afraid to be alive

The sensuality is lost. It’s nowhere better visible than in our eating habits. Food has become sterile, packaged, organic-shmorganic, with that many carbohydrates and that many calories. Fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free. Coming with instructions on the packaging, so that you don’t have to know anything about food anymore, it’s all been taken care of, professional nutritionists are working to provide you with nutrition that will guarantee you are eating healthily and that you won’t have to feel guilty about not taking care of yourself properly and according to the newest dietary fashion. Guilt-tripping is a powerful tool - when people see me eating salads their primary feeling is that of guilt that they are not eating enough salads themselves. Unprovoked by me, they usually mumble some kind of excuse why they don’t have time to do the same or that they really should be doing more of that too. As if me eating salads was a sort of slap in the face that reminded them of their dietary sins. They admire my discipline in forcing myself to prepare my own salads, to suffer the pain of touching the lovely sweet cherry tomatoes and feel the sharp knife slicing through them, the pleasure of cutting the striking purple onion in very thin, crispy rings, tossing the salad leaves into the bowl to make a bedding for all these juicy colours. Golden olive oil, delightful compositions of tastes, textures and aromas. One needs to be really disciplined to inflict so much beauty onto oneself, the risk of bursting with happiness is terrifying!
People get so used to the misleading safety of the packaging and instructions that they forget what food really is and what a joy it is too! How does it feels to touch it, feel it, taste it. I saw a friend of mine buy food for dinner and among the things that she bought were baby potatoes packed in plastic. The inevitable instructions said they should be prepared in a microwave. But soon she discovered that there was no microwave in the house. She panicked. How do you make potatoes if they don’t come with instructions? She called a friend that was ‘an expert’ on cooking and conferred with that person for about 15 minutes on the highly complex subject of potato cuisine. I was standing there in the kitchen, watching all this in awe. How can one be so far removed from reality?
But there are more examples like this. People don’t want to eat fruit anymore because you have to peel it. Even apples are too messy because juice can squirt out of them if you bite them. How terrible! The most practical fruit are bananas because they are easy to ‘unpack’.
How about the sensuality of food, juice of ripe fruits on your lips, licking it off, licking the juice off your fingers, getting your fingers dirty with food is one of the pleasures of eating, did we forget that?
People get so touchy, they become vegetarians not because of a genuine impulse but because their rejection of anything bloody, bodily, sensual. Blood and suffering are unacceptable, life should be all light and fat-free, sugar-free, all clean and sterile, eating internal organs of dead animals is a no-no. A juicy steak? We cannot eat that anymore, you can see blood oozing from it as you cut it with your knife. We can stomach chicken though - no problem; it’s meat too, it was a living animal just like the poor cow but you cannot see the blood. The meat is white, pure, seemingly fat- and blood-free, a sterile dose of protein for your balanced diet. Makes you feel a bit less guilty about not being a vegetarian.
Sex becomes sterile too. There is no place here for sweating in the throes of passion, there is no place for bodily fluids, for the scent of another person’s body, there is no place for sensuality in movement, for power and dominance, for pain, for rhythm in dance, in music, for intensity, for confusion, for provocation. All sterile, tasteless, colourless, according to the newest way of how not to be human. But we are humans, we are animals and we are not made to be sterile like that. We all desire life, passion, sensuality. If a sensual person enters the room, a person full of vitality, everybody is drawn to that fire. Everybody. Because that’s life, that’s fulfillment and we all want that. We might think something else, think we have to accept the rules of proper behavior and be sterile and polite but the moment such person enters the room we know, we feel what is that we really desire. We desire to be free and express ourselves as what we are. Ultimately, our deep nature is the same: we are animals, we are humans and we want to live and breathe and be happy.
