carajo

Whenever I read a new book I claim that it is my new favorite book. It usually is, too.

But this book really IS my new favorite book, and it stands apart from all of those other new favorite books.

Carlos Eire, am I myopic and naive to want to be you, or something like you...to see the world the way you see it? To live in Havana, or shall i say Habana, in 1959...even with Castro?

Yes, perhaps it is a bit twisted of me to wish that upon myself. But I am envious. I really am. And I compare my life to yours...my ordinary, white, suburban, middle-class life. Even the phrase "white, surbuban, middle-class life" is a white, suburban, middle-class phrase. Why can't I transcend my upbringing? Why can't I change my roots? That's the wrong question...why can't I absorb my roots, my childhood, my homeland? Why don't I feel comfortable calling America my homeland? And I supposedly have more: more education, more Christian principles, more this, more that. Why do I eschew it? Why do i want less? Or is it more??

It's not just the superficial. Sure, one can make the blaringly obvious comparison: I grew up in the Midwest in an age of PBS and backyard fences. You grew up in a tropical paradise in an age of paradoxical unbridled liberty...despite Castro. You had the ocean, that dark abyss that you write about, and recklessness and firecrackers and iguanas. Tangerine sunsets, lo exotico, and ciruela, furtabomba, and guanabana icecream. Your father was Louis the Fifteenth reincarnated, and your mother was Marie Antoinette.

So before looking past the superficial, I must confess that I long for that. Long isn't a good enough word. Anhelo para todo que es tuyo. I I yearn for all that is yours. #%$ARGH%#!&*$%# Culo, cono, hijo de puta, carajo. Culo, culo, culo feo. spanish explitives emitted by a tropical parrot... I want to be that parrot. because it gets to speak the language...it gets to KNOW the language, the culture. and it's a FREAKING BIRD! I really do think in Spanish at times...not to the extent that I did in Spain. Reading this book has been a trip back to Sevilla, but I am struck by so much MORE anhelo and longing and pain...I had something...I had Spain, todo que es espanol, for two glorious months, and now I have lost it. I don't wish to merely regain it though; I wish to be defined by it. and that's why I'm sad...because it can never be my native tongue. I love Spanish...the vowels, the accents, the smooth cadence of the lengauje cuando se habla como se canta. I wish I had that culture shaping my identiy; I wish that from birth I could have soaked all that is Spanish in my skin. The paella, the palms, the history, the beauty, even the tragedy. No, all I have is...America. new. democracy. the best country in the world. (sighs).

I want to say that I don't believe that wholeheartedly. I don't. But i feel obliged to say it. But i really don't. Yes, there are so many good and comfortable things about America, but that is just the problem. Where are the risks, the brushes with death, with life, the dramatic hues of experience? Where is the rich history and the culture and beautiful language? America is nice, but America is not beautiful. America is good, but America is not enthralling. America is all right, but it is not embued with that rich complexity. Rica. Hermosa. Llena de Pasion. Exotica. America no es eso.

And that's where i get stuck, lost in my own emotion...my own lack of emotion, rather. Carlos Eire, you had all that I want in Cuba. And you KNEW you had it...you are Cuban, you are shaped to the core by your country, your language, your history. The spirit of Cuba is the Cuba in you...it IS you. Hahaha, Courtney is being so dramatic and poetic you all think...but for Jesus. H. Christ de los culos I'm not! I read about beauty and tragedy and history and culture and life and death and sadness and lenguage y tristeza y el mundo de experienca rica. I read about it...it's so real or else all creative authors are just fucked up and deceiving us all. Why do i face criticism for wanting that richness? even the sadness? yes, i want the tragedy...because it's more interesting than my own life.

Show yourself to me
and let your gaze and your beauty kill me;
for the wound
of love,it can't be healed
save by your being here"
--Saint Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Carlos Eire in Waiting for Snow in Havana.

oh, there is so much more. Carlos Eire, I both admire you and envy you with endless celos for your thoughts. your perception, your understanding, your wrestling with the hardships of life itself and then the way you work out your salvation on paper with pen and spanish memories. you can write because you can feel. i want to feel. i want to experience such attachment to my homeland or my first love or my last love or my grandmother or my backyard. and i cry for you...i hurt for you because you have lost Cuba. you had paradise...and then it was seized from you in the name of "equality" by that tiny speck that squashed your home, your estate, your parents, your relatives, your homeland, your soul with his big fat muddy boot. fuck castro.

again, i repeat, culo culo culo feo. cono cojones carajo hijo de puta.

Is it stupid of me to want that unnumbered chapter? that vault of oblivion ? Those memories that are ugly as hell itself? argh why do i have to romanticize everything? you feel...you feel so much and it shows in your writing. you write, "Some chapters just can't be numbered. Not at all. I'm sure you have chapters like that in your life. ...You can't assign numbers to these chapters. Not even zero. Not even a zero ringed with thorns. You can't write them the same way as all the others. They can't look the same either. No. If you were to write them, you could only begin to do it at 2:30 a.m. after a horrible day."

Maybe i just need to dig deeper. Maybe i really am capable of unlocking the vault of emotion buried within my calloused heart. maybe i really am capable of feeling life so richly, albeit painfully. so real-ly. unadulterated.

It's just that the life that Carlos Eire writes of is so...paradoxical. At times I don't believe him...it's just a magical pardise and he writes with magical realism. Other times i think he's writing about hell itself. ANd then he's funny...so satirical. he paints pictures of incongruity and hilarity...juxtaposed with his seven proofs for the existence of God...all written with the urgency of a confession. It's not one thing or another, but many things and all things. Like those crazy holograms. Life is a hologram.

And that's what I liked...he showed everything, expressed every emotion, invoked every emotion in his readers...and it wasn't cheezy or unbelievable, even though it was unbelievable.

you won't understand unless you read it. so read it, and tell me if i'm crazy.

Estas despierto, hijo. Mas despierto que nunca.