A Certain Tree

First there was this. It was not very long ago. If I close my eyes, I can remember the day. Thin ice. And the wind. But no snow to cover the branches.

Then there was this.

The same wonderful tree, now wearing its colorful, Spring raiment.

Cortazar in one of the stories in the collection A Certain Lucas talks about wanting a job photographing sunsets, trying to discover and record the most perfect one. I've written before about photographing clouds. But now I think making images of the trees would also be fulfilling. Evidently, I am not alone in this quest.

Cloud Hunter

Julio Cortazar, to nobody’s surprise, had the right idea about employment (and so many other things). In “Sunset Hunter,” a story included in the collection, A Certain Lucas, he proposes that his job be finding and filming the perfect sunset. This, of course, will require world travel. And a grant. A big grant. Not just that. "I know that a good sunset doesn't last more than twenty minutes between climax and anticlimax, two things I would eliminate in order to leave only its slow internal play, its kaleidoscope of imperceptible mutations." The plan is to search the world for the perfect sunset and capture it on film. A perfect, creative occupation.

Personally, I don’t find sunsets all that fascinating. And I don't really know anything at all about making a film. No. But clouds. Clouds deserve my attention. I’d like to travel the world finding the perfect cloud and taking a still photo of it with a digital camera. Maybe even with a cell phone. I've already started on the project. Today I’m wondering what “rewards” I could give for financial support of the project so taht with the help of Kickstarter I could begin with the clouds of Patagonia. And Tanzania.

And I have a three-part Haiku as an inducement:

1.

To talk to the clouds
Climb the hill or tallest tree.
Open wide both your hands.


2.

A cloud has no feet,
just a face and two plump hands.
And wind for a voice.


3.

What stories clouds tell!
I cannot write them down here.
They are too fragile.

Being What They Aren't

According to the blue screen, I am now 1090 miles from my destination. Until then I remain one of many anonymous small anchovies inside a shiny, cold beer can with a long, mostly flat trajectory. The order of the moment is sleep. Or distraction. Or thinking. Or reading. It remains too early to contemplate the various useful forms of available intoxication. And so it comes as a surprise amidst the boredom to discover in Julio Cortazar’s collection, “Acerca de Lucas,” the following short piece, which I reproduce in its entirety (in English), “Love 77”:

And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, the comb their hair, they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.

What they aren’t.

Yesterday, I was informed (a special thank you) that in the centuries long battle to extirpate boredom, digital devices of various kinds are on the brink of delivering an outright victory. It appears that persistent distraction has venerable boredom locked in a small, tight, lead box, and has just swallowed the key. It refuses to let a single yawn or eye roll emerge. Let alone a sigh. Just look at all the screens. All the ear buds. The typing. The clicking. The apparatus before me is an example. There is no longer any reason, one thinks, to be bored to death on a long flight. There is, for example, the possibility of perpetual Solitaire. Is there something wrong with boredom on long flights? Apparently. Apparently, people demand freedom from boredom. Or maybe people demand constant distraction.

Unfortunately, the impending victory over boredom should not be applauded. Dread might be more appropriate. This is not the end of some dreaded psychological malaise. Far from it. It’s more an embargo on a precursor of creativity, of invention, of expression, of art. It’s this century’s Rip Van Winkle. You get distracted. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to read. You don’t have to figure anything out or make anything or do anything. You don’t have to think. Or wonder about anything. Why should you? You can distract yourself. That’s ok. There’s nobody there to tell you to find something to do. And, I fear, you wake up forty years later and wonder what happened. As the song says, who knows where the time goes?

I prefer in this moment instead to think about “what they aren’t”. There really isn’t anything else I’d rather do while we anchovies hurtle southward. I wonder whether thinking about these kinds of things will be on the chopping block right after boredom leaves our active vocabulary. And after that?

Graffiti

Graffiti in Palermo, Buenos Aires, November, 2010

How very wonderful. Today I found Julio Cortzar's story, Graffiti. What a masterful short story. It's a love story of sorts. I will not spoil it. It's about drawing graffiti on the walls of Buenos Aires during the military government, and the government's effort to suppress that form of expression. That's all I'll tell here. Except that it is a wonderful story, which was made into a short movie in 2005 by Pako Gonzalez.

I've raved about Cortazar here before, and in fact, in 2006, I posted this, which bears repetition here. It's a blurb written by Pablo Neruda which I at the time pronounced the world's greatest blurb. I still stand by that assessment. It's about Cortazar:

Anyone who doesn't read Cortazar is doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who has never tasted peaches. He would quietly become sadder... and, probably, little by little, he would lose his hair."

Graffiti is a story worth this kind of hype. Do not miss reading it.