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October 14th, 2008 - Tuesday
The Christ
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The trouble with oceans is they don’t take up enough room in your life to match their majesty. The ocean that bathes the piece of land you’ve settled in is a supporting character at best in the minor play that is your life.
A move changes things, though. The moment you feel uprooted, everything that seemed permanent proves taken for granted.
The Pacific felt permanent to me for over seven years. A silent partner, a silent witness. And only at the very end of that era, did it occur to me to spend a cloudy November afternoon gazing at it.
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We can all look.
Gaze.
Glance.
Glare.
Peek.
Peer.
Ogle.
Scan.
Squint.
We can all stare, convey different emotions while doing it, many at a time or pick one and give it room to take center stage, breathe out on its own. Accompanied by speech or spotlighted by silence. Clive Owen has always stared in a way that set him apart. I’ve always chalked it up to extra intensity but a few nights ago while watching The International I thought I spotted something, a small detail that just might be the secret to his stare, the ingredient that makes it unique and which has suddenly made me want to go back and watch each one of his films again. He doesn’t just stare defiantly, he doesn’t just linger confidently. He follows once eye contact is broken.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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It seems there’s love behind everything. Love shaped to resemble anything you can think of. And all too often, love made out to be the prize. I distrust anything and everything that makes love out to be immaculate and a source of endless joy.
Damien Rice first came to my attention in a dark screening room as an unfamiliar voice delivering a haunting song, with lyrics that sounded personal and required a context to be understood. The context on that particular rainy afternoon was the inherent complexity of human entanglements.
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October 14th, 2008 - Tuesday
The Christ
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She enters the painted bedroom with a new book and announces the title.
‘No books now, Hana.’
She looks at him. He has, even now, she thinks, beautiful eyes. Everything occurs there, in that grey stare out of his darkness. There is a sense of numerous gazes that flicker onto her for a moment, then shift away like a lighthouse.
‘No more books. Just give me the Herodotus.’
She puts the thick, soiled book into his hands.
‘I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. ‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history - how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love… How old did you say you were?’
‘Twenty.’
‘I was much older when I fell in love.’
Hana pauses. ‘Who was she?’
But his eyes are away from her now.
(The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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October 14th, 2008 - Tuesday
The Christ
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I had a flute I was forced to play when I was that age myself. Mine was a dark shade of brown instead of that ivory. The brown of my eyes away from sunlight and just a hint of that same ivory right where my name was carved on its surface. A measure of possessiveness in that carving, I can now see, a measure of selfishness, and also a touch of girlishness in that handwriting script. All minor differences in the context of the very dejavu-ish image of this boy and his flute. The one screaming difference was his absolute determination to do what had to be done in spite of the audience in attendance - the worst kind of audience, in fact. One that’s physically there but acts like it doesn’t want to be bothered, one that’s in its own bubble and seems to like it just fine that way. The kind of audience that is no audience at all but rather a bunch of gloomy-faced individuals sharing space for no higher purpose than to get to where they’re headed - simply immersed collectively in the common stretch of their routine and made temporarily lifeless by it.
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I found myself singing Born to Run in the shower today. The 1988 accoustic version performed in Los Angeles, which has always been to me the quintessential version of that song. The one that allowed me to really listen to the lyrics and get carried away by the sadness and the hunger they add up to. A while back I wrote about this dichotomy between music and lyrics that can sometimes detract from a song, calling ‘the steering clear of such a dichotomy’… The DR Effect. It is so present here. Another sad boy with a guitar (and harmonica), no doubt. (According to wikipedia, Irish ancestry and all :D)
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…happily spreading insanity wherever they go…
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Photos by Iris Watts Hirideyo.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Life is lost to us on a daily basis. Microscopic slivers of it, unnoticeably shaven off. Millimeters of width sanded into a miniature heap of grains. This and that opportunity. A given person, a broken tie, a faithful friend… all bits of this we call life - here one day and gone the next. The shavings pile up daily… hourly… relentlessly while we turn a blind eye choosing to follow some distraction instead. The losses add up slowly but surely towards the day they won’t take anything less than grief for a reaction. Today is such a day.
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It arrives and departs as often as flights on a tarmac but with longer intervals. I’m living in one of those intervals - lying on my stomach just off that figurative runway, on the cool grass, knees bent, legs defiant of gravity and guided by choice, feet crossed and free, chin propped up by loose fists. Girlish and carefree. Waiting for the next landing to put me back in the moment that comes and goes. The feeling behind… inside… condensed within the moment that comes and goes. That feeling that is among the clouds one minute, touching the ground the next. That feeling that goes from hazy thought to hard fact, just like that and changes everything.
It used to be ‘I feel alone’ lurking gloomily inside that moment. And then it morphed into ‘I am alone in the world’ - the greater truth. It has stuffed my chest the way only potatoes or farofa chowed down greedily have managed to. It’s made breathing a struggle and thoughts ineluctable. And suddenly it became just a truth. A bearable truth. A quiet enough roommate. A palatable notion. A dream from which you wake or a life from which you doze off. A magic pair of glasses that bestow on you the super power of objective vision with which to view the trail left behind, that slideshow of memories that exacts a (tearful) price but hesitates to name a currency.
Most people seem to have an easier time putting the puzzle of their lives together, finding appropriate pieces for the appropriate holes and moving towards a recognizable image of some kind - be it a landscape or an abstract painting. I fall short of qualifying to join them. And especially short of succeeding in steering myself. I wait just off that figurative runway instead.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Click here to see part one of ‘Louca de Fotos’ (Urca)
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This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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All photos by Iris W. Hirideyo.
Click here to see part two of ‘Louca de Fotos’ (Urca)
For other Christ shots click here, here, here and here.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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‘She’ hitched a ride with the wind, landed on my window ledge and hung out long enough for me to take this shot…
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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The following is a paraphrased excerpt from a childish exchange Marcio and I had on Friday that made it clear to me you can NEVER hope to win a confrontation with a secretary.
Me: So, you know what to do, right? (asking for the thousandth time)
Marcio: If you say that one more time, I’ll give her your phone number.
Me: If you give her my phone number, I’ll take all your pictures off my blog.
Marcio: If you take my pictures off your blog, I’ll enroll in your class just to annoy you.
Me: If you enroll in my class, I’ll fail you.
Marcio: (triumphantly pointing at the computer) I’ll pass myself.
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