Sunday, 12 August 2007
To Thine Own Self Be True
Man, if you can't be honest to your diary, then what hope does anyone have of getting it from you?
The last 2 days have marked a real deterioration in me. The weight of all this nothingness is pushing me into a hazy, conscious oblivion, where there is a constant inner numbness that ahces.
I wash floors, I clean the oven till it shines, I sort out my office - is that some kind of pleasure, or just relief?
From 2.15 to 3 pm, I sit alone on a bench in the riverside garden (as if there is another one somewhere else, like up the mountain...ha-ha-ha!), exhange godd afternoons with a passing old man and realise that I am already like him and the countless others of this town's visibly ageing population, looking for somewhere to pass another day's endless hours of nothing, doing nothing, achieving nothing more than spending time until tomorrow. At least he can talk for hours with his mates about Benfica. Living just to talk about a football club, which lives on its past glories, is like living just to talk about mud.
I sit there, staring out across the river to that static, out-of-reach flat horizon on the other side, noting that nothnig has changed except the temperature since January, trying to think. But it has gone too far and the nothingness is too heavy a burden for more than a minimum of depressing cogency.
The only movement in this frozen panorama is the downstream current, a fluttering of absurd, meaninglçess flags and three or four aerobatic swallows. On the way there, I had passed a pigeon, dead but sitting upright, like one of the dozing old men. Maybe it was one of these, captured 4 months ago.
A solitary seagull, my first sighting in weeks, flew purposefully upriver, me watching until it disappeared after the bridge, as if it was anxious to pass quickly and not be infected.
All i could try to think about was the battery of dates bringing anniversaries and memories of conflicting extremes almost every day from now on. To make it worse, I remember the sequence of days either side of all the events. What an affliction that can be.
August is terrible; this year, the 10th anniversaries seem to be of just about everything, and the significance of Princess Diana's death is far more than just that. August 1997 now seems like the pivotal momth between all my pre-1997 and all of my 10 years since. It feels like everything to follow was determined and sealed in August 1997.
Tomorrow, Monday 13th marks 17 years since Monday 13th August 1990.
However, I fear that Wednesday 15th is going to be the toughest to endure, marking as it does 30 years since Monday 15th August 1977.
My Dad would have been 94 on Thursday 16th. I still miss him, but I thank the skies that he is not still here. Not to see this. He saw enough.
I feel that I have no more resistance or defences to what is happening to me now, however much I have been complicit or responsible.
Life should not be like this. Not mine, at least, if I don't have the means to bear it.
The last 2 days have marked a real deterioration in me. The weight of all this nothingness is pushing me into a hazy, conscious oblivion, where there is a constant inner numbness that ahces.
I wash floors, I clean the oven till it shines, I sort out my office - is that some kind of pleasure, or just relief?
From 2.15 to 3 pm, I sit alone on a bench in the riverside garden (as if there is another one somewhere else, like up the mountain...ha-ha-ha!), exhange godd afternoons with a passing old man and realise that I am already like him and the countless others of this town's visibly ageing population, looking for somewhere to pass another day's endless hours of nothing, doing nothing, achieving nothing more than spending time until tomorrow. At least he can talk for hours with his mates about Benfica. Living just to talk about a football club, which lives on its past glories, is like living just to talk about mud.
I sit there, staring out across the river to that static, out-of-reach flat horizon on the other side, noting that nothnig has changed except the temperature since January, trying to think. But it has gone too far and the nothingness is too heavy a burden for more than a minimum of depressing cogency.
The only movement in this frozen panorama is the downstream current, a fluttering of absurd, meaninglçess flags and three or four aerobatic swallows. On the way there, I had passed a pigeon, dead but sitting upright, like one of the dozing old men. Maybe it was one of these, captured 4 months ago.
A solitary seagull, my first sighting in weeks, flew purposefully upriver, me watching until it disappeared after the bridge, as if it was anxious to pass quickly and not be infected.
All i could try to think about was the battery of dates bringing anniversaries and memories of conflicting extremes almost every day from now on. To make it worse, I remember the sequence of days either side of all the events. What an affliction that can be.
August is terrible; this year, the 10th anniversaries seem to be of just about everything, and the significance of Princess Diana's death is far more than just that. August 1997 now seems like the pivotal momth between all my pre-1997 and all of my 10 years since. It feels like everything to follow was determined and sealed in August 1997.
Tomorrow, Monday 13th marks 17 years since Monday 13th August 1990.
However, I fear that Wednesday 15th is going to be the toughest to endure, marking as it does 30 years since Monday 15th August 1977.
My Dad would have been 94 on Thursday 16th. I still miss him, but I thank the skies that he is not still here. Not to see this. He saw enough.
I feel that I have no more resistance or defences to what is happening to me now, however much I have been complicit or responsible.
Life should not be like this. Not mine, at least, if I don't have the means to bear it.
Friday, 10 August 2007
Side-Notes
What I mean by side-notes is that they contain no new startling revelations from my memoirs. After this week's sequence, I have to plan it a little (different for a diary, forward planning), because there is a lot to write and though I may write sequentially, it will always appear backwards.
