READIN

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

🦋 To have been a fly on that wall!

Monterroso writes, "There are three topics: love, death, and flies" -- and right away I'm thinking of Robyn Hitchcock... This is the introduction to part II of Monterroso's collection Complete Works (and Other Stories).*

There are three topics: love, death, and flies. Since humanity has existed, this sentiment, this fear, these presences have accompanied him everywhere. Let others deal with the first two; I will occupy myself with flies, which are greater than men (if not than women). For years I've had in mind the idea of putting together a universal anthology of the fly. I still mean to do it -- but, I soon came to realize the task was practically infinite. The fly pervades literature; anywhere you cast your eye, you are sure to find the fly. There is no true author who has not taken the opportunity to dedicate a poem, a page, a paragraph, a line to him; if you are an author and have not done this, I advise you to follow my example, to hurry up and do it. Flies are the Eumenides, the Erinyes; they are chastisers. They are avengers, for what we don't know -- but you know that they have persecuted you; as far as you know, they will go on persecuting you forever. They are vigilant. They are the avatars of something unnameable, something benevolent or malign. They pursue you. They follow you. They watch you. When at last you die, it's likely (and it's too bad) that one fly will suffice to carry your poor, distracted soul who knows where. Flies convey -- and they come over the course of the ages to own their cargo -- the souls of our dead, of our forebears, who thus remain close to us, accompanying us, determined to protect us. They are a means for our small souls' transmigrations; they accumulate wisdom -- they come to know everything that we do not dare to know. Perhaps the ultimate propagator of our tired western culture will be the body of this fly, who has come down through the course of the centuries, furthering his line without enriching himself....

* It appears this piece is actually from a different collection, Perpetual Motion; the two collections were published together in translation under the title of the first.

posted evening of April 29th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 26th, 2010

🦋 Odiseo en Nicaragua

Pablo Antonio Cuadra's poem "El barco negro" (in Poets of Nicaragua) inspired me to buy the book Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea, which is Grace Schulman's selections and translations from Cuadra's Cantos de Cifar, because I was so dissatisfied with White's translation. A really powerful poem, but the translation is nothing at all...

Well: the book arrived in the mail today; I'm looking at it and enjoying Schulman's translations by and large. But her selections not so much: she did not include "The black boat." Rats... Ok, so here is my first attempt at a translation of a poem.*

El barco negro Cifar, entre su sueño oyó los gritos y el ululante caracol en la neblina del alba. Miró el barco     â€”inmóvil—     fijo entre las olas.     â€”Si oyes     en la oscura     mitad de la noche     â€”en aguas altas—     gritos que preguntan     por el puerto:         dobla el timón             y huye Recortado en la espuma el casco oscuro y carcomido, (—¡Marinero!, gritaban—) las jarcias rotas meciéndose y las velas negras y podridas              (—¡Marinero!—) Puesto de pie, Cifar, abrazó el mástil     â€”Si la luna     ilumina los rostros     cenizos y barbudos     si te dicen     â€”Marinero ¿dónde vamos?     Si te imploran:     â€”¡Marinero enséñanos     el puerto!     Â¡dobla el timón     y huye! Hace tiempo zarparon Hace siglos navegan en el sueño     Son tus propias preguntas     perdidas en el tiempo.

The Black Boat Cifar, inside his dream he heard the cries, the ululating conch out in the mist of dawn. He saw the boat     â€”immobile—     fixed among the waves.     â€”If you hear     from the darkness,     the middle of the night     â€”on high seas—     cries, cries that beg you     for the port:         turn your tiller back             and flee Outlined in the raging surf the boat's hull dark and eaten away, (crying, —O Seafarer!—) the broken rigging swaying and the sails black and rotting             (—O Seafarer!—) He held his ground, Cifar, he clung to the mast     â€”If the moon     lights up their faces     ashy, bearded, jinxed     if they ask you     â€”Seafarer, where you going?     If they implore you:     â€”Seafarer, show us the way     to the port!—     turn your tiller back     and flee! They set sail long ago They're sailing for ages, in the dream     The questions are your own     forgotten in the ages.

...A different selection of Cuadra's "Cifar" poems (an objectively better selection since it includes "El barco negro") is on offer at Pelele's blog, Muchacha Recostada. Also the whole book is online at turtleislands.net.

* Wait no, that's wrong. So, the next attempt in an extremely infrequent series of poetry translations by Jeremy.

posted evening of April 26th, 2010: 4 responses
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Saturday, April 24th, 2010

🦋 Wandering in France and Belgium

(I see other translators have rendered it "Roaming" or "Vagabond" in F and B, these may be closer to an accurate translation -- I'm leaving it "Wandering" thinking that reflects the directionless feeling I get from reading the story and trying to inhabit B's character.) In this paragraph B is thinking about how he knows the authors listed on the magazine's cover. Notice something interesting with tense, which is that the story having been told up to here in the present, here Bolaño wants to loosen the focus a little so he shifts into a mix of past tenses and actually goes so far as to alert the reader that's what's going on.

La Revista, que aparece o aparecía tres veces al año por iniciativa de Marc Dachy, está editada en Bruselas, por TRANSéDITION, y tiene o tenía su domicilio social en la rue Henry van Zuylen, número 59. Roberto Altmann, en una época, fue un artisto famoso. ¿Quién recuerda ahora a Roberto Altmann? piensa B. Lo mismo con Carlfriedrich Claus. Pierre Guyotat fue un novelista notable. Pero notable no es sinonimo de memorable. De hecho a B le hubiera gustado ser como Guyotat, en otro tiempo, cuando B era joven y leía las obras de Guyotat. Ese Guyotat calvo y poderoso. Ese Guyotat dispuesto a comerse cualquiera en la oscuridad de un chambre de bonne. A Mirtha Dermisache no la recuerda, pero su nombre le suena de algo, posiblemente una mujer hermosa, una mujer elegante con casi total seguridad. Sophie Podolsky fue una poeta a la que él y su amigo L apreciaron (e incluso se podria decir que amaron) ya desde México, cuando B y L vivían en México y tenían apenas algo más de veinte años. Roland Barthes, bueno, todo el mundo sabe quién es Roland Barthes. De Dotremont tiene noticias vagas, tal vez leyó algunos poemas suyos en alguna antología perdida. Brion Gysin fue el amigo de Burroughs, el que le dio la idea de los cut-up. Y finalmente Henri Lefebvre. B no conoce a Lefebvre de nada. Es el único al que no conoce de nada y su nombre, en aquella librería de viejo, se ilumina de pronto como una cerilla en un cuarto oscuro. Al menos, de esa forma B lo siente. A él le gustaría que se hubiera iluminado como una tea. Y no en un cuarto oscuro sino en una caverna, pero lo cierto es que Lefebvre, el nombre de Lefebvre, resplandece brevemente de aquella manera y no de otra.

The magazine, which appears (or was appearing) three times a year under the initiative of Marc Dachy, is published in Brussels, by TRANSéDITION; it has (had) its home office on rue Henry van Zuylen, number 59. Roberto Altmann, at one time he was a famous artist. Who remembers Roberto Altmann nowadays? thinks B. The same with Carlfriedrich Claus. Pierre Guyotat was a noteworthy novelist. But noteworthy is not synonymous with memorable. In fact B would have liked to be like Guyotat, in another age, when B was young and was reading Guyotat's works. This bald, powerful Guyotat. This Guyotat who was fixing something for dinner, in the darkness of a chambre de bonne. He can't place Mirtha Dermisache, but her name reminds him of something, maybe of a beautiful woman, almost certainly an elegant woman. Sophie Podolsky was a poet whom he and his friend L had appreciated, you could even say adored, way back in Mexico, when B and L were living in Mexico and were hardly over twenty years old. Roland Barthes, well good, everyone knows who Roland Barthes is. Of Dotremont he has heard vague reports; perhaps he has read some of his poems in some lost anthology. Brion Gysin was that friend of Burroughs, the one who gave him the idea of cut-ups. And then at last Henri Lefebvre. B hasn't seen Lefebvre at all. That's the only one whose name he has never seen at all; in that anticuarian bookstore, the light comes on right away, like a match struck in a dark room. Or at least, that's about how B feels. He would like if it would light his way like a torch. And not in a dark room but in a cavern -- what's for sure is that Lefebvre, the name Lefebvre, shines briefly in just that manner, not in any other.

One thought running through my head as I go over this passage, is how Bolaño can write using bits of his experience, and I don't necessarily need to label the writing a form of memoir -- I have a habit of thinking of The Savage Detectives as if it were, or were in parts, a work of autobiography -- the bit about Sophie Podolsky references a bit of Bolaño's experience, and also a bit of Belano's experience, and I don't really see any need to untangle which is which.

posted evening of April 24th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 19th, 2010

🦋 Angels in Argentina

Today I read a comment to the effect that Bolaño's style in Nazi Literature in the Americas was influenced heavily by Borges and by J.R. Wilcock. Well Borges of course, think I; but whose is this other name? ...Turns out he is a very intriguing Argentine author from the mid-20th C. (who spent much of his life in Italy, and it looks like much of his writing is in Italian). Also he was a civil engineer, like my father, and like Oswaldo. Here is a story of his I found online, the story of Yahweh's messenger looking for work in the ages when Yahweh no longer speaks to His creations -- powerful stuff!

El ángel por J.R. Wilcock El ángel Elzevar está desocupado, lo único que sabe hacer es llevar mensajes pero ya no hay más mensajes que llevar, y entonces el ángel da vueltas revisando en la basura del gran basurero municipal en busca de restos de comida y sobras de fruta: algo tiene que comer. De noche, hizo la prueba de recorrer la orilla del río en calidad de prostituto todo servicio, y de hecho sabe hacer muchas cosas y su condición angélica lo exime de cualquier escrúpulo moral; pero la mayoría de las veces el encuentro termina mal, por ejemplo cuando el cliente, antes o después, descubre que Elzevar no tiene sexo: por lo que parece, en ciertas ocupaciones el sexo es particularmente requerido, e incluso indispensable. Para aplacar al desilusionado cliente, Elzevar le muestra un poco cómo vuela, primero a la derecha, después a la izquierda, después le pasa sobre la cabeza y le desordena los cabellos como una brisa ligera; pero los clientes de la orilla del río exigen algo más concreto que una normal exhibición de levitación; uno le mordió el tobillo en pleno vuelo, otro calvo con peluca lo llamó sodomita y un tercero lo denunció a la policía, basándose en un artículo del Código Penal que prohíbe exaltar la seducción y otros dos artículos del Código de Navegación Aérea relativos al vuelo urbano sin documentos. Después de lo cual Elzevar tuvo que mudarse a otro recodo del río, peligrosamente frecuentado por familias y pescadores con cañas, incluso de noche. Estos inconvenientes, natural consecuencia de su desocupación temporaria, no pueden realmente preocupar a un ángel. Para comenzar los ángeles son inmortales, y son pocos los mortales que pueden decir lo mismo. En cuanto a la falta de mensajes, un día u otro tendrá que terminar. Nuevos emisores se están alistando, y los potenciales receptores por cierto no escasean. Ya en el pasado le sucedió estar sin trabajo por períodos más o menos largos, sin hacer nada. Basura de comer nunca le ha faltado; es verdad que la prostitución angélica ya no es lo que era , pero de cualquier forma, hasta que esté listo el nuevo mensaje, hay que seguir en contacto con los hombres. Mientras tanto Elzevar siempre puede encontrar trabajo en un circo, en tanto lamentablemente muchas cosas cambiaron desde que existe la televisión. Si el Gran Silencio durase mucho, otros caminos interesantes y poco recorridos se le abren: por ejemplo el cine underground, la aplicación de antiparasitarios, la manutención de computadoras, la limpieza de ascensores y los desfiles masculinos de moda.

The Angel by J.R. Wilcock The angel Elzevar is unemployed -- the only thing he knows how to do is carry messages, but there aren't any more messages for him to carry, so the angel wanders through the garbage in the great municipal garbage dump, in search of food scraps and vegetable trimmings: he needs something to eat. At night, he tries his luck along the river's bank, offering his services as a prostitute; for to tell the truth, there are many things he can do, and his angelic status exempts him from any moral scruple; but the majority of these encounters end poorly, for example when the client discovers (sooner or later) that Elzevar has no genitals: as it appears, in certain occupations genitals are a particular requirement, even indispensable. In order to placate the disillusioned client, Elzevar demonstrates for him how he can fly, a bit on the right, a bit on the left, then passing over his head and toussling his hair like a soft breeze; but the clients on the river's bank are looking for something more concrete than a simple exhibition of levitation -- one bites his ankle as he is flying over, another, a bald man wearing a wig, calls him a faggot; a third denounces him to the police, basing his accusation on an article of the Penal Code which prohibits solicitation, and also on two articles of the Code of Navigation relating to unlicensed flight in urban areas. After that, Elzevar has to move around the bend of the river, to an area dangerously thick with families and fishermen, even at night. These inconveniences, the natural consequence of his temporary unemployment, are no real distraction for an angel. To begin with, angels are immortal; there are few mortals who can say as much. And as far as the drought of messages goes, one day or another that will be over. New transmissions are readying themselves, and potential recipients are hardly in short supply. It's happened in the past now and then, that he's been without work for however long a time, and it hasn't affected him. He's never been lacking for trash to eat. It's true that angelic prostitution is not what it once was; but somehow or another, until the next message is ready, he has to remain in contact with people. Elzevar could always find work in a circus, though here too, lamentably, much has changed since the invention of television. If the Great Silence lasts too long, other avenues could open, interesting and little explored: for example the underground cinema, the application of static suppressors, computer maintenance, cleaning of elevators, male modeling.

Note: I don't know about "Elzevar" ("El-Zephar"?), likely this is the name of a particular angel but I'm not familiar enough with the Christian pantheon to know which one it would be or how to render it in English. Scanning Paradise Lost is not turning anything up... And is "The Great Silence" used to refer to the post-Mosaic times in which God no longer sends angels to communicate his wishes or commands to humanity? Wilcock's capitalizing that made me think he is referring to a term that is in use. "Solicitation" is a pure guess at a tranlation of "exaltar la seducción".

Update: Look at that, Wilcock translated Jack Kerouac into Spanish! Interesting... Is this book Desolation Angels?

posted evening of April 19th, 2010: 1 response
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Saturday, April 17th, 2010

🦋 Last Evenings on Earth

On re-reading, I find the last third of "Last Evenings on Earth" confusing. It seems like there is supposed to be some confusion, like that's the point of it -- the title suggests (and B seems to be worried) that B and his father die in Acapulco; but I'm pretty sure (though the ending is totally open) that's not what is going to happen, rather it's some element of their relationship that is dying.

Bolaño sets this up at the beginning of the final section of the story when he says,

There are things you can say and things that can't be said, B thinks, depressed. From this moment on, he knows that he is approaching the disaster. ...

And here ends the parenthesis, here end the forty-eight hours of grace, when B and his father have visited the bars of Acapulco, have slept on the beach, worn out, have eaten and even laughed; here begins an icy period, a period seemingly normal but dominated by some frozen gods (gods who otherwise never interfere with the heat which reigns in Acapulco), a few hours which in another time, perhaps when he was a teenager, B would have called boredom, but nowadays he would never use that term; more likely disaster, a peculiar sort of disaster, a disaster which on top of everything else will distance B from his father -- the price they have to pay to live.

B thinks of Gui Rosey, who disappeared from the planet without leaving a trace, docile as a lamb while the Nazi's hymns rose up to a blood-red sky, and sees himself as Gui Rosey, a Gui Rosey buried in some vacant lot in Acapulco, disappeared forever, but then he hears his father, who is making some accusation to the ex-clavadista, and he realizes that unlike Gui Rosey, he is not alone.

This has the feeling of an important moment for B, the moment where he grows closer to his father (and given the barroom-brawl setting, it must be said there is a lot of potential for this to be corny) -- but the moment has been set up as one of further alienation. So I come away from the story not sure what to make of it -- B's defining characteristic is his passivity, his father's might be his boorishness or it might be his cool-headedness "when it counts." I feel for B and hope he has a better time on his next vacation...

posted evening of April 17th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 buzo/clavadista

The high frequency in "Last Evenings on Earth" of the word clavadista (diver) makes me think about Bolaño's poem Resurrection: "Poetry slips into the dream/ like a dead diver/ into the eye of God." The word translated as "diver" here is buzo; I wonder what the distinction is. Is clavadista specifically a "cliff diver"? Is buzo a deep-sea diver?

Update: Yes, I think (based on Google image results) that it's a distinction between clavadista="an athlete who jumps gracefully into the water" and buzo="an explorer who wears a scuba suit and pokes around underwater" -- the fact that both of these are "diver" in English is coincidental, it's not part of the source material. Actually this makes the imagery in "Resurrection" a lot easier to understand.

posted afternoon of April 17th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 12th, 2010

🦋 Sartor Resartus

I knew nothing about this book or about this author, until I read Borges' foreword today. Now I want to seek it out and read it... This translation is fairly close to literal, it seems to work pretty well in this case.

From Parmenides of Elea until today, idealism -- the doctrine which affirms that the universe, including time and space and perhaps ourselves, is nothing more than an appearance or a chaos of appearances -- has been professed in diverse forms by many thinkers. Perhaps nobody has educed it with greater clarity than bishop Berkeley; nobody with greater conviction, desperation, and satiric force than the young Scot Thomas Carlyle in his intricate Sartor Resartus (1831). This Latin can be rendered as The Patched Tailor or Mended Tailor; the work is no less singular than its name.

Carlyle invokes the authority of an imaginary professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (Son of God Droppings of the Devil), who publishes in Germany a vast volume dealing with the philosophy of sand*, which is to say appearances. The Sartor Resartus, hardly more than two hundred pages, is a mere commentary and compendium of this gigantic work. Cervantes (whom Carlyle had read in Spanish) had attributed the Quixote to a Moorish author, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This book includes a pathetic biography of Teufelsdröckh, in reality a cryptic, secret autobiography, full of jokes. Nietzsche accused Richter of making Carlyle the worst writer in Britain. The influence of Richter is evident, but he was no more than a dreamer of tranquil dreams, not infrequently tedious, where Carlyle is a dreamer of nightmares. In his history of English literature, Saintsbury holds that the Sartor Resartus is the logical extension of a paradox of Swift's, in the profuse style of Sterne, master of Richter. Carlyle himself mentions the connection to Swift, who wrote in A Tale of a Tub that certain pieces of ermine hide and a wig, placed together in a certain fashion, make up what we call a judge, just as a particular combination of black satin and Cambray is called a bishop.

Idealism affirms that the universe is appearance; Carlyle insists that it is a farce. He was an atheist and believed he had disavowed the faith of his parents; as Spencer observed, his conception of the world, of man and of behavior shows that he never ceased to be a rigid Calvinist. His gloomy pessimism, his ethics of iron and fire, are perhaps a Presbyterian heritage; his mastery of the art of the insult, his doctrine that history is a Sacred Scripture which we continually decipher and transcribe and in which we are also written, prefigures -- fairly precisely -- Leon Bloy. He prophecied, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, that democracy is a chaos at the mercy of the electoral urns, and counseled the conversion of all the bronze statues into bathtubs. I know of no book more ardent, more volcanic, more weary with desolation, than Sartor Resartus.

* (Maybe worth noting in this regard that 30 years later, Borges would title one of his last works of prose The Book of Sand. Or maybe just a coincidence... The first story in The Book of Sand does make a passing reference to Sartor Resartus FWIW.)

posted evening of April 12th, 2010: 3 responses
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Sunday, April 11th, 2010

🦋 Cronicas Marcianas

Opening up Borges' Prólogos, one of the first things that caught my eye was his foreword to the Spanish edition of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, first published in 1955. I don't think of Borges as a science-fiction author though some of his stories certainly fit in the genre. Have not read Martian Chronicles since I was 15 or something!-- but I remember reading it a couple of times as a young kid... Perhaps it's worth revisiting.

In the first Century of our era, Lucian composed a True History, which contained among other things, a description of the Selenites, who (according to the truthful historian) spin and card metals and glass, remove and replace their eyeballs, and drink juice of air or fresh-squeezed air; at the beginning of the 16th Century, Ludovico Ariosto imagined a knight discovering on the moon all that had been lost on earth: the tears and sighs of lovers, time wasted in play, unsuccessful projects, unsatisfied longings; in the 17th Century, Kepler published his Somnium Astronomicum, presented as the transcription of a book read in a dream, whose prolix pages reveal the forms and habits of the moon-dwelling serpents -- they shelter themselves from the heat of the day in deep caverns, and emerge at dusk. Between the first and second of these imaginary voyages, one thousand three hundred years elapse; between the second and the third, some hundred -- the first two are, essentially, free, irresponsible invention, while the third seems weighted down by an effort at verisimilitude. The reason is clear: for Lucian and for Ariosto, a journey to the moon is the symbol or archetype of the impossible; for Kepler, it is already a possibility, as it is for us. Wouldn't universal language inventor John Wilkins soon publish his Discovery of a World in the Moone: a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable world in that planet, with an appendix entitled, Discourse on the possibility of a voyage? In the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, one reads that Arquitas, the Pythagorean, built a wooden dove which could fly through the air; Wilkins predicted that a vehicle of analogous mechanism would carry us one day to the moon.

In its anticipation of a possible or probable future, the Somnium Astronomicum prefigures (though I would not confuse one for the other) the new narrative genre which the Americans of the north term science-fiction or scientifiction* and of which these Chronicles are an admirable example. They deal with the conquest and colonization of the planet. This arduous enterprise of future men seems meant for epic treatment; Ray Bradbury prefers (without enunciating this choice, perhaps; the secret inspiration of his genius) an elegiac tone. The Martians, who at the opening of the book are horrific, merit pity by the time we reach their extinction. Humanity wins; the author does not rejoice in this victory. He speaks with mourning and disappointment of the future expansion of the human lineage over the red planet -- which his prophecy reveals to us as a vast desert of blue sand, checkered with the ruins of cities and yellow sunsets and ancient ships which sailed over the sand.

Other authors choose a date in the future and we do not believe them, for we know we're dealing with a literary convention; Bradbury writes 2004 and we feel the weight of it, the fatigue, the vague, vast accumulation of the past -- the dark backward and abysm of Time of Shakespeare's verse. Already it was heard in the Renaissance, from the mouths of Giordano Bruno and of Bacon, that we are the true ancients, not the men of Genesis or of Homer.

What did this man from Illinois do, I'm wondering, as I close the pages of his book, that these episodes of the conquest of another planet fill me with such terror and loneliness?

How can these fantasies touch me, and in such a close, intimate manner? All literature (I will dare to venture) is symbolic: there are a few fundamental experiences, and it makes little difference whether an author, in communicating them, chooses the "fantastic" or the "real," chooses Macbeth or Raskolnikov, chooses the invasion of Belgium in 1914 or the invasion of Mars. What is important about the novel, the novelty, of science-fiction? On this book, this apparent phantasmagoria, Bradbury has stamped his long, empty Sundays, his American tedium, his solitude, just as Sinclair Lewis stamped his on Main Street.

Perhaps The Third Expedition is the most troubling story in this volume. Its horror (I suspect) is metaphysical; the uncertainty over the identity of Captain John Black's hosts insinuates -- uncomfortably -- that we can know neither who we are nor how God sees us. I would like also to point out the episode entitled The Martian, which contains a pathetic variation on the myth of Proteus.

Around 1909 I read, with fascination and fear, in the darkness of an old house which is no longer standing, The First Men in the Moon, by Wells. These Chronicles, though very different in conception and in execution, have given me the opportunity to relive, in the last days of autumn of 1954, those delicious terrors.

