ellos - reflections/ reflexiones

Ellos is coming towards the end of its run.

It has had a curious existence.

On the one hand, the public has reacted in a way I would never have anticipated. The show has been running for over six months. The reaction has sometimes been remarkable: the show has touched people in ways you never quite anticipate it might in the making of it, when the process is all-important.
That it should have flourished within what remains an insular culture is something, I like to think, we are all proud of. The paradox of the play is that it is a piece about immigrants within a society where the notion of the immigrant is more associated with events of half a century ago than today, in contrast to large parts of the world that I have known.

On the other hand, the theatrical 'medio' has by and large ignored the show. Normally you do something and you anticipate that those you know working in the business will be your chief defenders, but very few have been to see it and their reaction has tended to be neutral, at best. The piece, with its multiple scenes and cinematic structure is fomally challenging, in addition to the fact the subject might feel alien to what can tend to be a slightly introverted scene. (It is, after all, in the nature of theatre to look inwards, which has its benefits as well as its drawbacks.)

The dialectic of these twin reactions is intriguing. Montevidean theatre can be innovative and bold. At the same time, it frequently possesses a cerebral quality which peversely resists a strong emotional bond with its audience. Theatre remains a minority sport in the city, with a slighly elitist bent. The experience of Ellos makes me wonder whether there the 'medio' is not more disconnected from its 'publico' than it would like to believe.

Obviously I also cannot help wondering how the play, or a local variant of it, (as it is a devised piece), would have been received in other cultures which are more receptive to the notion of immigration and, dare-one-say-it, diversity. Something I shall never know.

Anyhow, this is by way of resume. There are now only three shows left. We have lived with the production for the best part of a year and it has been a gratifying experience. However, yesterday, when I wasn't there, the show received the following commentary from a Spanish audience member. It's in Spanish. The fact that I'm writing this in English and the following is in Spanish kind of sums up my own disconnected, schizoid existence, which no doubt contributed strongly to the play's genesis and development. Nevertheless, I wanted to reproduce it here because this message alone is sufficient to have made the whole project worthwhile, and in some ways encapulates whatever the mission of the play has been. To talk across frontiers, to make connections in spite of distance, and so on.

I would also like to thank the audience member for sharing their thoughts; reminding us of why, when we set out at the beginning of the year to construct this play, we believed it mattered.

Hace 55 minutos

María Zanzara

• Realmente nunca he hecho esto de enviar mensajes a las compañías, pero ayer les fui a ver al teatro circular y me ocurrió algo... Soy española, llevo viviendo en Montevideo algo más de un mes, vine para trabajar como becaria (una pasantía como dicen acá). Comencé la universidad en 2008, en el año en que arrancó la crisis. Ahí ya nos dijeron que el futuro estaba gris, y poco a poco se nos fueron arremolinando nubarrones negros. En 2011 participé en las manifestaciones de los indignados por el 15-M, acampé durante varios días en Madrid, a pesar de que tuve que desplazarme allí desde mi ciudad. Luché y protesté porque entonces pensaba que todo era posible. En 2012 empecé a trabajar, siempre como becaria, siempre con esa esperanza de que tal vez gustes y te ofrezcan un trabajo de verdad. En 2013 acabé mis estudios, me surgió la oportunidad de venir a Montevideo, y decidí salir porque en mi país, con un 57% de paro para los que somos menores de 25 años, las oportunidades eran más que escasas. Me dio rabia y me decepcionó pensar que la batalla de 2011 no había servido para cambiar esto.
  Todavía no sé cuándo volveré a mi ciudad, o si encontraré trabajo acá cuando acabe mi beca. Y mi ciudad de allá ya no es mi ciudad, porque casi todos mis amigos se están marchando al extranjero en busca de una oportunidad. No me preocupa que el futuro sea incierto. Me preocupa que no tengamos futuro.
  Ayer les fui a ver y creo que si les digo que me conmovieron me quedo muy corta. Me retrataron, de repente muchos de los diálogos, no sólo los del personaje de Manuela, sino también de los otros...reflejaban cosas que ya había pensado al venir acá. La sensación de que al llegar a Uruguay todo va a ser fácil, de que hay oportunidades, de que la gente es fantástica y acogedora. El desamparo de ver a grupos de gente en la calle y pensar que tú aún no encontraste el tuyo. La añoranza de las cosas grandes y de las pequeñas. Creo que hicieron un trabajo de documentación fantástico. Pero sobre todo creo que lograron transmitirlo de una manera que hizo que sintiera eso que llaman la catarsis teatral, y que yo traduzco en minutos enteros de tener un nudo en la garganta al acabar la función... Me hicieron , y me harán, reflexionar muchísimo. Y sobre todo me hicieron liberarme y sacar de mí unos sentimientos que tenía guardados y casi ignorados. Quizá les suponga muy poco un simple comentario, pero sólo quería darles las GRACIAS.