I don’t want to hear that people are different and maybe there are people that desire to be sterile. I strongly disagree, passionately so. I believe that there are many ways to err but there is only one way to do it right. There are many ways to be unhappy but only one way to be happy. We all know when we see a truly happy person, don’t we? A person that laughs a lot, that laughs throwing the head to the back, exposing the throat, it’s a deep laugh of someone free, of someone that is not afraid. A person that enjoys life and inspires people around him/her to enjoy it too. Don’t we all know how to tell if someone is truly happy? And it’s not the momentary happiness that I’m talking about. Not a happiness of winning a prize, getting a present, no, a constant happiness of someone that enjoys to be alive and enjoys both the good and the bad. Because there is no good and bad, there is simply life. It’s a kind of happiness that is difficult to hide and radiates to the outside, it spills over and touches the people that are near.
There is one way to be happy, one truth and there are thousand ways to deceive oneself, thousand ways to become a slave of this and that cultural brainwashing. A slave to feel guilty that you are not doing what everybody (it seems) says you should be doing. Guilty of not being perfect and up to (what seems) to be everybody’s expectations. But is it even true? Do other people really expect us all to be doctors and lawyers? Accountants and consultants in suits? I don’t think so. I see when I take a good look around me, I see that people want to be with people that are interesting, that are doing something interesting to us all, something entertaining and useful. We want people around us to be happy and there are happy doctors and lawyers, of course. They are people that truly wanted to become that, that really felt that was that right thing for them. But there are many others that enter that path because of what they think everybody else wants from them. And that is a shame. Because we don’t want people to be unhappy, we don’t want them to do something without conviction. Who wants to be the patient of a doctor that is forcing himself/herself to be one, that is doing it only for prestige, that treats his/her patients as objects that will help on the path to success? Nobody. We want a doctor that cares about his/her patients, that practices medicine to help people. Simply put, we love and respect a person that is true.
Ultimately we want everybody around us to be happy, to be free. When people are afraid, enslaved and hurting they are bound to do stupid things and hurt others. Or to nullify themselves and become zombies, self-effacing automatons that are not capable of true human interaction, that can ‘talk’ to people only through pre-baked formulae, only along the safe rails of politeness. Politeness used in that way becomes another face of alienation, another way to stay away, to avoid touching the other person, to avoid saying anything provoking, anything that might bring life into the conversation. Life is scary, dangerous, especially if you are in the state of extreme retraction, if you have made your personality and your true nature shrink so much inside of you that you live almost exclusively by the rules imposed from the outside. To the people from the outside interaction with such a person is like talking to somebody who’s dead. Dead, yet smiling, dead, yet talking. When you are like that, interaction with someone alive is very scary. Why? Because you don’t want to face the truth, because facing the truth and seeing the reality for what it is is what you have been avoiding the whole time. Because you have internalized the myths and recipes of your culture and you decided that living according to them can spare you from uncertainty and suffering. It won’t happen but it’s hard to stop believing in that. It’s hard to stop believing in all that reassuring fairy-tales that our culture imposes on us. It’s a siren song and we are enchanted, we keep believing in face of the enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary, we cling to it because it’s supposed to be true and since everybody says it’s true, it must be, right?
Looking for figures of authority to show us the way is one of the causes of this problem. Why do we look up to the other people to tell us what to do? Why do we think they know better? Because they have studied? Because they wear a suit? Because others seem to listen to them too? Everybody is his/her own best expert on how to be happy. We only have to ask ourselves, talk to ourselves. Look carefully into the world that is around us and see and feel what is it that we want. What makes us happy? What makes us miserable, what makes us feel we are alive? What are we afraid of and why?

