Category: Life

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” 

“Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing,” Alan Watts

When I was about 10 sitting in class the girl sitting behind me pulled me back to tell me some little secret. I remember that the sudden movement made me feel dizzy and for what was probably a few seconds but felt like it would become permanent, I thought I had traveled outside myself and was experiencing whatever was happening in class from above. I think this was the first time my wild imaginative child mind came to the conclusion that I couldn’t actually be sure that reality was real.

This experience, coupled with years of being an extremely shy and introverted little girl who spent hours reading whatever books I could find and talking to all the characters that came out of all those pages, resulted in the conviction that indeed the world must be only a stage and  we have our entrances and get to play a character, sometimes even an interesting one, and we have our exits and get to seat in the audience and just watch while others dazzle or scare us or are just unable to make us feel anything with their performance.

Not that I ever read Shakespeare when I was 10. I was never that precocious.

If this was so there was also, I thought at the time, little proof of  my existence and this conviction has lead to the creation of all the different characters that have helped hide, protect and accept myself in order to keep going.  In doing so, I created a multitude of characters some of which did not even get as far enough as the dress rehearsal. Their wardrobe was ready but it never left the archival depths of countless steam trunks and old leather bags. I will have plenty of time to experiment with all that, I thought. I will just get ready for whatever or whomever it  is I might feel like playing . This delusional fantasy has resulted in an “identity superflux“.

It would have probably been easier to settle for “the desirable and permanent order of things”, to follow Polonius advice and be true to my own self, but I never managed to understand how it would be possible to be just one. Facing the plurality of the world how can it be that being singular is enough?

And then you actually Realize that even if most days you still might feel that you are 10, time has passed and there might not be enough of it to stage all the plays you have been rehearsing for. Maybe only a few of us are meant for reality but life doe manage to find all of us.

 

 

References

King Lear

Hamlet

The book of disquiet

Bizarre witnesses

If they asked me, I could probably write a book on my mistakes. Not that it would amount to a very interesting read. But then, I take a long time to admit mistakes and I am not ready to talk about most of them, let alone willing to write them down.

My “Closet of Errors” is an attempt to come to terms with some of those mistakes by honoring them as intentional, mostly because my closet is full of witnesses.

In the Summer of 1992, I went to León in Spain for a paid work placement wit immigrant communities. I used part of the money I got to buy this Junior Gaultier jacket on sale. It was a super sale. It cost me 2.500 pesetas, something like €15 today or, if you are to believe that some online vintage  listings are accurate, €500. This witness still lives in my closet. I think I bought it because it was an unmissable opportunity to own a Gaultier piece (even if it was a little too small and it makes raising my arms a tad impossible) and because, in some way, it resonated with a watching, and loving, “Little House on the Prairie” when I was a kid. I think I haven’t worn it for at least fifteen years but it is not going to be easy to let this one go.

Having grown out of “Little House on the Prairie” and after a few years studying in the UK, my next Gaultier was a nod to Punk aesthetics and an attempt to keep some kind of Britishness with me. It’s now the property of someone living in New York. I though I was ready to let it go because I was selling it someone who would love it as much as I did. I wasn’t and I have the feeling that I didn’t sell it to the right person. I never got any feedback apart from the one in my mind telling me that, even though my unworn wardrobe can be an investment with an interesting return, it’s really not about the money. It is always about the lives I have lived wearing a particular piece, the lives I planned on living when I bought some other.

I planned, or better yet, I daydreamed a lot, and, in the process, started to choose the wardrobe to go with all the fabulous things I would be and for the grandiose life I would live. I have always missed places in time that I didn’t know  and prepared for them. I dreamed of being an aristocratic bohemian in Marrakesh, a flaneur who spent the time reading books and being intellectually brilliant and aesthetically striking.

Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

Adam Phillips


I prepared myself to go live in Ibiza and lounge by the sea in never ending parties.

 I was even ready to go dancing at Studio 54.

I got ready to be a rock star wearing silver leather jackets, or maybe be a bass player for Lenny Kravitz in fringed suede pants.