la realidad y la memoria by enrique lihn

El simulacro de profundidad que presta la memoria a todas las cosas porque ella es por definición lo profundo
esa profundidad consustancial a las cosas en la memoria, razón
por la cual se sustraen al reconocimiento

deslizándose en sí mismas constantemente hacia un atrás
aparente.
En la memoria
no nos encontraremos nunca delante de las cosas que vimos alguna vez ni en realidad ante nada

Pero en lo real -donde ocurre exactamente lo contrario- las cosas son pura superficie
que nos cierra al conocimiento de las mismas
cosas de las que ergo nada puede decirse en realidad. 

©Enrique Lihn, 

Watching the Ashes in la calle J.M. de Rosas, esq San Luis, Rosario, Provincia de Santa Fe

It could be the apogee of Englishness, an up-yours for the Malvinas, a valediction of Anglo-Sajon pluck and nerve. It could be an example of a super-globalised world where in fact you can occupy your personal bubble wherever you are, however you are. Switch on, switch off and float downstream. There will always be scones for tea, the elms shall never be diseased, the swallow’s dart never stilled.

(In North Essex, by the banks of the Deben, two weeks ago, the oaks were suffering from a blight which left their leaves wrinkled and withered, turned papery like old people’s skin. Is there a cure? Does anyone even know this is happening? When a tree falls in the forest…)

Bell tickles a single. The TV in the background mentions the fate of a digraced milico. Pinter is in heaven, hell or limbo, drinking chilled champagne for breakfast. Trying to get into my shoes. Claudia works on Dorfman’s post-dictadura, post-apocalypse drama. The connection goes fuzzy. Bell strokes successive boundaries. Pinter sneezes. There’s nothing left to write. Even in Argentina, living is reduced to a test match commentary. The bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey. Lillee to Hobbs. Smoted for six. Laker to Walters. Plumb. Every language a code, protecting some last vestige of the hope that in a hundred years we might still be capable of misunderstanding one another. Life shall not have been definitively reduced to an ersatz transparency. Everyone weeping at the same songs. Laughing at the same jokes.

Perhaps this is why we came to Rosario. To watch cricket. To observe the cracks the system has yet to paper over, homogenise.

A leg-bye.

london notes, summer 2013

To live in London is to be constantly on the brink of a life-changing event which never arrives.

+++

Overground

The man is muttering without pause on his smartphone as we travel between Surrey Quays and Canada Water. About Jesus. And God. To whom he perhaps believes himself to be speaking. Or to whom he is perhaps indeed speaking. His conversation is urgent, animated, contained. Jesus punctuates. The speaker is black. He has a goatee. His phone is a Sony Experia. It is weighty, even flashy. Its screen barely seems to fit in his hand. He doesn't care. He travels with God.

You are in Madrid. You're in Tarragona. You're drinking beer in Alcala de Henares. You're in Madrid again, in a hostel with marcabre sillhouettes on the wall. You're in Badajoz. You're in Madrid. I'm gyrating round London like a tourist. Hoping God will find me. But God's talking to the man who's other hand, the one not holding the Sony Experia, is flicking through the pages of the Standard without looking at them. He's fully occupied with Jesus. Who has no time for anyone else.

+++

Geography

If LA is the Northermost Latino city, then London must be the Westernmost Asian city.

