always a curious boy... wanting to know the world... too much... understanding to seek... constantly...
I like that line. Very poetic... in my conception of poetics... But I can't continue with the thread. Nor will I try. I know I disappoint you. Why? Because maybe it could have been better... the time you dedicate to reading what I wrote... But, that's just it with "maybe"... there is no certainty... as I know with my blog... The other day a friend wrote me in Spanish that I seem like a writer. Now, what's the difference between writers and those who seem like a writer? "MAYBE"... a lack of certainty. But, what gave you the idea that there existed so much certainty in life... We don't know. We just plug on... someone once wrote "keep on keeping on..." It may have been in a popular song I heard... I may have used the line too... you keep on continuing, just as the Earth continues spinning... Do you ask why... Remember that song, "I stop the world and melt with you"? And when we thought about the world suddenly stops spinning, we feel nautious... why?
Margarita is reading the last part of Follett's "the 20th Century Trilogy"... that takes place during the civil rights movement, the cold war... etc and so forth... I finished that book in October... Towards the end I became disappointed... as if Ken Follett felt extremely pressured to finish it on time... Too bad. A few days ago, I was looking for movies on Youtube... if we don't have to pay to go to the movie theater or buy the video (if you can actually find it here... or on YouTube)... At the moment I don't remember why I stumbled across Spike Lee... Or was it that he produced or directed a movie... aah... yes... It was because we wanted to watch "Old Boy", as a change of pace... a film unrelated with anything we were reading or studying at the moment... and I was surprised that it was produced and directed by Spike Lee... If I'm correct, I haven't seen a Spike Lee "Joint" since the early-90s... I'm so out of the loop. Truthfully, I don't know what I was seeking and how it led me to "Black August"... maybe I was looking up Spike Lee's documentary on Huey Newton...
At the moment I'm reading at least 3 books at a time: The second book "The Green Pope/El Papa Verde" of "the Banana Republic Trilogy" by Guatamalan Nobel Prize Novelist, Miguel Angel Asturias, "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexandre Solzhenitzen (also Nobel Prize Novelist) and the last 40 pages of Udo Erasmus' book "Fats that Heal; Fats that Kill"... in the middle of awaiting the response by our car insurance company and considering the acquisition of a new cargo van and "arguing" with one of my 8 brothers-in-law and researching random items about diet and health etc... I figured a change of pace would be good...
The interesting thing is that, while movies are a nice change of pace, they also serve as great back up sources for what we or Margarita is reading... Since I couldn't find anything interesting by Spike Lee on YouTube, like The Huey Newton Story or "get on the bus"... I settled for "Mississippi Burning". Today we watched "Black August", connected with Angela Davis' prison reform movement... It serves as a good back-up source of Margarita's reading, since one of Follett's main characters "Verena Marquand" is based partially upon Angela Davis... In the film, one of the very aggressive/intense Black Family (related to the Black Panthers) members "Lumumba" sells out to the CIA. Since the film is based upon true events and since Margarita mentioned that the name "Lumumba" appears in Barbara Kingsolver's "A Poisonwood Bible", I decided to look him up on Google... It turns out that there are 3 Lumumbas... The lider of the Congolese Independence movement and the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo (who appears in Kingsolver's Novel), Chokwe Lumumba, former Mayor of Jackson Missippi who is mentioned by a different name in Follett's book, who was the lider of the "New Africa Movement" for creating an African American Republic in the region of the gulf states just after Martin Luther King was assassinated. While seeking historical truth connected with the traitor Lumumba portrayed in "Black August", I stumbled across a "Black August Conmemoration Kick-off and Chokwe Lumumba Birthday celebration party..." page on Facebook and "Chokwe Lumumba [speaking] on Black August Resistance"... and then Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele; NAACP/LDF, who is senior community organizer in LDF's Criminal Justice Practice, also community organizer/educator in central Brooklyn, and founder of the "Black August Hip Hop Project", but too young to have been the Lumumba traitor in the film... Ironies...
All in all, in the middle of all of this "curiosity may have killed the cat; more likely he was just unlucky..." my computer froze... I'm all to familiar with the freezing of the computer in the middle of an innocent search... But someone else has always been searching. But, truthfully, what do they find?
Maybe they find my writings less boring that do I. Yes, you heard me correctly. I don't return to read my writings... not even curious to see why "someone" returns constantly to read certain writings... I get bored. Why? "I spy a... " what? Part of a 60s or 50s children's game...? No, it's from a much earlier children's game in England... around the 30s... Can you finish that line? I heard it in a recent Zoë song... although the singer was singing in Spanish... and the singer and the group are from Mexico... Granted, he sings wonderfully in British English... sounds a little bit like John Lennon or the singer of Arctic Monkeys... although from England, they film a lot in the Mojave Desert of California... the drummer seemingly wishes he were an actor and has a fixation on guns, the "Hells Angels" and motor cycles... If the Beatles could sing "The Balad of Bungalow Bill..." and "Rocky Rackoon" that takes place in the Black Hills of South Dakota... I guess this turn of the century (21st) Punk/Indy group from Sheffield England could be fixated on Film Noir Lifestyles of Southern California, just as the author of "Curiosity", Scottish Poet and South American Scholar, Alastair Reid could have lived in Argentina, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Chile, writing his poems in English...
