Saturday, October 10, 2020

 

Yuki, Bella Vista, Provincia de Buenos Aires

In the beginning of this century I had a joint show with Argentine artists Juan Manuel Sánchez and Nora Patrich called Argentine Nostalgia.  We would meet in Vancouver cafés or sip mates until the late hours of the night discussing and sharing stories of the country where we were born. Because this was all nostalgia it had to be rosy or funny or both.

Looking back at all this I must reconsider it. I left Buenos Aires in 1954 and lived in Mexico City (and other places in Mexico like Veracruz and Nueva Rosita, Coahuila). Then, after five years in Austin, I returned to Buenos Aires for my military service. I married my Rosemary in Mexico City in 1968 and moved with our two daughters to Vancouver in 1975.

What makes my nostalgia now different is that I must include my subsequent trips in this century with Rosemary to Buenos Aires. In two of those trips, in one we took our older granddaughter Rebecca and in the other the younger one Lauren.

It would seem that my nostalgia is tinged by more recent memories.

Suddenly I find that my nostalgia is no longer nostalgia. It is something more powerful. Nostalgia is a noun, it is a feeling. But to yearn (and in that beautiful word añorar) is a much more active verb. The feeling is now an action. It is an action that lacks the subject. I can do just fine with a rosy memory that is nostalgia but it is not enough. I need the very place and thing I am thinking about.

This idea cemented itself on Sunday when our eldest daughter Ale (visiting us from her home in Lillooet, BC) my Rosemary and I went to Chapters/Indigo on Granville and Broadway. There were books and books, but leather purses, and frames, and jig-saw puzzles and so much other stuff that I was overwhelmed. When we left (I bought nothing) I told my companions, “I yearn for a Buenos Aires bookstore that only has books.”

In Vancouver Pulp Fiction and Macleod Books almost qualifies for a sort of similarity.

But they cannot satisfy my yearning for books in my native language (maternal if we are going to be gender specific). I was pleasantly surprised that at Indigo in their reduced Spanish section of about 10 books they had two copies of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela in the very edition that I am currently reading.

As I read Rayuela, written in 1963, Cortázar uses words in the Argentine lunfardo an ever changing Buenos Aires jargon, such as pituco. I had not seen or heard that word since I left Buenos Aires in the late 60s. It sort of means, sort of cool and posh. It can be used to describe a woman as pituca.

Seeing these words is more than nostalgic as now I have to bring in my Rosemary’s impression of the Buenos Aires we have now visited many times.

In 1966 I was invited by my nephew Georgito O’Reilly to spend the summer in his parent’s rented summer home in Pacheco which had a pool. We both had to put coins inside a large ashtray so that the alarm clock would jangle us awake so we could take a 6am bus (it was called the Don Torcuato) that would leave us at a train station and from there to our military job (he was a conscript in the army and I was in the navy). And his brother Ricardo who was doing his servixe in the police force.

Their step sisters (their widow mother, my first cousin and godmother, had married a widower with four daughters) kept playing a record called Misa Criolla over and over until I could not stand it anymore. How was I to know then that the composer was a man called Ariel Rámirez?

A few years ago I discovered through a friend a magnificent, perhaps unknown poet in our globalized-in-English-world called Alfonsina Storni. She was born in Switzerland but as a very young girl moved with her Argentine parents to Argentina. Of her I have written, here, here, and here.

And because of this poet I have come to love, adore a composition called Alfonsina y el Mar composed by Ariel Ramirez the man whose music I loathed back then.

This means that I cannot have nostalgia for Ariel Rámirez and his music. But I can have a yearning for his absolutely beautiful composition particularly if performed by Argentine folksinger (now dead) Mercedes Sosa.

What makes this song especially lovely are the lyrics by Félix Luna an Argentine writer, lyricist and historian.

And more so, as the song is an Argentine zamba (with a z not with the Brazilian S) so it has a quirky rhythm that makes me shed tears and particularly when I listen to any version (and I have many) of Alfonsina y el Mar.

Mercedes Sosa - Alfonsina y el Mar (with the Zamba rythm) 

Ariel Rámirez plays it on solo piano

While I have most of the books that Jorge Luís Borges, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato ever wrote I do not have a single volume by Storni.

I can safely and accurately state here that I yearn for a Buenos Aires bookstore where I would find her books. And should they sell CDs I would pick up a copy of that damned Misa Criolla.

I cannot stop there without mentioning that my yearning is one I share with my Rosemary. Yearning in company is so much better.

Friday, October 09, 2020

La Recoleta - Buenos Aires

I write a blog, 5160 to date, but I am not a writer. At one time when I was not only taking photographs for periodicals I was getting paid a dollar a word. But I am not a writer. It is not my gig.

But this caught my eye today in an interview with novelist Tana French in my NY Times today. I have read three of her novels. I am a fan.

…for the last few months, French has been struggling to write. She’s too anxious about the state of the world.

”I’ve realized how much of this gig is your subconscious, and my subconscious, like everybody else’s in the world is a smoking crater right now, “It’s all used up by dealing with what’s going on around us and trying to process it.”

So while writing is not my gig, writing my daily blog has been a slog these last months. I worry about feeding my-not-too-well Rosemary; I stare at the ceiling while contemplating our two orange and white sibling cats; and I try to remain sane while reading about a circus cat (el gato calculista) who can count in Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela. I believe that anything by James Joyce or William Falkner is simple in comparison to this “contranovela” as Cortázar called it when he published it in 1963. The novel unsettles me but then I am living in unsettling times.

My wife tells me, “Do something. Go to your oficina and write some blogs. You are driving me crazy.”

With the pandemic pretty well eliminating local theatre and concerts, I find that I do not want to listen to YouTube or much less what friends send me in links with no explanations. We are living a time when content (newspaper content is one example) has all but disappeared.

The ushering in of the internet devalued heretofore romantic/lovely words. As an example there was, “Visit our web page, Vancouver Garbage Department”. With pandemic visits in persons all but gone, that early internet word has become central to my understanding how far we have gone in social interaction. It has been devalued.

One of the most beautiful words in English, to share, is even more beautiful in Spanish, “compartir”. The idea of the word (my opinion) is con- with and partir- break comes from Christ breaking bread with His disciples. That act in the New Testament has these lovely words, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Now particularly those in social media go to some sites that have music videos, jokes, posters, and then they “share” them without much of an explanation. “This song by Frank Sinatra is my fave.” There is no explanation on why. This sharing lacks context and more important (my view) in content.

Here goes and explanation:

My fave Ástor Piazzolla is Milonga del Ángel.

I can leave it at that or I can proceed with personal content.

In 1966 when I was in my native Buenos Aires, Piazzolla was the centre of controversy. Those who were classic tango lovers (my first cousin Jorge Wenceslao de Irureta Goyena) pointed out that nobody could dance to this “Nuevo Tango”. This was patently not true as I learned (many years later to dance to Piazzolla). In tango the man (who is in charge as in fly fishing and perhaps no other activity) can stop or pause while dancing at will. The partner (no longer having to be a woman in this 21^st century) then has to adapt and stop, too. Piazzolla pieces lend themselves nicely to this method of imposing one’s manliness!

My first cousin and I had many arguments but pragmatically we navigated to other subjects like the wonders of his native state of Corrientes.

It was in that year that I fell in love with a lovely Argentine woman even though with my short Argentine Navy haircut I looked even less attractive than I really am. We went to a party in the neighbourhood of Martínez one Saturday. Susy, was hip on new music so she had persuaded me to buy two tickets to a performance of Astor Piazzolla downtown on Calle Florida. When it was time for us to leave she told me that she was having too much fun and that she was going to stay at the party. Melancholic beyond words I waited for the train at the Martínez station. It was a sad evening and I seemed to be the only person on the platform.

At the theatre (Teatro Florida, now gone) I sat down and the seat next to me was empty. She was not there. The concert began and Piazzolla’s tangos made me go further into depression. The Argentine tango can do that nicely. Then the group began this lovely piece called La Milonga del Ángel. Suddenly I felt a slight pressure on my right hand.There she was. During a lull she whispered into my ear, “I could not let you be here alone. I thought you would miss me."

Perhaps that is not great content. But it is content.

My grandmother showered me with all kinds of Spanish advice, sayings and I did not know then that many of her aphorisms came for Cervantes. It seems that Sancho Panza was full of them.

There is one such advice that my abuelita often gave me:

Saludar con sombrero ajeno. (to greet with someone else’s hat).

This is what social media sharing is all about. 

A Glass of Warm Blood

Thursday, October 08, 2020

 

Bronwen Marsden 2019

Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!

Emily Dickinson

 

 

In this new (to me) 21^st century I am hip (a favourite word of William Gibson) enough to understand that to call a woman a muse is no longer appropriate (I hate this word). To call a woman an inspiration perhaps sounds better. And yet I see a muse as someone (not necessarily a woman) whispering in my ear ideas that I can then make my own and perhaps even display them well.

 

Promise This -- When You be Dying -- by Emily Dickinson

 Promise This -- When You be Dying --

Some shall summon Me --

Mine belong Your latest Sighing --

Mine -- to Belt Your Eye --

 

Not with Coins -- though they be Minted

From an Emperor's Hand --

Be my lips -- the only Buckle

Your low Eyes -- demand --

 

Mine to stay -- when all have wandered --

To devise once more

If the Life be too surrendered --

Life of Mine -- restore --

 

Poured like this -- My Whole Libation --

Just that You should see

Bliss of Death -- Life's Bliss extol thro'

Imitating You --

 

Mine -- to guard Your Narrow Precinct --

To seduce the Sun

Longest on Your South, to linger,

Largest Dews of Morn

 

To demand, in Your low favor

Lest the Jealous Grass

Greener lean -- Or fonder cluster

Round some other face --

 

Mine to supplicate Madonna --

If Madonna be

Could behold so far a Creature --

Christ -- omitted -- Me --

 

Just to follow Your dear future --

Ne'er so far behind --

For My Heaven --

Had I not been

Most enough -- denied?

 

 

More Emily Dickinson 

Sublimity mingled

If you were coming in the fall 

 Purple Haze 

Yellow she affords 
A sepal, petal and a thorn
Her breast is fit for pearls  
I would not paint a picture
November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 
We turn not older with years, but older
Now I am ready to go

 A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue

 

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

 

With so much time in my hands I sit at home and look around. Invariably when I am in the living room I spy this framed photograph of a former tango partner and friend Nena Kazulin. The photograph is to me an obvious portrait. I believe that after a face the next most important and telling feature of a human being has to be the hands.

Early in my boyhood I watched my mother and grandmother remove a strong box from a closet and open it to decide what jewellery to wear for a party. They picked necklaces and bracelets but invariably chose from their collection of rings. I do not recall my grandmother’s hands perhaps because my mother had hands to match her beautiful legs. She had long fingers and immaculate manicured finger nails. Since those days I always look at a person’s hands right after noticing their face.

And I would assert here that if my portraits have brought me some element of fleeting fame it is because when they hands show I do my best to show them in some graceful manner.

This photograph of Nena I took with Kodak B+W Infrared film. Because as  boy I had fallen in love with Estella in Great Expectations I saw in this photograph (before I even took it) a vision of her guardian Miss Havisham, a wealthy spinster, once jilted at the altar, who insists on wearing her wedding dress for the rest of her life.

It seems that I have blogged about hands before many times. Here are some of them:

 Rebecca's hands

I took the power in my hand

 The hands that talk

Toco tu boca 

I would not paint 

Tus manos son mi caricia

Al borde de la desesperación 

A Kiss 

Earth day 

A bassist's hands 

Mate cocido with Curtis Daily 

New Music for old instruments 

 

And below a beautiful poem by Uruguayan poet  Mario Benedetti called Tus Manos (Your Hands)

 

TUS MANOS - Mario Benedetti

 

Tus manos son mi caricia

mis acordes cotidianos

te quiero porque tus manos

trabajan por la justicia.

Si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice y todo

y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos.

Tus ojos son mi conjuro

contra la mala jornada

te quiero por tu mirada

que mira y siembra futuro.

Tu boca que es tuya y mía

tu boca no se equivoca

te quiero porque tu boca

sabe gritar rebeldía.

Si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice

y todo y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos.

Y por tu rostro sincero

y tu paso vagabundo

y tu llanto por el mundo

porque sos pueblo te quiero.

Y porque amor no es aureola

ni cándida moraleja

y porque somos pareja

que sabe que no está sola.

Te quiero en mi paraíso

es decir que en mi país

la gente vive feliz

aunque no tenga permiso.

Si te quiero es porque sos

mi amor mi cómplice y todo

y en la calle codo a codo

somos mucho más que dos...