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The Look (Shoreditch)

The look comes from within, intially. It is the external projection of a cerebral dream. Of course, the look, the affectation of the look, would appear on first sight something superficial, vacuous. 'Style over substance'. But this is in itself a shallow reading, by-and-large adopted by those who lack the courage to attempt to realise their inner visions; those who feel safer shattering idols rather than constructing them.

+++

Summer Fragrance

Aroma of promise, threat of rain, loss of virginity,
Untramelled nights, days of plenty, drunk beneath the
Spreading oak, head leans on kind breast, the world as it
Might have been, the eternity of England, promise,
Promises kept, promises reneged. A man in mirror
Shades and moustache, dressed in black. A girl in
White. Nothing to do. Laze the daze awaze. This was
Our youth and the youth of all who come hereafter
To imbibe this smell now that summer has come
And Albion belongs to you and your buttercup dreams.

+++

Interrupted by Dhiraj

How can a city contain so many corners? I would like to return in 20 years to find it has all been irrevocably altered. Beyond re-cognition. Beyond repair.

+++

the invisible director

The hardest thing for an actor is not to 'act'.

The hardest thing for a director is not to 'direct'.


+++

heirachy of hawks

The often-quoted Book of St Albans or Boke of St Albans, first printed in 1486, often attributed to Dame Julia Berners, provides this hierarchy of hawks and the social ranks for which each bird was supposedly appropriate.

Emperor: The Golden Eagle, Vulture, and Merloun
King: The Gyr Falcon and the Tercel of the Gyr Falcon
Prince: The Falcon Gentle and the Tercel Gentle
Duke: The Falcon of the Loch
Earl: The Falcon Peregrine
Baron: The Bustard
Knight: The Sacre and the Sacret
Esquire: The Lanere and the Laneret
Lady: The Marlyon

Young Man: The Hobby

Yeoman: The Goshawk
Poor Man: The Tercel
Priest: The Sparrowhawk
Holy Water Clerk: The Musket
Knave or Servant: The Kestrel

snowden or the spy who became a spy

The first thing I thought, seeing the name, was how peculiarly British it sounded. It has echoes of decadence and empire. The fifties. A decade which acts as the parent of the UK’s contemporaneity. A country which inverts the ageing process, becoming a childish imitation of what it once was, as it seeks to cling to a memory of a time when the map was red. ‘Our’ red.

Then I watched the video. A brief shot of a harbour in Hong Kong. Then his face. With the back of his head caught in a mirror. No sign of the interviewer. His face a blank, IT face. Which is described as 29 years old but could easily be older. An anonymous face, you might say, which is perhaps perfect for a spy, except that Snowden wasn’t that kind of spy. More Smiley than Bond. A backwater fish. A face which doesn’t look like it knows how to look after itself. Which knows its way around a computer, but might get knocked over crossing the road.

This lack of worldliness might be the clue. As to why he should have the guts or the temerity or the stupidity or the vanity to take on the might of his former proxy employers, the US National Security Agency. Bond would never be so foolish. Bond emerges, counter-intuitively, as a company man. Always back for more. Snowden, his nemesis, is prepared to burn his bridges.

He’s articulate. His way of talking, or rather, his way of responding to an interviewer’s questions, is precise, clear-headed. He’s condensing months, years, of thoughts into clear, simple answers. The interview technique of one whose decisions are grounded. It’s a ten minute conversation. Only bare details of his life emerge. But these are enough. To make the viewer think about the fate of this man’s family, his girlfriend, his life. He doesn’t seem lost or confused or bewildered. It’s not as though life has overwhelmed him, although at one point, in the last fortnight, that must have been what happened. The point at which consideration became action. When he contacted the journalists. Sent the Powerpoint presentations. When he spoke to someone or sent the email requesting sick leave for his epilepsy. When he spoke to or didn’t speak to his girlfriend. When he went to the airport. Did he pay in cash? How did he cope with the weight of the world on his shoulders during those days? The days when he finally felt like a spy, a real spy, a spy like the ones in the novels and the movies, working undercover, risking everything.

Only then, of course, did he realise that he was a spy spying on his own. As indeed his government constantly acts as a spy, spying on its own.

