Gara’s Weblog

In case you haven’t heard, your life doesn’t belong to you anymore. Just pick ten random people and ask them a few key questions, and you’ll soon find that one way or the other they’ll try to prove how the acts they play a role in and their consequences have nothing to do with their intention, choice or excercise of free will anymore. We are right back into the Middle Ages and everything we face has to do with the mysterious powers of Destiny, the Hidden Forces, the star signs, the Unknown.

It’s easier, of course. We are no longer responsible for anything, because before us lies a path that is predesigned for us and unfolds as we go on, and things are simply “meant to be”, or “everything happens for a reason”, as they like to say now.

So you go out in the street and get hit by a car, and you are taken to a hospital and you engage into conversation with this woman who is in the same waiting room and -oh, surprise!- you happen to get on like a house on fire, decide to go out for dinner the following week, fall in love, move in together, have three kids. It was meant to be. Or you are about to go on holidays but miss the flight, take a couple of trains instead, and in the second one you meet this guy you really like, see him often when you go back home, build up a friendship that lasts for years. Of course, you were meant to meet one another, not that there was any chance of meeting someone you would have liked just the same had you not missed that flight! No, there’s no chance anymore, no probabilities, let alone anything close to Science. This is just dated rubish, because what counts, what really dictates your life, is that you might be a Libra instead of a Leo, and so Libras are lazier and more disorganised and tend to miss flights far more often than the more methodical Leos. Or that woman in the waiting room was a Cancer and you are a Sagittarius, so of course you must be the perfect match. Had she been a Capricorn, forget it, it just wouldn’t work. And so everything happens for a very, very rational reason.
I’m just making this up as I go along, obviously, but I’m sure one could earn a few hundreds by just talking this shit in a properly arranged esoteric practice of some sort.

But somehow it seems to me that it only works as a justification for good things. In this new religion that has all the necessary elements except Resignation, I wonder if getting robbed, or rapped, or being diagnosed with a terminal illness, is also part of what is meant to be for each one of us, or just an error of design, or bad luck, or sheer unfairness. They are quite convenient, these new faiths, because they are open to so many interpretations, depending on the mood of each one of the followers. Handy.

As an antidote, one should be able to prescribe -and the treatment should be followed rigorously- one or two books by John Allen Paulos, who among other things says that whenever someone asks him about his star sign, he makes a new one up, only to verify that whatever answer he gives on that occasion will be followed by the inevitable “Of course you had to be!”, and the unavoidable explanation that follows. Oh, the new mystics always find their ways!

Evolution? Who talked about evolution? Welcome to the 21st Century.

I saw him yesterday at the concert he gave in Madrid. He appeared on stage running like a twenty year old, dressed in black and wearing his hat, and he gave a concert which turned into a sublime experience that lasted for over three hours. He started with Dance me to the end of love, and followed a studied succession of songs that only got better. I wasn’t expecting much more than whispers from a man of his age, but his voice was deep as ever, and his musicians were exceptional. I didn’t feel the time and I could have gone on forever, just listening. My perception was not being altered by the inevitable excitement of seeing a legend live -effect I have no intention of denying- but his music is just an excuse, just the vehicle he uses to put on songs whatever he could just leave on paper with no music, all the same.

I will say no more of the concert, one had to be there. But I have been reading him a lot lately, and I will leave one of his poems here, because they are filled with the same overpowering sensitivity, the same sharpness and almost insulting precision of his songs.

There it goes.
And it goes to Kiron, who thought he couldn’t be there.
And to Bárbara, who most unfortunately couldn’t be there either, after all.
And to Paul, who likes to be considered his alter ego.
And more generally, to all those who are born into this world to be oppressed by the figures of beauty, like Leonard himself.

The collapse of Zen.

When I can wedge my face
into the place
and struggle with my breathing
as she brings her eager fingers down
to separate herself,
to help me use my whole mouth
against her hungriness,
her most private of hungers-
why should I want to be enlightened?
Is there something that I missed?
Have I forgotten yesterday’s mosquito
or tomorrow’s hungry ghost?

When I can roam this hill with a knife in my back
caused by too much drinking of Chateau Latour
and spill my heart into the valley
of the lights of Caguas
and freeze in fear as the watchdog
comes drooling out of the bushes
and refuses to recognize me
and there we are, yes, bewildered
as to who should kill the other first-
and I move and it moves,
and it moves and I move,
why should I want to be enlightened?
Did I leave something out?
Was there some world I failed to embrace?
Some bone I didn’t steal?

When Jesus loves me so much that blood
comes out of his heart
and I climb a mettal ladder
into the hole in his bosom
which is caused by sorrow as big as China
and I enter the innermost room wearing white clothes
and I entreat and I plead:
“Not this one, Sir. Not that one, Sir. I beg you, Sir”.
and I look through His eyes
as the helpless are shit on again
and the tender blooming nipple of mankind
is caught in the pincers
of power and muscle and money-
why should I seek enlightenment?
Did I fail to recognise some cockroach?
Some vermin in the ooze of my majesty?

When “men are stupid and women are crazy”
and everyone is asleep in San Juan and Caguas
and everyone is in love but me
and everyone has a religion and a boyfriend
and a great genious for loneliness-

When I can dribble over all the universes
and undress a woman without touching her
and run errands for my urine
and offer my huge silver shoulders
to the pinhead moon-
When my heart is broken as usual
over someone’s evanescent beauty
and design after design
they fade like kingdoms with no writing
and, look, I wheeze my way
up to the station of Sahara’s
incomparable privacy
and churn the air into a dark cocoon
of effortless forgetting-
why should I shiver on the altar of enlightenment?
why should I want to smile forever?

…………………………………………………………………………………

…and now just listen to this. And cry, or go to sleep, but don’t go out in the street.