I swiped this picture from my brother's FB feed. My Mom getting ready to tear into a Frisch's Big Boy.
Here's a picture that the excellent Daria sent along. I sent it along to my siblings with the comment, "I'm sure she's talking smack and I'm just smiling innocently." My sister Beth responded: "You bear no innocence. Ever." I suspect that wins the Internet for the day.
Just another random picture from July's Portugal trip. Here's the window in the upstairs bedroom, where we slept until the unrelenting heat forced us downstairs.
Yesterday the excellent Dasha (aka Daria), the daughter of my dear friends Steve and Kerry, shared some of the pictures she took of the wedding. Here's one I love of me giving my friend (and, as we know, little sister) Cyndi a bear hug at the wedding.
I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life. My worst sorrows have evaporated when I've opened the window on to the street of my dreams and forgotten myself in what I saw there.
I've never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I've always belonged to what isn't' where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn't mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. . . .
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 92
This passage brings up so many memories and so many emotions. One of the most obvious is my Dad famous/infamous judgment that I "was never there" when I was growing up. He didn't mean physically, but rather intellectually or maybe emotionally. In that he's probably correct. I was always someplace else, lost in a dream. It meant that I didn't complain much or involve myself in active confrontation, but it also meant that I didn't pay that much attention to what was happening around me in the family. Sadly, it also tends to explain why I'm not "there" now.
Eventually I'll carve off time to upload a lengthy post, including too many pictures, of the graineries that saw in Lindoso and Saojo. This is not a particularly good picture (in the midst of focusing in the picture ended up a bit fuzzy - I need to check out one of the versions on my camera) but it gives a sense of the generally creepy nature of walking around the graineries at night (and also why I did it every night).
Where is God, even if he doesn't exist? I want to pray and to weep, to repent of crimes I didn't commit, to enjoy the feelings of forgiveness like a caress that's more than maternal.
A lap in which to weep, but a huge a huge and shapeless lap, spacious like a summer evening, and yet cosy, warm, feminine, next to a fireplace . . . To be able to weep in that lap over inconceivable things, failures I can't remember, poignant things that don't exist, and huge shuddering doubts concerning I don't know what future . . .
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 88
On my recent trip to Indiana I made my way out to Moores Hill to visit my mother's grave, as I do every time I make it back to that part of the universe. It was a weird visit because my father went with me (they were divorced something like twenty-five years before her death). I left him in the car and spent some quiet time with my mom, which ended up as a quite emotional experience. It was emotional in a good way because I was telling her that I just got married this summer and that I was happy, and that she didn't have to worry about me. After that I got back in the car and my dad almost immediately began to trash her, going over the same endless rehash of her alcoholism and how hard it was on him; this is very typical of him, and it's one of my regrets that I wasn't smarter or more emotionally advanced enough to see how he was separating us from her when we were growing up, which only made it worse, of course. It's all grown worse as he's passed into his MAGA phase, and, as people often point out, the cruelty is the point. In this instance he had the advantage of being old and increasingly infirm because I think if he were younger and more fit I would have pulled over the car and a row would have ensued (which is a rare for me; I think I've yelled at him exactly once in my entire life). Essentially, this was not the time to be trashing my mother. Of course, here's the thing: she wasn't really that supportive presence that Pessoa describes above. She was, as I said when I spoke at her funeral, "complicated." As I've often joked (or, well, not really joked), if I had grown up with my friend Dave's mom I'd be a much saner person. So, what I think I miss is the dream of a mother. It makes perfect sense that I've found such happiness in the cabin here in the woods with a loving, supportive, nurturing woman (an almost Freudian/Campbellian womb).
Seriously, how much grilled octopus can one man eat? I almost discovered the answer to that question this summer in Portugal.
I have nothing profound to add by way of commentary to this picture I snapped of a winding street in Porto, other than I'd love to be there right now.
Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself. . .
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 329
It's funny how a write like Pessoa, who can can come off as so isolated (and appearing to desire even more isolation) and unfeeling (and almost celebrating that unfeeling) can also write a passage which also a tremendous lament for that isolation and lack of feeling. I'm only 230 pages into the 1000 page biography of Pessoa by Zenith, so maybe I'll have a better answer for this question soon. Is it simply because these are supposed to be the words of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's better-known heteronyms, and allegedly not those of Pessoa himself, that allows for this disconnection? Or, is it simply that all of us are this emotionally disjointed?
If you're wondering how long it takes postcards to get from Soajo, Portugal to the US the answer is seven weeks, which I'm blaming on the US postal service and not the Portuguese.