And, let’s be honest, there’s nothing particularly shocking in all this. We all know, in this age, this database, this mainframe, that the chips have been implanted and that They Know Everything. That’s modernity, baby. You have no secrets in modernity. Even the things you don’t type, you don’t buy, you don’t dream about. They Know These Things Too. They are your jealous partner, wedded for life.

There’s nothing shocking about this, for all the liberal shock and awe. It’s part of the new religion. God merged with State. They are all-seeing. Foucault saw it first. Dick saw it second. Bourne made the movie.

Which might be why the story as such didn’t impact on me particularly, the first days it broke. It was only yesterday, when the hero emerged, that the story acquired body. Which reveals something about stories. Without protagonists they’re just more data. Part of the mainframe. Stories can’t run on their own. To really work, they need people to front them. Snowden has made this story his own and in so doing he has made the story real.

Unless, that is, he is no more than another plant. 

further extracts from road to babadag by andrzej stasiuk

The night filled the room in the attic. amd he could recall his life without obstacle, because insomnia, just as many years ago in Sibiu, has taken the place of eternity for him. On Brazilor Avenue and Father Bratu Avenue and Episcopei Avenue And Andrei Saguna Avenue and Ilarie Mitrea Avenue the animals sleep. In the dim, close barns the cows lie and chew as they sleep. The horses stand with lowered heads at their empty cribs. As it ought to have been and in fact is. The heat departs from him forever and over Rasinari joins the heat of the livestock. Then it lifts into the black sky above the Carpathians and flows towards the cold stars like a vision of the soul, a vision he couldn't stand because it kept him awake.

+++

The loneliness of a liberated mind is as great as the sky over Transylvania.

+++

Travel is no more than a relatively healthy form of narcotic, after all.

+++

Time, approaching from afar, is like the air that someone else has already breathed.

+++

Kocevski Rog suggested an architecture that would never come to pass, because the simplicity of its beauty would throw into question the whole point of an imagination.

+++

It gives me no rest, my wish to know the fate of all these scenes that entered my eyes and have remained in my thoughts. What happens to them when I am no longer there? Unless I have taken them with me, immobilised them for all time in my mind, and they will be with me until the end, untouched by the change of seasons and the weather.

+++

From across the bleached, shaggy dunes, the sound of waves crashing, as old as the world and as monotonous.

+++

For almost an hour I saw him come and go, in a constant rush, trousers bagging as he did battle with dirt and dust, a Buster Keaton of the Delta trying to stem the chaos of volatile substances and defend Sfantu Gheorghe against the rain of particles from outer space.

+++

From inland would come mirages of distant cities. Between the mirror of the water and the clouds, Bucharest might appear, Berlin might float, Prague, London, Istanbul, and, with the right combination of light and convection currents, a fusion of New York and Montevideo, Tokyo and Montreal.

+++

This surviving is done day by day, without hope; fatalism alone holds things together. Concrete, bricks, steel and wood combine in random proportions, as if waxing and waning can reach no final agreement.

+++

Any place with a population of over 100,000 I cross off my list: Go ahead, build, in the hope that some day it will completely block the view of where you came from.

+++

Freed from the workings of time, they are indifferent to the nothingness that will claim Gonc and all the other places we have given names to, because only by naming can we grasp the world, even as we condemn it to destruction.

+++

I need my own country. Where I can travel in a circle. A country without clear borders, a country unaware that it exists and doesn't care that someone invented it and entered it. A sleepy country with murky politics and a history like shifting sand.

+++

A graceful, relaxed clutter here, the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish. Plastic bags, compost, fallen apples, weeds, beaten paths, an eternal present crouched in the shadow of walnut and cherry trees. The Gothic slowy disintegrated here, and its disintegration led to things that had no history, things that had use and significance for a moment only. The new joined the old in a just order, a liberte, egalite and fraternite of matter.

