Log: Cycles

Around the time we first began to build Comma Directory, I acquired a little notebook which I wrote about in my very first post: "The Small Bibliographic Log" from the independent Colombian press, Rey Naranjo. Almost eight months later, the log is now filled to the brim with the readings and thoughts that have accompanied me from Colombia to Cyprus to Sweden to France, and finally, to England.

To commemorate the completion of my first pequeña bitácora bibliográfica, I have picked out a selection of quotes, some of them dug out of the tight corners that I stuffed them into as I ran out of space on the page. And so, ...

"Recuerdo que [...] escribía sobre toda la superficie del papel, sin respetar ningún margen. Eso me daba la sensación de llenar completamente un vacío".
– Mario Bellatin, El libro uruguayo de los muertos

"At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

« Nous voyons ces filets, leur beauté, leur appartenance tout à la fois à la liberté et à la capacité de capturer, oui capturer. »
– Franklin Arellano & Julia Bejarano López, Entretierras

"Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long."
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"What is the consciousness of guilt but the arena floor rushing up to meet the falling trapeze artist? Without it, a bullet becomes a tourist flying without responsibility through the air."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

« Est-il aucun moment
Qui vous puisse assurer d'un second seulement ? »
– Jean de La Fontaine, Fables Choisies

"Il faut sinon se moquer, en tout cas se méfier de bâtisseurs d'avenir. Surtout quand pour bâtir l'avenir des hommes à naître, ils ont besoin de faire mourir les hommes vivants. L'homme n'est la matière première que de sa propre vie".
– Jean Gino, Refus d'obéissance

"Whatever he did allowed him to be told [...] that he indeed existed, that he was not, as he had always dreaded, a figment of his own imagination, or of God's imagination, who disappeared when the lights went out."
– Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

"¡Morir, Dios mío, morir así tísica a los veintitrés años, al comenzar a vivir, sin haber conocido el amor [...] morir sin haber realizado la obra soñada, que salvará el nombre del olvido; morir dejando al mundo sin haber satisfecho las millones de curiosidades, de deseos, de ambiciones [...]"
– José Asunción Silva, De sobremesa

"Pienso, antes de ponerme polvos
que aún no he comenzado
y ya estoy por terminar".
– María Mercedes Carranza, El oficio de vivir

« Elle rêvait aux palmiers droits et flexibles, et à la jeune fille qu'elle avait été. »
– Albert Camus, L'exile et le royaume

"I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once on begins,
there are only endings."
– Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

"I shall soon enter this broad desert, perfectly level and boundless, where the truly pious heart succumbs in bliss. I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union. And in this sinking, all equality and all inequality shall be lost [...] I shall fall into the silent and uninhabited divinity, where there is no work and no image."
– Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"In the midst of the word he was trying to say;
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see."
– Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

- Andrea

It has been a while since I last read and wrote. Work has been overwhelming, and the time I had to spare went into exploring the fundamentals of Linux.

But today, I finally managed to read a bit again. When I was younger I used to hate Swedish literature, perhaps because of traumatic recall to school. However, reading in a language other than English–especially in a Swedish from a time when the world carried less universal cultural references–is interesting. And thus, I have discovered a newfound love for Swedish literature.

I have begun to read Willy Kyrklund's Solange. It kicks off with a poem and an intro I want to share:

Where does all song go, that becomes suffocated and trapped?
Where does all hope go, that reaches nothing?
Could be that it abounds in the earth and water.
Could be that it whistles in the wind all around.
– Karin Boye

Or in Swedish:

Vart går all sång, som blir kvävd och innestängd?
Vart går all längtan, som når ingenting?
Kanhända den i mullen och vattnet ligger mängd.
Kanhända den viner i vinden omkring.
– Karin Boye

Followed by this intro:

This story shall tell the tale of Solange and Hugo. It carries, thus, not both names–Solange and Hugo. It carries only the name of the loved one: Solange.

