still thinking on it

I realize that marquez is not the man we think to go to for the verisimilitude (though I imagine he'd protest, "why not!?!"), and the argument could be made that if there is an element of magical realism to this book it would be in the countless manifestations of love -- violent love, filial love, dull love, young love, old love, surprise love, tired love etc., love actually being the thing most magical and real, and that the book is concerned with giving life to these manifestations... I understand this... and I'm not beyond reading the rape scene as metaphorical or even imaginable if unlikely... none of this actually settles me, but I want to be fair and acknowledge it.

quest' amore

"And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?" he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
"Forever" he said.

ends the love in the time of cholera book, a pretty beautiful book with a pretty beautiful ending that kind of reminds me of the end of the princess bride only, you know, with radically different though no less mythic and way older characters and a touch less hilarity (but a little hilarity).

though I'm not sure what to do with things like his description of prostitutes as the "night birds of emergency love" which is a stunning figuration and yet romanticizes something that I imagine was not in the nineteenth century (is not now) all glorious debauchery and a happy celebration of an economy of desire. the women of the book who don't want to be seduced by such and such a man are "haughty" and rare, and the men are never really critiqued for their lack of invention in bed or an underabundance of tenderness, or "meager" package (as a woman's "meager bosom" is considered a defect -- I notice this criticism for not totally disinterested reasons!). a rape victim falls instantly in love with the man who attacks her, who forces "passion" upon her. I don't know... the book is written exquisitely (see again the night birds of emergency love, the parrot that squawks "every man for himself!", the ending) but I have to confess that I kept thinking where he was most romantic his verisimilitude was most questionable, and as a reader I'm not sure what to do with this.



speaking of love, I also now love the unicorn whale (narwhal whale has a unicorn horn on its head). it's at least in my top five favorite animals (mammalanimals). kualas and penguins are up there too. in a beautiful act of naming, the inuits call this whale "the one that is good at curving itself to the sky," and according to the newspaper a man named mr. rosing says, "often one can see a male and female shoot up from the water, trembling, belly to belly," which is just as pretty a description of animal love or people love for that matter as any I can most immediately think of.

now enough of all this mushiness! time for a martini and a bath!

random thoughts

ecstasy: from a word meaning displacement. when we find ourselves no longer in ourselves. we think of pleasure, but from the root we could imagine daydreaming as a kind of ecstasy, or reading, or watching movies, tv, etc. cooking could be an ecstatic moment. I would like to have half a waking day of ecstasy and half a day grounded in real living attention. this sounds very good to me.

suffering: to be under a pressure. to endure from under that pressure. we push up, work against the force of suffering, of course our emotional endurance expands, like every day walking with a hundred pound weight on the body... given enough days, that weight will be hardly weight at all. and then maybe the weight is gone, we manage to shed it somehow, or it dissipates the way suffering sometimes but not always does. when our nemesis throws an eighty pound weight at us to knock us over, we laugh at our nemesis, mock our nemesis, call our nemesis baby names. granted, we might expect our posture to be a little warped from all those pounds, but we've gained as well as lost. note: if I'm okay with suffering for this reason, it comes with the stipulation that I'm only really okay with my own. I don't believe this excuses the imposition of suffering on another person. I'm not evil or anything.


here's something random: I'm trying to make scarves for my baby sisters, but I can't seem to remember how to do it well, and so I'm wondering: is it better to give terribly deformed scarves to your sister at christmas or no scarves at all? it is worse to make them pretend not to be horrified, or to let them know that you, sadly, tried but failed?

tis the season...