Evanston: fragile
Evanston: fragile
I bought some music from iTunes last evening, something I haven’t done for a while because my 64 GB iTouch, whose true capacity is 58.1 GB, has been full. Deleting movies and music I seldom listen to freed 8 GB.
The albums are both in Portuguese, which I don’t speak, but whose seafarers and music I admire: MOMENTOS by Dulce Pontes and MOVIMENTO by Madredeus.
Among the books I’ve started to write, but will never finish, unless I became an invalid and can live only in my imagination, is a novel, THE PORTUGUESE MOMENT, about the single generation in the early 16th Century when the tiny Portuguese nation became “First in all Oceans,” as viewed from the life of the poet of that explosion of exploration and exploitation, Luis Camoes.
Here is the first page:
“Now I have heard everything. I had already seen everything, or, since Ceuta, half-seen everything; and now I have heard everything. Obviously there is nothing left to do but die.”
The words brought me to an abrupt halt. I was walking past the Praca Luis de Camoes in Lisbon. No one was nearby. The closest was a man wearing a white polo shirt, jeans, and Nike jogging shoes, sitting on one of the green slatted wood benches bordering the sterile open space around the central statue of the poet in the Chaido district. But I heard the words clearly, as though spoken by someone standing right beside me, and, most disconcertingly, they were my words: the opening sentences of a long abandoned novel I had tried to write about Camoes.
A woman bumped me with a shopping bag. A trolley rattled past. I shook myself and thought: you are losing your mind, old man—I would be sixty in a few months—and resumed walking. As soon as I did the words began again. “Now I have heard everything. I had already seen..” My head turned. I suppose wildly. I thought I saw lips moving on the man on the park bench, though he was sitting a good twenty yards away. I walked toward him. Two steps away I heard, “but die.” And he looked up at me and smiled.
At a glance he was short, no taller than 5’3” or 5’4”, stocky, well-muscled, and about ten years younger than I.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“I’m practicing my lines.” He spoke English with a British accent.
“But those are my words.”
“You put them in my mouth, so now they are mine.”
The setting is the present. Or was eleven years ago. The man is Luis Camoes himself, or his ghost, who spends the evening in a bar, telling me his story. I had forgotten that a war injury left him blind in one eye.
He returned to Portugal, after having spent most of his adult life in Portuguese colonies in India and China, a few years before King Sebastian led the nation into a disastrous defeat in present day Morocco and the country fell under Spanish rule for decades.
Camoes is said to have said, “I returned not only to die in my country, but with it.”
All that is a long aside, for what I intended to write about is Sting’s song, “Fragile,” of which I have two renditions--neither his: one sung by Holly Cole on the guitarist, Jesse Cook’s album, VERTIGO; and the other by Chico and the Gypsies--which I happened across yesterday.
While I like the song, I’ve always taken exception to the lyrics, “Less we forget how fragile we are” repeated several times; and “That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could.”
Having just learned that Sting wrote the song as tribute to an American civil engineer who was killed by Contras in Nicaragua, the words may make more sense. But my reading of history is that much has come from violence and probably always will.
And even now, when my body is somewhat betraying me, I don’t think we are fragile at all. We, like everything that has survived, are tough. We are not flimsy or easily broken or delicate. And although the word is almost invariably used to describe ecosystems, they aren’t either. What is, is strong.
This is not to say that I don’t think we are destroying the planet, I do. See “Last Born.”
What we do have are narrow parameters and balances in which we can survive. Deprive the brain of oxygen for a few minutes; add or subtract minute quantities of chemicals in the body; and we can’t exist.
Life, I wrote thirty years ago, when CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE pitch-poled west of Fiji, can change with the passing of a single wave.
I have since learned that life can change, too, with a single eye-drop.
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I am still itching, but less so.
The weather is perfect.
If I can stop scratching long enough, GANNET sails this weekend.
Thursday, May 17, 2012