- Marc

After a week of sunny blue skies, the rain has returned and so have the clouds. As it should be, it is only early March after all.

But we had so much fun in the sun, and that is how I believe Marc and I will remember Château de Feÿ. The view over the valley, the white stone (blinding in the daylight), the soft grass, the smoke of the barbecue, the forest. Or will it be the perpetual fog of late January and the muddiness of the earth that remain?

There is a near perpetual extravagance to what goes on at Feÿ, at least at first glance. Themed parties, cyber-workshops, spontaneous art installations, ghosts and AI-oracles. And yet, the magic of the château has revealed itself to me, over time, in its quietest corners and most mundane minutes. Like sharing a cooking shift, a cup of coffee, a ride into town, a wagon on the train from Joigny. It is on that train that I have ultimately felt at home at Feÿ, leaving and returning in the company of others that have shared the experience of the château. It makes me look forward to a return, someday.

- Andrea

« [...] nous nous sommes avisés à nouveau de la douceur et de la chaleur, que nous avons pour un temps oubliées, propres à cette substance qui a nom 'papier' [...] » – Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Éloge de l'ombre (p. 24)

After the first half of December, I have not sat down to write again. This is a lie, of course. I write all the time—for work, in my journal, agenda, out of obligation, obligations that I have engaged in voluntarily (as a form of self-torture). There is also a cloud of ideas and texts yet to be written that every so often haunts me. This entry, for instance, which I have been imagining for some time now.

And still, since December I have not sat down to write—

that which I want to write the most. Those texts that are like a pond or the rain, beautiful and completely lacking in any mission or argument (which is not to say disengaged, but that is a topic for another entry).

For much of last year, I have tweaked, re-written, and elongated pieces of flash fiction, satire, the possible first chapter of a longer story. I have reworked the same texts over and over, and I have gone back to old writing that I had given up on, only to re-discover its potential. And of the new writing that I did do, most came from ideas long present in my mind. Perhaps this was the result of having thought so long about writing without actually doing any writing (of this kind).

In any case, there came a moment in which I felt the urge to sit down and begin to write again. Really write. And while a part of me was excited to jump back in and take a look at last year's writing with fresh eyes, I also felt like starting off the year with something new. So I opened up my journal and my agenda (I have fresh pages in both) and I sat down to think about what to write about.

Nothing came to mind.

The white winter light glowed on the vaguely yellow textured paper. My mind felt as blank as the page, and I discovered that I liked that feeling. This was no writer's block. There was no anxiety, fear or frustration. Instead, I felt as illuminated as the blank page by the windowpane, which seemed to promise so much in all its emptiness. As if anything could happen now.

- Andrea

It snuck up on me, on both of us, as the days grew chillier and darker—in a way that had seemed unimaginable in the heat and brightness of September. We were, after all, in the very heart of the Mediterranean. White rock, bright sand, the big blue sea.

Now, it is the misty grey grounds and the muddy forest paths of the Château du Feÿ that surround us. How can it be?

But I know exactly how we got here. I did the bookings myself. All it took was a flight, too many trains to count, a few border crossings, a Swedish Christmas, a night in Germany, Paris.

And yet, returning to Comma Directory after two months of travels, holidays, and the flu (again), it feels as if I had just stepped away from my computer for a moment. Pistacho has run off, wagging his tail, to fetch a big stick, I have wrapped myself in a shawl, the water is boiling in a kitchen in Paramytha. And suddenly, I am in France and the grey day is quietly coming to an end behind the bare black branches of the forest. And then, it is as if Cyprus, Limassol, Paramytha had all just been part of some faraway dream.

- Andrea

There are now more birds in Paramytha than when we first arrived. They sing from a scenery that is now greener due to the rains that have arrived with them and with the end of summer. The days are still warm, but the nights are fresh—now populated by new scents, awakened by the humidity that has set in.

