Autor: sylvia

ee cummings

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

pero aún así, no apresuro nada. me detengo. observo. escucho. leo.  escribir para no escribir. porque ha sido un año muy rompe-pelotas y, al mismo tiempo, un año de lecciones indispensables.

tengo muchas ideas.

tengo tiempo.

nada me urge. nada.

They say that when you go blind your other senses become magnified. In Lina Meruane’s Seeing Red  (Deep Vellum 2016), it is not the senses, but the emotions of the protagonist that become magnified. Lina—yes, that is her name—is a writer who suffers from an unusual disorder in her eyes that leads to a bleeding that hollows her mind and her everyday life. This story is based on the author’s own sight issues, which makes Seeing Red a piece of auto-fiction, but to be honest, I prefer to call it a decided attempt of writing while blind. Odd as it sounds, it is precisely this blindness, of both the author and the protagonist, what makes Seeing Red such a vivid tale:

Time was speeding up. A shower. A brushing of teeth. A drying of the face. Full suitcases that exhale on closing. A Dominican taxi ordered by telephone and the subsequent arrival of a taxi that would be anything but yellow. The driver, who spoke a Caribbean Spanish, barely said a word to us, turned up the radio and muzzled us with a merengue that could have been bachata. My head already set off on its own trip, and only the shell of my body remained, disregarded in the backseat.

The reader will walk on these pages as if blind, surrounded by sharp objects that inflict pain, nostalgia, loneliness. Seeing Red is not only a story about becoming blind, it is a story about fear, trust, and the limits of love. Lina walks “by touch” through the streets of the New York and Santiago de Chile, but also through the aisles and rooms of what used to be known and remembered: her eyes, her passion, her writing.

Because as the world went black, everything that belonged to it was also left in the dark. Now there were voices that completed the unseen or that read to me tirelessly. I could fast forward or rewind them, interrupt them. Listening to borrowed novels suspended the anguish of not being able to write, it kept me from stopping to think about what I wasn´t writing, about what I would never write.

Lina is helpless, everything that surrounds her “seems to be a crowd of sound all elbowing and shoving.” She deals with this new dark-reddened world with her fingertips in an attempt to not be “dead weight” on her lover as she once was on her brother. It is precisely to Ignacio, her lover, that sometimes this story is addressed to, but ultimately it is for her that she chronicles this loss, even though she has decided to stop writing, because as her friend Raquel says, “you don’t write, she said, with just your eyes and your hands.”

Lina, the character, writes about the blindness of love, about the holes, the flashes, the surgeries, about what it was and what it will never be. Lina, the author, writes as a means of cautery and brings an ending that it is also the beginning of an eye for an eye. Seeing Red was originally published in Spanish and it comes to life with a strong and beautiful translation by Megan McDowell, who is able to render and magnify Lina Meruane´s visceral and blinding language.

 

 

diciembre siempre es un poco duro. era el mes favorito de mi madre. su casa, en estas fechas, ya estaba llena de decoraciones navideñas. yo no pongo nada, ni un solo rincón de mi casa dice navidad. y sin embargo, quiero que sea 24 porque estaré con mis dos hombres en una bella casa de Taos. cocinaremos, reiremos, estaremos en piyamas hasta que se nos dé la gana. dejaremos atrás todo lo duro que ha sido este año y cargaremos energía para el que viene y lo que viene.

la época decembrina es dura, pero no tiene que serlo.

hoy le leí el tarot a una amiga. cuando leo el tarot a alguien más siempre termino aprendiendo algo yo. hoy aprendí que hay que regresar lo que se recibe con todo el amor del mundo, hay que aceptar las derrotas, caídas, y que este es tiempo de meditar y editar. sí, meditar qué sirve y qué no en la vida y desechar, cortar, borrar, reescribir.

reescribir y re-ser.

yo no deseo re-seo.

Don’t you think it would be nice to provide a journalistic initiative that risked everything by saying to the public: read books, see movies, go to the theater, hear music, and construct your own preferences based on the works and not on the editorial pecking order displayed by the dailies, by the Sunday supplements, by TV?

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia.

tan bonito ese el momento en el que una idea te cruza en la cabeza y la escribes y te sale un relato. tan bonito ese el momento en el que sigues tramando y de pronto el relato se vuelve cuento. tan bonito ese el momento en el que lo llevas a tu taller y los comentarios te ayudan a descubrir sus debilidades y sus potenciales.

tan bonito ese el momento en el que enmedio de la noche, enmedio de la nada, te viene un destello y te das cuenta de que ese que tienes entre manos puede ser una novelita corta para entretenerte en el invierno.

tan bonito todo eso.

Me casé con un veterano que aún sufre las consecuencias médicas y económicas de su baja. Tengo un hijo de 17 años que cursa el último año de preparatoria y vive el estrés de las solicitudes para estudiar la universidad. Soy residente de este país al que emigré hace seis años. Los tres somos de origen hispano. Los tres hemos pasado los últimos días discutiendo y obligándonos a bromear sobre el panorama tras las elecciones.

Ninguno lo dice, no abiertamente, pero en los tres flota la pregunta ¿y ahora qué?

Entre el sábado y el domingo pensé que tal vez era hora de volver al terruño. Anoche me dije que no, que ahora más que nunca hay que quedarse aquí. Esta mañana mi alma tiembla mientras adjunto documentos para solicitar, de nuevo, una otra situación laboral. Quería apostarle a todo y ver dónde pegaba el chicle. Ahora, ni chicle quiero mascar.

Es tan raro lo que siento, no es miedo pero se le parece.

Mothers are the women who birth us, but also the women who raise us, who compel us to stand up, who teach us that kindness and strength are not mutually exclusive; our sisters and friends, the women who guide us, who lend us their dresses and coats, and teach us to sew our histories, to embrace imperfection in messy cross-stitch. Stitching, much like motherhood, is storytelling.

 

Stitching Motherhood, Laura Maw