problema parece radicar en la falta de voluntad y de disciplina, más que en el exceso de tiempo libre.

¿Pero cómo es posible aburrirse con todos los libros que hay por leer, música por escuchar, películas por ver, lugares que explorar, platos que degustar? En estos meses de asueto, no he conocido en ningún momento la sensación de querer volver al trabajo, sino más bien el deseo constante de querer prolongar esta situación hasta el infinito, y si económicamente pudiera permitírmelo sin duda lo haría: no concibo una existencia más plena que aquella que me permitiera el disponer de mi tiempo como yo lo decidiera, y estructurarlo cada día de acuerdo a mi voluntad.

Claro, he mentido antes cuando he dicho que desconozco lo que es el aburrimiento, porque sí hay una cosa que me aburre enormemente, hasta lo indecible, que es precisamente el verme obligada a acudir al mismo lugar cada día, a la misma hora, para realizar casi la misma tarea que el día anterior, y muy probablemente que el posterior y los que le sigan. No es necesariamente el trabajo como tal a lo que me refiero, porque trabajo es también el cuidar de un jardín de cuya evolución disfrutas, o el sentarse cada día en una biblioteca durante unas horas, o el entrenarse para una maratón. El origen del problema está en que la especialización obligada del individuo para poder acceder a un empleo remunerado limita las perspectivas de enriquecerse personalmente en otros campos, fundamentalmente por falta de tiempo, y genera mucha frustración y mucho malestar a quien es capaz de vislumbrar todo lo que este mundo puede dar de sí.

Pensando en todas estas cosas, y a raíz de haber tenido entre las manos mi currículo frente a mí demasiado a menudo últimamente, deseaba poder vivir un Renacimiento modernizado en el que estuviera bien visto hacer de todo un poco. Pero aunque las cosas comienzan a cambiar, las personas seguimos teniendo un valor de mercado que está directamente asociado a la cantidad de experiencia acumulada en tan sólo un campo, en lugar de a la experiencia en general. No puede ser de otro modo desde el momento en que los empleos se sobre-especializan y requieren de unas aptitudes muy concretas, pero yo quisiera diseñar hoy una casa y mañana pasar consulta como psicóloga, y al otro cocinar chipirones encebollados en un restaurante frente al mar, y al siguiente decidir subir el Naranco de Bulnes como entregada montañera. Aunque idealmente, insisto, querría todo el tiempo que me queda de vida a mi entera disposición para poder dedicarme a esas mismas disciplinas sin tener que tiznarlas, pervertirlas, con la necesidad de convertirlas en una actividad obligada, repetida, diaria. Remunerada.

Y un año entero no me serviría, dedicándole ocho horas al día durante cinco días a la semana, para conocer todos los rincones de Londres, de Mumbai o de París; o para leer todo lo que me gustaría leer, o para ir a todos los restaurantes a los que quisiera ir, o para aprender todo lo que me gustaría. Es muy corta esta vida, pero parecemos hacerla aún más corta con tanto despropósito.

Por cierto, en esta sociedad nuestra a lo mío se le llama desequilibrio, o en el mejor de los casos inconstancia. Bienvenidos sean ambos si a lo que me empujan es a descubrir.