When it rains, it pours, and that’s exactly what has happened in Limassol. During a recent, sudden thunderstorm, a tornado was spotted near the city. All the while, the air has been heavy with dust and particles swept up from the Sahara. Coughing, cold, soaked, it was hard to not feel like Cyprus is testing me. Every time I try to crawl out of sickness, weariness, stress, there is a new challenge to face.

But this post is not really about that. Not directly. It is about the day after the storm, when I headed out to the local taverna for a Halloumi wrap. Milos Taverna was a bit emptier than usual, the lights dimmer. The two men who seem to run the place were hard at work in back room. Something seemed off.

It turned out that the thunderstorm and wind had produced leaks, flooding parts of the taverna. They were closed, but even so, they insisted on making me something. There was a bit of dry charcoal leftover, after all!

That small act of kindness, despite the big headache they were dealing with, really touched me. I felt guilty too, after all, running a business is tough. I didn’t want to put them through more trouble, and I wondered how I could tip them as a thank you. But when it came time to pay, the owner handed me the pita and told me it was on the house.

It seems like these past few days after the rain, I notice glints and glimmers of this sort of kindness all around. A kind word from an old professor, genuine curiosity about my work from a stranger, a joke from the barista at the usual café.

In spite of winds, dust storms, viruses, and the weight of a day like today, glimmers of kindness persist and remind me of the things that are worth nurturing and protecting.

- Andrea

While we are now well into September, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some memorable August reads, books that I still think about and will be thinking about for a while.

I read two books last month, one poetry and one prose (very unconventional prose, however).

El oficio de vivir, or (roughly) The craft/work of living, is a collection of poetry by María Mercedes Carranza. Compiled posthumously and prefaced by her daughter, the collection sinks, poem by poem, deeper into the despair that plagued Carranza, especially in her final years. Despair about aging, despair about Colombia’s endless violence, despair about injustice, meaninglessness, despair about despair. Death weighs heavy on almost every page. It is so well-written that her words manage to covey the hollowness of depression in a way that I have not seen captured in any other piece of writing (even books and memoirs about war or genocide). It is grim, very grim.

El libro uruguayo de los muertos, or The Uruguayan Book of the Dead, on the other hand was much less grim, despite of the title. It did take me a very long time to read. Along with García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca, it might be one of the toughest books I’ve ever gone through. In short snippets destined to a mysterious correspondent, Mario Bellatin melds fact and fiction to speak about everything and anything. Some themes do stand out: writing, publishing, illness, death, family, truth, falsehood and mysticism. Like the Twirling Dervishes he describes, cyclical snippets of narrative appear, disappear, only to reappear later, the same or almost the same or altered incomprehensibly. Temporality is warped, contradictions appear, and, as a reader, offering resistance only makes the read more painful. At some point you just have to let go and let Bellatin take you on a trip that goes round and round. And in the end, I was left a bit dizzy, I must admit.

El oficio de vivir was close to making it on my favorites list—it is a work of art. But the art that resonates with me the most is that which peers into the void, but with defiance. There is a will to live and an affirmation of life, the renewal of life. With Carranza, we succumb to the void, even if the last poem of the collection offers a glimmer of hope.

Mario Bellatin’s Salon de belleza (Beauty Salon) is one of my favorite books, but I can’t say the same of El libro uruguayo de los muertos. There are very interesting ideas about the nature of truth and fiction, about the pain of creation, and about life, death and creation as cyclical. The unconventional form resonated with these themes, but maybe it went on for too long. But then again, watching Twirling Dervishes perform is fascinating, but it can also feel eternally long after a while. But isn’t that what we’re all after, eternity? Reading El libro uruguayo de los Muertos definitely felt like it took an eternity too, but maybe that's what Bellatin was trying to do—approach eternity, which also means to approach death.

Other Interesting August “Reads”

• “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic”
• “The Betrayal of American Border Policy”
• “The Funeral: At a Loss” (recommend reading this only after watching Itami Juzo's film)

- Andrea