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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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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