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.