View from the Majestic Hotel Restaurant, 13 October 2023

Philosopher Ramón Xirau taught me for two years from 1962 to 1963 at Mexico City College. He covered from the pre-Socratics to Sartre. I learned lots of stuff. One night a few weeks ago I could not sleep. I started to think.

I came up with this startling conclusion (at least to me) that those Greek philosophers had no books or phones. What did they do besides teach? 

They thought.

These cold rainy days in which with my two cats on top of me for most of the day I seem to do nothing except think and try (with no success) not to think on how I miss my Rosemary now gone since December 9, 2020.

Back in October, 2013 at the Zócalo Feria del Libro in Mexico City (these initials are now popular CDMX) I took my friend Laura Zamora (a friend of my oldest daughter Ale) for dinner at the Hotel Majestic that overlooks (nice view) the Zócalo which is the centre of Mexico City and where the book fair was being held.

Laura Zamora in the Majestic Hotel Lobby

It was impossible for me not to think that I frequented the outdoor veranda (now gone) with Rosemary in the early 1970s and had lovely breakfasts with a warm sun. The veranda is now covered and the restaurant is well kept and the food is very good.

The hotel is central to a book by my friend Paco Taibo II called La Sombra de la Sombra. I have 18 of his books, mostly in Spanish but it seems I read this one in English. I remember nothing of the book. In fact I have at least 4000 books, of which I have read most, yet I remember little of their contents.

Paco Taibo II at the Rosario Castellanos Bookstore

Thinking about this I have come to the conclusion that all the information of those books, all the people in my life, who are mostly dead, contributed to the person that I am now. I may not remember about The Shadow of the Shadow, but its contents are like a fertilizer you pour on a plant and the plant grows and flowers.

Because poetry is usually much shorter I can quote lots of it. I especially remember Jorge Luís Borges’s poem  La Lluvia (Rain) with that line that is impossible to translated into English:

“el curioso color del colorado”

In my thoughts I wonder if one could enter my brain and separate the fragments that represent books, visual experiences and conversations and dealings with family and other human beings.

I have concluded that I am a person that is made up of a considerable amount of experienced fragments.

In the 80s I did not hold a job. I was a freelance photographer.  I liked to hang out at Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine. I was there so often that many thought I worked there. Mac, as we all called Parry, had an office at the end of a long hall. His door was always open. I watched politicians, hoods, actors, actresses, boxers, business people, radio announcers, wrestlers, illustrators, photographers, writers, prostitutes, singers, punkers and even a young man wearing a Santa Claus T-shirt enter Parry's open door.

Many of them left the magazine with some sort of assignment. I got to photograph many of them.

Today I found out that Stan Persky died yesterday. I looked in my writers' files and he was not there. On a chance I looked in my regular files under P. There he was.

At my age of 82 I have very little memory of the man except that I shot photographs for some of the articles he wrote for Mac. When I photographed him I remember one salient fact. I asked him, “How would you define yourself sir?” His answer, “I am a dreamer.”

In the 20 frames of my Tri-X roll, that I surely shot in some spot in the magazine, I regret that the date of the newspaper he is holding is not sharp enough for me to discern.

Having these photographs serve to remind me that so many of the people I have known in my life are either dead or not long for this world. 

A friend who calls me every day (a rare occurrence in my life) insists (rightly I believe) that he and I are lucky to have lived in that second half of the 20^th century. Leibniz said, and Voltaire parodied, his thought on Candide that indeed I may have lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Mac’s door was open. I could dream of a story and a photograph and sometimes a month later that dream could even be on the cover.

While not an intellectual as Persky, I can indeed proclaim, that I, too, was a dreamer.

Sobering for me is the fact that he was only one year older than I am.

Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' & Hosta 'Lucky Mouse' 14 October 2024

 

Borges, ¿qué es para usted la poesía? ¿Cómo la definiría?

Borges: Creo que la poesía es algo tan íntimo, algo tan esencial que no puede ser definido sin diluirse. Sería como tratar de definir el color amarillo, el amor, la caída de las hojas en el otoño… Yo no sé cómo podemos definir las cosas esenciales.

 (En Roberto Alifano: Conversaciones con Borges. Buenos Aires, Editorial Atlántida, 1984).

What is poetry for you? How would you define it?

Borges: I believe that poetry is something so intimate, something essential that cannot be defined without diminishing its meaning. It would be like trying to define the colour yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn…Y don’t know how we can define essential things.

