Nov 01 2008
Allô Gouine
Halloween. Wikipedia decorates its description with the legend of Stingy Jack. It is a night that many children may have used to offer a trick- or-treat promise on alerted neighbors ready to meet the traditional demands. It is a night for playing, even when tradition is nowhere to be found in a DNA that is carved straight from the Pampas, where everything grows to look just as plain as barren land.
It was my night for literature. A group of shining knights in armor with a literary sword decided to organize a cultural soirée, reading short stories written by one of them in candlelight. We were entertained with a good lentils broth (or stew, for that matter, I’ll never know what to call it for sure), some pot-smoking and literature. My two escorts — beautiful ladies with a coincidental birth date — looked excited to be there, and so was I, enjoying a little bit of hippie life after a Doris Day hiatus. The stories were not really good, or perhaps it is simply the fact that the whole idea of oral transmission of literature is a double-edged sword, exposing the flaws of a story that does not flow all the more bluntly. It does not matter. It made me want to write about this Halloween night, which in my French days of yore I arbitrarily baptized with the heading that crowns this posting.
Halloween is a good set of instructions to abide by in a cool spring evening. Last year, at Halloween, I was in Rome, absorbing and saying goodbye to Europe as I once knew it. Today my Jack -O- Lantern is blind, and I like to feel that it can start anew. It is a night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire. A night to lie to ourselves, consciously, for there will be a morning, but we will have left her room stealthily in the small hours, long before we could remember the contours of her face, or recognize — were we ever to hear it again — the sound of her voice as she called a fictitious, ghostly name.
Woolfian:
Yo, jamás en mi vida he festejado Hallowen, y sin decirlo he caido en los tipicos pensamientos sobre la penetración cutural y la mar en cochecitos. Últimamente , más inclinada en la vida y hoy especialmente al leerla, pienso que al cabo de uno años quizas haga un debut, no porque haya dejado de pensar lo que pienso (aunque es un posibilidad) sino porque el 31 de octubre puede ser también una ” night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire”. NO me puedo resistir a ciertas cosas.
Un beso
(café, café, café)
Tampoco me representa esa fecha, pero sí he sentido (y siento) ciertos días/noches que merecen la inflexión del tiempo. Un antes y un después casi mágico. Y qué mal me sienta si por algún motivo no sucede. Me pasa por el cuerpo una desilusión casi infantil (“no ha sucedido… no”).
También pensaba shakespireanamente en “Midsummer…” como fecha en la que se disuelve algo lógico para que entre en juego algo “mágico”.
¿No estuvo interesante la parte literaria? Lástima, ese también era un buen proyecto.
Me pregunto: ¿no se podría pretender una nueva fecha? ¿un nuevo momento para volver al no-tiempo?
Lo de las “gemelas” de cumpleaños me pareció un detalle altamente chic.
Un abrazo grande, espero que esté bien
(“gouine”… hace un montón queno usaba esa palabra,pero me gusta mucho!!!!)
Dear Emi,
I really don’t understand the celebration myself that much, to be honest. Being prone to Anglo-cheesiness, I should, but it never really got to me. I noticed it was a worldwide trend first when I was living in France, and then when I came back and realized people here had somehow adopted it (who knows? too much Harry Potter?)
Anyway, thank you for reading me, as always. I’m glad you also agree with the idea of making October 31 a good fucking night….(oh, should I be a lady and not say such words?
)
Take care and best regards,
W.
Dear Fiamma,
Thank you for passing by again. Indeed, there are some nights that have the, shall we say “pumpkin effect”? If it doesn’t happen, we become a pumpkin or a Cinderella, whatever we perceive as a negative…
No, the literary part was a little fiasco, to be honest. There were short stories that carried no literary weight, and I was there with two writers (one of them a real literary expert). Even for me the whole thing was quite long, but I guess the idea of reading stories out loud is great if you want to really test how your story flows. Definitely a technique to consider…
As to gouine…it is a wonderful word, and it gives food for thought in the fertile ground for puns that the French language provides. Actually, in retrospective, we should have spent the rest of the evening at Sitges, dancing…if only I had known there was the Gay Pride on Saturday!
I am doing fine, let’s say. Thanks for asking.
Take care and my very best regards,
W.