+++

Extract from 'on the road to badabag' by andrej stasiuk

Some sping, not only will the snow melt, everything else will melt too. The brown-grey water will wash away towns and villages, it will wash away animals, people, everything, down to the naked skeleton of the earth. Meteorology and geology will join forces, ruling in a dubious coalition with history and geography. The permanent will seize the transitory by the throat. The elements will resume their places on Mendeleev's table and no more tales, no more narratives will be needed to interpret existence.

+++

I imagined that somewhere between Cierna, Chop and Zahoney a city would grow from the naked soil like a hallucination of the damned, with twenty-four hour commerce, unlimited supply and demand, nd that consumption and capital expenditure would be joined forever in mystical marriage. 

margaret

Margaret Thatcher won her third election on my 21st birthday. It felt inauspicious and inevitable.  We drove to Bridlington. It was bracing. We sat on the beach and drunk the best part of a bottle of champagne. I don't seem to remember there being any real doubt about the outcome of the election and for this reason it didn't seem right to be celebrating. I went swimming in the sea. For the hell of it. There is little pleasure to be gained from swimming in the North Sea in early June on the day of a British general election. At some point we must have driven back across the moors. In my memory this all occurred in late Winter not early Summer. I imagine we went out to eat in the evening. I remember a large barn of a restaurant that served fancy burgers and being drunk and How Soon Is Now playing and then sitting outside beside the Ouse but that might have been another birthday or someone else's birthday or it might never have happened at all. The only things that stick are swimming in the sea and knowing Thatcher was about to win another election. Which was not good news. Bad news for the country, for us, for me and above all for my 21st birthday. It felt like this thing - Thatcher - would never end. She would always be there, buggering up my birthdays, casting a pall over our youth, leaving us searching for the light at the tail end of long Summer days.

the script reader dreams the script they dreamt they were reading

The alarm clock goes off. The reader reaches to switch it off. Slowly the realisation dawns. The reader is trapped within a script. But what kind of script? She gets out of bed and tiptoes through to the next room. The TV is still playing. Scattered on the floor are cans of lager and the vestiges of last night's Chinese takeaway. On the sofa someone stirs. They have long hair and they're clearly hung over. Upstairs music starts playing loudly. The reader recoils in horror. She's landed in a student sitcom. Any second now three spotty males are about to arrive and eat toast and take the piss out of the man on the sofa. Then, the man wakes up. He stands up and he starts to cry. The reader walks to the window and looks out. She's on a council estate. It's run down and grim. There's a dog barking next door. The student is on the phone to his dealer. He's not a student. He's an ex-con. It's not a student sitcom. It's an urban crime story. The ex-con is saying he's got the money. He's shouting at some one, saying he'll be there. The ex-con leaves and the reader follows them. The ex-con goes to a cafe. He meets an arctic explorer. A female arctic explorer. They have a long conversation about why the arctic explorer needs to have therapy. In fact, the ex-con is the arctic explorer's therapist. And they're having an affair. The conversation is interrupted by precise sound effects. The sound of the wind in the arctic. The exaggerated tones of an expresso maker. The reader tries to keep up. She realises she's in a radio drama. The drama cuts to a boat. The arctic explorer has her own cabin. The good-looking ship's captain enters. He tells the arctic explorer he'll follow her to the ends of the earth. She says that's good, because that where they're going. The reader's watching through a porthole. Next thing the captain's outside flirting with her. It's a romantic comedy. With a bittersweet ending. The explorer's running away from her true love. Who's an ex-con who lives on a council estate. But no matter how far she goes, she can never escape him. The ship's captain knows this. So even though he's fallen in love with the arctic explorer, he decides to flirt with the reader. Because he trusts her. To stick with him to the end, no matter how corny it gets. Now it is the end. The reader's pregnant. She's in a large house with views of the sea. The captain's boat is coming into port. She can't see it but she knows he's coming back. With a rising sense of horror, the reader realises the worst. It's all going to end happily ever after.

tango en flor (with thanks to hector manuel vidal)

She was softer than the water,
than the soft water,
she was fresher than the river,
orange tree in bloom...
And in that summer street,
lost street,
she left a piece of life
and she left...

First you learn to suffer,
then to love, then to leave,
and finally to walk without thinking...
Scent of orange blossoms,
empty promises of love
that escaped in the wind...
After, does it matter the afterwards?
All my life is the yesterday
that stops me in the past,
eternal and ancient youth
that has left me unnerved
like a bird in the dark.

