Our Secret Puppet

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We are all born with our own puppet, a fellow of flesh to shadow our steps in life – we always hold its hand as we walk along the track of time.
I have often longed to be rid of it. The burden of its beating heart too heavy to drag along.
I have often dreamt of drowning it when no one was looking.
I often look at the puppets Others were given, all radiant and rich with life, and I feel jealous.

We have tried to mimic them, my puppet and I. This was no play for us.
We often huddle together in front of windows. We often watch the world whirl by.
When my puppet shakes in my arms, I grow angry. I grow sorrowful.
We exist as we are. This is our lullaby. Our new song.
We do not want to lie anymore. We exist as we are.
No conventions, no expectations. We are outcasts by nature:
The pain is familiar. No tears flow anymore.
We won’t obey their laws.
We sit in the margins, loving from afar
eyes wide with longing, too wise to hope,
we sit and dream, me and this puppet I call Myself.

Beauteous

This beauty here is the Steingraeber 168, the king of small grand pianos, whom I met yesterday in Paris. I had never played on as fine an instrument as this one before and it was love at first touch.

The sound, the feel of it, by Chopin, it's incredible! This piano dances along with the pianist in all the paths and byways of inspiration. With such a marvel under your fingers, you cannot feel but creative.

Just one small snag of five numbers: 47 700 €.

I want, I want, I want! I calculated that I could have it in...20 years. Now I just have to save, save, save...or wait until I win the loto.

As the saleswoman said, we have the right to dream, right?

At the moment, I'm dreaming in C sharp minor.

Onwards

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I stopped and sat on a bench. Looked at the sky, and out of the blue came the startling thought: I need help.
I waited, but no angel came. So I rose. I left.

Holiday List

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The pile of books to be read during the holidays is threatening to compete with ceiling-scrapers. There's nothing like a list to evaluate the impossibility of a task.

Books in:
-English:
How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker (565p)
Towards a Cognitive Semantics, vol. II, Leonard Talmy (482p)
The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco (353p)
Rethinking Innateness, Bates and al. (396p)
Icelandic, grammar, texts, glossary, Stefán Einarsson (293p)
Hyperion, Dan Simmons, (473p) - A novel, yes. These are supposed to be holidays.

- German:
Der Tod in Venedig, Thomas Mann, (139p) ("Death in Venice")
Ungarisch ohne Mühe, Assimil

- Icelandic:
Sumarljós og svo kemur nóttinn, Jón Kalman Stefánsson (214p) ("Summerlight, then comes the night")

- French:
Le hongrois dans la typologie des langues, Anna Sorés ("Hungarian in language typology")

- Hungarian:
A kis herceg, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ("the Little Prince")

- Latin:
De origine et situ germanorum, Cornelius Tacitus (36p) ("germania")

- Musical scores:
Variations études, Thierry Escaich (contemporary music)
Impromtu 4 op.90, Franz Schubert
Ma mère l'oie, Maurice Ravel
Sonata in c KV 457, Mozart
Sonata in C KV 545, Mozart

To this should be added:
- writing a ten-page review of Talmy's book
- working on my Master's Mémoire
- translating a few pages into French and English
- preparing the lessons for my students
- (perhaps) meeting friends, sleeping, eating

Thoroughly impossible. No need to mention that 70% of this list are not required by Uni or Work. I hope my failure will be a warning to other dragonflies who can't help visiting all flowers at once.

Joyeux Noël à tous !

Joyfully,

Dragonfly-en-chef

"Jejuri", by Arun Kolatkar

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To patch up my sluggish memory and to keep in touch with the different languages I'm learning, I have decided to learn bits of poetry by heart.
Today was dedicated to English, but which poet to choose ? Keats, Plath, Eliot ? As I stood pondering in front of my wardrobe (which happens to be crammed with books), my eyes fell on a thin book by the Indian poet Arun Kolatkar : Jejuri.

This sequence of poems presents the persona's pilgrimage to the holy place of Jejuri, yet the persona is more a flaneur than a devotee, which makes for a unique vision of the temples.
One poem focuses on a door and is called..."The Door".
The definite article elevates the door, a usually prosaic and unnoticeable item, to the rank of a universally known object. Moreover, as the door of a temple is what separates the profane world outside and the divine space of the holy site, a tone of awe and devotion is called for.