I got ready for all the fantasy going around in my mind. I prepared myself for a life of eccentricity and adventure. I groomed myself to be someone else. In the process, I forgot to get ready for real life.

The witnesses to my mistakes that still live in my closet are now stories written on small papers that accompany the items I’m ready to let go or in somewhat bigger posts when they tell the stories of a life that I can’t leave behind. They are the witnesses to whom I am becoming. As Adam Phillips wisely puts it, “we share our lives with the people we have failed to be.” There’s no escaping this, “we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the characters in Randall Jarrell’s poem, that “The ways we miss our lives is life,” we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. “

Coming to terms with my unlived life(s) has not been an easy process. Sometimes I get the chance to perform one of those imaginary parts for a moment and live out real scenes exactly as I imagined they would turn out. In January 2014, I dragged myself through the polar vortex and went to the opera at the Met. As I should, wearing my, never worn before or again, opera coat. I will most probably keep repeating mistakes and collecting witnesses to those repetitions.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Parker Palmer

References

Dinah Washington,  I could write a book

Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

New Order, Bizarre Love Triangle

Parker Palmer, Naropa University Commencement Address

 

 

Witness

 

There she goes, my beautiful world

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Mark Twain

My beautiful Grace, Magic Twinkletoes could not fight anymore and left today.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.
Leonardo da Vinci

Rare

Leaving Denver

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

Butterflies on silk

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
John Keats

Sometimes a print on a piece of silk makes you contemplate life.

 

 

 

 

 

Hanae Mori Boutique butterfly print silk wrap dress

Sometimes it snows in April 

and, sometimes,  it never stops

Sometimes I feel so bad, so bad

O. died yesterday. Last time I saw him was in 2013 after a long hiatus in our conversations on art and music and books. We met at a conference on photography and it was like our conversation had never really gone mute.

If you look into someone’s face long enough, eventually you’re going to feel that you’re looking at yourself

We promised to reconnect and go out for coffee,  rekindle our platonic passion for Auster and New York and let our words wander to beautiful spaces. We never did. We exchanged texts wishing each other a happy new year and thought we would have time to keep our promises.

Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.

Even if we know it’s a part of life, death is inexplicable as well. O. died yesterday. His heart just stopped on the same day of his birthday. The day he had given up celebrating a long time ago. Mr. Vertigo left the same day he arrived. Like a time traveller.

The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.

References

Prince

Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

Photo: Central Park CC0 Public Domain

Things I learned in the midst of frivolous amusements 

I am a frivolous person and I have often felt guilty about it mainly because I fear that most people would understand that as meaning that I am a shallow person. Most of my time seems to be occupied with aesthetic considerations or concerns of some kind. Most of the space I live in is organized accordingly. Every morning I go out hoping that what I have chosen to wear will contribute to make the day a little more beautiful, a little less real (I suppose that’s where the love of vintage clothes comes from). Every evening I want to come back home to the same kind of fantasy. I watch movies and plays looking for the kind of visual and emotional grandeur that can make one forget that there’s some kind of reality out there. I read books to be seduced by the music in words and I like music because it embodies all the beauty I find in movies and books.
Form always seems to overcome purpose and content.

Except when it comes to people. Their content is what sustains their form. And still, I also tend to understand human relationships as an aesthetic ideal in the sense that they should be a pursuit of pleasure and an avoidance of pain.  I like people. I like watching them, I like talking to them and getting to know their stories and I feel mesmerized by the things they know and the lives they lived.

I am terribly shy so I never start conversations with strangers but I do engage in them often and listen.

There was someone from Belgium sitting next to me on a flight to Lisbon and he told me how he hadn’t spoken to his family in over twenty years because he had taken his dad to court over child support money. There was an  elegant lady in the subway in New York who collected ancient tiles and a kid from Spain who talked for over seven hours during a flight between Johannesburg and Madrid and  street artists in London and drag queens in Porto and soccer fans in Zambia and the regal looking lady in Houston during intermission at the ballet. She was a widow and her son was working for an oil company in Nigeria. Maybe we could go to the ballet together the following week. I would not be in Houston anymore. And the Brazilian girl  that had been left at the altar and was trying to forget that she was hurt and afraid of flying while the plane was getting ready to land.

