Los hijos secretos de...

Rome, whose melodic intensity on Flowers from Exile goes far beyond anything that can be classified as "martial industrial" music, whose lead singer is out somewhere lost on a journey of self-discovery and whose official website contains nothing more than a succinct "WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS GONE FOR GOOD" (a prize quotable, by the way) - well, they have a song called "The Secret Sons of Europe". Along with "To Die Among Strangers", it took my breath away and put it in a box. The concept of the album borrows heavily from the story of the Spanish Republicans banished from their homeland after the Spanish Civil War, and the flamenco guitars and claps reinforce that sentiment. The sentiment expressed here is nostalgia (processed though it is), and the secret sons of Europe are those who drifted in a life of shame and virtual inexistence as the Franco regime encroached on what was once not a land of fascisizing nuts. I'm not a fan of making martyrs out of anyone, and the civil war was about much more than the good freedom fighters vs. the dark, ominous colossus of merciless military might. But the fact is every time a shameful, tyrannical time comes along for a country, the generation borne by it and bred in it is later a lost generation. The losers are silenced, smothered and obliterated. But to have been part of the great tyrannical machine and later subsist following its dismantling - that is also being a loser and having to slither and creep under rocks, hiding from the sunlight and the scornful faces of those around you. Because the loser always has to slump his arms and bow his head. Think of the simplest examples: the former people of Nazi Germany in 1945, still at least partly faithful to the criminal regime Germany spawned; die-hard Stalinists from the Russian countryside in 1956, whose Great Patron's face suddenly crumbled and fell apart like an old collage of facial feature cutouts glued together long ago and falling to pieces as the glue dries; Japan's post-war society of complete disillusionment with the free-fall of imperial authority; Poland's ex-communists -with Jaruzelski as their epitome - tainted by the (perceived) wrongdoings of their time. They lived, to some extent, between the cracks, in a hard shell of shame.

Here's a poem randomly lifted from this blog ("Noctívagos") that expresses more of the same:

---

Soy el hijo secreto de Lee Harvey Oswald
Soy el hijo secreto de Unabomber
Soy el hijo secreto de un Pantera Negra
el hijo secreto de América...

Soy el hijo secreto de Franco
Soy el hijo secreto de Olof Palme
Soy el hijo secreto de Adolf Hitler
el hijo secreto de Europa.

Soy el hijo secreto de Hiro-Hito
Soy el hijo secreto de Mishima
Soy el hijo secreto de Pol-Pot
el hijo secreto de Asia.

¡Dónde están las televisiones públicas y privadas
para publicitar mi enajenada vida, mi propio horror!

Soy el hijo secreto del Primer Mundo
mis cinco minutos de fama ¿dónde están?

---

I don't even want to begin elaborating on those, but interestingly enough, the references to Olof Palme and, to some extent, Mishima , seem a bit out of tune with the rest. Nice criticism of today's "First World" though - the secret sons of today's powers can float up to the surface riding the currents of cheap scandals and shock value.

Maybe subconsciously I'm posting this because I'm about to become a secret son of Europe myself - this being my last week in Poland before I go bumping into a Belgian afternoon. But hey - nothing new there. I've always felt a bit detached or excluded from the concept of nationality. I'm Polish by birth, by passport, by language - but not by spirit. And since I'm getting a bit too muddly and convoluted, I'll finish this up by saying that I hope I make it, hell, I believe I'll make it. 7 months in a foreign land alone is more than I've ever done. The challenges of the MA will come in a total package with the comings and the goings on the other side of the classroom. And an important relationship to maintain, to keep well watered and evergreen, and all that jazz. A big test it's up to me to pass. And last but not least, part of being a son of the world is moving around it, absorbing it as much as possible. After all, the road is the destination.



Titotazqueh.

All in a Day's Work, or: Proto-socialist Rants and the Poor in HD

(Part of this was written before)

Gotta love a day when what should be the most exciting line in the agenda actually turns out to be the most blah. So, I'll refrain from commenting on the Spain - Portugal match other than that it was about as exciting as a boxful of doilies. The World Cup is a no-no for me here - why comment on something you'll joyously forget the next day? Just a shame some class teams - and if class is what we're after, Cameroon, Germany, Argentina and Slovakia probably showed the bulk of it when at their best - went tally-ho and buh-bye, off to another ball game. The instant-replay/ultrasensitive-camera/homing-device-in-ball/laser-implant-into-eye-of-referee controversy is not even worth touching on. So, that's about it for the World Cup. I mean, North Korea's out (coming to a "training camp" near you, comrades!), so why get too excited? The rightful champion is disgracefully gone and the capitalist horde of the ever-cursed Pig-Lord of the Fifty Stars has been named the winner even before the kickoff to game one. I'm tellin' ya, these bourgeois dogs will stop at nothing.

