The Write Thing

It is midnight on a Saturday that has been eventful only because it marks my first arrival ever in the most famous Latin American country this week in the news: Colombia. I am in Bogotá (yes, I’ll write it with an accent, that is why I have a French, an English and a Spanish keyboard all configured in the same computer, so I can toggle across them and meet spelling requirements as they emerge).
Strangely enough, only a few moments ago I realized that nobody in my entourage (family in Buenos Aires, or closest friends) knows where I am staying at. It also occurs to me that this could be a marker of freedom, although I do not need to mark it. I have always been a free spirit, even when I thought I was not.

Not even my office colleagues in DC or Houston know where I am staying — I don’t think I ever mentioned it to them. They know I’ll be at this Congress, but not much else. So I am technically untraceable today, and will remain so unless I decide to disclose my whereabouts. The only person who knows where I am is somebody I met once in Buenos Aires, and who has an interest in me (asked me to her bed). But she lives in Oregon, and she does not know anybody in my circle of friends, so my location technically still remains a mystery, even if she does know. There is no way anybody could get to her to find out about me.

In the past, when I had a steady girlfriend, she would know. She would ask me every time, and we would talk on the phone or Skype quite often. Now I no longer speak to her with that frequency, only when we get organized so I can pay my fatherly visits to our dog and keep him with me for a few days. There is a certain charm to being unable to be reached like this. Of course, there is the extra element of fear…should anything happen to me, nobody would find out. I guess I like such a wide array of possibilities to exist just because I simply forgot to say where I was. And I enjoy the paradox of having a total stranger know. Now I am a single, free and lurking soul in the shooting range. Only members are entitled to share knowledge.

I am not normally a very good poetry reader. Had I specialized in literature exclusively, I might have not taken the most daring of all paths. Dealing with the complexity of verse, rhyme and meaning all combined into a unique expression that must trigger its own eternity, I confess myself powerless. However, there are moments of being, as Woolf would put it, that do merit poetry. Actually, no form of prose would be on a par with the quality that poetic perfection can attain. Over the past few days, my soul has been drawn to this kind of food. To put it bluntly, exquisite poetry is like oysters in a world of prosaic corned beef (not that I don’t like prose or corned beef, but the cases of caviar-tasting prose are quite rare, and one must go too far back in time to find them). So my soul pleaded for me to feed her gourmet literature…and I did. One spoonful at a time. How did I achieve this task? Usually the way I go about it, especially being in the Anglophone world as I am now, is to do a hunt through local bookstores and let my nose drive straight to the poetry shelves. I did. And there were many authors, a mountain of books to peruse almost frantically in search of that group of (a)symmetrically-spread lines that would beckon in recognition. Usually that is the way it happens. Poems choose me, I don’t really look for anything. My eyes stopped on the yellow cover of the book, and the name jumped forward, straight into my arms. I opened the odd page, and here it was. Ms. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ladies and gentlemen, showing her mastery and carving her fire in my soul with the touch of her magic wand:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.