I don't think I am intending, or am actually able to write this in a chronological sequence. Memories of events, determinant factors, just rise up into the consciousness and, in any event, if I chose to read all of my stuff going back through most of the time, I could transcribe, but I would never have the time. I want to stick to what I feel is salient to where I have got trapped in the here & now. Certain clues might already be emerging, but it will all come, depending on how able I actually am to write it decently.
The major reason for this side-note is a response to the reaction this week. I had said that I am writing to myself, and I MUST keep it that way. So if I don't answer the comments, please rest assured that I am reading them and it is now in fact a further encouragement to keep on. So when I wrote to Auds the other day "Ne Me Quittes pas", that is what I meant: Don't go away from me. And I hope I won't. Thank you all for your heart-felt comments.
I am trying to capture Siberia with the camera. It is harder than I had thought. Partly because you can't HEAR the sound of it, partly because of the dimesions. Now I think that this difficulty could go towards explaining why I posted "Born Running" and "Keep on Running". It is as if I have to explain what has made me me, that could, in turn, explain, why I experience this as a prison without escape called Siberia.
I am actually looking forward to writing the next entries to this diary/autobiog. Masochistic of me, perhaps, because I already know what it has to contain, which is the follow-on from the miracles and other elements of my childhood. Everything that was seminal to all the most positive and most negative in me.
It has never been lightly that I have always answered the question: "What is your greatest achievement?" automatically by saying: "To have survived". There is what I know, there is what I have been told and there is what has been confirmed of my own auto-psychological excavation & analysis.
I also know just how richly lucky I have been. It all could have been so very different. And if today I, we, have so little to show materially for our time, I understand that too. Even miracles have their limits. And we cannot have everything.
It is like we are all dealt a hand of cards at the beginning, when our circles start turning. We have to play that hand and we can't usually see where it will lead. But on this basis, this strikes me as a fabulous reason for never judging anyone else, or over-estimating or underestimating them.They have their own hand of cards, their own circles to turn through, their own 360º.
"Ulysses", Ruth. I am telling myself our one-word battle anthem today; because today has been really hard. It is the contagion of Siberia, you see.
May the weekend be better, although the days and nights don't really make any difference when nothing happens to distinguish them, and you feel yourself being sucked deeper into something awful so lacking in stimulation that you are surrounded by human debris who know no better, and you wake up exhausted, incoherent and having to try and repair yourself, just because you do not belong. And just because there is no alternative. And you are starving for lack of art, sky, intelligence, ocean, diversity, curiosity, engagement, fields, trees, roads, beauty, sense, the unlimitedness of being truly alive.
ULYSSES!!!
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
Keep On Running.......
Looking back at "Born Running", which was close to the literal truth (precocious, archetypal little Sagitario that I was, walking without any problem or assistance at 9 months, in too much of a hurry to explore beyond the horizon), I feel like fast-forwarding to a day in my adolescence. It does me some good, I think (and hope) to get this story out of me and on to "paper". I have told it many times, but I believe that I have never written it down.
I was going towards 17 in October 1967, still at school, my sister, who had been married and out of the house for 2 & a half years, became ill. When nothing could be established by her doctor on the other side of London, my Mother - who, understandably, given all of the past, was far too protective of my sister - ordered that she and her husband move to our house, where our Mum could look after her & deal with the situation, until my sister was better.
My sister, who is 7 & a half years older than me, has in reality, always been younger than me. I also undewrstand this.
And so it happened, no resistance. After a short while, my mother arranged for a specialist urologist to come to the house to examine my sister. On the day of his visit, I had to be at school, but there was an extra expectancy around the event. I report it here as it was told to me afterwards.
The specialist, a middle-aged man, arrived punctually, examined my sister and diagnosed that it was a not-serious infection. He accepted my mother's offer of a cup of tea and as he sat at the table, she said to him:
" Doctor Blandy, were you by any chance working as an intern in London Hospital in 1952?"
He replied "Yes, I was. I've been there all of my career. Why?"
"Do you remember the case of a little boy of 20 months who was brought in as an emergency with huge, near fatal scalding that Spring?"
He thought in silence for a few seconds and said: "Of course I do! It was one of my first emergencies. We were sure we would lose him. Hang on, your name is Scott! That was the name. You are the same Mrs Scott, aren't you?".
"Yes, quite right".
"My God, what happened to him? Is he well? Where is he (tentatively)?".
Next my mother said: "Well, first, do you remember how he defied each stage of the prognosis? First he would survive, but would have to spend his life in a wheelchair? Then, you had to revise that, but believed that he would spend his life physically weak and unable to stand straight, or do anything like normal children?"
Doctor Blandy remembered everything as vividly as my parents. He became a mixture of excited and apprehensive.
"I remember the day he left the hospital, smiling in his push-chair, everyone waving, and a lot of his nurses with tears in their eyes after 6 months of caring for him. It was too special to forget. How is he doing?"