During the fair, I was repeatedly visited by a Federal Police officer who supposedly wanted to practice his English with me since he supposedly spent most of his life (26 years) in the U.S., while destroying sales, since Mexicans don't like to buy from us if they hear me speaking English (or Spanish with my "American" accent)... One of the first of his questions was, in his words, personal, "Are you legal here?... My brother-in-law is from rural South Carolina (where I also worked for the sheriff's department) and he wants to know how he could live in Mexico." I offered to show him my residency card pulling the wallet out of my back pocket, immediately causing his response that that is not necessary... The following day he asked my permission to take a photo with me for the Federal Police website showing their contact with foreignors in Mexico and asked me why I seemed nervous when I was considering the response. With the José's destruction of the pick-up, and the fact that our line of customers dwindled in the time that the Federal (Investigator) was speaking with me... and due to my having prepaired myself two double moka-nut cappuccinos a few minutes earlier, since I was very tired and needed to be awake for the heavy work, I may have seemed nervous...
But, his two questions in two days reminded me of the only other time I was accused of being illegal in Mexico and at the same time asked why my hands were trembling: February 2008, after packing our coffee bar the whole night and not having slept for 36 hours and then while driving 6 hours from Colima through Guadalajara to Tepic Nayarit, on the federal (not toll road) highway approaching Tequila, Jalisco (yes, that Tequila), I passed a Federal Patrol car that had just pulled over someone in a curve, noticed that the speed limit sign said, 40 kms, and slowed my speed to that... And then suddenly, that Federal Patrol car was pulling me over... And then one of the two Federal Police Officers asked me why I was driving so slow... And then they asked me to step out of the truck and told Margarita to stay seated. And then they asked me to show them what I was carrying... and asked me if I was transporting arms/weapons... And I invited them to inspect my cargo... And they asked me for my visa, which I explained was in Immigration in Mexico City, since every February (I entered Mexico at the end of January) they asked for my visa (FM2 or FM3) for the visa renewal process... Sometimes they didn't give me the response for between 3 and 6 months... The younger official was very antagonistic and said, "so you are illegal here!!!". And I explained to him that I was NOT illegal, since my papers were with Immigration... and showed him the paper that explained that they had my visa in their offices... In the end, his superior told him to stop wasting time with me and let me return to the truck and on our way... But, I will never forget the question and how it reminded me of the only other time I was asked the same thing...
Look, this is petty stuff... when you read about what happens with other "less fortunate" people and in other countries... Did you know that the only way that the newly formed Soviet Union could defend its "revolution" and later on compete with the U.S. and other industrialized nations was to arrest innocent people (many highly educated) and send them to labor camps? I didn't know that... But, Nobel Prize writer Boris Pasternak and especially Solzenitzen make that extremely clear... And one can spend their lifetime reading horrifying examples of much worse communal experiences of people of African Descent in the U.S. and how the Soviet Union treated their ethnic "communists" and what happened in so many South and Central American countries in the 60s through the 80s... And why ignore what has been occuring throughout Africa and what occurred in the Carribean during the first half of the 20th Century and what is happening in many Islamic countries... And, yes, what happens here in Mexico since 2006...
And maybe these things are really the least of anyone's troubles... And if someone became interested in why I was watching "Black August" and looking up information that may have something to do with Black-"American" revolutionary or separatist movements... causing the freezing of my computer... it was not the Mexican Federal Police but a department of the U.S. Federal Government that is always concerned that "expatriots" living in foreign countries (especially Mexico) are connected with subversive movements (terrorist), such as Al Quaeda...
Read my whole blog... and read it twice... and you should find the truth... and what I realized a long time ago: I'M NOT THAT INTERESTING... Interested, yes... I am curious... I want to understand... As for revolutions and changing the world... Nor with incredible violence, nor with incredible logic or education or super intense and massive peaceful movements... Human nature is generally selfish and autodestructive, greedy and inconsiderate, hedonistic and chauvanistic with a tendency towards ignorance (which is intentional and not innocent) and short sightedness... You can preach all you want about honesty, sincerety and consideration... But, what you find in the end is that everyone lives as if there is no other life (and no one more important than they; "Look after #1") and worries first and foremost about being comfortable and increasing their material well-being... and who truly gives a flying "fish" (You know what word is hidden behind "fish") about how anyone else lives or suffers or had their rights stolen from them...
The United Nations is home to the International Department of Human Rights and UNICEF and WHO... and finds its headquarters in New York City... But, truthfully, those "funding" the UN truly worry about human rights or if countries designate enough of their budget to protecting and developing their children or if poor communities around the world have adequate food or clean water or medical facilities or or or for true health etc?
And do you believe that killing people and blowing up buildings will help the UN work better? Or millions of people marching on their capitals throughout the world will actually change things?
Yes, I believe that the activists and the educators and the documentary film makers and those who try and publish their stories or have their voices heard... the conscientious and concerned people are very very important... for something... The world's "lesson"? But, I don't believe that they are enough, even if they were half of the world's population or 3.5 billion people, they could "correct" the problem... Since, truthfully, I don't believe that they truly know what it is that must be cured or solved... And if they knew, maybe they wouldn't truly care... or they wouldn't know what to do... Violence is simple-minded... Although, when you understand what has happened in the U.S. to offspring of those who were brought from Africa to the Americas, you may understand the violent response... But, you should also understand that that isn't a solution either... What is the solution?
You can't change human nature... Some people change dramatically. But most people don't... And we find history constantly repeating itself, although we do teach it... The idea was that remembering the events prevents history from repeating itself... momentarily, in regions, possibly... But, in the long run... it's all a nice intellectual idealistic illusion... like a catch phrase...
Yes, I believe in sharing for raising consciousness. Truthfully, I don't know why I do that... since I have so little faith in human nature...
Look at who has responded to what... "They" read so much of what I write. But, no one responds... Why not?
And do a perusal of the internet blogs and analyze what creates lots of responses...
What a bad revolutionary I am!
Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.
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