Today, 14 October 2024 I will be visited by my youngest daughter Hilary. I will prepare dinner and we will then watch the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Both Rosemary and I adored her.

I noticed the lovely fall colour of Hosta ‘Lucky Mouse’ and the fact that somehow English Rose, Rosa ‘Sweet Juliet’ was in bloom. It had several buds but the chances of them opening with the coming rains made me decide to cut them and scan them.

No matter the season it is always one that reminds me of my Rosemary. This scan has her lovely face on it.

All my life I have been surrounded by women.

One of my first shocks happened when I was 8 or 9 in Argentina during the annual carnival. I was with my mother in the subte (the Buenos Aires subway). In the car in front, I saw a woman’s bare back. I was confused as the woman turned her head on the side and it was clearly a man.

Perhaps soon after, when I was in colectivo (bus), a woman got on with a little creature in a dress with all the hair shaved. I had always connected little girls as having long hair. I did not know what to think.

My grandmother often told me of my Filipino great aunt who rode horses and dressed as a man. That was her Victorian way of pointing out that she was a lesbian. Many years later my aunt and he partner visited us at our Kerrisdale home and charmed us. We were a tad sorry for her as her partner had the beginnings of dementia.

In my late 50s four years at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, the only hint we had of homosexuality happened when one of our classmates joined the cheerleaders. We thought he was effeminate. We soon found out that he was extra smart as without any girls in our all boy’s school, he was with all those beauties.

Somehow all these years in Vancouver having photographed gay men in the late 70s for a publication called Bi-Line, I have never had any thoughts about homosexuality as being out of the ordinary.

In one of those Bi-Line shoots I had coffee with a lovely lesbian and I thought to myself, “She is not interested in me as a man. This means I do not have to prove anything.” That felt refreshing.

Because both my mother and my Rosemary were feminists I had to learn to do stuff that women were supposed to do like hem my jeans, sew my buttons and cook.

Now in 2024, I am experiencing a transformation in how I look at women. I tell my family and friends that the only woman I am interested in is my Rosemary who is dead. I would like to send Chip Wilson to hell for having created those yoga pants. I am tired of tight buns and red-carpet cleavage. I long for a woman who wears a dress. When I see on the street I generally thank them and I smile.

My friends cannot understand this transformation as in my files I have many photographs of women not wearing much or not wearing anything at all. For a long time I wanted to define eroticism with my photographs. Eros (because I am 82?) bores me.

Now, (could this be a relief?), I simply want to define that Platonic essence that makes a woman a woman. If I faced a trans woman, that would not in any way affect my pursuit of that womanly essence. A trans woman would have it.

All the above brings me to these sandwiched (two negatives scanned together) of the extraordinarily beautiful Anastasia Milne who posed for me in a room of the Marble Arch Hotel sometime at the end of the last century.

There was something about her that captivated me. With this negative sandwich I perceive a transformation that approaches that essence.

She is a woman.

Geranium 'Rozanne' & Aconitum carmichaelli 'Arendsii' 10 October 2024

Fragmentary Blue

By Robert Frost

Why make so much of fragmentary blue

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,

When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

If anything, since I started blogging in January 2006, where I combined my photographs with text, I have become much more literate. Sometimes (and this has been quite often) I find poems or short stories that match with my photographs. I have over 100 blogs that involve Emily Dickinson and almost as many dealing with Jorge Luís Borges.

Today I scanned two of Rosemary’s favourite plants as she adored blue. With Google for help I put “Blue, Robert Frost”. I found the lovely and short poem.

When I did the same with Julio Cortázar I discovered that with a famous Argentine tango composer Tata Cedrón he wrote lyrics for a record called " Veredas (sidewalks) de Buenos Aires”. One of the tangos is called “El Guante (glove) Azúl (blue).” It is one tango that has no lyrics by Julio Cortázar. I will place the link here for fun. Cortázar is the chap in the middle of the photograph below. Left is guest musician Edgardo Cantón, and Tata Cedrón on the right.

The blue gloves in my scan I found in one of Rosemary's drawers. Every other day I give my male cat Níño a human cancer pill. He has lymphatic cancer of the intestines. I am supposed to not touch the pill. I had problems with rubber gloves. Rosemary's gloves are perfect. Niño, after 8 months, is back to normal. Every day I wonder who will go first, he or his master.

El Guante Azúl