136.

This time we are swimming in a boundless sea. There are no waves, no sounds, no animals, no people. Just water everywhere we look. I cannot hear you any longer, perhaps because I silenced you, or you silenced me. What would be the difference? And I – we – are swimming day and night, not speaking, not seeing the shore behind us, not seeing the shore in front of us. Not once have we believed that we have seen a glimpse of land in front of us, a small island where we could rest and finally find our peace. But all our glimpses are mere illusions, and we keep on swimming, feeling the power of water on us, swimming, feeling how tired we are, telling us that we have to keep on going on for a minute, for an hour, for a month, until we reach that lost destination - that we barely remember which it is - , or a damn boat where we could breathe for a while, feeling all the time how the water pulls us down, wanting from the bottom of our soul to rest, only for just one brief second.

Memento

“I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become.”

In a world full of absurd repetitions, where each life reflects the life and the search of the other, in a world governed by corruption, superficiality and everything that defers our dreams, I do need a memento of why I do what I feel, of what I have to do, of what I try to mold through my insanity and wildness.

“Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me. Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer – a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen.” (72)

“When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart – a Nathuatl concept. My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remarking and giving birth to itself through my body. It is this learning to live with la Coatlicue tht transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience. It is always a path/state to something else. (73)

“She writes while other people sleep. Something is trying to come out. She fights the words, pushes them down, down, a woman with morning sickness in the middle of the night. How much easier it would be to carry a baby for nine months and then expel it permanently. These continuous multiple pregnancies are going to kill her. She is the battlefield for the pitched fight between the inner image and the words trying to recreate it. La musa bruja has no manners. Doesn’t she know, nights are for sleeping?” (73-74)

“The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body – flesh and bone – and from the Earth’s body – stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.” (75)

Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera

Dezumanizare

Am mers mereu pe principiul de a privi întregul, nu o felie, nu o față, nu o simplă perspectivă. Nu cred că trebuie să fim cu toții extrem de empatici, așa cum nu cred că trebuie să cădem pradă unui egoism complet. A ne iubi pe noi înșine nu înseamnă a ne opri de a-l vedea pe celălalt. Prea multă empatie strică propriei persoane, așa cum mult prea mult egoism devine psihopatie.

Nu știu încontro ne îndreptăm. Nu știu ce lume ar rămâne moștenire unui viitor copil. Ne considerăm specia superioară, când unele animale ne arată uneori ce înseamnă a fi uman.

Nu vorbesc de empatie, de morală, de egoism, de competențe și incompetențe, de pile și de realizări, de inteligență sau de prostie, ci de simpla calitate de a fi om. Mergem mai departe, fără remușcări, când alții se bat, când cineva este tâlhărit în fața noastră, când cineva strigă după ajutor, când cineva cade în spatele sau în fața noastră, când oameni – cunoscuți sau nu – se îneacă în fața noastră, iar noi stăm. Dăm la o parte oameni competenți și nu ne pasă câtuși de puțin de ei pentru oameni de la care putem primi acel ceva care ne poate mulțumi o perioadă de timp. De la personal, până când personalul se răsfrânge în social, ne lăsăm orbiți de orgolii, de trufii, de putere, de la prietenii care se destramă, sau firme care se distrug din cauza acestor orgolii până la vieți care se pierd atunci când uităm complet să mai fim oameni.

Când un caz apare și ne lovește în față și ne arată cât de inumani am ajuns, împânzim rețelele de socializare cu fel de fel de discuții, de conștientizări. Până când uităm și ne întoarcem la vechea ordine, de care părem că nu putem să mai scăpăm. Uităm. Uităm atât de multe, ca indivizi și ca ființe sociale. Uităm binele care ni s-a făcut, uităm oamenii care ne-au fost alături, uităm ajutorul primit. Sau poate că nu l-am primit niciodată, așa că întoarcem moneda. Uităm să mai comunicăm. Uităm să mai ieșim din noi înșine, uităm să spunem un simplu ,,mulțumesc” sau să întrebăm, cu sinceritate, ,,cum te mai simți? Ce mai faci?” Uităm să fim noi cei care dăm o mână de ajutor.

