Bridges

Some time ago, I read an article about bridges (HERE). Well, not exactly. It was about suicide, and the fascination bridges caused in suicidals. There is one in particular that attracts many:  The Golden Gate, in San Francisco, CA., and a friend mentioned that there´s a movie about that, which I haven´t seen, but planned to. Someday.
Bridges are connections that allow us to reach what was once unreachable. It seems that, for suicidals,  they are seen as exit doors to this life. A passage to a different other, perhaps.
Very few of those who jumped from The Golden Gate lived to tell how it was to nearly die. They had multiple fractures, but before hitting the water, they experienced an euphoric relief while falling, a sense of self-annihilation that then led to the realization suicide was not the solution. It seems the suicide attempt worked as a sort of a rebirth. To a very few.

To Kafka, the bridge is not made of concrete, stones, iron cables; it´s made of flash and bones, a human being fighting not to colapse. The fear of collapsing to the burdens of life, to the cruelty of others, what a powerful metaphor.

Kafka lived a sad, short life. Happiness was always out of his reach, it seems. Tuberculosis killed him at the age of 37. The bridge he needed simply didn´t exist at that time.











It´s hard to go through life without experiencing periods of deep sadness.  Looking for a way out is not an easy task, because, many times, and I know it very well, there´s seems to be none. But there is. And there will be a bridge. No to help you plunge into desperation, but to ease your way out of it. As long as there´s life, there´s hope.

Oddity

I was in between births; my mother´s first, my father´s second child.

My brother, the first. Older, much older than me at that time, eager to plunge into the fleshy years of his adolecence, while I was just unaware of everything. I adored him, and I know he loved me back, but we were light years apart.

Then came my sisters; twins, always together, never alone.

I was the odd. 

Circumstances. Unplanned, mundane sequences of facts. Parts of everybody else´s life. But that was my life.

I was the odd. And I will always be.

  

a million years

I was reading an interview with Alex Kapranos, Franz Ferdinand lead singer, and he mentioned he still feels as he was in his late twenties, or early thirties (not sure), the same age as he started the band. Having a rock band makes you fell like that, forever young. Take a look at Keith Richards. Despite all his creases, he plays and sound as young as he was when he and Mick started the Rolling Stones. The same with Bowie. His new album was probably one of the best of 2013, and he is in his late sixties.
My examples are kind of way up there, right? Not really. It seems to also work for those who happened to have a small band as well. It´s not the success, it´s the attitude.  I´ve  heard the same from a person who once had one. And it´s true, he has that rock n´roll attitude, and that makes all the difference.
I never had a band. I sing, but in private. My first time facing an audience was a stressful experience. Being the center of the attention was never really something I felt comfortable with. I´d rather be on the backstage, but I had no choice, I had to be in the front this time. I did sing, but I´m not sure how.I had the weird feeling of not being able to move my lips, how can someone sing without moving the lips? Anyway, I did, and, when I was done I´ve got some compliments, which means I didn´t blew it completely. What I can say is that I don´t think I´m ready for another try. There is no way I will start a band, so I will not feel young. Or younger.
But, to be honest, I never felt young even when I was. Many of the things my friends enjoyed during our youth weren´t exactly appealing to me. Considering the triad sex, drugs and rock n´roll; except for the least, and I have to confess I had some horrible preferences that I can no longer stand in terms of music; drugs were out of question - I always thought I would better have some control of my mind than no control at all-  ; and sex, well, who can actually brag to have had a satisfying sex life during his/hers teenage years?  I was the introverted type of girl, the one who was always paying attention to the stories told by others much older than me. I liked to read, especially things that I found in my father´s library, and that was when I fisrt read Oscar Wilde for the first time, the portrait of Dorian Gray.  

So maybe by reading that book at that age had affected me  more than I could have imagined at the time. The thing is, in a way, I felt as I was somehow similar to Wilde´s most famous character. I felt I had a million years. I don´t show it, but I do.
When I was autographing my book, I´ve heard from a person that she was expecting to see someone older, someone with more life experience. I just smiled and thought of Dorian, who always looked fresh and younger, but had an old, vicious, imperfect version of himself  hidden  somewhere, and thought: you have no idea.    