the smell of fear

Redhead vs blonde. This was the Scottish Universities karate competition. I didn't expect it to be that stressful but when it was my turn to fight I felt my heart pumping and swelling in my throat. I smelled my armpits and my sweat didn't smell the way it does normally - it exuded a very intense pungent odour, the smell of fear, the smell of something very animal. Animals can supposedly smell our fear and as I was sniffing my stinky armpits I realized why - when we are afraid we let them know.

When the fight started something very strange happened to me: I was totally unaware of what was happening around me, of what judges were saying, of all the people watching; only the sound of my name shouted by my friends could pierce that wall, they were calling me back to reality, they were calling me to wake me up. It was the strangest sensation to be lost to your body, to be lost to your animal side in this way. I only realized that afterwards, I realized how much the focus of my attention had narrowed. I remember reading about tunnel vision: people describe the sensation of their visual field narrowing in the throes of intense physical fight. For this moment they lose control of reality, they only see the person they're fighting with.

It happened to me and I lost because if you lose your calm and you're fighting against someone who didn't (and who knows what he or she is doing), you will lose. It was fascinating for me to realize that and to see that I could be taken over by emotions in such a overpowering way.

more photos from the competition

press your tongue against the heaven of your mouth

This is the story of how I bought a mouthguard and how it made me think about the history of language and thought. On a beautiful sunny day and I went for lunch and swung by a sports shop and got one. Back at home I started reading the instructions on the package. I read the one in English first:

Bring water to a boil. Remove water from heat source. Place mouthguard in the water for 12 seconds (see picture).

After that you have to put the mouth guard in and let it adjust to the shape of your teeth. In that bit it says:

Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

and in Spanish:

Empuje la lengua contra el cielo de la boca.

Cielo de la boca! Roof of the mouth! Only that 'cielo' doesn't mean roof, it means heaven. Heaven of the mouth. The firmament of your mouth.

Of course, heaven was something quite different before. It was the roof of our world, a solid surface encrusted with stars, a protective shell that enveloped our planet and gave the sun and the moon a place to run around and around again and come back on the other side.


from some random website:

Until about the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) [See biography], Christian scholars understood the firmament of the Bible as depicting the rigid sky, which revolved around the earth once each day, carrying along all the stars. This assumed motion of the sky reflected the common-sense notion that the earth was stationary. For the stars to move in a manner consistent with observation, they had to be held fixed in their relative positions. The stars seemed to trace partial circles around the poles each night. Their movements appeared exactly as if they were fixed on the underside of a great revolving dome, or the inner surface of a sphere. This belief in a rigid sphere of heaven gave rise to the expression "the sphere of the fixed stars."

The planetary motions did not conform to this explanation, and it was the detailed study of the orbits of the planets by Johannes Kepler, his discovery of the elliptical form of the orbit of Mars, and Newton's interpretation of Kepler's discoveries, which led to the recognition of the law of gravity, and the abandonment of the idea of a rigid rotating firmament.

Cortazar in ecstasy

This is Julio Cortazar. I wanted to show you a piece of his writing that is a good example of what ecstasy means, what it looks like when you have words flow through you. It's enough to look at his face to understand that this man was not afraid to live.

If you don't understand Spanish try reading it anyway, see if you can find the rhythm, feel the waves rock you from side to side, see how he keeps on repeating the same words over and over again, over and over again, see how the stream of words takes you in, envelops you. I imagine this gives you a taste of how he felt writing this. It's not only the informational value of the words, it's the rhythm and structure of the whole piece that conveys something more than the story he's describing. See if you can feel it.

Julio Cortázar, Rayuela, cap. 7.

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si
saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me hasta
cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca
que deseo la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida
entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mi para dibujarla con mi mano en
tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu
boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.

Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez mas de cerca y entonces jugamos al
cíclope, nos miramos cada vez mas de cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan
entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las
bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando
apenas la lengua en los dientes, Jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado
va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan
hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras
nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de
movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y
si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa
instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta
madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mi como una luna en el agua.


for more of Cortazar

ecstasy

[click on the image to see a larger version]

Ecstasy comes from Greek and means standing out of yourself, coming out of your body. Letting go of controlling everything in an intellectual way and letting your body be possessed by music, singing, writing, dancing. It's letting yourself BECOME what you are doing, letting go and emptying your body to merge with music, to let words flow through you, to let you voice fill you and the space around you, surrender totally and unconditionally.

Only if you are able to surrender, if you are not afraid to be possessed, engulfed, devoured, if you are not afraid t give up your identity, your personality, become a nobody, a mere instrument, an object, only then you will achieve ecstasy. You cannot make a decision to enter into that state, you cannot force it, plan it. It's in the sweet vulnerability of surrender, it's in letting down your guard, exposing your delicate underbelly of emotions that it can come to you. It's the fearless, the passionate, the mad that will be granted ecstasy.