Nu cer empatie, nu cer martiri. Cer o lume în care să reînvățăm să fim în primul și în primul rând oameni, să fim umani, dacă acest cuvânt mai poate avea vreo valoare în societatea în care trăim.

Borderlands/Meraki

“Educated or not, the onus is still on woman to be a wife/mother – only the nun can escape motherhood. Women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children.”  (Gloria Anzaldua)

Non serviam. Some of us choose to be our own creations, what we make ourselves in the end. We rebel from the beginning. In front of families, religions, nations. We run away from the stories encrusted in our skins in childhoods. We abandon that cruel, meaningless God, with which we have been raised and listen to our voice within. To reason. We search for our own language, playing with words, searching. We search for our own people, our own families, despite our misanthropy and our inheritance of lack of trust. Because this is what we have inherited. And even in our wilderness, our wild nature, we are haunted by our past – how couldn’t we, living, growing so much under so powerful myths? No matter how many myths we deconstruct, no matter how up we go, how many theses we write, no matter how successful we are, we are failures in the face of some cultures, some families. 

“There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.” (Gloria Anzaldua)

I have always searched for androgyny in literature, in the style of a writer. I have always searched for wholeness in a person. I have always tried to understand, to see the whole picture.

"I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture.” (Gloria Anzaldua)

I have found the other days a world with which I fell in love: meraki – “to do something with soul, creativity, or love; to put something of yourself into your work.” I think this is the word that characterizes my workaholic nature, my stuborness and my wilderness. Meraki. 

Or, on the same note, 

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.” (James Joyce)

Another Shape of Freedom

Because I have always preferred wilderness to civilization.

Tiredness

We get born. We grew up in more or less dysfunctional families, and we start searching for our own families, promising we would not repeat the mistakes of our parents. Or, on the contrary, we fully embrace them. Somewhere, we start working, becoming so workaholics that we can’t remember when or how we started this, and since when work is the only thing we really have. We read books, we find a job that suits us, we write PhD.s, ignoring all our social life for something we are not quite sure why we’re doing (and we'll probably end in bankruptcy), we work too many hours, we search for connections in this absurd, meaningless world, although we have been fully aware from the beginning how lonely we are. We work. Swallowing all our words that we want so desperately to scream. We work. Swallowing all the feelings. We work. Swallowing all we want to say if someone asked us how we really feel. Work on our jobs, on our theses, if we still have time, even on our relationships. We work so much and we get so tired that this Tiredness seems a part of us, like that big, black shadow depression used to be represented somewhere on the Internet. So tired that we feel it like part of us, like our limbs. Going with it to bed, waking next to it in the morning, going to work with it, to parties, shopping, present there, every second of our lives. We wait to fall asleep and maybe our brains will forgive and give us a nice dream, like the one sitting next to a friend, looking at a lake. But sometimes not even in sleep Tiredness doesn’t let us be. And one day, just like that, we drop dead, without knowing, without warning.

Another image of Life

Call it the Wild West, Humanity, the human being, or simply Life.  

"There was a lull in the dancing and a second fiddler took the stage and the two plucked their strings and turned the little hardwood pegs until they were satisfied. Many among the dancers were staggering drunk through the room and some had rid themselves of shirts and jackets and stood barechested and sweating even though the room was cold enough to cloud their breath. An enormous whore stood clapping her hands at the bandstand and calling drunkenly for the music. She wore nothing but a pair of men's drawers and some of her sisters were likewise clad in what appeared to be trophies - hats or pantaloons or blue twill cavalry jackets. As the music sawed up there was a lively cry from all and a caller stood to the front and called out the dance and the dancers stomped and hooted and lurched against one another. 

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

(Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy)