Vavie, Warrior Queen of the Amazon

This magnificent photograph is of my maternal grandmother, Agnes Costa. She was born in 1918 in the Azores Islands, which belong to Portugual. In portuguese "grandmother" is "vovozinha" or "vovo". For some reason it was easier for us children to say "Vavie", and so this photo is of my Vavie.

Her husband died when my mother was 6 or 7 years old and so Vavie had to take charge of the ranch in order to support her three children. In this photograph we see her on the ranch ready to go.

I love this photo not only because of the emotions it provokes in me as her grandson but also, and more importantly, for aesthetic reasons. Either the photographer had a great eye for composition or by fortunate happenstance all the elements in this scene came together to impart a highly stylized and symbolically provocative image. The horse she's mounted on was clearly bred for hard work as we see in the chest muscles and the very girth of its neck and body. The size and power of the horse is patent and even imposing. The interesting thing is that it is in a very stylized position. The mane standing erect, the head inclined in a submissive position. It reminds me of an antique bronze like this one found in Yemen two centuries before Christ.



On this horse, a woman. The posture she affects connotes power, domination. One arm akimbo and the other holding the reins imparts a sense of control, although easy and unforced. The clothes she's wearing, the boots and overalls, are a man's clothes. In the midst of this most masculine of scenes is a woman controlling his world. We know she is a woman because of her breasts, but what makes this photograph more than a woman on a horse is the position of her head. It is inclined in a flirtatious pose, like those stylized pinups of Betty Grable. She's flirting with the men of her world, but from a position of power. She doesn't have to give him anything because she is in control.

This photo of Vavie must have been taken sometime around WWII. One of the iconic images from that time is of Rosie the Riveter. Her image was found everywhere inviting women to join the war effort. Had Vavie been holding a rivet gun rather than seated on a horse, it would have been the same image. But whether Rosie, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, or the Warrior Queen of the Amazon, they are all present in this mythical representation of woman.



I send you a kiss from afar my dear Vavie.
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If you're reading this, you are very fortunate

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If the world's population of 6 million were reduced to a small community of 100 people, keeping the same proportions we have today, it would look something like this:

43 would lack basic santiation
18 would lack access to clean water
6 of them would own more than 59% of the wealth
13 would go to sleep each night hungry
14 could not read
12 would have a computer
3 would have access to the internet
1 would be living with HIV/AIDS
whoever had a refrigerator, a bed, and a roof over their head would be richer than 75% of the population
18 would struggle to live on less than $1 a day
53 would struggle to live on less than $2 a day

Be thankful for what you have, and fight for a better world.

http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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From Whirlpool to Philosophy

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A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other. We are particular and temporarily identifiable wiggles in a stream that enters us in the form of light, heat, air, water, milk, bread, fruit, beer, beef Stroganoff, caviar, and paté de foie gras. It goes out as gas and excrement–and also as semen, babies, talk, politics, commerce, war, poetry, music, and philosophy.

–Alan Watts, Does It Matter?
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Life Should have a Soundtrack Godammit

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Did you ever have the feeling that something you're experiencing is missing the soundtrack? I guess nowadays we would say audio file, but the idea is the same. Imagine watching a movie with dialogue but no music. Lawrence of Arabia would be about a blue-eyed, tunic-wearing, train-blower-upper rather than the sweeping David vs. Goliath epic that it is. Movie directors add music to give an emotional tone to the story they're telling. The muscial score imparts an emotional unity to the different scenes and helps in bringing it to its end. Even without music, good actors and a good director can provoke emotion, as in theater, but not with the same intensity. I really don't know what it is about music that makes it able to evoke emotions so easily and unify the input of our senses. At times I think about my life, the past and present and everything I've done and I would love to feel the wholeness or unity of it just as one feels the arrangement of notes in a symphony.

This reminds me of a story by Borges (I don't recall the title) in which the narrator speaks metaphorically of all the steps that one has taken in his life, here and there, up and down, and when we look back on it all we see only a confusion of tracks. He says that although we are unable to perceive order in this chaos of events and decisions, from a divine point of view the arrangement of all these steps makes up an intelligeible whole. All the steps are interrelated and impart a unified intelligible sense. Well, maybe God (the big music director in the sky) gets the drift but I don't! I want to feel it! I can reflect on this totality in terms of the goals I have set for myself and see that those goals have been accomplished, but its not the same, its not sufficient.

