Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' 6 September 2025

My first awareness of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet happened in Buenos Aires in 1952 when I was 10. My mother took me to see the 1936 version with Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. My mother was fascinated and attracted to Leslie Howard. I have also been a fan of Howard since.

In 1961 I was going to a Roman Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School. I was keen on seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the University of Texas. For me it was an aural disaster as Juliet had a nasal Texan accent. Imagine, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

That terrible performance was somewhat ameliorated as soon after I saw the Dave Brubeck Quartet live for my first time. 

In 1966, while doing my conscription in the Argentine Navy, I was madly in love with a lovely woman of Austrian descent, Susy Bornstein, who was sophisticated in her tastes and told me I was an uncultured man. I thought that taking her to see that 1936 Romeo and Juliet on movie theater row on Avenida Lavalle might just change her mind. It was not to be. She immediately told me that both Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard were much too old to be the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet. Not long after that film, in the middle of a cold and rainy Buenos Aires winter she called me. She said, “You are an uncultured man with no future. Don’t ever call me back. I have a new boyfriend. He plays violin in the Teatro Colón Symphony.” That was it and I spent months listening to Miles Davis in Kind of Blue. I thought that hitting a depressing rock bottom would improve things. It didn’t.

In 1987 I returned to Buenos Aires on a magazine assignment. I rang the bell at Susy’s apartment. She opened the door and said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

I wonder what Harold Bloom would say of my experience with William Shakespeare’s play?

It was while teaching English in Mexico City at Colgate Palmolive that I came up with an idea. I had one class that was made up of female secretaries. For three months I taught them to pronounce English with that Texan twang. I wonder what their bosses might have said later? 

“The artist must live to paint, not paint to live.” — Charles Webster Hawthorne

“Muchas veces me siento solo. Pero tengo amigos, pocos pero buenos; tengo gente que me quiere. Y tengo además un refugio que no todos tienen y es el hecho de que esencialmente soy un escritor. Mal escritor, buen escritor, eso no importa. Lo importante es poder refugiarme en la literatura, eso es lo que más me ayuda a escapar de la soledad". Jorge Luís Borges

I feel alone often. But I have friends, a few, but good; I have people that love me. I also have a refuge that not everybody has and that is that I am essentially a writer. It is not important if I am a bad or a good writer. What is important is to find refuge in literature, it is what helps me most to escape solitude. My translation.

The above quotes kept to mind a few weeks ago when I reposted a blog called Who is Going to Go First? I wrote of the ramifications of dying before my Rosemary. Someone I know posted a thumbs-up emoji. I cannot understand how a sad and melancholic blog could elicit that.

Who Will Be First? 

I have come to understand the compulsion that the painter Charles Webster Hawthorne wrote about. I wrote that in a blog here.

 A Compulsion 

Writing my daily blog (as Borges said is not important if it is good or bad writing) scanning my plants (good but after almost 4000 who might care besides me?). Taking photographs at age 83; should I retire my cameras?

What is patently obvious is that what I do every day I do just for myself. Last night I went down to my living room and listened to Bill Evans playing Round Midnight. This CD is one of the most remarkable ones in jazz. Evans explains his method in great detail and includes a justification which is a personal one. Suddenly listening to Bill Evans hit home. I am alone. I live in a Borgesian solitude

Round Midnight - Bill Evans  Conversations with Myself 

But I must continue as there is no escape.

Rebecca Stewart - October 2007

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' 5 September 2025 and my mother's red rebozo

Ever since philosopher/writer Ramon Xirau exposed me to the teachings of Plato in 1962 in Mexico City, I have been affected and influenced by Plato's concept or the perfection of reality and that we humans are not able to see it. We are in a cave, tied to a stone bench, watching the reflections from the outside (the perfect world) on a wall.

When I read Aldous Huxley’s The Door of Perception and Heaven and Hell, I was jarred by what seemed to be an exception to Plato’s dictum. Huxley presented the idea that certain drugs could remove from our brain a filter that enabled us then to see reality unfiltered..

I have written about this a few times. Here is one link to the very few times I took drugs: Sister Icee

Through the years I have avoided drinking or taking drugs. There are instances in my past life where I thought I was seeing absolutes. In the late 60s Rosemary would drive our VW Beetle from Mexico City to Veracruz on Friday afternoons to visit my mother who lived there. The drive took us from the high altitude of Mexico City to an eventual sea-level. It was before Veracruz, in Córdoba, when it was close to nightfall when I would stop the car and change a little device in the carburetor that gave it more fuel as there was more air for it to handle. It was there where we would notice the green of the landscape and the smell of the humidity. I must have told Rosemary more than once that the green was an absolute green.

In San Francisco in 1967 when I went to see Jefferson Airplane, I saw a young woman sitting in a corner staring at a wine glass of what must have been crème de menthe. I suspected that she was dazzled by the intensity of its greenness while she must have been on the influence of LSD.

I am now happy to report that I have found another valve that can be removed from our brain that is drug free.

My roses (and perhaps other plants) when I scan them have an intensity of colour that I do think that my red roses are a perfect Platonic red.

My now gone Argentine artist friend Juan Manuel Sánchez painted every day. He began with a blank canvas. He told me that he wanted to resolve the problem of finding the absolute perfection that was woman. One day I told him that would it be that in some future morning he would simply put a dot in the middle of the canvas and that would define woman in perfection. With a smile he nodded affirmatively.

It was only a few days ago that in an old blog I noticed the portrait I took of my granddaughter in my studio in 2007. To me the dress and her expression combine to what to me is a Platonic perception without any filters.

The first scan features my mother's red Mexican rebozo. In 1952 when my grandmother, mother and I were living in Buenos Aires my grandmother became uncomfortable with the fact that Perón was burning  churches. She sent my mother to Mexico City, where my mother's sister lived with the idea of reporting back if we should move. My mother returned with the rebozo (it is made of heavy and rough cotton) which was given to her by my Aunt Dolly. It significance is that it was dyed with the red produced by a special Mexican sow bug. The story behind that is in this blog below.

That Perfect Red

 We did move to Mexico and the red rebozo has been with me since. It is in perfect shape. But then it is perfect.