My Mother told him to wait just a moment. "I'm going to show you what happened to him", went out and came back with her hands full.
"He was the first at everything in primary school. First to read, first to write, first to swim. Here are the certificates. Always the best footballer, always the fastest runner, tennis, cross-country. Here are the newspaper cuttings. West Ham wanted to give him a trial, but he has other plans than becoming a footballer. He plays 3 times a week for 2 different teams. This is some of his writing. He also plays music a lot".
And what did Doctor Blandy do? He fell back in the chair, looking hard, carefully at everything, then put his hands over his eyes and burst into tears. 15 years later, this eminent man, who was on his way to becoming one of the country's top Professors of urology, sat there in our living room and cried his eyes out, overcome by emotion and a joy that he later expressed. His only regret was that he couldn't wait long enough to meet me.
"Nothing of that tragedy that turned into a miracle by the time he left us could have prepared me for this. I am only grateful that we were brought together again today". And he refused to accept his fee for examining my sister.
A very good man indeed. That same young intern who had urged my Dad to go home and pray.
It is a beautiful story, in fact I love it. In the 1980s, my and Professor Blandy's paths uncannily crossed twice, but we were just not destined to meet in person. Once when I had an appointment at London Hospital in 1982, I went looking for him. I found his office, but discovered that he was away at a conference. Instead, I went to visit our old neighbours, who still lived in that East End apartment building, which had been the scene of the horror.
Then, incredibly, at a Christmas party in 1987 at the home of a good Argentinian exile urologist friend, we were introduced to a woman who, in the course of the conversation, turned out to be Professor Blandy's private secretary! I was totally stunned, it was so emotional. She knew nothing of my story, but as soon as she heard it, spellbound, she said she couldn't wait to tell him of our meeting, and that maybe finally we could meet face to face.
It never happened; he or I was always too busy then. But again, he got a full update on my life, which in the intervening years, had blossomed and was unlike anyone's that I have ever come across. By 1987, I was fully involved in doing whatever I could to help the 3rd world towards development, with educational projects, NGOs, linked to the the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, dealing with the aftermath of some of the world's worst conflicts, famines, victims of torture, repression etc. etc. etc. Hot, heavy and immensely enriching in all that I learned, all of the true friends I made among some of the best people this world will ever have in it. It was equally very humbling for me. None of us should ever over-estimate who we are, or underestimate just how much we can accomplish, if we really want to make things better for others.
So, we exchanged letters, that was all. Strange. But then, nothing is stranger than life itself; particularly mine. He retired. He passed away. I know I owe him a lot, but I always felt that my parents owed him even more.
Yes, I know, but this is today and this is Siberia. But whatever happens to me, they will not tame or pacify me. I cannot be caged, not for long, and this is what Siberia is attempting to do. I know myself too well, I know who I have been, what I have done and why. And that is why I know why I am suffering so much now.
Now, I suspect that my next entry to this diary has to throw light into the darker corners and open out just what I know of me, how I found out and why it is the way it is. These are fragments of MY life, not Mary Poppins. It is not all fairy tale.
I suddenly remember the last lines of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, that I studied in 1967. With the aid of an inspirational English Literature teacher, Eddie Thorpe, I quickly grew to love Tennyson's poetry. It was Thorpe, emotionally intoning these final lines of "Ulysses", that planted what has returned from its sleep to me just now:
"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which, in old days,
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and NOT TO YIELD!".
I was going towards 17 in October 1967, still at school, my sister, who had been married and out of the house for 2 & a half years, became ill. When nothing could be established by her doctor on the other side of London, my Mother - who, understandably, given all of the past, was far too protective of my sister - ordered that she and her husband move to our house, where our Mum could look after her & deal with the situation, until my sister was better.
My sister, who is 7 & a half years older than me, has in reality, always been younger than me. I also undewrstand this.
And so it happened, no resistance. After a short while, my mother arranged for a specialist urologist to come to the house to examine my sister. On the day of his visit, I had to be at school, but there was an extra expectancy around the event. I report it here as it was told to me afterwards.
The specialist, a middle-aged man, arrived punctually, examined my sister and diagnosed that it was a not-serious infection. He accepted my mother's offer of a cup of tea and as he sat at the table, she said to him:
" Doctor Blandy, were you by any chance working as an intern in London Hospital in 1952?"
He replied "Yes, I was. I've been there all of my career. Why?"
"Do you remember the case of a little boy of 20 months who was brought in as an emergency with huge, near fatal scalding that Spring?"
He thought in silence for a few seconds and said: "Of course I do! It was one of my first emergencies. We were sure we would lose him. Hang on, your name is Scott! That was the name. You are the same Mrs Scott, aren't you?".
"Yes, quite right".
"My God, what happened to him? Is he well? Where is he (tentatively)?".
Next my mother said: "Well, first, do you remember how he defied each stage of the prognosis? First he would survive, but would have to spend his life in a wheelchair? Then, you had to revise that, but believed that he would spend his life physically weak and unable to stand straight, or do anything like normal children?"