What have my hands done to her?
What have they done to her
to leave me in the chest
so much pain?
Pain of an old grove,
street corner's song
with a slice of life,
orange tree in bloom...


***

Era mas blanda que el agua,
que el agua blanda,
era mas fresca que el rio,
naranjo en floor...
Y en esa calle de estio,
calle perdida,
dejo un pedazo de vida
y se marcho...

Primero hay que saber sufrir,
despues amar, despues partir
y al fin andar sin pensamiento...
Perfume de naranjo en flor,
promesas vanas de un amor
que se escaparon en el viento...
Despues, que importa el despues?
Toda mi vida es el ayer
que me detiene en el pasado,
eterna y vieja juventud
que me ha dejado acobardado
como un pajaro sin luz.

Que le habran hecho mis manos?
Que le habran hecho
para dejarme en el pecho
tanto dolor?
Dolor de vieja arboleda,
cancion de esquina
con un pedazo de vida,
naranjo en flor..



LYRICS by: Homero Exposito

Ley Nº 18.250 MIGRACIÓN NORMAS

Artículo 1º.- El Estado uruguayo reconoce como derecho inalienable de las personas migrantes y sus familiares sin perjuicio de su situación migratoria, el derecho a la migración, el derecho a la reunificación familiar, al debido proceso y acceso a la justicia, así como a la igualdad de derechos con los nacionales, sin distinción alguna por motivos de sexo, raza, color, idioma, religión o convicción, opinión política o de otra índole, origen nacional, étnico o social, nacionalidad, edad, situación económica, patrimonio, estado civil, nacimiento o cualquier otra condición.

On Exactitude in Science

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .

on irony - tracey thorn

I think it's really problematic that everything is now seen through an ironic tinge; it just makes it very difficult for people within the arts to be entirely sincere about things without looking like they just haven't thought it through properly. The problem with irony is it assumes the position of being the end result, from having looked at it from both sides and having a very sophisticated take on everything, so the danger of eschewing irony is you look as though you just haven't thought hard enough about it, and are just being a bit simplistic.


===

rites of passage

We had spent nearly three months lost in the Sahara. Our initial plan had been to

cross from East to West, using Sorenʼs house in Tenerife as our launch pad. We

flew from there to Marrakech. Things started to go wrong almost immediately. We

travelled to Erg Chebbi on the edge of the Sahara, the gateway to the real desert,

where we were due to meet up with Rashid, our guide. He never showed up. The

local guides made their living from helping tourists disembark from their four by

fours and transfer to a camel train which took them half an hour into the desert,

where groups of Canadians, Australians and North Americans would sing songs

round an open fire and eat couscous and satisfy their lust for adventure. None of

these guides were interested in a group of five crazies who actually planned to

enter their desert. The expedition was only rescued from disaster when a Berber

who was heading towards the Algerian border to hook up with his tribe agreed to

let us tag along.

The succession of wrong turns, near-death experiences and mirages (both

physical and psychological) that occurred over the course of the following ten

weeks have been detailed in my travelogue, Lost in a Sea of Sand, which you

may well have read. This isnʼt the place to repeat any of that. Suffice it to say that

when we finally escaped from the desert and arrived at Timbuktu, it seemed like  

a dream. Each one of us had forgotten what a world containing buildings looked

like, had forgotten that a world where man could exercise some kind of

ascendancy over nature (and sand) existed.

Timbuktu is an ancient city, with an extensive and highly developed cultural

heritage. None of us had the slightest interest in this. All we cared about was

having a proper shower, not having to sleep in a tent, and being able to get out of

the sun. These are the things that matter after youʼve spent the best part of three

months trying to stay alive in the Sahara. When Pav came back after going out to

have a look around and told us sheʼd found a Welshman in the library, no-one

was impressed. It was only when she added that he was a Welshman with a

generator, a fridge and a seemingly limitless supply of cold beer, that our

curiosity was aroused. 