* Scientifiction is a monstrous word in which the adjective scientific and the substantive fiction are amalgamated. Jocosely, the Spanish idiom generates analogous formations; Marcelo del Mazo speaks of gríngaro orchestras (gringos + zíngaros), and Paul Groussac of the japonecedades which obstruct the museum of the Goncourts.

(I'm noticing as I work my way through this piece, my reluctance to divide a sentence where the original has a single sentence. I'm happy to change punctuation -- it seems to me like Spanish frequently reads better in English with stronger punctuation, semicolon where there is a comma or "and" in the original, dash where there is a semicolon -- but I am averse to putting in extra periods. Similarly -- even moreso -- with paragraph divisions.)

posted afternoon of April 11th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, April 10th, 2010

🦋 Faith and mountains

While I'm thinking of it, another story I really enjoy from The Black Sheep and other fables:

At first, faith moved mountains only as a last resort, when it was absolutely necessary, and so the landscape remained the same over the millennia.

But once faith started propagating itself among people, some found it amusing to think about moving mountains, and soon the mountains did nothing else but change places, each time making it a little more difficult to find one in the same place you had left it last night; obviously this created more problems than it solved.

The good people decided then to abandon faith; so nowadays the mountains remain (by and large) in the same spot.

When the roadway falls in and drivers die in the collapse, it means someone, far away or quite close by, felt a light glimmer of faith.

posted evening of April 10th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The monkey who wanted to write satire

This is the second story in The black sheep and other fables -- the story of which Isaac Asimov says (and I'm dying to know now whether this book has been published in translation, or if Asimov reads Spanish...)* that after reading it, "you will never be the same again."

In the jungle there once lived a monkey who wanted to write satire.

He studied hard, but soon realized that he did not know people well enough to write satire, and he started a program of visiting everyone, going to cocktails and observing, watching for the glint of an eye while his host was distracted, a cup in his hand.

As he was most clever and his agile pirhouettes were entertaining for all the other animals, he was received well almost everywhere; and he strove to make it even moreso.

There was no-one who did not find his conversation charming; when he arrived he was fêted and jubilated among the monkeys, by the ladies as much as by their husbands, and by the rest of the inhabitants of the jungle too, even by those who were into politics, whether international, domestic or local, he invariably showed himself to be understanding -- and always, to be clear, with the aim of seeing the base components of human nature and of being able to render them in his satires.

And so there came a time when among the animals, he was the most advanced student of human nature; nothing got by him.

Then one day, he said: I'm going to write against thievery, and he went to see the magpies; and at first he went at it with enthusiasm, enjoying himself and laughing, looking up with pleasure at the trees as he thought about what things happen among the magpies -- but then on second thought, he considered the magpies who were among the animals who had received him so pleasantly -- especially one magpie, and that they would see their portrait in his satire, however gently he wrote it.. and he left off doing it.

Then he wanted to write about opportunists, and he cast his eye on the serpent, who by whatever means (auxiliary to his talent for flattery) managed always to conserve, to trade, to increase his posessions... But then some serpents were friends of his, and especially one serpent; they would see the reference. So he left off doing it.

Then he thought of satirizing compulsive work habits, and he turned to the bee, the bee who works dumbly and without knowing why or for whom; but for fear of offending some of his friends of this genus, and especially one of them, he ended up comparing them favorably to the cicada, that egotist who will do nothing more than sing, sing, who thinks himself a poet... and he left off doing it.

Then it occurred to him, he could write against sexual promiscuity, and he directed his satire against the adulterous hens who strut around all day restlessly looking for roosters; but then some of them had received him well, he feared hurting them, and he left off doing it.

In the end he came up with a complete list of human failings and weaknesses, and he could not find a target for his guns -- they were all failings of his friends who had shared their table with him, and of himself.

At that moment he renounced his writing of satire, and began to teach mysticism and love, this type of thing; but this made people talk (you know how it is with people), they said he had gone crazy, they no longer received him as gladly or with such pleasure.

* Yep, looks like it was published in English in 1971.

posted evening of April 10th, 2010: Respond
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