Doctor Blandy remembered everything as vividly as my parents. He became a mixture of excited and apprehensive.
"I remember the day he left the hospital, smiling in his push-chair, everyone waving, and a lot of his nurses with tears in their eyes after 6 months of caring for him. It was too special to forget. How is he doing?"
My Mother told him to wait just a moment. "I'm going to show you what happened to him", went out and came back with her hands full.
"He was the first at everything in primary school. First to read, first to write, first to swim. Here are the certificates. Always the best footballer, always the fastest runner, tennis, cross-country. Here are the newspaper cuttings. West Ham wanted to give him a trial, but he has other plans than becoming a footballer. He plays 3 times a week for 2 different teams. This is some of his writing. He also plays music a lot".
And what did Doctor Blandy do? He fell back in the chair, looking hard, carefully at everything, then put his hands over his eyes and burst into tears. 15 years later, this eminent man, who was on his way to becoming one of the country's top Professors of urology, sat there in our living room and cried his eyes out, overcome by emotion and a joy that he later expressed. His only regret was that he couldn't wait long enough to meet me.
"Nothing of that tragedy that turned into a miracle by the time he left us could have prepared me for this. I am only grateful that we were brought together again today". And he refused to accept his fee for examining my sister.
A very good man indeed. That same young intern who had urged my Dad to go home and pray.
It is a beautiful story, in fact I love it. In the 1980s, my and Professor Blandy's paths uncannily crossed twice, but we were just not destined to meet in person. Once when I had an appointment at London Hospital in 1982, I went looking for him. I found his office, but discovered that he was away at a conference. Instead, I went to visit our old neighbours, who still lived in that East End apartment building, which had been the scene of the horror.
Then, incredibly, at a Christmas party in 1987 at the home of a good Argentinian exile urologist friend, we were introduced to a woman who, in the course of the conversation, turned out to be Professor Blandy's private secretary! I was totally stunned, it was so emotional. She knew nothing of my story, but as soon as she heard it, spellbound, she said she couldn't wait to tell him of our meeting, and that maybe finally we could meet face to face.
It never happened; he or I was always too busy then. But again, he got a full update on my life, which in the intervening years, had blossomed and was unlike anyone's that I have ever come across. By 1987, I was fully involved in doing whatever I could to help the 3rd world towards development, with educational projects, NGOs, linked to the the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, dealing with the aftermath of some of the world's worst conflicts, famines, victims of torture, repression etc. etc. etc. Hot, heavy and immensely enriching in all that I learned, all of the true friends I made among some of the best people this world will ever have in it. It was equally very humbling for me. None of us should ever over-estimate who we are, or underestimate just how much we can accomplish, if we really want to make things better for others.
So, we exchanged letters, that was all. Strange. But then, nothing is stranger than life itself; particularly mine. He retired. He passed away. I know I owe him a lot, but I always felt that my parents owed him even more.
Yes, I know, but this is today and this is Siberia. But whatever happens to me, they will not tame or pacify me. I cannot be caged, not for long, and this is what Siberia is attempting to do. I know myself too well, I know who I have been, what I have done and why. And that is why I know why I am suffering so much now.
Now, I suspect that my next entry to this diary has to throw light into the darker corners and open out just what I know of me, how I found out and why it is the way it is. These are fragments of MY life, not Mary Poppins. It is not all fairy tale.
I suddenly remember the last lines of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, that I studied in 1967. With the aid of an inspirational English Literature teacher, Eddie Thorpe, I quickly grew to love Tennyson's poetry. It was Thorpe, emotionally intoning these final lines of "Ulysses", that planted what has returned from its sleep to me just now:
"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which, in old days,
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and NOT TO YIELD!".
Sunday, 5 August 2007
Born Running
I wrote this for J & E a little more than a year ago. It looks like page one of my autobiography. Now I want it here.
I was born running – almost literally.
Nine months later, I was already able to walk.
I was born in late-November, a true Sagittarian, in the year of the tiger.
I was born probably under grey skies, in the middle of the 20th century.
I was born in the middle of a place that had, 10 autumns earlier, suffered the brunt of the Nazi bombing storm on my native city and country.
I was born 5 years after peace returned to Europe; so, in a place and a time that was, most surely unwittingly to my family or any of those around me, to prove in the years to come akin to winning a lottery jackpot.
I was born into a family deeply scarred by tragedy, more of which was also to attempt to assert its total dominance on us in such a short time ahead.
I failed to die as I was expected to when I was only 20 months old, unlike my preceding brother, who succumbed to meningitis in the war-year spring of 1943, only 14 days after the birth of my sister, so that I became widely known as the ‘Miracle Child’, who had clung to life in the immediate aftermath of an appalling kitchen accident, when a young intern doctor, late into the first night in hospital, replied to my father’s tortured plea to know what were my chances of survival, since having lost their first son, they would not be able to stand losing the second:
“Well, there isn’t very much of him, is there?”