The Door

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A prophet half brought down

from the cross.

A dangling martyr.

.

Since one hinge broke

the heavy medieval door

hangs on one hinge alone.

.

One corner drags in dust on the road.

The other knocks

against the high treshold.

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Like a memory that gets only sharper

with the passage of time,

the grain stands out on the wood

.

as graphic in detail

as a flayed man of muscles who can not find

his way back to an anatomy book

.

and is leaning against

any old doorway to sober up

like the local drunk.

.

Hell with the hinge and damn the jamb.

The door would have walked out

long long ago

.

if it weren't for

that pair of shorts

left to dry upon its shoulders.

As the reader can see, the grotesque and burlesque have superseded the expected religious tone : right from the first stanza, the imagery is grisly and comic. The prophet is "dangling" like a puppet on its strings, and he is "half brought down from the cross", as if people decided they didn't want to finish the job after all. The door, as a fallen prophet forsaken by his followers, is ridiculous. The vivid imagery is present throughout the poem and culminates with the "flayed man of muscles", and the final image of the pair of shorts.
Arun Kolatkar often has very stricking punch lines, or rather, punch images, and the one in "The Door" is one of my favorites in Jejuri.

Such is the way of creatures

A tiny life out of the egg

-little eyes, little fins -

curious spark among the grass

like a seed full of morrows

ground to ashes

Never to grow, never to be,

the little eyes, the little fins,

all gone to early, too early

dust.

Fare thee well, little Fitzy. Life is never fair, otherwise, your young heart would not have been silenced so early.

Lost forever, the mystery of your tiny face.

Chopin Week

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A piece like Chopin's first ballad, you can't play it : you must live it.

Empty the carverns of your being and breathe, breathe the rhythm of the melody.
Break the stiff window pane stuck through your head.
Open the score, brush the self away.
Cleanse the mind from the network of thoughts skating on its surface : only the music matters.
Each note must be felt, each note must be sung. A body is but a string of flesh vibrating and pulsating, ebbing and flowing with the breath, the breath of the melody.

When I play next Saturday, I must rise and leave my self on the bench, carefully folded like a clean handkerchief. I will rise and ripple with panic, I will rise with pounding heart and cotton-feet. But when I sit and touch the piano, I will be a blank flag flapping for one wind, only one wind : the crystal breath of Chopin's ballad.

Fits like a glove/Atrociously Overcooked

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WONK (slang) n.
1.
a student who spends much time studying and has little or no social life; grind.
2.
a stupid, boring, or unattractive person.
3.
a person who studies a subject or issue in an excessively assiduous and thorough manner: a policy wonk.

Replace "studying" with "stuck in Jam", and what do you get ?

It's like looking into a mirror. The impossible meeting of one lonely word and the person it describes best !
Ok, I'm (slightly...) exagerating. Remember the urge to add spices to the Pickle of your story ? That's what's happening in this post : you're in the middle of a chutnification process, with too much self-loathing sauce (in my factory, there is only that kind left for the moment : the delivery boy is late again).
What label should I put on this jar ?

WONK CHUTNEY

How my grandfather came to Lebanon

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Magic carpets always were fashionable in the Middle-East, be it in the days of King Salomon or nowadays. You just have to watch my mother lovingly brush her carpet or shout if any of the boys step on it with a dirty sock to know it is true. Believe don't believe I know of a carpet which saved a boy's life.

Once upon a time, in Turkey, there was a village and there was a Chaldean mayor and his son Joseph. These were dark days, and Muslims killed the mayor. Joseph burried the horror and the pain of this day deep inside him, behaved as if nothing had happened.
Until his school organized an outing. In Joseph's class, there was a boy who was a Pacha's son. This day, all the anger gushed to the surface, and Joseph knew the time had come to avenge his father ; he throttled the Pacha's boy.
News travelled fast, as they always do. Joseph was denounced. To save him, his mother decided to flee. In the living room, the carpet seemed to wink up at her.
The former mayor's wife fetched a donkey, loaded it with a rolled carpet inside which a boy lay huddled and hidden, and set off. Southwards she went, for weeks and weeks she went south.
Nobody questioned her at the frontiers : just an old woman, a donkey, and a carpet.
And that is how she smuggled her son into Lebanon, under the protection of the family's magic carpet.
Like a caterpillar out of its cocoon, Joseph emerged from the carpet into a new land, a new life.
I don't know what happened to the carpet after this, but I like to imagine it safely rolled in some attic, ready to fly with another passenger.