Warsaw, where I stopped by a few days ago, gave me a lil' internship in the Embassy of Venezuela, a remote chance of being accepted into the Yucatan program in Mexico, and above all, a chance to meet up with a friend of mine who I'd never talked to before quite so freely. "Intellectually inspirational," said she as I walked her to the train, missing my last bus and not giving a damn. "Right back at you," said I. "Thank you," said she. Until I see some results and set about inspiring myself and others to ACTION, not to thinking, I ain't convinced. But I have come a long way from the bumbling blob of hypersensitive thick tar I was a year and a half ago. Still, I need change, and not only change in my life, but to enforce change where it needs enforcing, be one of those in the front line. Not the guy who puffs his chest out to pin the medal on better (vanity destroys, and baseless vanity is pitiful), but the guy who actually works in a team to take someone out of the dark hole he's in.

But where's my practice? I have no practice. I've never saved a life, never pulled someone out of the gaping maw they were falling into, never changed anyone's walk of life. It's just talk, and chattering, and bullshit. And talking about acting. And talking about talking about acting. How about a "DO", huh? How about a "DO"? It ain't gonna come floating down river for you to collect. The friend I met up with in Warsaw had been to the favelas in Rio, and she said the poverty here and the poverty there are worlds apart. Here, we lack programs that could really make a difference, take people off the streets permanently, give them just enough cheese to want more but just enough hurdles to know that it ain't gonna be easy to get from the bench back to real life. There, the favelados do what they can, but try as they might, the putrid system puts the hurdles there itself - stay inside, poor bastards, we don't want you peons moving. Maybe.

One thing is for sure - the dirt-splattered, weathered and beaten-down dregs everyone in Poland sometimes comes across (the older generation, not the current human wastes of are that go around robbing people at will) rarely elicit a second glance, or a bit of attention. Do they deserve it? I don't know. To each his own answer: would you grace a half-naked, old and broken drunkard with more than a fleeting glance? The last time I did - a few days ago - I stopped and took a few minutes to talk to a man with drooping skin and dirt smeared all around hands and fingernails, a man claiming to have been a sailor who did 24 years of jail time for beating up his bosun and a couple of others - which the faded Bruce Lee tats seemed to at least partially confirm. Toothless, he told me his plight: 65 gr for a beer, and starting from the 5th (which is when he gets his pension), he's off to rehab. Said it with real tears in his eyes, too, as he did when telling of his sons - two out of three supposedly dead. On the rehab front, no chance. I have no naivete to abuse there, he's not going anywhere voluntarily. Might have lied about the rest too. But who knows?

I gave him 70 gr.

Wrong? Right? Either way, it won't change a thing. And my talking to him doesn't make me any better than countless others who wouldn't even spare a second. It doesn't make me any better, because it's really just a formality. Nothing comes of it, like tossing a beggar a dime just to quash and quell your pricked guilty conscience and tickle your sense of righteousness - when in reality it changes nothing and you'll see the same beggar reeking just as bad and needing just as bad the next day until the day he dies or someone shakes him and takes him off the street. And someday I'd like to be able to say that when I'm stopped and talked to by a person of the category of the Anonymous Seaman - lower than low - something might come of it.

Parting thought: take a look at the teenage plastic princesses that abound on these streets and others. Or better yet - since this is a backwards town and always will be - imagine yourself in NY, LA, Boston, London, Paris, or the metropolis of your choice. And the slick suits that stride through the streets with confidence oozing corporate success. Would they want to admit the existence of a world unlike their own, a world of dirt and drugs and destitution? And starvation and wife-beating and hitting the bottle time and again? Would they acknowledge any ugliness in this world? Or is it easier to dig a trench in your pristine bubble and pretend it doesn't concern you?

Yeah, trench wins.

In Warsaw, at the station, I saw my first methhead. Up close, the bruises and open wounds on her face were grotesquely covered by a thick layer of correction fluid. Her eyes were dead, she was a shuffling zombie, asking for money with hand cupped, head down and gait somnambulant, despite a surprisingly (apparently) unravaged body - a meth trainee, perhaps. Now the question is - does she exist? Can she be helped? Or is she just a transparent ghost sleepwalking through a train station that's full and vibrant by day, but horrendously empty by night, the eternal night that never gives way to day in her little life of horrors?

We Are Headless

And there's really not much more to say, so I'll keep this short. I've never been particularly involved in politics and have always disliked frivolous and loose opinions from people who don't have a full picture of a political sitation. Recently I read an essay entitled "Keep Your Identity Small" (linked for the sake of completeness), where the author noted religion and politics are two areas that always spark flame wars online and off due to the fact that there is no universal, objective truth, and either no one's right, or no one can be sure. That - and my not entirely well-defined political views - have up to now prevented me from taking an active part in political life. Regardless of the party they belonged to and the views they had, the top brass of Polish politicians, intellectuals, freedom fighters and army chiefs, are dead. Something so bizarre, sudden and deconstructing that it's unfathomable, like reality gone topsy-turvy.

The fact that nothing of the sort has ever happened in the history of the world doesn't make it any better. Macedonia (Boris Trajkovsky), Rwanda and Burundi (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), Pakistan (Muhammad Zia-ul-Huq), Mozambique (Samora Machel), Panama (Omar Torrijos, frankly the only one I had heard of previously) and Ecuador (Jaime Roldós Aguilera) have all gone through something similar, the difference being that scores of other important people went down with the Polish plane.

A few comments. First, I'm impressed by the rapid reaction of politicians (it looks like there was no chaos in carrying out the constitutional procedures) and news sources alike. The journalists over at TVN did a formidable job, practically unwavering, professional, factual, without the great pathos and pointless hope associated with the pope's death way back when.

Second, it will be interesting to see the presidential campaign in this context. Been a long time since I've really understood Polish politics, but seeing as some of the campaign would decidedly involve judgments on Kaczyński's presidency, any mention of his successes and failures would now be considered a no-no, a faux pas, a taboo. So will this be the first truly respectful campaign in the history of Poland? Doubtful, but it will impact the results severely. Not that that's the most important thing ATM.

One more thing on a smaller scale. My sister's year at university was planning to throw a huge prepaid party in the evening. For some two hours or so and based on an grotesquely inappropriate forum post from one of the girls who organized the thing, it seemed like it was not only going to take place, but also include a minute of silence (to precede some merry binge-drinking) and all the showings of a grand, rippin' and roarin' party. Additionally, all of the guests would "join the rest of the mourners in grief following the party". Real smooth. Get back up the rabbit hole, Alice. Wonderland ain't doin' you well.

I'm no patriot, but the repercussions of this are bound to echo far and wide and we should all be conscious of the fact that this will redefine Poland completely. Though I like words and words seem to like me, like in most cases on April 10, words have failed me.

On the Bridge, in the Rain

Tap to trickle
Trickle to torrent
The shower camouflages her tears as she stands in a puddle-filled pothole
Straight white painted centerline
Deteriorated fuzzy with age
Cuts between her feet and disappears into the misty distance
Of the mile-long bridge.
Just one mile? Is that good? Bad?
She pleads no contest, can't decide.

She could be anywhere
Literally anywhere
Tossing sponge rocks into the stream on a warm summer evening
On a short rickety bridge made of beat-up floorboards
Teetering on the edge of rope in lush green hopelessness
On a curved rickety bridge stretched and gutted cross-canyon
Taking shallow breaths of wonder in the Old World's sinking city
Under the age-old arch of stone and bathed in twilight.

She could be anywhere
Literally anywhere
But she has this
Pitiful gentle giant of a bridge
Deserted by the good people of the empty city behind her
A heaving bulk of great mass
Swaying, groaning, chipping, rusting
Rain pushing it inexorably toward the rapids
And she steps
On the bridge
In the rain
And she's back
THERE

As two eyes peer at her with fleeting sadness
And perhaps a flash of pity.

The Awakening, the Vigil, the Dream

Nightfall
The dreams form a linear pattern like the coils of a rattlesnake
Each flowing into the next
Seamlessly

So seamlessly

I await the dénouement
Passive, powerless, pondering
But the secret unravels when it so fancies
And promptly sinks back into its lucid wakeful obscurity
The oneiric detective wakes and shakes his fists in frustration
The damned solution has slipped his grasp once again

Ain't that just always the case

Pathetically he rises and stares at the moon
His accusatory glare is understandably ignored
The moon and the night must have bigger fish to fry
Tending to insomniacs and whores and dark alley dwellers
Handing out gifts of poetic inspiration and pneumonia

Usually not upon request

The City
Is what he always dreamed of
Seventy stories of nothing separate him from the ground
Jagged spikes protrude from the earth and scrape the clouds
And inside their metallic shells the last workaholics of the day drag themselves away

To families that don't exist.

High up the wind swirls and rocks the tower

The pillar of modernity

But his vision is that of old yellowed photographs and noir classics
And melancholic nighttime diners and fedoras and shots of whisky
And soft saxophones and pianos

And creases in the face

Unable to solve the mystery that haunts him
He revisits old dreams
And the glass is his accomplice
His listener his consolation his silent obedient counselor

His partner in crime

As the City

Looms.

16/02/2010

Bahram Alivandi

Simorgh (The Conference of Birds)



Ferdowsi and His Mythos

Boris Dubrov