He then asked my father as the two of them stood in the silence, looking down at my terribly scalded body, me face down and tied like a political prisoner in a police state by wrists and ankles to the 4 corners of my cot, as if it were a jail cell:
“Mr Scott, do you have faith?”
Poor, wretched, desperate Mr Scott answered “Somehow, still, I think so. Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to go home now and pray. Stewart is no longer in our hands, there is nothing more we can do to help him pull through, only monitor. He may survive, but it will not be because of any miracles that we have”.
And wretched, wracked Mr Scott did just as the young doctor bade him.
6 months later, I went home. A miracle? Here I still am. However, no journey is that simple.
There is a long road between that distant, unremembered “then” and today. It is all – in so many ways – explained by that flashing instant of “then”……….
From the Flames? To the Flames?
I was born running – almost literally.
Nine months later, I was already able to walk.
I was born in late-November, a true Sagittarian, in the year of the tiger.
I was born probably under grey skies, in the middle of the 20th century.
I was born in the middle of a place that had, 10 autumns earlier, suffered the brunt of the Nazi bombing storm on my native city and country.
I was born 5 years after peace returned to Europe; so, in a place and a time that was, most surely unwittingly to my family or any of those around me, to prove in the years to come akin to winning a lottery jackpot.
I was born into a family deeply scarred by tragedy, more of which was also to attempt to assert its total dominance on us in such a short time ahead.
I failed to die as I was expected to when I was only 20 months old, unlike my preceding brother, who succumbed to meningitis in the war-year spring of 1943, only 14 days after the birth of my sister, so that I became widely known as the ‘Miracle Child’, who had clung to life in the immediate aftermath of an appalling kitchen accident, when a young intern doctor, late into the first night in hospital, replied to my father’s tortured plea to know what were my chances of survival, since having lost their first son, they would not be able to stand losing the second:
“Well, there isn’t very much of him, is there?”
He then asked my father as the two of them stood in the silence, looking down at my terribly scalded body, me face down and tied like a political prisoner in a police state by wrists and ankles to the 4 corners of my cot, as if it were a jail cell:
“Mr Scott, do you have faith?”
Poor, wretched, desperate Mr Scott answered “Somehow, still, I think so. Why?”
“Because I’m going to ask you to go home now and pray. Stewart is no longer in our hands, there is nothing more we can do to help him pull through, only monitor. He may survive, but it will not be because of any miracles that we have”.
And wretched, wracked Mr Scott did just as the young doctor bade him.
6 months later, I went home. A miracle? Here I still am. However, no journey is that simple.
There is a long road between that distant, unremembered “then” and today. It is all – in so many ways – explained by that flashing instant of “then”……….
From the Flames? To the Flames?
Friday, 3 August 2007
Notes From Siberia - 1 & 2
[Preface: none of the photos were taken in Siberia. Lisbon, Saturday 21st July].
I have grown accustomed to referring to Vila Franca de Xira as Siberia over the past few months. I utter this as easily to my friends and acquaintances in the town as I do to people anywhere beyond its boundaries, or beyond the frontiers of this country. It is no secret; and it is no joke.
The people here invariably make the wrong association, not so surprisingly. But it confuses them, until I explain. They are at least much more adapted, if not totally, to this place than I could ever be. So when they hear "Siberia" and no doubt think: "But it's not cold here. There's no tundra here. What's he talking about, the crazy foreigner?", I quickly elucidate.
Only I can see it this way, because only I am suffering from its effects. Mind you, many of the locals suffer from them too, but they are blissfully, mercifully ignorant of their suffering. They have no, or very few, other experiences to compare, and there's no place like home, is there? Not all of them, but a great many. They are inured or blind or deaf to it, to everything that the place does not give them because it doesn't possess such things.
Or are denied them by an indolent, self-serving local politics that abuses the bulk of the population and its votes with lies, circuses, inverted priorities and plain, backward, pseudo-democratic, crypto-fascistic, lazy inaction and negligence.
The people may be inured by their ignorance, their pettiness, their passivity and their clinging to 'tradition', which was handed down to them by the Dictator 75 years ago, but they are not immune to the town's infectious, pernicious diseases. A small town is its people; the locals ARE the small town. There are many obvious cases of sickness, and clear evidence of insanity in this small town - both among its individuals and throughout its society. Mental deficiency - as normal - in many forms that you would hardly believe. As my Dad used to say: "There are more out than in".
VFX = Siberia.
No, there is no perma-frost here [that, by the way, global warming is at this very moment melting away, far to the east of Moscow. And as it does so, it is bringing to the surface its own unique domino effect in the cause-effect chain - the release of billions of tons of highly toxic gases into the air that will speed up many of the greenhouse processes, destroying life to the little that is north of Siberia, but much worse to the vast lands that are south of it across Asia]. Only brain-cells lie buried, dormant or extinct, beneath the surface of these wretched inhabitants of this corner of the Ribatejop region. This is a mere 30 kilometres from Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese Republic that sits on its 7 hills at the mouth of the wide Tejo estuary, staring wistfully out at the Atlantic and with its back eternally, defiantly turned to Spain.
