The Write Thing

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.

Buenos Aires, Saturday afternoon, 6.00 pm:
La Giralda. Came downtown for a good walking exercise and a tour of bookshops along Corrientes Avenue. Nothing to die for, so far. Got hold of a copy of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal on DVD as a debt I had with the Swedish master. Stopped here, for a quick “cortado” at a cafe that seems to be one of the few traditional things still standing in this city where progress equals monumental tower buildings and sterilized glass-clad coffee shops. La Giralda is still one of the few places in town where you’ll pay five pesos for a sizable cup of white coffee…yes, perhaps I should have gone for the submarino con churros, a classic here.

There are quite a few people at the bar. A threesome at the table next to mine are engaged in passionate platitudes, and make a raucous scene once every five minutes, startling my pen off the lined pages of my Moleskine…I can even smell the salami of the sandwich the bulky boy next to my chair is having. But that’s part of the deal in this place, so I find it somewhat charming.
The book tour so far is proving hard. I walked similar streets to those I prowled over ten years ago. Zivals is now a tango store as well, and the classical jewels I used to marvel about in the old nineties are now dusty leftovers of those days, when you could choose between at least two different versions of Wagner’s Der Ring. Unknown singers now beckon from their dim-lit racks, offering exciting — and challenging — renderings of Schumann’s lieder.
I crave for rarity. Where is that book that will bring me a glimpse of the odd, magical city where you could find the weirdest things, like a postcard of Patty Duke’s 1960 TV show? Where is the city in which Bolshevik-oriented youngsters would flock to see Streisand’s On a Clear Day instead of a Fassbinder’s retrospective that played in the next room? Where is the all-encompassing Buenos Aires, apocalyptic but shining with the charm of rare movies? Where is the unexpected pleasure, the purpose of the quest? It seems I belong now to the small group of outcasts left to ponder and waltz around our own thirst for more.

One more hour is left to my wanderlust to see a hopeful outcome. I have the hunger inside. The hunt will go on.

I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik, sweetheart in Spanish, as I still can’t read Japanese (or understand it for that matter). I cannot say I did not like it. I did. Yet, there is something missing in his writing (or should we say traduttore, traditore was more to blame here?). The story in itself is interesting, a typical triangle of love (oh, don’t you love number three? who was not in one of those little stories him/herself at least once in life?) between two women and a man. The narrator loves Sumire who loves Myû and so on and so forth. No, don’t expect raw sex bursting out from the pages à la Ian McEwan in Atonement. But you should, by all means, expect sexual tension. Sumire at times seems a typical lost soul, one of those we would all love to take home and feed on a daily basis, take care of, and read to at night before tucking her in. However, there is this darkness about her, emanating from her own suffering as a struggling writer/woman in this world. Yes, writers, we’ve all been there, or we may still be. The narrator is a schoolteacher with a sex life, in spite of his undying love for the protagonist. At a given moment, Myû comes along and disrupts the love flow between narrator and Sumire (narrator giving, Sumire receiving — oh, heterosexual males, have you not suffered at the hands of little girls who just don’t know what the hell is going on?) . All of a sudden, Sumire, who had felt no hunger for human flesh until that point, begins to yearn for Myû. So far, so good.

Now, I won’t tell the rest of the story because I could be sued, but it is in what I consider to be the book’s climax that the pile of cards crumbles before us, and it really doesn’t get together again. There is something there that simply does not happen, something I lost as a reader. It is universally acknowledged that Murakami looks simple, but he is indeed complex. To be honest, I am not really sure. This is one of the possibilities of literature, we simply can decide that someone is complex or that he just digressed from the core of his own artistic work. We can hail him as a genius — he might be, I’m just a poor amateur — or destroy him because he could not really grasp his own essence. But, isn’t it what literature is all about?