I think this sensation has a lot to do with what Kundera talks about in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The main character, Tomas, experiences his being as incredibly light. Everything he does, all the decisions he's made in his life, are the result of his freedom. Among the innumerable ways that his life could have played out, he made a series of decisions that made it play out just as it has. What led him to make these decisions was not something eternal, transcendent, fixed, canonical, or heavy, but rather something based only on the whim of his will. Thus he feels his life as insignificant, as light, as not tied down to anything that could give it the sensation of heaviness. This is how I feel. Although I've had much pleasure, achievement, friends, etc in my life until now, I cannot, like Tomas, avoid the sensation of its lightness. It is this that is unbearable.

In some way I'm looking for heaviness. Many find something like it in religion. I think of my grandmother. For her, her whole life has meaning and sense because it all fits snugly within the confines of the Catholic faith. Everything she's done runs noiselessly along the doctrinal tracks of the cristian Weltanschaaung. For some reason this makes me think of sleeping under the wonderful heaviness of two or three homemade quilts. Sleeping without anything covering you at all is very uncomfortable, at least for me. But where is one to find these quilts? Just pick a religion and say you believe? I know I'm too skeptical or sophisticated for that. Maybe turn myself into a Nietzschean übermensch? Easier said than done. What I'm hoping is that love will do the trick, really falling truly and deeply in love, like the angel in Wings of Desire that falls finally from his heavenly perch into the messy but blissful heaviness of the Earth below.
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Lost in Havana

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I'm alone in the heart of Havana, the streets deserted. The Caribbean sun has long since left it, and the warmth, that hours before bathed this city, leeches slowly away like the tide. But something magical pulses still. Among the normal twilight sounds a city makes I hear a distant modulation in the air, a rhythm that gives tempo to my steps and leads them off. A few moments later I find myself in an alley, and by stoop and stride I face a door. When I open it, the indefinite rhythm of before becomes a panoply of melody and percussion bathed in a voice both sweet and melancholic. There's Omara Portuondo singing as only she can. The place is as empty as the streets outside and the voice seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. I find myself by a table, a bottle of rum, an empty glass. Before I can take a drink I hear the first chords of "La Sitiera" and in that moment I feel your hand on my shoulder. I look to my side and find your eyes, and an enigmatic smile that says all that there is to be said. We move out to the dance floor, and there, surrounded by tables long ago abandoned, we enter the world that Omara weaves with her voice. I hold your body against mine, and you my gaze within yours, and we dance ever so slowly on these floating notes, on this the verdant ground of our daily communion.
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The Grammar of Love

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I have a friend from Spain who's extremely punctilious about Spanish grammar. She lives here in Mexico and I've actually seen her wince when she hears something said incorrectly (just as an Englishman may wince when hearing an Americanism). She'll say, "No, its not said like that, rather . . ." Apparently she makes these comments for my benefit so that as a foreigner I learn to speak correctly. But I tell her that language is a living phenomenon, it changes and evolves depending on context and use. The point of language is communication, I tell her, so if you understand variant uses then there is no pragmatic difference between your Spanish and Mexican Spanish. But she still insists that the Spaniards have it right. Ok, whatever.

Now on the one hand this is an attitude that is easily revealed to be chauvinistic and elitist, and thus easily refuted. On the other hand, I began to think about grammatical tolerance as a metaphor for love and fidelity. I hope to express this idea in a poem but I still haven't figured out how. For the time being I'll express it here more prosaically. The points of comparison in the poem would be "linguistic communication:love" and "grammatical tolerance:infidelity". We can tolerate variations in the grammar of a language without the latter ceasing to function. We continue to communicate. The question is if, in the same sense, we can tolerate change in the grammar of love. What happens when one violates the strict rules of the dynamic of a relationship? What happens when one is no longer faithful to these rules? Can a couple tolerate infidelity and continue loving just as in language we tolerate changes in grammar without thereby ceasing to communicate? How much can we tolerate? At what point do we stop understanding the other? At what point does the grammar of love, if pushed far enough, begin to dissolve into a cacophony of isolated emotions?
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Slowly

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I climbed a tree today. Its been years since I've done that. People walking by on the sidewalk below looked at me as if I'd taken my clothes off. The birds flew to a nearby tree and from there watched me suspiciously. A column of ants descending a branch not so much as looked at me as they marched by, their little green flags held aloft like sails in the wind. How good, how secure I felt in the arms of that tree. What I most like about them is the pleasure they take in moving with infinite slowness.
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