Lisbon, dressed in its array of wondrous, many-coloured but ancient, fading jewellery, like the slightly senile, misguided, falsely proud old lady she is, lost in her nostalgic dreams of what seems like a glorious, distant past that sparked its delusions of grandeur and global power 500 years ago. Lisbon, an old lady who confuses her own identity by punctuating her appearance with increasing brush strokes of contradictory, riotous brush strokes of ultra-modernity, as if she were an architectural teenage fashion victim; like some desperate attempt to make sure the train of life does not depart without her.
I should never appear this spiteful towards the Old Lady. After all, she more than just accommodated me and my particular madnesses during 10 magical winters and summers. I am not at all spiteful towards her . On the contrary, she holds me love, my respect, my admiration, my deep gratitude, essa velha Senhora Lisboa. She became my dreams come true that I didn't even know I had had, my last sanctuary, my springboard, my mother, my lover. Now, I am truly bitter for her loss, eaten by grieving, but I will not blame her.
I had to leave my decadent, unpredictable old lady to discover finally what the unique Portuguese word 'saudade' means. No, I must correct myself; not what it means, but how it feels, to actually fully experience it.
'Ter saudades'. This does not accurately translate into English or any other language. If people tell you that it just means 'to miss something or someone deeply, please simply smile back knowingly and remember the following.
Saudade is an integral, intrinsic element of the Portuguese soul. It is a nostalgia that burns with longing, yearning; it can be a warm, almost joyful missing that is comfortable, and not just an impassioned sadness at great, irrevocable loss.
Saudade is a normal, everyday fact of life in the Portuguese psyche. Without it, Portugal's very own musical genre, fado, could never have existed.
The Spanish neighbours may have flamenco; Brazil may be incomparably rich anddiverse in its musical culture; Portugal's other ex-colonies turned-little-sisters in Africa, Goa and Macão may have their own distinctive representations in song and rhythm. But nowhere else, not anywhere in the world will you come across fado (except in Portuguese emigrant community restaurants and gatherings), its singers (fadistas) and its principal instrument, the guitarra portuguesa. Combined, they produce sounds to tug the heart and tempt out the tears, even if you cannot understand the words.
Fado is the voice and words of saudade.
And I have fallen victim to saudade - even more than I foresaw that I would as the time to leave counted down from 18 months ago - by burying myself away in this Siberia.
The Siberia that I evince and allude to, finally, is not about frozen nature, at least not literally.
The Siberia that I feel stronger with every day is the creation of Ivan the Terrible and perfected by Stalin, who realised its full potential for breaking dissenters, purging his view of earthly paradise of its 'pessimists' (dictators' euphemism for those who resist).
You see now? I am talking of the Siberia of the gulags; Siberia the world's largest-ever concentration camp, with its innumerable, remote penal villages, towns cities, and their industries feeding a vast, endless, inescapable, successful economy of hard labour, punishment and torture only relieved by death.
The breaking of body, mind and spirit; of the defencless, unadapted individual. The elimination of stimulation, diversity, creativity, dynamism. The robbery of beauty and colour and nature; the rape of the intellect and the urge to enquiry; the murder of my soul.
For make no mistake, fado this is not. Death this is.
Of course, as with anything, it is relative and subjective. Only I can see this and feel it to such an extreme, but only I can be me and am me. It is Siberia because there is no more than a 1% chance of escape. TINA, which stands for: There Is No Alternative.
'Gaivota' means 'seagull'. Besides what my photos have shown as to my feelings for gaivotas, it is also the title of one of the most beautiful fados. Maybe I should have alternatively put here my picture of the street-sign, Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon's Seagulls Street.........but the boat out of water is as symbolic as the other pictures suggesting liberty that appear here.
Notes from Siberia - 2
Yesterday, in amongst the the monotous agony of circular anxiety and rising mental fragmentation that my head, being so wholly vulnerable, has become as it is worn down and weakened, I had 2 cogent thoughts:
(1) The sudden realisation that everything around me that is offensive to by being only affects me because for everyone else, this is normality. They mostly live like they are on permanaent holiday.
(2) I must find a way to convey this Siberia graphically, using my camera, to the "free world" beyond.
It isn't enough for me to write about how I feel and what I see. I must try to back that up with visual evidence. As with everywhere else I've ever set foot - from Ilford to Istanbul, from Stepney to Sarajevo, from Atlanta to Akko - I have observed and analysed this place. I have come up with theories that I have never heard expressed as to why Vila Franca de Xira is much like a microcosmmic Siberia of the mind.
So, that is my project for a diary entry in the near-future.
I have grown accustomed to referring to Vila Franca de Xira as Siberia over the past few months. I utter this as easily to my friends and acquaintances in the town as I do to people anywhere beyond its boundaries, or beyond the frontiers of this country. It is no secret; and it is no joke.
The people here invariably make the wrong association, not so surprisingly. But it confuses them, until I explain. They are at least much more adapted, if not totally, to this place than I could ever be. So when they hear "Siberia" and no doubt think: "But it's not cold here. There's no tundra here. What's he talking about, the crazy foreigner?", I quickly elucidate.