His name was Liam and he told us heʼd lived there for almost ten years. He had

originally come as part of a project which intended to catalogue the library of

Abdarahman Sidi Idie, initiated by an organisation heʼd worked for which he

grandly claimed was a depositary for all the stories in the world. The job had

taken longer than anticipated. After a couple of years the funds had run out, and

his colleagues had returned to Europe, but Liam had fallen in love with the city,

its libraries, and their stories, and had chosen to stay.

    

I asked where the beers came from. He told me they were made from barley

stewed in fermented camel milk. Back home Iʼd have probably spat out the sip Iʼd

just taken, but under the circumstances even camel-piss fermented beer would

have tasted just fine.

It turned into a crazy night. The alcohol went to everyoneʼs heads. The energy

weʼd been using just to survive was no longer needed for that purpose. We

suddenly had a surplus. It affected us all in different ways. Pav and Soren finally

had sex, after weeks of pretending they werenʼt really interested. Those seven

days in Timbuktu, drinking Liamʼs beer, waking up hungover then drinking some

more, was one of the best weeks of our lives. None of this is in the book,

because itʼs personal, and even though the publishers begged me to make the

book a bit juicier, I didnʼt think it was appropriate. Thereʼs a big difference

between your public life and your private life, and you have to respect that.

It was also under the influence of Liamʼs beer that I found myself walking into a

mosque for the first time in my life. Of course, Iʼd visited mosques before, as a

tourist, but this time it wasnʼt like that. I guess that whilst the others used up all

that surplus energy being physical, I used that surplus energy and applied it to

the spiritual side of things. It was the first time I realised what it meant to be in a

holy place. As I sat on the floor, watching people chat or pray, with no one

seeming to bat an eyelash at this westerner sharing their sacred space, I

experienced what I can only call, no matter how corny it sounds, a sense of

transcendental relief. There and then, God came to find me. I knew straightaway

the part he had played in our salvation, as well as realising that it would always

be, from now on, so much better now that I was aware of his presence, by my

side, to guide me through all the journeys I had yet to make.

Of course, none of this is in the book either. My publishers like to play me up as

some kind of macho figurehead, always going on crazy adventures, challenging

the boundaries, as it says on the back of all my books. I canʼt complain. My

image is my fortune, and without it, I wouldnʼt be able to do the things I feel I

have to do in this world, no matter how self-serving and absurd they sometimes

seem. My public doesnʼt need to know the truth about my relationship with God.

Not yet. One day soon, I shall tell them. Or God will reveal it. But for now, they

wouldnʼt be ready for it, and I have to assume that heʼs OK with that, otherwise

heʼd do something about it.

2010

+++ 

neruda on cortazar

"Anyone who doesnt read Cortázar is doomed. Not to read him is a grave invisible disease which in time can have terrible consequences. Something similar to a man who had never tasted peaches. He would be quietly getting sadder, noticeably paler, and probably little by little, he would lose his hair."

+++

random dialogue from unwritten london drama

Once I went to see a film. It was on the South Bank. I went with a friend of mine and he invited these people who I didn't know. We all went together. After the film ended we all walked out and we were by the river. There was this boy. The boy was lost. Quite clearly. He was like a little bird. A fledgling out of the nest. He was timid and shy and he didn't talk so much as whimper. One of my friend's friends, a girl, started talking to him. She was good with him. She talked to him. Got his trust. She took him by the hand. It was impressive. You know, those women who have a way with kids. And this was more than that. Because he didn't just have a way with kids, she seemed to really connect. With this lost child. To bring him out of himself. Gradually she coaxed him into leading the way. Because - like a lost bird - the child knew the way. The way back. I was really impressed. The child had been on a boat trip. And she got him to lead us back to the boat. Two years later, the girl turned up again. And of course I remembered. And I was attracted to her. I thought she had a wonderful gift. But - do you know what? 

What?

It didn't work out. The truth was that she wasn't the person I thuoght she was. She was a bit like the boy. She was really lost. She was constantly looking for someone to lead her home. 

She'd identified with the boy. That was why she'd understood.

Yeah. The boy being lost had nothing to do with the boy. It was all about her.



16/06/12