And, if they asked me, I could go on and almost write a book with all the moments some stranger decided to confide in me. Sometimes I talk and understand how liberating it is to be your vulnerable self with someone you know will not cross paths with you ever again. And you go on for hours sitting across a perfect stranger in some Lower East Side bar after checking some independent production of Hamlet and talk about all your unfulfilled dreams and what your fear and how finding Shakespeare has changed your life.

These are the moments of bliss that truly feel they could be enough for a whole lifetime and shield me when the world just seems to hurtful to endure. I am one of those. Deeply hurt by the trivial, the rudeness and mainly by the pain of others, of strangers, by the injustice, by whatever dehumanizing force seems to be operating on any given day.

“Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.”

And my heart also got used to marvel at others, to shudder, tremble and thrill with the same pleasure and emotion it felt coming face to face with Hopper’s “New York Movie” or driving to Jarrett’s “Köln Concert”.

Works of art,  Martha Nussbaum says,  “give us insight into how other people live and feel, how they strive for happiness, and how conditions of many types affect them. [And] that is crucial for living any sort of decent life.”


References

Marcel Proust

Dinah Washington

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Homer

Martha Nussbaum

On fear (an exercise in copy/paste)

I have been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – and I wish I could say that I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do. I have. Once you let fear get possession of your soul, it does not readily yield its place to another sentiment. Then you just realize you have to fight yourself and let everything happen to you, Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. I go back to a gin infused advice over “I am sailing” announcing the final round at Peter’s, years ago. Don’t think. And I realize I do appreciate the unknown, the feeling of jumping before looking. I learnt that through facing the fear of traveling alone. I prefer it like that now. No longer fearing freedom. For a few days. I do not fear mistakes. I do fear perfection and the fearlessness will come when I stop waiting for the right day to go up or down in my own way. I fear wasted time. 

References 

Georgia O’Keeffe 

Leo Tolstoi

Rainer Maria Rilke

Jim Morrison 

Pink Floyd

Photo via Pinterest 

A character on 2046

Heartbreaking pasts and unchanged futures

 

2046 is one of my favorite movies of all times. It’s beautifully photographed, the wardrobe is divine and it leaves you with a permanent sense of longing and missing the future. I bought this dress on eBay and I was totally convinced that I could attain the sort of elusive elegance portrayed by Wong Kar Wai.

I’m not a movie critic of any sorts and even though I spend a lot of my time watching movies, I related to them primarily through an aesthetic involvement, I want to get lost in them. This particular movie mirrors what seems to be my most pervasive attitude towards life. Somewhat aimless, seldom focused on the outcomes, but always looking forward and enjoying the journey.

Is a dress that important? Having been on stage (not metaphorically) more than once, nothing makes me more aware of the character than the wardrobe that lets me understand what story I’m supposed to be telling.

On the other, the metaphorical stage, having the right props for the day’s performance always seemed to be the most enjoyable way of making the journey., transforming ordinary activities into moments of filmic fleeting beauty.

Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention. They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody knows if that’s true because nobody’s ever come back.

A different way of letting go

“Women [seem to] have a dynamic relationship with their clothes that can be grouped around three co-existing views of self; ‘The woman I want to be’, ‘The woman I fear I could be’ and ‘The woman I am most of the time’.These three views illustrate women’s attempts to achieve satisfying images as they engage with clothes to create, reveal or conceal aspects of their identity.”( Guy and Banim).

They can also help explain why we keep the clothes that we no longer wear or even those that we have never worn. These clothes laid to rest are somewhat magic both because they connect us to our memories and they keep the promise of possibilities, of a different future.  Letting them go is also letting go of past and future, at least of the one we no longer see ourselves fulfilling.

Why open an online shop instead of just donating everything? This would not allow me the necessary reflection time to understand the process of revisiting myself and, above all, I could not tell the stories of how the Closet came to be.