Only I can see it this way, because only I am suffering from its effects. Mind you, many of the locals suffer from them too, but they are blissfully, mercifully ignorant of their suffering. They have no, or very few, other experiences to compare, and there's no place like home, is there? Not all of them, but a great many. They are inured or blind or deaf to it, to everything that the place does not give them because it doesn't possess such things.
Or are denied them by an indolent, self-serving local politics that abuses the bulk of the population and its votes with lies, circuses, inverted priorities and plain, backward, pseudo-democratic, crypto-fascistic, lazy inaction and negligence.
The people may be inured by their ignorance, their pettiness, their passivity and their clinging to 'tradition', which was handed down to them by the Dictator 75 years ago, but they are not immune to the town's infectious, pernicious diseases. A small town is its people; the locals ARE the small town. There are many obvious cases of sickness, and clear evidence of insanity in this small town - both among its individuals and throughout its society. Mental deficiency - as normal - in many forms that you would hardly believe. As my Dad used to say: "There are more out than in".
VFX = Siberia.
No, there is no perma-frost here [that, by the way, global warming is at this very moment melting away, far to the east of Moscow. And as it does so, it is bringing to the surface its own unique domino effect in the cause-effect chain - the release of billions of tons of highly toxic gases into the air that will speed up many of the greenhouse processes, destroying life to the little that is north of Siberia, but much worse to the vast lands that are south of it across Asia]. Only brain-cells lie buried, dormant or extinct, beneath the surface of these wretched inhabitants of this corner of the Ribatejop region. This is a mere 30 kilometres from Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese Republic that sits on its 7 hills at the mouth of the wide Tejo estuary, staring wistfully out at the Atlantic and with its back eternally, defiantly turned to Spain.
Lisbon, dressed in its array of wondrous, many-coloured but ancient, fading jewellery, like the slightly senile, misguided, falsely proud old lady she is, lost in her nostalgic dreams of what seems like a glorious, distant past that sparked its delusions of grandeur and global power 500 years ago. Lisbon, an old lady who confuses her own identity by punctuating her appearance with increasing brush strokes of contradictory, riotous brush strokes of ultra-modernity, as if she were an architectural teenage fashion victim; like some desperate attempt to make sure the train of life does not depart without her.
I should never appear this spiteful towards the Old Lady. After all, she more than just accommodated me and my particular madnesses during 10 magical winters and summers. I am not at all spiteful towards her . On the contrary, she holds me love, my respect, my admiration, my deep gratitude, essa velha Senhora Lisboa. She became my dreams come true that I didn't even know I had had, my last sanctuary, my springboard, my mother, my lover. Now, I am truly bitter for her loss, eaten by grieving, but I will not blame her.
I had to leave my decadent, unpredictable old lady to discover finally what the unique Portuguese word 'saudade' means. No, I must correct myself; not what it means, but how it feels, to actually fully experience it.
'Ter saudades'. This does not accurately translate into English or any other language. If people tell you that it just means 'to miss something or someone deeply, please simply smile back knowingly and remember the following.
Saudade is an integral, intrinsic element of the Portuguese soul. It is a nostalgia that burns with longing, yearning; it can be a warm, almost joyful missing that is comfortable, and not just an impassioned sadness at great, irrevocable loss.
Saudade is a normal, everyday fact of life in the Portuguese psyche. Without it, Portugal's very own musical genre, fado, could never have existed.
The Spanish neighbours may have flamenco; Brazil may be incomparably rich anddiverse in its musical culture; Portugal's other ex-colonies turned-little-sisters in Africa, Goa and Macão may have their own distinctive representations in song and rhythm. But nowhere else, not anywhere in the world will you come across fado (except in Portuguese emigrant community restaurants and gatherings), its singers (fadistas) and its principal instrument, the guitarra portuguesa. Combined, they produce sounds to tug the heart and tempt out the tears, even if you cannot understand the words.
Fado is the voice and words of saudade.
And I have fallen victim to saudade - even more than I foresaw that I would as the time to leave counted down from 18 months ago - by burying myself away in this Siberia.
The Siberia that I evince and allude to, finally, is not about frozen nature, at least not literally.
The Siberia that I feel stronger with every day is the creation of Ivan the Terrible and perfected by Stalin, who realised its full potential for breaking dissenters, purging his view of earthly paradise of its 'pessimists' (dictators' euphemism for those who resist).
You see now? I am talking of the Siberia of the gulags; Siberia the world's largest-ever concentration camp, with its innumerable, remote penal villages, towns cities, and their industries feeding a vast, endless, inescapable, successful economy of hard labour, punishment and torture only relieved by death.
The breaking of body, mind and spirit; of the defencless, unadapted individual. The elimination of stimulation, diversity, creativity, dynamism. The robbery of beauty and colour and nature; the rape of the intellect and the urge to enquiry; the murder of my soul.
For make no mistake, fado this is not. Death this is.