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Shoes

Shoes, some of my old memories involve observing my feet taking me somewhere; to the kindergarten, wearing a black pair, small steps, one foot in front of the other. I think the grass was green, I mean, grass is always green, but what I wanted to say is I wasn´t dreaming. I´ve heard once we don´t dream in colours, and I don´t know if this is true or not, I hardly ever remember my dreams. Anyway, this is probably one of my oldest memories, my feet walking me to school.

There´s another pair, red ones this time, and I am not going anywhere, I am just spinning around in excitement before my birthday party. I could do that for a long time without getting dizzy, the faster the better, what a strange thing. I just lost this ability of not getting giddy.
What I´ve never lost was an ability to twist my ankles, or maybe an inability to avoid missteps would be a better way to put it, so that´s maybe the main reason why I was always paying attention to my feet.
I like to think my feet took me places and not the other way around, that I was deliberately choosing my paths. That would be the perfect excuse for all the dead ends I faced in my lifetime.  

  

Scars

I have some in my body, remembrances of my mortality, of  my imperfections. Human imperfections, better said, since the wounds inflicted to our bodies heal, tissues recover, but not completely. Warning signs, that´s what scars are, just like those we see on the side of the roads: do not exceed the speed limit, do not pass, keep your right, keep your left. It´s the way nature found to warn us not to exceed our limits, to be more cautious the next time. 

So I have scars, it´s almost impossible to go through life without gaining some during childhood. From that period, I have one on the sole of my foot. It was caused by a huge nail that pierced my skin as I step on it. Frighthening experience from which I have very imprecise memories.  

Others were caused by medical interventions. Two C-sections brought my daughters into this world, so I am very proud of having that one (the incisions were made at the same spot twice, resulting in a single scar). Another two were the resulst of a plastic surgery. Was it worth it? I don´t know. All I can say is that it was an interesting experience to lose consciousness  and step into a condition of temporary non-existence, and then return to life with the realization that only the living could suffer from such an excrutiating pain.

I have other scars as well. They look and feel ugly to me, but are not exactly visible to others. Results of difficult healing processes, deep wounds caused by disappointments, and that is also something we cannot completely avoid during our lives; we suffer and cause suffering. Sometimes accidentally, unintentionally, sometimes with the deliberate intention of hurting as deep as possible.

And there are the scars we choose to have. Signs that only make sense to ourselves. Permanent inasmuch as life can be considered perpetual. So I added two more signs to the map of my skin. I tattoed two letters on my wrists: an A, the first letter of the alphabet, the inicial of my name on the left, and the Z on the right. There are many reasons why I´ve chosen to have those letters, but the main one is that I didn´t want to forget what they meant to me. Letters are my great companions, my partners in creating words that put together give birth to paragraphs, and then to full texts. And I just realized now that our DNAs are represented as sequences of letters. So that´s it. What we are, what I am, at the end:  a sequences of letters.    

          

Playing dead vs Playing Death

I´ve been fighting against this post for days. I should have abandoned the whole idea, but, I don´t know why, I kept on insisting. Maybe I could get something out of this subject, or maybe not. Let´s see.

Playing Dead vs Playing Death 

I read an interview with an actor that usually plays the bad guy, and, as it happens often in movies, or at least in those ones I am thinking of, bad guys tend to die spectactacular deaths, and so he did. Over, and over. Danny (that´s his name: Danny Trejo)  believes no one else in Hollywood has died so many times (or killed so many times) as he did (see LINK). But there was a sentence, that hooked me immediately as I read, which was:  "not just anybody can play dead".

