April is the cruellest month

I’m finally understanding the first line of The Waste Land. I never used to think that April was cruel. It was a month of renovation, of a new life, of prolonged glimpses of sun.
But now I get it: April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire.
Sometimes, the renovation of life is an awful spectacle to watch. Especially when you feel you’re being fed on memories that cannot bring anything new. People and nature around you are preparing for something better to come, but all you can do is live off memories and you feel incapable of contributing to the emergence of life. And it does become cruel.
‘I wonder if a memory is something you have or something you lost’ – I’ve heard this line in a Woody Allen movie called Another Woman and I’ve been thinking about it. I prefer to think that a memory is something you lost. At least you know you can't get back the things you lose and you feel your only chance is to try to overcome the winter (the winter that kept you warm and was dark and made you forget – it covered earth in forgetful snow) and rejoice when April comes. But you do feel you’re trying to breed lilacs out of the dead, that the new life you’re trying to celebrate is more of a death than an actual life. It is indeed fucked up. I’m sure I’m not making sense. Like all of us, I grow old.
All this to say that I finally get the first line of The Waste Land.

Iconic lyrics

When I was young, I knew lyrics of my favourite songs by heart. I bought CDs and then spent days and days with the booklet in hand, listening to the songs and figuring out, deciphering, memorizing and analyzing their lyrics. Suede (my first serious obsessive musical love), the Cure, Radiohead were all so important to me.

Now it's different: I listen to songs but I don't pay an attention to the lyrics as I used to. Fewer and fewer songs make me want to write something about them (with the notable exception of Antony and the Johnson's amazing album, Fistful of love being the brightest jewel on its crown. But to analyze this song, one needs a post by itself, so until another time...).

This morning I was going to work with my ipod, listening to music and two songs' lyrics hit me on the head.

"Let's make love and listen death from above'
Amazing line. It could also work as a pick-up line methinks. But what does the poet mean? Does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death who is above us (all)? Or does she mean: let's make love here and listen to death from above, us being above of death? Isn't ambiguity the best?

"I'm gonna get you out of your cave. I'm gonna get you out of your cage, man, and set you free."
(Hallo Kitty's favourite song for 2007 everyone.) Amazing again. The duality of human nature, rational man vs. primitive animal, expressed by the rhyme of cave with cage. Are all our cages caves and vice versa?


Back to the future, then, back to adolescence and analyzing lyrics...
Searching for our (my) lost inspiration...

Pills

Some people say they don't like pills, but I don't share this opinion. I love pills. The more the merrier. Specially the ones that make you doze off and forget who you are. Or the ones that make you unable to pay attention to what people tell you because everything around you just floats and you can't be bothered.

A Portuguese poet wrote about the pain of thinking once. This is the worst pain of them all. Pills can make you forget your thoughts and that can be a bliss. Oscar Wilde wrote that mankind's worst crimes happened in the brain, which goes to show how dangerous your brain can be if you let it run free.

The pain of thinking is a bitch. I wish I knew how to turn it off and numb down for a while. Alternatively, I could also get into drugs.

Difference/tolerance

Unless you live in another planet, you might know that there is a pregnant man these days. He is from Oregon, and he was born as a woman. Some years ago he did a sex change operation but kept his reproductive organs "in case one day a miracle would happen and he could have a baby". He got married to a woman, who is unable to carry a baby and when they decided to have a baby of their own, and since he was able to, they decided that he would be the one carrying the child. Yesterday he gave an interview to Oprah that can be seen here.

I saw this interview just now and I am so amazed with this story. Two things made me more of an impression: firstly some of this guy's words, he said "I feel that the desire to reproduce is not a male or a female desire, it is a human desire. Wanting to carry my own baby, did not make me feel more 'female'." I find this quote very impressive, because it illustrates so clearly, the arbitrariness of categorization. People are people, they are all born the same, little lumps of life and depending on the hormones they have, they turn out as women or men. When they are born, enter society with its social stereotypes and da dah, here you go. The guy of this story was not like that however. Calliope/Cal in Middlesex is not like that, some people are not like that. Is that so bad, so difficult to accept (even if you cannot understand)?

The second thing that made an impression on me was the doctors' response. Apparently this guy and his wife, were turned down 5 times by various doctors who claimed that either they or their staff feel somehow uncomfortable with this situation. Because the baby will not be normal, they said. Their doctor who finally agreed to take them, is this plain American lady who, when asked about how she felt about the 'normalcy' of this pregnancy, she responded 'the baby is normal, therefore I treat this as a normal pregnancy'.

I think all this is very interesting. Difference, for me, is the most treasured ideal of our times. That's why I love people who obsess with it, like Tim Burton. A boy with scissor hands, a corpse bride, an avenging barber, a pregnant man. It's all the same. We're all different, but we all feel the same.

Inspiration

I feel guilty for not having posted anything for a while. (Guilt; a topic I shall discuss another time.) The problem is that I feel utterly uninspired: I came back to work and I feel overwhelmed, I am supposed to multitask to death and I find it hard, still. I have no time to think, I have no time to reflect on things I see or read. I read the Persepolis "graphic novels" and I liked them a lot (the first more than the second) but I have nothing inspired to write. And then I remembered that I never write about the things I loved the most. Oldboy, Lady vengeance? I never wrote about them! The edge of heaven, the lives of others (Germany's pride)? I never wrote about them either. Maybe the things we like the most, we cannot analyze.

And maybe just now, I am starting to sound like Carrie Bradshaw's blogger twin.

'Either this wallpaper goes, or I do'

Apparently, these were Oscar Wilde's last words, or so the Observer's 'little book of genius', tells me. The reason I like this so much is because they depict a man with humour even when he dies. Even at the time when people are supposed to be either pensive or cynical, Oscar Wilde was fun. It is a tremendus achievement to leave this world with a smile or with a wink, instead of what so many people regard as best, with dignity.

Because maybe humour is the ultimate illustration of dignity.

The accident

It took me 29 and a half years to go to a proper demonstration, and that was by accident, two days ago. I'm back in Greece for a few days and I was asked to go to the general march that was happening the other day. The issue is simple: pension plans. The government wants to change things and the workers disagree. (There is a reason why I don't write political/social posts, it's because I suck when I try to explain such things. But whatever.)

So government says: you need to work more years and the trade unions say fuck you. Kind of.

My friends were on strike and were going to the demonstration, and I went as well. When I come back to Greece I don't have anything to do really, so I follow my friends around. The demonstration was big, like a party, or as d/a said, like the carnival of Patras: every trade union had its own banner and guy in front who was yelling slogans. People were repeating them, sometimes. The atmosphere was nice. Not exceptionally revolutionary, but nice.

What made an impression on me was the heterogeneity of the crowd: young goths, young kids from the suburbs, young trendy guys with nice glasses, older men with Palestinian scarfs and long hair and 50-year old women with big dyed red hair (Greece's trademark) and big glasses. I liked that, I liked that a lot. I want to be one of them when I grow up. I want to get my friends and go to a demonstration, instead of just going to the hairdressers'. I am not sure if I care enough about what the demonstration is about. As long as it is against the mainstream, it's cool. I'd obviously like to demonstrate for aesthetic reasons, like against dyed red hair for example, but that is not so important. The most important thing is to demonstrate. Until you're 50, 60 or 70.