Crazy Lebanese

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Languages are funny clowns : they have universal principles, but they all put so different make-ups on their faces.
I was thinking about Lebanese the other day. This language is related to Arabic, spoken in Lebanon, and it's my mother tongue along with French. But French I studied at school and used every day, whereas Lebanese, I spoke and heard without reflecting on it. These days I've been looking at it more closely, and I discovered funny things about it.
Let's give a sample, translated word for word.
"Hallo Mum, how in-you ?"
"Fine. Where brother-yours ?"
"Went football match. Me hungry. Me want food. In our home food ?"
"Yes, in our home. In my home potatoes and taboule."

Have you noticed there is no verb "to be" ? What about the verb "to have" ? Can you find it in the sample ? I've always thought there was a verb "to have" in Lebanese, because I knew how to express possession, but I was mistaken : there is no verb "have". Instead, Lebanese uses an adverbial group :
hande : in-my-home = I have
handic : in-your(fem.)-home = you(girl) have
handac : in-your(masc)-home =you(boy) have
handa : in-her-home = she has
And so on.
So weird : I've always thought I was using the verbs "to be" and "to have" when I spoke Lebanese, but I wasn't, and I didn't even know it.

I love Lebanese idiomatic expressions. This language is stuffed with images. Like :
"Your blood's so heavy !" = You're annoying me.
"You're taking the soul out of me" = You're annoying me.
"His face is upside-down" = He's annoyed.
"He took a face" = He's cheeky.
"He's making his face white" = He's flattering you.
"Ya my uncle !" = gosh.
"Ya blindness !" = damn.
"May he send you [over there] !" (yib'atlac) = go to hell !
My grandmother grew up in Syria, so she sprinkles her talk with Syrian expressions. To ask "How are you ?", she says "your corner ?" - Arabic languages are very concise as you can notice.
When someones coughs, you pat him on the back and say "Smala !" (meaning "in God's name!"). When you see a healthy babe, a very intelligent child or a beautiful person, you can also say "smala".

My father's language is interesting : it's a mix of French and Lebanese. The definite article in Lebanese is "al". In French, for"glasses" we say "des lunettes". What does my dad say ? "Des al-lunettes". *grins*

Crazy languages. Crazy Lebanese. Crazy country - 150 years of troubles, of robot speech and funny idioms and delicious cuisine and Lebanese way of thinking. Let's hope all won't be lost. Lebanese are a very stubborn - they just have to be so about peace. Ya lebnaniye, ma lesim tet'aatalo !

Ya hamme, ana johane ! Ya uncle, me hungry ! *winks*

The Pickles of Memory

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What is writing if not an act of pickling ?
Words are dipped in ink and spread on flat jars called pages. They are labelled, stored in books and put on shelves. And whenever you want, you can open them and taste the flavours of past memories, forever preserved on sheets of paper - or almost : for pickling isn't an exact science. Compare tomatoes and pickled tomatoes : they aren't completely alike. Pickling alters memories, distorts history, changes fruits, especially if you like your pickles spicy.
Pickles are 'licious, but they appear more like agents of metamorphosis than of preservation. And like pickles, like history.
We are all reconstructing our own history, pickling our stories, and we end up with a pickled, spicy self on the shelf of our minds. Who are we, what are we ? What's our (his)story ? Let us dine pickles together.
Nobody described the process of pickling ("chutnification") better than Salman Rushdie in Midnight's Children, a novel in which the narrator ends up running a pickle factory. The chapters are the jars, and Saleem fills them with his story. Thoughts and emotions keep seeping into food, especially chutney. Food becomes the stuff of life, the matter of history.
Here's a quote from the last pages :

To pickle is to give immortality, after all : fish,
vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a
slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely ? The art is to
change the flavor in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty* jars
and a jar) to give it shape and form - that is to say, meaning. (I have
mentioned my fear of absurdity.)
One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of
history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be
overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be
possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of
truth...

*the novel has thirty chapters. The remaining jar is for the ending, but Saleem doesn't quite know how to end his story at this point.

What does your story taste like ?