Of course, as with anything, it is relative and subjective. Only I can see this and feel it to such an extreme, but only I can be me and am me. It is Siberia because there is no more than a 1% chance of escape. TINA, which stands for: There Is No Alternative.
'Gaivota' means 'seagull'. Besides what my photos have shown as to my feelings for gaivotas, it is also the title of one of the most beautiful fados. Maybe I should have alternatively put here my picture of the street-sign, Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon's Seagulls Street.........but the boat out of water is as symbolic as the other pictures suggesting liberty that appear here.
Notes from Siberia - 2
Yesterday, in amongst the the monotous agony of circular anxiety and rising mental fragmentation that my head, being so wholly vulnerable, has become as it is worn down and weakened, I had 2 cogent thoughts:
(1) The sudden realisation that everything around me that is offensive to by being only affects me because for everyone else, this is normality. They mostly live like they are on permanaent holiday.
(2) I must find a way to convey this Siberia graphically, using my camera, to the "free world" beyond.
It isn't enough for me to write about how I feel and what I see. I must try to back that up with visual evidence. As with everywhere else I've ever set foot - from Ilford to Istanbul, from Stepney to Sarajevo, from Atlanta to Akko - I have observed and analysed this place. I have come up with theories that I have never heard expressed as to why Vila Franca de Xira is much like a microcosmmic Siberia of the mind.
So, that is my project for a diary entry in the near-future.
Thursday, 2 August 2007
White Heat in These Flames
My oldest blog friend wrote me earlier, saying, among other things, that I didn't owe it to anyone to explain anything.
And immediately, I saw she was right, for which I thank her. I have said so many times that I was going to try and write to explain what must look like a madness, or a maddening enigma.
The plain truth is, it seems beyond me now.
But I have decided that I want to use this space to write to myself. Anyone with access is free to read it. But bear it in mind that, from now on, I am writing to me, for me, to try to encapsulate where I am, and how I got here, in this terrible month of August, in this awful year of 2007.
I think it is better this way. This way, it is easier for me to be open, as if I was writing a private diary.
I have come a very long way; and I have next to nothing to show for it. My mind has little lucidity, my memory is getting worse and worse. I need loads of things. I can't have them.
If I lose my capacity to care - MORE THAN MY CAPACITY TO WORK - then I lose everything that remains. Sadly, i know that I have already stopped caring about a lot fo things that used to be of pre-eminent importance. It as if my edges are going blunt, because my head feels like it is locked in a vice that is sqeeezing me and my existence more every day. Particularly when I wake up.
You have all seen pictures taken in the context of my old life. Well, that is just what it is: my old life. And the photos that had done so much to sustain me, as well as the taking of them, in that wonderful old life in that poetic city increasingly have brought me pain, instead of joy. Because I see everything that is lost with that past. "Always something there to remind me - dah-dah da da da..". My past has entered into an unholy alliance with my present to simply intensify my torture. There is no beauty, no photo ops in my everyday life anymore. So, if the past, where the beauty is, cannot comfort me, I will do all I can to stop seeing it in its lifeless, one-dimensional form. I have already done it ad nauseum over the past 15 months, as a defence. Now, when I go to the city, it tells me: "Ha-Ha-Ha! You don't belong here anymore. It is no longer yours. You are an outcast. Get back where you came from! The dream's over".
And what a past! Whoever thinks they know me through these random, selective posts mostly has no real idea, nowhere near the full picture. It is an illusion, through snapshots, fragments of who any of us really are.
It is the fault of the internet. Recently, I have developed virtually an aversion to the web, to e-mails, to blogs, to photo sites, and to a lot more besides. It ain't 3-D, is it? You can't see your people, hear your people, hug your people, kiss your people. It is all a next-best surrogate.
But I - and some of my closest friends - are in desperate, urgent need of much more. They make do. I can't anymore, because I am hanging on to my life by my finger-nails....and they are breaking, one by one...............
I didn't want the photo to be at the top. I thought of this old acquaintance of mine as I wrote the previous sentence, and I immediately wanted him here with me.
Why? Becasue I learned something beautiful from him, or rather he consolidated something I had witnessed in other places in the world.
The people with the very least to give are the first to give whatever they have. He is a warm, generous, unwashed, homeless man. I have seen it many times. Here he comes, sits down with his bags, takes out his bread and first, as every time, he feeds the birds with it.
I would give him bread, biscuits and he would always instantly offer me his bottle of wine. I don't drink, so it was easy to decline the offer, but that isn't my point.
My point is about safety nets and just how easy it is to fall through them, when they aren't very large, or their holes are not small enough. There is the State (in Europe, Australia, Japan and Cuba, at least) to offer some protection to the weakest who fall through, due to misfortunes beyond them. But that isn't enough. Oh, I am not talking about thopse who choose to live on the outside. Besides, believe me, there are moreways than one to live "on the outside" of society.
I am stopping my diary entry now; but I will finish this with the words of Dostoevsky that I have never forgotten and always agreed with:
"Everybody is responsible for everyone and everything".
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