Neruda's history of political radicalism, fallacious love affairs, and dangerous crusades would slap me in the face with their strange red tentacles just as I began to trust his prose. I found that going back to Atwood would reaffirm my distrust of men. Neruda would always start me off nice and easy, like a professional baseball player showing an 8-year-old how to play catch. "Fleas interest me so much," Neruda wrote in 1945, during the last moments of World War II. Little does the child know that Neruda is not interested in fleas at all. In fact, I'm sure he is quite opposed to fleas. "Passive aggressive" is an interesting term for it, coincidently coined by the United States military during that very same war when psychiatrists noted the behavior of soldiers who displayed passive resistance and reluctant compliance to orders. 
Before I sent Neruda back to the shelf, I tried to get to know a few of his friends so as not to feel judgmental. I had two cups of coffee with Federico Garcia Lorca. He was a nervous but handsome man. Took his coffee black and tended to keep one eye on the doorway. He told me of his good friend,Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, who was gored by a bull. Thus began a reluctant comradery, a lifetime of free therapy, and a strange encounter with a surrealist revolutionary.
The Favourite Poet, 1888
by Sir Alma-Tedema
I like Lorca better than Neruda, and Atwood better than all of them. I would invite them all to my party, but would expect that they would leave by 11. Margaret would have left of her own accord by 10. Her poem Boredom has always been a winner for me. Have you ever felt like you have left so much unsaid that you want to violently shake your lover..or former? I find myself doing the opposite and then vowing never to sit in silence again. I can remember moments when I was young and of course stupid, staring forward like an un-hatched queen bee stuck in royal jelly, while old boyfriends would drone on about their infallible skills on the bass guitar, or worse yet, would chastise me for what they viewed as imperfection or weakness. As Atwood put it, "it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details. Myopia." Burning holes with my eyes through the thin air between us, through my shoes, through blank walls, the toneless scream resonated in my own head but was expressed primarily in resentment or endless silence. The act of concentrating strictly on the present, on the details closest to each second and losing a grasp on a situation as a whole is what I get out of Boredom. And this is by no means a personal attack. In fact, it speaks more of my own fears and weaknesses than of your chauvanistic tendencies. :) Promise. And this is not to you (though you think it is for good reason...I'm a very complicated woman), it's to the one before you..and maybe the one before that. I keep a lot pent up, you can't blame me.
2 comments:
atwood better than lorca? then you ca both go to hell, darling!
hahaha stephen, give me my small pleasures. hell be the destination
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