I first smiled a condescendent and superior smile,  thinking, oh, c´mon. But then I realized that he had one moment of enlightment few humans experience in a lifetime. That was a definite philosophical statement. Being dead is nothing, really. It´s a condition each one of us reaches someday. And, as other things we experience in life, there´s no rehearsal. Either you get it right from the begining or you blow it, period. I was thinking about that while I was reading Don Quixote. In one of his conversations with Sancho Panza, he says something about the perfect death, and that would be an unexpected one in the battlefield, of course. Well, dying during a battle does not exactly come as a surprise, but, again, and this is very human, even soldiers do not expect to die. In fact, death is always unexpected, right? There´s always hope even in the most desperate situations. We cling to life until we can´t anymore. The surprise comes with the realization that we cannot scape. And that reminded me of the best scene of the first movie based on Stieg Larsson trilogy, I think is the one called  Men who hate women. The hero got to solve the mistery and to know the identity of the serial killer. The only problem is that he is about to become a victim as well, too bad for him, but, before going on with the kill, the bad guy not only describes his modus operandi, but also his drives. What really turned him on was to recognize in the eyes of his victims the moment they understand they were doomed. The realization of the end of their lives by his hands. A mix of surprise, disbelief, anger, perhaps? The definite end, no second chances. And, on this case, the killer played death, the major role, leaving the victims to the secondary role of simply dying.  
That´s why I think Danny is a fortunate man. He´s been having the great chance to face different ends for his different lives. Maybe not that different, considering his roles do not vary much, but still. He´s in a clear advantage when compared to mortals like you and me. He plays dead all the time. He´s rehearsing for his ultimate act. And has he learned something from his experience? Of course he did.
What he learned seems kind of a cliché, but I guess all the great truths are like that, so obvious that can easily be misunderstood: "When it´s time, it´s time. When it comes, it comes, so don´t think about it too much. Don´t be afraid of death". 

Then I read another interview, that one with Woody Allen ( HERE), and I could find points in common in the two different reasonings, which is kind of comforting, I guess. I am not sure Woody has played dead very often, but he certainly played with death as a writer, and as a director. Bottom line, what they say is pretty much the same: life ´s short, we´re insignificant creatures, everything passes. Get used to that. Of course, it´s hard, especially for some who have big egos and want to leave a legacy for future generations. C´mon, guys. That doesn´t make any sense, because, as he points out,  the whole universe will be gone eventually.
So why do we do what we do? Why to bother getting up everyday? Oh, well, since we´re around, we must do something in order not to get terribly bored, depressed or both. In his words: "the key is distraction" .And: "The truth of the matter is that your life is pretty much out of your control". 
Then, the best thing you can do is to chill out, and find something you think will be a good distraction. Since we´re all doomed, we better have some fun before the very end.





      

What hurts the most?

I´ve read an article where I learned that a person had developed a scale of pain for bites and stings and, in order to do it properly, he let different insects bit and sting his flesh before categorizing the level of pain felt afterwards.

What would be the use of such scale I can´t tell, maybe getting to know that a wasp bite was categorized as 2 meaning that it is painful, but not excruciating (that would be a 4), would have a soothing effect. However, if a tarantula hawk crosses your way, and that encounters works out really bad for you, meaning that you were bitten at the end, and boy, that hurts as hell, knowing that this is a top 4 type of bite would help you somehow?


Anyway, the article goes on to present the story of another man who was accidentaly bitten by a black widow spider. The bite wasn´t that bad, but the symptons after the venon started to spread were something else, pure agony, the worst pain he have ever felt (LINK).

Black widow spider

Scales of pains, categorizations of agonies. Interesting subject. I would tend to think pain is highly subjective. Something that would be very painful for me couldn´t be that awful for you. It seems thare´s a gender component as well. I´ve heard/read once that women are more resistant to pain then men, but I also read/heard that is the other way around, so, who knows, it´s a touchy subject.

I always had problems with categories in general. I don´t like the idea of putting things into specific compartments, adding values, and  attributing grades. When thinking about pain is even worse; every time I experienced some level of it, I hated it.  I don´t think it ever crossed my mind any attempt to categorize how much pain I was feeling. I just wanted to take something that could make it go away.
That´s my way of dealing with pain, others think it differently. Scientists, doctors, nurses, for scientific reasons I guess. So when I was asked to grade the level of pain after a surgery, I took the question as a valid and scientific one, even though I wanted to use very unappropriate words to describe what I was feeling, and that is also something interesting; why do we want to curse when we feel pain?
All of that made me think about pains and the different types we can experience through life. What would hurt the most? The more physical ones that reflect injuries in parts of our body, or those we usually associate with psychological agonies, such as the pain we experience after a breakup?

I wish I knew. I have the impression that although  the level of pain experienced can be highly subjective, there´s nothing like pain to attach us to the present. It´s like an anchor, forcing us to live the actual moment. There isn´t much space left  for remembering the past or thinking about the future. It´s just us, the agony and the god damned endless present.

I love this version of King of Pain by Alanis.
Have a good day.