[Image: “Walking on Autumn,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

Before this is all over. Before they close the house and sell the furniture and give away the books. Before the cosmetics and shoes are handed out. Before they throw the pans in the trash. Before they empty the cupboards, before they take away the spices, the noodles. Before the happy days and Sunday afternoons end. Before the last of the mornings. Before the end of the anguish. Before sex without love and love without sex are over. Before the clothes rot in the closets. Before they take down the paintings and cover the armchairs with canvases and close the windows forever. Before they burn the photos. Before the doormats dry out, before the curtains rust on their tracks. Before curiosity is over, the bones, the liver and the corneas. Before all the plants on the balcony dry out. Before there is no more snow, no colors, no tropics. Before the end of all the jungles, of all the seas, of all the reflections in the water. Before the last poem. From the end of the sidewalks and streets. The end of all walks.

Before goodbye to all the airports and all the planes, all the cities and all the cafes with steamed up windows. Before the cancellation of all the discussions, of all the arguments, of all the fury, of all the contempt. Of all the metallic anxieties. Before the end of the screams, the desolation and the guilt. Before the last agenda, the last Friday, the last bar, the last dance. Before all the domes and all the screens go out. Before the moths eat the remains of the wool and the pillow. Before the end of pets. Before, much before: you have to live.

But how? As? “How admirable / he who does not think ‘life flees’ / when he sees lightning,” Basho wrote. Admirable those who are in time without thinking about it.

(Leila Guerriero [source: nothing canonical, but see here])

Not from whiskey river:

What Is Lost

Can you picture the Argentine pampa? Flat fields, eucalyptus trees, a seemingly inoffensive landscape where a gray sunset might use your boiling blood to paint a path straight to hell. That’s where I’m from, from that landscape. There, my grandfather showed me how to plant seeds, my grandmother read to me from Struwwelpeter, my mother taught me that cruel things are not always done with cruelty. “I need a hook to reach the high branches,” my father says now in the backyard of the house I grew up in. We watch him disappear into the leaves of the fig tree while my brothers and I shout warnings of absurd dangers—bees, rotten fruit—and we laugh like idiots as he collects figs to make jam. Later on, in the evening, we go fishing and come home when the sun goes down, without having caught anything. That night we eat under the grapevine, on the stone table that has been there since my grandparents were young, since they planted these trees and a sea of calla lilies that no longer exists. The next morning my younger brother and I look through boxes stuffed with toys and old dolls that fall apart in my hands. After lunch we start taking my mom’s clothes out of the closets. We put them in bags (her silk blouse with a pattern of little anchors), and we leave them on the bed, unsure of what to do with them. At night I return to Buenos Aires, staring at the stars, the highway like a smooth metal slide at the playground. A song comes on the radio and suddenly I remember a verse by Arnaldo Calveyra: “I didn’t know I was sad until they asked me to sing.” It’s a lie that we can keep everything alive inside us through memories. Some things are lost for good. And there is, in recognizing that, a brave, icy beauty. Even if it pierces your heart and shatters it to pieces.

(Leila Guerriero [source])

It’s strange, this being-in-your-70s thing. (And yes, I always must qualify these musings with: “Given the entire context of my life… my economic situation, my ‘demographic,’ my personal history, my geography…”) On the one hand, we don’t have the everyday pressure — the pressure of every literal 24 hours: we barely remember what day it is, from one to the next. On the other hand, there always seems so much to do. The latter situation springs largely from the unsettlement of our last few years — travel plans, unraveling travel plans, the impact of COVID, downsizing from a house we loved to an apartment which we liked, leaving the apartment behind to go on the road for two years, and finally moving to an area where neither of us had lived before. We’re kinda exhausted, kinda excited about settling down, and kinda trying not to kill the excitement by settling down too soon…

And although it’s not something to dwell on, always at the back of my mind — I can’t speak for The Missus — skulks the question: how long do I have? Given the unlikelihood (come on: really, now) of my ever finishing and publishing another novel, how easy or how difficult will it be to pull together a collection of shorter works? Once pulled together, how easy or difficult will it be to, well, do something with the thing? What can I do with the thousands of photos I’ve got — can I even manage to whittle it down to a few hundred or so?

For me, at least, I just lock the “how long do I have?” questions away. I know better, but in the meantime I just try to stay focused on the doing which constitutes each moment. Things are still too scattered — literally and figuratively, we still have too many boxes out in the garage to be unpacked — too scattered to be able to say, “I’ll have this personal project done within N weeks, and then I can start on the next,” and so on.

Yeah. I just gotta live, and let come whatever happens afterwards.

________________________

Note: the work of Argentine journalist Leila Guerriero is wonderful — and almost none of it (including the above translated quotation with which whiskey river introduced it to me) exists in English. I could find only one complete book by her in English — A Simple Story: Dancing for His Life (a review here) — although she’s published at least three others in Spanish; she also edited and wrote the introduction to Cuba on the Verge (review here), a collection of pieces by other writers about the island nation. It’s appalling, the extent to which English-language publishers overlook the possibilities of translating writers in other languages. (And yes, again with the context: perhaps the real problem is English-language readers, like myself, who’ve simply never learned to read anything else!)